If it seemed to you after COVID that the pews were never as full as they had been before, you weren’t imagining things. The public goes to church less these days than it did pre-pandemic.
This is bad news, and not just from the perspective of the collection basket. Church attendance is a great predictor of all sorts of good outcomes and pro-social outcomes.
BEN SASSES AND THE INSTITUTIONS
Back in March 2020, states, cities, and counties around the country banned in-person church services, and many churches (especially Catholic dioceses) shut things down before governments did.
Where I lived, Montgomery County, Maryland, Catholic Mass was illegal from mid-March through mid-June. After that, churches were allowed only some fraction of their ordinary capacity.
Even when the government allowed full capacity, U.S. Catholic bishops granted a dispensation from the ordinary obligation to attend Mass, and a lot of Catholics continued not to attend.
I noticed at my Maryland parish that a lot of old regulars stopped coming. Some of these drop-outs were elderly, but many were younger families, probably families with a loose attachment to the Mass and to the faith, who were attending out of habit. Once that habit was gone, the willingness to give up half your Sunday morning disappeared.
This was a general phenomenon, and it wasn’t about religious affiliation so much as attendance, specifically, according to new
research
from the Survey Center on American Life.
Religiosity didn’t change much from pre-pandemic to spring 2022, report the scholars, led by my AEI colleague Dan Cox. But attendance changed a lot. Adults who report never attending religious services jumped from 25% to 33%. Attending at least “occasionally” fell from 36% to 32%.
The increase in never attending was concentrated among young, unmarried liberals, but even conservatives dropped out in large numbers. Before the pandemic, 14% of conservatives said they never attended. Last year, it was up to 20%. That’s a 43% increase in never attending.
This is worrisome because attending church, synagogue, or mosque is highly correlated with good outcomes and decisions. I argued in my 2019 book Alienated America that the public falling away from church attendance is the central factor in alienation, which is a central factor in our greatest social woes.
Men who attend church are better husbands. They are less likely to
cheat
, be
abusive
, or get
divorced
.
Children who go to church, Robert Putnam reported in Bowling Alone, have better relationships with their parents.
Half who attend church weekly call themselves “very happy,” data from the General Social Survey shows. The very happy contingent gets smaller as church attendance goes down.
Churchgoers even live longer.
The church closures in 2020 — voluntary and government-imposed — seem to have interrupted the habit of attendance and resulted in more nonattenders. Most people returned to the pews, but a measurable minority did not. This will lead to more suffering in the long run.
