Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries

The attendance rate at religious services is an important variable for the sociology and economics of religion, but long-term and global data are scarce. Retrospective questions from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) allow the construction of rates of religious-service attendance back as far as the 1920s in 66 countries, half from the “Global South.” A number of checks support the reliability of the retrospective information. One exercise demonstrates the consistency between retrospective and contemporaneous survey data when the two overlap. Another procedure shows that the retrospective values are similar when generated from individual ISSP surveys for 1991, 1998, 2008, and 2018; that is, there is no clear dependence of memory on the number of years of recall. The new data document a century-long “Great Religious Divergence” between North and South. We use the data to carry out event studies for effects on religious-service attendance of two major events. Vatican II, in 1962-1965, triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations. In contrast, the endings of Communism in the early 1990s did not systematically affect religious-service attendance. Finally, in a large sample, religious-service attendance responds positively to wars and depressions.