Religious Commitment and Existential Insecurity in the United States

Joe Marshall, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation presents a quantitative analysis of religious commitment among U.S. adults who were polled in nationally representative surveys between 1984 and 2010. The three studies presented in this dissertation investigate two key research questions. First, are people in the United States more religiously committed, on average, when they live in geographic areas (e.g., counties and cities) where local indicators of human development such as life expectancy, education and income are relatively low? Prior research has found a robust cross-national relationship between human development and religiosity, but little evidence has been presented that suggests the same relationship exists at the level of subnational geographies. Second, if such a relationship exists, are the reasons for the statistical link between human development and religiosity attributable to the theoretical explanations in the extant literature? Are people living in poverty and poor health more likely to be religious because they fear for their security? The results presented in this dissertation suggest, first, that a strong and robust association exists between the levels of human development in U.S. counties and cities and the levels of religious commitment reported by survey respondents who lived in those areas. On average, U.S. adults tended to self-identify with a religious group, report strong affiliation with their religious group, pray more frequently, attend religious services more regularly and hold more supernaturalistic religious views when they lived in geographic areas with relatively low levels of human development. Inversely, survey respondents who lived in areas of the country with higher levels of human development—where living conditions were more comfortable and desirable—tended to report significantly lower levels of religious commitment on average. These results held after adjusting for covariates at the individual and geographic levels of analysis, including denomination, political party affiliation, population dynamics and basic demographics. Second, although the overall relationship between human development and religious commitment is present in the results, there is little evidence for the explanatory chain predicted by the literature. Individual-level measures of psychological distress do not mediate the relationship between human development and religious commitment as the existential insecurity literature would expect. Existential insecurity may be important, but not at the individual level as often assumed. Instead, what this dissertation finds is that the effect of human development on individual level religiosity seems to be mediated mostly by aggregate-level insecurity rather than individual-level insecurity. Indicators of mental distress at the level of geographic areas are much better mediators of the overall relationship than indicators of mental distress at the individual level. Incidentally, these findings may be important for understanding why levels of religiosity differ so substantially by area of the country and by countries in the world. It may be that determinants of religiosity work more through local and regional cultural values and they do through individual psychological means. Of course, this last conclusion is speculative and is not the main goal of the dissertation, but it may be an important implication to be explored in future research. Collectively, these results contribute to theory and ongoing research around the existential insecurity model of religious commitment, a theoretical model that sees economic precarity as part of a broader collection of everyday threats to basic survival. In geographic areas where human development is low, inevitable risks to survival such as old age, death, sickness, conflict and poverty are more immediately threatening.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Olson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Clinical psychology|Economics|Philosophy|Philosophy of religion|Political science|Psychology|Religion|Sociology|Theology

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