Is going to church on Christmas like going to the polls on election day? Andreas Whittam Smith shows a financier's numeracy in his view of membership decline in the Church of England. As is customary, Christmas church attendance is among the numbers that he cites as an indication of the strength of religious sentiment in England. Whatever sort of "church" is being counted, It makes sense to quantify an easily verifiable public behaviour as an indicator of personal sentiment. After all, that's why we count votes on election days. But if that is the case, should we begin to think about church turnout the way campaigns think about election turnout? Yes.

After all, mild disaffection like that in the comments below Smith's article is not unusual among voters. They too have mixed feelings about candidates and parties, even if they belong to one. But they vote. They do so because campaigns spend time and money to teach voting behaviour to voters. Participation is a habit, and the principles of habit formation are the same for all social behaviours. Each person has just one brain.

Is there any place in England like Saddleback Valley in southern California-- lots of people who have some feelings about Jesus but have not formed any religious habits?  If so, then please consider Charles Duhigg's explanation for the explosive growth of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church.

Warren uses the science of habit. He has not succeeded with a Fresh Expression for the disaffected, although his services do look and sound like southern California. He has some talent for teaching, but he is no theologian. He does not offer rare insights into the discontents with which many rationalise their disinclination to pray. Rather, he has used findings from contemporary neuroscience to mend the fabric of habit so that the unchurched can start Christian lives with the hazy faith that they already have. Over time, his teaching ministry leads them toward firmer faith, whilst he reinforces this with a church experience that has both small groups and a large plenary congregation. This combination of weak and strong social bonds is known to be habit forming, as it no doubt was in the ancient dioceses where presbyters led the small groups and the bishop led the whole body in plenary liturgies.

So the big church in Saddleback Valley is the story, not so much of a preacher with charisma, as of a teacher-organiser with a well-founded method. Please note that to explain that method, Duhigg, a science writer, is talking not about sociology but about neuroscience, and so not about aggregate statistics but rather about the building of valued habit in persons and groups. That is very different from most of the stories that we have seen since the latest British census numbers on religious belief were released.

But to think big, we can tell a similar story about the science of habit changing a mass behaviour. With US unemployment above 8% for most of 2012, and an incumbent president associated with unpopular bank bail-outs and health care legislation, Americans should be looking forward to the inauguration of its first Mormon president next month. And because respected national polls predicted this outcome as late as election day, Boston's Logan Airport ran out of parking places for the private jets bringing supporters to President-Elect Romney's "Victory Celebration." But the voters who went to the polls on November 6th were not the ones those pollsters expected.

Drawing on talent from Silicon Valley, President Obama's campaign of "predictive analytics" met with unprecedented success in finding his supporters and getting them to the polls. Their success in getting people to the polls who vote less than they should-- the poor, immigrants, and racial minorities--  led to participation so far above even their historic 2008 levels that national pollsters badly underestimated his lead.* The analogy with church attendance is hard to miss, though it breaks down in two ways-- voters need to be registered in advance, and have to stand in line for an hour or more for a moment in a voting booth.

 Insights from the neuroscience of habit were critical to both the finding and the motivating of millions of individual voters. Again, the appeal of the candidates does not explain an operational difference between the campaigns-- one had a cutting edge approach to getting its voters to the polls, and the other didn't. The take-away lesson from this is that an investment in finding people pays off and once you find them, you can methodically influence their habitual behaviour for good.

And there is nothing particularly political about these tools. Duhigg explains here how Target, the American department store chain, knows that a woman is pregnant before she has told her friends at the office, and automatically launches a program to make loyal customers of the expectant mother and father for years to come. Again, the analogy with participation in a church is hard to miss. Every minister can think of life passages that trigger inquiries into church, and most would agree with Target's predictive analytics department that the approach of a child is the most powerful in shaping habits.

Please note-- Target does not have a consultant; Target has a department. Whilst the tools that work for Rick Warren and Barack Obama would work for many who read this, they are not enough without an experienced feel for the way the data maps the reality on the ground. An American denomination once sited its church plants in new communities using the sophisticated model that McDonald's devised for siting fast food restaurants. This worked well in most places, but I saw one expensive failure where a new church had been built on a site where a high water table made roads to the church difficult to build. There were many unchurched people nearby, but they would have had to wade through swamps to church.

We are living in a golden age of behavioural science that combines neuroimaging and laboratory experiments to make sense of how human beings learn, decide, trust, feel, empathise, and form habits. Every major institution in our societies is being reshaped by this knowledge. Recalling how much John Wesley was able to accomplish with the moral philosophy of the 18th C, a church in the 21st C may want to pay attention to its scientific heir. Few are attracted to theological studies by the beautiful mathematics, and many ideas for Fresh Expressions just reflect the interests of their inventors, souls who have never thought much about the hippocampus. There is actually nothing wrong with a "U2charist" once in a while, but changes of style will not work unless they lead to well-formed habit. To be as savvy in dealing with postmodern society as Apple or Google, it might be wise, even urgent, to acquire some of their tools and to build the capability of using them prayerfully.

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* Even the Financial Times and The Economist badly badly misanalysed the data, running this article and this article, respectively, the latter under a cover that declared the race a "toss-up." Not at all. See the final estimates of the probability of an Obama reelection from the "quants"-- Silver  90.9%, Wang 99.2 or 100% (Bayesian). Only experienced poll aggregators noticed the major clue that something had changed-- polls of single American states consistently predicted higher margins than national polls of those same states. The former make less use of past voting to weight their data, so their results were not biased against the evidence that something had changed on the ground.