Livestreamed church services, adopted by many churches as the best way to keep church communities intact during the coronavirus pandemic, are attracting fewer people than expected and frustrating some Christians.
Since March, when the coronavirus pandemic prompted many governors to issue stay-at-home orders and many churches to decide on moving their services online, only 28% of people have viewed livestreamed services, a study conducted by the American Enterprise Institute found. At the same time, the study found the majority of Americans have reported praying or becoming more religious as “religious coping” skyrockets worldwide.
But the increased devotion has not necessarily translated into greater participation in streamed services. Streaming records for individual churches indicate a drop in participation since the closures. The Catholic Cathedral of Saint Matthew in Washington, D.C., for instance, shows that the mass offered by Archbishop Wilton Gregory on March 29 received just over 500 views on YouTube. His mass on the Sunday before, the first weekend that all public masses in the D.C. area were canceled, received about 1,300 views.
The cathedral has seating for about 1,000 people and usually offers seven Sunday masses, often nearly filling the church at individual masses.
The church received about 13,000 views for its Palm Sunday mass, consistent with the high numbers reported by the nearby Diocese of Arlington, as well as the Archdioceses of Detroit and New York for their Palm Sunday masses. Palm Sunday, however, is one of the most important holidays in Christianity, and churches often see inflated numbers in services around Easter time. YouTube also only counts the number of individual streams, not the number of unique streams, making it difficult to tell how many people actually watched any particular service.
The reasons for the low numbers are many. Churchgoers tend to be older and often technologically challenged, but a lack of familiarity with the internet is not necessarily the main reason, the AEI study found. Among Christians, the lack of viewership is about equal between the old and the young, with only about a third of each demographic saying they have watched a service since their church closed.
Among individual Christian sects, white evangelicals are the most likely to have watched services online, with 53% answering in the affirmative. From there, however, the numbers drop off steeply. Only 36% of black Protestants, 34% of Catholics, and 23% of mainline Protestants say they have participated in any online service since their church closed to the public. Non-Christian churches also report low numbers, with 25% of people saying that they have participated in some sort of online service.
Daniel Cox, a research fellow at AEI, told the Washington Examiner that there are likely a number of reasons contributing to why online church attendance is so low. The first reason is that, as with many measurements of faith communities, not every member of a church attends services weekly. Those who are less likely to go to church under normal circumstances are also less likely to watch a streamed service faithfully.
On top of that, he said, many people reported that the feeling of community that comes with church is irreplaceable in an online setting. Social pressure to go to church, too, is harder to enforce when fellow congregants cannot see who is and who is not watching streamed services.
“Most of the research on social interaction and influence says that in-person interactions are more influential, meaningful, and memorable than those online,” Cox said. “This is likely true for worship as well.”
The advent of online church services has brought much criticism from a vocal minority of Christians. Some Protestant churches have refused to close down, prompting local authorities to arrest pastors, such as Tony Spell of the Life Tabernacle Church in Louisiana and Rodney Howard-Browne of The River Church in Florida, both of whom called the closure of churches a violation of the First Amendment.
Among Catholics, too, a vocal minority have pushed back against bishops, who, in mid-March, closed all public masses in the United States at least through Easter.
“Canceling church services is the wrong response to the coronavirus pandemic,” wrote R.R. Reno in the conservative magazine First Things. “In a time of pandemic — a time when Satan whips up in us all fears of isolation, abandonment, and death — churches must not join the stampede of fear.”
Most religious Americans, however, have said they are comfortable with churches closing, with about 75% of people across religious traditions agreeing on that point, according to AEI’s study.
Among evangelical protestant churches, many have reported great success in moving online. But as with other faith traditions, the relatively greater number of evangelicals watching church online does not necessarily represent an increase in viewership. A study of online church watching habits conducted in 2019 by the Christian nonprofit group LifeWay Research found that 50% of Protestants were already sometimes replacing in-person services with online streaming.
This same study also found that, while permissible in times of crisis, the majority of Protestants do not view online services as legitimate replacements for in-person church, with less than a third of people calling it a valid option. Now that churches are forced to change the way they reach communities, they risk attrition, said LifeWay Research Director Scott McConnell.
“The long-term question is whether churches can convince viewers there is more to church than just video content on a screen,” he said.
