It's no secret that personal difficulties which might reduce church attendance might also reflect economic prospects and standing. Health, transportation, or household organization problems that reduce church attendance don't seem great for employability, either. And people whose work hours interfere with church attendance seem less likely to have "made it" economically. (Even in demanding careers, seniority matters for scheduling. Eg, healthcare workers with more seniority can expect to make church more often, if they choose.)
My church attendance has just been affected by an accident, reducing attendance from > 1x/week most weeks to 0x/week for about a month. My health was poor before the accident, already reducing my employment prospects and leaving me less optimistic about material success. Bad health news since the accident has further reduced the optimism.
During another spell when the demands of new motherhood in poor health kept me away from church, I began writing an oratorio: in orthodoxy of belief and personal fervency, my faith isn't less than more-regular attenders I share church with. What is less is my success at organizing my life to show up in a body that's ready to work (breathe, move, etc) at scheduled times. That quite rationally affects my optimism about my material future, even if "My hope is built on nothing less / than Jesus' blood and righteousness"!
As DB Hart says, "Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces — whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance — that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred … It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead." (The Doors of the Sea)
I regard hope reduced to optimism as weak and false. True hope is liberated from optimism.
Ryan, almost every time you post about the correlation between religious attendance and quality of life, someone points out that the causation could work in the opposite direction of what people often assume: it's not so much that people who go to church fare better, but that people who fare better are more likely to go to church. I realize that causation is always difficult to prove, but I was wondering if you see anything in the data to support this. Maybe a response like "I would like to go to church more often but can't." Do any of the surveys include a question like that?
And I would expect causation to go both ways here. Bourgeois virtues like steadiness and reliability are, well, virtues, and among the virtues that church attendance cultivates! *If* people can commit to a house of worship *without* blowing their available job prospects, that commitment *should* help form habits and connections that brighten their honest economic opportunities (hopefully while also steering them away from the dishonest ones). That's good!
Thanks - I had forgotten about that one! I'll have to revisit it!
And yes, I agree that there should be benefits to being actively involved in a church, and there's likely a positive feedback loop going on here. Still, I wonder how one might gauge the degree to which these things influence one another!
Ex: The piece indicates that an individual who is affiliated with the evangelical tradition is no more/less optimistic than someone with no religious affiliation.
I'm not sure what "faith" means because that's not really the way that social science measures the concept of religion. Instead we use three metrics: behavior, belief, and belonging.
I wondered the same thing. After reading the follow up comments I meant not tangible faith, but an individuals belief that there life was or would be better.
I think that a massively important variable that appears to be being ignored (I may have missed it) is "how are you doing now", or simply income. For instance, you see in your data that Black Protestants have a decently high rate of believing that they will do better in the future. The incomes of black protestants are well below the mean. So if everyone simply thought that they would do "average" in the future, then that would mean that black protestants would expect to do better than now, and Jewish people would expect to do worse than now.
Similarly, churches often prey on the most exploitable, and convince them that if they simply give their money to the pastor, their "seed money" will be multiplied by god. That is a large chunk of the population, and for them, they will score high on both the church attendance and the optimism scores, so of course we can expect to see that those who attend church more will expect more money in the future. How could anyone be surprised by that finding?
Sure, plenty of churches don't use the explicit "seed money" language, but many, probably most, churches give and upbeat message where "god has great plans for you". Is anyone really wondering why those who hear an upbeat message more often think that things will get better for them?
Thanks for giving Praveen the credit he has earned.
There are a number of key studies on social connection and optimism. Also longevity. Perhaps the two best known both come from Harvard, Bowling Alone and the longitudinal survey of the Harvard Class of '38 from graduation to death and now extended to the descendants.
What the current GSS data seems to show are composites taken at different times. While this only goes back 30 years, American history records the shift in different ways, giving some of them names. We have an Era of Good Feeling along with a variety of panics. Historically we have immigration, where people arrive in America feeling they have emerged from rock bottom, cycle downward in tenements, then back up with union jobs, then back down with stagflation. These cycles, economic and personal optimism, have been polled many times, with pundits doing their best to correlate not with religion but how people will vote. While religious adherence is not included, there are parallel surveys done at the same time documenting religious cycles. Attendance can be deceptive, though, as people once attended to avoid adverse social consequences rather than as an expression of devotion.
