Church Attendance in the United States 91
of churchmembership. In 1789 only 10 percent of Americans belonged to churches, ris-
ing to 22 percent in 1890, and reaching 50 to 60 percent in the 1950s. Today, about two
thirds of Americans say they are members of a church or synagogue. These rising church
membership numbers, however, are potentially misleading about underlying religious
participation rates because churches have become much less exclusive clubs than they
were at earlier points in our history. Today, fewer people attend religious services than
claim formal membership in religious congregations, but that situation was reversed
earlier in our history. Thus, a historic increase in formal church membership may not
be a valid indicator of historic increase in religious participation. The changing mean-
ing and standards for official church (and synagogue) membership make it difficult to
know what long-term trends in membership imply about trends in religious participa-
tion. The historical record, at the moment, seems too spotty to say anything definitive
about long-term national trends in religious service attendance. Still, one prominent
historian of American religion who has reviewed the available historical evidence has
argued that “participation [as opposed to formal membership] in [U.S.] congregations
has probably remained relatively constant” since the seventeenth century (Holifield
1994: 24).
Rising church membership rates notwithstanding, self-reported church attendance
has appeared to be remarkably stable for as long as we have survey research on this
topic. The Protestant rate has hovered around 40 percent since the 1940s. Although self-
reported Catholic church attendance declined markedly during the 1960s and 1970s –
from about 70 percent reportedly attending weekly to about 50 percent – the Catholic
numbers, too, have been stable for about twenty years. These remarkably stable survey
numbers are the basis for the standard view that church attendance in the United
States – whatever the level of overreporting – has been essentially constant at least
throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Several recent studies, however, have shaken the view that religious service atten-
dance in the United States has been essentially stable in recent decades. We already
have discussed Presser and Stinson’s (1998) contribution to knowledge about the con-
temporary weekly attendance rate. They also examine time-use diary evidence spread
over several decades, and they find evidence of decline in church attendance during the
last third of the twentieth century, from about 40 percent in 1965 to about 25 percent
in 1994. Hofferth and Sandberg (2001) find a similar decline – from 37 percent in 1981
to 26 percent in 1997 – in church attendance reported in children’s time-use diaries.
Because there are reasons, discussed earlier, to believe that the indirect approach used
in time diary studies measures church attendance more accurately than the direct ap-
proach used in conventional surveys, these findings raise considerable doubts about
the meaning of the stability produced by decades of surveys that directly ask people
about their religious service attendance.
Additional evidence of decline comes from Robert Putnam’s recent monumental
book on civic engagement in the United States. Putnam (2000) combines survey data
from five different sources and finds the same decline in religious participation as did
Presser and Stinson. This is important in itself. But perhaps even more compelling –
because of the context it provides – are Putnam’s findings about a whole range of civic
and voluntary association activities that are close cousins to religious participation.
Virtually every indicator of civic engagement currently available shows decline in the
last third of the twentieth century. Here is a partial list of indicators that follow this