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Hey everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and I have a very special guests, another substacker who's coming up in the substack rankings, although I think they’ve deemphasize the rankings, but you guys know where to find them. Ryan Burge, he is a professor, a political scientists, statistician, and American Baptist pastor, and he's a professor at Eastern Illinois University. And I know him because he produces a lot of infographics on religion, a lot of them. About American religion and they kind of go viral all the time. And so I decided subscribe. I'm a subscriber to a substack. And I've wanted to have him on for a while. And I just decided to like pull the trigger right now, because I feel like there's a lot of good content coming out of his substack, and I want to talk a lot about it. Because it's about a topic religion in America, which I think a lot of people are interested in, I think this will be accessible to American and non American listeners. Ryan, so before we go into specific topics, and you know, there's all these specific things you highlight, can you kind of review the secularization of let's say, the 21st century, the United States, the changes that you've been documenting over the years, and that you've noticed. Give a general high level or potted history for people who don't know about this field?
Yeah. So we break religion basically into seven different categories. The biggest one I'm gonna talk about today, obviously, is the nones, non religious people, these are people who identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular. So the farthest back we have good data is 1972. It's a General Social Survey began. So I'll use that as my timeline. In 1972 about 5% of Americans were nones. And it stayed about that same number to the early 1990s. And then from the early 1990 until about 2020 it was just like hockey stick style growth, I mean, every year is like 1%, or 2%. And by 2020-2021, the share of nones got to 30%. Now I just had a piece on my substack this morning that says that's that's slowing down now precipitously. And so it's not going to continue to have that hockey stick, it's going to plateau and sort of level off in the future. But today, about 30% of Americans are non religious, amongst Generation Z, which if you were born 1996 or later, it's about 40% - 45% are nones. But it seems like that's slowing down as well, too. There's other groups like the Catholic Church is about 20% of America. evangelicals are 17% of America today, which is exactly the same size that they were in 1972. They got to 30% of America in 1993 and then have gone down since then. And then the group that I'm a part of which is called mainline Protestant Christianity. These are non evangelical Protestant. So think of like Episcopalians, United Methodists, United Church of Christ. They were 30% of America in 1975. Today, they’re 9% of America in the latest data and hurtling towards 5% very soon, because they're very old and are dying off very quickly. Only one and a half percent of Americans are mainline Protestant under the age of 35 years old. So there's really no future for my tradition in America.
Yeah, I have a friend and she does listen to the podcast sometimes. But she's Episcopalian, and she is under the age of 40. She is rare, very, very rare bird. And I make fun of her about that. She doesn't say anything about it because it's true. You know, you said 1993. You know, 30% of Americans or Evangelical. Listeners of mine who are Gen X or older. Especially I think Gen X, like me, younger boomers, we remember a very different America, because of that 30% value in terms of - You know, so I'm an atheist, I've always been an atheist. And it's just not really that big of a deal now. When I was a kid, it was kind of a big deal. You know, there weren't that many. I mean people didn't even know what the term was. America just felt way more normatively religious. So if you're talking about a vibe shift, like you're talking about data, and I love data, but also vibe shifts are something you have to experience and I think a lot of the younger Millennials and definitely Zoomer listeners to this podcast, do not have any conception how Christian and evangelical Protestant America felt sometimes in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Oh man, I grew up - I was born in 1982, So I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, which is like prototypical evangelical Christianity in the 1990s. So I was just bathed in, you know, the religious right and anti abortion, anti LGBT, and anti porn and family values and anti Bill Clinton and all those things. So like, people don't understand how all encompassing evangelicalism was in the 1990s. I mean, you could buy T shirts, you could go to Christian concerts, Christian events, you could read Christian bookstores were all over America, it was like an entire - like you felt tucked in with evangelicalism and everything made sense in the evangelical world. And evangelicalism is still strong today, but not in nearly the same cohesive way as it was back in the 1990s. It's much more disparate, it's much more disconnected than it used to be, like, there used to be these events, I would go to that had 5000 high school students, evangelical high school students, and now they have 500. It's like, where are all these kids going now. So evangelicalism is definitely it, the numbers are down, but also the vibes are down. It just feels like a completely different movement today than it did whenever I was growing up.
Yeah, I mean people, so, you know, secular, secular liberals in particular, they did not, just for the context, I think most of the listeners know this, but I will just repeat, I grew up in northeast Oregon. I had a lot of Mormon friends, I had a lot of, you know, Baptist, Presbyterian, evangelical type friends, and stuff like that, you know, a lot of secular liberals. They don't know the differences between these different groups, and just their effect their beliefs, but also the social cultural implications. So for example, all this talking about Christian nationalism, I don't know what you think, right? I don't like to talk because it's just a big catch all. And it seems to bracket a lot of different types of people. And I'm not sure how useful it is. Partly because, you know, a lot of the, quote, “Christian nationalists” are not very pious people in some ways. They're more cultural Christians. I don't know what you think about that.
Oh, I think that to me, and I've written a ton about this, right? Like, I wrote a post called ‘I'm religious by don't go to church’ which is like people are like, No, you can't be religious and not go - I'm like, Yes, you can. You see a growing number of, for instance, on self identified Evangelical, these are people who on surveys will say they're Evangelical, the share, who never or seldom attend church in 2008, was 16%. Today, it's 27%. So we're seeing the rise of like, I like the idea of religion, but I don't like any of the trappings of religion. So what we're seeing is like, religion is a cultural marker, it basically means like, I'm a Trumper. I'm a conservative. I'm a right winger. It doesn't mean like I go to church or I go to a specific type of church anymore. And I think that's how religions changed in the lives of the average person. Now it's almost become, it's been reduced, like a tribal marker is what I call it sometimes whether it be like I rooted for the Cubs or the Yankees, or I live on the West Coast, or I'm, you know, that's what religion has become, it's really been devoid and stripped of all the theological precepts, and really means nothing more than us versus them in a way to self identify in a larger, diverse, you know, American strata of culture, economics, politics. It's like, I'm an Evangelical. When you say that, you're saying, I belong to a certain set of belief system to help me understand the world. Not necessarily I go to church.
I think one way to explain this to non Americans is, you know, I think America is a unique country in some ways. There are other countries like this, like South Korea, where traditionally your ethno cultural identity, with some exceptions, obviously, like Jews, is not tied to your religious denomination. And people change quite frequently in their lifetime, depending on where they move, their class shifts, and it's just not that big of a deal. Whereas in a lot of other countries, like I have friends from Europe, they're very secular, but their families from say, a Protestant background, and they don't believe in it, but to them, that's okay. Like, that's like a legit religion, they think the Catholics are kind of superstitious. You know, they don't get all these evangelicals. And I feel like a lot of America, not all of America, but a lot of America is going more towards that. And it's an interesting place to be in 2024. Because American was always exceptional in terms of, I'm gonna say like, it's confessional, individualistic ethos when it comes to religion.
Yeah. And I think like for me, I'm a Baptist, my parents are Baptist, my grandparents. I don't tell anyone with third generation Baptists though. Like if I left the Baptist faith and became a Presbyterian, it wouldn't be some sort of national scandal or familial scandal in my life it’d be like, Okay, you're something different now. And religion just doesn't work - If actually look at the data. People are moving around religion today more than they ever have before. So you know, evangelicals are becoming nones and nones are becoming evangelicals and a lot of Catholics become non denominational Christians actually a huge pipeline now in like 40% of people raised Catholic don't end up Catholic as adults. So even in America, it's a much more volatile marketplace. It's in much more volatile marketplace, people skip and hop around and jump around, pick something new, there's just not that much negative view, there's a stigma against changing a religion actually think in some ways you're kind of incentivized to do that cuz it makes it like you're a free thinker, trying to break away from your parents , your heritage, and all those things to try to find something new for yourself. So, America is just a different marketplace. And that's also why I never get invited to give talks anywhere outside of America, because I specialize in American religion. It's just so weird compared to religion in the rest of the world for a whole bunch of weird reasons.
