Even Intense Religiosity Is Declining in the United States: Comment

David Voas, Mark Chaves

Sociological Science, November 15, 2018
10.15195/v5.a29


In their 2017 article, “The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research,” Schnabel and Bock claimed that “intense religion . . . is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States.” In this article, we show that even the intensely religious segment of the American population is indeed shrinking. Schnabel and Bock mistakenly concluded otherwise because their analytical strategy was not sufficiently sensitive to detect very slow change (leading them to miss signs of declining intense religion on the indicators they examined), they examined a limited set of indicators (missing still more signs of declining intense religion), and they paid insufficient attention to cohort differences. Overall, their empirical conclusion that “only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States” is simply false. And their interpretive conclusion that “intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis” should be rejected.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

David Voas: Department of Social Science, University College London
E-mail: d.voas@ucl.ac.uk

Mark Chaves: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: mac58@soc.duke.edu

Acknowledgements: David Voas received funding from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council via the Research Centre on Micro-Social Change. The authors thank Tom Smith for helping to detail the changes that occurred in the General Social Survey between 2002 and 2004 and Simon Brauer for suggesting the use of a scale measure of intense religiosity.

  • Citation: Voas, David, and Mark Chaves. 2018. “Even Intense Religiosity Is Declining in the United States.” Sociological Science 5: 694-710.
  • Received: August 3, 2018
  • Accepted: September 30, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a29




The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

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