Three in 10 U.S. adults attend religious services regularly, led by Mormons at 67%
As Americans observe Ramadan and prepare to celebrate Easter and Passover, the percentage of adults who report regularly attending religious services remains low. Three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services every week (21%) or almost every week (9%), while 11% report attending about once a month and 56% seldom (25%) or never (31%) attend.
Among major U.S. religious groups, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also widely known as the Mormon Church, are the most observant, with two-thirds attending church weekly or nearly weekly. Protestants (including nondenominational Christians) rank second, with 44% attending services regularly, followed by Muslims (38%) and Catholics (33%).
Majorities of Jewish, Orthodox, Buddhist and Hindu Americans say they seldom or never attend religious services.
I’m not religious now, but I was raised in a Methodist household and know the dogma and culture.
Church membership and attendance is kind of an interesting phenomenon to me. It’s a form of community that I think has ancient roots and satisfies a social need that we don’t have many other good structures for. A church is a tribe. You don’t have to like everyone in your tribe but they’re your tribe and people enjoy a psychological benefit from clearly distinguishing their ‘us’ and ‘them’. This structure has some modern analogies- sports teams, clubs, professional groups, etc, but a church also has a larger connection to a denomination and a religion. This extends the ‘tribe’ out such that even if you leave your city and have to find an entirely new tribe- you can find a church that will more-or-less treat you as a local member of the tribe.
That’s pretty comforting and helps a lot of people define their life- having a group of people they know will accept you as ‘one of them’. Other modern social structures don’t really have this assumed tribal acceptance feature. Coming into a new team or club from the outside doesn’t share the connection that churches have with other denominations. Granted a lot of that is ceremonial and not reality- churches have in\out groups and even the most polite congregations will quietly ostracize people, but it’s all within the framework of the church\tribe. Not many people ever really get tossed out of the tribe.
I wish we could recapture some of the positive aspects for community building without the dogma, but I’m afraid it’s two sides of the same coin and you really can’t separate the positive community aspects from the dangers of dogma.
Part of the problem though is that out-group exclusion is baked in, and if you wrap that up in anything important, it gets toxic even if the dogma is kinda loose. I mean, why aren’t UU churches absolutely bursting at the seams? In part, it’s because they refuse to reject anyone.
Yeah and weirdly that’s about the only thing I respect about Catholics- they actually can and do tell mofos “you aint Catholic, those aint Catholic beliefs” so they can kind of ‘police their own’. Whereas I can say I’m a Baptist Zoroastrian that believes Jesus was actually Zeus and nobody can tell me that’s not a Baptist belief. Not that I think Catholic dogma makes an sense on its own but at least they don’t allow any old shmuck to fork it.
But yeah I don’t think there’s a way to keep the secular community and drop the religious tribalism, at least not without a Moon Haven style guided cultural reboot but to me that’s less plausible than Jesus actually being Zeus.
Citizenship. You’re literally a citizen of the entire country.