Rodney Stark

• Baylor University

Data from two national surveys of China in 2001 and 2007 are compared to demonstrate the rapid resurgence of religion in China. In only six years there has been a massive decline in the percentage of Chinese who claim to have no religion and a corresponding increase in the percentage who say they are Buddhists. Turning to the many claims about the...

From the perspective of a refined religious economy theory, the present paper is the first to empirically study the interplay between exclusive and nonexclusive religious bodies. Through reconstructing the historical facts of Chinese and Japanese immigration to the pre-1945 United States, I find that: 1) under certain social circumstances, an exclu...

In the 34 years since earning a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, Rodney Stark has written almost a book a year (27 at last count). One of them resulted in a Pulitzer Prize nomination ( The Rise of Christianity), and “distinguished book awards” dot his resume for many of the others. In a field where the scholarly artic...

A typology of churched and unchurched religions is developed and then used to analyse the status of unchurched spirituality in the United States, Sweden, and Japan. In the United States, churched religions remain strong, while most of those who say they have no religious preference are quite religious, merely unchurched. In Sweden, the lack of part...

The religious economy approach in the social scientific study of religion emphasizes the importance of supply-side factors in stimulating religious demand. Where many religious firms compete in a relatively unregulated market, levels of religious belief and participation will be far higher than in situations in which religious life is regulated by...

Several years ago a well-known member of this organization asked a young Ph.D. candidate at the start of his oral examination whether he was a Durkheimian, Weberian, or a Marxist. When the candidate said that none of those terms really fit him, he was told that he couldn't qualify as a mature scholar until he had made a choice. Now, suppose that th...

This Handbook showcases research and thinking in the sociology of religion. The contributors, all active writers and researchers in the area, provide original chapters focusing on select aspects of their own engagement with the field. Aimed at students and scholars who want to know more about the sociology of religion, this handbook also provides a...

Most social scientists still agree with Marx that religion is rooted in the suffering of the poor, despite the fact that dozens of studies have found that class is, at most, barely related to religious belief and that the middle and upper classes dominate religious participation. These facts are eluded by the claim that it is intense religion, such...

In a major revision of my earlier theoretical work on religion, I attempt to identify and connect the basic micro elements and processes underlying religious expression. I show that all primary aspects of religion—belief, emotion, ritual, prayer, sacrifice, mysticism, and miracle—can be understood on the basis of exchange relations between humans a...

That men are less religious than women is a generalization that holds around the world and across the centuries. However, there has been virtually no study of this phenomenon because it has seemed so obvious that it is the result of differential sex role socialization. Unfortunately, actual attempts to isolate socialization effects on gender differ...

It has long been assumed in sociology that gender differences in religiousness are a product of differential socialization. Yet, there is little empirical support for this assumption. To address this gap in the literature, this study draws on an extensive investigation of the relationship between differential socialization and differential religiou...

Finally, social scientists have begun to attempt to understand religious behavior rather than to discredit it as irrational, ignorant, or foolish--and Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have played a major role in this new approach. Acknowledging that science cannot assess the supernatural side of religion (and therefore should not claim to do so), Stark...

The functionalist “law” that religion sustains the moral order must be amended. As is demonstrated in this study, religion has this effect only as it is based on belief in powerful, active, conscious, morally-concerned gods. Contrary to Durkheim’s claims, participation in religious rituals per se has little independent impact on morality and none w...

Three of the most central concepts used in the social scientific study of religion are so poorly and inconsistently defined as to preclude coherent discussion, let alone theoretical progress. In this essay I examine the similarities and crucial differences that can be used to clearly distinguish religion, magic, and science. Among the many contrast...

Although the social scientific study of religion has seen the accumulation of numerous case studies, comparative work involving substantial numbers of cases is rare. In the absence of an accepted agenda for field research, field studies contain information relevant to the study at hand, but do not add systematically to a cumulative database. By con...

The familiar sect-to-church theory holds that successful sects will gradually become more church-like over time, reducing the level of tension they hold with their environment. H. Richard Niebuhr (1929), the originator of sect-to-church theory, took it for granted that transformation was possible only in the church-like direction — that churches co...

In previous work I have demonstrated that, claims by the secularization faithful to the contrary, religious participation in most of Europe did not decline in modern times, having never been very high. In this essay I attempt to explain why. Why did earlier efforts to Christianize Europe fail? In conclusion I assess present American missionary effo...

