Daily Archives: December 23, 2010

A lovely story about Las Posadas featuring Grace parishioners

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The story on Madison.com includes photos and a description of what went on last Saturday night. Las Posadas, emphasizes the fact that Joseph and Mary were themselves in a sense refugees, forced from their home by an imperial power, and forced to seek shelter wherever they could find it. And their journey didn’t end in Bethlehem, but they went on to Egypt, when Herod sought to kill the child who was the Savior of the world.

The publicity for our Hispanic congregation is somewhat bittersweet, because while celebrating Christmas in this way, our Spanish-speaking congregation, indeed all of Grace, is saddened by the fact that the Rev. Pat Size is retiring at the end of 2010. She has provided leadership and vision to our noon service, and pastoral care for many of us at Grace over the years.

But the congregation will continue to thrive, relying on the gifts of its members and the support of the whole congregation.

Why do Americans claim to go to church more often than they actually do?

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Surveys fascinate me, especially surveys of religious belief and practice. I suppose I should have been a Sociologist of Religion. There’s an article on Slate.com that explores the reality behind survey results that show high percentages of Americans attending weekly services.

In contrast to self-reporting surveys, some social scientists have tried alternatives. For example:

This neutral interviewing method produced far fewer professions of church attendance. Compared to the “time-use” technique, Presser and Stinson found that nearly 50 percent more people claimed they attended services when asked the type of question that pollsters ask: “Did you attend religious services in the last week?”

In a more recent study, Hadaway estimated that if the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they attended church in the last week were accurate, about 118 million Americans would be at houses of worship each week. By calculating the number of congregations (including non-Christian congregations) and their average attendance, Hadaway estimated that in reality about 21 percent of Americans attended religious services weekly—exactly half the number who told pollsters they did.

Perhaps most shocking: Philip Brenner concluded:

Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans. The significant difference between the two North American countries and other industrialized nations was the enormous gap between poll responses and time-use studies in those two countries.

The full article is here. The first couple of paragraphs of the article are somewhat misleading, beginning with the question “why do Americans say they are more religious than they actually are?” In fact, church attendance may not correlate to beliefs or self-identification as Christian. The article then goes on to cite percentages who claim to believe in God.

Perhaps even more interesting would be to try to figure out whether rates of church attendance have fluctuated over the centuries. Certainly there’s an assumption that it was very high in the 1950s, but as I recall from reading a bit about the problem, that may have been an aberration.