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Does religious pluralism undermine or promote religious involvement? Some secularization theories contend that diversity breeds loss of belief and lower participation. The religious economies model counters that involvement is boosted by the availability of alternative religious suppliers and the competition that results, with each group working harder to gain adherents. The issue is sufficiently important that a recent review found 193 tests of this question in 26 published articles. Almost all of these findings (both positive and negative) should be abandoned. The associations reported do not reflect the effects of pluralism but a previously overlooked mathematical relationship between measures of religious participation and the index of pluralism. Even when pluralism has no effect on participation, the correlation between these two variables is likely to be nonzero. The sign and magnitude of this expected correlation depend on the nature of the size distributions of the religious groups across the areas studied. Results from several frequently cited studies closely match what would be expected from chance alone. Various alternative methods for studying pluralism in future research are examined, but currently there is no compelling evidence that religious pluralism has any effect on religious participation.
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, sociologists of religion have been debating the question of whether religious pluralism increases or decreases religious commitment. Are people more religious when religious variety is limited, and especially when a single church is dominant? Or do people become more interested and involved in religion when there are many different alternatives available?
Finke and Stark (1988) sparked the debate with their assertion that religious pluralism increases church membership. This claim ran counter to what they described as the received wisdom of the day, particularly as embodied in Berger's (1967) The Sacred Canopy. Berger asserted that religious pluralism undermines the influence of "plausibility structures," the social networks and institutions that reinforce the plausibility of belief. When the state, public institutions, and day-to-day social contacts no longer reinforce the truth of a given religious belief but instead expose people to a diversity of opinions, religion loses its quality as takenfor-granted truth. As a result, belief and religious involvement decline. Berger (and many classical sociological theorists) saw increased exposure to religious diversity and decreased religiosity as a natural part of the...