Cellphone Study: Just 5% Are Weekly Churchgoers
Cellphone Study: Just 5% Are Weekly Churchgoers
Plus, Israel’s priorities, Galle-Desmond Rule of Tax-Increase Advocacy
Only about 5 percent of Americans attend religious services weekly, even if “weekly” is generously defined as 36 out of 47 weeks, according to a new paper by an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
In the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Religious Worship Attendance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data,” professor Devin Pope uses cellphone geolocation data to show that Americans are in churches, mosques, and synagogues far less regularly than they tell survey researchers when they are asked to report their own behavior.
Even the self-reported survey data about weekly attendance had been trending downward, with Pew and Gallup both putting the recent levels around 30 percent. Those declines prompted a Harvard professor of epidemiology, Tyler VanderWeele, to write an article citing research suggesting that the decline may be contributing to increases in the suicide rate and in depression. (See “Church Attendance Slump Caused Mental Health Crisis, Harvard Professor Suggests.”)
The cellphone data used in the new paper are from 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic and the reaction to it further eroded in-person attendance at religious services.
While Pope’s data show the surveys overestimate weekly attendance, the same data also show the self-report-based surveys underestimate annual attendance. “73% of my sample attended a religious service at least once” during the nearly year-long sample period, he writes. “This is higher than the 46% of Americans who report in surveys to go to a religious service at least once per year.”
About 45 million Americans attend a worship service during a typical week of the year, he writes.
Pope also uses the cellphone data to provide breakdowns about differences in attendance among denominations and religions, to track how many minutes congregants tend to stay at the place of worship, and even, by matching the census tracts of the residences of the cellphone owners, drawing conclusions about congregant incomes. That lets him compare income of never attenders and weekly attenders, or between Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
He uses weather data to show that “cold temperatures and precipitation lead to less worship attendance.”
And he finds that “frequent religious service attenders are less likely to go to strip clubs, liquor stores, casinos, or go to the gym.”
Pope mentions the previous research on religion and mental health: “research has provided causal evidence that increased religiosity can lead to lower levels of depression (Lucchetti, Koenig, and Lamas 2021), fewer deaths of despair (Giles, Hungerman, and Oostrom 2023), more prosocial behavior (Benjamin, Choi, and Fisher 2016; Bottan and Perez-Truglia 2015), less crime (Moreno-Medina 2023), and less drinking and drug use (Gruber and Hungerman 2004).”
He also acknowledges that plenty of people may be praying privately or studying religious texts at home or in other locations that aren’t official “places of worship.”
I’m not an academic economist, but I read a lot of social science papers as part of a university-based job I had from 2019 to 2023, and this looks to me like a pretty nicely done paper.
Israel’ s priorities: Among the most useful information sources on the war has been a daily briefing by Israel’s Defense and Security Forum, often featuring its chairman and founder, Brigadier General (reserve) Amir Avivi, who meets regularly with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Highlights from today’s briefing:
More than 50 percent of the Iranian missiles failed either in Iran or on the way to Israel. “They are not producing really high quality missiles,” General Avivi said.
Avivi is certainly a hawk on Iran, holding it accountable for the activities of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—“They are managing everything, funding, directing all the attacks….They are the head of the snake and their head needs to be cut….Iran has built Hamas, has built Hezbollah…Everything that’s happening is really generated by Iran.”
Yet he also said that Israel has three priorities right now.
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