The complicated story about religious attendance rates

SALT LAKE CITY — With mounting statistics showing a steady exodus from the pews, this trend of declining church attendance continuing is sometimes treated as a foregone conclusion.

It's true that millions of Americas have formally or informally disaffiliated from religion, and younger generations show less attachment to religion than older generations do. Fewer Americans say religion is important to them and studies show the majority of people leaving religion aren't looking for a new religious home.

It's reasonable to see the decline of religious attendance across different faiths as a trend likely to continue. But it might be time to pause and consider a twist in the trend — religious attendance has actually stopped dropping.

Posting data from the Cooperative Election Study, leading religion data analyst Ryan Burge said there isn't a statistically significant change in church attendance from 2019 to 2023. There is a small decline in 2021 (during the pandemic), but otherwise the trend line is pretty flat.

There are a few ways of looking at this trend.

The first is this is status quo — the trend line is flatter, but eventually it'll continue to trend down. Gallup also tracks religious attendance data. Thirty percent of Americans say they attend religious services weekly or nearly weekly. The survey data shows that since 2000, religious attendance has declined across nearly every major group in the United States. Jews and Muslims have seen a modest increase in attendance.

Gallup senior editor Jeffrey M. Jones wrote that this trend of declining attendance is likely due to the increase in Americans deciding to disaffiliate from religion. Jones said because younger generations have less attachment to religion, this trend will likely continue.

Religious trend flips

Looking at the data from the Cooperative Election Study, the trend line is flat in other places before dropping off more. So, it's plausible this is a reflection of that previous reality, too.

The second option is that the line really is getting flatter and may stabilize for a while at this rate — the religion gender gap may account for this.

Men have generally reported less religious engagement than women, according to the Survey Center on American Life. The way authors of the report Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond put it, "for as long as we've conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement."

But now with Gen Z, the trend has flipped.

In a survey of 5,459 adults, the Survey Center on American Life found that more women than men disaffiliated from religion if they were part of Gen Z. Thirty-four percent of Gen Z men said they were religiously unaffiliated and 39% of women said they were religiously unaffiliated.

Cox and Hammond said this will bring challenges to religious congregations — in part, because of research showing women are key to passing religious beliefs down to children.

"Americans who were raised in religious households credit their mothers more so than their fathers for leading in their religious upbringing, and children who are raised in mixed-faith households are more likely to adopt their mother's faith in adulthood," wrote Cox and Hammond.

Though women becoming less religiously engaged could have more long-term impacts on religiosity, especially as it relates to children, men becoming more religiously engaged could offset the impact on the overall rate.

Religiosity and life events

Then, there's another open question — what will the rates of returning to faith look like for younger generations?

It's possible we don't have any research to determine what a reasonable rate of reconversion is — and without that, it's hard to evaluate how much that would impact the overall rate of religiosity. Younger generations do have a weaker attachment to religion, but that doesn't mean that rate is stagnant.

A paper published by Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center looked at several studies measuring the impact of life events on conversion, reactivation and loss of religious faith. Religious belief and commitment can be impacted in different ways by life events like divorce, losing a loved people, change in financial situation — those negative events correlate with lower religiosity.

But on the other hand, people who saw people they love go through difficult life events were more likely to experience increased religiosity. There's more than life events that goes into measuring how important or unimportant religion is in a person's life, but this is an important perspective. As people undergo more life events, it's possible they can reconvert to religion — and we may not have enough information at this point to be able to accurately assess any potential long-term changes in the religiosity rate.

"There are few rigorous studies with large samples that evaluate individuals who reconvert, and more research in this field would be beneficial, but it is clear that a significant number of leavers return to faith," said a report from the Wheatley Institute. "Research suggests that 1 in 5 individuals who leave religion in early adulthood eventually reconvert."

We've talked about how the religiosity rate could continue to decline or could stay stagnant. The last option is the rate could increase — to be clear, an increase in religiosity is generally not expected by experts.

According to Pew Research Center, there are no patterns right now that show there could be a revival of Christianity in the U.S., but that doesn't mean that isn't a possibility in the future. These factors that could lead to a change include "war, economic depression, climate crisis, changing immigration patterns or religious innovations."

Survey data measures the attitudes of a group of people at a particular moment in time and analysis done after that cannot predict with complete accuracy what the world will look like years later. And it cannot predict people's individual circumstances and the choices they will make based on their circumstances.

This might be cause for hope that a religious revival could be on the horizon.

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