Yeah, that does cause problems, because we are, you know, the imperial power, like until recently we were the hyper power. I don't know if you can say that anymore. And I think Americans tend to impose their view of what religion is on other parts of the world where there's just a lot of disconnect. And that's caused a lot of problems in my opinion.
I think that's always the problem is everyone thinks that we should - You know, America where we export our culture to other places. I think when it comes to religion, we do not do that at all. And mobile, actually, in most parts of the world, I think in some parts of
South Korea, South Korea, I think is a little bit like America.
Yes. And I do think that Sub Saharan Africa has become more like America, too. Like there's some there's a documentary called “God Loves Uganda” where basically a bunch of evangelicals went to Uganda and told him that God hates gay people, and now they're passing laws making sodomy like a capital crime. So there are ways that - but like, there's parts of America, like American religions, not gonna go to, you know, like Eastern Europe, it just doesn't work that way. So, you know, the thing about America is I tell people, like we were founded by a bunch of weirdos, and a lot of them were religious weirdos, including the Puritans. And I think that strain run through American theology in American politics, like you said, we are a very individualized culture. And that's one of the reasons Protestant Christianity does so well in America, by the way, because it's a very individualized religion. You get personal salvation through Jesus Christ, you know, not because what your parents and your grandparents did, what your church believes what you do individually. I think there's a lot to be said about how America was founded on Protestant beliefs and how it drove us to do things like Manifest Destiny and embrace capitalism and all the things that make America the world's superpower, I think, at least in some part is due to our Protestant Ethic.
Yeah, no, this actually ties into a whole literature. If you know, evolutionary anthropology and cultural anthropology, you know, I'm sure you probably know Joe Hendricks work about the weirdest people in the world. You know, it's not like explicit, but I mean, you talk to Joe, it's pretty clear. A lot of it like Protestantism, Protestant Christianity, is in some ways, like the end, like terminal state of this hyper individualistic rationalistic view of viewing the world that's very exceptional in the world.
Oh, and, you know, we can talk all day about Max Weber's “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” right. Like Weber argues one of the reasons Americans work so hard, it's they're trying to figure out if they're saved or not. Because Calvinism taught, you could figure out if you're saved by how much God blessed you on this earth. So what's a good way to figure that out by how much wealth you obtain, and you want to live in a country that has low taxation or low regulation, because it makes it easier to figure out if you're one of the elect or not. So really, our entire system was devised as a way to figure out if I'm individually chosen by God to go to heaven when I die. And that's the reason that we have such a work ethic in America that most of the rest of the world doesn't copy because we were trying to figure out our salvation. And now I guess you would argue that that ethos has moved away from religion and just sort of like, into the cultural bloodstream, like how we work so hard, just because we're trying to figure out how good we are, and what our worth is really, which is what Protestant Christianity is about, in some ways, is finding your worth.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to like, you know, totally, like, stick to this topic. But there's something I want to bring up, which I think a lot of people know, implicitly, you know, we're talking about Protestantism. And obviously, it comes out of particular history and a tradition. And we're actually talking about like second reformation or radical Protestantism. We're not talking about like, you know, magisterial reformation and state churches like Lutheranism, in the US at least. We're talking about very individualistic churches like Baptists, maybe Presbyterians, whatever, okay. But other religions in the United States have also taken up this. So you know, Catholics have complained you know, very right wing traditionalist Catholics or European Catholics, that American Catholics they're not like real Catholics, they act like they're Protestant. I've talked to Muslims in this country where, let's just say like they don't have like the standard Muslim beliefs that say like Sunni Muslims are supposed to believe in some sort of predestination and they sound like Armenians and I don't want to get into details but it's like, you take any religion that comes to the US and it does transform itself social culturally into like - or reorganized in a Protestant way.
I think yeah, I really think Protestantism, we're like the the sun and everything orbits around us in American religion like Catholicism has become more - everything has become like think about what the LDS or the LDS is the American made religion, right Latter Day Saints. It's an American religion through and through, it's one click away from Protestantism, like on a whole bunch of metrics. I think that show like even Scientology in a weird way kind of has some Protestant strings to it. If you really want to right down to it. Like, I don't think many religions can survive and go on a broad scale unless they're Protestant or Protestant adjacent, And like, okay, so think about this nondenominational protestant Christianity is the fastest growing religious group in America today. Okay, they were 3% of America in 1972. There 15% of American adults are now nondenominational. That's the most American religion ever. Because a lot of times it's a dude whose insurance salesman starts a church in his basement with no theological training and no sort of like certifications from anywhere. And all of a sudden, five years later it’s 1000 people in a mega church with a huge gymnasium on the side of town, like that is American capitalism, right there, you have a good idea, you're charismatic, you're good preacher, and you build a congregation. That is what the future of American religion looks like, like it or not.
Well, I mean, in some ways, it is already the present right? Like, there are people you were saying, who don't go to church who are religious, you know, I would like to see, like some sort of chart, I don't know, if you already have one where it's like, okay, like, how much of the religion experienced in America? How much of it is this type of religion, right? Because there are certain churches where people have high attendance rates, other churches, where they have low attendance rates, and whatnot. And so there's like big differences in how you estimate the size of the religion, and stuff like that. So I think that's something to explore. But I want to ask you, because like, people have different ideas about this. And, you know, I've read different things. What happened since about the year 2000, really, maybe it'll start in the late 90s, what happened to trigger this wave of secularization that we've seen since the 1990s, when, you know, there was maybe a little bit of drop off since like the 70s. But really, people thought America had kind of attained an equilibrium. And then, you know, George W. Bush becomes president, and he's an evangelical president. And the Christian right is ascendant and everyone's freaking out. And that's actually the beginning of the end.
So we point to a couple of things in social science one, so 1991 is the inflection point during the data. That's where like, it goes from flat, flat, flat, to boom, up and to the right. A couple things. One, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, right, because you got to think before that to be an atheist was to be a communist by default, like, you could not delink those two things in the American psyche. Like we added In God We Trust, to the pledge and the money to as a way to inculcate us against atheism during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Like, that's what the goal was. So once communism falls, now you can be an atheist and not be a communist, it kind of takes that negativity away from it. We have to talk about the internet. I mean, I don't you can't do this empirically. Because like, everyone got the internet, like a three year window of time, so you can have a control group to really control against. But you know, once you get on the Internet, what you realize is a couple things. One, you can you can investigate other religions very quickly and very easily and get high quality sources on Islam or Buddhism or Judaism even if you grew up in rural Illinois don't know anything but Baptist theology. Right. The other thing is, imagine you're an atheist born in Mississippi in 1950. You're never going to tell another soul you're an atheist and Mississippi in 1965, because you'll get run out of town, out of your house, out of your job. But then you go on Reddit, you know, you're you're born in 1995. You go on Reddit, and find a community ‘atheists in Mississippi’ and all sudden, you realize, wait a minute, I'm not alone here anymore. There's a bunch of people like me, and it makes you more bold in your beliefs. So when you answer a survey, you're going to be more likely to answer honestly. And the third thing I'd point to as politics, I think, politics, if you look at politics prior to the early 1990s, it was relatively calm and compromising after the early 1990s. That's when like, you know, Newt Gingrich’s the Contract with America started in 1994. And people got really - It wasn't we disagree. The other side's evil. And I really saw that growing up in a rural Illinois as a Southern Baptist, it was like, no, no, Democrats are baby killers, and they're evil. And we didn't see that before in politics. So I think what happened was the political divide drive a lot of moderate people away from religion, because they thought, Well, can you be religious and be pro abortion or be pro same sex marriage? It seemed increasingly, like you couldn't be beginning in the early 1990s. And a lot of moderate people who kind of hung around for a while ago go No, no, that's a bridge too far. And walked away from Christianity because it was becoming so right wing during that time period. So it's a confluence of a bunch of events, I think.
Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you when I was younger, you know, when I was, let's say, when I was a teen, you know, I would tell people, I'm not religious. I'm an atheist. And one thing that would be interesting is and I've always by the way, I've always been a libertarian conservative. So that's a that's a whole different thing. In terms of my politics, I've always been kind of right wing, and I know you've written about Republican atheists. I have some experience as a Republican atheists, but — Well, you know, me and Heather McDonald, like, George Will you know, well, okay. We can talk about that later. But like what I was gonna say though, is uh, There are a lot of people who are like, not very religious, but they would be like, Oh, but like, you know, you should at least like, have a church or religion, it was just the default thing to do. And some of the people that were telling me this, you know, they lived very secular lives in terms of their I don't know, their behavior, let's just say that they were not living by the book, you know. So I was always curious about that sort of thing. I think that that sort of hypocrisy, you'll always call it hypocrisy is rarer today, I think people that are just not living a Christian life. They don't have to, and they don't feel like they should say that they're Christian anymore. They don't. In the past, most people would say that. And you know, I would get like feedback from people, well, you should at least say you're Christian or religious or something. You know,
I think this is actually a really interesting methodological question, because like, how do you measure religion? Like, that's something that I confront, like, every day of my life, because it's not one thing, we actually think of it as, like three different spheres of activity. There's behavior, which is like going to church or like tithing or praying, there's belonging, which is like saying, I'm an Evangelical, or I'm Catholic, or Jewish or Muslim. And then there's the belief thing, which is like, what do you believe about Jesus, or heaven or hell, or the Bible, or whatever it is, we know that people can be religious, very religious, on one dimension, and not at all religious on another dimension, you know, people who belong and don't behave, or behave and don't believe, like, we know, there's a lot of people in church each Sunday who go on a regular basis who don't believe in any of it, but they go because they see the social benefits of it. I think what we've seen over time is the belonging piece has fallen away, because the thing that we're just talking about people who say they're Christians, but just didn't live by the precepts of Christianity, because they really weren't Christians in any functional way, except they put on airs, right? That's just the label that I give myself. I think a lot of those people over the last 20 years or so ago, you know, what I'm going to the facades over, like, I'm just a none. I've been a none for 20 years now. And I'm not gonna say I'm a Protestant who never goes. And I think that's, in some ways, I tell people, this is actually kind of comforting, because we're actually seeing what America really looks like. We were probably never as religious as we thought we were. It just people lied a ton on the surveys about certain things, and made them look more religious than they actually were. And what we're getting to now is the bare metal, we're really seeing what people are up to, because they're being more honest, because A, there's less, you know, stigma against being non religious. But B surveys have gone online. And in my field, that's actually a really good thing. Because people will not lie to a web browser when they’d lie to a human being asking them questions. So all that to say is I think we're actually we're much closer to what's really happening in America with survey data than we've ever been ever in the history of academia, as far as I can tell.
I'm gonna ask about nones. But I will tell you a quick story, which I think some of the listeners have heard before, I went back to my 20 year reunion. And so I, most of my friends, I was pretty straight edge in high school. So most of my friends by the end of high school were Mormon, Latter Day Saints. A lot of them went to BYU at my 20 year reunion, one of my most Mormon friends, we met at a bar, and I saw she had beer in her hand. And I, because I moved away. And I didn't really keep in touch with anyone. You know. So I fly back to Oregon from Texas, and like, what's going on here, and she will explain the internet happened. And basically a lot of my extremely devout Mormon friends apostatized. Although they were still culturally Mormon, and you know, this individual, for example, she and her husband are both in belief they're apostates. But they go to church, they go to the church, and their kids go to church. The kids also are basically apostates now too, but they really, you know, the Mormon church was, like, you know, the church league and like, all the infrastructure of the churches or, you know, so we're in a really strange place in America, in some ways in 2024, where it's like, I don't really know what to think, and how to anticipate things. That's what I'm gonna say,
I think - but I get, I get the inclination for someone to do that, by the way to be an apostate in belief but still belong to a church, because of all the things that church does. If you need an insurance agent, you go to someone in the church, you know, real estate, and you get dentists, you know, vet, you know, like, all these people are in the church, and they want to help you out because you know them on a friendly basis, not just a business basis. And I was just having a conversation earlier today, when both my boys were born, I came home, and there's a casserole dish sitting on my front step. Some old lady in the church made me a casserole both times and I think to myself, like, wow, you know, like that really made our lives easier because we didn't have to cook for a day or two because we had a casserole like, I think we have to remember that church at its heart is a social organization. Like you got to think about the horizontal dimension of religion as much if not more than the vertical. When I say religion to the average person, I think they almost always gravitate towards belief. As a social scientist, I want to kind of steer the ship a little bit back towards the idea of the horizontal, the social gathering. And I think that's why a lot of people go to church because it gives him a chance to socialize and give him a chance to plan something with their friends, and be someplace with other people. Because think about how many third spaces we have an American life right now, the answer is hardly none and religion is one of the very last ones and it's collapsing rapidly. So we need a third space, I think we can all admit to that we have to go home and work. What is that? I tell people, I go, Listen, you don't have to go to church, I don't care if you go to church or not, but find a third space, I have not seen the non religious community generate a third space in any way that matches what's happening in the religious world. I would love for them to do that. I just haven't seen that yet. And I think we desperately need that that to me, that's the bigger issue is the socialization piece.
Sure. My friend David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, well he's emeritus now at SUNY Binghamton, he's been talking about this for 30 years. And he's tried with various, I think, projects, I don't think they've succeeded. But yeah, it's difficult. It might not be possible, it might be, you know, just from a purely instrumental viewpoint that you do need supernatural beliefs to kind of anchor these sorts of institutions and social technologies, I don't know. Actually, I'm gonna ask you something. This is like, not off on the list of what we're gonna talk about. But I want to bring it up grades, and, you know, being religious, that correlation and belonging, or religious attendance versus belief, from what I remember, reading the social science like, maybe like 20 years ago, is there was a weird pattern where it's pretty consistent, that in most societies, kind of like the more, you know, high status, or like, high achieving you are, the more socially, you know, maybe bourgeois you are, the more you're likely to go to church or be belong to a church. But belief is not correlated the exact same way, where there's a much weaker correlation, or maybe even a negative correlation. And I'm just wondering if that still holds, like, what's tracking in the United States right now?
