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

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

Finally, we are interested in discovering whether divorce carries a greater stigma in more conservative denominations. Following the classification scheme suggested by Roof and McKinney (1987), we coded the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Brethren, Church of God (Anderson), Church of the Nazarene, and the Southern Baptists in the conservative category. We have already discovered that divorce does not carry a negative stigma for men as a whole. In model 7 we limited analysis to respondents (both men and women) who are currently working in denominations coded as conservative. If conservative denominations are more strict with regard to the status of divorced clergy, we would expect that the coefficient will be negative, suggesting that divorced clergy earn less than married clergy in conservative denominations. We find that the coefficient is small and not statistically significant. One reason for this was revealed when we examined a cross-tabulation of marital status by ideological groupings. There are o nly twelve divorced clergy within the conservative group of denominations, hardly enough to create a significant result. When this group was deconstructed further, we found that only one of the divorced clergy is a woman.

There are three possible reasons for the low number of divorced clergy. One is that the conservative tradition discourages divorce, and many more persons in these faiths remain married. A second explanation is that the stigma associated with divorce is so serious in conservative denominations that divorced clergy leave the church and do not show up in our sample. A third explanation is that divorced clergy quickly remarry to overcome the divorce stigma. We are able to discount this final explanation, however, because further checking of our sample showed that there are very few remarried clergy in these denominations.

CONCLUSION

In these analyses we find results similar to selected findings in research on non-clerical populations regarding the relationships among marital status, gender, and work. In sum, we find that marriage effects are strongly differentiated by gender. For men, marriage has a relatively strong positive effect. We find that married men earn roughly 20 percent more than single men who have never been married, after adjusting for differences in age, experience, education, and denomination. However, we also find no difference in earnings between married male clergy who have employed spouses, and those who do not. This finding challenges the explanation that married male clergy earn more because they bring extra assets, i.e., the pastor's wife as unpaid staff, to the job. Married male clergy whose wives work full time outside the church are also paid higher salaries, suggesting that it is the desirability of marriage as a character trait for men, rather than the presence of a full-time "pastor's wife," that accounts f or the premium. An alternate explanation is that expectations of clergy wife support are so ingrained in the minds of congregations and denominational elites that -- even when a wife is busy with her own career -- it is assumed that she must be providing some unobserved assistance, or at least that she offers the potential for future congregational labor. This fits with the arguments of Nesbitt (1995), who speculates that such role expectations may have become institutionalized into the procedures of clergy mobility in the Episcopal Church.