Catholicism By Generation A Rapid Collapse Or Steady As She Goes?
Photo by Maya Reagan
(ANALYSIS) Sometimes, an important high-level finding warrants some additional reflection. I have several of these rolling around in my head at any given point. The one I wanted to zero in on is from a post that ran over a year ago on this Substack.
Simply put, Catholic Mass attendance is way down. About half of all self-identified Catholics said that they attended Mass nearly every week in 1972. In the most recent data, it’s about half that rate (~25%).
How is that possible? Well, when you track a statistic like that over the course of fifty years, there are two primary drivers of such a drastic trend line.
Catholics just stopped attending Mass as they got older: This theory is really an individualized one. A couple million Catholics go from weekly attendance to yearly attendance, and the overall Mass attendance rate just plummets.
Generational replacement: Older Catholics are more religious than younger Catholics. Over time, the older devout Catholics die off and are replaced by younger adult Catholics who are much less active in their faith. The result is the same — Catholic Mass attendance declines significantly.
Well, I wanted to try and figure out if that second explanation actually makes any sense in the data because it’s much harder to test the first explanation, honestly. You would need panel data, which I explain here is so hard to get.
I wanted to start this one quite simply — I broke the sample down into generations of Catholics and then just tracked the share who were weekly Mass attendees from when they entered adulthood through to the end of the time series. The GSS began way back in 1972, so those early waves have a whole bunch of the Greatest Generation, Silent Generation and baby boomers. The more recent data has Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z.
It’s interesting to me that the Greatest Generation actually saw a slight increase in Mass attendance as members aged. They went from ~58% weekly attenders to ~65% near the end of their lives.
The Silent Generation line is also fascinating because of how steady it was for a very long time. About half of them were at Mass on a regular basis from 1972 through the late 2000s. There was a pretty significant decline from that point forward, but I am betting that a big chunk of that is health-related.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.