Yeah. So this is something that I think like most people who don't who don't think about religion very much think that getting more educated drives you away from religion? And the answer is, it does in some ways, but not in other ways. So, belief wise, you're absolutely correct. People who have a higher level of education have a less certain belief in God. You know, which kind of makes sense, right? If you're taught to question everything, and inquire and be inquisitive, it makes sense that you would not believe in God. But what we find is the people who are the most likely to be weekly religious attenders. Today, and this is across multiple surveys, hundreds of 1000s of participants are those with a graduate degree, are more likely to be in a house of worship this weekend, compared to someone with a high school diploma or less, and you can control for all kinds of factors. And that relationship still holds up. It also holds up on the belonging piece, too, by the way, the people are most likely to be nones, which includes a group called nothing in particular, are people with a high school diploma or less, the least likely to group to be nones are those with a graduate degree or more? So what your if you can't answer it, like in a quick little anecdote, because in some ways, it makes you less religious, but other ways. And part of this is and this is a really important conversation to have is education is positively related to interpersonal trust. The more education I have, the more likely I am to say that other people can be trusted. If I say that I’m going to be more likely to be social, like going to church. So it all sort of feeds this this flywheel, right more education, more trust, more trust, more education, more income, better connections, better mental health all sort of like runs on the same tracks. And I think that when you see it that way, it makes perfect sense, right? Because if you look at why a lot of people come to church, they go for external reasons, which is to, you know, climb the social ladder and get a new job or help your kids get a job or get into a new school, or whatever it is, that is people who go to church realize there's a lot of value outside the whole salvific side of things and a lot of don't even believe in the salvific side of things, but they can see tangibly the real value of being in a community of people who are different than you.
Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna tell one more story. Before we talk about nones, we'll talk about nones next. When I was in high school, I'm not like I said, I'm an atheist. I'm not religious, but my one of my teachers wanted me to do the Islamic prayer for the school because like, my family is Muslim. And so I know that, and I was like, you know, I don't believe in this stuff. Like, my teacher was like, basically, like - Look Razib, I go the Presbyterian Church because my wife makes me. I don't believe in any of that crap either. You know what I'm saying? So just like go with it. Okay. It's funny. But speaking of no religion, the nones, you know, there's massive growth of nones over the last generation. Could you talk about that growth and then talk about what you're seeing of the leveling off and why?
Yeah, I mean, so I think it's the biggest cultural shift in my lifetime in the last 40 years, you know, going from 5% of America to 30% of American is just unbelievable. And here's what's even fascinating about it is you You don't get to 30% of America by just being one thing, you can't get to 30% by just being a bunch of white dudes, or a bunch of people with color, you got to be a little bit of everything. Now, primarily, the nones are rising amongst liberal people left leaning people. So for instance, amongst people who identify as liberal, almost half of them are none today amongst people identify as conservative is at 12%. So we call that the the Pew gap or the God gap. It's just the idea that Republican parties become the party of Christians, typically, white Christians, and the Democratic parties become the party of nones and then non white Christian, so black Protestants, Latino Catholics, things like that. So what we're seeing is it's, it's growing amongst every racial group to so for instance, amongst white people, it's about 35% are nones amongst black people. It's about 35%, or nones, the group that's the least likely to be nuns or Hispanics, but we're talking like 32%. So 35%. And then amongst Asian Americans is even higher there in the 40s, low 40s When it comes to, to being non religious. And really, like I said, if you look at like regionally, where it's happening, it's happening all over, but it's predominately happening in the Northeast, and the northwest. So Oregon, Washington and the Northwest, and the Northeast, it's it's places like Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, obviously, religion is still very strong in the south, especially the southeast, the Bible Belt, and it's also pretty strong in the southwest, too. So places like Arizona and New Mexico and Texas, but even places like that you're seeing 25-30% of Texans have non religion. Now, it's here's the thing, it used to be that most kids who are raised in a non religious household would grab on to religion into adulthood. So about only about a third of kids raised nones were still nones as adults in the 1970s, which means that two thirds became religious, it's actually flipped. And now two thirds of people raise nones stay nones as adults. So we're seeing now for the first time in large numbers, our second and third generation non religious Americans, which is something that we have no conception of, because it didn't exist until the last 30 or 40 years. So all that to say that we're in this really interesting moment in American history, we're trying to figure out what a group looks like, as it's growing rapidly and changing rapidly. We're trying to study it as it's doing all these metamorphosis. And we're really in the beginning stages of understanding on religion in America.
It's interesting, when you're saying the rapidity. You know, this is a phenomenon that's exploded over the last 25 years, the last generation, you know, other types of researchers, you know, are examining trends that are happening over centuries, 1000s of years. And, you know, the slope of their graphs are, you know, you have to do this fit and all these things. And you're talking about stuff where you can start writing a book, and then three years later, you know, at some point that some of the stuff would have been outdated. Right?
I wrote, The first version of The Nones came out in 2021, I had to write a new addition, two years later, because things were changing. And now with the new data that just came out in the last six months, I've got to draw out a new version of the nones as the nones are not as rising as fast as we thought they were going to, and they sort of hit this plateau now. So like, it's, it's literally like a plane is flying. And we're building it like as it's taking off, which is really exciting, by the way, but also terrifying
Just in time scholarship.
Well, that's the thing about - not to go off on the substack conversation too much, but like to do this conversation in academia would take 18 months, you know, to get the data to write the article, to get it through peer review, and to actually get it published would take at least 12 to 18 months on substack. I got that data on Thursday, I wrote the post on Friday, it ran on Monday. So you're getting this information, like in real time, almost in real time for when it was collected, which I think is such a tremendous value to the general public, that they wouldn't have had, you know, even 10 or 15 years ago, because of just the slow very frustrating process academia is
So I was just about a month ago, I was talking to Kristian Kristian, who’s an archaeologist in Denmark. And he basically telegraphed a paper or preprint that was going to come out soon. It's interesting to people who are interested in ancient DNA, which me and my listeners are, okay. But someone pointed out the comments, when they were young this sort of result would have taken 10 years probably to percolate out into the public sphere. Whereas today, with the podcast, he just previewed a preprint to a bunch of people who are super interested in the topic. So you know, we complain about the internet, Jonathan Haidt got that stuff about smartphones. But, you know, there's good things about the rapidity of our information flow. Right.
I will give you one caution about that though, and that is we talked about Christian nationalism a couple of minutes ago. If you look in the academic literature, there was almost no mention of Christian nationalism before about 2017 or 2018. And now it's like what everyone wants to talk about in my world, my world of religion and politics. That idea kind of jumped the fence from academia into the public discourse too quickly before was completely baked. Like before we understood the measurement very well. And the right scale construction very well. We didn't theorize it very well. So we're like we're like having this debate in the public sphere, when usually that'd be hidden behind The ivory tower for a while. And when it was pretty ready, you know, much more developed and understood, then it would jump the fence out into the public discourse. And I think that's one of the reasons that Christian nationalists come so problematic is because it got out too quickly before we were ready to really conceptualize it in a meaningful way. So, you know, it's I think it's generally good that we're doing scholarship in public, right, getting it out to the general public, and doing public facing scholarship. But there are downsides that we need to figure out how to mitigate or at least be more thoughtful about going forward.
Sure. Well, let's just let's just do some a little bit of epistemological hygiene. You know, you're a scholar of religion. You're a pastor tell us - talk about Christian nationalism, tell us what it is and what it ain't, you know?
So that's the problem it's hard to figure out what it is. So it's the idea that America is a Christian nation that should be run by Christians, and especially white Christians, white Christian nationalism. And the problem is, like the original measures for it were not created to create a Christian nationalism scale. So I had questions like, ‘we should allow prayer in public school’ That was actually one of the six statements that like kicked off this whole conversation, which is a ridiculous statement, because prayer is allowed public school and always will be like, that's just a foundational part of free speech. Right? And it was part of the scale. Now on the other side of it, like I've seen people say that yeah, my vote should matter more on election day, because I'm a Christian than a Muslim or Hindu or a non religious person. Now, to me, that's crystal clear. Like, I don't think it's like, you know, obscenity, Potter Stewart was asked, you know, what is obscenity? I don't know how to define it. But I know it when I see it. The problem of Christian nationalism is like, I don't know how to define it in a way that makes everyone happy. But I can point to you examples where I go, No, no, that is definitely Christian nationalism, and other examples where I go, I'm not so sure, that's Christian nationalism, kind of based on the context, we're getting better scale development now than we had. But it's still a work in progress. Because it takes a long time to try these out. You got to fundraise, you got to get grants, you got to run the survey, you got to run it three different times, you got to validate. So I think in five or 10 years, we're gonna have a much better scale that we almost all can agree on Christian nationalism we have right now. All
right, yeah, that makes sense to me. So you, you know, speaking of like just in time scholarship, so the nones are possibly leveling off. Can you talk about why you think that is? Because you did offer some hypotheses?
