New Data on How Many in U.S. Attend Church Every Sunday

All the data on religious participation I've ever seen has been bases on questionnaires. We've all be queried by those doing questionnaire research. We've been asked by phone, on our computers and from knocks on our doors. We all know the weaknesses of doing this. When we are asked how much we eat, what we spend our money on, how often we pray or how often we go to church our answers might not be completely candid. 

Something new has come along. It is tracking people's locations by cell phone data. If we know how many cell phones went presents at a specific location at a specific time we have a good idea of how many people were there and when they were there.

When asked how if they attend church often, that is most Sundays (or other designated religious day), the percentage of the population that is in a church each Sunday has been around 20% for several years. A pundit recently wrote that Christian numbers were holding steady because regular church attendance is holding steady. Twenty per cent is not an insignificant number. Cell phone data, however, puts per centage of the public that goes to church on any given holy day at 5%. This means when people are asked how often they attend church they over-state their frequency.

We can all speculate on why people over-state how often they attend church or how often they pray. It could be they want to present themselves to others as "better people" than they are actually. But it also could be they just tell themselves they attend church a lot, believe that and never challenge their own self image.

I've been watching the You Tube channel, "Mormon Stories" which included stories of both Mormons and other demanding conforming branches of Christianity like charismatics. A woman mentions her journey out of religion and mentioned what happened during covid. She said, "Suddenly, a million or so people who had gone to church every Sunday were doing other things Sunday mornings. They found doing other things was quite pleasant and some never returned."

I know I'm being sarcastic but when a religion makes up stuff about a virgin birth, coming to life after being dead and an invisible life after people are dead, I really am not inclined to believe their statistics on church attendance or anything else.