What is the cost-to-benefit payoff of paying for expertise? Years ago, my brother was a business manager for a consulting firm in Houston when business was declining. He concluded after some analysis that the firm’s fees were too low. People expected they must be getting inferior service because of the low price. It took a few months of persuading colleagues, but they finally came around to raising their consulting fees. Business began booming.
It may sound crass, but some sociologists believe something similar to this happens with religious affiliation. Faith communities that demand little time, money, relationships, and ethical behavior, can’t be worth much. Those with high demands must provide something, or people wouldn’t make the sacrifices. The first type of community tends to draw in lots of loosely committed “free-loaders.” They may be attractive to the curious and the dabblers, but they tend to drive off those wanting a deep commitment and high payoff. The second type of group tends to create high solidarity and deep commitment but creates insulation against those who might not yet be willing to pay the cost.
So what happens if you lower the barriers of a high commitment context to blur the differences between the “ins” and the “outs?” You have effectively reduced both the “cost” of entrance and the “benefit” of being a committed community.
Roger Finke and Rodney Stark give some examples of this in their book The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy. In the following chart, notice what happened to the Catholic priesthood and the number of brothers and sisters in Catholic orders.
With Vatican II, there was a blurring of the lines, as it were, between sacred and secular callings. Sacred callings came down in status, and there was an attempt to become more accommodating to non-Catholics. The benefit of becoming a priest, brother, or sister diminished, and therefore fewer people were willing to take these paths.
Similarly, look at the Methodist offshoot Church of the Nazarene over the past century.
The denomination started in relatively high tension with culture, but by the 1970s and 1980s, a transition away from distinctive codes of holy living was being made. By the end of the century, growth as percentage of the population in the U.S. was almost flat, just as with their Methodist forbearers almost 150 years ago.
There are doubtlessly more variables involved here, but evidence for this cost-to-benefit phenomenon often emerges as a plausible factor when analyzing trends with religious groups.
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