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Thirty-odd years ago, Dean M. Kelley of the National Council of Churches wrote a book he intended to call Why Strict Churches Are Strong but that his publisher insisted on titling Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.1 It was a relatively short work, with a relatively simple thesis, but it was clearly the right book on a long-overlooked topic, and it arrived at the perfect moment. Sociology of religion in North America was in the early stages of being born again after a prolonged gestation, and Kelley's book followed important works by Peter Berger, Robert Bellah, Andrew Greeley, Charles Glock, Rod Stark, and others.

Kelley argued that "the conservative churches, holding to seemingly outmoded theology and making strict demands on their members, have equaled or surpassed in growth the yearly percentage increases of the nation's population. … It is the sectarian groups that have had most success in attracting new members." Many people took issue with Kelley, then and later and for numerous reasons, but with that elegant thesis he framed the terms of the debate for three decades.

Recently, however, Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley, and Melissa Wilde have exclaimed "WRONG!" so loudly as to compel a retrospective review of the Kelley thesis and its rivals.2 Hout, Greeley, and Wilde (HGW) don't merely disagree with Kelley. They want to get his thesis off the table once and for all. Instead of growth resulting from sectarian theology and strictness, they argue for a "demographic imperative" or a "differential natural increase." Of those who have insisted for 30 years that strictness and switching explain growth, HGW say simply, "They were wrong. … The explanation for the changing shape of U.S. Protestantism is … demographic, not ideological."

Are the revisionists right? And what is finally at stake in the debate? To answer those questions, we have to make our way through a thicket of sociological controversy.

The first two chapters of Why Conservative Churches Are Growing sought to answer two questions—Are the churches dying? and Is religion obsolete?—that Dean Kelley used to confront two existing interpretations of religion in America. In American Piety, Rodney Stark and Charles Glock had concluded by asserting, "If there has been an erosion of traditional faith [as they believed there had] we would expect people to be shifting from denominations which have retained unswerving commitment to that faith into denominations with more demythologized positions."3 A year earlier, Peter Berger had painted an even bleaker picture in The Sacred Canopy, depicting the forces of secularization advancing over the church. Two responses were possible, Berger suggested—accommodation or resistance—with each carrying grave, perhaps fatal, consequences.4

Kelley was familiar with the trends and processes observed by Stark, Glock, Berger, and others. But his conclusion differed radically: the "churches that have not tried to adjust to the times—to ingratiate themselves with the world—in many cases are not declining. In them we see no indication that religion is obsolete, churches outdated, or modernization helpful." Kelley provided mainly denominationally based statistics as evidence; the big gainers were the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Salvation Army, the Nazarenes, the Mormons, and other conservative groups—the "wrong" churches, he suggested tongue-in-cheek. "In or out," he concluded: "upon this distinction the survival of any serious group depends. … Groups which preserve their seriousness through strictness will not only mediate effective meaning to their members and others, but as a consequence will thrive and grow."

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