Quotes from Roger Finke

light of the two centuries of church statistics we have examined, it is obvious that a group can add members and still fail to keep pace with the growth of the population and of other religious firms.

light of the two centuries of church statistics we have examined, it is obvious that a group can add members and still fail to keep pace with the growth of the population and of other religious firms. The mainline denominations do not qualify as rockets that suddenly ran out of fuel in the sixties-their market shares were falling in the forties and fifties too, and throughout the century

most sect movements have remained small and obscure. Placing high demands on members and maintaining distinctive boundaries with the surrounding culture are not sufficient to explaining the vitality of religious organizations. Yet these are often necessary conditions for vital rcligions.11

The concern of Methodist jeremiads in the late nineteenth century (see Chapter 5) was that growing Methodist churches were mimicking the standards of others, seeking to be respectable in their eyes. Finally, professional clergy will be more restrained by the norms of the profession and the larger denomination than lay clergy, because they have more to lose-for

the decreasing demands in other areas were as important, and probably more so, for reducing the commitment of Catholics. As lannaccone (1994, p. 1204) has commented, the Catholic church "managed to arrive at a remarkable, 'worst of both worlds' position-discarding cherished distinctiveness in the areas of liturgy, theology, and life-style, while at the same time maintaining the very demands that its members and clergy are least willing to accept.

a majority of American Catholics now agree that one can marry outside the church and still remain a "good Catholic

That is, we will repeatedly suggest that as denominations have modernized their doctrines and embraced temporal values, they have gone into decline.

Thus we see the Methodists as they were transformed from sect to church. Their clergy were increasingly willing to condone the pleasures of this world and to deemphasize sin, hellfire, and damnation; this lenience struck highly responsive chords in an increasingly affluent, influential, and privileged membership.

evangelical clergy showed growth in giving, attendance, and even membership, for pastors who had served in a congregation three years or longer. But the most dramatic changes were in congregations served by clergy seeking less tension with the culture. Congregations with "officiant" pastors showed sharp drops for all of the measures (Finke and Stark, 2001).

Humans want their religion to be sufficiently potent, vivid, and compelling so that it can offer them rewards of great magnitude. People seek a religion that is capable of miracles and that imparts order and sanity to the human condition. The religious organizations that maximize these aspects of religion, however, also demand the highest price in terms of what the individual must do to qualify for these rewards.

during and immediately after the Revolution, a period that Williston Walker (1894, p. 319) described as "the epoch of the lowest spiritual vitality that our churches have ever experienced." Or, to quote Leonard Woolsey Bacon (1897, p. 230): "The closing years of the eighteenth century show the lowest low-water mark of the lowest ebb-tide of spiritual life in the history of the American church.