Utah? That's easy. Either you're LDS, or you moved to the SLC area from somewhere else (for work) (or you're a Park City ski bum). I'd imagine you'd find SLC to have a much lower level of church going than the rest of the state.
I wish it were possible to see some kind of data on work schedules for these demographics. I worked in retail and recreation before becoming a vocational pastor, and can tell you industry has a giant impact on churchgoing, even if a person would like to- they are working almost every weekend. Schedule privilege I a real thing.
I'm 42 years old. I graduated high school with a girl who is a grandparent to a 1st grader. And another friend from high school just had their first child.
Attendance for parents of young kids vs non-parents makes sense given the differential opportunity costs. Non-parents can do whatever they want with their Sunday morning. Parents, especially of young kids, are probably up early anyways and are facing a day of activity entirely driven by their children's needs. Parents are not giving up anything at all by going to church and probably find those few hours of free childcare to be incredibly helpful. At worst you can scroll through social media without anyone touching you or whining at you while the pastor drones on.
As one who rouses kids out of bed to get them to church service in a timely manner, I can tell you that it is not convenience. Do we parents enjoy our toddler competing with the minister in passion and volume? No it's humiliating. I think the answer is as follows:
1) Conscientiousness (the personality traits).
2) Parental support group: you need a crowd that shares your values and is/has wrestled with the challenges of parenting and marriage. The Christian message of sacrificial love, forgiveness and endurance fits the bill.
3) Moral formation of children. If you don't provide an ethic and mythology for their kids, they'll latch on to whatever someone authoritative serves up. High education parents are aware of this and educate accordingly.
Those are all reasons I take my kids to church, plus I go for myself as a practice or faithfulness. But my own experience and that of I many parents is know is the kids under 4 are awake before 6am anyway. No rousing required. And once we're all up, the prospect of 3-4 hours when they can be in Sunday school and children's church is a major relief. I love my 3 year old, but entertaining her for prolonged periods is exhausting. I suspect this makes a difference for the marginal parent. Older kids, yes, it's a different story, but hopefully the habit sticks by then.
Granted, I have more than the average share of ill health exhausting me throughout the week than the average young parent does, but returning to church after COVID meant losing precious laundry time.
We also had to return to a DIFFERENT church just to get reliable childcare at church — not all churches have it. I miss the unreliable-childcare church like the dickens, but I concede the situation was simply unworkable.
As a Utahn, I call tell you exactly what is going on here. The LDS church dominates many aspects of life throughout the state, and you're either fully in or you have to clearly cut it off. The church doesn't leave much room for middle ground.
Within a decade or so following the end of World War II, my Protestant denomination of heritage (Southern Baptists) began to significantly focus efforts on evangelism, launching new congregations, and compassion ministry in the northeast and northwest states of the United States. Their research showed these two regions were the most unchurched, unchurched, and dechurched areas of the USA. Despite significant--but not significant enough--efforts, according to the graph in this post on religious attendance, in the words of a ministry colleague --"we ain't hurtin' them none,"--which translated means our efforts have not made a significant change in the religious participation of these two regions.
I wonder if the increase in attendance when they have a kid under 1 is caused by the number of children. Meaning, a family with 12 kids is more likely to have a child under 1 in their household when they are sampled than a family with 2.
I really appreciate your Substack, Ryan! A question, which you may have answered here, but perhaps I missed in my post work, post 5 pm reduced focus attention span. Does this include people who attend only Christian services or would Jewish respondents also be included? Just wondering about the potential relationship between higher education and Judaism here…
How amazing that the age gradient (18-39 < 40-64 <65+) is consistent in every single state, though Arizona is really trying to buck the trend.
Based on the growth of the Amish, I'd predict that Wisconsin will start rising through these charts in the coming couple decades (assuming they're sampled for these surveys - they may not be).
I'm a Latter-day Saint (current) Utahn who grew up in a very church-less state (Oregon)... and this tracks.
I'm curious what comes first: are people who attend church more likely to have children (my prediction), or those who have kids more likely to attend church (I have known a few people who started going again after having kids).
There are a whole lot of people in Utah who attend *weekly,* I wouldn't be surprised if that's the highest in the country. But for many in the church it's really all or nothing. There are just a handful on the side who attend occasionally, and those folks are not that likely to be LDS.
