Compare methods

	Secularization Index Modeling	Religious Economies Analysis
Field	Sociology Of Religion	Sociology Of Religion
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2009	1987
Originator	Steve Bruce (theory); David Voas (cohort measurement)	Rodney Stark & William Sims Bainbridge; Roger Finke
Type	Measurement and cohort modeling of religious decline	Supply-side economic analysis of religious markets
Seminal source	Voas, D. (2009). The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review, 25(2), 155-168.	Stark, R., & Bainbridge, W. S. (1987). A Theory of Religion. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN: 9780820403564
Aliases	Religious Decline Modeling, Secularization Measurement, Generational Religious Decline Model, Fuzzy Fidelity Modeling	Religious Market Model, Supply-Side Theory of Religion, Religious Economy Model, Rational-Choice Theory of Religion
Related	3	3
Summary	Secularization index modeling measures the decline of religion in modern societies and models its dynamics across generations. It combines two tasks: building defensible indices of religiosity from survey items on belief, belonging, and practice, and decomposing observed change into age, period, and cohort components to determine whether religion is fading as individuals age, as eras shift, or as each successive birth cohort enters life less religious than the last. Steve Bruce's God is Dead (2002) restated the classic secularization thesis that modernization corrodes religious authority and participation, while David Voas's 2009 analysis of European data showed that decline is overwhelmingly a cohort phenomenon and introduced the idea of 'fuzzy fidelity' - a large middle that is neither firmly religious nor wholly secular - that swells and then shrinks as societies move through the secular transition.	Religious economies analysis treats a society's religious life as a market in which competing firms (denominations, sects, and movements) offer products to consumers (potential adherents) under varying degrees of state regulation. Developed by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge in A Theory of Religion (1987) and elaborated by Stark and Finke in Acts of Faith (2000), the framework inverts the older secularization assumption that modernity erodes religious demand. Instead it holds that latent demand for religion is relatively stable, and that observed variation in religiousness across societies is driven mainly by the supply side: how many religious firms compete, how specialized and energetic they are, and how heavily the state regulates the market. Where competition is open and unregulated, vigorous firms mobilize participation; where one firm enjoys a state-protected monopoly, it grows lazy and overall participation falls.