Yeah. So I think one of the were described as we've scraped off all the loose topsoil over the last 20 or 30 years of American life. So the marginal Christians, the nominal Jews, you know, people were just like kind of Catholic in name only over the last 20 or 30 years have decided, you know, what, I'm really not Catholic, or Protestant or Jewish, I'm really non religious. And what you have what you got the low hanging fruit, basically, over the last 20 or 30 years, and what you're left with is the bedrock. And the bedrock is not going to become a none, like these are hardcore Catholics and evangelicals and Jews and Muslims. They're not changing. So I think what we saw over the last, you know, 30 or 40 years is like a winnowing process in the wheat and the chaff to use a biblical reference. And we saw a lot of people who are marginally attached now, just say they're nones, when they always been nones are probably approximate to nones over the last 20 or 30 years, I think, going from 5% to 30% is a heck of a lot easier than going from 30% to 50%. I don't think that's very likely, because the people who are left are now really true believers, and they're not going to become nones on a whim or because of politics or anything else. They're going to be Protestants or Catholics for the rest of their lives.
I think for the biologists out there, I think what we're seeing here is, it's a logistic, basically a logistic type growth pattern where there's initial slow rate of change, that rapid rate of change as the social norms are changing, and everybody who's accessible, and within those social networks are flipping, but eventually, you kind of run out of the raw material, and, you know, you're hitting people who are different social networks who are more resistant. And I think, you know, for religious example, look at South Korea, South Korea has pretty much like leveled off over the last like, you know, probably like the 10 to 15 years in terms of the proportion who are Christian or Catholic plus Protestant. You know, and I think it's partly just because you're seeing the carrying capacity in South Korean society, of how many people are going to be Christian. And you know, they're obviously influential. They're a big deal. They're over representative elites, but you know, South Korea is not going to be 80%. Christian, it seems from what we can tell.
I think the same thing has been true in America. We just lied about it for a long time. You know, we're never - we were 90% Christian and 1972, according to the GSS. But we weren't in any meaningful way 90% Christian in terms of people functionally going to church and believing in Jesus and things like that. I think that what we see in every society is like, I think we're actually getting in some ways back to what's really happening in America. And the problem is now we look back a lot of Evangelicals do this, like well back in the day we were really religious, like look at the nostalgia for the 50s and 60s. I want to tell them we were never as religious as we thought we were. It was all just a facade. And as you look back at the right, for instance, like I think Truman said, I want people to be religious, I just don't care what kind. Like, that's not what evangelicals say. Like, that's not how they think about religion. So, I think in some ways we recreate the past and an image that we want it to be, and then are really sad that we're not there. We were never there. That past never existed in America. If you look back at the colonial period for God's sakes, more women gave birth within nine months of being married, then were members of churches in New England. So like they were not paragons of virtue at any point in American society. We just create this weird reality. And I think that's the problem is nostalgia, is like cancer in a lot of ways because it's wanting to go back to a place that never really existed. And I think America's never been as religious as we thought it was.
Yeah, I would say and you can disagree with me Ryan and we can talk about this. One thing I would say to evangelicals, and this not all evangelicals, but you know, this founding of Christian America and whatnot. I think it's pretty clear that the founders and the founding generation, you know, they had various levels of belief or orthodoxy, however you define it, but there are culturally Christian. So even Thomas Jefferson’s Jefferson Bible, which, you know, at that time, Jefferson was basically a Unitarian, or the later became a more conventional Episcopalian like Christian Protestant assumptions, right. And, you know, the original, like many of the early presidents, like, you would not say that they were atheist or anything like that, but they were not particularly devout. And in America today, you know, if you have like an evangelical Southern Baptist, they would not be the type of person that they would say that those Southern Baptists would say is a Christian, right. And so it's like a subtle thing, because culturally, they're clearly Christian, you know, they probably still go to the Anglican Church or whatever. Some of these, you know, Virginia, you know, these these Virginia aristocrats, but they were not like the low church evangelical Protestants that we see in the American South today.
It was so funny to Google what's the most religious president we've had? I go like, by what metric, right like who do we, Joe Biden, by the way has gone to mass more than any presidents going to church in my lifetime. Like he's easily the most like devout in terms of behavior, but then you go back and you look back at history and okay, like, think about like, who's been President. Obama was mainline Protestant but like, barely kind of classic mainline Protestant, like, he went every once in a while. Bill Clinton was the same way. He was Southern Baptist, but you really didn't go to church. I mean, Reagan was not in any way religious. George HW Bush was Episcopalian like Jimmy Carter was really an Evangelical, but like a moderate Evangelical, like he wasn't like a hardcore right winger
Well he left the Southern Baptists
Over gender, exactly. But if you look at most of our presidents, they're exactly what you just described, which is culturally Christian, but not really functionally religious in any way that like evangelicals would respect. And I think that's what the founders were, like Ben Franklin believed in reincarnation, George Washington only went to church to get votes, he actually left because the pastor got mad at him one day, he like, they were not religious, you know what I mean? They weren't religious in a way that we would go, Oh, wow. They're really devout. They were Christian, because everyone else was Christian. It was just the thing to do for educated aristocrats. And I think that is - understanding that makes us understand history a whole lot better, that we don't make this like plea to oh, we had real Christian roots. No, we had the same Christian roots today as they had back in those days, which is generically Christian, but not functionally religious in any meaningful way.
Well, okay, so I want to ask you, you know, I have said before, Obama and Trump, were kind of an interesting sequence, because, you know, Obama said in his book that he believes in, like his biography, I think he said, he believes in evolution more than he believes in angels, which is a very weird thing for a Christian, in my opinion, to say. And then Trump he's definitely a cultural Christian. But I mean, in some ways, I think Trump is the like, in the last generation of the most secular American president. And I think that's really changed a lot of things. You know, on the right in the Republican Party, even though it's still the Christian party, there's a lot of schizophrenia, especially with the younger people that I know on the right, where, you know, the sort of Bible Belt, Christian coalition evangelicalism is just not as dominant as it was, you know, during, say, the Bush administration.
I mean, just think about the last couple Republican candidates. You’ve got Trump, who we just talked about was born Presbyterian, but really not. I mean, and then he became nondenominational. By the way. That's what he said, which is, you know, whatever. And then you got McCain, who was in no way - You don't think McCain and think religion. The guy wasn't religious. And then he got Romney. He was incredibly religious, but in a way that most Americans don't respect in that he's a Latter Day Saint. So like the Republican Party, a paragon of white Christianity is running candidates who are not really functionally white Christians in any way. It's the weirdest thing if you think about it, like they cannot find a candidate who they can. And I guess here's what a lot of them would say evangelicals will tell you this right now. We like Trump better because he ended Roe. Bush was an evangelical we didn't get anything done. He really didn't want to end Roe at the end of the day. He wanted to tell us he was going to end it but actually he didn't do it. Trump was an empty vessel and gave us what we wanted on abortion, which means I don't care what you believe. I care what you do, and you delivered for us. So therefore, you're one of us. And I think that's why evangelicals have embraced Trump in a way they've not embraced most other Republican candidates, because he actually got them a meaningful win that changed their lives in ways they, at least they think it changed their life, you know?
