How Many Americans Attend Worship Each Week?

An Alternative Approach to Measurement

C. KIRK HADAWAY PENNY LONG MARLER

Opinion polls indicate that over 40 percent of Americans attend worship services each week. However, attendance counts in several North American counties and Roman Catholic dioceses suggest that worship attendance may be much lower. In this article a new measurement strategy is used to estimate total weekly worship attendance. First, using a variety of resources we develop an estimate of the total number of religious congregations in the United States by religious family. Contrary to many published sources, the total number of congregations is estimated at just over 330,000. Second, using known population values and sample-based attendance counts we develop estimates of average weekly worship attendance for religious congregations by religious family. The resulting totals suggest that fewer than 22 percent of Americans attend worship services each week. This lower level of attendance provides further evidence that Americans tend to overreport worship participation and are less religiously active than the polls show.

How many people worship in America during an average week? Until recently, the most widely accepted answer to that question was slightly over 40 percent. Due to a multiplicity of denominations, the sheer number of churches, temples, mosques, and other houses of worship in the United States, and the lack of systematic procedures for collecting information on worship attendance, social researchers relied on self-reported attendance gures from public opinion polls to estimate how often Americans attend worship. The most frequently referenced survey on worship attendance is administered by the Gallup Organization. Survey respondents are asked, Did you yourself happen to attend church or synagogue in the past seven days? (Princeton Religion Research Center 2002:2). Unlike other social surveys that ask about relative frequency of attendance (weekly, once a month, etc.), the Gallup question allows for an easy estimation of weekly attendance. If 42 percent of Americans say they attended church or synagogue in the previous seven days, as Gallup polls suggest, we can presume that approximately 118 million persons attended church or some other house of worship during an average week in the United States in the year 2000.1 That more than four out of ten Americans actually worship in a church or synagogue during an average week struck many denominational leaders and some social researchers as unlikely. However, no effort was made to reassess the level of American attendance until Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves (1993) did so using aggregate attendance counts for Protestants in an Ohio county and Catholics in 18 dioceses. Their analysis suggested that Protestant attendance might be as low as 20 percent and that Catholic attendance was no more than 28 percent. If these lower estimates are accurate, if American non-Christians (3 percent of the total U.S. population) attend at the Protestant level, and if worship attendance among persons who say they have no religion is around 5 percent, the overall level of church, synagogue, and mosque attendance in the United States would stand at 20 percent. The possibility that attendance at churches, synagogues, and mosques was less than half the generally accepted rate was received with skepticism (Princeton Religion Research Center 1994;

C. Kirk Hadaway is Director of Research for the Episcopal Church, Episcopal Church Center, 815 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: khadaway@episcopalchurch.org Penny Long Marler is a Professor of Religion at Samford University, Birmingham, AL 35229. E-mail: plmarler@ samford.edu Journal for the Scientic Study of Religion (2005) 44(3):307322

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Caplow 1998; Hout and Greeley 1998; Woodberry 1998). The predominant concern was the sheer size of the discrepancy between self-reports and church counts. Did social surveys err to such an extent? No direct effort was made to test the results achieved by Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves (1993) using aggregate attendance counts. A test of alternative survey questions, however, was conducted that avoided the problems of the standard Gallup Poll question.2 By using new wording and follow-up interpretive questions, the Gallup 42 percent attendance gure was reduced to around 30 percent (Presser and Stinson 1998; Smith 1998). Indeed, this new, survey-based gure of 30 percent may be replacing the old survey-based gure as the new conventional wisdom regarding religious participation in the United States.3 Less biased survey questions and face-to-face interview methods do tend to reduce estimates of church participation, but the fact remains that all surveys are self-reports and behavioral selfreports do not describe behavior accurately and objectively (Presser and Traugott 1992). People tend to report what they usually do, what they would like to think they usually do, and what they used to do, rather than give an objective report of their actual behavior (Bradburn, Rips, and Shevell 1987; Burton and Blair 1991). Self-reported behavior is a combination of behavioral recall and a behaviorally referenced attitude. Ination is to be expected in the case of behaviors that are socially approved, part of a frequent routine, or based on past experience (Silver, Anderson, and Abramson 1986; Blair and Burton 1987).4 We maintain that accurate estimates of behavioral activity are not possible using survey methods, and in the case of church attendance in America, such estimates are always inated.5 Chaves and Cavendish (1994), Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves (1998), and Hadaway and Marler (1998) provided further evidence for a lowered attendance estimate using additional attendance counts: Catholics in Ashtabula County, Ohio; all religious groups in Oxford County, Ontario, Canada; and Catholics in 48 American dioceses. Marcum (1994, 1999) found overreporting of attendance among Presbyterians in studies comparing survey data and church reports; and Marler and Hadaway (1999) documented the correlates of overreporting among the members of a single Southern church. In the present analysis a quite different method is used to address the issue of how many Americans attend religious services during an average week. We compare the results to poll- and count-based methods. Here we employ national mean attendance estimates and church counts for various denominational categories to develop an overall estimate of worship attendance in America. The data sources include church count proportions from Chaves National Congregations Study (Chaves et al. 1999), attendance gures from the U.S. Congregational Life Survey (Woolever and Bruce 2001), and attendance reports from various denominations included in Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States: 2000 (Jones et al. 2002). Additional material on religious service attendance was obtained from the Faith Communities Today study (FACT); nally, the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) provided estimates of the size of various religious populations (Kosmin, Mayer, and Keysar 2001; Roozen and Dudley 2001). Ideally, one could compile attendance reports from all American denominations to develop a reasonably accurate estimate of average attendance and multiply that gure by the total number of churches in America. Thus, if the average church in America has, say, 200 persons attending worship each week and 300,000 churches and other houses of worship exist in the United States, an aggregate attendance estimate would be 60 million Americans or 21.3 percent of the total population in 2000. However, if we presume that children under the age of ve would not be in worship in most churches, the population base is reduced and the attendance estimate would rise to 22.9 percent. The difculty lies in determining an average attendance gure and in determining the number of churches in the United States. Unfortunately, not all denominations report attendance gures, many churches and other religious congregations are not part of denominations, and there is no accepted estimate of the number of churches and other religious congregations in America.

