I think the more likely answer is that the stereotype of most ppl going to church in the ‘50s is not based on reality, as the actual statistics seem to show. This tends to be the case with many stereotypes and assumptions about life in the “good ol days”.
[Moderating]
Again, bring data or other factual information if you’re going to post. Next violator gets a Warning.
According to Gallup itself, via The Guardian, they’ve been asking this question: “Do you happen to be a member of a church or synagogue or mosque” since the 1930s, and the results are clear: a solid 73 percent said “yes” in the 1950s, down to 47 percent in 2020. Now, membership and attendance are two different things, and one number can and will be significantly higher than the other, congregation to congregation.
U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.
As for the OP’s question of how those who did and did not go to church could be distinguished, I’m just spitballing here, but I imagine a man whose livelihood depended on a lot of social contacts – a contractor, for example, or an insurance salesman – would probably have a less-successful business than his churchgoing peers because a churchgoer could cultivate contacts inside his congregation. Similarly, I suppose, a schoolchild whose family didn’t regularly attend church might have fewer friends and get ostracized on the playground.
I fear a Warning, so I won’t discuss the anecdotal situation with my mother and her family in the 1950s, but it’s illustrative.
I can give one example of this, because we recently ran the numbers for our congregation.
Our average weekly church attendance is about 115. Our membership, however, is 323. We have a “hard core” of 60-70 members (and a few nonmember congregants) who attended more than 40 times over the past year, although five of them “attended” via Zoom which obviously wouldn’t have been the case in the 1950s. Just above half of the remainder attend more than half of the time, and the rest of a typical week’s attendance are visitors and some members who come less than half the time (often due to health issues).
My guess, and it’s just a WAG, would be that a traditional church like a Catholic or Presbyterian one, would tend to have a higher membership than attendance, because the people who would belong to such a church tend to derive benefit or meaning from a formal association with a congregation. Further, such members may skew older and thus, health and/or transportation issues could hinder regular attendance. By contrast, a freewheeling, modern, more seeker-friendly evangelical congregation may have a higher attendance than membership, as these places tend to eschew formality and the people who attend feel no real compulsion to formalize membership.
Probably not, because there are so many different reasons. I mean first, you have the issue of what question was actually asked - even if I normally go to Mass every Sunday, if I was on a cruise last Sunday and there was no priest , I would have to answer no if I was asked if attended church in the last 7 days. Then there’s the issue of different religions - some require attendance and some don’t. Then there’s culture- in some cultures, church is for women and men only attend for weddings and funerals etc. Perhaps single people living on their own are less likley to attend.
Rockwell was a master at creating art that told a full short story. His museum in Stockbridge is a knockout. He also was a master at observing society. All his short stories capture a bit of contemporary American culture.
According to material I’ve read over the years - sociological rather than statistical - many fathers assigned church-going to the mother, included in her role of raising the kids. Many factors played into this. Suburban families like this one were still minorities. Working-class men often had six-day work weeks and rested on Sundays. (Or on Saturdays, but Rockwell’s dream America was Christian.) They may also have gone out with the “boys” on Saturday and still be feeling the effects. Suburban fathers typically had shorter work weeks, but binge boozing played an equally huge role. Not every family followed this pattern, but it was significant enough to warrant comment.
Women have traditionally been church-goers is far greater numbers than men. The Feminization of Christianity touches on this. Cotton Mather complained about it in 1692.
“There are far more Godly Women in the World than Godly Men…I have seen it without going a Mile from home, That in a Church of Three or Four Hundred Communicants, there are but a few more than One Hundred Men, all the Rest are Women.”
But:
The only time the sex ratio of church attendance was commensurate with the population at large was in the post-war period of the 1950s and 60s, when attending a mainline congregation became part of the fabric of suburban life for men and women alike.
The question again becomes, do we trust the numbers?
Not really. I like Setting the Record Straight – Mass Attendance Has Dropped, But Not as Much as We May Think. Reflections on a Recent CARA Report, which is commentary on a similar piece that - pulling the circle together - uses that Rockwell painting as its launch point.
Some churches might not even have a formalized membership list. But given a survey question of “Are you a member of a church?”, I don’t think that respondents would necessarily restrict their answer to formal, official membership. I would expect that most people would interpret “member of a church” as meaning that there’s one particular church that they attend regularly, when they attend anywhere (even if only twice per year).
Which of course raises the issue that the error bars on any survey result obtained from a vague question are larger than the error bars on a more precise version of the same question.
We might assume that most people will take an expansive view of a vague question couched in vague terms. But we’d be guessing about that.
The term that you quote is “attended church at least once a week”. That implies that someone who went to church 49 times a year would count in the 51%, even though by any reasonable estimation, they’d count as a pretty avid churchgoer.
I can think of LOTS of reasons that, even in the 1950s, might preclude someone from attending church at least once a week. Work-related stuff, military stuff, Boy Scout stuff, illness, vacations, and so forth. All of those might cause someone to miss a few Sundays of church, and if they’re not so motivated to go on some other day of the week, they’d get lumped into the 51%.
Personally, I find it astounding that something like a third of the population goes to church at least once a week every week. Even the most devout people I know don’t manage to go every single week at least once a week, and miss a few weeks here and there.
I, the OP, am a formerly religious person (from the age of 12 to the age of 27, water under the bridge as I have been an atheist for most of the ensuing 18 years). As a young adult, I attended church every Sunday for the Divine Liturgy (Orthodox Sunday mass), making exceptions only rarely for occasional Sunday / all weekend events, IIRC with my father confessor’s blessing. I also tried to attend on various church feast days and, while not every single week, went to Saturday vespers quite regularly.
