Chronic Murmuring

The Passion and Church-going

It'd be interesting to, some time next year, have a dataset for church attendence in a single city - perhaps a non-Biblebelt city - over 2003/2004. And specifically try and determine what effect The Passion had on church attendance during the window in which it screened. It happened during Lent, and since during this season (most notably Easter although maybe it's true for the entire season, especially if you're Catholic), you see unusual spikes in church attendance, it'd be difficult to separate the effect of the movie from the more general cycle in church attendance. Still, it'd be interesting. Iannaccone has an interesting paper out there called "Never on Sunny Days: Lessons from Congregational Attendance Counts" which is currently in press. In it he found - somewhat contrary to my original intuition, but now it makes sense - that sunny days tended to lower church attendance, whereas drearier days resulted in greater attendance. The conclusion he draws from the entire study is that what has the biggest effect on church attendance is not barriers, necessarily, like bad weather, but rather the number of competing things we could do with our time that day. A sunny day opens up a number of leisure activities, while a rainy day closes them. I'm more or less of the opinion that nothing like a single cultural event - no matter how great it may be - has any kind of cultural affect on permanent attendance trends. But, that is an empirical question worth pursuing. Everyone is talking about massive conversions, revivals, and other related phenomenon resulting from this film. It'd be interesting to look at the attendance rates of churches a certain distance from theaters exhibiting the film and see what effect, if any, the film had on those attendance rates. Iannaccone talks about the problems with this data in his paper - for one, the errors in collecting the data most likely differ from church to church. Some churches keep really good records on attendance; some keep little to no records. It's the lack of good data that makes empirical work on religious phenomenon a bit scary (for me). I had the hardest time finding any reliable cross-section, time-series dataset on clergy compensation last semester. I could've used the the monthly Current Population Survey, since in both, "clergy" is an occupation listed, and wage is listed. But I couldn't control for religion (is the person a Christian, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim cleric, or even a druid? I never could get a sense of whether the CPS controlled for those variables), and I wasn't confident that the wage attributed to the clergy was the total compensation of the clergy (ie, did it include things like the parsonage or housing allowance). Eventually, once I get more experienced with empirical work, I'll return to that paper. I want to test my hypothesis that the decline in the relative wages of clergy is principally what is driving the megachurch phenomenon, as well as the increasing number of shortages of preachers in small churches. But that has nothing to do with this post, which was simply me wondering whether this movie will have any noticeable effect over church attendance.