Unfortunately it feels quite polarizing, religiously. I wish we could better integrate the good parts of church life (the community!) with those who don't want the religious aspect, because connection helps us all. Also, my church congregation is literally 5 blocks, and as a result I actually know almost all of my neighbors and where they live; it would be hard to be left out of that group. I/we try to be mindful of that and inclusive of the non-goers.
I will keep writing this comment until someone answers me satisfactorily.
Since we are not directly measuring this data and instead relying on self-reporting, how much of this data is polluted by "telling the pollster what (you think) they want to hear"?
To put a finer point on it: Do we have a Bible Belt? Or do we have "a geographic cluster where people think 'Yes, I attend church' is the right answer"?
What you are describing is a concept called "social desirability bias."
For decades polls were conducted either face to face or over the telephone. You had to offer a verbal response to another human being. That process obviously involved a lot of social desirability bias.
Now, almost all polls are doing via an online web browser. No one is looking over a respondent's shoulder. They are much more free to say what they actually think.
When I still attended (White Evangelical) church, I used to joke that it was a fertility cult because of all the emphasis that they put on baby dedication and special baby days (not to mention abortion restrictions). I would suspect that there's a chicken-and-the-egg situation there: do people who go to church just love babies or do people who just love babies tend to go to church?
Utah? That's easy. Either you're LDS, or you moved to the SLC area from somewhere else (for work) (or you're a Park City ski bum). I'd imagine you'd find SLC to have a much lower level of church going than the rest of the state.
Yep, and if you head to Provo, near the BYU campus, you probably have the highest rate of church attendance in the country.
I wish it were possible to see some kind of data on work schedules for these demographics. I worked in retail and recreation before becoming a vocational pastor, and can tell you industry has a giant impact on churchgoing, even if a person would like to- they are working almost every weekend. Schedule privilege I a real thing.
I sooo wish Sundays would be a sabbath for our capitalist, consumerist society
Restricting the sample to 18-45 to weed out grandparents made me feel more geriatric than being called that at the ob/gyn!
I'm 42 years old. I graduated high school with a girl who is a grandparent to a 1st grader. And another friend from high school just had their first child.
Attendance for parents of young kids vs non-parents makes sense given the differential opportunity costs. Non-parents can do whatever they want with their Sunday morning. Parents, especially of young kids, are probably up early anyways and are facing a day of activity entirely driven by their children's needs. Parents are not giving up anything at all by going to church and probably find those few hours of free childcare to be incredibly helpful. At worst you can scroll through social media without anyone touching you or whining at you while the pastor drones on.
As one who rouses kids out of bed to get them to church service in a timely manner, I can tell you that it is not convenience. Do we parents enjoy our toddler competing with the minister in passion and volume? No it's humiliating. I think the answer is as follows:
1) Conscientiousness (the personality traits).
2) Parental support group: you need a crowd that shares your values and is/has wrestled with the challenges of parenting and marriage. The Christian message of sacrificial love, forgiveness and endurance fits the bill.
3) Moral formation of children. If you don't provide an ethic and mythology for their kids, they'll latch on to whatever someone authoritative serves up. High education parents are aware of this and educate accordingly.
Those are all reasons I take my kids to church, plus I go for myself as a practice or faithfulness. But my own experience and that of I many parents is know is the kids under 4 are awake before 6am anyway. No rousing required. And once we're all up, the prospect of 3-4 hours when they can be in Sunday school and children's church is a major relief. I love my 3 year old, but entertaining her for prolonged periods is exhausting. I suspect this makes a difference for the marginal parent. Older kids, yes, it's a different story, but hopefully the habit sticks by then.
It could be that a third cause leads to both, such as...
- More hopeful people (I've written about hopefulness) both having more children and being more likely to attend services.
- Education or (like Burge suggests) ideology causing both.
Granted, I have more than the average share of ill health exhausting me throughout the week than the average young parent does, but returning to church after COVID meant losing precious laundry time.
We also had to return to a DIFFERENT church just to get reliable childcare at church — not all churches have it. I miss the unreliable-childcare church like the dickens, but I concede the situation was simply unworkable.
As a Utahn, I call tell you exactly what is going on here. The LDS church dominates many aspects of life throughout the state, and you're either fully in or you have to clearly cut it off. The church doesn't leave much room for middle ground.
