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The effect of religious diversity on the community's overall level of church membership and growth is examined. As the findings suggest the urbanization's positive effect on church participation which also obstructs the religious growth.

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.