Recognizing the distinction between church attendance and prayer, we looked at data from the Association of Religion Data Archives to assess how church membership has evolved over the event’s history — with an eye toward geographic changes. This runs counter to our understanding of how church attendance has evolved. We tend to believe, thanks to research like Pew’s, that church attendance has waned. In fact, the number of counties where church attendance increased since 1952 as a function of population is distributed fairly evenly, with slightly more counties seeing increased density in church attendance than decreases. If we look at the shift since 1952 relative to the 2010 population density in each county, there’s a clear pattern.

Source: Washington Post May 04, 2018 21:32 UTC