The Upshot
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The United States has long been unusually religious for an affluent, industrialized Western nation — in survey after survey, Americans report relatively high levels of belief in God, affiliation with religious institutions and participation in worship services.
But counting churchgoers has always been a bit tricky. Some congregations tend to over-report attendance, seeking to demonstrate vitality. Others are more scrupulous, especially in denominations where churches pay assessments based on size. And it’s been evident for years that Americans tend to overstate their own religiosity: There is a persistent gap between the number of people who claim to go to worship services and the number who can actually be counted in pews.
The gap grows more striking as America becomes more secular. In recent years, poll after poll has found more Americans who do not identify with a religious tradition, and many denominations show evidence of decline. And yet, Americans continue to report high levels of belief and participation — more than 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God or a universal spirit, and nearly 40 percent report weekly attendance at a worship service, numbers that have remained relatively unchanged for decades.
What’s going on? A new study, released Saturday, suggests that the gradual secularization of the nation has not eliminated the perceived social desirability of going to church, and the result is that Americans exaggerate their religious behavior. That exaggeration is more pronounced among some groups — Catholics, mainline Protestants and, strikingly, the unaffiliated, meaning that even people willing to say they don’t belong to a religious tradition still feel compelled to exaggerate their attendance at worship services.
The study, by the Public Religion Research Institute, used an intriguing method to try to measure exaggeration: It asked the same set of questions in telephone interviews, and in an online survey, and compared the results. Researchers say that online surveys, with their lack of human questioners, significantly reduce “social desirability bias” in polling — the tendency of people to exaggerate behaviors that they think will impress others. In this study, the group that took the online surveys reported much lower levels of worship attendance than those interviewed by telephone.
Reported Religious Attendance: It Depends How You Ask
Americans are more likely to claim to attend religious services frequently if they're asked over the telephone rather than in response to an online survey.
“This points to a paradox in the country: On the one hand we have the rise of the unaffiliated, but at the same time the social expectation of church attendance is still alive and well, and we can see it as people inflate their reports of church attendance in live interviews,” said Robert P. Jones, the institute’s chief executive. “We have a long history of religious attendance being connected with all kinds of upright moral behavior, and we still see the vestiges of that.”
People appear especially unwilling to say that they “seldom or never” go to worship services. In the phone interviews, only 30 percent described themselves that way, whereas in the online survey 43 percent acknowledged rare attendance. The effect continues even with the unaffiliated: In interviews, 73 percent say they seldom or never attend religious services, but online that number is 91 percent.
Young people, as well as people living in the Northeast and West, are especially prone to exaggerate their worship attendance. The levels of attendance inflation are less pronouced among white evangelicals, black Protestants and Southerners.
“Even with the inflation, America still stands out as a very religious country, particularly as compared to Western Europe,” Mr. Jones said. “If anything, it points to how strong this social norm is.”