Secularization theories, such as Berger's Sacred Canopy argument, hold that religious diversity leads to a decline in religious participation. Religious market models (e.g., Finke and Stark) argue the opposite. Voas, Olson, and Crockett found that nearly all of the vast research exploring this important question prior to 2002 was flawed due to a previously unrecognized noncausal statistical relationship between measures of religious diversity and measures of religious participation. Since 2002, this methodological issue has largely stymied research on this important topic. We first describe how, following Voas et al.’s recommendations, longitudinal models can overcome these problems. We then apply these methods to data measuring the religious composition of all U.S. counties found in the Religious Congregations and Membership Studies from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Using multilevel longitudinal regression models, we find that greater county‐level religious diversity is followed by later declines in county‐level religious participation rates. The negative effect size of religious diversity is large and robust to changes in the control variables and different methods of measuring religious diversity.

中文翻译：

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神圣的檐篷还是宗教市场？县级宗教多样性对后来宗教参与度变化的影响

世俗化理论，例如伯杰的圣树冠论认为宗教多样性导致宗教参与度下降。宗教市场模型（例如Finke和Stark）则相反。Voas，Olson和Crockett发现，在2002年之前探索这个重要问题的几乎所有大型研究都存在缺陷，这是由于宗教多样性测度和宗教参与测度之间以前未被认可的非因果统计关系所致。自2002年以来，这个方法论问题就大大阻碍了对该重要主题的研究。我们首先描述根据Voas等人的建议，纵向模型如何克服这些问题。然后，我们将这些方法应用于测量在1980年，1990年，2000年和2010年的宗教会众和会员制研究中发现的所有美国县的宗教构成的数据。使用多级纵向回归模型，我们发现县级宗教参与度更高，随后县级宗教参与率下降。宗教多样性的负面影响规模很大，并且对控制变量的变化和衡量宗教多样性的不同方法具有较强的抵抗力。