Is America a nation of regular church-going faithful, a "religious majority" as some argue? Or is the demographic profile less certain? For decades, the percentage of those claiming to attend religious services on a steady basis has remained the same. But new data suggests that those figures may be inflated, and we are really a nation of Unchurched Americans.

Web Posted: May 23, 1998

It is said that numbers don't lie. Or do they?

    In public opinion surveys, responses to questions often can be influenced by an array of factors, everything from data collection techniques to a person's desire to please interviewers -- a phenomenon dubbed "social desirability bias." And in the midst of the debate over state-church separation and the role played by religious belief in the national cultural experience, the question has often been asked: "How religious are Americans, anyway?"

   The term "religion" covers a good deal of territory; and many Americans forget the fact that Eastern faiths such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Shintoism account for the largest chunk of the demographic pie. In the United States, it is generally conceded that Christianity is the religion of choice, although that profile is changing as immigrants bring other faiths into the country. And breaking down the Christian segment involves noting all of the denominational cleavages and fault lines.

   That task falls to private polling organizations, as the U.S. government makes no survey of religious affiliation and belief. In 1906, the Bureau of the Census -- after being integrated into the Department of Commerce -- did begin a report which included the history of various denominations, and attempted to measure the size of respective congregations and the value of the property they owned. Failures quickly became apparent, though, since the reporting was left to individual denominations and officials, some of whom even protested and resisted the survey. By 1938, groups like the Alabama State Baptist Convention were declaring that they would not cooperate with the census, and by 1946 the Bureau abandoned any attempt to gauge the size (or wealth) of religious congregations, or establish a profile of America's faith community.

    Since then, attempts to measure religious membership, or even the regularity of church attendance, have been precarious enterprises. The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, claims to have over 60 million adherents in the United States, but bases that figure on the number of baptismal records. Dividing the claimed number of respective diocese and parishes by the number of church buildings, though, suggests that it would impossible for the churches and chapels to accommodate so many people in regular religious services.

   There is good evidence that in the entire history of the United States, including the colonial period, the majority of Americans were never regular churchgoers. That is despite laws which required membership in an "established" church during pre-Revolutionary times in order to own property, vote or exercise other rights, or which mandated religious mottos and oaths. Indeed, within clerical circles, the majority of Americans are still today derisively referred to as "unchurched."

    In questions about church attendance, though, one item has bothered sociologists for decades; the percentage of Americans claiming that they attended religious services at least once a week has not changed in the past thirty years, hovering near 40% of respondents. That figure may well be inflated, though, suggests new research, including a study reported recently in the Washington Post. Conducted by sociologist Stanley Presser of the University of Maryland and research assistant Linda Stinson of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it indicates that a more accurate assessment of church attendance data shows only 26% of Americans regularly attending church -- a drop from the 42% reported in 1965.

   The new research employs a novel technique, that of checking diaries completed in the mid-1960s through the 1990s. The Post reports that the analysis "reveals a discrepancy between the diaries and the polls, and suggests that many Americans have been misreporting how they spend their Sunday mornings, inflating estimates of church attendance by perhaps as much as a third."

   The researchers also found that the percentage of Americans who lie about their attendance is increasing. Presser and Stinson described the 16-point drop off in church attendance "really very striking..."

   The new study also casts doubts on the two major sources which claim to have widely measured church participation, the National Opinion Research Center and the Gallup organization. NORC reported 38% of those surveyed claiming to attending weekly services; Gallup came in at a 42% figure.

    Founded and operated by Christian evangelical George Gallup, the Gallup Surveys have traditionally given high percentages to everything from church attendance to audience size for religious programming, a fact which has stirred considerable debate.

    In 1980, for instance, the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Television Research was launched with a $175,000 grant from the Roman Catholic Church, National Religious Broadcasters, Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, Jim Bakker's "Praise The Lord" (PTL) ministry and others to survey the potential audience for their programs. Two groups -- the Gallup Organization and the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, underwritten by conservative media tycoon Walter Annenberg, were hired on. The main objective was to determine whether or not religious programming on television affected church attendance. As results indicated, the effect was really to increase participation at local churches.

    The studies, conducted independently by both organizations, also confirmed that the typical viewer of religious programming was female, over 55 years of age, and "less educated and more concerned with moral issues than secular television viewers," according to writer Sarah Diamond. But the Annenberg and Gallup research gave significantly different percentages in measuring the size of the religious programming audience. "Annenberg concluded that the number of people watching at least one-quarter hour of religious television per week was about 13.3 million or 6.2% of the national television audience," observed Diamond in her book, "Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right." The Gallup survey, however, suggested positive responses from 32% of those questioned -- a staggering 70 million viewers.

    Gallup was also responsible for the claim that 50 million adult Americans were "born-again" Christians; he made that declaration in 1976, and proclaimed the time as "The Year of the Evangelical" as a result. More recently, Gallup and his polling group have been devoting resources to "research on successful -- and culturally relevant -- evangelistic techniques" in anticipation of the new millennium, notes Diamond.

    While bias may or may not be creeping into Gallup polls, there might be other reasons for why surveys reflect inaccurately high numbers on the question of church attendance. Presser opined that in the Gallup and NORC polls, "respondents felt the need to inflate their church attendance to impress the interviewers." The diaries used in the new study would not have suffered from that "social desirability bias."

    The Presser-Stinson study can boast another safeguard, namely, the data base. The diaries were originally used in a 1992-1994 survey conducted by the University of Michigan in an unrelated area; they were part of a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which analyzed diary entries to determine how often people might have been exposed to harmful substances.

    And the study also confirms other trends, including "empty-pew syndrome," especially in metropolitan areas where religious groups are closing and consolidating parishes. In Boston, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church will be shutting down 60 churches in the next several years for lack of money -- and parishioners.

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