When research is theory-driven, the "proper" research method is the one that best tests one's theory. An often unnoticed byproduct of theory-driven research is the ability to "discover" appropriate data. I illustrate this point with the many instances when I recognized that the data I needed to test a theory were already available in some rather od...

This essay attempts to explain the dramatic, recent decline in Catholic vocations--in the number of persons becoming priests, nuns, or monks. Appropriate data force rejection of gender-based explanations, such as increased secular career opportunities for women. Cross-national data show that the declines began in Europe and North America immediatel...

From the beginning, social scientists have celebrated the secularization thesis despite the fact that it never was consistent with empirical reality. More than 150 years ago Toajuen'lle pointed out that "the facts by no means accord with [the secularization] theory," and this lack of accord has grown far worse since then. Indeed, the only shred of...

This paper applies a general theory of why religious movements succeed or fail to explain the meteoric rise of Christian Science, and to explain why the movement began an equally precipitous decline and may soon simply disappear. The analysis is based on quantitative data, on field work and on a variety of historical documents. The fall of Christia...

The social-scientific study of religion has long presumed that religious thought is 'primitive,' nonrational, incompatible with science, and, thus, doomed to decline. Contemporary evidence, however, suggests that religious involvement correlates with good mental health, responds to perceived costs and benefits, and persists in the face of advanced...

Does religion have the power to regulate human behavior? If so, under what conditions can it prevent crime, delinquency, suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, or joining cults? Despite the fact that ordinary citizens assume religion deters deviant behavior, there has been little systematic scientific research on these crucial questions. This book is the...

Religious partipation is far lower in most western European nations than in the United States. Most European social scientists believe this is a demand-side phenomenon in that Europeans no longer find religion plausible. But, recently some American social scientists have defined it as a supply-side phenomenon -- that lax and inefficient state-suppo...

This paper applies a general theory of why religious movements succeed or fail to explain why the Jehovah's Witnesses are the most rapidly growing religious movement in the western world. In addition to qualitative assessments of Witness doctrines, organisational structures, internal networks, and socialisation, we utilise quantitative data from a...

Traditional religious research fails to recognize religion as a market phenomenon. It especially overlooks supply-side factors that shape the incentives and opportunities of religious firms, emphasizing instead demand-side shifts in the perceptions, tastes, and needs of consumers. This paper reviews the effects of government actions that alter reli...

In this essay I refine and greatly expand the scope of my 1987 theory of why religious groups succeed or fail. The initial version was limited to new religions (cult movements). This version applies to all movements, including sects. The theory now consists of 10 propositions which attempt to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for succ...

Recent theoretical arguments contend that when the state permits a religious free marker, pluralism and competition will emerge and overall levels of religious participation will increase. We return to nineteenth-century America, when the emergence of a religious free marker was in progress, to examine whether pluralism generated higher levels of r...

Does religion have the power to control behavior? Are religious people less apt to steal, cheat, use drugs and alcohol, commit suicide, join cults or become mentally ill? Do cities with high rates of religious participation have lower crime and substance abuse rates, less suicide and mental illness, and fewer cults? Is religion an essential element...

This article models the growth of religious organizations as a “product” derived from inputs of time and money. Using measures of church attendance and contributions as proxies for time and money resources, we predict membership growth at the levels of both individual congregations and entire denominations. Our data also highlight the tremendous va...

Of 13 published empirical tests of the proposition that religious pluralism results in higher rates of religious participation, only a study based in the 1851 religious census of England and Wales reported contrary results (Bruce 1992). We therefore subjected these fascinating data to a fuller and more adequate analysis, both statistical and histor...

Modern and ancient historians agree that women were especially responsive to the early Christian movement. It also is agreed that women were accorded considerably higher status within Christian circles than in the surrounding pagan societies. In this essay I first explain how these two aspects of the early church were connected. Then I explain how...

In this provocative book, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark challenge popular perceptions about American religion. They view the religious environment as a free market economy, where churches compete for souls. The story they tell is one of gains for upstart sects and losses for mainline denominations. Although many Americans assume that religious parti...

