The Growing Mystery of the "Missing" Catholic Infants

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that despite a decade of turmoil and change many things among the adult Catholic population have remained quite steady. Mass attendance levels have shown no significant change since CARA began measuring these nationally in 2000 (...even among adult Millennials). Affiliation has hovered just under a quarter of the population for decades with a considerable number of reverts coming back to the Church after leaving in their youth. Immigration has also bolstered Catholic ranks—albeit not to the magnitude most assume. But there is also a potentially significant problem looming.

Remember at the end of the movie Back to the Future when Doc tells Marty … “You’ve got to come back with me. Back to the future. … You and Jennifer both turn out fine; it’s your kids. Something has got to be done about your kids.” That is what someone needs to say about Catholicism in the United States now, before it becomes apparent in national polls in the next decade.

Polling has a big blind spot. We generally only survey people ages 18 and older. We often don’t notice changes occurring among youth. Last week Melissa Cidade and I were looking at baptismal data from The Official Catholic Directory (OCD) to project potential future Catholic school enrollments for Catholic Schools Week. We noted that schools may face a challenge as Catholic baptisms have been down in recent years. This fits the general pattern of fertility decline occurring in the United States since the recession began in 2008. But then I matched the baptism data to the CDC’s vital statistics data for births per year in the United States and was a bit stunned. These trends are not traveling together.

From 1995 to 2004 there was about one Catholic infant baptism for every four births in the United States. This is how Catholicism remains a quarter of the population. Some leave before reaching 18 and some of these people come back later in life. Immigration also adds numbers. But after 2004 the pattern begins to shift with several years of more births (until the recession) and fewer Catholic infant baptisms. In 2011, for the first time since 1946, there were fewer than 800,000 Catholic infant baptisms in the United States. In another first (...since 1989 when more sacramental data became available in the OCD), there were more First Communions celebrated nationally in 2011 than infants baptized. 

In the graph below I show U.S. Catholic infant baptisms as a percentage of all live births in the United States for each year from 1943 to 2011 (i.e., the most recent year with available data from the Church or the CDC. OCD publication years include data from the previous year). The U.S. birth cohort for 2011 was 20.1% Catholic. It has never been this low in the post-World War II era (...note there were slight changes in how the OCD collected/reported baptismal data beginning in 2006 that reduced the likelihood of any child baptisms being counted as infant baptisms. The data from this point on most accurately measures infant baptisms. As shown below, the decline in baptisms begins before the OCD changes. More than nine in ten children entering the Church do so within the first year of their birth).

This leads to two possibilities-one being more likely than the other:

1. Catholics are just as likely to baptize their children now as in the past but they are having significantly fewer children than non-Catholics. Possible but unlikely.
2. Catholics are just as likely as non-Catholics to have children but are less likely to baptize these children than in the past. More probable.

It is the case that some parents choose to baptize children later in life. But this would “catch up” in the data with more of these baptisms rolling into later years. This is unlikely the case now with a declining trend over so many years (...unless they are letting children wait to adulthood to decide for themselves). Let me emphasize that these are real data—counts of births and baptisms. We’re not dealing with surveys that would have margins of error. This is really happening. We just don’t notice it yet because much of the research on religious affiliation in the United States is derived from polling data of adults and not many of these surveys ask respondents if they are baptizing their children.

The type of ground being lost by the Church will not be easy to make up. Without many baptisms of tweens and teens the Catholic population percentage will begin to decline later in the next decade as older Catholics from higher Catholic population percentage cohorts pass on to be replaced in the adult population by these smaller percentage younger cohorts (...note that it is possible for population percentages to decline even as a population continues to grow in absolute numbers). In the last five years of data combined, the Church has baptized more than 4.5 million infants and fewer than 300,000 other children/minors. One could hope for a big uptick in Catholic fertility rates and baptismal decisions that mirror the period between 1958 and 1973 when infant baptisms regularly measured more than 30% of all births in the United States (the peak year is 1965 with 1,274,938 infant baptisms and 3,760,358 births). But this seems unlikely.

