This bit, with which they bottom lines their 2022 report showing the decline in religiosity, is interesting:
And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.
They observe that church attendance is falling faster than belief per se, but I wonder if there’s a causal inference to be made. Are people stopping church attendance (say, because they’re turned off by the politics of the church) and eventually stop believing in god once they don’t have that weekly injection of opinion and the social pressures that go with it? You’d need a different kind of poll to look at that.
This bit, with which they bottom lines their 2022 report showing the decline in religiosity, is interesting:
They observe that church attendance is falling faster than belief per se, but I wonder if there’s a causal inference to be made. Are people stopping church attendance (say, because they’re turned off by the politics of the church) and eventually stop believing in god once they don’t have that weekly injection of opinion and the social pressures that go with it? You’d need a different kind of poll to look at that.