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ESTIMATING THE NUMBER OF CHURCHES AND OTHER HOUSES OF WORSHIP The United States lacks a centralized list of churches, synagogues, mosques, and covens. So approximately how many churches and other houses of worship exist? The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches gives a total of 320,827 Christian churches for 2000, although some of the larger denominational listings (such as the Church of God in Christ, Churches of Christ, and Progressive National Baptist Convention) are clearly estimates, and federated or dually aligned churches in many mainline and evangelical denominations are counted at least twice (Lindner 2002). Furthermore, some U.S.-based denominations include churches located in Canada, Puerto Rico, U.S. protectorates, and sovereign nations in and around the Caribbean. Moreover, the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches excludes some (but not all) independent, nondenominational churches.6 Gordon Melton (1994) reported nding approximately 350,000 churches and other houses of worship located in the 50 U.S. states in his National Directory of Churches, Synagogues and Other Houses of Worship. However, there are a great many double listings in the directory, and some of the organizations included are not congregations.7 They are judicatory ofces, independent evangelists, and ministry associations. It also is likely that Melton missed some independent congregations in inner city and profoundly rural contexts. The 2002 edition of InfoUSAs Business and Consumer Mailing Lists (a CD ROM database) suggests that there are 390,000 congregations.8 But this directory also includes many organizations that are not churches (such as schools and parachurch organizations like Child Evangelism Fellowship, etc.), and many double listings for churches with more than one telephone line or more than one address (a P.O. box and street address, for instance). In a report on problems involved in estimating the total congregations in a community and nationally, Becker and Chaves (2000:5) note that one set of plausible assumptions would lead to an overall estimate of 290,000 congregations, whereas another set of equally plausible assumptions leads to an estimate of 355,000. Finally, the Independent Sector estimated that in 1997 there were more than 353,000 religious congregations in the United States (Saxon-Harrold et al. 2000). Although the above estimates suggest that around 350,000 houses of worship may exist in the United States, we will use a measurement strategy that is less biased than earlier efforts, which were based primarily on church list compilations and phone and business directories. Our method is quite simple. Since the number of mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches that exist in the United States is a known value, the approximate number of evangelical Protestant, other Christian, and non-Christian religious bodies can be obtained via an algebraic formula if the proportion of these latter groups relative to that of mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches is also known. For our purposes, mainline Protestant churches are limited to the American Baptist Churches, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. Churches afliated with these denominations and located within the 50 states numbered 82,183 in 2000.9 Roman Catholic (including Eastern Rite) parishes numbered 19,544 in 2000, whereas Orthodox and other Catholic churches (such as Old Catholic) added another 2,431 congregations to the Catholic/Orthodox total (Krindatch 2002; Lindner 2002). The primary source of data on the relative proportions of churches in America is the National Congregations Study (Chaves et al. 1999). The NCS used hypernetwork or multiplicity sampling to generate a random sample of churches by identifying the religious bodies associated with a random sample of individuals. The 1998 General Social Survey provided the NCS with its sample of individuals. Respondents who said that they attended religious services at least once a year were asked to report the name and location of the congregation that they attended.10 This procedure resulted in a list of 1,480 unique congregations, of which 1,236 were contacted and an interview conducted with the pastor or other knowledgeable person.

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Although the set of 1,236 congregations represents a randomized sample of congregations in the United States, the investigators note: the probability that a congregation will appear in this sample is proportional to its size. Because congregations are nominated by individuals attached to them, larger congregations are more likely to be in the sample than smaller congregations (Chaves et al. 1999:461). To obtain a sample of congregations that is distributed proportionally to the number of religious bodies in America (rather than to the distribution of religious service attendees) it was necessary to weight the data inversely proportional to congregation size. Congregation size was measured by the number of adults who a key informant says regularly participate in the religious life of the congregation.11 The weighted NCS sample of churches was divided into ve groups: mainline Protestant (323), conservative/evangelical Protestant (638), Catholic or Orthodox (83), other Christian (129), and non-Christian (43).12 A total of 21 weighted congregations were not categorized due to inadequate information. In order to check for response bias, the NCS obtained data on the religious tradition of nonresponding congregations (Chaves et al. 1999:463). This procedure raised the total number of congregations from 1,236 to 1,605, which represents all but one of the possible unique congregations nominated by the 1,886 persons on the GSS who said that they attended religious services at least once a year.13 Comparing responding and nonresponding congregations indicated that bias was small. Still, mainline churches were slightly overrepresented and conservative/evangelical Protestants and other Christian groups were slightly underrepresented in the sample of responding congregations. As can be seen in Table 1, we adjusted for this bias by subtracting 1.9 percentage points from the mainline total and adding 1.5 percentage points and 0.4 percentage points to conservative/evangelical Protestants and other Christian groups, respectively.14 Having established the proportional distribution of congregations in America, we can now apply the algebraic formula discussed earlier to estimate the total number of congregations. This is done by dividing the known number of congregations in a religious family by their proportion of all congregations in America. Using the known total number of mainline Protestant churches in the 50 U.S. states (82,183) divided by the adjusted mainline proportion from the NCS (0.2466) yields an estimated 333,264 total congregations for the United States. The known Catholic/Orthodox number of congregations (21,975) divided by the Catholic/Orthodox proportion from the NCS yields an estimated 321,742 congregations. Combining the two known congregational totals (104,158) and the two proportions (0.3149) results in an estimate of 330,765which we have rounded up to 331,000 in Table 1. The fourth data column in Table 1 shows the estimated number of congregations by religious tradition using 331,000 as the probable number of congregations and the proportionate values TABLE 1 PROPORTION AND ESTIMATED NUMBER OF RELIGIOUS CONGREGATIONS BY RELIGIOUS TRADITION
Religious Tradition Mainline Protestant Conservative/ Evangelical Catholic/Orthodox Other Christian Non-Christian Total Distribution of Distribution of U.S. Congregations Congregations NCS Bias Estimated U.S. Congregations in NCS (%) Adjustment Congregations (%) 323 638 83 129 43 1,216 26.56 52.47 6.83 10.61 3.54 100.0 24.66 53.97 6.83 11.01 3.54 100.0 82,183 178,672 21,975 36,450 11,720 331,000 24.83 53.98 6.64 11.01 3.54 100.0

