Slate repeats old canards about church attendance

 It's a piece that is otherwise generally good, but nothing really new — it's about the closure of ever more "mainline" houses of religious worship in the face of the rise of the Nones, etc.

But, it then goes to a Gallup Poll that claims as late as just before COVID, just over one-third of Americans went to religious service weekly and it was still 40 percent in the early years of this century.

Tosh, as I told the story's author on Twitter. Time and motion studies have shown that self-reporting of church attendance (and perhaps the same for synagogues, mosques, temples, etc.) is somewhat to highly inflated. And, it's sad that these statistics still get trotted out, especially in the context of this story, and what individual congregations, parishes, minyim etc. face — whether or not to try to renovate a religious building, whether or not to move, whether or not to shut down. 

The actual number? Yes, 2020 was the first year of COVID, but it was down to 20 percent then. Even "every week" PLUS "almost every week" was just 30 percent, according to Statistia, and THAT may be high. It was down at about 25 percent at the turn of the century, and some evangelical orgs admit that, and THAT link is from 2007. But, this from 2018 concurs.

Having accurate information might help inform such decisions. (Or it might not; motivated reasoning is still real.)

The Gallup piece then gets worse with a section, a little over halfway down, about worship converting from in-person to virtual. That, too can be fudged. (Unless the congregation takes a roll call via Zoom!)

Nowhere near the first time Gallup's had idiotic polling about religiosity.

The header's central word, "canards," is not too harsh. Henry Graber had done more than a modicum of other research for the story, but then just accepted Gallup's words as gospel truth, literal pun intended.

Beyond the issue of whether individual groups of worshipers should shut down or not, such misreporting overstates the influence of churches on American life and culture, and allows religious right churches to run with that.