There are a lot of charts, graphs and numbers here, but the information deserves attention.
Both Catholics and Protestants are losing practicing members at an alarming rate. What can be done?
Read on, for the analysis from writer and professor Ryan Burge, who unpacked the numbers from some recent surveys:
Let me put a really fine point on this. In the 2024 data, among people who were raised Catholic, nearly three quarters of those respondents were either no longer Catholic or they still identified as Catholic but attended Mass seldom or never. Just a quarter were going to Mass at least once a month. Now, it’s not like Protestants have nothing to worry about in this regard – the same statistic for them is about 55%. But Catholics are 20 points worse than that.
Does going to a Catholic school make much of a difference?
The answer for older cohorts was clearly “no.” I mean if you compare Protestants who went to at least seven years of Christian education, retention rates were a staggering 84%. (That’s Amish level retention, for what it’s worth). For Catholics, it was a dozen points lower than that. Among the middle birth cohorts, the gap was actually larger (60% vs 77%). So, that’s actually pretty compelling evidence that a Protestant going to Christian school is more effective at keeping kids in the church compared to Catholics sending their children to the local parish school.
Among the youngest folks in the survey, retention is just lower. That’s already been established, but that persistent gap between Catholics and Protestants is still there. For those who attended private Christian schools for at least seven years, Protestant retention was 71% compared to 57% for Catholics. That’s a pretty tough pill to swallow. And let me point a finer point on this:
Among Catholics born in the 1990s or 2000s who attended Mass at least weekly as children and spent seven or more years in religious school, just 57% still identify as Catholic as adults.
There’s a lot more to this, and the numbers can be dizzying. But it leads the author to this compelling conclusion:
If you had two children who were born in the same decade, and raised them in a very similar religious environment, the Catholic kid would be about eleven points less likely to be retained compared to the Protestant. Now, I did try to poke around some variables to try and help us understand what factors were the most predictive for retention for both groups.
My conclusion is: the strongest childhood predictor is not simply attending services or religious school. What matters most is whether religion feels personally important. Compared with adults who said religion was very important during childhood, those who said it was not important have dramatically lower odds of remaining in their childhood tradition. This relationship is evident among both Catholics and Protestants.
If someone is raised Catholic, there’s a 75% chance that as an adult they are no longer Catholic or they are still a Catholic but hardly ever attend Mass. Among people who were raised Catholic, just 15% are now weekly Mass attenders. For Protestants, it’s nearly double that rate (~28%).
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It seems the questions now become: how do we change that? What can we do to make “religion feel personally important”? How do we make the Catholic faith matter (beyond the persistent idea that going to Mass is an obligation)?
