Religious service attendance and religious and secular organizational engagement in the United Kingdom

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

August 31, 2023

Summary:

The study uses nationally representative data to examine whether the moral freighting Putnam and Campbell (2010) propose, based on American experiences, may apply to overall British society. Specifically, it tests whether religious service attendance increases religious or secular organizational activities, possibly due to moral freighting that encourages religious congregants to practice their faith, transcending ego boundaries and self-interest. It is also necessary to determine if engagement in religious or secular organizational activities elevates the degree of religious service attendance, thus forming a bidirectional association. The study employs the maximum likelihood-structural equation modeling (ML-SEM) method to verify the proposed reciprocity. The empirical tests confirm that a synergistic reciprocal relationship is established between religious service attendance and religious organizational engagement, and that religious service attendance increases secular organizational engagement. However, secular organizational engagement does not make a bidirectional contribution to religious service attendance.

Published in

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12878

ISSN

218294

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

© 2023 The Authors. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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