The Local-Cosmopolitan Orientation and Traditional Religious Commitment

Some substantive issues involved in explaining variation in traditional religious commitment are examined in this paper, and an argument is put forth calling for new explanatory schemes. The local-cosmopolitan orientation is proposed as a predictor of traditional religiosity, viewing “localism” as a context of meaning for church-linked behavior and belief. This hypothesis is tested and substantiated with exploratory data from a sample of Southern Baptists. Moreover, the findings suggest that localism as a variable explains greater variance in five measures of religiosity, on the whole, than do structural variables such as age, education, occupational prestige, and sex. These results suggest that further attention to orientational factors is needed in devising more satisfactory theories of religious commitment.