Religious freedom and the unintended consequences of state religion.

1. Introduction

"[A] union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion."

So wrote Justice Hugo Black in the majority opinion in Engel v. Vitale, (1) a 1962 school prayer case decided by the United States Supreme Court. Today, church-state issues continue to rise to the forefront of American politics. In recent years alone, disputes have arisen over public school vouchers and prayers, the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the display of the Ten Commandments in public meeting halls and courthouses, and the proper scope of President Bush's recent Faith-Based and Community Initiative. Across the Atlantic, William Carey, the recently retired Archbishop of Canterbury, argued in April 2002 that establishment strengthens the Church of England by allowing it to build a comprehensive network of parishes throughout the entire country, and he denied that establishment has constrained "the prophetic voice of the Church." (2) In contrast, Carey's successor Rowan Williams, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in July 2002, has in the past advocated the disestablishment of the Church of England. (3) In Sweden, where the Church of Sweden had been the state church since 1593, the parliament passed a statute providing for the formal disestablishment of the church on January 1, 2000. (4)

In the United States, the strongest advocates for giving religion a more prominent role in governmental settings have often been religious conservatives, whereas the strongest opponents are often political liberals. For example, in the recently decided Cleveland school voucher case, (5) Christian organizations like Focus on the Family, the Christian Legal Society, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops filed briefs in support of the program, which allowed public funds to pay tuition in private schools (including religious schools). Among the organizations filing briefs in opposition to the program were the NAACP and various public education lobbies, whereas the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State provided legal representation for some of the plaintiffs challenging the voucher program. Interestingly, however, several religious organizations also filed briefs in opposition to the voucher program, including the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC), and two regional Seventh-Day Adventist organizations. Except for the NCC, these organizations represent the interests of religious groups that are (or in the case of the Baptists, once were) distinctly in the religious minority.

A growing body of research suggests that any positive benefits to the church with direct support from the state are outweighed by indirect effects that undermine the church's autonomy and its authority with the general populace. (For an excellent introduction to this research, see Stark and Finke 2000, chapter 9). If such research is correct, then the advocates of governmental endorsement of religion may be undermining the very institutions they seek to support. In this article, we use cross-country survey responses to assess the impact of religious freedom and the separation of church and state on the health of religion throughout the world. Using survey responses on the frequency of attendance at religious services, we find that government establishment of state religion reduces religious attendance, whereas enduring constitutional protection of religion increases religious attendance.

Adam Smith recognized that establishment could ultimately undermine the state religion. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith discussed the impact of establishing a religion on the fervor and effectiveness of the clergy in that religion:

The teachers [of religion], in the same manner as other teachers,

may either depend altogether for their subsistence upon the

voluntary contributions of their hearers; or they may derive it from

some other fund to which the law of their country may entitle them;

such as a landed estate, a tythe or land tax, an established salary

or stipend. Their exertion, their zeal and industry, are likely to

be much greater in the former situation than in the latter. In this

respect, the teachers of new religions have always had a

considerable advantage in attacking those antient and established

systems of which the clergy, reposing themselves upon their

benefices, bad neglected to keep up the fervour of faith and

devotion in the great body of the people; and having given

themselves up to indolence, were become altogether incapable of

making any vigorous exertion in defence even of their own

establishment. The clergy of an established and well-endowed

religion ... are apt gradually to lose the qualities, both good and

bad, which gave them authority and influence with the inferior ranks

of people, and which had perhaps been the original causes of the

success and establishment of their religion. Such a clergy, when

attacked by a set of popular and bold, though perhaps stupid and

ignorant enthusiasts ... have commonly no other resource than to

call upon the civil magistrate to persecute, destroy, or drive out

their adversaries, as disturbers of the public peace. (Smith [1776]

1981, pp. 788-9)

More recently, a number of scholars have conducted direct empirical examinations of the effect of a country's church-state relationship on the religiosity of its citizens. This literature is interdisciplinary, coming from sociology, political science, and economics. Iannaccone (1991) provided an early look at the relationship between religious competition and religious attendance. Using a cross-section of 12 predominantly Protestant countries, he demonstrated a negative relationship between weekly religious attendance and a Herfindahl index of Protestant religious concentration. The lowest levels of attendance were in Great Britain and Scandinavia, the only countries in the sample with official state churches. However, when predominantly Roman Catholic nations were included in the analysis, the negative effect of religious market concentration on attendance disappeared. Iannaccone suggested that there may be no attendance-reducing effect in Catholic countries because (i) Roman Catholicism is more internally diverse than most Protestant denominations; (ii) within countries, the Roman Catholic Church has suffered less government co-option even where ties to the government exist; and (iii) Roman Catholicism places a much higher emphasis on church attendance than do most Protestant denominations.

Chaves and Cann (1992) examined the same data used by Iannaccone (1991) but created a simple index of "religious regulation" based upon six factors showing church-state entanglement. They showed that for the 18 countries in the sample, there was a significant negative relationship between weekly religious attendance and the degree of religious regulation. These results were robust to inclusion of the six predominantly Roman Catholic nations.

Iannaccone, Finke, and Stark (1997) presented a primarily qualitative comparative discussion of religious institutions in Sweden and the United States. They argued that the huge differences in religious attendance in the two countries (43% of Americans attend religious services at least once per week compared with 5% of Swedes) were traceable to widespread religious competition in the United States contrasted with a stale officially established church in Sweden. Furthermore, they showed that the low rates of church attendance among members of the Church of Sweden were not mirrored by Swedish members of other denominations. Thus, although attendance rates in the Church of Sweden are very low, weekly attendance rates among Catholic Swedes are around 20%, and among Swedish members of Latter-Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and other small sects, weekly attendance rates are around 70%. Further evidence of differential rates of attendance between the state church and nonstate churches appeared in Sawkins, Seaman, and Williams (1997). Using British data, they demonstrated that Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants were much more likely to attend church frequently than were members of the Church of England (or even the Church of Scotland). Thus, in both Great Britain and Sweden, people claiming affiliation with the state church are much less likely to attend regularly than are adherents of other churches in those countries.

Other studies found that deregulation of religious markets led to increased religious participation in 19th century New England (Olds 1994), among youth in Italy (Introvigne and Stark 2003), and among Muslims in the industrialized West (Chaves, Schraeder, and Sprindys 1994). Posner (1987) argued that because government and organized religion are substitutes in teaching moral behavior, the "aggressively secularist" stance of the Supreme Court on issues relating to school prayer, public religious displays, and other establishment issues may have increased the demand for religious services.