But did some of them give up on God?

Sociologists like Michael Hout want to know.

Hout, a professor of sociology at New York University, has long tracked the decline of organized religion in America. So he was interested to see that several indicators of what he called "intense religion" declined in the 2021 General Social Survey.

In that survey, fewer Americans than in 2016 said they take the Bible literally, pray frequently or have a strong religious affiliation.

Even as church attendance had been consistently dropping off over the past decades, those more personal measures of faith had previously held steady or showed only slight decline.

"Then they fell off a cliff," said Hout in a video interview.

In a new, yet-to-be-published study, Hout and colleagues Landon Schnabel from Cornell University and Sean Bock from Harvard, raise questions about the rapid decline in those measures during the pandemic, which they argue may be more due to changes in how the GSS was administered rather than a sign of religious decline.

Founded in 1972 at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, the GSS, conducted every two years, has long been considered a gold standard for national surveys, in part because it has been administered in person rather than online or over the phone.

When the pandemic made in-person surveys unworkable, the GSS switched to a hybrid approach, with most participants answering questions online, while others took the survey over the phone.

Researchers also asked some of the participants in the 2016 and 2018 surveys to take part in the 2020 survey, which was published in 2021.

Hout and his colleagues compared past participants who agreed to retake the survey with those who did not and found that fewer "intensely religious" people retook the survey.

For example, they wrote, 36% of those who took part in the 2016 survey said they took the Bible literally.

That dropped to 25% among those who completed the follow-up.

They also found those who did not take the follow-up survey were more distrustful of institutions and more disconnected from civic society and the internet than those who did.

As a result, the change in survey format led to fewer religious people participating in the 2021 survey, which Hout believes skewed some of the results on religion.

That's unfortunate, he said, especially at a time when the religious landscape in the United States is changing.

"If you want to measure change, don't change how you measure it," he said. "In this moment of great change, we changed how we measure it."

Hout said that the 2022 GSS data will give a clearer picture of how religion in the United States changed over the pandemic. And he hopes the GSS will remain an in-person survey in the future — though he admitted doing in-person surveys is costly and difficult.

Overall, Hout said, surveys have become more difficult in recent years because of larger changes in American culture.

In the past, he said, surveys offered ordinary people a way to comment on larger trends in the culture. Now, he said, social media allows everyone to speak their mind. And people are more sceptical about talking to strangers.

"Before the internet, one of the things that kept GSS and other survey response rates really high was the fact that people said, ‘Oh yeah, I'd love to get a few things off my chest,'" he said. "Now they have a lot of other options that they control much more of."

A spokesman for the GSS did not respond to a request for comment about changes in methodology.

Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and author of "The Nones," believes a move online is inevitable for the GSS.

Burge, who often writes about religion and survey data, said most other major surveys, including those from Pew Research and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, now have embraced online panels.

Burge believes online surveys give a more accurate view of religion in America than in-person interviews, in part because people are less likely to lie to a computer about their faith.

Being religious, he said, is still seen as a social good for many Americans. That leads to the so-called halo effect, where people overestimate how religious they are because they want to make a good impression on the surveyor.

Burge argues previous GSS surveys have undercounted the number of Americans who are considered nones — those who have no religion. The 2021 survey, he said, gave a result more in line with other surveys, showing that about 30% of Americans would be considered nones.

"People are more honest when they are looking at a web browser," he said.

Burge says that there are losses in the move from in-person to online surveys.

There is more nuance in an in-person interview, as people can give an answer that's not on the survey. And not everyone understands all the denominational categories on surveys, he said, and might not know where they fit in an online survey.

Hout said that while organized religion in the United States is likely to continue to decline, much of the decline is among so-called Christians and Easter Christians, who only occasionally attend services.

That has led to what he called "all or nothing" approaches to religion — where people show up all the time and believe intensely, or they give up on religion. And people remain spiritual, even if they don't identify with a particular faith.

"Atheism is not what's happening," Hout said.

"If we think of organized religion as a conjoined thing, the quarrel is with the organized part, not the religion."

• Bob Smietana is a veteran religion writer and national reporter for Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Often we think of walking in terms of what it can deliver us: A reduction of anxiety! An increase in creativity! Our much-vaunted steps!

He says we've got it all wrong.

The real gift of a walk lies not in what it can do for us, but in allowing ourselves to be swept away by it and letting it give us what it wants.

It's very much the kind of "finding God in all things" idea that we Jesuits love.

Still, as I read it I kept thinking, "Sure, the natural world is beautiful. But how do we deal with all the people?"

I live in New York City, which is very much a walking-and-taking-the-subway kind of place.

On a Saturday afternoon when I get to amble around Central Park or the Village, people watching and now leaf peeping, that's wonderful.

"Sure, the natural world is beautiful. But how do we deal with all the people?"

But I dare Mr Sanzaro to practice mindfulness during the work week in New York, to keep his head up to gaze at anything when people are walking directly at you (sometimes despite the fact that the sidewalk is otherwise empty).

How do you savour a hailstorm made of humans or walk through a seaweed bed of tourists and teenagers on cell phones?

Ask any big city driver about others using exit lanes (or even worse, the shoulder) to try to cut in line in heavy traffic, or my suburban parents about dealing with people and their shopping carts in a Jewel-Osco, and you'll hear much the same.

