Cross-National Trends in Religious Service Attendance: Table 1.

Abstract

The nature of religious change and the future of religion have been central questions of social science since its inception. But empirical research on this question has been quite American-centric, encouraged by the conventional wisdom that the United States is an outlier of religiosity in the developed world, and, more pragmatically, by the availability of survey data. The dramatic growth in the number and reach of cross-national surveys over the past two decades has offered a corrective. These data have allowed research on religious trends in the United States, Canada, and Europe, putting American trends into comparative relief. This research synthesis reviews the past quarter century of cross-national comparative survey research on religious behavior, focusing on religious service attendance as a commonly measured behavior that is arguably more equivalent across societies and cultures than other measures of religiosity. The lack of evidence for religious revival is highlighted, noting instead declining rates of attendance in the United States and Canada, and either declining rates or low "bottomed-out" stability in Western Europe, most of Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Finally, countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are discussed to the extent that research allows, before a call for future research-in these places in particular-is made in order to correct for the Western and Christian focus of much of the research on cross-national religious trends.

Religious Change among Cohorts in Eastern Europe: A Longitudinal Analysis of Religious Practice and Belief in Formerly Communist Countries

“…As reported in the theoretical section of this paper, many studies have noted a revival of church attendance, especially for Romania, Bulgaria, and the Russian Federation (Pollack 2003;Burkimsher 2014;Brenner 2016). Many other studies (e.g.…”

“…Only in three countries -Romania, Russia, and Bulgaria -we can observe some evidence of increasing attendance (Brenner 2016).…”

“…This is, of course, a general picture, and we can pinpoint the main possible exceptions: Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria (Brenner 2016;Burkimsher 2014). The literature hints at this idea of diverging trends, especially in Tomka's (2010) discussion of an interpretation of religion that deviates from tradition by becoming more diverse and individualistic.…”

An empirical note on the long-run relationship between education and religiosity in Christian countries

“…As can be seen in Figure 1, church attendance declined in all countries in the sample between the years 1925 and 1990, but the decline was not steady: in some countries, such as Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States, church attendance increased over long periods despite increases in secondary education. Piecing together the evidence from more recent time periods also suggests that while several countries exhibit declining trends in attendance rates, some (few) countries show either mixed or even upward trends ( Brenner 2016). Some authors even claim, based largely on anecdotal evidence, that we are now experiencing a "desecularization of the world" ( Berger 1999).…”

Religion in Public Health‐Care Institutions: U.S. and U.K. Perspectives

“…In other categories of our scheme, there are equivalent examples of faith's influence and penetration into health‐care settings. And yet, given the greatly different rates of religious participation (Brenner ) between the two countries, one would expect the “take‐up” rates for these services to be quite different, which easily suggests a series of research questions for comparative research on the prevalence of these forms in the two countries, as well as their impact on both providers and consumers of healthcare. Where there are equivalent forms for the two countries, e.g., the formal faith role of chaplains in acute care hospitals, one might compare the numbers of chaplains on staff per patient bed in the two countries or the content of the interactions of chaplains with patients (Idler et al.…”