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Packed pews: understanding evangelical group formation

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Abstract

Evangelicals are one of the largest subgroups of the US population. With formal associations over 200 years old, they are certainly not new on the scene. Yet, their political group activity has remained relatively unexplored. Why do they emerge and what constitutes the evangelical group universe? Using an original dataset of evangelical groups and drawing upon a rich literature of theories of group formation, I use population ecology to explain evangelical interest group emergence. I find that evangelical groups are approaching a critical mass where competition for resources discourages group formation. I also find strong evidence that the political polarization of the mid-1990s encouraged group formation at a staggering rate. I also demonstrate that evangelicals are responsive to “threats” to their social values. In addition to this, I control for a number of other variables that further bolster the evidence that population ecology is a good way to explain a complex religious group.

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Notes

  1. Around 17% of self-identified evangelicals are Black or Latino (Pew 2014). None of the organizations I identify were primarily focused on minority membership. I recognize that this could influence the findings in my results section. However, these ethnic groups tend to behave differently than Whites (see, e.g., Wong 2018), so if there was an impact, it would make my findings conservative estimates.

  2. It should be noted that several churches/colleges/universities founded or were founded as a result of other evangelical groups. For example, Liberty University shares its founder, Jerry Falwell Sr., with the Moral Majority.

  3. This happened in only one instance where I could not verify a group’s existence by any reasonable means.

  4. Results are substantively identical when using alternative tests like a Poisson or zero-inflated negative binomial regression. To check for serial autocorrelation, I also conducted a linear Poisson autoregressive (par(P)) analysis on the data. Because the density and density squared figures are perfectly correlated, one had to be dropped for that model to converge, so it is not presented in the body of the paper. Nevertheless, the significance of the key independent variables remained unchanged. The par(P) analysis was conducted in R statistical software and was developed by Brandt and Williams (2001).

  5. In an effort to capture a generalized, monetized measure of group influence, I checked group websites for financial disclosures, secondary sources that report on nonprofit spending, and filed five FOIA requests with the IRS. The first two methods revealed extremely limited information for a few of the groups in the data. The FOIA requests were successful but only allowed for a few years of information to be gathered. Further, the flow of finances varied greatly between the sources that I found. Analyses based on these data were (1) too small to be statistically sound and (2) would likely be heavily biased toward visible groups backed by big donors.

  6. Generally, I find data imputation to be risky given that the model is now fitted to speculative instead of observed data. However, there were too few years of data available to do anything more than a simple regression with the included variables.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on early drafts of this paper, the author thanks Jim Gimpel, Frances Lee, Kris Miler, Tony Nownes, and the anonymous reviewers. For methodological assistance and data access, the author thanks Allen Hertzke, Will Reed, Patrick Wohlfarth, and the Center for Responsive Politics.

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  1. Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, 3140 Tydings Hall, 7343 Preinkert Drive, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Tristan M. Hightower

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Correspondence to Tristan M. Hightower.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 4, Table 4.

Fig. 4
figure 4

The count data fit well along a Poisson distribution

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Table 4 Evangelical interest group formation
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External threats

This is the list of Supreme Court Cases that made up my “external threat” dummy variable. Years that are associated with one of the following decisions were coded as 1; all others were 0. Because I was dealing with roughly six decades of data to analyze (\(\approx\)60 observations), I did not want to include more than 10% of the cases being coded with the variable to prevent estimation bias. So, I chose to include six cases that were directly applicable to evangelical culture. They were:

  • Engel v. Vitale (1962)

  • Abington v. Schempp (1963)

  • Roe v. Wade (1973)

  • Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988)

  • Lee v. Weisman (1992)

  • Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000)

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Hightower, T.M. Packed pews: understanding evangelical group formation. Int Groups Adv 10, 221–239 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41309-021-00122-3

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