Religion appears to be on the wane in the United States, and yet millions of people still attend a church, synagogue, mosque, or other house of worship. On any given week, about 45 million Americans attend a service of some kind, finds Chicago Booth’s Devin G. Pope using cell-phone data.
But they may attend far less often than they say they do, he says, as evidenced by a comparison he did between those cell-phone data and survey responses.
Understanding human behavior through surveys is notoriously unreliable in certain contexts. People can have a hard time recounting their own feelings or actions—or they may bend the truth according to what might be socially desirable, in a phenomenon known as social desirability bias.
One area that has relied heavily on surveys is research into religious-service attendance, and Pope set out to assess the accuracy of existing study results. He looked at cell-phone location information from about 2 million people of various religions, analyzing how often those people attended services over a given year (in 2019, so before the pandemic) and comparing the findings with results from previous surveys.
There are discrepancies between what cell phones and surveys reveal, Pope’s research indicates. For example, his cell-phone data showed that only 5 percent of people attended weekly (at least 75 percent of the time), versus 22 percent of people who claimed in surveys to do so. Similarly, 21 percent of people in the sample attended services at least monthly, compared with 30 percent of people who claimed to do so in surveys.
In terms of worship attendance, Pope finds that about 85 percent of regular weekly worshippers in his sample were Protestants. Though fewer in number, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses were more likely to be weekly attenders, while Catholics and Jews were less likely. To be sure, many Orthodox Jews don’t use their phones on the Sabbath and holidays, when they are likely to be in synagogue. Thus they are probably being undercounted in the data, Pope writes. But he determined that the vast majority of people other than Orthodox Jews do take their cell phones to their house of worship.
People who attended services more regularly tended to be in slightly lower income brackets and were more likely to live in the South and Midwest. Among individual states, Utah, with its large Mormon population, ranked highest for attendance. Major holidays, including Christmas and Easter for Christians and Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah for Jews, were likely to increase attendance, while data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveal that bad weather was linked to poorer attendance.
Pope’s final finding taps into the fact that cell-phone data might also reveal connections between multiple behaviors. In his study, more frequent worshippers were less likely to visit other types of establishments, including casinos and strip clubs. While Pope underscores that these are just correlations, he says cell-phone data can identify behaviors that people may be unaware of—or may even feel social pressure to hide.
“Hopefully this new data source allows researchers to not just better understand religious worship, but to better understand the connection of actual behavior and survey data,” he writes. “For example, why does there appear to be so much social desirability bias when it comes to religious worship frequency? When survey data suggest a drop in religious attendance over the last two decades, how much of this drop is actual attendance drop and how much is a change in social desirability (e.g., a greater willingness to admit to not being a regular worshipper)?”
Cell-phone data may also help reveal more about larger behavior patterns, including how religious attendance has been affected by certain news events, such as the sex-abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church. Cell-phone data that are used to measure religious worship might also be used to detect how events such as economic stressors or presidential elections affect behavior.
Devin G. Pope, “Religious Worship Attendance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data,” Working paper, May 2024.
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