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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For the first time in U.S. history, more than 50% of Americans is Agnostic, Atheist, or Non-practicing.
[b]
Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup's eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.[/b]

https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
[img]https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/1mlbpqjqyuma9i2skgqowa.png[/img][/quote]

[url=https://ibb.co/DMbrN5S][img]https://i.ibb.co/ykR4DWb/1-F1-F85-A8-AF69-4559-A63-C-14-C50705-C174.jpg[/img][/url]

I do not think you are correct. Being a member of a church is different than attending church, you can attend church and not be a member. Also lots of religious ppl do not attend a traditional worship service weekly. [/quote]

NP. Agreed. I think there's three things kind of being conflated here: membership in a church, regular attendance at a church, and religious belief. Obviously they overlap to some degree. Membership is an interesting thing to single out, because membership in civic organizations overall has been declining for years. It's not surprising to see church membership go the way of the Elk's Club, but I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions about religious belief from that.[/quote]

Third poster who was going to post the same thing but you guys beat me to it. When I went to church, 1/3 of the regular attendees weren’t actually “members” for whatever reason. A few years ago at a friend’s church, the pastor said they had some people who had been attending for 20 years or more and still weren’t members, and he said that was OK. Then there are the religious people who don’t like organized religion—lots of them. So it’s a little premature to agree with OP’s claim that half the country is now atheist or agnostic. [/quote]

Still, declining membership suggests that there is also declining attendance of people who are not members.  It's unlikely that people who attended but never joined would be attending in the same or greater numbers, while members were dropping off.

In fact, I bet membership is used as a barometer of religiosity because it is easier to track than attendance. [/quote]

Attendance is super-easy to estimate and head-counting is done every week by lay members or clergy. What’s changed is that the stigma of not attending church has diminished, and millennials and gen X are less affiliated with any of the things their parents were. Neither of these is related to religiosity. [/quote]

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