Historicizing the Secularization Debate 113
Europeans? It is not at all clear that these differences in religious observance can be
traced to differences in modernization.
There is also another anomaly that is worth noting: the difference in Protestant and
Catholic rates of observance. Based on the classical theory, we might expect “supernat-
ural” forms of religious faith such as Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, to
decline more quickly than more “rational” types of religiosity, such as liberal Protes-
tantism. But in fact the very opposite appears to be the case. Throughout the West,
Catholics are more observant than Protestants, and fundamentalist and evangelical
Protestants are more observant than their “liberal” and “mainline” coreligionists. Thus,
there are important variations – cross-national and interdenominational variations –
which do not readily conform to the expectations of secularization theory. It is pre-
cisely these variations that the next theory – the religious economies model – claims
to explain, and it is to that theory that I now turn.
PRETENDERS TO THE THRONE: THE RELIGIOUS ECONOMIES MODEL
Why do levels of religious belief and practice vary so much from one country to the
next? As we have just seen, classical secularization theory does not provide a com-
plete or satisfying answer to this question. It is this deficit that the religious economies
model (REM) seeks to address. Drawing on neoclassical economics, proponents of the
REM argue that “religious vitality” is positively related to “religious competition” and
negatively related to “religious regulation.” More specifically, they argue that where
“religious markets” are dominated by a small number of large “firms” (i.e., churches) or
heavily “regulated” by the state, the result will be lethargic (religious) “firms,” shoddy
(religious) “products,” and low levels of (religious) “consumption” – in a word: Religious
stagnation. By contrast, where many firms compete in an open market without govern-
ment interference, individual firms will have to behave entrepreneurially, the “quality”
and “selection” of religious products will be higher, and individual consumers will be
more likely to find a religion which is to their liking and standards. If there are variations
in the level of “religious vitality,” they conclude, these are due not to “secularization”
but to changes in the “religious economy.”
Since the late 1980s, proponents of the religious economies model have produced
a steady stream of books and articles that appear to confirm the theory (e.g., Finke and
Stark 1988; Stark and Iannaccone 1994; Finke, Guest, and Stark 1996; Finke and Stark,
Chapter 8, this volume; for an exhaustive bibliography, see Chaves and Gorski 2001).
Most of them have focused on the effects of religious competition, rather than reli-
gious regulation. The most pertinent of these studies examine the relationship between
“religious pluralism” (operationalized in terms of the Herfindahl Index, a standard mea-
sure of market concentration) and “religious vitality” (operationalized in terms of re-
ligious belief, church membership, or church attendance) (e.g., Finke and Stark 1988,
1989; Finke 1992; Stark et al. 1995; Finke et al. 1996; Hamberg and Pettersson 1994,
1997; Johnson 1995; Pettersson and Hamberg 1997). These studies generally find a
positive relationship between religious pluralism and religious vitality.^3 Based on these
(^3) There is also a second and smaller group of studies that examines the relationship between the
relative size of a particular religion – its “market share” – and its internal “vitality” (e.g., Stark
and McCann 1993). These studies show that minority religions receive more support from their