The Religious, the Paranormal, and Church Attendance: A Response to Orenstein ANDREW M. MCKINNON Orenstein’s (2002) JSSR article “Religion and Paranormal Belief” uses Reginald Bibby’s 1995 Project Canada data to argue that religious and paranormal belief are positively correlated, but that church attendance and paranormal belief are negatively correlated. In this response, I use the same data to show that while his basic model is true, we also need to consider the interaction between church attendance and religious belief. Religious attendance conditions the effect of religious beliefs on paranormal beliefs in an important fashion. I find that religious and paranormal belief are positively correlated, but only for those who do not attend church regularly. Theodore Adorno liked to tell the story of someone he interviewed while doing the research for The Authoritarian Personality (1954). This individual claimed that “he believed in Astrology because he did not believe in God” (Adorno 2001:3). This, Adorno suggests, is emblematic for the relationship between “occult” and “religious” beliefs, that the former is typically a substitute for the other. A very interesting recent article by Alan Orenstein in JSSR (2002) uses Reginald Bibby’s (1995) Project Canada data to challenge this oft-made claim; paranormal beliefs, he demonstrates, are not substitutes for religious belief. Rather, conventional and “paranormal” religious beliefs are in fact strongly and positively correlated. In this article, I will extend that research by examining what conditions the relationship between conventional and paranormal beliefs. Orenstein uses six questions to produce a scale of “conventional” and “unconventional” or “paranormal” beliefs (both ranging from 1 to 4). The first of these scales (conventional) includes belief in God, heaven, angels, hell, life after death, and that “you have experienced God’s presence.” The second scale (unconventional or paranormal belief) includes the following items: extra-sensory perception (ESP), that some people have psychic powers; that you have experienced an event before it happened; astrology; that it is possible to communicate with the dead; that you will be reincarnated. Using these scales, Orenstein has made a compelling case that conventional religious and unconventional religious beliefs are positively correlated, but that unconventional beliefs and church attendance are negatively associated, even when controlling for religious affiliation, gender, education, marital status, and having moved in the last five years (Orenstein 2002:308). The question that emerges from Orenstein’s analysis is this: If religious beliefs are positively correlated with paranormal beliefs, and church attendance is negatively correlated with paranormal belief, is it possible that church attendance conditions the relationship between religious and paranormal belief? We can hypothesize that the relationship between religious and paranormal beliefs will be different for regular attenders than for those who are not regular attenders. My analysis builds on Orenstein’s basic model and seeks to extend it by looking at this relationship. METHODS In the interests of comparison, I have replicated the variables in Orenstein (2002) as closely as possible and used the same data set (Bibby 1995). 1 Like the earlier research, I have included Andrew M. McKinnon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 2J4. E-mail: amckinno@chass.utoronto.ca Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42:2 (2003) 299–303