Amid the wealth of commentary and analysis about the decline of American religiosity over the past few decades, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the impact of how people actually spend their time.
Instead, public debate has centered on a wide range of concerns and controversies that are often seen as causing an erosion of faith commitments, ranging from growing political polarization to disagreements over identity, sexuality and gender.
While all of these no doubt play a role and continue to merit attention, some new data on American priorities as reflected in how Americans spend their time adds another important perspective to the debate: They confirm that Americans devote surprisingly little time to religious activities in their daily lives.
As part of the U.S. government’s American Time Use Survey, a wide variety of Americans record the events that took place over the previous day, event by event, and note the approximate time they spent on each event before moving on to the next. This creates a fairly reliable record, down to the minute, of how much time the average American typically spends on various activities.
Since 2003, the government has interviewed nearly a quarter of a million Americans about how they spend their time each day, and because so many Americans have been interviewed, we can draw some solid conclusions about what the average American’s day is like, even if the final day of the interview was unusual for any given person.
Many of the numbers are as you’d expect: For example, Americans spend an average of nine hours sleeping, one hour and six minutes eating (plus another 30 minutes preparing the meal), and about 20 minutes of exercise per day.
But other numbers might surprise you: For example, the average American spends just 34 minutes a day socializing in any way, just 30 minutes a day caring for and helping family members (children and adults), and just 15 minutes a day reading for personal interest.
The figures for average religiosity are also surprising: the spiritual dimension is measured in two ways: the average time spent in formal religious ceremonies, and the amount of time spent on a given day in personal religious or spiritual activities (including prayer, Bible study, etc.).
In 2023, the U.S. population spent an average of 3.6 minutes per day in formal attendance-based religious practices, nearly half the 6.6 minutes per day recorded in 2003. Of course, Americans typically only attend religious services one day a week, and days other than Sunday (for Christians) drag the average down.
But as a trend, it is clear that the American Time Use Survey is capturing an overall decline in Americans’ propensity to attend religious services.
What about the percentage of people who engage in personal religious or spiritual activities on a given day? That number, although very slightly, is trending upwards. In 2003, the average American spent an average of 1.8 minutes per day on these activities; by 2023, that figure had fallen to 2.4 minutes.
This increase is very small and certainly not something to celebrate, but it is fair to say that, to some extent, many Americans are switching from worship services in houses of worship to more private worship.
But there’s a larger, more obvious fact: based on how people choose to spend their time, spiritual and religious practices do not appear to be major forces in most people’s daily lives.
On average, Americans spend nine minutes a day caring for their pets, about four times as much time as they spend on religious and spiritual practices outside of formal worship, and 22 minutes a day gaming, nine times as much as they spend on personal religious and spiritual practices. (Because this survey began in an earlier era, unfortunately there isn’t a category that “scrolling doom on a smartphone” neatly fits into.)
Of course, Americans have many demands on their time. And yet the average American watches more than two and a half hours of television each day — 63 times more time than they spend on spiritual and religious activities. They watch television ten times more than they read, eight times more than they exercise, and five times more than they spend on child care or other family care.
Can this time discrepancy alone explain the decline of religiosity in America today?
Some might argue that these figures simply reflect, not explain, the decline of religiosity, but the impact almost certainly runs both ways. How much more fulfilling do you think family relationships, work, or physical fitness would be in these areas of your life if you spent just 2.4 minutes a day on those areas?
As the saying goes, whatever you focus your attention on grows and expands. “The lamp of the body is the eye,” Jesus famously taught in the Sermon on the Mount. “If your eye is single, then, your whole body will be filled with light.”
If Americans aren’t typically very interested in spiritual or religious matters, is it really surprising that those same transcendent realities seem less “real” and relevant to our everyday lives?
Imagine how much richer our spiritual and religious lives would be if we devoted at least some of the two and a half hours we normally spend watching television to prayer, Bible reading, and spiritual practices.
Of course, television has its advantages, and not all Americans watch that much TV (again, this is an average), but this data makes it hard to believe people who say they have no time to pray, exercise, or study when they have so much other time to do so.
Simply increasing your spiritual devotion to match the time you spend with your pet will triple your level of spiritual devotion. Now imagine how much more physically energetic and healthy you will be if you dedicate some of those two and a half hours a day to exercise, or how much more knowledgeable and informed you will become if you spend more time reading.
Ultimately, I think the decline of religion is consistent with the decline of organizations and collective activity in general. For example, during the same period, volunteering for the average American peaked at an average of 9.6 minutes per day in 2007, but has plummeted to 6 minutes per day since COVID-19. Union membership rates have fallen dramatically, as has political participation. Generally speaking, declining participation and engagement in all things is a headwind facing not just religion, but organized activity in the U.S. in general.
But this data, reflected not just in general commitments but also in the specific ways each of us spends our time, provides a good opportunity to reexamine our own priorities.
President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acknowledged that we face “circumstances beyond our control” in life, but emphasized, “there is much we can control. We set our own priorities and decide how to spend our energies, our time and our resources.”
He then warned that “if most of the information you get comes from social and other media, your ability to hear the whisperings of the Holy Spirit will be diminished,” and repeated his plea with his listeners to “make time for the Lord in your lives every day.”
From a pure data perspective, it would not be technically difficult for most of us to increase the amount of time we devote to our faith each day—we have so little time for God to begin with—but on a practical level, entrenched habits and patterns in our lives can take on a life of their own and gain a momentum that can feel very difficult to resist.
But we’re still in the driver’s seat. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to pick up the remote to turn on Netflix tonight. So why not try a little change?
With so much outside media in our lives, moments of calm and spiritual contemplation may be rare, but they are needed more than ever.
