The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
It’s hard to overstate the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on houses of worship.
Almost overnight, churches, synagogues, mosques and other gathering spaces had to revamp their weekly routines, first by creating virtual service options and then by finding ways to keep in-person worshippers masked and spread out.
“I do kind of laugh every once in a while and think, ‘OK, God. Thank you very much. We’ll just keep going,’” said the Rev. Martin Diaz, rector of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, about the pandemic’s many challenges to the Deseret News in May 2020.
But surprisingly, given the twists and turns faith leaders like the Rev. Diaz had to weather, the pandemic appears to have had almost no effect on Americans’ worship habits.
The share of U.S. adults who say they generally attend religious services at least once per month dropped just three percentage points from 2019 to 2022, from 33% to 30%, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
“We can pretty clearly say from this data that there were no major shockwaves from the pandemic that totally threw off attendance from the trajectory it was already on,” said Michael Rotolo, a research associate at Pew.
In other words, if someone were to look at a chart of church attendance rates over the past few years with no knowledge of the pandemic, they’d struggle to pinpoint when the unprecedented, earth-shattering event had occurred.
“Thirty-three to 30% percent is a 3 percentage point drop, meaning 1 percentage point per year. That’s right on trend with the declines we were already seeing in attendance” before the pandemic, Rotolo said.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
