Religious Pluralism and the Individual: The Effects and Meaning of Inter-religious Contact

Abstract

Inter-religious contact is an indicator of religious pluralism at the individual level. Debates about the effects of religious pluralism on religiosity are heated and inconclusive. While most measures of religious pluralism necessarily look at the societal or community level of religious diversity, theoretical explanations of why religious pluralism is important to levels of religiosity tend to focus on the individual. This paper offers an empirical analysis of an important and unexplored link in the fragmented chain of theory that connects religious pluralism to religiosity. In multivariate regressions using data from The Religion and Diversity Survey (2003), we find that the impact of inter-religious contact on individual-level religious behavior depends on the type of behavior in view. Inter-religious contact correlates negatively with church attendance but positively with spiritual effort. Regarding religious economies, we conclude that inter-religious contact does not promote religious participation, but that it is relevant to the theory mainly in the sense that religious organizations are likely to want to minimize it. Regarding Berger's perspective on pluralism and religiosity, we conclude that it offers a reasonable interpretation of our findings, although we question the extent to which religious cultures with deep "taken-for-grantedness" are likely to persist in pluralistic modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]