Everything You Want To Know About Who’s Watching Online Church
(ANALYSIS) The world went into lockdown in March and April of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic forced Americans to stay home on a scale unseen in our lifetimes. Now, nearly four years removed from the height of the crisis, it’s clear that if life were going to snap back to “normal,” it would have already happened.
Remember all those think pieces predicting that the pandemic would spark a wave of remote-only jobs? A recent Washington Post headline suggests otherwise: Crowded trains, lunch and coffee lines: More people are working from the office.
Lockdowns also reshaped houses of worship across the United States. Many churches had never even considered streaming services online before COVID-19. That was certainly true for my small congregation. On a good Sunday we had about 15 people in attendance, and with most members older, streaming just didn’t seem worth the effort.
But the data shows that churches adapted quickly. According to the State of Church Tech 2024 report, 91% of churches were live-streaming their services by 2024. The share of leaders who said streaming would play a key role in the future of their church jumped from 47% in 2023 to 62% in 2024. In short, more and more churches are leaning into the idea of growth through the internet.
Until recently, though, few surveys have asked about the people watching church online. The new Pew Religious Landscape Study, fielded in late 2023 and the first half of 2024, included a question specifically about watching services online—giving us a real look at this group using a very large sample.
Let’s start by visualizing how Americans reported attending services both in person and online.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on Substack.
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.