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For more than a decade, sociologists of religion have been debating the answer to a basic question: What is the relationship between religious pluralism and religious vitality? The old wisdom was that the relationship was negative, that pluralism undermines vitality. This view has been challenged by advocates of a supply-side model of religious vitality. They argue that the relationship is positive—that pluralism increases vitality—and this empirical claim has become foundational to the larger project of applying economic theory to religion. We review the relevant evidence and reach a straightforward conclusion: The empirical evidence does not support the claim that religious pluralism is positively associated with religious participation in any general sense. We discuss this conclusion's theoretical implications, and we identify potentially productive directions for future research on religious pluralism, church-state relations, and religious competition.It appears that North Americans are religious in spite of, not because of, religious pluralism. ( Olson 1998a :761).[R]eligious practice is strongly and positively associated with pluralism. ( Finke & Stark 1998 :762)

Why do some individuals engage in more religious activity than others? And how does this religious activity influence their economic attitudes? We present a formal model in which individuals derive utility from both secular and religious sources. Our model, which incorporates both demand‐side and supply‐side explanations of religion, is unusual in that it endogenizes both an individual's religious participation and her preferences over economic policy. Using data on over 70 countries from the pooled World Values Survey, we find that religious participation declines with societal development, an individual's ability to produce secular goods, and state regulations on religion, but that it increases with inequality. We also find that religious participation increases economic conservatism among the poor but decreases it among the rich. Our analysis has important insights for the debate about secularization theory and challenges conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between religious participation and economic conservatism.

In this article religion is viewed as a collectively produced good. Religious groups must, therefore, overcome collective action problems, namely, coordination. This problem is usually alleviated by entering into an agency relationship with an organizer whose job is to ensure efficient production of religious goods. This will lead to an increase in participation from congregants and an increase in quality of the religious goods. However, this relationship is open to the principal–agent problem. Using data from the American Congregational Giving Study this paper finds that the organizational structure of religious groups makes some groups more susceptible to principal–agent problems, which ultimately impacts participation levels.

What are the effects of religious participation on collective action such as protests? Until recently, conflict scholars have focused on the macro-level characteristics of religion, while assuming, but rarely analyzing, individual-level mechanisms. I fill in this gap by incorporating insights from the field of American Politics, which has long emphasized the roles of individual-level mechanisms such as attendance at religious gatherings. I hypothesize that attendance at religious gatherings can address problems of collective action and thus lead to protests. I test these hypotheses by exploiting exogenous variation in the attendance at Islamic religious gatherings: rain on the day of Friday Prayer. I apply the design both to macro-level event data and an individual-level survey. The analyses indicate that rainy Fridays decrease the frequency of Muslim religious attendance and lower the likelihood of Muslim protests in Africa. These results imply a core role of communal gatherings in religious mobilization.