I know a guy, a committed church member, who missed his own grandchild's baptism. It was far away, on a Sunday that was a busy one for his own church. So he felt compelled to skip the trip and go to church.
This impressed me. It's hard to imagine such a thing at the church where I work. There, a lot of people just show up when they're free, maybe twice a month. People are excited about the church, and many say they'd like to show up more. But for whatever reason, they don't.
This new PRRI study on church attendance is based on a pretty clever idea: ask the same questions by phone and online, and measure the gap between the results. It's about "social desirability bias," the pressure people feel to say the right thing when they're talking to an actual person. And when it comes to church attendance, this is evidently a very real thing: people are more likely to tell a person they go to church frequently than to click that box on a screen.
