CHAPTER SEVEN
Church Attendance in the United States
Mark Chaves and Laura Stephens
Although there is more to religious belief and practice than participation in organized
religion, and although media reports sometimes make it appear that new and uncon-
ventional forms of religiosity are swamping more traditional practice, the collective
expression of religion in the United States still mainly means attendance at weekend
religious services. When people who say they didnotattend religious services in the
past week are asked in surveys whether they participated in some other type of reli-
gious event or meeting, only 2 percent say yes. If other sorts of religious activity have
increased, that increase is not much at the expense of traditional weekend attendance
at religious services. For this reason, the level of participation in traditional worship ser-
vices – church and synagogue attendance – and trends in those levels, remain valuable,
if mundane, windows onto American religion and its collective expression.
For many years scholars of American religion agreed on two basic facts about church
attendance: (a) on any given weekend approximately 40 percent of Americans attend
religious services, and (b) this rate has been essentially stable at least since the 1950s.
In this chapter, we review the evidence about the contemporary level of attendance
at religious services, and we review the evidence about trends in that participation.
Regarding the first, recent research has shown that weekly attendance in the United
States is significantly lower than 40 percent. Regarding the second, recent research has
unsettled the previous consensus about stability in attendance over time. Although
recent research has not yet definitively established that there has been decline rather
stability, several major studies point in that direction, and these studies are suggestive
enough to throw into question what previously appeared to be a settled matter. In
exploring the factual matters at issue here, we will see that assessing the level of religious
participation in the United States, and interpreting its meaning, is a more complex
matter than one might initially expect. In the conclusion, we discuss the meaning
of religious participation levels and trends for larger questions about religion’s social
significance in the United States.
HOW MANY AMERICANS ATTEND RELIGIOUS SERVICES?
Very few findings within sociology become widely and firmly established as solid so-
cial facts. However, the claim that approximately 40 percent of the population of the
85