Who Are Filling Up The Pews In The US These Days?
(ANALYSIS) It’s something that I’ve noted before, but let me mention this again: The United States Census Bureau has launched a new survey that is not just about counting people.
It’s focused on other types of questions like religion! And that’s really great for folks like me. (I swear to you if Elon spikes this project, I am going to be very upset).
It’s called the Household Pulse Survey, and there’s a lot to like about it: It’s got a really big sample size (over 55K), and researchers release the raw data in pretty short order after it’s collected. Be still my heart.
I wanted to try and do some more data work on what drives religious attendance. So, that’s the point of this post — it’s just a journey through me trying to figure out what demographic factors make someone more or less likely to show up for church this weekend.
But before I get to that part, let me just show you the most religious and least religious states in the United States based on the most recent wave of the Household Pulse Survey. I need to point out that this instrument uses a very loose measure of religious attendance — asking about it over the prior year. There are four options that range from zero times to at least once a month.
There are four states where at least 35% of the population attends at least once a month: Utah, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. But I really have to point out this huge aberration in the data among these four states.
For the three Southern states, the share who never attend is about the same — just about 40%. But look at Utah! According to this data, 52% of folks in the state are never-attenders.
It’s like people living in Utah are either really religious or really not. Other states aren’t like that. I am making a note to myself to figure that one out.
I don’t think the states at the bottom of the graph are really going to surprise anyone. Just 1 in 10 people living in Vermont or New Hampshire are regular church attenders, while about three quarters never darken a church’s door.
Oregon is the fourth from the bottom, and then it’s back to New England, with only 16% of Rhode Islanders being monthly attenders. When people ask me about the least religious parts of the country, it’s clearly the top right and the top left, but there’s also Colorado and Wisconsin sprinkled in there, too.
I know you all love a map, so this is that same data visually spatially.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
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.