Blessed Are The Downtrodden? An Empirical Test*

Deprivation theory of religious commitment has relied traditionally upon status measures of deprivation: age, sex, income, ducation, race. Measures of religiosity and status indicators, however, have never been combined with subjective measures of felt deprivation. A recent major national quality of life survey fills this ~ap by providing a cluster of felt deprivation measures. The data enable us to ask if religiostty cushions the effects of negative feelings of well-being among the "objectively " deprived. R sults uggest religiosity, as measured by survey indicators, has little effect in this regard, a finding which raises questions concerning traditional formulations of functional definitions as well as the adequacy of religiosity and quality of life measures. Deprivation theory has been with us for some time now. In fact, as Dittes (1971) has reminded us, its roots appear in the biblical portrayal of Jahweh's concern for nomads, exiles, orphans, and widows and inJesus ' direction of his message to the poor, sick ~ outcast, and persecuted. Weber, Marx, and Freud were scarcely unaware of religion's compensatory functions. We turn to Charles Glock, how-ever, for the theory's explicit formulation (1964), launching a spate of "deprivatio