Religiosity and Church Attendance: The Effects on Use of "Hard Drugs" Controlling for Sociodemographic and Theoretical Factors

Our study, of 532 adolescents from three urban public high schools in a large metropolitan area on the East Coast of the United States, was designed to examine whether church attendance and personal religiosity (e.g., private prayer, evangelism) were significant predictors of "hard drug" use (e.g., cocaine, heroin) when analyzed together with well-documented sociodemographic factors and elements of social control and social learning theories. The analyses tested several assumptions found in the literature: (a) religiosity is significant only in ecological contexts where religion permeates the culture (unlikely for this sample), (b) religiosity is relevant only to behavior for which societal values are ambiguous (unlikely for the drugs studied), (c) religiosity ceases to be related to drug use when considered with other well-known predictors, and (d) church attendance is an adequate measure of religiosity for such research. This study found that a measure of personal religiosity, rather than church attendance, is a significant predictor of drug use along with gender, race, family structure, attachments to mother and to father, parental supervision, self-esteem, and peer association. Conceptual implications of the study are discussed.