I’m amazed you don’t know, since the subject has been thoroughly covered in The Atlantic. 
I don’t believe in the whole premise behind god worship, but I like to believe that if I did, I would still find churches to be monuments to excess, exploitation and intimidation and would not attend. I have to believe that at least part of the Christian demographic feels the same way.
I can see the appeal of community and fellowship. But as someone who has attended church with my Mother-in-law twice in the last five years (and none in the previous 40 or so) I can tell you that attending church for the other purposes is pure hell for us non-believers. People are having what they perceive as serious conversations about a guy who was conceived immaculately, and later died, but then rose from the dead. Plus a lot of other obvious crap. So, joining together to worship insane ideas does not foster any sense of community I’m interested in.
I’d be happy to join a bowling league, however.
I am a little more generous. Even as a non-believer, I think the churches fill some of the social voids our modern world has by providing people a sense of community and connection with others - real, not virtual. Beyond that sort of thing, yeah, organized religion runs the gamut from harmless community gathering to swindling the faithful to outright hatred and persecution of others.
My church is nothing like what you imagine. But you do you.
So when we (Lutheran church - ELCA) came back from COVID, our attendance was abysmal - now granted we came back later than some other churches and mandated masks for way longer, but it was down to like 40 on a Sunday vs. 70-80 before. Though on Easter Sunday, it was amazingly full - around 100. And I know some of that are people who go twice a year (or for nostalgia), but more than a few talked about coming back. So who knows at this point.
I’m involved in a club for writers, which is part of a network of such clubs around California. We went virtual when Covid hit, and stayed that way, but some clubs went back to physical meetings and report a decline in attendance also. I think people got out of the habit of going to physical meetings.
It depends on where you are. In the Bay Area there are so many non-Christians that I’ve experienced the expectation of religion someone in the South might have. And I worked in tech so not much expectation there either, and the percentage of Christians was even lower than in the general public.
A lot of it might be that atheism is more respectable than it used to be, and the role models of prominent atheists help people find they are not alone. Not being gay I can’t say for sure, but I think there are a lot of similarities between coming out of the atheist and gay closets.
So that might explain some of the increase in self-reported atheists, and we can’t know for sure the number who are atheists but are scared to say so, even on a poll. (Which might be also afraid to admit it to themselves.)
I don’t need your permission.
Such asperity!
You know he played the Marlboro Man, right?
Amazement seems an awfully strong emotion. I don’t remember reading that article in The Atlantic, which I do like and which often inspires my threads…
The church I attended as a child had other purposes. And while it didn’t have a bowling league, it did have a curling league (we’re in Canada). Sometimes, I think our family only attended Sunday services so I could be in Cubs and Scouts, my sister could attend a dance class, Dad could go curling, Mom could play bridge, and so on. Mind, it was a very inoffensive Protestant sect, without all the “You need Jesus! Jesus will save you! Have you been saved?” crap that more evangelical/pentecostal churches had, and continue to have, in every “extracurricular activity” outside of Sunday services. Hell (heh!), we didn’t even have a Bible study class, or midweek prayers, or anything other than an hour-long Sunday morning service.
Our church was basically a social club, where membership required an hour of time on a Sunday morning, and a couple of bucks in the collection plate. I ended up singing in the choir for years–hey, free singing lessons, because they never passed around the collection plate among the choir.
Point is, that not all churches try to ram religion down your throat, even in their “extracurricular activities.” For some, community and fellowship is the goal, not conversions.
Many “nones” are not atheist or agnostic; they may believe in a higher power but do not practice a specific religion.
Moderating:
Please comment on the content, and not on the commentators.
Sorry, but I felt that the rude and dismissive comment needed a response.
This report provides good insight and data on the topic WRT the pandemic:
There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.
At the same time, the share of U.S. adults who take part in religious services in some way (in person, virtually or both) in a given month has remained remarkably steady since the early days of the pandemic – even though how they participate has shifted dramatically.
It takes two people working 40+ hours a week to have a roof over your head and food. I don’t think people just stopped wanting to go out and have a few beers with their friends on a Wednesday or dancing on Friday. When the local butcher could have a house, 5 kids, and a stay at home wife. People had evenings and weekends to do stuff.
I tried to find studies about how the amount of leisure time has changed. The trend since post WWII has been a substantial jump in available hours, followed by a modest trend of increase. Not a decrease. Much of the increase has to do with less time managing households – less cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping, sewing, mending, growing and putting up food. Most of that fell to women but men are also much less likely to repair and build stuff like machines, cars, and their own homes than they once were.
Similarly, people are far less likely to create their own entertainments as a social group ; one can think of many now moribund pastimes of previous generations, and most of them were social, like local dances, pick up games, fairs, etc. I think churchgoing – mainly a social function, for many – falls into that general pattern.
People are now much more likely to be pure consumers of entertainment, not actors or creators.
I don’t think the amount of available leisure time (whether more or less) has much to do with church attendance. People do have enough time to go to church, if they want to go. There are just other things they would rather do. Why the percentage is increasing of people who would rather do something else with their free time is a question that I don’t think anyone has answered. Speculation is fun but inconclusive.