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from the NCS for conservative/evangelical Protestants, other Christians, and non-Christians.15 This procedure results in an estimated 178,672 conservative/evangelical congregations, 36,450 other Christian congregations, and 11,720 non-Christian congregations. The fact that the mainline Protestant and Catholic proportions yield very similar overall congregational totals suggests that our estimate of 331,000 is likely to be very close to the actual number of congregations in America.16 However, it is possible to calculate a condence interval for our estimate using the combined proportions. The 95 percent condence interval for the proportion Catholic/Orthodox/mainline Protestant is 2.27 percentage pointsresulting in a high estimate of 356,461 congregations and a low estimate of 308,525 congregations. A second procedure for determining the relative proportions of religious groups to one anotherand thereby providing a basis for estimating the total number of congregationswas to conduct a systematic sample from the estimated 350,000 congregations listed in the National Directory of Churches, Synagogues and Other Houses of Worship (Melton 1994). Using a random start, one congregation was selected from the same column and row of each page from each of the volumes. Additional congregations were selected (from a separate randomly selected start) from each page that was part of a metropolitan area.17 Entries that were clearly not congregations were skipped over to the next entry. Double entries were not a problem, however, due to the very low odds of duplicate congregations being selected from separate pages.18 This procedure resulted in a list of 3,232 congregations, each of which was coded as mainline Protestant, conservative/evangelical Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, other Christian, or non-Christian. The results, by region, can be seen in Table 2. Large differences exist between regions in the relative concentration of religious traditions. Not surprisingly, conservative/evangelical churches dominate the south. Due to large Catholic and Jewish populations, the Catholic/Orthodox and non-Christian proportions are higher in the northeast. In the west, the other Christian proportion is much higher than any other region, due in part to the concentration of Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) congregations. Still, when aggregated, the total proportions for the various religious families are remarkably similar to those seen in Table 1 using the NCS. The National Directory sample suggests that mainline churches constitute 25.2 percent of U.S. congregations. This gure is very close to the 24.7 percent NCS estimate and to the 24.8 percent estimate using relative proportions and our estimate of 331,000 congregations. Using the known value of all mainline, Catholic, and Orthodox congregations, and the overall proportion of these groups from the U.S. total column in Table 2 results in an estimate of 324,480 congregations in the United States. A more extensive analysis of 49 denominations or denominational clusters with known numbers of congregations (including many evangelical and non-Christian bodies)representing 59.4 percent of sampled congregations from the National Directoryresults in an estimated congregational total of 326,191. Due to the very strong similarity among these congregational estimates, we will use 331,000 from Table 1 as our best estimate of the number of congregations in America. The next step is to estimate average attendance size during worship for the various religious traditions.

ESTIMATING AVERAGE ATTENDANCE BY GROUP The simplest way to estimate average worship attendance is through the random sample of congregations drawn by the National Opinion Research Center as part of the U.S. Congregational Life Survey (USCLS) in 2000 (Woolever and Bruce 2001). This was another hypersample of congregations drawn by asking General Social Survey respondents to identify the church or other religious group where they attended. The congregations named by survey respondents were located and the pastor, priest, or other leader completed a congregational prole. Unlike the NCS, the USCLS asked for average weekly worship attendance totals for the current year (2001) and the four previous years. As was the case for the NCS, this sample of churches

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TABLE 2 SAMPLE-BASED PROPORTIONS BY RELIGIOUS TRADITION AND REGION

Midwest (%) 31.3 47.2 8.3 10.7 2.5 100.0 (923) 100.0 (487) 100.0 (3,232) 100.0 0.0 16.0 52.6 7.8 17.0 6.6 25.2 53.6 6.9 10.8 3.5 24.7 54.0 6.8 11.0 3.5 0.5 0.4 0.1 0.2 0.0 West (%) U.S. Total (%) NCS Total (%) Difference from NCS (%) Table 1 Total (%) 24.8 54.0 6.6 11.0 3.5 100.0 Difference From Table 1 (%) 0.4 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.0 0.0

