"I Go to Church a Little Bit"

Why “seldom” attenders aren’t the same as never attenders

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about folks who report that they attend religious services multiple times a week. They make up about 6–8% of the country, and they are a qualitatively different group than people who report attending weekly. They have much higher levels of religious importance and prayer frequency. In other words, they’re super religious.

In the midst of that post, I also opined a bit about a question regarding religious attendance and what it’s actually measuring. Here’s my bloviating:

But that’s not how this question works. Instead, people read it and ask themselves, “How do I see myself in relation to this?” Choosing something like “seldom” doesn’t mean the person attends once every three years. What it actually signals is this: I do go to a worship service sometimes—more than “never.” “Never” is the clear line in the sand: I despise religion, and I never take part in it. “Seldom,” on the other hand, means, “I really don’t go much, but I might under the right circumstances.” That’s a subtle but important difference.

In the comments, David Durant took exception to my characterization of never attenders as being much more anti-religion than those who report seldom attending. And that’s worth exploring, right? Do seldom attenders have a different posture toward organized religion than those who choose “never”?

Before I get to that question, though, I need to start with a much more basic one: what share of Americans report that they seldom attend religious services?

According to the Cooperative Election Study, this group made up about a quarter of the population back when Barack Obama took up residence in the Oval Office. In fact, it stayed at 24% or higher through 2012. After that, the figure began to slowly decline over time. And by slowly, I mean slowly. It was 23% through 2016, and then it dipped to 22% all the way through 2023.

In the 2024 results, 21% of respondents answered the religious attendance question by saying “seldom.” Functionally, that means they go often enough to not be never attenders, but they also aren’t attending on a yearly basis. These aren’t Easter-and-Christmas folks—this is one click below that. They might go to a Christmas Eve service once every two or three years.

What about the General Social Survey? One complication is that it offers eight response options, while the CES only provides six. That means I had to fiddle with the categories a bit. Still, I think I found a pretty direct corollary in the GSS data: people who attend “less than once a year” or “about once or twice a year.” I know the wording doesn’t line up perfectly (this is a huge problem when comparing different survey instruments), but the percentages are in the same ballpark.

You can see that just over 20% of the sample falls into this “more than never but less than three times a year” crowd. And that figure stayed unbelievably stable for a very long period of time. It hovered around the 21–22% range from the mid-1970s all the way through the early 2010s. It’s remarkable to me that this number barely budged over a four-decade window, even as the overall religious composition of the United States shifted so dramatically.

Now, there is a bit of a wiggle in the 2021, 2022, and 2024 results. The “seldom” category jumped to an all-time high of 26% in 2021, but that’s almost certainly about the weirdness of COVID and the fact that the GSS had to change its methodology. You can see that in the last two surveys, the ‘seldom’ share has started to drift back toward its historic baseline. Still, both the CES and the GSS are in the same general vicinity here: a bit more than 20% of Americans land in this ‘seldom’ category of attendance.

But I had to check one more thing: how never attenders compare to seldom attenders in both surveys. If the ‘seldom’ share has been this stable for so long, then what’s going on with the percentage of people who report never attending religious services?

Here’s the big upshot for me: the “never” attenders have not been stable over time. They’ve risen dramatically in both surveys. In 1972, just 12% of the sample said they never attended religious services. That was about ten points lower than the share of seldom attenders. By 2004, though, those percentages were exactly the same—20%. Over the last 20 years, the never-attending share has continued to climb, and now it exceeds the seldom attenders by about ten points.

You see this same basic pattern in the Cooperative Election Study. The lines cross a bit later—around 2012—but the trajectory is clear: the ‘never’ line moves steadily up and to the right, while the ‘seldom’ line declines just slightly. In the CES, the never-attending share now sits at 34%, about two points lower than what the General Social Survey reports.

Just sit with that result for a second. Never attenders have exploded in size, while seldom attenders have basically held steady. Why would that be? One possible explanation is that Americans are simply sliding down the attendance scale. Weekly becomes monthly, monthly becomes yearly, yearly becomes seldom, and seldom becomes never.

