(ANALYSIS) One of the most important questions that one has to ask in doing data work is pretty simple: “Compared to what?”
If I make a graph that visualizes the partisanship of White evangelicals and it indicates that 60% of them are Republicans, the data means very little by itself. Every set of results needs to be held up against a “reference case.”
So, in the prior example, it would be helpful to compare the partisanship of White evangelicals to maybe the entire sample or the entire sample of White people. This helps us understand where this data stands in relation to the bigger picture.
That’s always the issue with American religion. If I tell you that in the 1970s, about 40% of folks reported that they were weekly church attenders and now it’s closer to 25%, that seems like a big drop.
But does that mean that the average American is pretty irreligious? Well, it would help to compare Americans to other advanced democracies across the world. That would give us a sense whether 25% was at the top or the bottom of the religiosity spectrum.
That is exactly what I want to do in the post today — give us all a nice “reference case.”
In this instance, it’s Europe. While we can surely debate this fact, they are probably our nearest cultural neighbor. So, seeing where they are on measures of religious belonging and religious behavior can provide a bit of a guidepost for where the United States could be in a couple decades.
Lucky for us, the European Social Survey just released Round 11, which is data collected in 2023-2024 across two dozen European countries.
Let’s first focus on a super basic question: religious attendance. The ESS gives respondents a range of options from ‘Never’ to ‘More than once a week.’ Just be aware that not many people put themselves at the top end of this scale.