(RNS) — At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every congregation in the United States shut down, at least for a while.
For some Americans, that was the push they needed to never come back to church.
A new report, which looked at in-person worship attendance patterns before the beginning of the pandemic and in 2022, found that a third of those surveyed never attend worship services. That’s up from 25% before the start of the pandemic.
The pandemic has likely led people who already had loose ties to congregations to leave, said Dan Cox, one of the authors of the new study and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Fewer Amricans Attend Religious Services Following Pandemic” Graphic courtesy of American Enterprise Institute
“These were the folks that were more on the fringes to begin with,” said Cox. “They didn’t need much of a push or a nudge, to just be done completely.”
As part of the 2022 American Religious Benchmark Survey, researchers from the American Enterprise Institute and NORC at the University of Chicago asked 9,425 Americans about their religious identity and worship attendance. Those surveyed had answered the same questions between 2018 and early 2020.
Researchers then compared answers from between 2018 and 2020 to answers from 2022 to understand how attendance patterns changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are looking at the attendance patterns and religious identity of the exact same people at two different time periods,” said Cox.
The new study focused on attendance at in-person services versus online services. While some people — including the immunocompromised and their families — may still be attending digital services, measuring online engagement is “messier,” said Cox, and very different from in-person involvement. For example, he said, tuning in to a service for a few minutes is much different than going to a service in person.
The report also noted the decline in attendance most affected groups that had already started to show a decline before the pandemic — particularly among younger adults, who were already lagging before the pandemic and showed the steepest drop-off since.
“Liberals, Young Americans Saw Greates Declines in Worship Attendance” Graphic courtesy of American Enterprise Institute
Liberal Americans (46%), those who have never married (44%) and those under 30 (43%) are most likely to skip worship service altogether and saw the largest declines in attendance rates. By contrast, conservatives (20%), those over 65 (23%) or those who are married (28%) are less likely to say they never attend services and saw less drop-off.
One in 4 Americans (24% ) said in 2022 that they attend regularly — which includes those who attend nearly every week or more often. Another 8% attend at least once a month — for a total of 32% who attend regularly or occasionally. That was down slightly from a total of 36% in 2020.
