RELIGIOUS LOYALTY, DEFECTION, AND EXPERIMENTATION: A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS 
OF
UNIVERSITY
MEN' 
ROBERT WUTHNOW GLEN MELLINGER
Department of Sociology
Institute
for Research in Social BehaviorPrinceton University Berkeley, California
Review
of
Religious Research,
Vol.
19,
No.
3
(Spring,
1978)
:
234-245
The campus unrest of recent years has ended and there are
signs
of return to traditional values. The present paper exam-ines whether there also may be a return to traditional religiousloyalties and an abandonment of nonreligiosity and experimen-tation with
new
religions. The data are from two panel studiesof approximately 2,000 male students at the University ol: Cali-fornia, Berkeley, conducted i~etweerz1970 and 1973. The dataafford assessments of trends and intra-cohort shifts in religiousidentities, commitments, and experiments.
It has been widely suggested that two of the dominant religiousdevelopments of the recent period are a trend away from commit-ment to traditional religious beliefs and practices and an upsurgeof interest in new, especially Eastern and mystical, religious move-ments (among others, see Ahlstrom, 1972: 1079-1094; Glock, 1976;Wuthnow, 1976~).On the one hand, Auguste Comte's prophecyover a century ago that religious commitment would gradually witherand die appears much closer to being fulfilled today than it did onlya decade ago. Virtually every indicator of religious commitment hasshown a major decline, especially among young people (Wuthnow,1976b). For instance, weekly church attendance among young peoplehas declined 23 percent since 1957 (Gallup, 1972). The proportionof college youth identifying with people of their religion dropped17 points between 1969 and 1973; noncollege youth registered adrop of 18 points (Yankelovich, 1974). Among Detroit residents, 20percent fewer were sure of God's existence in 1971 than in
1959
(Duncan,
et al.,
1973). And in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1973,
65
percent of the young people surveyed said they had gone tochurch weekly while they were growing up, but currently only 14percent attended weekly (Wuthnow, 1976~).At the same time,dozens if not hundreds of new religious groups have appeared.One recently published guide to "spiritual communities" listed over300 new groups in the San FranciscoBay Area alone
(SpiriturtlCommunity Guide for North America,
1973). Many of these groupsremain small and are of dubious longevity, and yet some (Transcen-dental Meditation, for example) count their past and present de-votees in the hundreds of thousands (Wuthnow,1976a).
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