Every data collection has stuff that is shows and stuff that you might like to know that it doesn't show. Here, we get composites of groups but not shifts of people within those groups. Since the GSS question began in 1994, this was also roughly the inflection point when people started disaffiliating from their banner religion in favor of No Religion on surveys.
The educational data does not surprise me. An acceptance letter to a medical, dental, law or MBA class elevates expectations of finding a niche in American prosperity.
How common is church attendance associated in a very simple way with the power through occupation or economic security to consistently take Sunday mornings off?
> Again, I controlled for a whole bunch of factors that could matter here like age and education, but what I found was unmistakable — people who go to church more often are much more likely to believe that they will have a positive economic future. Among never attenders, just 44% agreed that they could raise their standard of living. Among those who attended church once a week, it was 58%. That difference is both statistically significant and substantively meaningful. A fourteen point increase on this question is the largest we’ve seen across any variable.
A great follow up question to those surveyed and who answered optimistically about their financial future: "What data and evidence are you using to justify your improved odds of a potential positive economic future?" I am not surprised by these results, but am very curious how the decision is made for the answer provided.
Thanks; your suggested mechanisms (reliance on social (ecclesial) networks, optimism, and frequency of attendance) all read as very plausible. I wonder what other tendencies are at work here, e.g., people for whom "improvement" may have less to do with financial substance and more with contentment, or more to do with neighbor/civic relationships that are free of conflict. Those religious persons might be rare, I know, and, of course, the tendency in North America is to think about economic gain when responding to a question like the one from GSS.
A reflection of the axiom that good research leads to better questions...
Due to an unusual (and very enjoyable) trajectory that began when I entered the mission field after undergad, I've had a foot in declining communities, professionals with Master's degrees, and PhDs within the academy for decades.
My observation looking at this data is that a lot of optimism & despair seems based on context. TBH, Master's degrees cost a lot and often mean relatively little change in annual income (some preferred fields even mean income decline). Yet people also invest in peer networks - they see that choosing preferred vocation can be more about life satisfaction than about income (don't mean to blow the minds of economists out there). Those with associate's degrees mix with those getting bachelor's and might feel their options are more limited. Those with high school degrees only see friends who moved away living better on social media. In every case, expectations based on social perceptions might explain optimism/pessimism better than actual income and/or chance for economic improvement. This could warrant further exploration.
Two other observations: 1) the big impact of higher education is on long-term planning, especially for those who gain a Master's degree. People who learn that tend to prosper despite all other circumstances (after 4 years accumulating nothing as a missionary, then working in low-pay NGOs and churches, I plan to retire next year at 60). The ability to see potential progress due to long-term planning might have a huge impact on outlook.
2) In addition to the close and supportive networks churches provide - especially those with over 80 yet fewer than 200 in attendance - there's the impact of messaging. Church is the one place where money isn't supposed to be the biggest consideration and where hope is a stated (though not always lived) value. Frequent attendance might impact how people respond to surveys, especially since this is the very group who might reflect on the teachings of their faith when answering survey questions.
As a Christian who has deep relationships with atheists, I find that atheists are more in tune with social justice issues than the average "church" person (I know, no stats to back it up). Since they aren't looking to escape to heaven, they worry more about their neighbors, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. That could impact their "happy" or optimism showings.
Thank you, very good article(once I remembered reading it). As a discussion that tends to be with more "religious" people, I just wanted to address some of the bias against those that are not.
Thank you Ryan and Praveen for this one. I thought the comments were just as interesting as your material you presented.
It's no secret that personal difficulties which might reduce church attendance might also reflect economic prospects and standing. Health, transportation, or household organization problems that reduce church attendance don't seem great for employability, either. And people whose work hours interfere with church attendance seem less likely to have "made it" economically. (Even in demanding careers, seniority matters for scheduling. Eg, healthcare workers with more seniority can expect to make church more often, if they choose.)