But the news may be even worse. Not all those baptized remain Catholic as adults. Many who leave the faith do so before reaching the age of 18. So to estimate “how Catholic” these post-2004 birth cohorts are likely to be when they are adults we must account for the likely Catholic retention rate (i.e., the percentage of those raised in a faith who affiliate as such as adults). It is true that the Catholic retention rate is among the highest of any of the Christian faiths. But this has also been declining in recent years. For example, in the 1973 General Social Survey (GSS) it is estimated that 88% of Americans raised Catholic remained as such as adults. In 2007, a major study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimated that this had fallen to 68%. This fits right into the pattern identified by the GSS and other studies. If we assume that this retention rate continues to decline at its historical pace (...which admittedly is not always a wise assumption), retention could fall to about 55% when those born in 2011 come of age in 2029. this would result in a 2011 native-born cohort being about 11% Catholic by the time they reach adulthood at age 18 (...excluding later child baptisms of those born in 2011 or immigrants born in that year who were baptized elsewhere who come to the United States). If the retention rate in the future is able to recapture what it was for someone coming of age in 2010 (i.e., 68% in the GSS applied to those born in 1992) this would still result in this future cohort being only about 14% Catholic.

Why is this happening? It’s difficult to say. Jumping to “common sense” conclusions can often lead to embarrassing results once the data are all in. Recall that after Pew’s 2007 study many seemed to think that the Catholics who had left the faith must have done so in response to clergy sex abuse of minors (Note this was not the conclusion of Pew’s researchers and instead the “conventional wisdom” of many religion reporters/commentators). But when Pew did a follow-up study in 2009 they found that few who had left cited this as a cause in their own words in an open-ended question or when it was listed as one of many potential causes in a closed-end survey question. I’d also be hesitant to say this is simply secularization (another favorite theory of those who report/comment on religion but who seem mostly unaware of the academic research on the topic) as it does not appear some of these parents are personally leaving the faith themselves. 

There are other possible explanations: 

• Are some Catholics in interfaith marriages navigating the baptism decision differently than Catholics who marry other Catholics? 
• Are Catholics who have children outside of marriage less likely to baptize them as infants? 
• Are many foreign-born parents taking their infants to their country of origin for baptism? 
• Has there been a shift in culture regarding the appropriate age for baptism? 
• Has a reversal of immigration patterns since the recession led to fewer Catholics of child bearing age in the U.S. population?  
• Are changing conceptions of God, heaven, and hell creeping into baptismal decision making (i.e., “my child doesn't need baptism right away”)
• Is this simply a case of Catholicism losing its “periphery” with self-identified Catholics who used to baptize children but rarely go to church no longer even choosing to baptize (...while maintaining their own Catholic identity)? 

It’s a mystery to me… for now. There are too many potential causal factors to consider. Perhaps the most curious thing about these changes is that we don’t see significant shifts in Catholic affiliation among young adults of parenting age. With that said there is an alternative hypothesis regarding retention. If U.S. Catholicism is losing its “periphery,” perhaps among the remaining “core” we will see retention rates rise (...although they would be unlikely ever to approach 90% or more, still resulting in a decline in the Catholic population percentage) as the infants being baptized may be in families with more frequent Mass attendance who may be more likely to shepherd them through the childhood sacraments or enroll them in Catholic schools. This may result in a smaller but more active and observant Catholic population in the future. It’s a possibility.

Projecting into the future can be very risky business (...I teach a class on the subject). But in the baptismal data we see a future that is already here in children already born. We may one day call the post-2004 Catholic cohorts the “Baby Buster Generation” if current trends continue. I am often one to caution overreactions to any piece of data. But its hard not to think that there is a pressing need to solve this mystery. Oddly it’s not about what so many others highlight about Catholics personally leaving the faith. Instead it’s about too few infants entering it. Stay tuned for more research on this topic... 

Until then we provide a look at the infant baptism and birth data sub-nationally (the latest data from the CDC for this level of analysis is for 2010). Comparing these baptismal cohort percentages to Catholic state adult population percentages we see few states “keeping up.” Notably, those that are include California, Illinois, Colorado, and Oregon. In most other states Catholic baptismal cohorts represent a smaller percentage than one would assume given the size of the adult Catholic population (survey-based, self-identified).

