Church Religiosity and Church Attendance

Abstract

In a pioneering work, Jagodzinski and Dobbelaere (1995a) analyse church religiosity and secularisation in a comparative West European setting. In their theoretical discussion of religiosity, they use church integration as their central variable. They consider people as more integrated into the churches the more frequently they participate in religious rites and services (Jagodzinski & Dobbelaere 1995a: 86). Admitting that church integration is an indirect measure of more basic religious orientations and beliefs, they go on to examine the relationship between church integration (measured by frequency of church attendance) and more direct measures of church religiosity or religious beliefs. They find very strong correlations between church attendance and more direct measures of church religiosity. On the basis of the European Value Surveys (I and II), they find that correlations vary between 0.41 and 0.73 in different countries (Jagodzinski & Dobbelaere 1995a: 87–91). This is a magnitude seldom found in survey research. Moreover, they analyse changes in frequency of church attendance and in more direct measures of church religiosity, finding that pronounced changes in church integration are paralleled by similar changes in church religiosity or religious beliefs. Frequency of church attendance can then be used also as a measure of more general changes in church religiosity. There is apparently no clear time lag between the two processes (Jagodzinski & Dobbelaere 1995a: 91–6).