Within a decade or so following the end of World War II, my Protestant denomination of heritage (Southern Baptists) began to significantly focus efforts on evangelism, launching new congregations, and compassion ministry in the northeast and northwest states of the United States. Their research showed these two regions were the most unchurched, unchurched, and dechurched areas of the USA. Despite significant--but not significant enough--efforts, according to the graph in this post on religious attendance, in the words of a ministry colleague --"we ain't hurtin' them none,"--which translated means our efforts have not made a significant change in the religious participation of these two regions.
I wonder if the increase in attendance when they have a kid under 1 is caused by the number of children. Meaning, a family with 12 kids is more likely to have a child under 1 in their household when they are sampled than a family with 2.
I really appreciate your Substack, Ryan! A question, which you may have answered here, but perhaps I missed in my post work, post 5 pm reduced focus attention span. Does this include people who attend only Christian services or would Jewish respondents also be included? Just wondering about the potential relationship between higher education and Judaism here…
The question is worded in a totally generic way - as are all questions about religious attendance in every survey I've ever looked at.
We often use the phrase "church attendance" instead of "church/mosque/synagogue/house of worship of attendance" for brevity sake in our writing.
The dominance of the LDS Church in Utah almost certainly explains the dichotomy. Much of the state is LDS-or-nothing when it comes to church options.
How amazing that the age gradient (18-39 < 40-64 <65+) is consistent in every single state, though Arizona is really trying to buck the trend.
Based on the growth of the Amish, I'd predict that Wisconsin will start rising through these charts in the coming couple decades (assuming they're sampled for these surveys - they may not be).
This is just speculation but it seems more intuitive, at least to me, that religiosity would generate hopefulness than vice versa.
I'm a Latter-day Saint (current) Utahn who grew up in a very church-less state (Oregon)... and this tracks.
I'm curious what comes first: are people who attend church more likely to have children (my prediction), or those who have kids more likely to attend church (I have known a few people who started going again after having kids).
There are a whole lot of people in Utah who attend *weekly,* I wouldn't be surprised if that's the highest in the country. But for many in the church it's really all or nothing. There are just a handful on the side who attend occasionally, and those folks are not that likely to be LDS.
Unfortunately it feels quite polarizing, religiously. I wish we could better integrate the good parts of church life (the community!) with those who don't want the religious aspect, because connection helps us all. Also, my church congregation is literally 5 blocks, and as a result I actually know almost all of my neighbors and where they live; it would be hard to be left out of that group. I/we try to be mindful of that and inclusive of the non-goers.
I will keep writing this comment until someone answers me satisfactorily.
Since we are not directly measuring this data and instead relying on self-reporting, how much of this data is polluted by "telling the pollster what (you think) they want to hear"?
To put a finer point on it: Do we have a Bible Belt? Or do we have "a geographic cluster where people think 'Yes, I attend church' is the right answer"?
What you are describing is a concept called "social desirability bias."
For decades polls were conducted either face to face or over the telephone. You had to offer a verbal response to another human being. That process obviously involved a lot of social desirability bias.
Now, almost all polls are doing via an online web browser. No one is looking over a respondent's shoulder. They are much more free to say what they actually think.
Pew has a terrific report that I recommend on this specific topic: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/01/14/measuring-religion-in-pew-research-centers-american-trends-panel/
I also address it in Chapter 2 and Chapter 6 of The Nones, Second Edition:
https://www.amazon.com/Nones-Where-They-Came-Going/dp/1506465854
Thank you for a thorough answer to a more-snotty-than-I-intended question.
(I *still* have this question about another longitudinal data-set that is presumably outside your bailiwick: youth drug use.)
My big takeaways:
• There are four states where 18-39 year olds are more religious than 40-64 year olds: ND, SD, KY, VA.
• The most religious of these is Kentucky, where 29% of 18-39 year olds go to church at least 12 times a year.
• The positive correlation between education and religious attendance is strongest for ages 65+, but non-existent (or a horseshoe) for ages 18-35.
When I still attended (White Evangelical) church, I used to joke that it was a fertility cult because of all the emphasis that they put on baby dedication and special baby days (not to mention abortion restrictions). I would suspect that there's a chicken-and-the-egg situation there: do people who go to church just love babies or do people who just love babies tend to go to church?
Or does being more socially conservative make one more likely to go to church and more likely to have children....