Empty pews belie Gallup's good news - demise of religious observance and affiliation in the American society; includes analysis of research done by Roger Finke and Rodney Starke - Symposium - Column

Insight on the News, July 11, 1994 by C. Kirk Hadaway

Year's ago, a team of sociologists published a book about religion in a pseudonymous place called "Middletown" -- actually Muncie, Ind., to those in the know They painted the following picture of church life there:

An early Sunday morning finds Middletown remarkably quiet, but by 9 o'clock cars carrying families to church jam the streets, almost like the rush to work on a weekday. Church lots are crowded most of the morning."

On a recent Sunday morning in another Midwestern community -- Cleveland -- I sat outside my favorite coffee shop and watched the intersection in front of me. There was no Sunday morning rush hour here, nor did I remember traffic being very busy on Sunday morning in my former home of Nashville, despite its location in the Bible Belt.

Gallup Polls regularly report that 40 to 43 percent of Americans say they attend church during an average week -- a proportion that has not changed much in 30 years. My informal observations cast considerable doubt on the notion that this many Americans are out of their homes on Sunday morning doing anything -- much less going to church.

Of course I realize that it is possible to attend worship services at times other than Sunday morning. Catholics may attend Saturday Masses. Jews celebrate the Sabbath on Friday nights, and Seventh-day Adventists traditionally worship on Saturday rather than Sunday. Nevertheless, the reported figure of 42 percent of Americans attending church or synagogue each and every week always seemed improbable to me. And I was not alone in my skepticism. This sense of incredulity has been shared by many other sociologists, national news reporters and religious leaders (who wondered why most churches were not filled).

To test the tentative hypothesis that many Americans were inaccurately reporting their church attendance, Penny Long Marler of Samford University and I collected actual attendance data from all Protestant churches in a single county. We chose Ashtabula County in northeastern Ohio because of its location in the rural Midwest (where polls show high rates of attendance) and its isolation from major population centers. Not unexpectedly, we found overreporting of church attendance. But the extent of the overreporting was surprising.

Less than 20 percent of Protestants attend church during an average week in Ashtabula County -- not 36 percent, as claimed by people who responded to our poll of county residents. And not 45 percent, as found by the American Institute of Public Opinion in the Gallup Poll.

We teamed with Mark Chaves from the University of Notre Dame to test our findings among Catholics. The outcome was similar. Using data from Catholic parishes in 18 dioceses across the United States, we found that "the church attendance rate based on actual counts is significantly below the 51 percent rate reported by Gallup."

Additional research by Mark Chaves and James Cavendish on many additional Catholic dioceses and my own efforts to count attendance at all Masses at Catholic parishes in Ashtabula County confirm the original conclusion of our study: Weekly church attendance by Catholics in the United States is approximately one-half of what conventional wisdom takes it to be. The true rate is closer to 25 percent than 51 percent.

Church participation rates in the United States are much lower than most pollsters and social commentators suggest. Based on an extensive