Gallup finds that about 40% of Catholics attend mass in a given week.
Those are two very different statistics, and I would caution you not to confuse the two. The second says that on any given Sunday, any 40% of the total are attending mass. but it does not say the same 40% of the total are attending mass on every given Sunday. I do not recall at the moment where I got the 10% number I was using, but I have a feeling it was related to daily attendance, not weekly.
I would find either of those reasonable estimates of who I would call “real Catholics.” But by either of these measures, Christians in general are a small minority of the total U.S. population.
The question I raised, in response to mgist's earlier post, is whether there are really 75 million Catholics in the United States, or (recalculating with your 25% attendance number) whether there are actually 14 million "real" Catholics, with the other 61 million being "Catholics in name only" and nothing worth bragging about. And yes, I think we can make similar calculations using any Protestant denomination.
Ultimately, I think we would agree that "real" Christians in general are a small minority of the total U.S. population, and that recent elections have gone the way they have because the "real" Christians are being outvoted.
Thanks for a reasoned response to my short-tempered one. They are two different statistics, and that’s why I posted both of them, and that’s why they don’t match. However, as you probably know from your own congregation, it’s the same people every week. The people who answer that they went to mass last week, but that they don’t make it every week are confessing a sinful tendency; if they didn’t think mass was important, they wouldn’t go at all. (No-one would ever accuse someone of going to Catholic mass for the entertainment.)
The point is that they value their church, as opposed to the fifty percent who never make it to church and never try. And I think it would be unfair to call these, “Catholics in Name Only.”
At 70 million Catholics church members, Catholic church members outnumber all Protestant church members combined, using the broadest possible definition of “Protestant.” But I would never claim that the majority of Christians in America are Catholic. My larger point was that you should compare active Catholics to active Protestants, or all Catholics to all non-Catholic people who call themselves Christians.
Frankly, I think that the fact that mass attendance correlates with increasing the share of pro-life voting from 23% to 67% to be absolutely astounding. And it’s actually better than I stated: the 78% of “church-going Protestants” who voted for Romney was actually only “church-going white evangelicals.” The 67% of Catholics included church-going Catholics, including the 18% of church-goers who are Hispanic (yes, only 18%. Only 38% of Hispanic immigrants are Catholic at all), 10% who are asian, and 4% who are black.