Separation Of Church And Truth God Only Knows How Many People Attend Services
How honest are people when a stranger asks them about their church attendance? It’s a question that’s kept researchers abuzz the last few years.
For decades, sociologists and journalists have blindly repeated public opinion polls reporting 40 percent of Americans attend a worship service once a week.
That’s far higher than in most other Western nations.
Lately, some researchers have been questioning the conventional wisdom on the national attendance figures.
Could it be people who take opinion polls fudge a bit on their answers when it comes to religion? Some experts think so, saying the discrepancy may be enough to reveal major problems with organized religion in this country.
The Gallup Organization has been asking Americans about church attendance since the late 1930s, according to the fall issue of Religion in the News. When asked if they have attended church or synagogue in the past seven days, about 40 percent of poll respondents have consistently said yes. Until the last few years, at least, other major polls have tended to back up that finding.
If the results are accurate, it means “three decades of otherwise corrosive social and cultural change has left American church attendance virtually untouched,” wrote C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler in Christian Century last year.
Social scientists know people tend to give pollsters the answers they think they are “supposed” to give. Those answering polls exaggerate how often they vote or how much they give to charity. They underestimate how often they use illegal drugs, or the office photocopier for personal use.
Hadaway and Marler decided to challenge the stereotype in 1993. They consulted pastors and did head counts at Protestant religious services in Ashtabula County, Ohio. They also checked attendance figures at several Catholic dioceses around the country.
What’s going on?
Follow-up studies have convinced some scholars that the most committed members of religious groups are the ones who exaggerate their involvement to pollsters. As Walsh and others explain, those people figure even if they didn’t make it to worship the week before, they can answer affirmative because they know they usually do go to church.
“A `churched’ identity, once established, seems remarkably resilient and long-lasting,” Marler and Hadaway wrote. Although a person has to attend church frequently for a while to establish such a self-identity, “continued frequent attendance does not seem necessary for people to maintain it.”
A few poll respondents count things like attending a wedding or funeral, or even mowing the church lawn, as church attendance, Hadaway and Marler found.