The fall of Mass Attendance but Not US Religiosity

On the eve of Easter weekend, Gallup heavyweight Lydia Saad reported Thursday that the rate of regular church attendance by Catholics and Protestants is now equal. That marks a drastic decline in American Catholic religiosity.

One of the vestiges of American political commentary is the discussion of Catholics as a separate and unified voting bloc. That was once true, especially in the days of Joe McCarthy and John F. Kennedy. Religious Catholics today though vote more similar to religious Protestants than fellow Catholics who rarely attend mass.

For scholars of religion, the modern faith fault line is not denomination but church attendance. Weekly attendance is the best, though still imperfect, indicator of whether religion is a driving force behind a voters' politics rather than a peripheral aspect of their lives.

Gallup data shows that 45 percent of Catholics and Protestants say they attended church in the past week. That marks a Catholic attendance decline of 30 percentage points since 1955, while the Protestant rate has slightly risen. In other words, Catholics are no longer the more orthodox body in American life.

This is far larger than politics. At first blush, the finding may seem to substantiate the mistaken impression of late that American religiosity is fading, notably bolstered recently by the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 (ARIS). The more accurate statement is that the rate of secularism is growing while the portion of passively or somewhat religious Americans is declining. On the other hand, the portion of religious Christians is generally unchanged.

True, as ARIS found, the number of Americans who describe themselves as Christian has fallen from 86 to 76 percent between 1990 and 2008 while the secularists have doubled, from 8 to 15 percent of the population. But the study also found no decline and some rise in those identifying as Pentecostal, evangelical or born again. It also found the most significant identification decline in mainline Protestants. It's no coincidence that mainlines are less likely to attend weekly services as well.

The portion of voters who attend church at least once a week has held remarkably stable over the past half century, bobbing around four in ten. This stability is in part due to the slender increase in Protestant weekly attendance, after declining until the mid '60s. Weekly church attenders also have a higher turnout rate than the average voter.

Gallup found that the decline in Catholic religiosity largely occurred between 1955 and 1975 and happened most precipitously among the young. These two decades of course book ended the rise and decline of the counter culture, and no less are the period of particularly Catholic and ethnic white post-war ascendancy to the upper and middle class--only for their household incomes to stagnate by the mid '70s.

Where does this leave us today in political terms however? The God Gap is still a core divide in American politics.

Secular voters have become more firmly Democratic. Last year 67 percent of those who never attend church backed the Democratic nominee, the same as in 2006. But that marks a 7-point rise since 2004 and a 12-point rise since 2002. However in 2000, 61 percent of secular voters favored Al Gore. The secular move toward Democrats is therefore notable but not drastic. Seculars are 16 percent of voters today, a 2 point increase in eight years.

Meanwhile, while Barack Obama made gains with minority regular church attendees, likely due to issues of racial identity and/or immigration, the three in ten voters who are white weekly attenders have remained firm in their politics in recent years: only 29 percent supported the last three Democratic presidential candidates. Fifty-seven percent of born-again or evangelical Christians also backed the Republican in 2008, as they roughly did in 1980 as well.

So even amid Catholics' waning worship, in political terms American religiosity is what it was--a powerful force in U.S. politics

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