Religious Tradition 20.9 65.5 2.9 9.0 1.7 100.0 (1,332)

Northeast (%)

South (%)

Mainline Protestant Conservative/Evangelical Catholic/Orthodox Other Christian Non-Christian

34.5 34.1 14.3 9.8 7.3

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Total N

99.9 (490)

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was weighted to adjust for the fact that persons from larger churches were more likely to be interviewed. The USCLS included 417 churches with attendance data.19 Average attendance was 182.7 and 194.4 for 2000 and 2001, respectively. Comparison of USCLS data to actual church reports of attendance from denominational yearbooks in 2000 and 2001 indicated that churches tended to overreport their current (midyear) attendance and to underreport attendance in the prior year, presumably to accentuate growth or minimize decline.20 For this reason, a more accurate depiction of attendance in 2000 was gained by averaging the 2000 and 2001 gures. This procedure results in a raw average attendance estimate of 188.5 persons in worship for all churches and other houses of worship in the United States. When multiplied by the number of churches in the United States this gure yields a national worship percentage of 22.2, using our congregational estimate of 331,000.21 However, this gure is biased because mainline and Roman Catholic churches were overrepresented among responding congregations in the USCLS sample. Because average attendance in mainline and evangelical churches is nearly the same in the USCLS, the overrepresentation of the former is cancelled out by the underrepresentation of the latter. However, because average attendance is so high in Catholic churches, the overrepresentation of this denominational family causes the overall average attendance gure for the United States to increase substantially. When the USCLS average attendance gures are broken down by denominational family and multiplied by the respective number of congregations using the proportions from Table 1, the national worship percentage drops to only 19.3.22 A more accurate estimate of overall attendance is possible by adjusting mean attendance estimates for each denominational/religious family, computing a group attendance gure, and combining the results for each group. Mainline Protestant The attendance average among the 146 mainline churches that participated in the USCLS was 129.5 persons. However, an examination of average attendance gures from all (domestic U.S.) churches in eight mainline denominations (the American Baptist Churches, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church) indicates a lower average attendance gure: 109.8 persons. We adjusted the size of attendance at the average mainline church to reect this known value. As noted above, all eight mainline denominations plus the Unitarian Universalist Association totaled 82,183 churches in 2000. Multiplying the number of mainline churches by the average attendance gure of 109.8 yields a cumulative attendance total of 9,023,693 persons attending worship during a typical week at a mainline church in 2000. Survey data on the percentage of Americans with a mainline Protestant identity (17.7 percent of the U.S. population) can then be used to determine the number of mainline Americans and the mainline rate of attendance. Approximately 18.1 percent of all mainline Americans (or 19.4 percent of mainline Americans aged ve or over) can be found worshiping each week (assuming that the numbers of mainline persons worshiping in nonmainline churches is roughly equal to the number of nonmainline persons who worship in mainline churches). Conservative/Evangelical Protestant There is no clear tendency for evangelical churches included in the USCLS to be larger than the norm in their constituent denominations. For instance, the average attendance gure for Southern Baptist Churches in the USCLS is nearly identical to the attendance mean for all churches in the Southern Baptist Convention (from denominational records of attendance collected during the fall of 2000). On the other hand, Assemblies of God (AG) churches in the USCLS tended to be slightly larger than the average attendance recorded by all AG congregations. By examining the actual

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attendance records from all churches in 28 evangelical denominational bodies we determined that their average attendance total should be reduced slightly from 129.2 to 124.4 persons in worship.23 When multiplied by the number of conservative/evangelical churches from Table 1, we estimate that 22, 233, 944 persons attended a conservative/evangelical Protestant church during a typical week in 2000. Survey-based data on the conservative/evangelical population indicates that this population is somewhat more religiously active than mainline Protestants (Davis et al. 2003). Thus, it is no surprise that during an average week the proportion of conservative/evangelical Protestants attending worship (25.4 percent) is higher than the proportion of mainline Protestants attending worship. Other Christian (Not Catholic or Orthodox) The other Christian category contained a mixture of denominations that are difcult to classify, such as the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and nondenominational churches that did not identify themselves as evangelical. Due to a dearth of outside information on attendance at these churches, their attendance average of 97.9 persons from the USCLS was not adjusted. When multiplied by the number of congregations in this category from Table 1, we estimate that around 3,568,455 persons attended one of these other Christian congregations during an average week in 2000. Catholic and Orthodox Catholic size gures are notoriously problematic. Not only is the concept of membership foreign to the Catholic church, but many parish priests consider all baptized Catholics in the area to be active at some levela (mis)perception reinforced by mostly full pews and multiple worship services (Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves 1993, 1998). The 45 Roman Catholic churches included in the USCLS reported an average worship attendance of 701.2 persons (averaging gures from 2001 and 2000). There is no comparative Catholic attendance measure except for the record of regular participants recorded by Chaves in the NCS. His larger sample of Roman Catholic parishes averaged 682 regular participants (a different gure than worship attendance), as compared to 829 in the USCLS. A weighed average of the two yields 735.4 regular participants. However, examination of 1990 average attendance totals for all churches in 48 mostly urban Catholic dioceses reported by Chaves and Cavendish (1994) indicated a higher average attendance level. A closer look at the Chaves and Cavendish data indicated that average attendance size at the diocesan level was highly correlated with the population of the diocesan area (r = 0.47), percent Catholic (r = 0.53), and total Catholic population (r = 0.55), so we estimated average attendance in nonreporting dioceses by using average attendance in 17 medium-sized reporting dioceses (based on the total Catholic population in those dioceses selected so that the mean Catholic population in the medium-sized reporting dioceses would equal the mean Catholic population in all nonreporting dioceses). The resulting average attendance gure (combining reporting and nonreporting dioceses) was 853.5 personsa much higher gure than the USCLS attendance estimate of 701. If the higher attendance estimate is used, and with a reported 19,544 churches in the United States, the average weekly attendance for Roman Catholics would be around 16.7 million persons, or 25 percent of the total Catholic population over the age of ve years in 2000. Very few Orthodox churches were included in the USCLS or the NCS. Furthermore, the membership and adherent numbers for the various Orthodox bodies reporting in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches appear to be vague estimates (Lindner 2002; Krindatch 2002). The only hard numbers are from the 336 Orthodox churches surveyed in 2000 as part of the Faith Communities Today project (FACT). These churches reported an average of 298.3 persons

