Reddit mentions of WHY CONSERVATIVE CHURCHES ARE GROWING: A Study in Sociology of Religion with a new Preface (Rose, No. 11)

There was a study like this 40 years ago too.

You know what turned out to actually be the difference? Birth rates. The anti-birth-control-brigade make more Christians by doing the horizontal tango than liberal sorts do. All those jokes about Quiverfulls trying to win the culture war by reproducing? Yup.

Here's an example: The Amish have 7 kids per family on average. 85% (that is, 6 of 7) stay Amish. That means their numbers triple every generation. Surprise, surprise, they're also the fastest growing denomination in the US!

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This a longer thing I wrote elsewhere once. I've done some reading on the subject, and still am, but here's what I've gathered:

To begin to address this, we first need to start with when Christian churches began facing membership problems, from a purely American perspective.

American Mainline Protestants first started to decline in the 1970s. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and similar “old guard” Protestant sects started losing members. In 1975, about 13% of the US population claimed affiliated with these denominations, whereas that number would shrink to about 8.7% in the year 2000. In contrast, conservative Evangelical sects either held steady if not outright grew over the same time period. This trend lasted so long that religious sociologist Dean Kelly would pen his popular work exploring this phenomenon, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (1972).

It was largely accepted for a multitude of years that, from what the data was telling us, if churches wanted to “fend off” secularization they would need to adopt a conservative theological or cultural posture - something the Mainline Protestant sects lacked.
Here’s what Kelly wrote in 1978:

>Though many people-and even some social scientists and scholars of religion- are not aware of the curious contrasts in membership trends that occurred during the past decade, no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation of (1) why it happened to these particular religious bodies and (2) why it happened at this particular time in history.

What has Kelly’s answer to the mystery of some denominations falling while others grew? In a word: “Seriousness.” As he wrote in the same year:

>One of the most cogent criticisms of Why Conservative Churches Are Growingis that which contends that a particular class-linked mode of religious behavior has been taken as the norm and all others subordinated to it (i.e., the religious style of lower-class sect-members). The implication of the critic is that this is an unfair comparison; that Episcopalians are just as religious as Adventists, albeit they show it in a different and less demonstrative way. In the eyes of God, that may be true, since only He knows the inner devotion of the heart. But to any outward observer, there is no comparison. In the double tithe, the time spent, the efforts made, the witnessing overtures to non-members, the constant preoccupation with the faith, the average Adventist so far out-shines the average Episcopalian that they are not even in the same category of magnitude. If this is indeed the case, it suggests that religious behavior is actually more intensive (and extensive) among lower-class people (or at least among religious groups attracting such people), and that is a significant datum in itself.
…
>If ecumenical churches feel that they are as serious about what they believe as fundamentalists are, then it behoves them to find appropriate ways to exercise and communicate that seriousness. Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

Kelly’s argument that “strictness” kept a church going seemed true until only somewhat recently, as now conservative Evangelical sects have started to face the same kind of membership issues as their Mainline counterparts. Yet, for many decades, that theologically conservative posture was thought to be the cure to getting people back to church on Sunday morning.

Mainline Protestants were not the only group to lose members starting in the 70s, however. Beginning in the same decade, a wide variety of other membership-based groups or organizations also reported a loss of members, such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Kiwanis, Freemasons, Lion’s Clubs, and so on. American sociologist Robert Putnam, in his landmark 2000 work Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, found such trends in a variety of other areas as well, such as participation in bowling leagues (hence the title of his book) participation in political activities, or other social activities. Putnam’s research focused on “social capital,” and its decline in the American post-war period. As one review of his book summarizes:

>The data strongly indicate that declines in trust, interest in public affairs, newspaper reading, and religious attendance are due almost entirely to generational replacement, as what Tom Brokaw called the "Greatest Generation" is gradually replaced by more self-interested and materialistic Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Putnam argues that the unifying effects of World War II are an important explanation of why the "civic generation" was different from either its predecessors or successors, and he blames television in large part for declining levels of civic engagement in successor generations. The share of households with TVs rose from 10% to 90% in the 1950s. Viewing time has risen, along with viewing choices and the number of homes with multiple sets, so people watch TV alone instead of as a family.

>Some of the most convincing evidence Putnam presents on why civic engagement has declined comes from time diaries, in which randomly selected persons report in detail how they spend their time. The sheer amount of time Americans spend watching TV (3 to 4 hours per day on average) must crowd out time for informal socializing with friends and family, and for group activities and volunteering. Time diaries rule out one explanation popular among journalists and other casual observers, an alleged drop in "free time." Working hours have risen very little, and time on housework and child care has fallen, leading to an average gain of 6 hours of "free time" between 1965 and 1995, the period when most measures of social capital experienced steady declines. People are simply spending their time in more individualized and self-interested ways than before.