Which Cities are the Least Religious?
And, what factors drive down religious attendance in those areas?
Here’s a fun fact, the United States Census Bureau is prohibited from asking questions about religion on the Decennial Census. That’s the big data collection effort that is conducted every decade to get an accurate headcount of the United States for purposes of apportionment. The reason was articulated succinctly by the director of the Bureau, Vincent P. Barabba in 1976:
Asking such a question in the decennial census, in which replies are mandatory, would appear to infringe upon the traditional separation of church and [s]tate. Regardless of whether this perception is legally sound, controversy on this very sensitive issue could affect public cooperation in the census and thus jeopardize the success of the census.
Just a few months later, Congress passed a law which officially prohibited the Census Bureau from asking questions about religious beliefs or church membership. So, we have been kind of flying blind when it comes to American religion for quite a while. I actually wrote a chapter for 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America that got scrapped. The title was, “We Can Get An Accurate Count of the Religious Composition of the United States.” It was eventually published at Religion Unplugged (and no one read it.)
But, there’s been a big development in this arena in the last few months. The Census Bureau has rolled out a new instrument that they call the Household Pulse Survey. The stated goal is, “to produce data on critical social and economic matters affecting American households.” They want this one to be deployed quickly and the results disseminated to key stakeholders in real time so that they can better understand what’s happening in the country right now, not a year ago.
And, guess what? They asked a question about religious attendance. Of course they don’t ask it in the way that I would like but I will take what I can get at this point. One thing that I wanted to focus on in this first pass is the religiosity of major metropolitan areas. I’ve written about this before - the perception is that American cities are wastelands where religion goes to die.
But here’s an angle that I have not considered before - are there certain metropolitan areas that are more religious than other ones? I wanted to answer questions like: which cities are the least and most churched in the United States. And do demographic factors like age, race, income, and education have a different impact on religious attendance if I compare Los Angeles to Chicago? Let’s get to the graphs.
Here’s the top level graph. It’s religious attendance in the fifteen largest metro areas. The Census Bureau only gives four options ranging from less than once a year to at least twelve times per year. So I can’t give you the share attending weekly here. The top bracket is once a month.
The least religious cities are at the top and there are two clear winners here: San Francisco and Seattle. In both cases, about seven in ten adults are attending religious services less than once a year. But I think that San Francisco make take the crown for most secular - just 12% of folks in that city are attending church at least once a month.
The most religious cities are places in the South like Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta. However, there’s a weird addition here - Riverside, California. Nearly three in ten folks living in that metropolitan area are monthly attenders. The bottom end of the graph doesn’t have the clear outliers that exist at the top of the graph, though. There isn’t a clear winner for most religious city.
But this Household Pulse Survey is large enough to look under the hood a little about what factors can drive people to be attending less than once a year. Let’s start with education.
Okay, I don’t know if I would say that there’s a strong relationship between education and attendance in most metropolitan areas. The percentage who are attending less than once a year is pretty similar for those with a high school diploma or a graduate degree. That’s true all over the country: NYC, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Detroit.
There are a few examples of places where the relationship is not so flat. I think the San Francisco graph stands out. Only 43% of those with a high school diploma or less are attending less than once a year there compared to 71% with at least some college education. In both Boston and Riverside, attendance is the lowest among those with a four year college degree. I don’t know if I can theorize why that is.
How about household income, though? That should run in parallel with education.
The overwhelming trend I see in this data is that as household income rises, so does the share of folks who attend less than once a year. Sometimes the line is pretty steep. That’s true in Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, and Riverside. There are also metro areas where the line is pretty flat like Atlanta and Boston. But there is one city where the relationship between income and church attendance seems to go in the opposite direction, though - that’s Dallas. In that metropolitan area, nearly 60% of those at the bottom end of the income spectrum are low attenders. It’s only 45% of those making at least $200,000 per year.
How about race? We all know that there tends to be a lot more racial diversity in major urban centers than in a lot of the rural parts of the country. It makes one wonder if there’s a racial and regional variation in church attendance.
