More Americans stay away from church as pandemic nears year three

 By Bob Smietana - Posted at Baptist Press:

(RNS) — At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly every congregation in the United States shut down, at least for a while.

For some Americans, that was the push they needed to never come back to church.

A new report, which looked at in-person worship attendance patterns before the beginning of the pandemic and in 2022, found that a third of those surveyed never attend worship services. That’s up from 25 percent before the start of the pandemic.

The pandemic has likely led people who already had loose ties to congregations to leave, said Dan Cox, one of the authors of the new study and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute.

“These were the folks that were more on the fringes to begin with,” said Cox. “They didn’t need much of a push or a nudge, to just be done completely.”

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