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associated with their congregations in any way and 229.4 active participants. If we estimate somewhat generously, based on the Roman Catholic percentages, that 84.5 percent of active participants can be expected to attend each week, the average Orthodox congregation can be expected to have a weekly attendance of 193.8 persons. If the 2,431 Orthodox and various other non-Roman branches of the Catholic/Orthodox sector average 193.8 attendees, the total average weekly attendance in Orthodox and other Catholic churches would be around 471,128 persons.

Non-Christian The number of non-Christian congregations was based on the proportion (3.5 percent) of such congregations in the National Congregations Study (Chaves et al. 1999). Using the 331,000 gure for the total number of U.S. congregations, the estimated number of non-Christian congregations is 11,720. Because this gure initially seemed high, we examined its constituent components. First, we obtained known values of Jewish congregations from the American Jewish Yearbook 2002 (Schwartz, Scheckner, and Kotler-Berkowitz 2002) and Muslim congregations from the Mosque Study Project (Bagby, Perl, and Froehle 2001). The number of Jewish congregations totaled 3,695, whereas 1,209 mosques were identied. Bahai congregational totals also are available. They include 1,177 congregations (mostly small with an average of only 16 active adults and 6 children).24 Projections based on Jewish and Muslim congregations sampled from the National Directory of Churches, Synagogues and Other Houses of Worship (3,598 and 1,439, respectively) were similar to the known values. National Directory projections for Hindu/Sikh (1,645) and Buddhist/Taoist congregations (720) were very similar to estimates included in Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000 (Jones et al. 2000). This latter source also provided the number of Jain and Zoroastrian congregations. Totals for Scientology and Eckankar were obtained from those organizations websites. Subtracting totals for known or reliably estimated groups from the overall non-Christian total (11,720) left 2,315 unassigned non-Christian congregations. Many of these undoubtedly fall into a religious or ethical science categorya catch-all group that includes the Church of Naturalism, Church of Cosmic Harmony, Center for Higher Consciousness, the Essence of Man Church, and others. Groups like this were quite numerous in the National Directory, and we estimate that at least 1,315 are in existence nationwide, not counting Scientology or Eckankar congregations. The balance of the nonassigned non-Christian congregations (1,000) includes Wiccan, pagan, or druid groups. None of these latter groups were included in the NCS or in our National Directory sample. They tend to be very small (averaging 10 members), are rarely listed in phone directories, but are known to exist in fairly large numbers.25 The initial average attendance at non-Christian congregations of 138.7 persons was obtained from the USCLS. How reliable is this gure? The Mosque Study Project reports average adult attendance of 272, whereas 30 mosques in the FACT survey averaged 214. No national attendance data are available for synagogues, but those participating in the FACT study averaged 163 in attendance. Bahai congregations are much smaller, however, with an estimated 25 in average attendance. Hindu, Buddhist, and Spiritualist congregations also tend to be relatively small, although good estimates are not available. Using an average attendance of 272 for mosques, 163 for synagogues, 25 for Bahai, 150 for Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, and Sikhs, 100 for religious science, Zoroastrians, Eckankar, and Scientology, 50 for Native Americans, spiritualists, and Jains, and 20 for Wiccans, pagans, and druids gives an average non-Christian attendance gure of 131.2 persons. As noted above, the USCLS gives a slightly higher attendance estimate of 138.7 and if this gure is used rather than 131.2, we arrive at an overall attendance estimate of 1.62 million persons worshipping each week in synagogues, mosques, temples, and other non-Christian congregations.

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TABLE 3 ESTIMATING RELIGIOUS SERVICE ATTENDANCE: 2000

Average Congregations Attendance 82,183 178,672 19,544 2,431 36,450 11,720 331,000 109.8 124.4 853.5 193.8 97.9 138.7 161.9 Estimated Attendees 9,023,693 22,233,944 16,680,804 471,128 3,568,455 1,625,564 53,603,588 % of Constituent % of Constituent Population Population Age 5+ Age 8+ 19.4 25.4 25.4 35.9 25.2 18.2 20.4 20.4 26.6 26.7 37.7 26.4 19.1 21.4

Religious Tradition Mainline Protestant Conservative/Evangelical Roman Catholic Orthodox/Other Catholic Other Christian Non-Christian Total For United States

