Religious Change in America:
Coleman, John A
A CAREFUL COMPENDIUM RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN AMERICA Andrew M. Greeley Harvard University Press, $25, 137 pp. John A. Coleman I once had the good fortune to live in a small learned community of...
...3) an episodic event model which explains religious change because of a major history-making episode, e.g., the issuance of the encyclical Humanae vitae...
...By using such other strategies, Robert Wuthnow, for example, points to important areas of organizational change in American religion (e.g., the growth of the governmental role in religious welfare programs and the proliferation in the last decades of single-issue, nondenominational, religious lobbies and special purpose groups) which would seem to fit Greeley's religious change model, a model which in Greeley's study remains more of a cipher than is necessary...
...Students of religion will not be surprised...
...Was Jesus Christ divine...
...John A. Coleman I once had the good fortune to live in a small learned community of Dutch Jesuits where the rule of thumb for conversation was that we would never spend more than two minutes arguing a fact...
...My only caveat about this excellent study is a tone in the last chapter of the book which seems to suggest that if you cannot find an operational measure of religious change which can be translated into survey research data, any claims about religion remain mere armchair speculation...
...and (5) a religious growth model...
...In answering the question, "How well has religion fared in the United States...
...Greeley comments: "The secularization model which has never been confirmed by the data and has often been disproved-as in this book-nonetheless remains as strong as ever in scholarly and journalistic circles, unshaken and apparently unshakable...
...Do you believe in heaven and hell...
...The secularization thesis is an item of religious belief...
...Is there life after death...
...There are absolutely no data to confirm a secularization model...
...Contention over interpretation could last a long time but when an issue of fact came into dispute we turned immediately to an ample shelf of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases to settle the difference...
...Religion, after all, can change without declining.thout declining...
...Greeley has produced a careful compendium of findings from national samples of survey data from Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion, the National Opinion Research Center's semi-annual General Social Survey, and the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan...
...Greeley discovers only four areas of some religious decline in American religion since the 1940s: (1) a decline in the literal interpretation of the Bible (almost entirely among Catholics for whom such interpretation does not represent, in any event, orthodoxy...
...Greeley's data largely confirm models three and four...
...2) a cyclic model which predicts periodic revivals and declines...
...They know that religious faith is difficult if not impossible to disprove...
...Remarkably little variance on these items shows up in national surveys since the late 1940s...
...Andrew Greeley's new book would have been welcome in that room for it is chock-full of factual data about American religious behavior since the end of World War II...
...Surely, however, other research strategies (e.g., content analysis, interviews, comparative organizational analysis) yield empirical evidence...
...3) a decline in church attendance among Catholics from 1968-1975 which ended in 1975...
...Ever a bit feisty, Greeley here goes further than the modest and useful limit he set himself in the first chapter where he claimed, "I am limiting myself, by assignment and training, to the part of the story which can be gleaned from survey data...
...For those who want their "facts" about American religion straight, Greeley's survey results belong on a shelf with two other empirical (but more interpretative) studies of American religion: Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney's American Mainline Religion (Rutgers University Press, 1987) and Robert Wuthnow's The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton University Press, 1988...
...Catholic declines in church attendance since the late 1960s bottomed out around 1975 in America (but not in West Germany or Holland which also saw such declines from previous high levels) because of a latent "loyalty" to tradition, which Catholics justified "by an appeal to a God who 'understood' instead of to church leaders who did not...
...In a brief statistical exercise he demonstrates that "age correlations without cohort analysis prove nothing...
...4) a stability model which basically predicts no religious change...
...and (4) a decline in financial contributions among Catholics to their church...
...Roof and McKinney's study has the merit of dividing the Protestant sample consistently into distinctive families, e.g., the black churches, the liberal churches, the moderate center, and conservative churches, which frequently prove more illuminating when comparing Catholic with Protestant samples than lumping all Protestants together as Greeley tends to do...
...and religious practices (frequency of prayer, church attendance), the stability model holds...
...Greeley ably shows that a slight rise in those who describe themselves as nonre-ligious is due to the baby-boom demographic bulge (a function of age) rather than an increase in secularizing tendencies in American society...
...In other areas, such as religious beliefs (Is there a God...
...he tests five models for understanding religious change: (1) the secularization model which assumes long-term religious decline...
...They know a religion when they see one...
...2) the decline in the proportion of Protestants remaining in the mainline churches (where a kind of denominational musical chairs occurs which has not much impact on measures of individual religiosity as such...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
