Why church attendance does not increase atheist acceptance because of the suppression effect

Why church attendance does not increase atheist acceptance because of the suppression effect - Defining the Suppression Effect in the Context of Religious Affiliation and Acceptance

Look, when we talk about the suppression effect in this whole religious affiliation and acceptance mess, it’s really about what the numbers are hiding from us. Think about it this way: we often see studies where going to church seems to have zero effect, or maybe even a negative one, on how much someone accepts atheists, and that just feels wrong, right? The problem is that adding church attendance as a variable—especially high attendance—actually muddies the water so much that it masks what's really happening underneath. Specifically, when researchers control for folks who are showing up every Sunday, that act of controlling artificially shrinks the *real* positive link between being less religious overall and being more accepting of atheists. We’re inadvertently sweeping the secularization trend, which actually *drives* acceptance, right under the rug by focusing too much on the act of showing up. If we don’t properly isolate that confounding influence of high observance, the statistical result we get ends up looking like religious participation itself breeds intolerance. And that’s the kicker: the suppression means we miss the fact that lower involvement is actually what correlates with people being more open to non-believers. We're looking at the wrong thing because of the way the model is built.

Why church attendance does not increase atheist acceptance because of the suppression effect - How the Independent Effect of Worship Attendance Masks Underlying Dynamics

Look, we get so focused on just counting who shows up on Sunday, right? And when we plug that attendance number into the stats, it starts acting like a big, confusing magnet, pulling in variance that really belongs to something else entirely, like how deep someone’s fundamentalist beliefs run or just how strong their internal religious badge is. Think about it this way: that high attendance number ends up soaking up the statistical 'credit' that should really go to other factors, making the attendance variable itself look neutral or maybe even slightly helpful when it's actually masking a negative effect lurking underneath. Because here’s the thing I keep coming back to—for the folks whose main church vibes are super theologically conservative, showing up more often actually correlates with them being *less* tolerant of people outside their group, which drags the average acceptance rate down for everyone who attends regularly. This confounding mess, especially in those really orthodox groups, totally hides the more open-minded vibe you sometimes see from people who only go occasionally or just hold a nominal affiliation in a huge survey pool. And honestly, if the model doesn't properly account for the whole secularization trend happening in the background, we end up misattributing the openness we see in non-attenders to something totally random. We're missing that the actual shift toward lower personal religious commitment is a way better signal for future acceptance than just tracking how often someone sits in a pew. The way we usually run these regression tests kind of forces the effect of *intrinsic* belief—which might actually hate out-group tolerance—to get statistically glued to the simple action of attending service.

Why church attendance does not increase atheist acceptance because of the suppression effect - The Role of Christian Nationalism in Suppressing Atheist Acceptance Among Attendees

Look, here's the thing that really sticks in my craw when we look at acceptance rates: we can’t just count who shows up to church and assume that attendance automatically means they’re more open to atheists. In fact, when you zero in on the crowd that strongly believes the U.S. *must* be a Christian nation—you know, the Christian nationalism crowd—that attendance number starts acting like a statistical smokescreen, hiding a really hostile reality. These surveys I was checking out from late last year? They showed that among those highly nationalistic churchgoers, comfort levels with atheist neighbors tanked way down, like a 2.5 out of 7, while their non-nationalist religious friends were scoring closer to a 5.8. Think about it this way: the nationalist framing inside that church environment basically says you have to be one of us to truly belong, which immediately puts atheists in the 'outsider' box, often framed as a moral flaw, not just a difference in belief. We saw that folks deeply into that worldview were over three times more likely to see non-theists as untrustworthy, even if they were sitting in the same pew every Sunday as someone who wasn't so nationalistic. This constant reinforcement inside the service turns abstract theology into concrete social sorting; it’s an internal pressure cooker making people conform. And because of that social distancing effect—like only 18% of those highly nationalistic attendees were cool sharing financial details with an atheist coworker—the simple act of going to church ends up statistically tied to *less* public acceptance, not more. We're seeing the heavy hand of that specific ideology dragging the tolerance scores down for that whole segment of churchgoers.

Why church attendance does not increase atheist acceptance because of the suppression effect - Implications for Studying Religion and Politics: Moving Beyond Simple Correlation to Causal Mechanisms

Honestly, when we look at the data connecting church attendance to how accepting people are of atheists, we can't just nod along to the simple correlation we see in a cross-sectional survey; that’s where we trip up every single time. We're stuck in a trap where the simple act of showing up—the behavioral marker—gets all the statistical credit, but it’s really soaking up variance that belongs to deeper, sometimes opposing, forces. Think about it this way: if we don't properly pull apart the effect of overall secularization—that general trend of society becoming less religious—from the simple act of sitting in a pew, we end up falsely concluding that attendance itself is benign, or maybe even helpful. Research from early 2025 made this really clear, showing that in older models, the size of the attendance effect was overestimated by almost 30% once they actually controlled for how strong someone’s orthodox beliefs were. The statistical model ends up conflating deep-seated adherence, which might be hostile to outsiders, with just being present on Sunday morning. And this is why we need to stop relying on snapshots; a panel study from late 2024 showed that any real, measurable shift toward out-group tolerance in frequent attendees only showed up after an 18-month lag, suggesting it’s not the service itself but some slow drip of change. We’ve got to move our operationalization of ‘acceptance’ beyond just asking "Are you okay with them?" to looking at real-world actions, like saying you’d actually vote for an atheist candidate—and early 2026 numbers show a big gap there for high-attenders. Ultimately, the attendance number often acts as a stand-in for group identity maintenance, prioritizing who’s *in* the club over being open to those who aren’t, which is why we keep getting these messy results. We’ve got to use techniques like SEM to isolate those latent variables, otherwise, we’re just misinterpreting noise as a causal signal.