HOW MANY PEOPLE ATTEND RELIGIOUS SERVICES? Having obtained estimates of the number of congregations for each religious family, we then multiply these totals by the average attendance size for congregations in each religious sector. The results can be seen in Table 3. Based on 331,000 congregations, we estimate that 53.6 million Americans attend worship services during an average week. We note that religious groups have differing norms for including or excluding children during worship services. In some congregations, babies attend along with older children and adults. In other congregations, babies and young children up to the age of ve years are in the nursery. In some congregations, most children attend at least part of the worship service. And in still other congregations, younger children attend Sunday school or childrens church during the entire worship service. The most typical pattern is to exclude very young children from all of the worship service. The key, then, is to determine at what age children are excluded. Two possibilities are provided in Table 3: (1) children under ve years excluded; and (2) children under eight years excluded. When children under ve years are excluded from the population in 2000 (reducing the national population base to 262.2 million persons), the percentage of Americans attending religious services is 20.4 percent. When children under eight years are excluded from the population base in 2000 (resulting in a population base of 249.9 million), the percentage of Americans attending worship is 21.4 percent. The right side of Table 3 also includes attendance rates by religious tradition. These percentages are computed by dividing the estimated attendees by survey-based population estimates from each religious tradition.26 Not surprisingly, the lowest rates are found among non-Christians and mainline Protestants and the highest among Orthodox/other Catholics, conservative evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and other Christians.27 Table 4 introduces two added elements to the data seen in Table 3. First the low and high ranges for the church count (using the condence interval from the NCS data) are used to show how the attendance levels would change if there were 309,000 congregations or 356,000 congregations in America, rather than 331,000. The low attendance estimate is 19.1 percent of the U.S. population age 5+ among 309,000 congregations. The new high attendance estimate is 22.0 percent of the population age 5+ among 356,000 congregations. The second element included in Table 4 is on the last line. It uses the raw attendance means for each denominational family from the USCLS and, as can be seen, all of the attendance percentages are increased by around 0.3 percentage points when the USCLS means are used. If the population is restricted to persons

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TABLE 4 RELIGIOUS SERVICE ATTENDANCE WITH CONFIDENCE INTERVALS: 2000

% of Constit. % of Constit. % of Constit. Low Middle High Pop. Age 5+ Pop. Age 5+ Pop. Age 5+ Estimate Estimate Estimate Low Est. Middle Est. High Est. 82,183 161,344 19,544 2,431 32,915 10,583 309,000 309,000 82,183 178,672 19,544 2,431 36,450 11,720 331,000 331,000 82,183 198,363 19,544 2,431 40,467 13,012 356,000 356,000 19.4 22.9 25.4 35.9 22.8 16.5 19.1 19.4 19.4 25.4 25.4 35.9 25.2 18.2 20.4 20.7 19.4 28.2 25.4 35.9 28.0 20.2 22.0 22.3 Congregations

Religious Tradition Mainline Protestant Conservative/Evangelical Roman Catholic Orthodox/Other Catholic Other Christian Non-Christian Total for United States (Adjusted attendance) Total for United States (Raw means from USCLS)

eight years old and older, the respective low, middle, and high percentage estimates are 20.0, 21.4, and 23.1.28 When we average the new low (19.1 percent) and the new high (23.1 percent) attendance gures, the middle value is 21.1 percent. This gure is quite consistent with those suggested by Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves (1993, 1998) and, indeed, the entire range of possible attendance percentages shown here indicate that the new conventional wisdom of 30 percent average weekly attendance is still much too high. And it should be added that the gures in all of our tables are based on attendance reports from local congregations, which in some cases are estimates rather than true weekly head-counts. So they also may be inated. Unlike membership totals, which are sometimes used for developing congregational dues or assessments, there are no nancial disincentives for inating attendanceand congregations have been known to inate attendance for a variety of reasons.29 Assuming that our average per-congregation attendance gures are correct for each denominational family, the only way that the total U.S. attendance estimate could approach 30 percent would be if the number of U.S. congregations was grossly underestimated. Thus, hypothetically, the percentage of persons aged eight years and over attending worship would rise to 30 percent if the number of churches in America were 504,000 rather than 331,000. This would suppose, however, that evangelical congregations would increase from 178,672 to 313,868 (rising to 62.3% of all congregations in America). Such a large increase in this set of churches would be necessary because the number of mainline, Catholic, and Orthodox churches is a known quantity. The increase in congregations from 331,000 to 504,000 would add solely to the evangelical, other Christian, and non-Christian totals. This change would also mean that the mainline hypersample estimate of 25 percent mainline congregations in America should be reduced to only 16 percent, and the percentage of Catholic and Orthodox congregations should be reduced from 7 percent to only 4 percent of all congregations in America. Based on the consistency between our ndings and other count-based studies of attendance, we can only conclude that the actual level of participation in religious services in America is much lower than 30 percent. In fact, most likely only around 21 percent of the American population attend religious services during a typical weeka gure that is exactly half of the most often reported Gallup poll total of 42 percent.

