Thursday, April 05, 2007

Church attendance rates by denomination

(Part 3 in an 8 post series on Christian church attendance)

There is no particular reason to assume that attendance rates are the same across denominations of Christianity in the United States. To examine that, I divided the Christians in the GSS into three categories: Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, and Catholic. (A fourth group, Black Protestant, did not have enough members to analyze here). Here are the attendance rates by denomination, in both tabular and graphical form.

Evangelical Mainline Catholic

Weekly 47.1 28.2 35.3
Monthly 18.4 18.6 16.7
Yearly 25.3 40.2 36.5
Never 9.1 12.9 11.4

As shown, there is a lot of variation in church attendance by the type of Christian. Nearly half of all Evangelical Protestants attend church weekly while only about a quarter of Mainline Protestants do. Over a third of the Catholics attend weekly.

Next: Attendance rates by denomination over time

1 comment:

Brad Wright said...

That would be another way of thinking about nominal Christians and denominations... it's not just how many nominal Christians are in each denomination, but how they differ.

Cultural Catholicism seems stronger than with Protestantism.?