That’s what the fear of divine punishment does to you.
Let me put on my market researcher hat for a moment, and try to stay on topic. I’ve been working in market research, including writing surveys and analyzing the results, for nearly 40 years.
The wording of this is, as had been pointed out previously in the thread, clear on the one hand (i.e., it truly frames it as “in the last seven days”), but also leaving itself subject to interpretations or answers which may not exactly match behavior.
As noted, if a respondent answered truthfully, they would answer “no” to that, even if they were, usually, a diligent churchgoer, because of illness, being out of town last Sunday, etc. And, conversely, I can certainly see that someone who usually attends church, but happened to miss last Sunday, would have decided to answer “yes,” even if they had to miss last Sunday’s service due to being sick.
If, as a researcher, my goal was to understand who are (and are not) regular attendees of religious services, I might word it as: “During a typical week, do you attend a religious service, such as at a church, synagogue, mosque, etc.?” I might also consider construction the question to give people options to answer “how frequently do you attend,” versus a yes-no response (i.e., “once a week or more often,” “a few times a month,” “once a month,” etc.).
I, too, am a little surprised that, even in the 1950s, when there were, as we understand it, strong societal norms around being a believer, that the percentages in those polls are only around 50%.
In addition, there’s the lurking question of whether some of the respondents felt compelled to give a socially-acceptable “yes” answer when their actual answer would be “no.” In the '50s and '60s, most such polls and surveys were done face-to-face (often door-to-door), or maybe by mail, or possibly telephone. There is a phenomenon in which some people don’t feel comfortable giving a truthful response to such a question, when the truthful answer may paint them in a negative or embarrassing light – and that tendency is stronger when you’re talking to, and looking at, an actual person, even if they are a stranger.
To get back to one of the OP’s questions:
If you had access to the original poll data, you certainly could. Even back then, pollsters would have been asking respondents demographic questions (gender, age, income level, education level, race/ethnicity, etc.).
When you look at similar modern research, by groups like the Pew Institute, their online reports for their studies (and they do several studies about faith and religion) show breakouts by those demographic groupings, among others.
It’s certainly possible that the original data from decades ago, with those demographic breaks in some sort of tabulated tables, still exist somewhere in Gallup’s data library. But, there’s probably no way for a layman (or anyone else without access to Gallup’s proprietary data) could suss it out today, and answer this question for the OP. Anything else will come down to speculation and educated guesses.
And a truthful respondent would also answer “yes” if they usually don’t, but just happened to have an unusual week and did this time. When you average over all of the many people taking the survey, instead of getting a number for how many attend “typically” (without any hard guidance of what “typically” means), you get a weighted average, weighted by how often people attend. Looked at another way, it’s a measure of how full the churches are, without regard for whether the lack of fullness is due to people habitually or occasionally staying home.
Trying to pin down a definition for “typically” can also lead to misunderstandings. I saw a survey of this sort recently where the answer options included “I typically attend more than once per week”, and a lot of folks here interpreted that as “twice or more per week”. But it’s also consistent with “every Sunday, plus a handful of other holy days each year”, i.e., in most weeks, the respondent does not attend twice.
I’m not at all surprised. As I mentioned in my hidden post upthread, church attendance is something that basically never came up in my (secular, public) grade school or other social venues. The closest that religion entered into that life was “under God” in the pledge of allegiance. Plus obligatory Christmas festivities. In the medium-sized city where I grew up, where I lived in a single-family-home residential area, we didn’t even know if our neighbors went to church. There seemed to me to be zero social pressure to do so, nor to discuss whether one did or not.
Absolutely, and part of the art of survey and question design is creating questions (and responses) that are as clear and unambiguous as possible, as well as to give respondents a range of responses which covers most, if not all, possibilities.
That said, it’s quite challenging to create questions that are 100% foolproof – there will always be someone who will misinterpret or misunderstand a well-crafted question – but this is why, when I’ve been developing surveys, I’ve nearly always tried to have at least one additional experienced researcher review what I’ve written, to make sure that I haven’t missed something.
I’m certainly no expert, but I have written questionnaires and done door-to-door and telephone surveying. I’m so old I wrote Fortran programs to tabulate survey results from punch cards. The problems with phrasing questions to elicit the desired answer have been subject to huge amounts of research. I thought the Gallup wording was a particularly good example of minimizing the penumbra, so to speak, especially if the same question has been asked since 1938.
The flip side is probably more disturbing. Pollsters put enormous effort into getting good answers. Reporters seem to put little to no effort into properly interpreting poll results. The vast majority of articles on polls - and I’ve read zillions over the last 50 years because I’m a nut - get polls wrong in horrendously consistent ways. All too often, literal questions like this one are inflated so they answer questions beyond what the actual data reveals. Perhaps even more often, the demographics and other breakdowns necessary for understanding are left out. About 99% of contemporary articles about Trump banner headlines about approval and disapproval but fail to break out political affiliation. That Democrats and independents increasingly disapprove is not surprising. What’s important is that Republicans have seldom varied from 90% approval, but usually that data requires going to the full results page, if that can be found.
If professionals fail at this basic level, then ordinary interested readers probably lack any ability to judge what the numbers mean, if anything at all, and use them indiscriminately to confirm their own perceptions and biases. Democracy gets hurt, also at a basic level. Insiders who fund private polls receive information that public polling seldom produces.
The OP’s question is a really good one. Someone somewhere must have better answers than I could find. The reality is that much good information never becomes public. All the resources of the internet are useless if they’re hidden in somebody’s archives.