Status Inconsistency and Striving for Power in a Church: Is Church a Refuge or a Stepping-Stone?

Abstract

This cross-cultural study seeks to determine if churches serve as political forums where status inconsistent persons seek power in order to compensate for their unsuccessful lives in the larger society. The relationships of three variables— relative deprivation resulting from status inconsistency, adaptive skills, and psychological marginality—with political behavior in churches were examined. Status inconsistency theory, in conjunction with relative deprivation theory, was used as a theoretical framework. The data were collected through mail surveys of 366 members of 2 Anglo-American and 2 Korean ethnic churches in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, supplemented by interviews with the ministers of the 4 churches. Relative deprivation affects the political behavior of immigrants in a church, but not the political behavior of non-immigrants. For immigrants, a lower sense of relative deprivation toward occupation or income induces relative passivity and aloofness in a church, a behavioral pattern not found in non-immigrants. Inconsistency resulting from disparity between incompatible statuses in different societies (migratory inconsistency) does not affect immigrant political behaviors in a church. Although the inconsistency hypothesis synthesizing psychological and structural factors was partly supported, the status-balancing" rationale behind the inconsistency theory was not found to be true.