[britemp]

‘America is only 10 to 25 years behind Europe in this regard.’

Really? I can see five European countries who attend church more than America?

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/rel_chu_att-religion-church-attendance

[Wallace T.]

I must question some of the numbers in this chart. First off, Nigeria is 50% Muslim, making a church attendance figure of 89% rather unrealistic, unless mosque attendance is counted. Ireland's numbers look excessively high as well. While high church attendance numbers may have been characteristic of traditionally Catholic Ireland until about 40 years ago, the effects of secularism, liberal theology in the Catholic Church, and recent immigration from other countries (presently one out of ten residents of Ireland is of foreign origin) make the claim of 84% church attendance very suspect, certainly on a weekly basis. OTOH, the statistic for 2% church attendance in Russia seems low. This number may be based on a citation from the Russian Interior Ministry, which I found in Wikipedia, that said weekly church attendance is less than 2%. Even if his number on weekly attendance is accurate, the other statistics, including the one for the United States, may be based on monthly attendance.

Within the United States, there are wide variances in church attendance, with the figures in the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rocky Mountain states (excluding Utah) and the New England states being quite low, vs. much higher figures in the South and the Plains states. Dallas and Nashville are far different than Seattle or Boston, as Poland and rural Ireland are from Moscow, Berlin, or London. Furthermore, of the largest Western European nations listed (Germany is oddly absent from the list) in the EU, only Italy has a church attendance rate (45%) comparable to that of the United States. Look at France (21%), Britain (27%), and Spain (25%), and you can determine that the EU average is considerably below that of the US.