Baptisms and Births at the State/Territory-level, 2010
	Catholic infant baptisms	Total births	Baptisms as a % of births
Guam	1,699	3,416	49.7%
Puerto Rico	20,467	42,153	48.6%
California	182,931	510,198	35.9%
New Jersey	38,116	106,922	35.6%
Rhode Island	3,804	11,177	34.0%
Massachusetts	23,791	72,856	32.7%
Illinois	53,572	165,200	32.4%
Connecticut	11,491	37,708	30.5%
New York	69,451	244,375	28.4%
Wisconsin	16,332	68,487	23.8%
Nebraska	6,142	25,918	23.7%
North Dakota	2,151	9,104	23.6%
Nevada	8,109	35,934	22.6%
Louisiana	14,068	62,379	22.6%
Pennsylvania	30,576	143,321	21.3%
Minnesota	14,094	68,610	20.5%
Texas	78,122	386,118	20.2%
Kansas	7,972	40,649	19.6%
Arizona/New Mexico	22,408	115,327	19.4%
Iowa	7,323	38,719	18.9%
Colorado	12,286	66,355	18.5%
New Hampshire	2,370	12,874	18.4%
South Dakota	2,108	11,811	17.8%
Florida	32,680	214,590	15.2%
Michigan	17,317	114,531	15.1%
American Samoa	182	1,234	14.7%
Ohio	20,158	139,128	14.5%
Oregon	6,470	45,540	14.2%
Delaware/DC/Maryland	13,207	94,330	14.0%
Hawaii	2,469	18,988	13.0%
Indiana	10,899	83,940	13.0%
Vermont	792	6,223	12.7%
Washington	10,876	86,539	12.6%
Missouri	9,561	76,759	12.5%
Wyoming	937	7,556	12.4%
Virgin Islands	178	1,600	11.1%
Idaho	2,419	23,198	10.4%
Maine	1,347	12,970	10.4%
Montana	1,216	12,060	10.1%
Virginia	10,290	103,002	10.0%
Kentucky	5,049	55,784	9.1%
Georgia	10,915	133,947	8.1%
North Carolina	8,850	122,350	7.2%
Utah	3,744	52,258	7.2%
Oklahoma	3,754	53,238	7.1%
Arkansas	2,564	38,540	6.7%
Alabama	3,763	60,050	6.3%
Alaska	691	11,471	6.0%
South Carolina	3,168	58,342	5.4%
Tennessee	3,995	79,495	5.0%
Mississippi	1,912	40,036	4.8%
West Virginia	902	20,470	4.4%
United States (territorial dioceses)	819,688	4,047,780	20.3%

 

Photo above courtesy of Herkie from Flickr Commons.

The “Freakonomics” of Catholic Schooling

One of the biggest challenges facing Catholic schools is finances—how to keep quality schools running with a tuition that is affordable. Many schools need parish or diocesan subsidies (along with other fundraising and revenue sources) to operate. Subsidies draw from parish and diocesan budgets potentially making it more difficult for these institutions to balance their expenses and revenue.

However, Catholic parishes with a school or those that support a regional school are actually less likely than those without an association with a school to run a parish operating deficit. Overall, about three in ten U.S. parishes have parish expenses that exceed their revenue. Of those parishes reporting a parish operating deficit, the average size for the shortfall is 16% of revenue (for more see CARA’s report for The Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership on this topic). Thirty-four percent of parishes without a school run deficits compared to 28% of those with a school and 27% of those that support a regional school. Among those parishes with a school commitment, on average, 23% of the parish budget is devoted to the school. 

Among those parishes with deficits, those with schools have an average shortfall measuring 13% of their revenue. This is slightly lower, 11%, in parishes that support a regional school. Those without a school have shortfalls averaging 20% of their revenue. 

What is this some weird Catholic freakonomics? Should struggling parishes go out and start a school to reduce their parish budget deficit? No. Although there is a correlation between having a school and a lower likelihood of running a parish budget deficit this is not causation. Both of these factors are related to parish size, as measured by the number of registered households. Small Catholic parishes are significantly less likely to have a school and more likely to struggle financially. On average, a parish with 200 or fewer registered households is running a slight deficit (-0.5% of revenue). By comparison, a parish with more than 1,200 registered households has a parish budget surplus (+7.1% of revenue), on average. The costs associated with the physical plant of a parish do not change with the number of registered households but the amount of revenue a parish brings in does. There are economies of scale that allow larger parishes to provide more to their parishioners—including schools (...there are drawbacks as well such as a challenges in building a vibrant parish community and lower levels of giving per household. For example, a parish with 200 or fewer registered households receives an average of $12 in offertory per household, per week. By comparison, a parish with more than 1,200 registered households receives $7.81 per household, per week).

Larger parishes also tend to be more likely to be growing demographically. In the average parish with 200 or fewer registered households (i.e., 15% of U.S. Catholic parishes) there are about seven infant or child baptisms and about six funerals per year. By comparison, the average parish with 1,201 or more registered households (i.e., 33% of U.S. Catholic parishes) has about twice as many infant and child baptisms (113) than it has funerals (55) per year.

By no means is it true that running a parish school is an easy thing to do. Parish and diocesan subsidies could be used elsewhere. But at what cost? Recent CARA research revealed that Catholic schools are essential in recruiting and forming the next generation of Catholic leaders from priests to sisters to lay ministers (1, 2, 3, 4). More so, CARA research has shown that Catholic schools are essential to shepherding many young Catholics through childhood sacraments. And of course don’t forget that Catholic schools provide a great education. In the long-run Catholic schools are a solid investment for the Church even when the annual balance sheets can be so challenging. 

