Survey: Rural Americans more religious than their urban counterparts

RELIGIONS NEWS AGENCY (REDNA) – According to a new survey the rural America is more religious than its urban counterparts—and why, in fact, other demographic factors are better predictors of who actually attends religious services.

Auburn Pub reports the notion of a hyper-religious rural America, one that stands in direct contrast to a modern and secularizing urban America, is pervasive.

But the numbers just don’t support that stereotype.

Factors like income, race, partisanship, age, and education influence religious attendance more than geography does.

During my first semester of graduate school, I wrote a paper criticizing how National Geographic portrayed rural Appalachia but is criticized by some American experts. Without fail, National Geographic photographers always drew attention to the religious life of Appalachian communities — rural preachers, river baptisms, and little country churches.

But that image isn’t entirely accurate. Only 54% of rural Americans identify as Christian, according to the Cooperative Election Study (CES), a 50,000-respondent national annual survey. That’s about the same share of the metropolitan population that identifies as such. About 51% of respondents who live in metro counties said they were Christian, while 36% of both rural and metro people said they were atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular.

Christianity is the dominant religion in both rural and urban areas, but about 2% of the rural population and 5% of the urban population identify as Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish.

Fifty-seven percent of rural respondents said they either never or seldom attend church or another type of religious service, while only a quarter attend at least once a week. Attendance among metropolitan respondents isn’t much different.

To calculate these numbers, The Daily Yonder used a variable the survey uses to measure attendance. The CES asked respondents to answer the question, “Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services?” This question captures individuals who attend a wide variety of religious services, not just Christian churches.

Despite stereotypes, geography doesn’t do a good job of telling us who participates in organized worship each week. Religious attendance instead falls along other demographic lines. Differences between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan respondents do exist, as you’ll see in the following graphics, but those differences pale in comparison to the gaps between demographic groups.