This paper examines the nature of the relationship between religion and public life. Rather than examining the full range of ways in which religion might be related to civic and political engagement, it assesses one particular analytical approach to religion as a means by which to assess how religion might shape public engagement. Broadly speaking, the paper examines whether the particular way in which Americans express their religiosity has become more privatized over the past several decades and whether the privatization of religious faith is then linked to diminished patterns of engagement in public life. Because the paper seeks to track changes over time, it employs a variety of studies and depends on the use of identical, and frequently employed, measures of religion for purposes of measurement comparability across time. As a result, a relatively simple, yet revealing, measure of different forms of religious expression is constructed and applied across a variety of publicly available data files to address three basic questions about religion and public life: (1) Have the ways in which the American people manifest their religious faith changed, if at all, over time? (2) Are the ways in which people are religious related to the ways in which they engage in public life? and, (3) Is religion similarly or differentially related to civic and political activity and has this relationship changed over time? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we draw on broader psychological theories of the attitude-behavior relationship to postulate specific reciprocal patterns of causality between the civic attitudes and forms of political and civic engagement featured in contemporary political communication research. We then examine the extent of these reciprocal relationships with a 2-wave panel survey of 2,872 Pacific Northwest residents. Spanning the 2004 elections, structural equation modeling of the panel data shows complex reciprocal causal paths between political/civic attitudes (internal and external efficacy and civic pride and faith) and a range of political and civic behaviors (voting, political action, media use, political/community talk, and group involvement). The conclusion suggests how to conceptualize these variables and model their relationships in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]