We Know What You Did Last Sunday (…We read your diary)

Sociologist Philip Brenner has produced an excellent series of journal articles on the measurement of church attendance in the U.S. and cross-nationally. Some of his work utilizes time diary studies. These are unique and well suited for measuring attendance. In standard surveys, when an interviewer asks a respondent if they attended religious services this week or how often they do so generally there are social desirability pressures that often lead some non-attenders or infrequent attenders to “over-report” their attendance. Time diaries remove this pressure as the participant is just filling out a table of time of what they did in a day. They are not “primed” in any way to report any specific activity (…these are the data often used for estimating how many hours Americans spend watching television or commuting to work per day).

Brenner’s most recent article in The Sociology of Religion looks at cross-national attendance data. In his review of the literature he writes an excellent short description of “the effect of life-stage” on religion, which I discussed in a previous post: “After being baptized in, named by, or introduced to the religious community as an infant, the young individual attends regularly until s/he leaves the parental home. The stage of ‘prodigality’ characterized by a lack of attendance, ends after the young adult marries and returns to a pattern of regular attendance, perhaps hastened by the arrival of a child. Attendance remains relatively stable until fluctuations in midlife, after the departure of adult children” (2012, p. 366). Following this life-stage model, one of the reasons we might see declining church attendance is a growing adultolescence where people wait longer to marry or have children or choose not to do so at all. Time diaries present a unique and very accurate method to study this model of religiosity.

The U.S. government conducts a variety of large scientific surveys (calculating unemployment, income data, etc.) but typically does not ask anything related to religion in these studies. There is one exception and it is a time diary study called the American Time Use Study (ATUS). This is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If a respondent attends church on Sunday and records this in their time diary this is captured in the study. ATUS is one of many other time diary studies that have been conducted in recent decades in the U.S. which have been collected and formatted for combined use by the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) as the American Heritage Time Use Study (AHTUS). This allows researchers to study how Americans have used their time from the 1965 to 2011—including the hours devoted to religious worship.

So let’s read thousands of Americans diaries…  Below is a figure summarizing the percentages of American adults who report time spent on religious worship by day of the week in each decade since the 1960s. Attendance declined in the 1970s and again in the 1980s but has since stabilized at a level where just more than one in four Americans record attendance at religious services on Sundays in time diary studies. There are also noticeable upticks in attendance on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Note that some of the people reporting worship on these other days are also doing so on Sunday so the percentages are not necessarily additive. 

Currently, America’s Millennial Generation (born 1982 or later) includes those ages 31 and younger. How do the diaries of people in this age group compare across time? Just as the life-cycle model would predict, the 18 to 31 cohorts always have lower worship levels than the overall general population. However, there is no evidence of any recent decline in their attendance. If anything, there is a slight uptick in worship time among this demographic since 2000—including in the first two years of the 2010s which measures the Millennials specifically.

Disaggregating the data from 2003 for Sundays specifically we can see a bit more of this pattern of “revival” among Millennials. In 2011, their diaries began to look a lot like those of the previous generation (born 1961 to 1981; Generation X) yet still a bit below those of the Baby Boomers (born 1943 to 1960) and the Silent/G.I. generations (born before 1943).

In a recent post I spoke of a desire for more data that would reveal what the “competitors” to Mass attendance are for Catholics (i.e., what else are they doing on Sundays that might lead them to miss Mass?). Unfortunately, the time diary studies rarely ask for the religious affiliation of participants so we can’t break this out. But we can draw broader conclusions form these data. If you are a Millennial we can guess you might be sleeping through church. Forty-three percent of the 24 hours of Sunday are spent on sleep by those ages 31 and younger—more than the members of any other generation. Now it is true that younger people need more sleep and getting older may often bring on mild insomnia so perhaps we should not be too surprised. Sunday is after all a day of rest is it not?

Millennials are also ever so slightly more likely to be working on Sunday—perhaps a product of our modern economy where everything seems open for business on Sunday a.m. The youngest Millennials may be more likely than older Americans to have weekend retail or service jobs preventing their church attendance. Television may not be keeping them away from church. Millennials spend the least amount of time with the tube whereas the retired set are more avid watchers. With that said hours of television in each generation still greatly outnumber average time spent on worship (note that these averages include “0” time observations for those who do not report the activity at all. If one looks at worship time only for those who report worship there is almost no difference in time spent on this by generation or any differences between decades. Services have not become shorter or longer over time).

