Religious Participation NGUMC

This dataset shows that religious participation varies with business cycle using a sample of congregations from the North Georgia United Methodist Conference (NGUMC) from 1999-2009. The data was gathered from publicly available sources including national and county level unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, church level information from the NGUMC. The findings are consistent with theory on the attraction of authoritarian organizations during economic distress: Sales (1972), McCann (1999), and Beckworth (2009) .