By Ryan Burge, from Anglican Ink. (photo: John Price/Unsplash)
There’s an inherent tension between the world of religion and the field of social science. Lots of people of faith have a worldview that is based, in large part, on a belief in supernatural phenomenon. For them, the existence of angels, demons, and the Holy Spirit is just an assumption of their worldview. When they are confronted with some data that is saying that one church in their community is growing, they often want to attribute that to some type of supernatural cause. “They have God’s anointing” is a common refrain you hear in evangelical circles.
But, social science cannot work from that same set of epistemological assumptions. There cannot be supernatural causes for natural phenomenon – that is completely incompatible with an empirical worldview. If something happens in the world, we should ideally be able to quantify and explain why we are seeing such an occurrence.
The rise of the American megachurch is one of those areas in which these two worldviews come into direct conflict. I’m sure if you polled one of the original members of Life.Church in Norman, Oklahoma to find out how they understand the growth of their congregation to more than 30,000 on an average Sunday, they aren’t going to point to county-level demographic information. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do today. My working assumption is simply this – the geographic area surrounding megachurches provides fertile soil for rapid growth. Yes, I believe good preaching matters and I’m sure that there are some spiritual forces at play, but it’s the macro-level factors that I want to focus on today.
My data sources are two-fold for this exercise. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research’s Megachurch Database contains information on about 1600 churches in the United States that have at least 1800 regular worshippers across all services. I grabbed that information, then merged it with county-level demographic data that is furnished by the United States Census Bureau. After a whole lot of cleaning and merging – I’m ready to show you how I think that megachurches are unique in their geographic location.