We use long‐term longitudinal data from a sample (N = 155) of older age mainline Protestants, Catholics, and a small number of conservative Protestants to investigate the relations among church‐centered religiousness, spiritual seeking, and authoritarianism. In late adulthood, religiousness was related positively, and spiritual seeking was related negatively, to authoritarianism; these relations held even after excluding conservative Protestants and controlling for education, gender, age cohort, and personal flexibility. We find a similar pattern using measures of religiousness, spiritual seeking, and control variables scored in early adulthood, a time interval of close to 40 years.
