Devin Pope, an associate professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago, came to speak to BYU students on Oct. 3, to share his unique studies utilizing cell phone data to understand worship trends for many religions across America.
The trends covered in his research included the frequency and regularity of attendance based on cellphone tracking data.
The lecture by Pope was sponsored by the Wheatley Institute and the BYU economics department as a joint event. Students from a variety of majors attended the lecture.
Paul Lambert, the director of the religion society initiative at the institute, said they invited Pope to come speak at BYU to help students understand the role religion plays in society.
“This is a really unique view into how often are people going to church and what does it actually look like. And it's really interesting to see the difference between how often people go and how often they say they go,” Lambert said. “The larger reason is we just want to understand the religious experience in America.”
Pope began his lecture by explaining the methods he used to conduct his studies. He said that the typical studies in regard to religious attendance are often surveys, and thus the information may not be entirely accurate.
“You could get something that looks like there's a trend in religious attendance, but maybe it's a trend in the amount of willingness for people to admit they don't go to church,” Pope said.
He explained that his study used cell phone data to know how often people visit religious sites such as churches, mosques and synagogues. He illustrated that if a person has allowed even just a weather app to access their location, that data could be sold off to another company to access.
According to Pope, he chose to “restrict the sample to 2.1 million cell phones that are generating consistent location data for a one year period,” in order to gain regular data on people’s religious habits.
Porter Olsen, an economics major, found the methods of this study to be interesting.
“I thought it was really interesting, just like they tracked cell phone data. I didn’t know that was even a thing,” Olsen said.
Pope went on to describe the results from the study.
“I think this is the first time we actually have a week by week estimate of religious attendance on a large level, across all religions,” Pope said.
Pope displayed statistics for church attendance across some of the largest religions in the United States. When the results for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were shown, laughter erupted across the audience as they instantly understood the data.
“Protestants make up the vast majority of religious worship visits in the U.S. Catholics have an average attendance of about 5 million each week, with very large spikes on Easter and Christmas. Here is the next largest group, which is the Latter-day Saints; the typical attendance is about 2 million, with huge drops for general conference,” Pope said.
Kathleen Ledesma, a student studying food science at BYU, said she thought the data which showed attendance in different religions was interesting and illustrated a different perspective.
“What interested me the most probably was the data on each religion and their attendance. How Latter-day Saints … don't have those spikes on Easter," Ledesma said. "What's the purpose of other religions going to church on Christmas and Easter? It's like, we don't think like that,” Ledesma said.
Pope continued speaking about other things that this data can show, including diversity within congregations.
“We take any two people who show up at the exact same place of worship at the same time, and we say, ‘What is the difference in their income?’ We take the absolute value of that, take the average … and it tells us how different a random co-congregant is to each other in every religion,” Pope said.
The data shows that the congregations of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are one of the least diverse locations in America in terms of income, and the most diverse location for worshippers is mosques.
Aurelia Olson, who is also an economics student at BYU, voiced her thoughts on this.
“I was just seeing the income disparity between churches. You just think about it and … ours is not as diverse. It makes you think about that cause you're like, ‘What is that church doing that makes it so there is that disparity between people?’” Olson said.
Students who attended the lecture shared it made them think about questions in regards to what these statistics show, which was one of Pope’s purposes with this lecture.
“The hope is that as we continue to come up with novel ways of thinking about measuring religious observance and religious attendance, that we can then start to use some of that descriptive analysis to answer some of the more interesting causal questions that we might have,” Pope said.
Pope’s visit allowed students and faculty to gain a better understanding of the state of religion in the U.S. and the trends that are occurring, both positive and negative.
“We hear a lot about the decline of religion in the US. … There are still a lot of people that are showing up at 8:58 on a lot of Sunday mornings, and a lot of people showing up at 12:58 at a mosque on a Friday afternoon to worship all together, and I think that is kind of cool,” Pope said.