(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The COVID lockdowns and Fauci-led fearmongering, though ostensibly enacted to “slow the spread,” succeeded also in curbing church attendance across America, the Washington Times reported.
According to the Times report, which cited a November 2022 Pew Research poll, more Americans have stopped attending church since the lock downs than have increased their attendance.
Pew tracked church attendance data over the span of four years, from 2019 to 2022, covering the COVID panic and subsequent lock downs.
Out of the poll respondents, 87% said that their religious habits have not changed substantially in the four-year span.
But over twice as many, 8%, said that they have decreased their attendance at religious services than have increased, 4%.
By the poll’s conclusion, researchers found that 20% of Americans said that their in-person attendance at weekly church services had decreased, whereas only 7% said that it had increased.
Virtual “participation,” however, skyrocketed up, spiking by 15%.
According to the report, white evangelicals were the most likely to attend in-person services through and after the pandemic. In-person attendance never fell below 30%, even at the height of the lock downs. By November of 2022, 52% had returned to in-person attendance at religious services.
Things look less rosy for Catholics, whose attendance was a paltry 13% during the locked down summer of 2020. The poll indicated that a mere 20% had returned in person.
Blacks protestants also appear to have taken the lock downs very seriously, with a low point of attendance at 14% in July of 2020, returning to 41% by November.
Pew noted in its report, however, that blacks “suffered a disproportionately high share of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, which the left-leaning pollsters suggested might have contributed to the lower attendance figures.”
Some have accused the globalist administrative state of intentionally leveraging lockdown hysteria as part of a broader cultural effort to diminish the influence of religion—and Christianity in particular.
According to Pew’s pollsters, the lockdowns did not, in fact, play a major role in church attendance since it was already on the decline before the pandemic.
“We can pretty clearly say from this data that there were no major shockwaves from the pandemic that totally threw off attendance from the trajectory it was already on,” said Pew research associate Michael Rotolo, according to Deseret News.