Here’s the one thing I can say - white people tend to be lower attenders than other racial groups, on average. There’s not a single city in which white respondents had a lower share than other racial groups once you factor in the margin of error. Think about this - 71% of white people living in San Francisco are attending services less than once a year. It’s only 52% of Hispanics living in the same city.
But there are some big variations among white respondents in different metro areas. For instance, just 46% of white people living in Dallas are in the lowest attendance category - that’s 25 points lower than San Francisco.
It’s hard to make a big sweeping claim about which racial group is the least likely to be in the low attending category. In some cities it’s African-Americans, in others it’s Hispanics. But in many, those two groups are pretty close together. But in any case, both those groups are much more religiously active than white respondents.
One more factor I wanted to consider was age. I created four brackets and did the same analysis as before - the share who are attending less than once a year.
Yeah, it’s pretty apparent that young people are less likely to go to church compared to older ones in the same city. Sometimes the percentage point gaps are pretty large. For instance, 55% of the youngest adults in Atlanta are in the bottom category of attendance. It’s just 36% of those who are of retirement age. The gap is also large in Los Angeles, and San Francisco. But the biggest disparity is in Philadelphia. While 64% of those between the ages of 18 and 35 are attending less than once a year it’s only 39% of those who are 65 or older.
But let’s throw all this into a simple model to try and figure out if there are true variations based on metro areas. So, this is the output of a logit model that is predicting the likelihood of being in that bottom attendance category. I ran a regression for each of the fifteen cities listed in the Pulse Survey. A positive coefficient means more likely to be a low attender. But if the estimate or the blue lines intersect with zero, that means that the coefficient is not statistically significant.
I am pretty surprised to see how consistent these results are across all those different cities. In each case the same two variables keep bubbling to the top: age and race. As age increases, the likelihood of attending less than once a year goes down. Said another way - older folks go to church more than young folks. However, the variable for white is in the opposite direction. Holding income, education, and age constant - a white person is less likely to attend religious services compared to a person of color. That’s the case in every single city in the data and it’s always signed in the same direction. White people in urban areas are less religiously active than non-whites.
But I wanted to take that one step farther, so I put together an interaction model of age and race with controls for both income and education. Here’s the output:
You can really see how much of an outlier the white sample is in these metro areas. There’s not a ton of difference in the sample when looking at those of college age, but once you move into middle age, the gaps really start to emerge. For instance, compare the share attending less than once a year among 40 year olds by race:
White: 70%
Black: 50%
Hispanic: 58%
Asian: 61%
And those gaps only get larger among 60 year olds:
White: 60%
Black: 33%
Hispanic: 45%
Asian: 45%
So, there’s the big upshot of all this - white folks in urban areas are easily the least religiously active. Income and education don’t seem to matter but age does in a pretty significant way.
But, it’s also worth pointing out that some cities are much less religious than other ones. Seattle and San Francisco are incredibly irreligious. In one of those places you are six times more likely to find someone who attends less than once a year than one who attends at least once a month. In a place like Houston, it’s two to one.
Religion is clearly not pervasive in places like this. But as I’ve written about last week - there is evidence that being in one of these metro areas means a church is more likely to grow. As is often said in church circles, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” There are clearly a lot of unchurched folks in urban areas - but finding ways to reach them seems harder than ever.
Code for this post can be found here.
Edit: the first version of this post (which is the one that was emailed to all subscribers) had an error. I miscoded Los Angeles as Charlotte. It has been corrected now in the web version.
I took this survey, and I was really stumped by the religious service attendance question. I'm an atheist and secular humanist, and I am a leader with Sunday Assembly Atlanta, part of a network of communities that support and celebrate folks like me.
I even asked friends what they would say for that question and got various responses. I believe, but am not certain, I said Never (or the lowest option) and put my Sunday Assembly attendance in the question about hobby event attendance, even though that feels wrong.
I felt not especially seen by the survey in that moment. 🙁
Riverside doesn't surprise me -- that's where you can find a very concentrated hub of Seventh-day Adventists.