So how can we know more specifically about what Catholic Millennials are doing? To see a more detailed portrait we can look to recent CARA Catholic Polls (CCP). In the table below (click the table to enlarge) we show the many aspects of life reported by adult Millennials—who currently number approximately 11.5 million people—in CCP surveys. 

Half of adult Millennial Catholics (50%) are in a household registered with a parish and 37% of Millennials (or someone in their household) regularly contributes to a parish weekly offertory collection. A third (33%) says they regularly read their parish bulletin. Seventeen percent attends Mass every week and 19% do so less than weekly, but at least once a month (...some of those attending less than weekly are in pews on any given Sunday meaning that the weekly numbers of Millennials at Mass exceeds 22%). Fifty percent say they receive ashes on Ash Wednesday. As we’ve noted before here, Millennials are even more active during Lent than most other Catholics. If the Church wants to say something to Millennials they should circle February 13, 2013 on their calendars as a critical mass will be passing through the doors of Catholic parishes on this day. Three in ten (30%) wear or carry a cross or crucifix and more than a quarter (27%) go to confession at least once a year.

Eighty-four percent use YouTube but only 2% of these users say they watch anything about religion or spirituality on this site. Seventy-two percent say they watch music videos, 53% watch comedy content, and 46% watch viral videos on YouTube. Note that only 7% of older Catholic YouTube users say they watch any religious or spiritual content on this site. About two-thirds (67 percent) of Millennials say they have not accessed any religious or spiritual content in any medium (e.g., television, internet, print, radio) in the three months before they were interviewed. Twenty-two percent of Millennials say they have posted a video to YouTube at some point.

Eighty-two percent of adult Millennial Catholics are on Facebook and 24% have a Twitter account. One in ten (10%) has a Catholic-related app on a mobile or gaming device. Thirty-seven percent say they primarily rely on the internet for their news. Yet three in ten (30%) say they pay “very little” or no attention at all to national news. If you want to get their attention don’t put an ad in a secular newspaper. Just 11% subscribes to a daily newspaper and only 5% say they pay for online content.

Two-thirds (65%) of adult Millennial Catholics are employed and 26% are married. If digital content is not pulling them away from Mass, work and family obligations may be doing so. Friendships are unlikely to draw many of them to Mass as only 8% say they have “many” friends in their parish. Just 6% say they are very active in their parish outside of attending Mass.

At the same time it would be a mistake to think things were much different for Catholics young and old in the past. A previous post here showed that many did not attend Mass as frequently as we “remember” in the 1950s. Part of that post referenced research by Joseph H. Fichter, S.J. and more of this is shown below with a contemporary comparison (thanks to CARA Executive Director Thomas P. Gaunt, S.J., Ph.D.). In Social Relations in the Urban Parish (University of Chicago Press, 1954), Father Fichter classified Catholics into four groups based on their connection to a parish and their activity within this in 1951:

• Dormant: “have in practice ‘given up’ Catholicism but have not joined another religious denomination.”
• Marginal: “are conforming to a bare, arbitrary minimum of the patterns expected in the religious institution.”
• Modal: “are normal ‘practicing’ Catholics constituting the great mass of identifiable Catholic laymen.”
• Nuclear: “are the most active participants and the most faithful believers.”

For comparison we show approximations of these same groups now in CARA surveys based on dormant Catholics being those who currently self-identify as Catholic but do not attend Mass annually. Marginal Catholics attend Mass on Christmas and Easter only, modal Catholics attend Mass at least once a month and nuclear Catholics are those who say they “very” involved in parish outside of Mass.

The number of dormant Catholics has increased by 9 percentage points since 1951 and the number of modal Catholics has declined by 12 percentage points. These trends are consistent with what we see among the broader population in the worship data from the time diaries. Too many have forgotten about all the “dormant” religious in the 1950s and have unrealistically embellished the size of the “modal” and “nuclear” groups.

Perhaps our “memory” of religiosity further in the past is quite unrealistic as well. Historians and social scientists for example have noted that churches were far from full in earlier times. As sociologist Rodney Stark notes, using original source material, “As for the ordinary people, during the middle ages and during the Renaissance, the masses rarely attended church. … In further support of these reports, an extensive survey of surviving parish churches in various parts of Europe reveals them to be too small to have held even a tiny fraction of local inhabitants” (pgs. 255-56).

So perhaps Millennials are just repeating the patterns of attendance we have known for more than a millennium? Even if they are it is still the case that there are a lot more potential distractions now than in 16th century Europe. Imagine how the Protestant Reformation might have unfolded if the Ninety-Five Theses were posted in a video on YouTube rather than on a church door. Luther didn’t have to compete for attention with funny cat videos.

Photo above courtesy of incurable_hippie from Flickr Commons.