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.