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In a 1978 follow-up article, Kelley restated his two main points from the book. Few people had disagreed with his first point, that "the basic business of religion is to explain the ultimate meaning of life." But his second point had proven to be the "lightning rod": that "the quality which makes one system of meaning more convincing is not its content but its seriousness/costliness/strictness." Nevertheless, Kelley reaffirmed his thesis: "I have been asked if I would make any changes. Essentially, I would not. I am unrepentant and unreconstructed. The curves are continuing much as they were."5

Serendipitously, Kelley had unwittingly stimulated a new variant of the existing literature on "religious switching" that attempted to measure and interpret the movements of individuals and groups among Protestant denominations. For years, researchers had examined the correlation between Americans' upward mobility in social class and their movement from conservative sects toward mainline denominations. Individuals moved into higher-class denominations over time, alongside lower-class, sect-like groups moving upward collectively into a more respectable status. In apparently related ways, both trends expanded groups such as the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists.

Then as depicted by Stark and Glock, switching to mainline denominations more recently was part of a larger accommodation to the structural forces of a "demythologized modernism." Or in Berger's terms, the "plausibility structures" provided by mainline churches were more compatible with the forces of secularization than were the theologies and services provided by conservative Protestant groups. Conversely, if any switching occurred that favored the conservatives, that was simply assumed to be anomalous and also overwhelmed by the switching trends favoring the mainline. For all practical purposes when religious switching occurred, it was really in only one direction.

What Kelley's editors unexpectedly accomplished by changing the title of the book6 was to provoke an argument among researchers other than, or perhaps in addition to, the two main points that Kelley intended on meaning and strictness. Two new directions of research resulted. One was an empirical variant of the existing literature that examined the likelihood of switching toward conservative churches; the second was less empirical and more interpretive in proposing numerous reasons why people actually switch from one group to another.

In hindsight, we can detect several themes from the studies of religious switching in the following decade. The first was a nearly-total rejection of Stark and Glock's contention that the liberals were winning . They were not. Second, Canadians Reg Bibby and Merlin Brinkerhoff qualified much of the conservative growth and labeled it as a likely "circulation of the saints."7 Most conversions were from within groups. Third, Clark Roof and Kirk Hadaway quantified Kelley, setting the total proportion of "switchers" at 35 percent of Protestants.8 The big winners were the "conservative sectarians," with some liberal groups also gaining. The greatest losers were several liberal and moderate groups. Fourth, Hadaway added a qualitative evaluation of switching, that "converts make better members."9 Baptists and sectarians "get more out of their members and converts with respect to actual participation than do the more liberal denominations." And fifth, Roof reiterated that about one-third of actively religious persons switched their denominational identities, adding that about one-third of that group switched more than once.10

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