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Religious Loyalty, Defection, and Experimentation: A Longitudinal Analysis of University Men
Robert Wuthnow; Glen Mellinger
 Review of Religious Research
, Vol. 19, No. 3. (Spring, 1978), pp. 234-245.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0034-673X%28197821%2919%3A3%3C234%3ARLDAEA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9
 Review of Religious Research
is currently published by Religious Research Association, Inc..Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/rra.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgThu Jul 5 00:02:33 2007
 
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).
 
Yet it is evident even to the casual observer that the '70s aredifferent from the late '60s. The so-called "counterculture" hascooled, campuses have returned to placidness, and there are signsthat young people may be returning to traditional values and life-styles. Along with these trends, a return to conventional religiouslcyalties and an end to religious defection and experimentation alsomay be in progress. The present paper examines this possibility inone of the student populations which was affected most deeply bythe unrest of the late '60s. We also examine evidence on the natureand timing
d
religious defection and experimentation.DATA AND METHODSThe present report is based on data from two panel studies, oneconducted among freshman males at the University of California,Berkeley, in the fall of 1970 and repeated in the spring of 1973,the other conducted among senior males at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley, in the spring of 1971 with a follow-up study inthe fall of 1973. For purposes
of
clarity, these will
be
referred toas FR-I (freshman cohort at time-1), FR-I1(freshman cohort attime-2),
SR-I
(senior cohort at time-1), and SR-I1 (senior cohortat time-2). Nearly a thousand randomly selected members of eachcohort were interviewed at the first time periods by a team of pro-fessional interviewers from the Institute for Research in SocialBehavior (Berkeley) and were followed up with a mail question-naire approximately two and a half years later. The study waslimited to males because one of the larger purposes of the studywas to determine the effects of countercultural participation on occu-pational values. It was assumed that different processes wouldoperate among males and females; therefore, to include both woul.!lrestrict what could be learned about either. Through unusually strictanonymity procedures and intensive interviewer training, responserates of over 90 percent were obtained for both cohorts at the firsttime periods and return rates on the mailed questionnaires of 87percent for the freshman panel and 83 percent for the senior panelwere attained (see Manheimer,
et
al.,
1972, 1974). These excep-tionally high response rates help greatly to reduce sampling biasesthat might be associated with non-participation.The two-cohort panel design of the study affords opportunitiesto assess trends in religious commitment between 1971 and 1973by comparing the results of time-1 seniors in 1971 (SW-I) with theresults of those freshmen (FR-11) who were still enrolled at Berkeleyat time-2 (611 in all). It also allows an examination of currentshifts
in
religious commitment during college. For this, we comparethe results at time-1 (FR-I) with those at time-2 (FR-11) among
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