WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS ABOUT CHURCH AND STATE
By Charles M. North and Carl R. Gwin

TBC’s 2003 Annual Convocation focused on the theme of religious freedom. Coincidentally, one of the authors of this article was at a conference of economists that same weekend presenting our newest findings from a research stream on religious freedom and church/state relations (North and Gwin, 2003a). Of course, TBC is hardly alone in its interest in religious freedom; numerous organizations from across the religious and political spectra are always willing to offer opinions on the proper scope of the relationship between church and state. However, as empirical social scientists, we have noticed that many of these analyses lack substantial evidence rooted in actual data of the effects of state involvement with the church. In an effort to develop and add to the growing empirical literature on church and state, we have embarked upon a research agenda that relies upon variations in church/state relations across countries and over time in order to see what the effects of state involvement with the church has on religion and religious behavior.

In this article we will summarize in non-technical terms the conclusions of a number of scholars examining church and state from a data-oriented perspective. The works cited come from economists, sociologists, and political scientists. After our survey of the most relevant literature, we will discuss some of the implications of these findings for church/state relations in the United States of the 21st Century.

WHAT THE DATA SAY

Before we begin discussing the results of various studies, it makes sense first to talk about how something as abstract as religious devotion can be measured. Simply put, we cannot measure religious devotion very well. However, a number of more objective measurements can provide a decent alternative for quantifying how religious a person or a group of people are. One of the most commonly used is attendance at religious services.For individuals, surveys often ask how frequently a person attends religious services. For a larger group (like the population of a country), the responses to surveys can be aggregated to estimate the percentage of the population who attend religious services with a certain frequency (such as at least once a week or at least once a month). Interestingly, by this measure, the United States is one of the most religious countries in the world, with between 40 and 45 percent claiming to attend religious services at least once week. Plus, religious attendance is correlated with other measures of religious devotion, such as belief in God, belief in heaven, belief in hell, and so on.

It sometimes surprises people to learn that economists study religious behavior, religious organizations, and matters of church and state. Yet Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations addressed such matters, in addition to his much better-known discussion of the “invisible hand” of the market. Basing his analysis on his own observations of the Churches of England and Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church on the European continent, he argued that the clergy in a state church were less likely to “exert” themselves to attract new adherents, in large part because their subsistence depended less on the masses and more on the nobility who ruled the nations. As a result of their “indolence,” the clergy in the state churches had no defense against the “teachers of new religions” other than “to call upon the civil magistrate to persecute, destroy, or drive out their adversaries, as disturbers of the public peace.” (Smith 1981 [1776], 788-89)

Despite Smith’s early attention to issues of church and state, it took two hundred years for social scientists to develop the data needed to examine church and state issues more rigorously. One of the earliest empirical studies was by Iannaccone (1991), who examined the relationship between religious attendance and the degree of religious competition in twelve predominantly Protestant countries. He showed that, in these countries, the percent of the population who regularly attended religious services increased as the number and variety of religious denominations became more diverse. Of particular interest, the countries in the sample with the lowest levels of attendance were the five with state churches (Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark).

In a follow-up to Iannaccone’s work, Chaves and Cann (1992) analyzed a total of 18 industrialized countries, adding six predominantly Catholic European countries to the twelve Protestant countries in Iannaccone (1991). However, rather than looking at religious diversity, Chaves and Cann developed a rough index of “religious market regulation” based on six factors: the existence of a single state church; official state recognition of some denominations but not others; state appointment or approval of church leaders; direct payment by the state of church personnel salaries; the existence of a church tax; and the existence of state subsidies for churches’ operating, maintenance, or capital expenses. Their analysis showed that, for these 18 countries, religious attendance declined as religious regulation increased.

A study of church attendance in Great Britain by Sawkins, Seaman, and Williams (1997) showed that members of the Church of England attended services less frequently than members of other denominations. Switching tacks somewhat, Iannaccone, Finke, and Stark (1997) did a comparative study of churches in the United States and in Sweden (which until 2000 had an established state church). They argued that high American religious attendance (43 percent reporting weekly attendance) compared to Swedish religious attendance (5 percent) was due to the presence in the U.S. of competition among churches, whereas the officially established Church of Sweden failed to energize its adherents. They also pointed out the differences in attendance levels among members of the Church of Sweden
and members of other Swedish denominations, in that 20 percent of Catholic Swedes attend services at least weekly, and about 70 percent of Swedish Latter- Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists attend at least weekly. Studying Italy, Introvigne and Stark (forthcoming) found that there has been something of a religious revival among young Italians in the wake of a significant reduction in regulation of Italian churches in 1984.

