(Graphs about Religion. RYAN BURGE).
Sometimes, an important high-level finding warrants some additional reflection. I have several of these rolling around in my head at any given point. The one I wanted to zero in on is from a post that ran over a year ago on this Substack. Simply put—Catholic Mass attendance is way down. About half of all self-identified Catholics said that they attended Mass nearly every week in 1972. In the most recent data, it’s about half that rate (~25%).
How is that possible? Well, when you track a statistic like that over the course of fifty years, there are two primary drivers of such a drastic trend line.
- Catholics just stopped attending Mass as they got older. This theory is really an individualized one. A couple million Catholics go from weekly attendance to yearly attendance, and the overall Mass attendance rate just plummets.
- Generational replacement. Older Catholics are more religious than younger Catholics. Over time, the older devout Catholics die off and are replaced by younger adult Catholics who are much less active in their faith. The result is the same—Catholic Mass attendance declines significantly.
Well, I wanted to try and figure out if that second explanation actually makes any sense in the data because it’s much harder to test the first explanation, honestly. You would need panel data, which I explain in detail here about why that’s so hard to get: