Nor do recent religious trends in post-Soviet societies provide much support for the supply-side approach, which would lead one to expect a major upswing in religious vitality following the demise of Communism. Although increase in religious affiliation occurred in Russia during the 1990s, declines occured in other post-Soviet countries, such as Hungary and Slovenia. Still others, such as Poland, have been stable. The picture is simularly mixed with regard to chruch attendance. Like the longer-term pattern in the rest of Europe (and Canada), the recent trends in the post-Soviet countries for which we have data cannot be construed as showing a positive relationship between either deregulation or pluralism, on the other hand, and participation, on the other. At best, the relationship here is null.
Market model advocates recognize that some of the cases mentioned above are problematic for their claims about the relationship between pluralism and participation, and they invoke various qualifications to account for the exceptions that are brought to their attention. They have argued, for example, that religious conflict can substitute for pluralism and competition as the energizing force behind religious vitality, and that decreasing conflict among religious groups has caused religious decline in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Leaving aside the issue of whether this substitute mechanism would apply to all the contrary historical cases, wenote that a market explanation supplemented by qualifications of this sort is difficult to distinguish from more traditional explanations of religious change, which focus on the interaction between religious and political conflict, and cleavages of confession, class, and ideology.
What about the United States? Proponents of the market model have made of the American case. They have argued that the opening of the religious market dramatically increased religious pluralism in the United States, and that pluralism dranatically increased religious involvement over time. The principal evidence for this claim is a long-term increase in chruch membership. But there is a problem with this indicator: Membership criteria have generally grown laxer over time. Today, formal membership levels are higher than attendance levels; in earlier periods, the opposite may have been true. That at least is the conclusion reached by one prominent historian of American religion who argues that "participation in congregations has probably remained relatively constant" since the seventeenth century. Thus, an historic increase in formal chruch membership may not be a valid indicator of historic increase in religious participation. Whatever one decides about the specifics of the US historical case, however, it is of limited theoretical significance to debate about a general relationship between pluralism and participation. Even if we accept the claim that, in the United States, religious pluralism and participation are positively linked, that is an historical fact about a single case, not a basis for a theoretical claim about a general relationship between pluralism and participation.
Are the other times and places where the religious-economies propositions about pluralism, regulation, and participation fare better? At first blush, early modern Europe might seem to fit the predictions of the supply-side approach quite well. The Protestant Reformation brought substantial increase in religious plyralism and religious competition. The Catholic monopoly was broken into three large multi-nationals and a host of smaller and more embattled religious suppliers, such as Baptists and Unitarians which were all forced to battle for territory and people. Morever, this increase in religious competition was accompanied by improvements in the quantity, quality, and availability of religious products--more priests and pastors, more cathedrals and chruches, more schools and universities, more poor-houses and orphanages. Chruch-building and missionary campaigns of this period also brought religious services to many towns and villages that had been underserved or beyond the reach of the pre-Reformation Church. And, compared with their medieval predecessors, the post-Reformation clergy were better trained and probably more zealous as well.