"The Church versus the Mall"

What happens when the opportunity cost of church attendance goes up? Just what you'd expect:

The cost of repealing blue laws, by Sarah H. Wright, News Office: Blue laws, or Sunday closing laws, refer to statutes that restrict certain activities on the Christian Sabbath. By the end of the 19th century, nearly every state had at least some law prohibiting certain activities on Sunday. The 1960s saw the beginning of push to repeal these laws in favor of commerce, although a few still remain on the books.

In their study, which appears in the May 2008 edition of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Gruber and Hungerman show what happens when religious services must compete with shopping, hobbies and other activities.

To measure that competition, they studied the large number of states that repealed their blue laws over the past 50 years. ...

The economists used data from the General Social Survey on religious attendance and from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to show a very strong reduction in religious attendance and a decline in religious contributions once the blue laws were repealed. They found no change in other charitable activity, Gruber notes.

To confirm their findings and to complete the economic portrait, the authors also analyzed budget data for four major Christian denominations over the past 40 years. Church expenditures declined significantly since the repeal of the blue laws, they found.

Gruber and Hungerman did more than track how individuals chose to allocate their resources on Sunday once the malls were opened...

They considered the negative consequences for individuals or society from loosening secular constraints and they found those consequences in behaviors associated more with Saturday night than Sunday morning.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) on consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs, the economists found that repealing the blue laws did lead to an increase in drinking and drug use.

What's more, they found that individuals who had attended church and stopped after the blue laws were repealed showed the greatest increase in substance abuse, Gruber notes.

Those effects have significant economic and social implications, the authors say.

The study, "The Church vs. the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?" can be accessed online here.

Comments

[evagrius]

If the only entertainment is going to church....

[robertdfeinman]

The full version seems to be behind a pay wall, so I don't know if they took this into account:

There has been a general trend away from religiosity in the US over the same period. Those professing no religion have increased to as much as 40% of the population (it depends on how you phrase the question).

Those areas which have had the highest decrease in religious affiliation would tend to be those areas which were most likely to abolish blue laws as well. So declining church attendance and the opening of malls on Sunday may be both manifestations of the same demographic shift and not the result of one depending on the other.

[Mark Thoma]

Earlier version:

http://www.nd.edu/~dhungerm/w12410.pdf

[Jeff Hoffman]

The church and commerce can make interesting bedfellows. Here in Florida the presence of a storefront church affords a strip mall landlord property tax exemption. The landlord can own a topless bar on the selfsame piece of property a few doors down. That guy doesn't want to lose his religion.

[Emmenthal]

Color me sceptic, but why do they presume a direct correlation between a lack of blue laws and undesirable social changes? Can't they imagine that both the repeal of blue laws AND lower church attendance is due to another factor?

Some of you might be surprised by this but in the 1980's when TV broadcasting was finally introduced to Brits living on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena the result was a steep decline in communal activities. It wasn't just church attendance that dropped, popular secular activities like weekend community dances died off. Parents started caring less and well-behaved youths became independent minded, all of which led to an increase in the kind of undesirable social behavior that the MIT study decries (alcoholism, violence etc). This same pattern repeats itself in every remote community where TV is introduced.

Now, I'm not silly enough to argue we should chuck our TVs out the window, I'm just pointing out that it's very efficient at changing our behavior and in the process undermine traditional community structures. Quite frankly, I don't wish a return to community policing in the form of nosy neighbors and tittle tattle about people that don't fall in line. I'll just call it the price of individual freedom.

[anne]

"They considered the negative consequences for individuals or society from loosening secular constraints and they found those consequences in behaviors associated more with Saturday night than Sunday morning."

When Jews and Muslims run wild, or by chance only Christians?

[anne]

Jews and Muslims drink like fish on Saturday when the malls are open. OMG!

[anne]

Beware, drunken armed Jews and Muslims heading to the malls on Saturday. Wooooo, wooooo.

[Real Person from the Real World]

Just because the price of peanuts goes up in the summer, doesn't mean it's because it's summer. Could be, there are more baseball games, and people eat more peanuts at baseball games. Cause and effect, are not always that easy to correlate.

[Graham Reinders]

I suspect that the link between the invasion of "American" culture into Arab, Islamic culture and terrorist reaction is the fact that their Clergy knows that they cannot compete on equal terms with consumerism and freedom of action.

[hari]

This is an amazing story...

One one hand the Evangelicals (including GWB/McCain) are waiting for a *New Jerusalem* and, in the process, may be deploying all available *tactics* to obliterate (Yes! that's true!) the leftover of the crusades.

They also have the amazing capacity to sacreligiousness....

[Lafayette]

Article: To confirm their findings and to complete the economic portrait, the authors also analyzed budget data for four major Christian denominations over the past 40 years.

Oh, I am sooooo pleased that economists have, once again, put their certificate of authenticity on the obvious. We've always suspected the effect of Sunday Shopping on religious attendance -- now we KNOW!

The modern day equivalents of medieval cathedrals are the shopping malls, where the God of Mammon rules!

PS: Don't the shopping malls open on Sunday afternoons and leave at least the mornings to God ... or jogging? France is battling over the matter -- but it is not the Church that is in a dither. It's the unions who put up a stink. Germany, I think, closes at 5pm on a Saturday evening ... and nothing budges till Monday morning. Zer gut! ;^)

[anne]

Germany, by the way, even with malls closed tight as turnips on Sunday, is about as church-going a country as Japan, which is to say, beyond wandering painters or tourists, almost not at all. No wonder though the Shogun was always so worried about Christian missionaries spreading through Edo; who would shop?

