Measuring religiosity in the developing American culture today in a truly meaningful way presents many problems, but from each difficulty, new information is uncovered. As recommended by Chaves, many survey respondents say they attended a religious service in the past week in order to assure the pollster of the person’s commitment to religion. Outwardly and traditionally, commitment to religion is expressed in service attendance. Though in regards to the information provided by the time journals allocated to respondents previous to the interview a majority of respondents who said they went to service, didn’t.

Many information collection methods are narrow in their understanding of the modern world. Certain question regarding religious services as church, automatically alienates any respondent belonging to a religion who attends any other religious service like synagogue, temple, ect. Either way religious service attendance is any way you look at the information gathered decreasing or in the least stagnant in the United States today. Again go back to the first week of class we heard from several students how their parent’s religiosity impacted their own throughout their childhood and their practices and commitments today. Comparatively to national data the information presented to us that day was hardly different from that of which we have read this weekend, non-religious parents turn out on average less religious children and vice versa with variables and special circumstances to be considered of course. I’d like to explore further what exactly compels people to falsely state that they have attended a religious service regularly or just in a single week in order to defend their religiosity. How exactly has this been reflected in our own class discussion regarding religion? In what other ways do people defend their religiosity unconsciously and daily?