How Facebook Killed the Church: A Correlational Analysis

Having made the claim that Facebook (i.e., the advent of cellphones, texting and Web 2.0) killed the church I realized that I could put this thesis to the test.

From the General Social Survey data set I was able to get the percent of Americans who said they attended a weekly church service.

From the NationMaster data set I was able to get mobile phone subscriptions (per capita) data.

I started in 1986 and went to 2005. Below is the scatterplot of the relationship between mobile subscriptions and weekly church attendance plotted for each year from 1986 to 2005 (each dot is a year):

In short, although there is no proof here, the case I made is consistent with the statistical evidence: As mobile communications increased in America weekly church attendance decreased. Of course, there are a host of other explanations for this trend (i.e., the well known "third variable problem"). Regardless, I thought the graph was interesting.