Who’s speaking in tongues? Do chastity pledges work? What do religious consumers buy?
Exploring a world immersed in faith and mystery, religious research scholars provide hard sociological data to give some practical answers about the role of religion in American life.
More than 500 researchers met in Portland, Ore., recently for the joint meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association. Some of their findings are below.
Studies by scholars at the University of Texas at Austin found that religion and chastity pledges have “robust protective effects” on the incidences of premarital sex and their restrictive influences may improve marital and health outcomes for young adults.
A lot of kids are not virgins on their wedding day, including a majority of religious individuals and abstinence pledgers, said researchers Jeremy Uecker and Mark Regnerus. But religion plays an important role for many people who abstain.
Nearly 40 percent of 15-to-25-year-old virgins said their primary motivation for abstinence was that premarital sex was against their religion or morals. Twenty-one percent, the next highest group, said they abstained because they had not yet found the right person. A study of married adults who were virgins until their wedding day revealed 48 percent were consistent pledgers, compared with 9 percent who never pledged.
The study also throws cold water on the growing popular legend that teens who take chastity pledges are more likely to practice oral sex — or other forms of sexual substitution — to remain “technical virgins.” The opposite is true, researchers found.
Nearly half the respondents to the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey reported spending money on religious goods in the past month. Twelve percent reported spending $50 or more, while 22 percent spent less than $25.
Religious greeting cards were the No. 1 product, followed by religious nonfiction books and religious music. Religious-themed clothes and religious bumper stickers were the least popular categories.
Of interest, slightly more people bought religious jewelry than purchased devotional material or sacred texts. Remember when mainline Protestants were at the top of the nation’s economic ranks?
Episcopalians still are up there, but a study shows Jews are No. 1, with a median household income in 2000 of $72,000. Unitarian Universalists are second with a median household income of $58,000, followed by Episcopalians at $55,000 and evangelical, born-again Christians at $54,000.
Rounding out the top 10 in rankings reported at the conference and in the new book “Religion in a Free Market” by Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar are Hindus, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, unspecified Protestants and Catholics. The median household incomes of all these groups were at least $5,000 above the $42,000 median household income in the United States in 2000.
On the lowest end of the scale were groups such as Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, with household incomes of $30,000 or less. Worshipers’ race, gender and personal income don’t matter much in determining factors of congregational growth. Nor does it matter whether the pastor is male or female or the congregation is theologically conservative.
What does help a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation grow, even when the church overall — along with most mainline denominations — continues to decline, is sharing authority, welcoming new members and making children’s and youth ministries a priority. In a study combining membership data with the results of a random survey of 523 congregations, denominational researchers Perry Chang and Ida Smith-Williams found that churches that empower lay leaders were more than twice as likely to grow as churches that did not share authority.
Being able to welcome new members and make them feel part of the community and to care for young people also were factors associated with growing congregations.
Looked at from the other side, churches with large numbers of older worshipers were least likely to attract new members.
A national study of U.S. congregations found speaking in tongues is not limited to traditional Pentecostals. Researcher Keith Wulff of the Presbyterian Church (USA) found that 8 percent of respondents reported having spoken in tongues.
Twenty-one percent of people who reported speaking in tongues were conservative Protestants, but 5 percent were Catholics and 3 percent were mainline Protestants, according to Wulff’s research.
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