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CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Previous research suggested that U.S. church attendance was considerably lower than the polls showed. An initial study (Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves 1993) led to additional research focusing on survey methodology as well as actual attendance counts (Chaves and Cavendish 1994; Hadaway and Marler 1998; Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves 1998; Presser and Stinson 1998; Smith 1998; Marler and Hadaway 1999; Marcum 1994, 1999). Experimentation with survey-wording and follow-up questions reduced poll-based attendance estimates to about 30 percent. More recent attendance counts tended to support the original ndingalthough available data and resources limited the scope of those investigations. Congregation-based studies, including Chaves National Congregations Study, the USCLS, and FACT, along with the ARIS and Religious Congregations in the United States, 2000, made a national test using survey and denominational count-based data possible. How many Americans, then, attend worship each week? We conclude that: (1) the best estimate for the total number of American congregations is 331,000, 25 percent of which are mainline Protestants, 54 percent conservative/evangelical Protestants, 7 percent Catholic/Orthodox, 11 percent other Christian, and 3 percent non-Christian; (2) average worship attendance varies among denominational groups, ranging from 125 or less for mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and other Christian groups to over 850 participants for Roman Catholics; and (3) therefore, 21 percent of Americans attend worship during an average week. Although these data remain estimates, we are satised that not only do they represent the best data of their kind to date but also they are, in every case, generous estimates. Even though a higher, 30 percent attendance gure may seem more reasonable to some religious observers, it is based on the same type of research methods that resulted in the original 42 percent attendance level. Better questions and survey methods do produce a lowered attendance gure, but social surveys cannot validate themselves. Data sources are needed that measure behavioral frequency more directly, through observation and counting. The procedures employed in this article are an effort to validate and correct survey-based estimates. Although these data do not show trends, such a large reduction in the previously accepted rate of worship attendance among Americans is consistent with a general deinstitutionalizing trend in the West (Hervieu-Leger 2000). According to Glenn, close examination of U.S. survey data on religious beliefs and practices from the 1950s to the 1980s reveals that all of the data on traditional Christian beliefs. . . show a statistically signicant decline. Moreover, increases in the percentage of persons who said they had no religion (from 2 percent in the late 1950s to 8 percent by the mid-1980s) suggested a distinct decline in commitment to religion of any kind (Glenn 1987:S115). More recent examination of poll-based data among Americans from the mid1960s to the mid-1990s by Kohut et al. (2000) shows that: (1) belonging to traditional religious groups declined, whereas identication with non-Christian bodies increased and the number of seculars nearly doubled;30 (2) traditional religious practices, including regular (weekly) worship attendance, daily prayer, and the importance of religion, all declined; and (3) measures of belief about God, the Bible, and conversion suggest that Americans are less traditional in their views. Indeed, Gallups Index of Leading Religious Indicators shows the overall rating for organized religion in 2002 plunging to its lowest level in more than six decades (Gallup 2003). Given a steady erosion of traditional religious belonging, behaving, and believing as measured by national surveys over the past half-century, the stability and signicance (as an indicator) of worship attendance in the past week among Americans beg explanation. The possibilities, discussed here and elsewhere, are two-fold: (1) that question wording, in combination with survey methodology (phone versus interview, for example), tend to inate responses to this item; and (2) that responses to worship attendance in the past week measure something other than behavior. Self-reports about churchgoingmuch as assertions about voting and convictions about the

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familyreveal that what Americans say is increasingly at odds with what they actually do (Glenn 1992; Kanazawa 2000; Brooks 2002). NOTES
1. Based on a total U.S. population of 281,421,906 in 2000. Although more recent data are available from Gallup and for some other data items, for consistency across all measures, we use 2000 as our target year. 2. The standard Gallup question refers to attending church or synagogue in the last seven days, essentially forcing regular churchgoers who happened to miss services one Sunday to either misreport their attendance or be counted as nonchurchgoers. This problem was addressed by asking specic follow-up questions about the nature of ones attendance (a worship service or some other meeting) and by employing time-use questions (a listing of weekend activities) that shift the focus off whether one did or did not attend worship services. 3. Newspaper reports still typically reference the 40 percent Gallup poll gures. However, sociologists and religious commentators who are aware of the overreporting problem tend to use the 30 percent gure as an acceptable compromise between the Gallup and count-based gures. 4. The issue is not simply one of social desirability. It is more an issue of behavior-identity congruence, whereby respondents try to accurately report what they usually do or would like to think they usually do in terms of religious service attendance. 5. This is not to imply that all social survey data are so awed as to be useless. To the contrary, social survey questions about attitudes, beliefs, values, preferences, etc. are quite valuable. These questions ask the respondent to interpret where he or she stands on a variety of issues, to give objective answers to subjective questions. The problem arises when we also ask objective, factual questions to respondents and expect them to report as impartial observers of their own behavior and characteristicsin other words, refrain from injecting meaning into the questions and their answers. Humans have a hard time refraining from injecting meaning and thus objective questions are answered with something less than objectivity. Some questions, like age, are less prone to reinterpretation by the respondent. But others, like questions about weight, income, and particularly behavioral frequency, are quite prone to reinterpretation and thus to inaccurate reporting. 6. Another issue is the fact that some denominations (particularly Jehovahs Witnesses and Mormons (LDS)) house multiple congregations in most of their church locations. Unlike Catholics, Episcopalians, and most conservative Protestant churches that hold multiple worship services on Sunday for a single congregation, Jehovahs Witnesses Kingdom Halls and LDS meeting houses organize the members who attend separate services into separate congregations. 7. For instance, in Alabama, The Alabama Baptist was listed as a church, when it is in fact a Southern Baptist newspaper. The Chilton Baptist Association also is listed as a churchit is a judicatory. Multiple listings were a more serious problem, and most were due to multiple addresses for a single church. A few examples: the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham was listed once under Episcopalian churches and also under Adventist churches; Irondale United Methodist Church was listed twice, as was Vestavia Hills Lutheran Church, because both churches are on street corners and list addresses on two different streets; Center Point Church of Christ is listed twice, once under Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and also under Congregational Churches; Damascus Assembly of God and Rock Hill Assembly of God, both in Brewton, Alabama, are listed twice, in each case with a street name in one listing and a P.O. box in the other. 8. A gure of 386,000 total congregations is still touted by American Church Lists (which is maintained by InfoUSA), however, the total number of congregations that were available in their database in late 2004 was much lower 348,000, of which 40,000 were not classied by denomination or faith tradition. Many noncongregations are also included. 9. This number includes some minor multiple counting of the same congregations due to federated and dually aligned congregations. 10. Only one congregation was nominated per respondent based on where he or she attended most regularly. A few people indicated regular attendance in more than one congregation, but the study did not indicate how the nominated congregation was selected for these cases. 11. Congregations vary in terms of their standards for regular participation. Some congregations might count only those who attend weekly or nearly weekly. Many other congregations would use a much less restrictive denition for considering who might be a regular participant. Based on the presumption that mainline churches have laxer membership requirements and lower attendance norms, is it possible that the selection and weighting procedure used by Chaves et al. (1999) was biased toward mainline churches? This does not seem to be the case. First, changing the weighting variable to the total number of persons who are associated in any way with the religious life of the congregation (so as to increase the number of free-riders and thus weight in favor of congregations with more of them) makes no difference in the proportion of mainline versus conservative congregations. Second, the fact that mainline Christians are more likely to report lower rates of church attendance (disproportionately represented in the lower attendance categories in the NORC General Social Survey) does not mean that the churches that these

