- Oct 17, 2011
- 42,338
- 45,444
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Atheist
- Marital Status
- Legal Union (Other)
This week, we mine the U.S. Religious Census, a decennial count of America’s faithful, for insights into the geography of religious devotion. We also compare people’s claims on church attendance to their actual behavior.
This remarkable tapestry of devotion is woven from data collected for the U.S. Religious Census, which has been conducted every 10 years since 1990 by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), a far-flung crew of numbers enthusiasts from national church groups. The survey traces its roots to 1850, when the Census Bureau first conducted a count of religious bodies. [The census stopped in 1940, but]
Church groups scooped up the baton, with a dedicated core of statisticians working across doctrinal divides to pour thousands of hours into each census. Led by Cliff Grammich of the Catholic Glenmary Research Center and Rich Houseal of the Church of the Nazarene, the statisticians contact every religious body they can find in the United States, then pull additional data from marketing databases and web searches.
In the 2020 survey, they counted 372 religious bodies, 357,000 congregations and 161 million “adherents,” a broad category that includes synagogue, mosque, temple or church members, their children and other participants.
Varying methodology means their numbers aren’t perfectly comparable across religions, and they obviously can’t measure atheists, but it’s an incredible achievement by a shoestring operation facing some unorthodox hurdles. For instance, the clerk of a small protestant association once told Grammich he was risking the wrath of God, given that King David brought on a plague by taking a census of the Israelites.
For a look at church attendance, we called Devin Pope, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. (And no, to answer your inevitable question, Pope is not Catholic.)
[In national polls 20+% of Americans say they go to church weekly. It's not a surprise that people exaggerate. Pope's data show the figure is more like 5%. (Though this methodology undercounts the Amish and Orthodox Jews who eschew technology, or other people who leave their phones at home)]
This remarkable tapestry of devotion is woven from data collected for the U.S. Religious Census, which has been conducted every 10 years since 1990 by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), a far-flung crew of numbers enthusiasts from national church groups. The survey traces its roots to 1850, when the Census Bureau first conducted a count of religious bodies. [The census stopped in 1940, but]
Church groups scooped up the baton, with a dedicated core of statisticians working across doctrinal divides to pour thousands of hours into each census. Led by Cliff Grammich of the Catholic Glenmary Research Center and Rich Houseal of the Church of the Nazarene, the statisticians contact every religious body they can find in the United States, then pull additional data from marketing databases and web searches.
In the 2020 survey, they counted 372 religious bodies, 357,000 congregations and 161 million “adherents,” a broad category that includes synagogue, mosque, temple or church members, their children and other participants.
Varying methodology means their numbers aren’t perfectly comparable across religions, and they obviously can’t measure atheists, but it’s an incredible achievement by a shoestring operation facing some unorthodox hurdles. For instance, the clerk of a small protestant association once told Grammich he was risking the wrath of God, given that King David brought on a plague by taking a census of the Israelites.
For a look at church attendance, we called Devin Pope, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. (And no, to answer your inevitable question, Pope is not Catholic.)
[In national polls 20+% of Americans say they go to church weekly. It's not a surprise that people exaggerate. Pope's data show the figure is more like 5%. (Though this methodology undercounts the Amish and Orthodox Jews who eschew technology, or other people who leave their phones at home)]