But you can’t go lower than ‘never.’ So that bucket just keeps filling up, while the ‘seldom’ bucket is continually replenished by people moving down from higher attendance levels. Or it could be that a lot of Gen Z is skipping the whole downward slide altogether and speed-running straight to the bottom. That would be the case if weekly-attending Boomers are dying off and being replaced by never-attending Gen Z.

I’m going to explore that question another time.

So, who is most likely to be a seldom attender? You might reasonably guess that it’s mostly non-religious people. But that answer isn’t quite right.

For instance, the group most likely to report that they ‘seldom’ attend religious services isn’t any type of none. Instead, it’s groups like Buddhists, the unclassified, Jews, and mainline Protestants. Among the most devout groups—Latter-day Saints and Muslims—the share who say they seldom attend is pretty marginal, usually under 10%.

For the nones, the reality is that “I never attend religious services” is by far the most popular response. Among atheists, 90% choose this option, and 73% of agnostics fall into the same category. There just aren’t many respondents in these groups who have a spouse they go to church with once a year.

For those who say they are “nothing in particular,” the share of never attenders is 60%. That’s 13 points lower than agnostics and 30 points lower than atheists. Still, in total, about 84% of nothing-in-particulars are attending less than once a year, compared to 97% of atheists and 93% of agnostics.

Now we can circle back to the core question. Are seldom attenders a different group than atheists? More specifically, does attending just a little bit make a non-religious person more religiously engaged—or at least more open to religion—compared to nones who never attend?

Let me start by showing you a question about prayer frequency among the non-religious. In the next couple of questions, I’m just comparing never attenders to seldom attenders.

On the question of prayer frequency, I think it’s pretty clear that seldom attenders are significantly more religious than never attenders. Among atheists, agnostics, and nothing-in-particulars who report that they never attend religious services, 68% also say that they never pray. Among those who seldom attend, the share who never pray drops to just 21%. Put differently, 85% of never-attending nones pray less than once a month, compared to only 59% of those in the ‘seldom’ category.

You can also see a big gap at the top end of the scale. Among non-religious people who never attend a house of worship, just 7% say they pray daily. Among seldom attenders, that figure is nearly three times as high—20%. The evidence here is pretty clear: when a non-religious person goes to church even a little bit, they are much more likely to pray.

What about religious importance? I used the same setup here as well—restricting the sample to non-religious respondents who report their attendance as either seldom or never.

Among never attenders, nearly three-quarters say that religion is not at all important in their lives. For seldom attenders, only 29% choose that same option. In contrast, 36% of seldom attenders say that religion is somewhat or very important to them. Among the never-attending subgroup, just 9% fall into those top two categories.

Put simply, seldom attenders aren’t just slightly more religious than never attenders—the gap is substantial on both prayer frequency and religious importance. It would be hyperbolic to say that seldom-attending nones are warm to religion, but they certainly aren’t ice-cold toward religious practices or the idea that religion plays a meaningful role in their lives.

I can test this further using another set of questions from our Making Meaning survey. We asked a battery of statements designed to capture how non-religious Americans think about religion in public life. As before, I split the sample into seldom attenders and never attenders.

You can see across all three statements that seldom attenders are much less hostile toward religion than non-religious people who never attend religious services. Among seldom attenders, only 16% agreed that “religion has no place in the modern world,” compared to 30% of never attenders. The gap on the statement “religion is a form of child abuse” was 11 percentage points, and it was also 11 points on “religion needs to be eradicated.”

In each case, a majority of seldom-attending nones disagreed with the statement. The share who disagreed ranged from 51% to 54%. Among never attenders, disagreement was 12–14 points lower. The conclusion is pretty straightforward: seldom attenders express noticeably less opposition to religion than never attenders.

Now, I should say that I don’t actually think a huge swath of never attenders “hate religion,” as I wrote earlier. I got out over my skis a bit on that one. That’s the Baptist pastor in me—hyperbole is apparently baked into my DNA. I’m working on it.

Still, I think I’ve made a strong case that among non-religious Americans, going to a house of worship even occasionally signals something more. There’s clearly greater openness to religion, along with more hesitation to dismiss its value in American life altogether, compared to never attenders.

So even that atheist who goes to Easter Mass with their spouse is a categorically different person than one who never sets foot in a house of worship for any reason.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.