From the summary of a major new paper just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, authored by some of the greatest names in Economic research, including the famous Dr. Barro, of Harvard University, Dr. Dewitte, of the University of Oxford, and Dr. Iannaccone, of Chapman University:
Looking Backward: Long-Term Religious Service Attendance in 66 Countries
Robert J. Barro, Edgard Dewitte & Laurence Iannaccone
Issue Date July 2025
The attendance rate at religious services is an important variable for the sociology and economics of religion, but long-term and global data are scarce. Retrospective questions from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) allow the construction of rates of religious-service attendance back as far as the 1920s in 66 countries, half from the “Global South.” A number of checks support the reliability of the retrospective information. One exercise demonstrates the consistency between retrospective and contemporaneous survey data when the two overlap. Another procedure shows that the retrospective values are similar when generated from individual ISSP surveys for 1991, 1998, 2008, and 2018; that is, there is no clear dependence of memory on the number of years of recall. The new data document a century-long “Great Religious Divergence” between North and South. We use the data to carry out event studies for effects on religious-service attendance of two major events. Vatican II, in 1962-1965, triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations. In contrast, the endings of Communism in the early 1990s did not systematically affect religious-service attendance. Finally, in a large sample, religious-service attendance responds positively to wars and depressions. [source]
From the text of the working paper itself, available in PDF for download at the linked website, comes this:
Using an event-study design, we find that rates of religious-service attendance in predominantly Catholic countries started to decrease relative to those of all other countries and to those of other Christian countries precisely in the aftermath of Vatican II. This result holds for adult and child religious-service attendance and also holds when using the share of a country’s catholic adherents as a continuous measure of a country’s exposure. Overall, the Catholic relative attendance rate fell by four percentage points per decade between 1965 and 2015. This pattern is consistent with religion modeled as a club good (Iannaccone [1992]) and with the view that Vatican II shattered the perception of an immovable, truthholding Church (Greeley [2004], MacCulloch [2010]). More generally, these results might explain why many religious authorities are reluctant to modernize their doctrine or reduce barriers to religious participation.
The mathematical model is unassailable, and the study of the consequences of Vatican II for attendance occupy a good part of the 73-page-long paper. It is worth every paragraph, and hopefully the new American pope will be presented with the paper and its conclusions.
____
(Tip sent by reader Babatunde Obanajo, on X)
