Denison Forum
Dr. Jim Dension
How many Americans say they attend religious services each week?
How many actually do?
According to Gallup polling, 21 percent of us say we attend religious services every week; 41 percent say they attend at least monthly.
However, the data says otherwise.
Devin Pope, a business school professor at the University of Chicago, studied cell phone geodata from over two million Americans to examine their behavior with respect to religion. He found that only 5 percent attended services weekly, and only 21 percent attended monthly. As an article reporting Pope’s study headlined, “People who say they go to religious services weekly are probably lying.”
The story raises a cultural question: Why would so many people claim to attend religious services so much more often than they actually do?