Belief Vs. Behavior: Religious Importance And Attendance Aren’t The Same Thing
(ANALYSIS) For those who have been long-time subscribers to this newsletter, you will know that the predominant approach to measuring religion is called “the three B’s.”
One is religious behavior — that’s pretty straightforward: just ask people how often they attend a house of worship and you’ve got a pretty good assessment of this dimension of religiosity.
The second B is religious belonging. This is what we are tapping into when we ask folks, “What’s your present religion, if any?” and then they get a list of possible response options like Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, or nothing in particular. It’s the most sociologically accurate measurement of religion because it’s really about how the respondent situates themselves in the grand sweep of American society.
The last one is the one that is often the hardest to parse: Religious belief. If belonging is sociological, then belief is primarily psychological. It’s the mental schema that one has in their head when they think about supernatural and philosophical things. The most widely used question to measure this dimension of religiosity is about belief in God. But it’s also the question that gets the most criticism, because it’s so amorphous. And no one loves the response options.
There’s this other question that hangs out in surveys, too, that I don’t know if I have ever thought about that much — it’s religious importance. It’s pretty straightforward: how important is religion in your life? A respondent can indicate that it’s very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all important. I’m not sure which “B” this one falls into. Probably belief, but maybe not entirely.
I’ve been forced to think about it a whole lot more as a result of a recent Gallup poll.
The headline, “Rise in Young Men’s Religiosity Realigns Gender Gaps“ points toward a huge finding: among young adults (age 18–29), there’s been a weird shift in religious importance. For young men, the share who said religion was very important was 28% in 2022–2023. In the most recent data it shot up to 42%.
For young women, those figures went from 32% to 29%. A 50% increase in importance among young men in less than two years is a bit eyebrow-raising. For those who study long-term trends through survey data, it’s not every day that you see a measure move 10-plus points in such a short period of time.
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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.