The People Streaming Church Aren’t Who You Think
(ANALYSIS) I’ve been thinking a whole lot about social isolation recently. It’s probably because it’s this unspoken concept in a lot of the work that I do and many of the questions that I’m asked about religion in the United States. I swear I bring up Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” about twice a week when I’m doing interviews or giving presentations about data on religious attendance.
Putnam saw an America that was rapidly hurtling toward social atomization. He charted the decline in membership in social clubs and bowling leagues.
You know what he blamed it on? Cable television. And there’s a very good reason for that — he was writing his masterpiece in the mid-1990s, when that was the major entertainment innovation.
Isn’t that quaint? Now we don’t have 100 channels; we have a million channels, plus every streaming service imaginable. It’s easier to distract ourselves now than ever before.
I see church attendance as a keyhole into how people manage to socialize today. It’s one of the last voluntary social activities that Americans still do in large numbers. So the choice of whether to attend, with what frequency, and in what modality (either in person or online) is an ideal way to try to assess how the average person is thinking about “touching grass” right now.
To that end, I want to explore two factors that I think about all the time when it comes to the determinants of socialization: educational attainment and household income. I’m using the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which is exceptionally helpful here because it asks about attending religious services both in person and online.
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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.