Appendix B - Methodology

Research for this study included two nationally representative studies of US adults. The first was conducted using an online panel May 8–17, 2018, with 992 practicing Christians. In order to qualify, respondents had to self-identify as “Christian,” have attended a church service at least once in the past month and say their religious faith is very important in their life today. A similar study was conducted online with a nationally representative study of 1,001 US adults who do not meet the criteria for practicing Christians. Both lapsed Christians and non-Christians were interviewed.

Both studies have margin of error of ±3 percent at the 95-percent confidence level. Respondents were invited from a randomly selected group of people matching the demographics of the US population for maximum representation. Researchers set quotas to obtain a minimum readable sample by a variety of demographic factors and then minimally weighted the data by ethnicity, education and gender to reflect their natural presence in the known population, using US Census Bureau data for comparison.