The consequences of religious strictness for political participation

• Offers a new model of how religion can shape civic participation.
• Estimates a general model of civic engagement, with direct and indirect effects.
• Applies multiple imputation to analyze the Portraits of American Life Study.
• Demonstrates religious strictness has a minimal total effect on civic engagement.

Contemporary media portray highly religious Americans as active political conservatives. This article examines how church strictness influences political participation by churchgoers. We argue that church strictness influences aspects of a person's life that are known to influence political participation, so assessing the effect of religion on participation requires considering intermediate factors. To evaluate our theory, we analyze the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, which focused on the role of religion in society. We develop a recursive model of political participation, using multiple imputation to address missingness in the survey. The results indicate that indirect effects of strictness—through civic involvement, income, and religious participation—mitigate the assumed direct effect of strictness upon political participation. We conclude that, although religious groups show political activism in some specific arenas, strict churches are not strong political mobilizers in general, as many media portrayals may lead one to believe.