Who is Attending Online Church?

Are there only online members? Or is it a supplement to in-person attendance?

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

---

One question I get asked about a lot when I go speak at denominational meetings and with groups of pastors is about the issue of online church attendance. I have to admit - I haven’t felt really comfortable answering those types of questions because there just wasn’t data on attending religious worship services online. Can you even imagine a survey asking about it before the pandemic? I know that some churches were doing it but they tended to be very well produced and distributed across a variety of social media channels.

But when COVID hit, every pastor felt like they had to figure out how to hook their cell phone up to a tripod and broadcast their service through YouTube and Facebook. For some houses of worship, this quickly became an essential part of their ministry. They saw large numbers of folks tuning in and wanted to keep that going even after pandemic restrictions lifted. It’s been my anecdotal experience in speaking with these ministry leaders that very few shut down their livestream in the last year or two. But they also don’t really know what to do with that audience. It’s their weird limbo state.

Well, I now have some great data provided by the Pew Research Center, which asked over 11,000 people a variety of questions about their worship attendance (both in person and virtual). What’s nice is that the survey was fielded in November of 2022. That’s two and half years after the pandemic shut down the world for a while. Which means this can give us a pretty good picture of who is attending virtually after the worst of the COVID lockdowns were over.

Let’s start by looking at two questions.

In the last month, did you attend religious services in person at a church, synagogue, mosque, or other house of worship?

In the last month, have you watched religious services online or on TV?

It’s important to point out that 60% of the sample reported that they had not attended a worship service in person, nor had they watched one online in the prior month. The other three combinations are basically the same share - people were just as likely to do both as they were to do only one. And there’s no evidence here that a whole bunch of people are online only - it was just 12% of the total survey sample.

Among Protestants, only 40% answered no to both questions. But again, that same pattern emerges. About a quarter of the sample is in the remaining three boxes. There are just as many “in person only” people as there are “online only” people. Catholics do deviate from the pattern, though. They are about twice as likely to be “in person only” (23%) compared to “online only” (11%). Pretty clear evidence here that online church is just not as pervasive among Catholics as it is among Protestants.

Let’s take this a step farther, though. Does going to church in person more lead to a lower likelihood of watching services online? If people feel like they need to “check a box” when it comes to religious attendance, it would seem that one would crowd out the other. But that’s not at all what the data indicates.

There’s a clear positive relationship between attending church in person and watching it online. In the total sample, about 6% of folks who never attend in person worship had watched online. Among those who were attending religious services multiple times a week, 57% of them were also watching online church, too. It seems like there’s a significant contingent who can’t get enough of worship experiences. If anything, in person worship seems to be a catalyst for online participation.

I also need to point out that Protestants are on an entirely different level than Catholics on this metric. Among weekly attending Protestants, 50% of them were also watching online. For Catholics at the same attendance level, just 36% were also attending Mass virtually.

However, what about the reverse? Do people who attend virtual worship at a high frequency have a tendency to show up for church at a lower rate?

This data points to a pretty unmistakable conclusion - there is no crowding out effect when it comes to virtual attendance. For Protestants who report that they seldom attend religious services online, 45% say that they also attend in person worship. Among those who are watching online church every single week, half of them are still going to a worship service during the prior month.

Said another way, virtual worship seems to be little more than an add on effect for people who are already religiously engaged. People who don’t attend that much aren’t filling that void with online services. At least not in huge numbers. It seems like what is happening is that there are a smaller group of very heavy consumers of religious material and the proliferation of virtual church has given them an easy outlet to take in more religious worship and instruction.

That got me thinking, though. Do people actually prefer online worship to the in person gathering? I wanted to check that by age to see if the idea that young people are “digital natives” makes any sense.

There’s pretty convincing evidence that the vast majority of people think that gathering in person is superior to joining an online stream. (By the way this question was restricted to people who had done both in the prior month). Younger people do see to prefer online church a bit more than older generations, but it’s not by much. Even among 18-29 year olds, two-thirds think that in person gathering is preferable and only 19% have preference for online.

As age increases, so does the propensity to favor in person gatherings. Among the oldest members of the sample, 86% of them said that they would rather meet in person. Just 3% said that the online worship experience was better. It’s hard to look at these numbers and think that a huge swath of America is willing to never attend an in person worship experience again and will be faithful watchers of online church streams. It seems like it’s convenient, but less than ideal.

I did have a question that I really wanted to answer, though - who are these people who are faithful virtual church attenders. I restricted my sample to people who said that they watched a religious service online at least once a week but also reported that they went to in person worship gatherings once a year or less. In other words, their religious experience is almost completely through the internet. For reference, this group makes up 4.8% of the total sample.

Here’s how the demographics of those folks compare to their entire population.

In terms of age, what really jumps out to me is that just 8% of all virtual attenders are between the ages of 18 and 29 compared to 19% of the entire sample. There are also not that many people between the ages of 30 and 49 who attend virtually compared to the general population. In total, 53% of the sample were under the age of 50. It was 30% of virtual attenders. The virtual attendance tends to skew older. Thirty-five percent of all online attenders are of retirement age, that’s twelve points higher than the total sample.

When it comes to education, there’s good evidence here that the virtual audience is more concentrated among those at the lower end of the spectrum. While 35% of the entire sample had a high school diploma or less, it was 43% of those who were virtual attenders. About 34% of the sample had at least a four year college degree, compared to 25% of those who were only attending a house of worship through online means.

The racial composition of virtual attenders does skew in one notable way - they are more likely to be African-American than the general population. Twenty-seven percentage of all virtual attenders were Black, that’s over double the rate of the entire sample at 12%. Both white and Asian respondents tended to be less likely to be attending church virtually compared to the baseline.

I think that there a few clear takeaways for ministry leaders when thinking about their online strategy going forward.

1. Streaming your church service online is providing more content for folks who are already deeply enmeshed in their own faith community. It’s the most frequent in person attenders who are the most likely to watch online, too.

2. Very few Americans think that online worship is preferable to in person gathering. In the total sample just 11% said it was superior, compared to 76% who believed that gathering in person was the best way to worship.

3. Just 5% of Americans could be considered virtual church members. It’s not a very large audience. It tends to skew older and less educated, as well.¹

As I love to say - here’s the data. Now you all go make sense of this. I am certainly not advocating that thousands of churches should pull the plug on their livestream this weekend. But I do think it's helpful for them to see what they are dealing with when it comes to this new type of church member.

Code for this post can be found here.

1. I will point out that the shift to virtual church was a welcome addition for folks living with (or having family members with) disabilities. Churches need to think carefully about how many people who are watching online are doing so because of these issues. There’s a great paper that was published in the Review of Religious Research called, “And Then COVID Happened…”: The Impact on Ministry and Disability in Local Churches.” The team interviewed and did surveys of 200 church ministry leaders. There are some fascinating findings that are worth considering. If you need access, let me know and I can send you a link.