Not Just Church Ladies
Lynn Robinson
October 1, 2000
From Alexis de Tocqueville onward, observers of America have commented on the importance of "civil associations," those local organizations in which we learn to engage in discussion, make decisions, and, ultimately, govern ourselves. Does involvement in a church-itself one kind of civil association-lead to more or less involvement in other groups?
The data in Table 1, collected by Robert Wuthnow for his book Loose Connections, show that those who attend some kind of religious meeting regularly ("high-attendance religious respondents") are much more likely to be involved with other groups, from health clubs to artistic associations, than the general population.
(When you read these numbers, remember that high-attendance respondents are part of the general population-if they were left out of the general numbers, the contrasts would be even more striking. And we can only scratch our heads about the respondents who attend services frequently, yet say they have "no group affiliations," not even religious ones.)
In Table 2 we just focus on the congregations attended by eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds, and the results differ significantly, though not vastly, depending on where they go to church. If the respondent attends a religious service in their own neighborhood, chances are that their congregation distributes food to the poor (95%) or offers an inner-city ministry (51%). If, on the other hand, they "commute" to a church outside their neighborhood, the chances of those services being offered drops to 74% and 34%, respectively. In general, churches in the respondent's neighborhood offer more services to their community than churches that attract "commuters."
The most striking aspect of these numbers may be that group-comprising ...
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