[slg]

"The rooster crowed and the sun came up..."

Correlation is not causation.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E3D81738F935A15751C1A964948260

December 26, 1982

The Conversion of Japan
By JULIAN MOYNAHAN

THE SAMURAI
By Shusaku Endo.

SHUSAKU ENDO is modern Japan's most distinguished Roman Catholic novelist. If that description makes you blink, consider that a cross-national survey of religious belief published in American newspapers within the past year reported that among the populations studied, the Japanese came last in the percentage of people expressing any belief in immortality or the survival of the soul after death. Another recent survey, comparing I.Q. averages among populations of some leading nations, Eastern and Western, places the Japanese at the very top. It would seem, then, that Mr. Endo has his work cut out for him. Willy-nilly, a great part of his primary readership will be extra-bright people who are either not religious at all or who profess attachment to a religion for the sake of social solidarity, tradition, ceremony or worldly advancement.

Mr. Endo certainly knows about this secularist tendency of his countrymen, and he knows that it is not a new thing. For ''The Samurai,'' which is set near the beginning of the 17th century, abounds in descriptions of the plight of a Spanish missionary who wants to preach Catholicism in Japan:

* ''In order to spread God's teaching in Japan ... there is only one possible method. We must cajole them into it. Espana must offer to share its profits from trade on the Pacific with the Japanese in return for sweeping proselytizing privileges. The Japanese will sacrifice anything else for the sake of profits.''

* ''If a religion promises all the benefits of this life - the amassing of wealth, victory in battle, the healing of disease - the Japanese snatch it up, but they seem totally insensitive to the supernatural and the eternal.''

* ''The Japanese touch for acquiring worldly wealth is almost too sensitively attuned, but they have not the slightest feeling for things eternal.''

* ''Your cunning and wisdom are directed only towards the profit of this world. You move swiftly, like a lizard pouncing upon its prey.'' These reflections come from the diary of Father Pedro Velasco, a Franciscan missionary to Japan who is perfectly acquainted with the native language and culture. The last jotting is made while he lies in a noisome prison, waiting to be burned at the stake, an event that will mark the failure of his mission simultaneously with his translation from priest to holy martyr. He should have known that he could not succeed, for even the zealots of the Jesuit order who came to Japan years earlier had suspended their missionary activity in the face of brutal persecutions of the order and its few thousand converts.

But Father Velasco, who carries the blood of the conquistadors in his veins and is something of a spiritual Don Quixote, had been possessed by a proud dream of succeeding where the rival order had failed. He would exploit the very secularist and materialist tendencies of the Japanese to accomplish the Lord's work. His was a bold idea, yet his failure has been utter. Or has it been? For a man caught up in Father Velasco's plotting, the low-ranking samurai of the book's title, Hasekura Rokuemon, whom the priest pitilessly exploited for the sake of the larger goal of converting multitudes, has undergone a profound, inexplicable conversion to Christ and has already gone on to his own lonely martyrdom.

Along with the conversion of one or two others, this singular, haphazard and pitiful conversion of Hasekura (Father Velasco remains ignorant of it to the end) may have been what God intended all along....

[Magnificent writing.]

[anne]

Though I need to read more to decide fully, Jonathan Gruber strikes me as a researcher on a wildly conservative mission. I had this sense before, but more so now, and wonder at the pretense of being a sociologist wearing an economist's mask.

[anne]

Remind me to go out drinking after church, from now on. Being Catholic is becoming awfully difficult, but mainly because of this sort of offensive idiocy that only makes me wish to rebel. The problem is I don't even drink; still, I can learn.

[agricanto]

Thank you slg
Correlation is not causation

I wonder if research could show that the emergence of adult market cartoons in the "funny papers" like Doonesbury could play a role in decline for Sunday AM prosthletizing?

I betcha the ideological content of the pulpit's Sunday morning message which drifted from deep theology to crass admonitions on social behaviour did both--scare away the faithful and encourage youth disaffection. In my own case it encouraged the "search for meaning" outside church and in what was then the non-conventional world of youth culture and rock music that the mainstream saw as social deviance.

The capture of the Church by the "religious" right in the late 1970s had a lot to do with discouraging thinking people from church attendance, while it attracted political conservatives who found ideological legitimation for their emerging political philosophy. The latter was in obvious conflict with two decades of liberalism in the political sphere. And they succeeded. From the election of the Bishop of Krakow (and now Fr. Ratzinger) to lead the Roman Catholics to the growth of Evangelical Protestantism, Christianity has taken a long nose dive. This is why religion is big business today and why preachers like Hagee and Brice spew venom in stadiums filled with overheated crowds seeking "experience" and ratification for prejudice already held. No transformation of self there! It's more like a Nuremburg rally circa 1939 than a church. But who cares, right?

Alas the "religious" right has thrived as literalism, fundamentalism and historicism have displaced what was, for one brief shining moment, deep, poetic, relevant theology that did not pick fights with science but spoke to the alienation and tragic condition of modern society.

[2slugbaits]

anne,

"Remind me to go out drinking after church, from now on. Being Catholic is becoming awfully difficult..."

Maybe Catholic churches should offer a better quality wine with the Eucharist. And how 'bout better tasting wafers. I can still recall the awful taste of those things from my First Communion. Ah...it's good to be an atheist where now I only have to choose between sleeping in late on Sunday or watching Meet the Press.

[James Killus]

I've been thinking of writing a paper on the increase in the number of silly correlations that have been found, and false causalities invoked, since the advent of easy-to-obtain regression software.