Yeah, I mean, you know, render unto Caesar. I mean sometimes even a gentile or a pagan ruler serve the cause, or like work God's way the world, I think, is the way they would say it. I don't know. I mean, it's a very interesting, because you're right, there is a, shall I say, cult like devotion to Trump among American evangelicals, which is the inversion of, of the extreme aversion that you can see among secular, you know, the professional managerial classes. Even the central right secular professional managerial classes.
Yeah, have you heard the king Cyrus analogy with Trump?
Oh, okay. Yeah. Explain that for the listener .
So a lot of like, far right Evangelical, charismatic, believe that Trump is like the next iteration of King Cyrus. So the Israelites, they were destroyed in 586. They were destroyed by the Babylonians. And many of them were taken into exile into Babylon. So they couldn't revolt against the Babylonians. And Nebuchadnezzar was the king at the time. Well, eventually what happens is the Jewish people are living in Babylon, the Persians overtake the Babylonians and take it take that land for themselves. King Cyrus was the Persian king, and he allowed the Jewish people to return back to their homeland and rebuild the temple. So for them like Trump is, you know, Cyrus was a non Jewish person, but worked God's will for the Israelite people, just like Trump is not a religious person, but he's doing God's will in a different way that gets to the same spot. So that's a lot of Evangelicals think that, you know, like, we don't care what he is, we care what he does. And he did good things, just like King Cyrus, you know, he worked for God's plan and God's kingdom. And look what we got out of that.
Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. Because like I was a little shocked, I think, you know, people of our generation that Roe was overturned. And, you know, now it's like the new normal, you know, good for Democrats, in some ways, to be honest, politically, but, you know, it's, it's a big transformation. Trump went there, partly because, you know, he isn't a politician, and he probably doesn't understand what should or shouldn't be done. As opposed to what you say, right?
So here's an interesting stat. This is not my so this is from Sam Perry, who is a great scholar of Christian nationalism. He did a survey and asked a couple different questions about abortion that you don't typically see. One is do you think abortion is murder? And then another one was, do you think women should be jailed for seeking an abortion? You know, what percentage of Americans think both Abortion is murder, and women should be jailed for seeking an abortion? Do you want to guess?
About 10%?
It's 6% - 6% of Americans believe Abortion is murder, and women should be jailed for seeking an abortion. That is what we're talking about. If you're in that 6%, like from a Christian nationalist perspective, it’s like, I don't care. We need to change the law to reflect God's plan. But you got to convince 45% of Americans right to adopt your viewpoint to win through a democratic process. That's the issue that Christian nationalism faces that you have to convince people or shove it down their throats. And a lot of Christian nationalists will say no, I'm fine shoving it down their throats because the law is a teacher. So we'll use the law as a weapon basically, to teach people about morality. And I can say that most of the vast, vast majority of Americans disagree with that perspective, because they think at the end of the day, you know, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, right, the voice of people is the voice of God. And 95% of people disagree with you. And so that's gonna tell you about where we are as a society.
Yeah, I have friends who are Christian nationalists that not only, not only is Christian nationalism, like associated with these sort of beliefs, these authoritarian beliefs, you're talking about the locus, the demographic locus of Christian nationalism, is it a particular type of reform, you know, Calvinist Protestant Christianity. And it's interesting because, you know, they have issues with the Trad Caths, you know, who they are allied with, in many ways, the traditionalist Catholics, and it's, you know, it's a self marginalizing. Honestly, I've told him this, it's a self marginalizing movement, because at the end of the day, you know, you're not going to stone the gays, remove citizenship from non Protestants, and all these weird fantasy LARPing it's a little bit like the DSA and you know, come the revolution. It’s just not going to happen.
I think that's like that - the self limiting thing is the key here, right? Like, how many how far are you going to get as a politician saying we should in no fault divorce, make pornography illegal, make abortion a crime for everyone involved? Like how many what percent of Americans like yes, sign me up for that stuff? Like I think at some level, they've got to realize they're fighting a mission. That's impossible. You're not going to win over more than 10 or 15% of Americans to any of those viewpoints, especially that three of those viewpoints at once. So, what is your purpose? I think that's what Christians, especially evangelicals, they've been really dealing with this problem for a long time. Do they do He's kind of like go on their own enclave over like pick a state and make it super, super conservative and live there and be happy, or they try to like affect national politics. I think for the last 3040 years, they've chosen option two, which is like to go out in the world and try to change politics in their own image. And in some ways they've succeeded, but in some ways, they've been miserable failures and actually probably hurt the name of, of Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity in America, because a lot of people felt like it got shoved down their throats and they weren't persuaded by it. They were told, here's what you're going to do. And a lot of Americans just frankly, don't like that very much. Yeah,
you know, I will say, you know, not editorializing, but I think decentralization and kind of like devolution to the States. I think that's the only way that we can really have a little social peace right now, because we are a very diverse country, we don't have unanimity, kind of like the public facade that you were talking about, of, oh, everyone's actually a Christian and all that stuff that's collapsed. We have like legitimate legitimate religious diversity, ideological diversity, a lot of negative polarization. And, you know, the way I explained it to people is like, you know, Texas exists, Florida exists, California exists, New York exists, Iowa exists, all these different states with different configurations existed, maybe we just need to understand that it's going to be different. I live in a state that's functionally pro life. Now I live in Austin, Texas, and it's functionally pro life. And that's just how it is. I personally am not pro life, although I'm not, you know, like, super pro abortion rights either. But I’m definitely not pro life, but I choose to live with the state. There's trade offs, obviously. And that is how it is. And other people, I have friends who are traditionalist Catholics who live in California, you know, and obviously, there's trade offs there. But, you know, in general, people are moving with their feet, and they're going where they can, you know, can't go. And I will say, the really great thing about Texas and Florida, is the housing is accessible and cheap. And I do think that my friends is blue America, as you know, they're trying to make changes, they're trying to make California try to pay up past laws, but they need to think about, like what they're doing, when they make housing in accessible to basically the whole younger generation, that's not working at a fang company, you know, so just just a little off topic there. But I think, you know, let 1000 Flowers bloom, like have the laboratory of states, you know, kind of proliferate because I think that's the only way that we can maintain peace. So that's, that's just my take.
I think we should we should really lean on the the ballot referendum and initiative. Right? Like, if you want to move on abortion politics, I think every state should put it on the ballot, you know, put a 16 week 20 week ban on the ballot and let the people decide, and a 51% of people vote in favor of that, then that's what you do. Like, again, Vox Populi, Vox Dei . The voice of the people is the voice of God, let the people decide on these contentious issues. And honestly, if I'm a politician, I want that to happen. Because now let me say, Oh, you're killing babies. No, I'm not killing anybody. You voted to kill babies. You know what I mean? Like, I'm just reinforcing the view of the general public on this issue. I don't know why politicians try to stand in the way of what the public wants. So often. If they're 50 Different states, let them all have initiatives and referendums on gun control, on abortion, and same sex marriage and transgender and whatever you want it to be. Let the people decide. Because at the end of the day, when people go, Oh, the system sucks, go, Yeah, but you made it suck. You know, I mean, you're the ones who voted for this stuff. So it's your fault. I think, you know, moving towards a more federated system is probably the only way our country survives, as we become more and more ideologically and religiously polarized too by the way, there is no compromise on the position that abortion is murder. Like, how do you - you can't navigate a democracy where your position is abortion is murder. How do you agree with an atheist who says no, no, I don't even believe it's a life. You can't you can't make those those two views are incompatible with each other. Incommensurable. Exactly. And actually, I've written a book about this called “The Big Church Sort” where it basically making the argument that we're careening towards a future where on the right, you're gonna have a whole cloistered group of evangelicals and Trad Caths and conservative Muslims and conservative Jews and LDS, on the other side, you're gonna have a whole bunch of nones who hate religion, and want to not have a privileged place in American society. And the main line, which used to dominate American life in the 50s, and 60s is going to be gone, functionally disappeared. So all we're gonna have is people who hate each other on each side. And look, the worst version of the other side. How do you compromise on the big issues of our day, when you don't have any space in American life where people can debate and discuss with people they trust and like, but just disagree with. Those spaces don't exist. And the church has never been perfect. Don't get me wrong, but it used to be very diverse politically, educationally, culturally. And now it's all one note, and I think that's really, really bad, not just for religion, but for the health of a democracy.