My church attendance has just been affected by an accident, reducing attendance from > 1x/week most weeks to 0x/week for about a month. My health was poor before the accident, already reducing my employment prospects and leaving me less optimistic about material success. Bad health news since the accident has further reduced the optimism.
During another spell when the demands of new motherhood in poor health kept me away from church, I began writing an oratorio: in orthodoxy of belief and personal fervency, my faith isn't less than more-regular attenders I share church with. What is less is my success at organizing my life to show up in a body that's ready to work (breathe, move, etc) at scheduled times. That quite rationally affects my optimism about my material future, even if "My hope is built on nothing less / than Jesus' blood and righteousness"!
As DB Hart says, "Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces — whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance — that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred … It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead." (The Doors of the Sea)
I regard hope reduced to optimism as weak and false. True hope is liberated from optimism.
Ryan, almost every time you post about the correlation between religious attendance and quality of life, someone points out that the causation could work in the opposite direction of what people often assume: it's not so much that people who go to church fare better, but that people who fare better are more likely to go to church. I realize that causation is always difficult to prove, but I was wondering if you see anything in the data to support this. Maybe a response like "I would like to go to church more often but can't." Do any of the surveys include a question like that?
To be far to Ryan, he's written about "church as a hospital for the already-healthy" here before:
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/religion-has-become-a-luxury-good
And I would expect causation to go both ways here. Bourgeois virtues like steadiness and reliability are, well, virtues, and among the virtues that church attendance cultivates! *If* people can commit to a house of worship *without* blowing their available job prospects, that commitment *should* help form habits and connections that brighten their honest economic opportunities (hopefully while also steering them away from the dishonest ones). That's good!
Thanks - I had forgotten about that one! I'll have to revisit it!
And yes, I agree that there should be benefits to being actively involved in a church, and there's likely a positive feedback loop going on here. Still, I wonder how one might gauge the degree to which these things influence one another!
“Why does attendance have such a clear impact?”
Maybe there’s a correlation between attendance and…faith?
Going out on a limb here….
But it's not faith measured in every single way.
Ex: The piece indicates that an individual who is affiliated with the evangelical tradition is no more/less optimistic than someone with no religious affiliation.
“Faith” without concrete expression—mere “affiliation”—is… “dead”?
I'm not sure what "faith" means because that's not really the way that social science measures the concept of religion. Instead we use three metrics: behavior, belief, and belonging.
I've written about this before: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/what-does-it-mean-to-be-religious
I wondered the same thing. After reading the follow up comments I meant not tangible faith, but an individuals belief that there life was or would be better.
I think that a massively important variable that appears to be being ignored (I may have missed it) is "how are you doing now", or simply income. For instance, you see in your data that Black Protestants have a decently high rate of believing that they will do better in the future. The incomes of black protestants are well below the mean. So if everyone simply thought that they would do "average" in the future, then that would mean that black protestants would expect to do better than now, and Jewish people would expect to do worse than now.
Similarly, churches often prey on the most exploitable, and convince them that if they simply give their money to the pastor, their "seed money" will be multiplied by god. That is a large chunk of the population, and for them, they will score high on both the church attendance and the optimism scores, so of course we can expect to see that those who attend church more will expect more money in the future. How could anyone be surprised by that finding?
Sure, plenty of churches don't use the explicit "seed money" language, but many, probably most, churches give and upbeat message where "god has great plans for you". Is anyone really wondering why those who hear an upbeat message more often think that things will get better for them?
Thanks for giving Praveen the credit he has earned.
There are a number of key studies on social connection and optimism. Also longevity. Perhaps the two best known both come from Harvard, Bowling Alone and the longitudinal survey of the Harvard Class of '38 from graduation to death and now extended to the descendants.
What the current GSS data seems to show are composites taken at different times. While this only goes back 30 years, American history records the shift in different ways, giving some of them names. We have an Era of Good Feeling along with a variety of panics. Historically we have immigration, where people arrive in America feeling they have emerged from rock bottom, cycle downward in tenements, then back up with union jobs, then back down with stagflation. These cycles, economic and personal optimism, have been polled many times, with pundits doing their best to correlate not with religion but how people will vote. While religious adherence is not included, there are parallel surveys done at the same time documenting religious cycles. Attendance can be deceptive, though, as people once attended to avoid adverse social consequences rather than as an expression of devotion.
