By Terry Goodrich
Reports of religion’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, says Byron Johnson, co-director of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
Close examination of data from the General Social Survey and other data sources show that across 40 years, church attendance has varied only slightly, Johnson wrote in the Heritage Foundation’s recently published 2014 Index of Culture and Opportunity: The Social and Economic Trends that Shape America.
Headlines are “misleading, inaccurate and biased,” Johnson wrote, referring to reports that Millennials are leaving the faith of their parents; that young people under 30 are deserting the church; that women are rapidly falling away from religion; and that the “nones” — those without religious affiliations — have doubled in recent decades.
Johnson challenges media accounts that suggest a consistent — if not dramatic — decline of faith in the nation’s culture. He said that analyses of data from the General Social Survey and data from the Baylor Religion Survey support trends opposed to those being commonly reported.
The General Social Survey is a sociological survey used to collect data on demographic characteristics and attitudes of residents of the United States. It is conducted with in-person interviews by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago of adults (18 and older) in randomly selected households.
The Baylor Religion Survey is a random sample of 1,714 individuals across the country. Designed by Baylor scholars and conducted by The Gallup Organization, it includes more than 300 items dealing with religion and the attitudes, beliefs and values of the American public.
For example, they found that Millennials, like the vast majority of Americans, consider themselves religious. Because options abound, however, many people switch churches for varied reasons, often to a different denomination from the one in which they were raised.
“This change does not mean that they have departed the faith,” Johnson said, noting that many change to more theologically conservative churches than those of their childhood. “Switching churches is a fascinating subject, and if anything, it’s a marker of religious vitality, not decline.”
While surveys “perennially find that younger people are less likely to attend church, reflecting the fact that many single young adults choose to sleep in on Sunday mornings once they are out on their own,” church attendance rates recover once they marry and have children.
However, recent research confirms if people do not marry, and if they do not have children, there is a real decline in church attendance — a finding that is particularly striking among the poor and less educated. On the other hand, many who do not attend church regularly, especially the elderly, consistently report high levels of religious commitment and belief.
In 2007, 38 percent of women, compared with 26 percent of men, described themselves as “very religious,” according to the Baylor Religion Survey. Such a gender gap has been consistent since 1991, according to GSS data.
The number of atheists in America has remained steady at 4 percent since 1944, and church membership has reached an all-time high. Inaccurate perceptions may exist in part because traditional surveys do not ask respondents enough questions to accurately sort out religious affiliations.
Johnson noted that some of the “nones” indicated not only that they regularly attend church but even provided the name and address of their church. “The knee-jerk reaction that all ‘nones’ are unaffiliated — or atheist — is false,” Johnson said.
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