We propose a theory of religious mobilization that accounts for variations in religious participation on the basis of variations in the degree of regulation of religious economies and consequent variations in their levels of religious competition. To account for the apparent "secularization" of many European nations, we stress supply-side weaknesse...

Newly available data confirm previous claims that Europe abounds in new religious movements and that most European nations have rates far higher than does the United States. I also address objections that a count of movements is not a count of members.

Winner of the 1993 Distinguished Book Award, Pacific Sociological Association "A major work in three different areas of sociology, [A Theory of Religion] is a model of how to build a systematic theory, a leading accomplishment of the rational choice school, and a comprehensive theory of religion...It is a sobering as well as penetrating vision. [Th...

Economic theory holds that competition makes firms vigorous, whereas monopoly firms tend to be lazy. When this principle is applied to religious organizations, it leads to the prediction that the average level of religious commitment among Roman Catholics will vary inversely to the degree that a society is Catholic. This prediction is confirmed by...

Using our reconstructed denominational statistics for 1776 and 1850, we demonstrate that the so-called Protestant "mainline" began to collapse rapidly, not in the past several decades as is widely supposed, but late in the 18th Century. Hence, by 1850 the Baptists and Methodists -- vigorous, evangelical sects in that era -- dominated the religious...

While historians of American religion are aware that the original colonies did not exude universal piety, they have provided few statistics on colonial religion. Without these statistics it is difficult to describe colonial religion with precision, much less attempt to describe or explain changes since colonial times. In the following paper we prov...

For generations, sociologists have believed that cities are less hospitable to religion than are rural areas and that where many faiths compete for followers, the credibility of each is reduced. In this essay we attempt to explain why these received truths are, in fact, nostalgic myths. We try to demonstrate that religious participation is and ough...

The invaluable Glenmary data on church membership for 1971 and 1980 need correction for the omission of blacks and Jews in order to serve as ecological measures of church membership. Having explained how to make these corrections, the paper addresses the question: Just what proportion of Americans actually do belong to a church these days?

Quantitative studies of 19th Century American religion have long been frustrated by a lack of data on religious affiliation. In this essay we use census data on churches to reconstruct detailed membership estimates for 1850, 1860, and 1870 by means of weighted least squares equations. We then assess the validity of our membership estimates by compa...

This essay suggests the unique opportunity the Mormons present to sociologists of religion: a chance to watch an extraordinarily rare event, the rise of a new world faith. Patterns of Mormon growth are traced from the start of the movement in 1830 through the present. Data on where the Mormons are growing, and their rates of growth, suggest that wi...

While written in response to a critique by Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, this article provides an overview of the first five years of a project designed to develop and test a general scientific theory of religion.

This paper tries to explain many well-known patterns in the careers of cult movements by close examination of the arithmetic of plausible rates of recruitment and growth. Why do cults so often grow rapidly at the start, only to stall after a few years? Why do cult movements so often retreat from their initial aim to convert the world and turn inwar...

This paper reconsiders the impact of religion on suicide, a topic first raised by Durkheim in 1897. We look first at Durkheim's argument and find it inconsistent and unconvincing. Moreover, we find that for a scholar revered as a founding father of the sociology of religion, Durkheim was amazingly uninformed and misleading about elementary features...

This paper reports the existence of a wealth of data on crime and delinquency for the 1920s and earlier. It attempts to demonstrate the validity, and hence the value, of these old and forgotten data by "reverse" replication-by showing that these data yield results identical with a number of our recent studies based on contemporary data thought to b...

This article uses a variety of Canadian data to examine the relationship between secularization and the rise of cults. Many social scientists believe that trends of demystification occurring in major traditional denominations will lead to the near extinction of religion in general. However, we have argued in previous theoretical and empirical work...

Confusion has developed in the literature over whether religious commitment decreases delinquent behavior. In this paper we show that conflicting findings stem from variations in the religious ecology of the communities studied. In communities where religious commitment is the norm, the more religious an individual, the less likely he or she will b...

This paper reports our second effort to test the thesis that secularization is a self-limiting process that prompts the formation of new religions. Our initial study was based on contemporary data. Here we turn the clock back 50 years to the Roaring Twenties. Using excellent data from the sadly neglected and forgotten U.S. Census enumerations of re...

