108 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark
to go to mass and to keep their opinions to themselves” (Armstrong 1937/1967: 38).
Beginning with the “quiet revolution” from 1960 to 1966, however, French Canadians
began to acquire more rights over their own institutions and in 1974 the National
Assembly adopted French as Quebec’s official language (Moni ́ere 1981). The Church
was no longer the sole guardian of French Canadians’ institutions and culture.
Stripped of its significance as the organizational basis for resisting outside domina-
tion, the Catholic Church in Quebec quickly began to display the typical inefficien-
cies of a monopoly faith. Indeed, based on the 1990 World Values Survey, Catholic
mass attendance now is significantly lower in Quebec (29 percent weekly) than else-
where in Canada (47 percent weekly), fully in accord with the thesis that the Catholic
Church generates greater commitment in places where it is a minority faith. Given
the Church’s greatly reduced sociopolitical role, both the high level of Catholic prac-
tice in the past and its recent, rapid decline, are consistent with our theory. As stated in
proposition 5, if religious firms become significantly less important as vehicles for social
conflict, they will be correspondingly less able to generate commitment. No longer the
guardian of French institutions and culture, the Church is generating less membership
commitment.
CONCLUSION
Despite refuting the secularization thesis, and other long-held propositions of the old
paradigm, the new paradigm does not replace predictions on the inevitable decline in
the demand for religion with equally implausible predictions on an inevitable increase.
Instead, the new paradigm attempts to explain variation in religious activity by placing
attention on the changing religious supply.
This chapter reviewed a few propositions on religious economies to illustrate how
the new paradigm explains religious change. We argued that the most significant feature
of a religious economy is the degree to which it is deregulated and therefore market-
driven. The effects of such regulation are many, with the most immediate impact being
the supply of religions available to people, and the people’s freedom to choose any of
the available religions. But the long-term effects of changes in regulation are changes
in the sacralization of the society and the religious commitment of the people. As il-
lustrated by the United States and Latin America, religious deregulation leads to an
increasingly desacralized society, where there is increasing differentiation between re-
ligious and secular institutions. This is a very gradual process, with the once privileged
establishments holding cultural and political advantages long after the official ties be-
tween church and state were severed.
Religious deregulation also generates religious competition between a growing num-
ber of energetic and efficient religious firms; a competition that increases the overall
level of religious commitment. In the case of the United States and Latin America,
deregulation unleashed a host of new competing sects that displayed rapid organiza-
tional growth. Like desacralization, however, this growth required a substantial period
of time. After approximately fifty years of rapid growth, Latin American sects are now
enrolling a substantial portion of the population. For the United States, it was well over
one hundred years before over one half of the population joined a church. In each
case, the religious groups with a marginal market position generated the highest levels
of member commitment.