Cost and Benefit in Religious Affiliation

What is the cost to benefit payoff of a paying for expertise? Years ago, my brother was a business manger for a consulting firm in Houston when business was declining. He concluded after some analysis that the firm’s fees were to low. People expected they must be getting inferior service because the low price. It took a few months of persuading colleagues but they finally came around to the idea of raising their consulting fees. Business began booming.

It may sound crass but there are sociologists that believe something similar to this happens with religious affiliation. Faith communities that demand little in terms of time, money, relationships, and ethical behavior, can’t be worth much. Those with high demands must be providing something or people wouldn’t make the sacrifices. The first type of communities tend draw in lots of loosely committed “free-loaders.” They may be attractive for the curious and the dabblers, but they tend to drive off those wanting deep commitment and high payoff. The second type of group tends to create high solidarity and deep commitment but creates insulation against those who might not yet be willing to pay the cost.

So what happens if you lower the barriers of a high commitment context so as to blur the differences between the “ins” and the “outs?” You have effectively reduced both the “cost” of entrance and the “benefit” of being a commitment community.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark give some examples of this in their book The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy. In the following chart, notice what happened to the Catholic priesthood, as well as the number of bothers and sisters in Catholic orders.

With Vatican 2 there was blurring of the lines, as it were, between sacred and secular callings. Sacred callings came down in status and there was an attempt to become more accommodating to non-Catholics. The benefit of becoming a priest, brother, or sister diminished and therefore fewer people were willing to take these paths.

Similarly, look at the Methodist offshoot Church of the Nazarene over the past century.

The denomination started out in relatively high tension with culture but by the 1970s and 1980s a transition away from distinctive codes of holy living was being made. By the end of the century, growth as percentage of the population in the U.S. was almost flat, just as with their Methodist forbearers almost 150 years ago.

There are doubtlessly more variables involved here but evidence for this cost to benefit phenomenon does often emerge as a plausible factor when analyzing trends with religious groups.