To get emotional benefits from going to church, believers must attend regularly: study
Believers who only attend church a few times a year yet expect to get an emotional lift that will last need to go more frequently, according to the findings of a recent study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
In ’See You Sunday?’ Effects of Attending a Specific Weekend Religious Service on Emotional Well-Being: A State/Trait Analysis of the SoulPulse Study, researchers found that regular weekend church attendance leads to an increase in positive emotions and a decrease in negative ones. Subjects in the study who did not attend church regularly, however, experienced no change in their emotional well-being.
The study is based on data collected from 2,869 U.S. adults via their smartphones and highlights exactly what happens in the emotional lives of religious service attendees after they participate in a religious service. Participants in the study were asked to complete questionnaires daily over two weeks to gauge their attendance at religious services.
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To capture the emotional state of participants after they attended church services, researchers included the following question in a survey participants received on Sunday nights: “Did you attend a religious service this past weekend?”
Participants in the study were also asked to respond to multiple questions about their emotional well-being.
“The day-by-day nature of data collection in SoulPulse allowed us to make two really interesting comparisons,” Blake Victor Kent, lead author of the study and associate professor of sociology at Westmont College, said in a statement. “First, we were able to compare those who attended a religious service in a given weekend against those who didn’t. Second, taking only those who did attend on a given weekend, we were able to compare those who were regular attenders against those who didn’t attend regularly.”
And what the researchers found was “remarkable,” Kent said.
“In order to experience a positive emotional benefit from going to church you have to not only attend but attend regularly. This is probably because in order to benefit you need to be familiar with the routines, the style of worship, and the people with whom you are worshiping,” he explained. “If not, you just aren’t able to participate with the same level of familiarity, and the social connections just aren’t there. Thus, there is little or no emotional impact.”
Fewer than 50% of Americans hold formal memberships at a church, and more Protestant churches are closing than opening nationwide. Further decline also appears inevitable, according to estimates made by the Nashville-based Lifeway Research.
In 2019, well before many churches were forced to close in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, Lifeway Research found that approximately 3,000 Protestant churches were started in the U.S., but 4,500 Protestant churches had closed.
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