Yeah. You know, that' dark and it true. So let me let me ask you, I was looking at the data. And, there was huge generational differences, which you've written about. Actually, I'll tell you guys a quick story. I was talking to my sons, they're in elementary school. And, you know, just to give you a demographic, it's like, you know, kind of the type of elementary school where the parents are professors or doctors or lawyers is very, like, you know, upper middle class professional. And I asked my kids are Not being raised religious, you know, my wife is an atheist as well. In any case. So I asked them if, you know, they know any religious kids because they were, well, my daughter was in an elementary school that had a fair number of evangelical kids. And there were some religious arguments that were kind of weird when five year olds are doing that, but whatever. And my son's were like, not really, that they were like, Oh, well there's a Jewish kids. And they know that they're Jewish, because they're not there during certain holidays. But that's about it. So I don't I think there are some religious kids, but it's so low key and low salience that, you know, my nine year old and seven year old do not think they don't know any religious kids, except for the Jewish kids.
I think, I think that's the that's, can I just say, I think the bigger issue is a lot of people are not exposed to different religious groups. And we actually, there's something called social contract theory, which is just the basic idea, like, you know, someone from a different group, you become more tolerant of that group. It's not just like Muslims as an idea. It's like, the guy down in the cubicle next to me is a Muslim, and he's a good dude works hard, treats his family, well, tries to be a good American. So now for therefore I don't think Muslims are bad. Like, we've got to be exposed to people that are different than us, especially religiously. You know, when I was in college, when I was 18, we went to Chicago, and we went to a Catholic church went to a synagogue, a mosque, the Baha’i temple, a black Catholic Church, an Episcopal Church, a mosque, that was one of those transformative experiences for me, because I realized that at the end of the day, we're all trying to do the same thing. And that's find transcendence, whether you find it here, there or everywhere. And these people are different than me, but different is not bad, different is different. And that's okay. And it's always made me comfortable. When I walk in any house of worship. Now, I'm totally fine. Whether it's a mosque, a synagogue or a church, I don't care because I know what I'm there for. Right? I think we need a lot more of that in American life, because it opens our eyes to the idea that at the end of the day, we're all just people striving for something trying to make our lives better to live a more meaningful life. And I think when we only cloister ourselves, people who think the same, worship the same, believe the same, and vote the same. I just don't think that's going to create a good democracy for us in the future.
Yeah, no, no. Amen Brother. So I guess the last question I want to ask you, is - So we were talking about like the generations, right? So they're getting more secular? Actually, a couple of last questions. So is it true? My understanding is, people in a given generation don't get that much more religious. And in fact, your data seems to show that like some of the Silents are getting more secular, like as they age, because a lot of people are saying, looking at your data. Well, who cares if Gen Z is 35% none. A lot of them are going to become more religious as they age. And then the second issue is looking at your leveling off of the nones and whatnot, do you think that the US in the next generation is going to hit 50% or less Christian?
So the actually in ‘20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America’ one of the myths that I bust is that people become more religious as they age. If you break the data down into birth cohorts, which are like five year birth windows, and look at like 2008 versus 2022, which is like the farthest that I can go. Every almost every not every, but like 90% of birth cohorts are less religious today than they were in 2008. And even amongst like boomers and Silent Generation, folks who were born in the 30s, and 40s, and 50s, are less religious today than they were 15 years ago. What the problem is, when you go to church, you see a bunch of gray haired people and go, Oh, they must be coming back to religion as they age. They've been there the whole time. You don't see the people who aren't there. There's a lot of gray haired people who aren't there that you just don't see. So that's, that's kind of a big misconception. Now, I do. So when we think about what the future American religion looks like, if you see what's happening with the millennials, and Gen Z, they look almost exactly the same religiously, which is fascinating, because we're talking about being born in the late 70s versus the mid 90s, which is like a huge change technologically in America. I think we're going to get to about 45% None and stick there for a long time. We can't go above that, because that's what Gen Z and millennials are. About 45% of them are nones. So either the boomers start dying off and they're only 28 or 30% nones, you can't get above 45%. Cuz that's what the youngest generation is. Now, could it go on there? Theoretically, but I just don't see a future in my lifetime, where like, 55% of Americans 60% of Americans are non religious. It just we have that core that bedrock of people that aren't going to move and I think America has a bigger core than almost any country on Earth a very devout religious folks.
Okay, so, you know, it's gonna be about a 50/50 nation is what I'm what I'm hearing.
I think so. And the 50% is gonna be a lot of nones. But by the way, not that doesn't mean 50% Atheists agnostics, by the way, it's probably gonna Yeah, you know, it's like 10% atheist 10% agnostic, and 30% of people will call their religion nothing in particular. And then the other 50% is going to be like, mostly Protestants and Catholics and then a smattering of Muslims, LDS Jews, you know, and sort of everybody else that's, that's what America looks like and probably 2070 I would bet.
So you know, the whole like, you're talking about communism and atheism and like the kind of like the social stigma with the term. I will, I'll tell you a story, which I think is like Julia Sweeney the comedian was talking about, but a lot of people have told me things like this, where Julia Sweeney told her mom, I think she was raised Catholic. She was like, I'm an atheist now. I don't believe in God. And she's just like, she's like, Julia, you know what, like, don't believe in God. But did you have to be an atheist? It's just, it's just the terminology, the term has such negative connotations, or did that a lot of people that I do personally, where it's like, if I kept pushing, the clearly didn't believe in God, you know, like, they would just admit it, like, I don't really believe in God, you know, but they didn't want to call themselves atheist. I think that that's, that's decreased a lot over the last generation.
So what's funny is, if you actually look at the belief question, the GSS has been asking the belief question since 1988. If you look, people never attend religious services, they're just as likely to say that God is there certain that God exists, as they say that God does not exist, about 20% of them pick both options. So even amongst like never, like, it's really like 9% of people believe in God. At some level, they don't pick the atheist or agnostic view of God. And even amongst atheists, by by belonging, not all of them, only two thirds of them are atheist by belief, which just shows you like how weird American - We can't… No one has a coherent worldview on this on this stuff, it seems like you just kind of randomly pick and choose how you feel on certain topics. So when people say, Are we religious, like I have to say like, I don't want to be like, pedantic but like, What do you mean by religion? Because it makes it vastly different answer, if you mean, like church going people versus people who believe in a higher power, like we're talking 40% of people never go to church, but 90% of you will believe in God at some level. So we're somewhere between those two polls. And that's a that's a much different conception of America.