No matter where you live, we all face so many situations where the people around us are behaving badly, and we respond in kind.

The me who walks through Midtown Manhattan is absolutely the worst me there is.

A year ago at this time things were opening up, but new variations of Covid-19 were heightening our anxieties once again.

This year much of that concern has fallen away for now, which almost certainly means we're all encountering a lot more people. Times Square is probably "more" Times Square than it has been; so, too, driving in Jacksonville or picking your kids up after school. And how are we to deal with that?

I want to see the world in the way that Mr Sanzaro and St Ignatius insist is possible.

I want to savour the beauty that is all around me, to be a witness to whatever this day will offer me, and all the people in it, too. I want to be surprised. But it's hard!

Here are three little spiritual ideas I've been thinking about to try and help me get there.

Begin with reality

One of the most helpful suggestions I've been given about my own experiences walking in New York is to take a step back and see the big picture.

Midtown Manhattan (where I work) is a chaotic Hellmouth filled with people who are mostly ignoring the needs of everyone else.

From the outside, that may sound like a judgment, but no, that's just what it is.

It's the same with the highway in Boston or a grocery store on a Friday afternoon. You wish they were different, but they are what they are.

It's a pretty good depiction, actually, of what we mean by the "fallen world" or "original sin."

We are each "born" into situations that are fundamentally broken. And because we're moving through them all the time, eventually, they break us, too.

Probably every single person that I meet on the sidewalk feels the same frustration that I do, or used to. And now here we all are creating that outrage in each other.

Facing the truth of a situation doesn't fix it.

But it can put things in a different perspective.

You stop being so surprised when someone lays into their horn for a solid minute or refuses to give you any room to move. Maybe some of it even becomes a little bit hilarious. (This is aspirational, clearly. But sometimes it does happen!)

Allow yourself a moment in the mirror

When you're in a bad situation your options are limited.

It may seem ridiculous to describe driving in Northern California as a survival situation, but if you've ever been on the freeways there during its evening rush hours, you know that it can really feel that way.

It's the same with malls or airports during the holidays or a hundred other situations.

And so, yeah, you respond in ways that are maybe not so great.

You drop your shoulder to make the other person pay for not giving you room to move.

You ignore the person who is so very clearly signalling for you to let them into your lane.

You feel justified; sometimes maybe you are.

But

• Do I truly never weave down a street typing a text, infuriating everyone around me?
• Have I never cut in a line while spinning some story about if they really wanted me to respect this line they would have made it more organized?
• Aren't there times that I am exactly the person that I am often complaining about?

It's always struck me as significant that when people first meet Jesus in the Scriptures, often their first instinct is to attack him.

From the outside, we think, these are clearly the bad guys.

But even Jesus' friends reject him at times.

And it's in going through that experience and confronting the ugliness in themselves that they are able to finally become better people. Continue reading

The study, based on research carried out in the UK, United States, Brazil, and Canada in June, suggests that children felt marginalised by online worship and that parents felt that they were treated as "conduits" to pass on resources to their children instead of being offered support to nurture their children's faith.

Despite the diversity of churches in the four countries, researchers found the same challenges and issues reported during the pandemic.

The study, Do We Need a New Plan for Children's Ministry?, published at the end of last month, was written by a team of researchers from the four countries, including academics and theologians. They drew on an online survey of the views and experiences of 139 church leaders, 16 schools, and 113 Christian parents during the pandemic, as well as country-specific surveys and detailed interviews.

Children's ministry was affected particularly badly by the restrictions imposed as result of the pandemic, they discovered.

The study says: "The scale of the situation was captured by the Canadian research, revealing that 63% of churches cancelled or suspended Sunday School, 43% of churches cancelled or suspended midweek clubs and Vacation Bible Schools, and 35% cancelled or suspended camps."

The shift to online provision for children and young people did not work for many families, researchers found.

Two-thirds of those surveyed said that they felt disappointed or frustrated by the online provision, which often replicated what might have been provided in church, without allowing for a different setting at home.

"Comments illuminating this included: ‘I had to remind them to remember the children,' ‘it was easier to connect with parents than children,' ‘they did not take children seriously,' ‘the kids were left behind,' and ‘the children disengaged.'

These comments revealed an overriding sense that often pandemic ministry was more adult-focused, resulting in the exclusion of children," researchers said.

One survey of UK church activity during lockdown failed to ask a single question about children's or families ministry.

Collaboration between home, school, and church to support and nurture children's faith was lacking, and parents felt disempowered by the existing church culture to nurture their children's faith themselves.

Churches were often viewed as a "service provider" rather than a collaborator when it came to nurturing children's faith.

Researchers heard stories of how, even though the restrictions imposed by Covid were easing in some countries, children and families were not returning to church.

"As the pandemic restrictions ease, these impacts seem to continue, as many anecdotal reports in each of these nations indicate that children and families are not returning to pre-pandemic levels of attendance in church activities or programs."

When asked what their families' spiritual needs were, only one per cent of parents wanted their church to return to its pre-pandemic ministry; 97 per cent said that they wanted the church to offer more support to parents to help to nurture children's faith.

The report said that there was an "urgent" need for churches and church organisations to prioritise children's ministry, setting a clear strategy and prioritising "greater relational connection, rather than being primarily content or program-driven", the study concludes.

• Rebecca Pavely writes for Church Times