Church as a Family Surrogate: Another Look at Family Ties, Anomie, and Church Involvement

This paper examines the hypothesis that adults without complete ties (i.e., never-married, widowed, divorced, separated, or married but childless persons) resort to increased religious participation as a means of relieving anomie and gaining in church the comfort and companionship not available to them in their homes. This family theory of church involvement, put forward by Glock et aL (1967) in a study of urban parishioners of the Episcopal Church, has consistently been rejected in subsequent research. But many of these later studies are as suspect as the original one because of their limited samples and/or inappropriate methods of data analysis. Log-linear analyses of survey data from a nationally representative sample of Americans are reported in this paper. Contrary to the surrogate theory, the results show unmarried church members to be less active than married members. In addition, having children seems neither to promote nor discourage the church involvement of parents. However, the results do at first appear to support the operation of the church as a surrogate for persons who are not members of a congregation (a group to which the theory was not intended to apply). Lacking a spouse or a child elevates by about one-third the likelihood that a non-member will score high on a three-item index of church involvement. Yet, the analyses also reveal that this higher level of involvement is not associated in any way with feelings of anomie.