Sometimes I write a piece and a few weeks later I completely forget that I published it. I am not going to point out any specific examples on this Substack, but rest assured there are numerous occurrences where I've Googled an answer to a question and stumbled upon an article that I wrote at some point in my career, only to have forgotten about it entirely. As one of my homiletics professors said during my undergraduate studies, "not all sermons can be home runs." The same goes for public writing, I suppose.
But there are some little threads that I have exposed in earlier work that I just can’t shake. Sometimes, this is a result of giving a talk that goes really well and drives a lively Q&A, which then gets my mind spinning with possibilities. This was certainly the case when I was at Asbury University a few weeks ago, presenting some graphs from two posts that have run on Graphs about Religion.
They both circle around this idea that I have been exploring for a while—that religion doesn’t mean what most people think it means. Increasingly, it’s not some kind of theological ascent where people come to a clear understanding of Jesus, Mohammad, nirvana, etc. I just don’t think that’s how religion works in 21st-century American life. Instead, I believe that religion has been reduced to little more than a tribal marker, much in the same way that people say they are a fan of the Yankees, or they are Irish, or graduated from Stanford. It’s a way to create an "us vs. them" dynamic.
But there’s more evidence for this theory, too. There’s an increasing number of people who say that they are evangelical, yet they go to church less than once a year. Or, there’s a growing phenomenon of non-Christian faith groups like Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists who will tell survey administrators that they too are evangelicals. As I have shown, it’s pretty easy to predict why this is happening—it’s much more prominent among Republican non-Christians than among Democrats. Religion is not about a sense of the Divine; it’s about what tribe you associate with and what kind of cable news you consume.
So, consider this another entry into that larger discourse. This time I wanted to zero in on a small subset of people that I just can’t stop thinking about. Here’s the setup:
There are a handful of religion questions on mainstream surveys. One is, “How important is religion in your life?” Responses range from "not at all important" to "very important." They are also asked, “aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services?” with response options that go from "never" to "more than once a week." Let me just show you how the sample breaks down on these two metrics in a heatmap.
It should come as little surprise that the top left is sparse. Not a ton of people are high attenders but don’t think that religion is very important. That would be completely nonsensical. The most populated square is the bottom left—those who say that religion is not at all important and they never attend religious services—about one in five Americans fall into this box. In fact, the bottom left four boxes comprise about a third of the entire sample—that’s low attendance and low importance.
In contrast, about 7% of folks attend more than once a week and say that religion is very important. The top right four boxes equal about a quarter of the sample—those are the more religious folks.
But look at the bottom right, that’s where I wanted to focus my attention for this post. Specifically on people who meet two criteria:
They say that religion is very important.
They report their religious attendance as seldom or never.
In the sample from the last couple of years, that equals about 9% of folks. That’s not nothing. In fact, if you extrapolate that out to the adult population of the United States, that might mean 20-25 million people are high importance/low attendance.
Is there a growing trend, though? Are more and more people saying that they think religion is important, then just not showing up for a weekend service?
I’m not sure if that’s the case or not. There may be an increase in the trend line, but it’s not a huge one. Between 2008 and 2012 (let’s exclude 2009 as an outlier), I’m pretty confident in saying 7-8% met this criterion. But that figure has slowly crept up over time. Now, since 2019, the share who check both these boxes is likely in the 8-9% range. So, I think it’s fair to say that it’s a growing phenomenon, but not a rapidly growing one.
But I had to look under the hood of this one just a bit. Are there certain factors that seem to be driving this phenomenon of cultural religious people? Obviously, politics was the first thing that came to mind. So, here’s the trend line for Democrats, Independents, and Republicans between 2008 and 2022.
Okay, now I think we can see a clear shift. Among Democrats, the share who say that religion is very important but don’t go to church is stable over time. It was about 6% of them in 2008, and it’s essentially the same share today. For Independents, it’s probably a modest increase. It hovered around 7.5% for a while during Obama’s first term, then began to slowly creep up. Now, it’s probably the case that 8.5-9% fall into this camp.
But among Republicans, there’s no mistaking what is happening here. The share who are culturally religious has risen quickly. It was about 5% of all Republicans in 2008 who said that religion was very important but they attended services less than once a year. The trend line in 2022 was just about 11%. So, today, a Republican is twice as likely to be culturally religious compared to a Democrat.
I had to take a look at age, but I really had to think about how to visualize this in a way that is not deceiving. Because there’s a big problem when you combine two metrics like this: a lot more older people say that religion is very important compared to young adults. In fact, it’s 50% of those in their seventies, versus just about a quarter of college-aged young people. So, of course, more older people are going to be culturally religious, just based on that criterion.
So, I had to switch it up a little. I restricted the sample to just people who said that religion was very important, and then I calculated the share who described their religious attendance as seldom or never. This gets us closer to the actual reality.
About 15% of younger folks place a high value on religion but just don’t go to religious services, but the share begins to climb from that low point. Among 40-year-olds, it’s just slightly more than 20% who are in the seldom/never category of attendance. It really peaks among people in their fifties. Among 55-year-olds who say that religion is very important, a quarter go to church less than once a year. It does decline a bit beyond that point, but it’s still north of 20% even among folks in their seventies.
I wanted to put a little bow on this post by putting all this to a more rigorous test—a regression analysis. The dependent variable is identifying as culturally religious (religion is very important + I attend less than once a year). I threw all the basic suspects into the model—age, income, gender, race, education, and political conservatism. This model is awesome because everything is predictive in one way or another. That’s not usually the case.
There are four factors that predict a lower likelihood of being culturally religious: income, education, being white, and being male. The one with the largest coefficient is race. A white respondent is significantly less likely to be culturally religious compared to people of color. This is followed by gender and education. The least predictive is income, but it’s still statistically significant. All drive a lower likelihood of cultural Christianity.
There were two factors that make someone more likely to say that religion is very important but they don’t go to church: age and political conservatism. All things being held equal, older people are more likely to be culturally religious. The same is true for being a conservative.
I don’t why but I can’t stop conjuring an image in my mind when I was thinking through this data - this is Andy Griffith Show fans. It ran for eight seasons in the 1960s. In many ways it’s the most wholesome show you can get. No sex, no drugs, no swearing. Just good morals. Ted Koppel went to a small town in North Carolina that was Griffith’s birthplace. It’s revitalized it’s economy by becoming a haven for tourists to revisit a bygone era.
They like the clean, wholesome nature of Mayberry. They watched the show as kids. They want to go back to that earlier time. But they just can’t manage to make it to church. They want to recreate the era of Andy Griffith, but not expend the actual effort of sitting in a pew on a Sunday morning. It’s just another example of people who like the idea of religion, but not the actual religious part.
Code for this post can be found here.
Any chance growth in non-attending is due to online services (not sure if you or respondents count that as attending)? Also, might disability affecting lower attendance - it looks like age is a factor in high religiosity/low attendance.
To bring up “Hillbilly Elegy” here again, this sounds like it describes JD Vance’s grandmother exactly. She brings up her religion a lot and sees it as foundational to morality, reads her Bible some, but never goes to church. Her husband doesn’t ever seem to bring religion up, so he’d probably mark it as less important on a survey.