Seeking and Commitment

Just a quick posting about a paper from the current issue of the Review of Religious Research that caught my eye. The title, "Why Do Small Religious Groups Have More Committed Members?," poses a question that might be useful for Ecotopia Revisited. Do members of small communities demonstrate more intense bonds with the places and people that form their community than do members of larger communities? In other words, do members of intentional communities identify with their community more than do citizens of non-intentional or urban communities? We cannot answer that kind of a question until we get some data, but the reasoning provided by Daniel Olsen is intriguing (49:4, June 2008, pp. 353-378).

Olsen argues that among religious organizations, small groups have both the highest levels of commitment and the highest rates of leaving and joining. He links the two tendencies, suggesting that both leaving and joining tend to reinforce commitment (those with low levels of commitment leave and those with the highest levels join). Although this argument emerges from the theoretical paradigm of religious economies (which frightens me with its cold, reductive logic), Olsen points to a possibility that I think speaks to our study.

High rates of leaving and joining could also be called seeking, with lots of individuals coming and going according to whether or not a religious organization facilitates their worldview (again with the religious economies model). High levels of commitment to a particular religious community could also be called dwelling, with individuals "buying in fully" to a particular model or worldview. If this is true, then can Olsen's thesis be translated as "communities fed by intensely seeker-oriented processes strengthen the dweller-character of those communities"? Just a playful thought...