This paper extends our recent quantitative research on cults by examining data on cult membership and on client cult practitioners in the United States during the 1920s. In so doing we demonstrate the great utility of a series of strangely neglected nation-wide census studies of religion conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau during the first four dec...

The salience of religion for personal relationships is assessed using data from a large network questionnaire survey of 1439 West Coast university students. Analysis focuses on attitude concordances across close friend pairs in confirming three hypotheses: (1) objectively important ideological positions and questions of social policy are not in the...

This paper reports initial descriptive findings based on quantitative coding of basic features of 417 American-born sects still in existence. Sects are less numerous than are cults but are, on the average, older and larger. Nonetheless, most sects are small and very few are growing rapidly at present. Indeed, about a third have not grown since thei...

Social scientists often assume that individuals and societies orient themselves with respect to overarching symbolic frames of reference, sometimes called "meaning systems." But until the recent publication of Robert Wuthnow's analysis of San Francisco area survey data, evidence in favor of this key theoretical proposition has been lacking. This pa...

Benton Johnson's (1963) reconceptualization of churches and sects freed theory from the immobilizing grip of traditional typologies. Having utilized his single axis of tension with the sociocultural environment in our ongoing theoretical pursuits, the question arose: is tension too vague a concept to permit empirical testing of theories based upon...

Several sources of good information about client cults and audience cults are analyzed geographically. Data are taken from six directories, Fate magazine, Transcendental Meditation initiation records, classified telephone directories, and the Gallup Poll. The geographic distribution found in an earlier study of cult movements is replicated: the Pac...

Advances a theory to explain the apparent success of Scientology in raising its members to a superhuman level of functioning known as "clear". It is argued that empirical evidence does not support this claim and that the state of "clear" "is not a state of personal development at all, but a social status conferring honor within the cult's status sy...

This paper presents the basic axioms and some initial definitions from which we are constructing a general theory of religion. Here we carry the deductive process only to the point where three testable and non-trivial propositions about religious commitment are obtained. These propositions explain and clarify the available empirical literature. In...

A long tradition in social science explains recruitment to religious cults and sects on the basis of a congruence between the ideology of a group and the deprivations of those who join. A more recent approach to recruitment argues that interpersonal bonds between members and potential recruits are the essential element. In this paper we first show...

This paper draws upon numerous ethnographies to outline three fundamental models of how novel religious ideas are generated and made social. The psychopathology model describes cult innovation as the result of individual psychopathology that finds successful social expression by providing apparent solutions to common intractable human problems. The...

This paper examines the geographic distribution of American cults based on 501 independent groups listed in the Encyclopedia of American Religions, Vol. 2 (Melton, 1978). A third of the nation's cults are in California. However, when population is taken into account, Nevada and New Mexico exceed California in terms of cults per million residents. R...

This paper constructs a set of concepts needed for a theory of religious movements. First, the boundaries for such a theory are set by defining religion and then by translating this definition into terms more useful for theorizing. Next, we demonstrate why a faulty understanding of "ideal types" has led to conceptualizations of church and sect that...

The notion that there is a positive association between psychopathology and religious commitment is a hoary proposition handed down from the founding fathers even unto the nth generation of social scientists. But is it true? It seems unlikely to be true on logical and theoretical grounds. Furthermore, an assessment of the relevant empirical literat...

Religious training is assumed to prevent delinquency by promoting the development of moral values, acceptance of conventional authority, and belief in the existence of supernatural sanctions. The relations between church attendance and these presumed consequences are examined. Children who attend church are no more likely than non-attenders to acce...

In conclusion, a subsidiary finding in these patterns of belief among the denominations ought to be pointed out. The data seriously challenge the common practice of comparing Protestants and Roman Catholics. While Protestant-Catholic contrasts are often large enough to be notable, although often, too, remarkably small, they seem inconsequential com...

Materials derived from observation of a West Coast millenarian cult are employed to develop a "value-added" model of the conditions under which conversion occurs. For conversion a person must experience, within a religious problem-solving perspective, enduring, acutely-felt tensions that lead him to define himself as a religious seeker; he must enc...

Surveys since World War II have invariably found that, contrary to the expectations of traditional social theory, the lower classes are least, rather than most, likely to be involved in religion. The proposed explanation of these findings is that the lower classes find radical politics a more attractive outlet than religion for their status dissati...