23 December 2010

Church Attendance And Survey Accuracy

About 22% of Americans actually attend church in any given week. About 40% say that they do, however, when asked that question in surveys, and that data is often used to make the case that Americans are much more religious than people in other countries. The great exaggeration of church attendance is long standing, well documented and largely limited to Americans and Canadians. In reality, "Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans."

The number of people who actually attend church in any given week is only a little larger than the number of people who claim no religious affiliation.

1 comment:

Maju said...

Thanks for an interesting piece of info.

I understand that in the USA there's a lot of social pressure on religious affiliation or at least pretense of faith ("God" is a word filling too often the discourse). Something that is not real over here anymore.