Enforcing Family Values? The Effects of Marital Status on Clergy Earnings

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 1999 by Patricia M.Y. Chang, Paul Perl

Our survey offered respondents numerous ways of defining their marital status. The categories included "single, never married," "in a committed relationship," "divorced," "widowed," "currently married," "currently married after a divorce," and "currently married after being widowed." In these analyses we limited observations to the following statuses: "single, never married," "currently in first marriage," and "currently divorced (not remarried)." We adopted this conservative strategy in order to clarify the analytical meaning of our findings. We created a series of dummy variables for the analysis that is appropriate for the comparisons being referenced in the hypotheses. These will be explained further in the discussion of findings.

Previous analyses of the data suggest that the clergy labor market can be divided into three important career tracks (Chang 1997). The first track includes the majority of clergy, consisting of those who are engaged in congregational work. It includes senior pastors, sole pastors, associate pastors, specialized pastors of youth, or music and co-pastors. The second track includes clergy who have moved into administrative positions within the denomination at either the regional or national level. The third track includes clergy who are ordained but currently employed in non-church related work in secular contexts. For the sake of valid comparisons, we only included church-based clergy in this analysis. Limiting our analysis to congregational clergy makes sense from a substantive as well as a methodological point of view. Our theoretical logic suggests that only clergy who are employed in congregational contexts are likely to be affected by the positive effects of marriage, i.e., "the pastor's wife" bonus, or b y the stigma of being divorced or single, because these effects are reflections of congregational attitudes. We expect these statuses to be less relevant when a clergyperson is in an administrative or non-church position.

It should be noted that these conditions reduce the number of valid respondents in our analyses. Our original sample of 4,600 observations is reduced to roughly 3,200 when we limited observations to those currently working in congregational contexts. Of these, 523 did not report salary information, [3] reducing the valid sample to roughly 2,700.

A reviewer for this paper has noted that failing to control for clergy rank or job position (senior pastor, associate pastor, etc.) obscures a possible bias, namely that our findings might be reflecting a spurious relationship between marital status and rank. The reviewer suggested that we therefore include rank in our analysis as a control variable. However, we argue that doing so would result in controlling for much of the variation we wish to explain. Following the standard mobility literature we assume that earnings are directly associated with rank and job position (Sorensen and Kalleberg 1981). One way we expect marital status to affect earnings is through the kind of job mobility one experiences. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the cross section at nature of the data prevents us from knowing how changes in marital status affect subsequent earnings and job change.