[lbo-talk] how many Americans go to church, and why?

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 6 17:45:07 PDT 2007


--- Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:


> Yoshie wrote:
>
>
>
> >America is a country of loners who have few friends
> >other than their family, and that's no secret.
> Such loners, however,
> >seldom join any religious congregation and go to
> church, synagogue,
> >mosque, etc. regularly,
>
>
> How do you know these things? Not much of what you
> say about church
> goers matches my experience growing up going to
> church every Sunday
> until I was in middle school. Nor does it match the
> poll results Doug posted.
>

[WS:] Actually, there is substantial body of research showing a connection between religious and social participation , including social movement participation and civic engagement. I netted about 95 journal articles in Sociological Abstracts using search terms church membership social netwowrks and social capital.

It does not mean, of course, that every church memebrs is connected (hence your experience), but statistically speaking, church members are more likely to be connected than non-members. It is so, because churches make deliberate efforts to connect to people - anything from door-to-door proselytizng (those pests knock on my door several times a year) to very clever network building strategies used by Unitarians (who btw are very cool and on 'our' side.)

Wojtek

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