Denominational identity from age sixteen to age thirty-eight

For two decades researchers have agreed that Americans are feeling less loyal to specific denominations than they did in the past. In 1988, Robert Wuthnow described a gradual restructuring of American religion, as older denominational labels were supplanted by liberal or conservative factions within denominations, factions that were creating cross-denominational coalitions (Wuthnow 1988). Roof and McKinney (1987) found that members of mainline Protestant denominations are becoming less and less interested in denominational specifics and are switching from one denomination to another without hesitation. Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens (1994) found the same in a study of young adults reared as Presbyterians (also see Djupe 2000). Loren Mead (1991:87) stated the situation succinctly: "The church of the future may not include our favorite liturgy or hymn, our central theological principle, or even our denomination!"

Religious leaders are of two minds about the importance of denominational loyalty. Executives of denominational institutions such as seminaries and mission programs typically desire strong feelings of loyalty for the sake of constituent support. On the other hand, many Protestant preachers believe in nondenominational churches and see denominations as a distraction from authentic faith in Jesus Christ and the Bible. Christian Smith, in his study of evangelicals (1998), found that denominations are much less important to evangelicals than an evangelical identity based on personal faith and trust in the Bible. Similarly, the seeker church movement includes many nondenominational churches (Sargeant 2000). Our concern in this article is not to comment on the importance of denominations but to examine denominational loyalty over time in a cross-denominational sample.

One indicator of denominational loyalty is the percentage of members of any denomination who switch to another during their adult years. Roof and Hadaway (1977), Roof and McKinney (1987), and Hadaway and Marler (1993) used large-scale survey data to identify the determinants and effects of denominational switching. They found that persons who grew up Catholic switched less than those who grew up Protestant, also persons from religiously-active families and persons from denominations with definite ethnic identity switched less often. Numerous studies have found that interfaith marriage predicts denominational switching (e.g., Sherkat 1991). Most studies (but not all) have found that switchers are more active in their churches than life-long denominational members.

Recently Nancy Ammerman (1999) studied 542 congregations and compared the people who grew up in a denomination with those who switched in later. In denominations with a racial or ethnic consciousness such as Roman Catholic, Orthodox, National Baptist, or Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the percent of current participants who were born in the denomination was high. In evangelical congregations, the percent born in the denomination was low. The same low percentage of life-long members was true for liberal Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ. She hypothesized that a distinct worship tradition or a conscious ethnic heritage was behind the special denominational loyalty of Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. Ammerman reported that "in every denominational group and on every measure, those not born into the denomination are less loyal, knowledgeable, and committed than are those who were born into the tradition" (1999:7), in disagreement with most earlier research.

The present article continues the empirical analysis of denominational identity. It is based on a longitudinal study of persons from three denominations.

METHOD

The study is a follow-up to a 1976 study by Dean Hoge and Gregory Petrillo that gathered extensive data on the faith development, church involvement, and religious attitudes of 451 Baptist, Catholic, and Methodist tenth graders (Hoge and Petrillo 1978; Hoge, Petrillo, and Smith 1982). The subjects, whose average age was 16, belonged to mostly white, middle or upper-middle class churches in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. The Baptist churches were mostly Southern Baptist, but in the Washington DC area the Baptist churches are dually aligned because the District of Columbia Convention is dually aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches of America. Our analyses made no denominational distinctions within the Baptist family. All the Methodist churches were United Methodist. Most, but not all of the 1976 youth were active in church attendance or church youth programs. Hoge and Petrillo tried to include all the tenth graders in the churches' lists, but they succeeded in including only 68 percent of the youth on the churches' lists.

In 1997 and 1998 we set out to find and re-interview these 451 persons. We found current information on 285 of the original subjects, two of whom were deceased, and successfully interviewed 206 by phone, or 46 percent of the original sample (61 Baptists, 68 Catholics, and 77 Methodists). We checked on possible biases by comparing the 1976 data on these 206 persons with data on the 245 who were lost to the follow-up on gender, mother's church attendance, father's church attendance, respondent's church attendance as a youth, participation in church youth programs, and belief in the importance of church teachings. We found only one difference significant at .05--the 206 persons in the follow-up study reported slightly more church participation by their mothers. We conclude that our data has a small bias in that the follow-up persons were reared in homes more church-involved than average.