Explaining religiosity: towards a unified theoretical model

The article presents a unified theoretical model, explaining differences in Christian and 'alternative' religiosity at individual and collective levels. The model reconstructs and integrates the most important theories explaining religiosity (deprivation, regulation, socialization, cultural production, and ethnicity) as complementary causal mechanisms in a rational-action based framework. It is maintained that the mechanisms of the various theories are not exclusive, but complementary, and that integration into the general model is both theoretically and empirically beneficial. The model is tested on representative data from Switzerland. Substantively, I find for the Swiss case that Christian religiosity can be best explained by a religious socialization mechanism. The most important mechanisms accounting for alternative religiosity involve deprivation, gender, and age.