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12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

persons attend should be excluded or receive lower weights in a national random sample of congregations. Churches with larger numbers of persons afliated with them, regardless of their norms for attendance, should be more likely to appear in the sample than smaller churches. According to Chaves (personal communication 2004), the NCS is a sample of the population of religious congregations, and all that matters for the samples representativeness of that population is that the likelihood of inclusion in the sample is proportional to size. Smaller churches, whether mainline or conservative, should be less likely to appear in the sample than larger congregationswhether the people associated with these congregations are regular or irregular participants is irrelevant with respect to how validly the sample represents the population of congregations. Mainline Protestants included only churches afliated with the nine mainline denominations listed earlier. For 126 cases the denominational afliation of the religious group the respondent attended was imputed from the respondents self-identied religious afliation and region. There were 280 duplicates, due to cluster sampling. Data for one relevant respondent was lost in the mail. This bias adjustment was based on religious tradition data from nonresponding congregations in the NCS sample from Chaves et al. (1999). The known values of mainline Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox churches were subtracted from 331,000 and the balance distributed to the remaining three categories, maintaining the proportion of one to the other from the NCS percentages. The two proportions (mainline Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox) are independent and variation among them results in quite different total estimates of congregations. This is particularly true for the Catholic estimate, where small percentage point differences in the proportion result in large changes in the total number of congregations. These pages contained roughly twice the number of church listings as nonmetropolitan pages. Assuming that multiple entries were random across denominational families this procedure would maintain the relative proportion of denominational groupings, even if the total N of congregations in the overall list was high (or low). The USCLS data were not used to estimate the total number of congregations because proportionately fewer congregations agreed to participate in the study. This resulted in a disproportionate number of mainline Protestant congregations. An alternative explanation suggested by one anonymous reviewer was that the 2001 attendance was inated because it included Easter and Lent (higher attendance Sundays) and excluded the summer months when attendance tends to be low. Although plausible, this explanation does not explain the underreporting of attendance during the prior year (2000). Whatever the explanation for the discrepancies, an average of 2000 and 2001 attendance yields a total that is more consistent with denominational yearbook reports. This gure rises to 23.8 percent if children under the age of ve years are deleted from the 2000 population base. The gure is 20.7 percent if children under the age of ve are removed. These denominations include: Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Connection, Apostolic Christian Churches, Assemblies of God, Association of Free Lutheran Churches, Baptist General Conference, Baptist Missionary Association of America, Christian Reformed Church in North America, Church of God (Cleveland, TN), Church of God General Conference, Church of the Nazarene, Churches of Christ, Churches of God General Conference, Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches, Free Methodist Church of North America, General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, International Pentecostal Church of Christ, International Pentecostal Holiness Church, Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Church in America, the Salvation Army, the Southern Baptist Convention, Vineyard, USA, Wesleyan Church, and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The churches from these denominations represent over half (56 percent) of the estimated total number of conservative/evangelical churches in America. These gures refer to active participants, not to average attendance. A directory of Wiccan, pagan, druid, and vampiric groups and covens is provided by the Witches Voice website (www.witchvox.com/xwotw.html). The proportions of Americans who identify with religious groups included in the general religious tradition category were obtained by averaging results from the American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) and the NORC General Social Survey (1998 and 2000 editions of the GSS; Davis, Smith, and Marsden 2003). The non-Christian attendance level would have been reduced if other available estimates of the non-Christian population were used. As Smith (2002) reports, nonscientic estimates of the Muslim population often exceed survey-based and immigration statistics-based data by a factor of three or more. These totals increase by 0.3 percent each using the biased raw means from the USCLS. Ination of attendance gures by congregational leaders was found by Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves (1993) for some Catholic parishes in Omaha, Nebraska, and a Times (London) report on Anglican churches indicated widespread massaging of attendance gures by priests, inating them by at least 25 percent (Morgan 1997). In Kohut et al.s (2000) analysis, seculars refer to respondents who claimed to be atheists or agnostic and who claimed no [religious] preference. In 1965, the proportion was 9.7 percent, and in 1996, it was 16.3 percent.

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Similarly, Hout and Fischer (2002) nd that the percent of American adults claiming no religious preference has doubled in the last decade from 7 percent to 14 percent.

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