Why do religions thrive or decline? Will European secularization spread? How do pluralism and religious competition influence religion? How do leaders’ choices influence whether religions thrive or decline? These questions have bedeviled scholars for over a century. Unfortunately, the methods, samples, and data scholars use may bias "global" analyses towards the European pattern and distort our understanding of religious change elsewhere.
To mitigate these problems, Module 1 will link diverse surveys and repurpose retrospective questions to measure religion decades before previous studies, while employing cutting-edge methods to evaluate religious change for each major religious tradition. We will use information from both standard cross-national surveys and surveys designed to measure religiosity in each major religious tradition. Modules 2-4 will link these survey data to a sub-national, geo-referenced database of Protestant and Catholic activity, including from private reports of ‘bishops’ to the Pope about the activities in their diocese and their perceptions of and response to competition, restrictions, etc. The time-coverage, global spread, consistency, and detail of these data are extraordinary.
These data will allow longitudinal analyses of how religious leaders responded when religious competition begins, expands, and declines or when government restrictions begin and end. Moreover, we can measure religious change throughout the 20th and 21st centuries for geographic units where leaders’ decisions most likely matter (e.g., at the diocese, parish, and station level) and can measure thriving with both internal Church data and external surveys. We will write at least 3 articles during the grant period and many more afterwards. We will also make the data, code, and codebooks publicly available, potentially transforming research on both the causes and consequences of religious change.
