Who are filling up the pews? Highly educated parents.

And state level estimates of religious attendance, too!

It’s something that I’ve noted before, but let me mention this again - the United States Census Bureau has launched a new survey that is not just about counting people. It’s focused on other types of questions like religion! And that’s really great for folks like me. (I swear to you if Elon spikes this project, I am going to be very upset). It’s called the Household Pulse Survey and there’s a lot to like about. A really big sample size (over 55K) and they release the raw data in pretty short order after it’s collected. Be still my heart.

I wanted to try and do some more data work on what drives religious attendance. So, that’s the point of this post - it’s just a journey through me trying to figure out what demographic factors make someone more or less likely to show up for church this weekend. But before I get to that part, let me just show you the most religious and least religious states in the United States based on the most recent wave of the Household Pulse Survey. But I need to point out that this instrument uses a very loose measure of religious attendance - asking about it over the prior year. They have four options that range from zero times to at least once a month.

There are four states where at least 35% of the population attends at least once a month - Utah, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. But I really have to point out this huge aberration in the data among these four states. For the three Southern states, the share who never attend is about the same - just about 40%. But look at Utah! According to this data, 52% of folks in the state are never attenders. It’s like people living in Utah are either really religious or really not. Other states aren’t like that. I am making a note to myself to figure that one out.

I don’t think the states at the bottom of the graph are really going to surprise anyone. Just one in ten people living in Vermont or New Hampshire are regular church attenders, while about three quarters never darken a church’s door. Oregon is the fourth from the bottom and then it’s back to New England with only 16% of Rhode Islanders being monthly attenders. When people ask me about the least religious parts of the country, it’s clearly the top right and the top left, but there’s also Colorado and Wisconsin sprinkled in there, too.

I know you all love a map, so this is that same data visually spatially.

I love when the data confirms the prevailing notion - yes, folks, there is clearly a Bible belt in the United States. It starts in Arkansas and Louisiana and then runs through Kentucky and the Carolinas. I must point out, though, that Florida is not the South. Only 22% of Floridians are regular attenders, that’s a dozen points lower than other states in that part of the country. In fact, the religious activity of Florida fits in more with the Northeast than the South.

I was also struck by that strip of pink that runs north and south right through the middle of the country - extending from Texas all the way through the Dakotas. Those states are clearly pretty religious compared to their neighbors to the east and the west. In contrast, a large hunk of the Rust Belt is not that religious. That’s places like Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That’s also true in the southeast, too.

Let me add another variable to this state level analysis - age. I divided the sample into three age categories: 18-39, 40-64 and 65+ to see just how much religion differs across generations.

Let me just direct your attention to the top right portion of this graph. Among Vermonters who are under the age of 40, just 3% of them attend religious services a dozen times a year. That’s Denmark levels of non-religion. New Hampshire is right behind at 4%, but it’s not much better in Rhode Island, Maine, or Connecticut. It’s all single digits in those states. I think it’s fair to say that in 30 years, New England will almost be completely secular.

But it’s not like there’s some type of youth revival in other regions, though. For instance, in California, just 14% of younger adults are regular attenders. It’s the same share in Washington, but only 11% in Oregon. I will say that the Midwest and South tend to see a higher level of religiosity than the coasts, especially among the younger set. For instance, at least 20% of 18-39 year olds are attending with some consistency in places like Nebraska, Indiana, and Virginia. I was kind of surprised to see how low the figures were for states like Tennessee and Georgia, though. The strength of the Bible belt will fade if these numbers hold.

But I wanted to pivot away from state level analysis and look at some other demographics. Anyone who has read this newsletter for a while knows that the relationship between education and religion is one that I like to focus on.

The people who are the most likely to be regular church attenders? Old, educated folks. The top right of this heatmap are folks in their mid-50s and up who have college degrees. Clearly, they are much more likely to be at a house of worship this weekend than the rest of the sample. But, I think you clearly see a pretty strong age gradient when scanning from left to right, but it’s not a smooth transition. The 65+ column is much more religious than the 55-64 column, but then there’s a huge drop off. The differences in the last three age buckets just aren’t that large.

But, I do think you can clearly point to the positive relationship between education and religious attendance in this data. The least likely group to attend church are those who are younger and have a lower level of education. Someone who is between the ages of 18-35 and only finished high school is about half as likely to be a regular attender as someone who is in their late fifties with a graduate degree.

But there’s another set of questions in the data that I’ve not seen before - it’s about parenting status but it gets pretty granular. It asks respondents if they have children who are four different age ranges. So, we can see if having really young kids is more impactful than having teenagers, for instance.

I restricted my sample to those who are 18-45 years old, so that we are only considering folks who are of parenting age (excluding grandparents who are raising their grandchildren). For childless people, 70% report never attending religious services. It was 54% of people who had children of any age. A parent was about 10 points more likely to be a regular attender than a non-parent.

But what about the age of those children? Here’s what I found the most interesting in this analysis - parents of infants were significantly more likely to be at church than those who were raising older kids. For people who had children under the age of 1, 29% were attending at least once a month. That was the highest percentage in this analysis. But the other big takeaway that I have is that folks who have kids (of any age) are significantly more likely to be a regular attender than someone who doesn’t have children in that same age bracket. These gaps are large, too - averaging about ten points.

But let me try and isolate that by throwing together a regression, trying to predict what factors drive up religious attendance and which ones suppress religious activity.

There are three demographic factors that make one less likely to attend religious services at least 12 times a year. They were: being male, having a higher income, and being white. In terms of magnitude, being white was the most predictive variable in the negative direction. Said plainly: holding a bunch of other things constant, a white person is about 33% less likely to be a regular attender than a person of color.

What factors drive up attendance? Education, age, and having children. In other words, people with a college degree are more likely to attend compared to those with a high school diploma. Older people are more likely to attend than younger people and people with children attend with a higher frequency than those who don’t. But clearly parental status has the largest overall positive effect on attendance.

I wanted to make that plain by doing an interaction model with a bunch of control variables. This is when I had a “holy cow” moment.

There’s a huge parenting gap when it comes to religious attendance and it’s there at every single level of education. For instance, among folks who earned no more than a high school diploma, someone with children is more than twice as likely to attend church than someone with no children. Follow those orange bars all the way across the education spectrum and see how little attendance increases. That means that among people who aren’t parents, education has basically no impact on attendance.

That’s not at all true for people with kids. As education increases, so does attendance - and in a fairly dramatic manner. Among folks who have a bachelor's degree who are parents, about 30% of them are weekly attenders - that’s three times higher than those who do not have children. That same gap is there for people with graduate degrees, too. The magic combination here is clearly having a good education and being a parent. That’s what makes someone much more likely to be in church.

Of course, having kids is not just about choosing to procreate. It’s deeply related to a bunch of other things like marital status, where someone lives, etc. But there’s a latent variable that I can’t test because the Census Bureau doesn’t ask about it - political ideology. We know that there’s a huge parenting gap when it comes to political ideology. So, some of what we see above is certainly explained in part by - conservatives are both more likely to have kids and go to church. But I’m not convinced that it is doing all of the causal work there.

I’m going to revisit this in some future analysis.

Code for this post can be found here.