During the pandemic, a stable share of U.S. adults have been participating in religious services in some way – either virtually or in person – but in-person attendance is slightly lower than it was before COVID-19. Among Americans surveyed across several years, the vast majority described their attendance habits in roughly the same way in both 2019 and 2022.
Some Americans clearly long for a more avowedly religious and explicitly Christian country, a March survey finds. However, a clear majority of Americans do not accept these views.
In the new survey, the Center attempted for the first time to pose some of these philosophical questions to a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, finding that Americans largely blame random chance – along with people’s own actions and the way society is structured – for human suffering, while relatively few believers blame God or voice doubts about the existence of God for this reason.