Political Christianity: A Contextual Analysis

In this paper, an attempt is made to assess the relative importance of individual attributes and congregational-level contextual variables in explaining support for New Christian Right figures and for the Republican party. Using data gathered from 14 rural midwestern churches, the analysis suggests the following: (1) contextual effects are important and often are stronger than the effects of individual-level variables; (2) the unique effects of contextual-level variables are occasionally negative, suggesting that simple social learning models of contextual effects may be inadequate; and (3) contextual effects are likely to be weaker at simpler levels of conceptualization.