Olds (1994) examined the impact of the disestablishment of the last state churches in the United States. While the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1791, it was not initially applicable to the states. Indeed, state churches continued in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire through the first two or three decades of the 1800s. Olds showed that, in the decades following disestablishment of the state churches, employment among ministers grew drastically among the dissenting churches but not among the established Congregationalists. Similarly, membership in Baptist churches in Massachusetts grew rapidly following disestablishment, as did the number of Baptist churches in Massachusetts.

In the last few years, we have used data from international surveys to investigate the effects of religious freedom and state religion on religious attendance. With data on the percentage of people in 59 countries who attended religious services weekly during the 1990s, North and Gwin (2003b) found that the presence of a state religion in a country was associated with a reduction in weekly attenders by between 14.6 and 16.7 percent of the country’s population. We also found that a decade’s worth of constitutional protection of religious freedom (even if only sporadically enforced) increased the number of weekly attenders by approximately 1.2 percent of the population.

Continuing our exploration of religious freedom and state religion, North and Gwin (2003a) used survey data from individuals in 60 countries on how often they attend religious services. By looking at people instead of nations, we were able to analyze the data at the level where the actual attendance decision occurs. Again, we found that people attend religious services less frequently in countries with a state religion. Importantly, this effect carried over to individuals who were not members of the state religion. Thus, the average Baptist or Methodist in England attends church less often than an identical person in a country with no state religion. We also found that constitutional protection of religious freedom increased the frequency of religious attendance, but the size of the effect was much smaller than in our (2003b) paper.

Barro and McCleary (2003) is the only empirical paper to find that a state religion stimulates religious attendance. However, this finding was likely due to some specific statistical issues, which we analyzed in more detail in North and Gwin (2003b). Overall, the most reasonable conclusion from the empirical evidence is that a state religion hinders the practice of religion, whereas legal protection of religious freedom increases religious participation.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE UNITED STATES

Based upon the review of the studies presented above, it appears that state involvement in religious markets is strongly associated with lower levels of religiosity. An important question is what these findings imply for church-state relations in the United States. Because most of the research discussed above examines the effects of regulations on religion far beyond what is permitted under the U.S. Constitution, we must tread cautiously when applying the results we have described to a discussion of the kinds of church-state issues present in the contemporary United States.

Most importantly, we need to know why state involvement in religion lessens religiosity. Neither our research to date nor the other work described above has adequately examined this “why?” question. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith espoused a lazy monopoly theory. That is, a state church protected by law from competitors becomes lazy in preaching its message to the masses. Instead, the clergy focus on the rulers and the gentry who provide them with their support. While Smith’s hypothesis has merit, it cannot fully explain the lower religious attendance we observe today in countries with state religions, mainly because competing religions are much freer to proselytize than ever before in countries with state religions.2 In any event, on the surface it seems that any entity receiving government subsidies should be stronger than one that does not; lower attendance is inconsistent with this notion.

We are presently exploring the question of why state religion seems to weaken religion rather than strengthen it, and we set forth here our current working hypothesis. Drawing heavily from Gill (1998), we suspect that the church develops credibility problems when it becomes too intertwined with the state. Virtually every state will at some point adopt policies that some segment of its population dislikes. When such a disconnect develops between the state and a segment of its population, that group of citizens is likely to question not only the government’s concern for the group, but also the concern of any church closely aligned with the state. Over time, numerous groups will be alienated by various government policies, and the lack of trust in the government will carry over to the government’s favored church(es). Thus, not only will disaffected groups become disenchanted with the government, they will also become disenchanted with the favored church. Such disaffection does not need to rise to a revolutionary fervor; it is sufficient that people view government – and by extension the favored religion – negatively. Especially where there are restrictions on the ability of new religious groups to enter the country and attract new adherents from among the disenchanted, the negative feelings toward the favored church will lead to lower overall religiosity.

In fact, a mild disenchantment with religion may be all it takes for the state religion to become a mere cultural artifact rather than a vibrant religious movement. This is a fair description of religion in the European nations with state churches. The church is the place where you are baptized, confirmed, married, and buried, and the church maintains many pretty buildings that represent the nation’s heritage. But in such countries the church is not a place where large segments of the population gather to worship and to express their deep devotion to God, nor is it a place where numerous social networks revolve around membership in a local parish or congregation.

