Rural people aren't more Christian than urban folks, a new survey shows what influences church attendance

The idea that rural Americans are more devout Christians than their urban counterparts might be popularly accepted, "but the numbers just don't support that stereotype," reports Sarah Melotte of The Daily Yonder. "Factors like income, race, partisanship, age, and education influence religious attendance more than geography does."

That doesn't mean religious people don't live in rural areas, but the picture of pious, rural residents vs. secular urbanites isn't accurate. Melotte reports: "Only 54% of rural Americans identify as Christian, according to the Cooperative Election Study , a 50,000-respondent national annual survey. That's about the same share of the metropolitan population that identifies as such. About 51% of respondents who live in metro counties said they were Christian, while 36% of both rural and metro people said they were atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular."

Even when residents identify with a faith, it "does not directly equate to religious-service attendance," Melotte writes. "Fifty-seven percent of rural respondents said they either never or seldom attend church or another type of religious service, while only a quarter attend at least once a week. Attendance among metropolitan respondents isn't much different."

"Despite stereotypes, geography doesn't do a good job of telling us who participates in organized worship each week," Melotte explains. "Religious attendance instead falls along other demographic lines." Click on graphics to enlarge.

Partisanship: "The biggest differences in attendance are between Democrats and Republicans, not rural and urban," Melotte writes. "Forty-one percent of rural Democrats and 40% of urban Democrats say they never go, while never-attenders among Republicans only comprise about 21% of both rural and urban respondents.

Income also plays a substantial role. "Unemployed and lower income people go to religious services less often," Melotte reports. "Only about 15% of both rural and urban unemployed respondents said they go at least once a week, compared to the quarter of total rural and urban respondents who said they go that often."

Race is also a factor. "White respondents go to religious services less often than people of color," Melotte adds. "Only 24% of white rural respondents and 21% of white urban respondents attend at least once a week, while almost 30% rural people of color and 26% urban people of color go that often. In rural and urban areas, 28% of non-white respondents never attend, compared to the 35% of rural white and 37% of urban white people who never attend.

Church attender age is mixed. Melotte reports, "People who attend religious services at least once a week are slightly older than other respondents, especially in rural areas. The median age of people who attend at least once a week is 57 years old in rural areas, and 55 years old in urban areas. . . . People who attend once or twice a month, on the other hand, are younger than the other groups. In rural areas, the median age of people who attend once or twice a month is 49 years old. In urban areas, the median age is 46 years old." 

Educational level and attendance is a bit of an outlier. "In the previous examples, we saw that the gap between urban and rural attendance was insignificant compared to the gap between other demographic groups," Melotte reports. "But when it comes to education, we see a bigger divergence between rural and urban people and their rates of attendance.

"For rural respondents, the higher level of education, the more they attend religious services. But educational attainment among urban respondents doesn't have as big of an impact on attendance as it does on rural ones."

 All graphs by Sarah Melotte, The Daily Yonder, from CES national survey data collected by the Harvard Dataverse.