Religious Movements: Why JWs Grow So Rapidly

Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone have a paper on Why the Jehovah’s Witnesses Grow so Rapidly. They apply a theory of religious groups to better understand the history and impressive growth of JWs.

Included in their paper are ten propositions of what makes religious movements like the JWs successful. I’ve listed their ten points below–highlighting ones that I feel have direct application to our discussions on movement-building. At the bottom of this post, I’ve summarized some of the authors’ conclusions as well:

• New religious movements are likely to succeed to the extent that they retain cultural continuity with the conventional faith(s) of the societies in which they seek converts.
• New religious movements are likely to succeed to the extent that their doctrines are non-empirical.
• New religious movements are likely to succeed to the extent that they maintain a medium level of tension with their surrounding environment — are strict, but not too strict.
• Religious movements will succeed to the extent they have legitimate leaders with adequate authority to be effective. Adequate authority requires clear doctrinal justifications for an effective and legitimate leadership. Authority is regarded as more legitimate and gains in effectiveness to the degree that members perceive themselves as participants in the system of authority.
• Religious movements will grow to the extent that they can generate a highly motivated, volunteer religious labor force, including many willing to proselytize.
• Religious movements must maintain a level of fertility sufficient to offset member mortality (mean household size of 3.4; general population in U.S. 2.6).
• Other things being equal, new and unconventional religious organizations will prosper to the extent that they compete against weak, local conventional religious organizations within a relatively unregulated religious economy.
• Religious movements will succeed to the extent that they sustain strong internal attachments, while remaining an open social network, able to maintain and form close ties to outsiders.
• Religious movements will continue to grow only to the extent that they maintain sufficient tension with their environment — remain sufficiently strict.
• Religious movements must socialize the young sufficiently well as to minimize both defection and the appeal of reduced strictness.

Some General Applications from the Authors:

Movements need missionaries. Other things being equal, the more missionaries seek converts, and the harder these missionaries work, the faster a religious movement will grow.

Interesting Statistic: In 1992, the combined efforts of the Protestant churches of the US and Canada sustained 41,142 overseas missionaries at a cost of more than $2 billion dollars a year. That same year, there were 3,279,270 “overseas” Jehovah Witnesses publishers operating on a total budget of $45 million. That is 80 times as many missionaries for a tiny fraction of the cost. (Seems like this may be comparing apples and oranges…but it reflects something of the commitment of JWs).

Role of Close Personal Relationships. Conversion occurs when people align their religious behavior with that of their friends. People rarely convert, unless or until they form close personal relationships with persons who already belong. Many religious movements fail because they soon “implode socially,” in that members begin to restrict their personal relationships to one another. By forcing members to knock on the doors of strangers, the Witnesses combat the tendency to implode–despite the fact that cold calls seldom lead to conversions because of a lack of prior personal relationship.

Movements must keep both the front door and the back door open. The continuing growth of movements depends upon a certain level of “strictness” in which movements allow members to leave who don’t fit in—iow, those who are “latent free-riders” must be let go. “When groups do not grow, or grow very slowly, they will soon be made up primarily of those who did not choose to belong, but simply grew up belonging.” Each new generation must be socialized sufficiently to the movement’s strictness–normally accomplished in the JWs and Mormons by giving the youth important roles to perform (i.e. nothing builds more intense commitment than the act of being a missionary).