Every data collection has stuff that is shows and stuff that you might like to know that it doesn't show. Here, we get composites of groups but not shifts of people within those groups. Since the GSS question began in 1994, this was also roughly the inflection point when people started disaffiliating from their banner religion in favor of No Religion on surveys.
The educational data does not surprise me. An acceptance letter to a medical, dental, law or MBA class elevates expectations of finding a niche in American prosperity.
How common is church attendance associated in a very simple way with the power through occupation or economic security to consistently take Sunday mornings off?
> Again, I controlled for a whole bunch of factors that could matter here like age and education, but what I found was unmistakable — people who go to church more often are much more likely to believe that they will have a positive economic future. Among never attenders, just 44% agreed that they could raise their standard of living. Among those who attended church once a week, it was 58%. That difference is both statistically significant and substantively meaningful. A fourteen point increase on this question is the largest we’ve seen across any variable.
A great follow up question to those surveyed and who answered optimistically about their financial future: "What data and evidence are you using to justify your improved odds of a potential positive economic future?" I am not surprised by these results, but am very curious how the decision is made for the answer provided.
I'm not sure that we would be able to parse anything meaningful out of their answers.
A common refrain I use is, "putting smoke in a box."
I wonder: What does "standard of living" mean in the GSS?
It means whatever the respondent believes to mean.
Thanks; your suggested mechanisms (reliance on social (ecclesial) networks, optimism, and frequency of attendance) all read as very plausible. I wonder what other tendencies are at work here, e.g., people for whom "improvement" may have less to do with financial substance and more with contentment, or more to do with neighbor/civic relationships that are free of conflict. Those religious persons might be rare, I know, and, of course, the tendency in North America is to think about economic gain when responding to a question like the one from GSS.
A reflection of the axiom that good research leads to better questions...
Due to an unusual (and very enjoyable) trajectory that began when I entered the mission field after undergad, I've had a foot in declining communities, professionals with Master's degrees, and PhDs within the academy for decades.
My observation looking at this data is that a lot of optimism & despair seems based on context. TBH, Master's degrees cost a lot and often mean relatively little change in annual income (some preferred fields even mean income decline). Yet people also invest in peer networks - they see that choosing preferred vocation can be more about life satisfaction than about income (don't mean to blow the minds of economists out there). Those with associate's degrees mix with those getting bachelor's and might feel their options are more limited. Those with high school degrees only see friends who moved away living better on social media. In every case, expectations based on social perceptions might explain optimism/pessimism better than actual income and/or chance for economic improvement. This could warrant further exploration.
Two other observations: 1) the big impact of higher education is on long-term planning, especially for those who gain a Master's degree. People who learn that tend to prosper despite all other circumstances (after 4 years accumulating nothing as a missionary, then working in low-pay NGOs and churches, I plan to retire next year at 60). The ability to see potential progress due to long-term planning might have a huge impact on outlook.
2) In addition to the close and supportive networks churches provide - especially those with over 80 yet fewer than 200 in attendance - there's the impact of messaging. Church is the one place where money isn't supposed to be the biggest consideration and where hope is a stated (though not always lived) value. Frequent attendance might impact how people respond to surveys, especially since this is the very group who might reflect on the teachings of their faith when answering survey questions.
"Those with high school degrees only see friends who moved away living better on social media."
I had this distinct thought the other day -- social media has been an absolute windfall for the travel industry.
When I was a kid I had no idea where or if my classmates took vacations. Now, it seems like half the people I know are in Europe at any given time.
As a Christian who has deep relationships with atheists, I find that atheists are more in tune with social justice issues than the average "church" person (I know, no stats to back it up). Since they aren't looking to escape to heaven, they worry more about their neighbors, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. That could impact their "happy" or optimism showings.
That reminds me of this post: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/do-americans-care-who-their-boss
Thank you, very good article(once I remembered reading it). As a discussion that tends to be with more "religious" people, I just wanted to address some of the bias against those that are not.