Definition
The Frequent Religious Attender Score indicates a person's likelihood to attend a religious service at least once a week.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following survey question:
Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services?
- More than once a week
- Once a week
- Once or twice a month
- A few times a year
- Once a year or less
- Never
Respondents who answered “More than once a week” or “Once a week” were labeled as frequent religious attenders. Respondents who answered “Once or twice a month”, “A few times a year”, “Once a year or less”, or “Never” were labeled as not frequent religious attenders.
The Frequent Religious Attender Score was trained on polling data from the 2023 and 2024 Murmuration polls. We collected 16,000 responses via phone and online from registered voters. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter frequently attends religious services. The score represents the model's predicted probability (scaled to 0-100) that an individual attends religious services once a week or more.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out test set of 20% of the original survey sample. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Frequent Religious Attender Score, 52% are actual frequent religious attenders—making them 93% more likely to frequently attend religious services than the average voter.
Use Cases
The Frequent Religious Attender Score is useful for organizations looking to engage with religious or non-religious communities, and can be combined with other scores to create more nuanced universes for outreach. Below are a few examples of how partners could use this score:
- Cultural and Social Events: Groups planning interfaith dialogues, community festivals, or other religious gatherings can use this score to identify individuals most likely to attend or engage. Focusing on voters with the highest scores allows organizations to reach the right people and run more efficient outreach. The score can also be used in reverse — to identify voters who are less likely to attend religious events.
- Issue Support and Religious Activity: Organizations working on issues they believe are associated with religious attendance can use this score to identify supporters. For example, a community group focused on healthy food access — knowing that local churches and religious institutions are running food insecurity programs — could use the score to find voters who frequently attend religious services and may therefore be receptive to their efforts.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Frequent Religious Attender Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top… | Set the minimum score value as… |
| 10% | 41 |
| 20% | 33 |
| 30% | 28 |
| 40% | 25 |
| 50% | 22 |
| 60% | 19 |
| 70% | 17 |
| 80% | 15 |
| 90% | 12 |
| 100% | 2 |