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Scholars have long been concerned with the causes of differential growth in the membership of religious traditions and denominations. In this article I use data from three surveys, matched with census and membership data from U.S. states, to test Smith's recent theory of denominational growth and decline, I find that in the one denomination under study, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the states where membership has declined the least are those states where the members of the denomination are both the most theologically orthodox and have the strongest identity as theological liberals. Although seemingly paradoxical, it fits Smith's theory well. Liberal Protestants do not thrive where they are the most conservative, but rather where they have created a unique identity--a unique social niche--somewhere between evangelicalism and secularism.

The relative effectiveness of strictness theory and modernization theory in explaining congregational growth is tested using a random sample of white, Protestant churches in Middletown (N = 98). Although the former theory predicts that growth is positively related to an authoritative structure and to enforcing rules of ascetic strictness, modernization theory predicts the opposite pattern. For our sample, authoritative leadership seemed not to produce congregational growth. The main finding was that strict rules positively related to growth among working-class congregations, but negatively related to growth among middle-class congregations.

Questionnaire results from 762 attenders of five Baptist congregations suggest that the number and quality of friendships available within a congregation heavily influence attenders' church selection decisions. Ironically, the churches with the highest numbers of church friends per attender are either stable or declining. Newcomers find such churches 'cliquish' because high-tenure members have as many friends as they want or can manage. The ability of church friendship networks to incorporate newcomers appears to decline as average tenure and number of church friends increase. In contrast, attenders of the two growing churches have lower attendance tenure, fewer church friends, and greater desire for additional church friends. They are thus more inclined to incorporate newcomers, which further facilitates their growth.

Differences in the recent membership trends of liberal and conservative Protestant denominations have been a major focus of research on church growth and decline. This study examine the role of local contextual factors on these membership trends through their interaction with the detailed geographical distributions of eight large denominations, including four conservative groups and four more liberal groups. Results indicate that during the 1980s the more liberal groups tended to be concentrated geographically in places where contextual factors discouraged membership growth, while the conservative churches were concentrated in locations with renditions more conducive to membership growth. The findings suggest that the cumulative effects of local contextual factors have played a significant role in the contrasting patterns of membership change within liberal and conservative Protestantism in recent decades.