Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

The Dynamics of Religious Economies 105

Table 8.1.Competition and Church Attendance in New York Towns, 1865

Number of denominations in a

New York town

0 1–2 3–4 5 +

Towns with>25% church attendance 0% 18% 55% 84%

N= 42 280 37 237

Table 8.2.Competition and Commitment in American Towns and Villages,

1923–1925

Number of churches per

one thousand population

One Two Three Four or More

Percent who belong to a church 27.4 36.0 34.8 43.4

Percent enrolled in Sunday schools 15.8 22.3 25.2 37.4

Source: Adapted from Brunner (1927: 74).

New York cities in 1865 and 1875, we found that the greatest jump in church attendance
came between cities having no religious choice and those having some (see Table 8.1).
Even as late as the 1920s, when Edmund deS. Brunner (1927) conducted a series of
exceptionally well-executed studies of religious life in 138 small towns and villages,
religious choice was lacking in many rural communities (see Table 8.2). Once again, a
sharp increase in involvement occurs between those communities having some choice
as compared to those with none. The diffusion of religious movements throughout the
nation, combined with increasing population density and improved transportation,
has gradually led to a nation in which religious choice is ubiquitous.
Like religious choice and popular religious involvement, there also was a substantial
lag between the deregulation of religion and the desacralization of related institutions
(Moore 1986). Perhaps the easiest to document is the relationship between religion and
the emerging public (common) schools in the nineteenth century. The Catholic his-
torian Jay Dolan (1985: 266) explains that the public schools “became the established
church of the American republic” intolerant of other religious ideologies. This intol-
erance led to the formation of an extensive Catholic school system, holding the firm
backing of the American bishops and the Vatican. In 1875, the Vatican warned (Ellis
1962: 401, 404) that “evils of the gravest kind are likely to result” from the American
public schools and that if Catholic parents sent their children to the public schools
“without sufficient cause and without taking the necessary precautions...if obstinate,
cannot be absolved.” Even the nineteenth-century educational reformer Horace Mann,
who often is credited with the gradual removal of religion from the public schools, took
a stance of retaining religious instruction on Christian morals and continuing the use
of the King James Bible in the classroom (Butts and Cremin 1958). Writing in 1848,
he commented that the idea of removing religious instruction from the public schools
was unthinkable to the entire population: “I do not suppose a man [sic] can be found