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The Nation4l Congregations Study (NCS) was ";ndUcted in~njunclion~ith the 1998 Ge~ral~~ial Survey (GSS). The 1998 GSS as/ud respondenl8 woo altend religious. s~rvr.ces 10 na~the" rel,lI'ous congregation, thus generating a nationally representative sampk of rel'gwUB congregat'o~.. Data about these congregaRoIUI wen collecud uia a one-hour interuuw with. OM key znformanta ffll1Uster. pru:st. rabbi, or other staff person or kcukrfrom 1236 congregations. Information w~g ather:d aJJ:>utmul~pk aspecl8 of congregations' social composition, structure, activities, and program":,ng: This .artr.c~de8C~S NCS methodology and presen18 sekcted uniuariote resull8 in four.areas: deTlOrmnat,onalttes, sue, politioal activilie.. and worship practices. i Congregations-the relatively small-scale,l~cal collectiviti~s~d Organiz~tions~~d through which people engage in religious activityare a basic umt~f Amencan~h~ous life. They are the primary site of religious ritual activity, they proVIde an orgamzational model followed even by religious groups new to this country, they provide sociability and community for many, they offer opportunities for political action and volu.ntarism: they foster religious identities through education and practice, and they engage m a vanety of community and social service activities (Warner 1994;, Wuthn~w 1991; V~rba et al. .1~~5; Hodgkinson and Weitzman 1992). This list does not exhaust either the kinds of acti'?~es conducted inside congregations or the ways in which cpngregations relate to commumties. Perhaps it is sufficient, however, to make a prima facie case that congregations~a significant organizational population whose internal features and extex:nal re~ations warrant close attention in their own right. Congregations also represent nch SOCIaland organizational~ttings in which a wide array of sociological questions may fruitfully be addressed.. .. Sociologists have, of course, long recognized congregations' significance as an orgamzational population and their potential as a research site. Although the study of congregations as units of analysis began, in the remarkable work of H. Paul Douglass and Edmund deS, Brunner, by combining case studies .with surveys of large numbers of congregations in a variety of denominations (see, for exanlple, Douglass and deS. Brunner

Recent studies have demonstrated that conservative Protestantism negatively affects educational advancement. However, these studies have treated conservative Protestantism as a monolithic religious bloc that uniformly constrains achieving higher education. Disaggregating conservative Protestantism into fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and evangelicals reveals that the relationship between conservative Protestantism and educational attainment is more complex than recently shown. Findings from a nationally representative sample of Americans show that fundamentalists and Pentecostals are generally less likely to be college educated relative to other religious groups and nonreligious affiliates. The findings also show that not only are evangelicals more likely to be college educated than fundamentalists and Pentecostals, but with the exception of Jews, they are as likely or more likely than other religious groups and nonreligious affiliates to be college educated. This article suggests that different cultural traditions explain the variation in educational attainment among conservative Protestants.Recent years have witnessed renewed scholarship developing one of Max Weber's key theoretical insights in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: the material consequences of religious orientations and practices. Using cross-national data, Barro and McCleary (2003) reported that country-level measures of belief in hell, heaven, and the afterlife were robust determinants of economic growth, presumably because they promote values that stimulate productivity, such as honesty, thrift, and a work ethic. Employing individual-level survey data, Keister (2003) found that childhood and adult religious service attendance had a significant positive effect on wealth accumulation. She posited that this was because participation in religious ceremonies cultivates ideas of and skills for "correct" and conventional living. Similarly, Loury (2004) showed that the more individuals attended religious services during adolescence, the more likely they were to complete a greater number of years of schooling later in life.As Weber theorized, these studies demonstrate that religious orientations and practices can generate material gain. Yet other research highlights the opposite. Much of this research focuses on the constraining nature of conservative Protestant cultural orientations for material pursuits, especially educational attainment. Drawing on the writings of popular conservative Protestant elites, Darnell and Sherkat (1997) specified the ways secular education undermines the theological foundations of conservative Protestantism. For instance, they documented how the humanist and scientific philosophies in secular education challenge doctrinal orthodoxy and are thought to endanger the souls of believers. Given such threats of secular instruction, Darnell and Sherkat (1997) hypothesized that individuals embedded in conservative Protestant communities would oppose secular instruction and thus would not pursue higher education. To te...

We model differential participation in protest as a two-stage mobilization process: willingness to engage in protest and conversion of willingness into participation. Treating mobilization as a two-stage process resolves an important puzzle in the literature on differential participation: the lack of constraining effects for biographical unavailability. Using a nationally representative sample of individuals in the United States, we find that while our measures of biographical unavailability have no effect on the second stage of the mobilization process (converting willingness to protest to actual behavior), they show robust negative effects on the first stage of the mobilization process, removing people from the pool of willing protest participants. We also find that gender moderates the relationship between some of our measures of biographical unavailability-particularly marital status-and protest willingness.