Religiosity

In general terms, religiosity is the importance of religion in a person’s life. The fact that many more Americans identify with a religion than are actually affiliated with one points to a problem that has long concerned researchers: religiosity varies according to how it measured. Many years ago, Charles Glock (1959, 1962) suggested that religiosity involves many distinct dimensions. Experiential religiosity refers to a person’s inward emotional tie to a religion. Ritualistic religiosity refers to ritual activity such as prayer and church attendance. Ideological religiosity concerns belief in religious doctrine. Consequential religiosity has to do with how evident religious beliefs are in a person’s overall daily behavior. Intellectual religiosity refers to the extent of a person’s knowledge of the history and beliefs of a particular religion. Clearly, any one person is probably more religious in some ways than in others, underlining the difficulty of measuring a complex concept such as religiosity.

How religious, then, are Americans? Almost everyone in the United States (95 percent) claims to believe in a divine power of some kind and, as we have seen, 90 percent of Americans identify with specific religion. Moreover, 84 percent claim to feel “closeness” to God (N. O. R. C., 1987:132). In terms of experiential religiosity, Americans do seem to be a religious people.

Americans appear to be less religious, however, in ideological terms: only about 70 percent, for instance, claim to believe in a life after death. Americans score even lower on dimensions of ritualistic religiosity. For example, only about half of American adults claim to pray at least once a day, and only about 35 percent attend religious services on a weekly or almost – weekly basis.

American religiosity is, therefore, an ambiguous matter. Because belief in God is normative within American culture, for many people such a claim may be simply a matter of conformity. Similarly, people can have various motives for attending religious services, not all of which are, strictly speaking, religious. For some, religious organizations provide a sense of identity and belonging, a means of serving the community, or a source of social prestige. We may safely conclude, then, that most Americans are only marginally religious, although a large minority is deeply religious.

Correlates of Religious Affiliation

Religious affiliation is related to many familiar social patterns.

Social Class

Although there are differences in social class within every religious category, religious affiliation is generally linked to social class. Table 16-4 presents the relative standing of the members of major religious groups in the United States during the mid-1970s.

Dimension of Social Stratification
Religion	Family Income ($)	Relative Occupational Prestige	Education (years)
Jews Protestants Episcopalians Presbyterians Congregationalists Methodists Lutherans Baptists Sects Catholics	14.350 10.120 14.100 13.200 12.045 10.185 10.400 9.245 8.080 10.820	50.0 45.9 48.4 49.0 47.3 46.2 45.1 45.8 45.7 43.8	13.7 11.7 13.6 13.1 12.7 12.0 11.6 11.0 10.5 11.7

Of all the categories included in the table, Jews have the highest overall social standing in terms of income, occupational prestige, and educational attainment. Among Protestant denominations, Episcopalians and Presbyterians have higher social position than Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists. In general, Catholics occupy a middle position in the class structure of America. In the lowest position are members of various Christian sects.

Political Attitudes

Two decades ago, Charles Clock and Rodney Stark (196 5) examined links between religiosity and political attitudes in Great Britain and France. Politically speaking, British society can be divided into supporters of the Tory Party (who are politically conservative and generally of higher social class) and supporters of the Labour Party (who are politically liberal and generally of lower social stand­ing). Clock and Stark found that Tories were more reli­gious than Labourites: they were almost twice as likely to attend church, and were also more likely to believe in life after death. The same pattern was found in France: more politically conservative people were much more likely to engage in religious activity than more liberal people.

Looking at the United States, Protestants tend to be more conservative than Catholics. Consequently, Protestants are more likely to support the Republican Party, while Catholics have historically been Democrats. Jews, too, have traditionally supported the Democratic party (J. Wilson, 1978; Gallup, 1982). Consistent with their European research, Clock and Stark (1965) found that, among Protestants, the more conservative Republi­cans attended church more frequently than did the more liberal Democrats.