If these possible answers to the “why?” question are correct, then we can make an educated guess as to how changes in the church-state relationship in the U.S. will impact the church overall. If Adam Smith’s “lazy monopoly” argument is the reason for the negative impact of state religion, then there is little to worry about from increased accommodation of church-state interaction in the U.S. After all, the religious groups seeking government favor are among the most vigorous and aggressive in the nation. As we have already suggested though, we believe that there is a fundamental process by which religious groups and organizations that are associated with the state become tainted in the eyes of many people in the general population. Over time, outsiders come to view the favored religion as little more than an extension of an unpopular government bureaucracy. As more and more people become disenchanted with the government, the strength of the favored religion fades. As our latest research suggests, the disaffection with religion may well carry over to religions that have no connection with the state, weakening them as well.

At present, conservative evangelical Protestants (including many Baptists) are among the strongest advocates of an increased role for religion within U.S. government institutions. For example, publicly- funded vouchers for religious schools, prayer in public schools, postings of the Ten Commandments in public buildings, and funding for the Faith and Community-Based Initiative have been supported by groups like the Focus on the Family, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Presumably, these Christians believe that such government programs will strengthen the Kingdom of God. Yet our research suggests the opposite: if these groups succeed in getting prayers of their liking in public schools, or in placing the King James Ten Commandments in our secular courthouses, or in any other way infusing their preferred religious views into public forums, they could well be undermining their own credibility in the eyes of the people whom they seek to convert. Rather than moving the Kingdom of God forward, such church-state interaction could ultimately weaken the groups who successfully obtain the government’s favor.

Our comments above focus on the wisdom of church-state involvement from the perspective of the church; we are not expressing opinions on the constitutionality of various policy initiatives. After all, programs that intermingle church and state can be both constitutional and unwise. The accumulated social science research on issues of church and state suggests that state involvement in and regulation of religion is ultimately harmful to religion. These research findings should make Christians more cautious in advocating government policies that in some way favor Christianity (or more likely some particular branch of Christianity). Though it may seem to many believers that government favoritism is beneficial, the ultimate impact of such a policy may be a long-term decline in the religion being “favored.”

Charles M. North and Carl R. Gwin1 are assistant professors of Department of Economics, Baylor University

REFERENCES

Readers desiring a general introduction to social scientific research on religion should read Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. The following are the complete citations for the articles described in this article:

Barro, Robert J., and Rachel M. McCleary. “Religion Economic Growth.” NBER Working Paper No. 9682, May 2003

.Chaves, Mark, and David E. Cann. “Regulation, Pluralism, and Religious Market Structure: Explaining Religion’s Vitality.” Rationality and Society, 4(3): 272-90 (July 1992).

Gill, Anthony. Rendering Unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Iannaccone, Laurence R. “The Consequences of Religious Market Structure: Adam Smith and the Economics of Religion.”

Rationality and Society, 3(2): 156-77 (April 1991).

Iannaccone, Laurence R., Roger Finke, and Rodney Stark. “Deregulating Religion: The Economics of Church and State.” Economic Inquiry, 35(2): 350-64 (April 1997).

Introvigne, Massimo, and Rodney Stark. “Religious Competition and Revival in Italy: Exploring European Exceptionalism.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (forthcoming).

North, Charles M., and Carl R. Gwin. “International Evidence on Religious Freedom, State Religion, and Religious Attendance of Individuals.” Working paper, June 2003a.

North, Charles M., and Carl R. Gwin. “Religious Freedom and the Unintended Consequences of State Religion.” Working paper, August 2003b.

Olds, Kelly. “Privatizing the Church: Disestablishment in Connecticut and Massachusetts.” Journal of Political Economy, 102(2): 277-97 (1994).

Sawkins, John W., Paul T. Seaman, and Hector C. S. Williams. “Church Attendance in Great Britain: An Ordered Logit Approach.” Applied Economics, 29(2): 125-34 (February 1997).

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981 [1776].

Footnotes

1 The opinions expresses in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Baylor University or its employees.

2 An important warning applies here: to date, consistent data are not widely available for religious attendance in most of the Islamic world. Thus, our data come from industrialized Western countries, the former Soviet bloc, and a few Asian and African countries. We do not know how data from countries with state-supported Islam would affect the findings reported herein.

October 2003