worship attendance

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In terms of pews, who is more likely to wrestle with mental illness? Answer: liberals

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In terms of pews, who is more likely to wrestle with mental illness? Answer: liberals

It’s bizarre to even type these words, but the COVID-19 pandemic began almost five years ago in the United States. Lockdowns were instituted in March of 2020.

That’s such a weird time capsule for lots of us. I know that we all could write a book about the emotions we experienced and how that period of social isolation impacted our lives.

But, I’m a social scientist, and for all the death and destruction that COVID-19 brought to the United States and every other country on Earth, it also gave us a tremendous window into how folks handled mental stress in near real time.

In fact, the Pew Research Center put a poll into the field in late March of 2020. That was less than a week after many states began to shut down schools and businesses as a mitigation strategy for the spread of COVID-19. They made the data publicly available for download.

I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s Substack over the break, specifically this post: “Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.” He highlights a specific question, “Has a doctor or healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” His post is mostly about topics like gender, age and partisanship.

However, the Pew poll also asks about religion — so let’s get to digging.

I broke the sample down into liberals, moderates and conservatives and then again by larger religious tradition. Here’s the share who said that they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition.


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The rise of singleness and how organized religion is being impacted, big time

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The rise of singleness and how organized religion is being impacted, big time

A few months ago, I wrote a post about falling marriage rates and the possible link to religion: “Marriage rates are falling. Is the decline of religion to blame? (behind paywall).

But when I read over those graphs I think I had a big blind spot — gender.

Obviously marriage rates aren’t the same for men and women for a wide variety of reasons. For instance, an article in the New York Times in late July was focused on how online communities have sprouted up to help other women know that specific men they find on dating apps are safe to be around.

Dan Cox, from the American Enterprise Institute did some polling and found that younger women (18-29) were significantly more likely to report that they were single in 2022 compared to 2020 (45% vs 38%). And a book published in 2015 called, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” found that educated women just didn’t have that many options when it came to finding a potential mate because the share of men going to college has declined sharply in recent decades.

So, I wanted to explore that gender gap on marriage a bit. But also I wanted to see how all of that related back to religion.

I think it goes without saying that lots of people have found their current spouse at a house of worship. But is being single driving women further away from religion than unmarried men? These are questions worth some analysis and reflection.

Let’s start with the broadest question: are women more likely to report that they have never been married compared to men? 

In 2008, about 20% of all women in the sample reported that they had never been married — it was 30% of all men. That’s not a small gap and it’s persisted for the entire length of the Cooperative Election Study. Both trend lines have slowly edged up every year.

However, I would be remiss to point out that the line for women has stayed relatively stable beginning in about 2018 when 26-27% say that they were never married.

For men, the number continues to climb. In the most recent data collected from 2022, about 37% of men say that they have never been married. The overall conclusion is pretty unmistakable: singleness is on the rise for both men and women, but women are still 8-10 points less likely to never be married.

This is clearly a function of age, of course. Older people have just had more opportunities to get married compared to younger ones.


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Thinking about a sort of 'religious' question: Why do atheists have so few children?

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Thinking about a sort of 'religious' question: Why do atheists have so few children?

One thing I love about studying religion is that it impacts every aspect of social life. How people vote, where they live, what kind of jobs they pursue, are influenced in some way by their religious beliefs and behaviors.

One choice that is clearly shaped by religion is when (and if) adults have children and how large they want their families to be.

In the United States, the fertility rate in 2008 was 2.06 children per woman. In 2023, it’s projected to be 1.78 children per woman. Forty-nine out of 50 states had a lower fertility rate in 2020 compared to 2010 (North Dakota was the only one to buck the trend.)

Obviously, there are a ton of factors that lead to a drop in fertility. Economics is usually considered to be a leading culprit for a drop in fertility. The Great Recession is supposed to lead to an enrollment cliff in higher education in the next five years because people decided to delay pregnancy.

But here’s another explanation that may be playing a noticeable role in the drop in American fertility: the increasing secularization of the United States.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all encourage their adherents to marry and have children. But lots of Americans don’t adhere to those faiths anymore. I wrote an entire book (actually two of them) about the rising number of Americans who reject religion entirely or, at least, organized forms of faith.

Does this actually matter, though? Do we see in the data a difference in parenting rates for atheists compared to Latter-day Saints, for instance?


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Latest angles on Trump-era 'evangelicals,' including questions about the vague label itself

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Latest angles on Trump-era 'evangelicals,' including questions about the vague label itself

This Memo concerns not some breaking story but a potential scenario about U.S. "evangelical" Protestants that reporters on both the politics and religion beats should be watching.

For the umpteenth time we revisit the definition of this vibrant but challenged movement and its relation to a Republican Party that the secularized Donald Trump continues to dominate.

(See The Guy's effort at defining evangelicalism here, and remember that most media discussions involve White evangelicals only, since Black and Hispanic evangelicals are very different politically. And click here for a wave of tmatt posts on this topic.)

GetReligion team member Ryan Burge, an energetic political scientist who posts interesting data most days of the week, tweeted this chart on Sept. 16th showing how self-identified evangelicals described their own church attendance over a dozen years in Cooperative Election Study polling.

There's a clear developing trend. As recently as 2008, 58.6% of self-identified evangelicals said they worshiped weekly or more often, but less than half (49.9%) by 2020.

Over the same years, evangelicals who "seldom" or "never" attended grew from 16.1% to 26.7%. The slide did not begin with the Trump presidency but was already at work, since in 2016 the weekly-or-mores were down to 52.9% and seldom-or-nevers up to 22.6%.

The Guy considers attendance a good barometer of devotion, as a historically central value inside the evangelical subculture. We can speculate that similar downward slides might be occurring with other bonding activities in the evangelical tradition such as adult Bible classes, prayer meetings, small groups, daily devotions, evangelistic revivals and charity projects.

The numbers surely reflect the nation's 21st Century secularization. But Burge reaches the provocative conclusion that they mean evangelical "is not a religious term anymore." (What substitute word would suffice? There's a story theme for you.) Certain movement insiders have argued that a different label is needed because the term has taken on such a heavy Republican -- and Trumpublican -- flavor


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