Yeah, you know, so I live here in Austin, Texas, it's a very liberal city. You know, because I run a somewhat more conservative circles. I have good friends who are religious, but most people here are not religious. You know, a lot of people will say atheists, but some of them not. I remember talking to a friend of mine, his graphic designer, just conventional liberal Austin person. And we were talking about ghosts, you know, whether he believed in ghosts. And he said, You know, I was like, Oh, do you believe in ghosts? And he's like, Yeah, of course, I believe in ghosts. And I'm like, why? And he said, Because I'm human. And I'm telling that story. Because it's just like, you know, for a lot of people. It just makes sense to them, whether they're religious or whether they go to church or not, these sorts of things make sense to them.
We actually have a survey in the field right now. The Templeton Foundation gave me a whole mess of money. I’m doing a survey like 16,000 Americans and 12,000 are non religious. And we asked questions about the soul. Like what happens when you die? Do you have a soul does it go somewhere? Do you believe in Heaven and Hell? Do you believe in karma? You know, like what goes around come trying to figure out like, what is the contours of spirituality in America? Because like what I want to know what percent of Americans are just like, don't believe in any of that stuff. Right? Like no soul. No heaven. No hell, no karma, no ghosts, nothing. They don't have crystals. They don't do Tarot. They don't do any. Like, they literally have no spirituality or religiosity at all, I bet you with a vanishingly small number, like we are still, for whatever reason, a deeply spiritual, if not religious people, we still believe in all this stuff. And, and it's still so funny. Like course, I believe in ghosts. I'm a human. Like, it's almost like you have to believe in supernatural things. That's the American ethos, it feels like
I'll tell you this as one of the soulless people, you know, and I've always been like this, you know, we are few, we are truly few and far between, you know, in spirit is what I would say, there are people who fancy themselves heterodox, like, you know, when you dig, you know, they are there but human as well. So, ironically, we're talking about differences and polarization and all these different beliefs. But it also comes back to there is a common humanity. And that's kind of going to what you were alluding to when you were saying you were in different houses of worship, and yet there's a commonality, there's a universality there, and, you know, maybe like me on a hopeful note we can reflect on that. And, you know, you know, you're talking about being exposed to different types of people. You know, I know, I tried to do it myself, you know, what I do know different types of people. You know, I tried to bring different types of people onto this podcast. You know, I had Ramesh Ponnuru a conservative writer, thinker, talking about the prolife movement, like I think January of 2021, before Roe v. Wade was overturned. I just got some interesting responses because a lot of my audience, who are scientists, have never really heard an articulate, intelligent, because he's obviously very smart, pro life person, you know, so I thought that was just interesting.
I’ll give you a story about that. We were talking about that one of my classes, I always start my class by saying what's going on in America was talking about for a little bit, and we were talking this was like, during COVID coming out of COVID we're talking about you know, vaccine mandates, and you know, people are like no, no, you should have you should be able to get a you know, you should have to get the vaccine and I was like, okay, like, under what pretense and I go, Yeah, but what about when people say my body my choice. They go well, no, no, that shouldn't matter here. But what about when when women say that when it comes to abortion? And my students like, Well, wait a minute, like, you know, they saw the analogy
Awkward
They never have heard the the pro life argument articulated intelligently to them, like they never heard, like when I explained in the Catholic view of sanctity of life at beginning, middle and end, a lot of them go, okay, I can respect that. I don't know if I agree with it, but I can respect it, because they hear it, you know, from a theological perspective and like a holistic perspective. Okay, you know what, you are anti death penalty and anti abortion and anti euthanasia? That all makes sense to me. Not that I agree with you, but I respect your viewpoint because its cohesive. They've never heard it, you know, explain in a meaningful, thoughtful, academic intelligent way. It's only the worst version of that argument they hear on MSNBC or Fox News, not the smart, nuanced, intelligent view. And that's the problem, I think, is we don't hear the other side done well very often.
Yeah. I mean, I 100% agree with you. Everyone should go at the strongest arguments that they disagree with, they should, you know, engage with people who aren't clowns, or entertainers, because that's what a lot of these quote unquote public intellectuals, these talking heads are, they should engage with, you know, the text or, you know, just the speeches of people who are actually trying to put thought in, because over the long term, you know, the din of the noise and the clown shows, they fade away, what we do remember, are the substantive ideas like those will persist over time, even if they are a little softer and quieter in the present. I mean, that's what I would say to that.
Oh the marketplace of ideas is one of the most powerful- Think about the idea of like in 1850s. And hey, black, black people are not animals, they're people, you would have gotten laughed out of a lot of places in the south, right? Or women should have the right to vote in 1900. A lot of people say absolutely not, or gay people should have the right to marry each other in 1980. But now all those arguments are accepted as just being like, well, of course, like that's, of course, how can you believe in anything else, like if you have a good idea, persuade people that you're correct in the marketplace of ideas. That's why I don't believe in shouting people down by the way, like, we've got to allow the flow of information. Even if you hate the idea, you've got to be able to hear the idea. And that's the thing we've got. In America, we should respect free speech, you should say, I believe in God, or I don't believe in God, or I believe in Mohammed or Moses, or Buddha, or whatever, you should be able to have your voice heard. And in America, if you're good, effective, if you're intelligent and effective communicator, you can change people's minds. That's how society changes. And that's also why I'm very reluctant to say like, we should, like, you know, make abortion illegal, because God says is illegal. No, no, convince people that this is God's designed for life, and then pass legislation, and most people agree with you. That's how we should legislate. That's how religious people should act in a pluralistic democracy. Unfortunately, a lot of who have given up on that. And I think that's just such a failure of discourse. And it really betrays what the founders put us together for.
Well you definitely are a pastor in terms of your ability to communicate these ideas, which I think I want to end it on this on that hopeful note, although although I did not, I think shill enough for your book. So I do want to do that really quickly. So you have “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They're Going” And I guess you have two editions of that right now. And it’s in, like audio book and Kindle as well as like regular book formats. The same with “20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America” I guess that came out two years ago. Two years ago. Yep. Okay, they're still all valid myths.
Oh, most of it's actually become even more like even more prominent the last couple of years. So yeah, so and then a book called last year called “The Great Dechurching” Which is actually with two pastors about like, why people left we did like this $90,000 survey of why people left religion, most expensive survey I e ever been a part of. Which talks about why people left religion and what would bring them back. I've got a textbook with Oxford coming out next year, just called the American religious landscape facts trends in the future. I signed a contract with Brazos Press Write a book called “The Big Church Sort” which I just mentioned, which have come out in 2026. And then the substack right, that's how we all got here. Graphs about religion. Graphsaboutreligion.com.
Yeah so everyone should check. I mean, I mean, what I'll link to the substack, but everyone should check out graphsaboutreligion.com. It is, you know, there are things that people read, that are addictive and kinda like, you know, page turning type, that it's kind of like empty calories. And then there's other things where, you know, you learn something, I do think, you know, I'm gonna say this like, totally, sincerely. And candidly, like, you learn a lot on your substack I mean, Ryan, you are a great communicator. You know, you're kind of, I think, what we need more academics to be, you're obviously, just very open minded. And you're, you're passionate about your scholarship. You're not a snob about it. You know, there are some people Those who, you know, only talk to other academics and all this, like, you know, it has to go through peer review and whatnot. You know, obviously, that's good. I think we should have a plurality of venues to consume intellectual, let's say product, right. But I think it's really great that you put it out there for the people, because this is about the people, right? It's great that they can know about themselves through these various venues, and you have books and all these other things, kind of, like a lot more people should be doing what you're doing. And you show that it can be done. And I'm really glad to have you on the podcast because I think I think you're gonna be a much bigger deal later. And I can say that I do on the podcast, would you we're just starting out.
Several people have told me that over the years, and it hasn't happened yet. So I'm kind of like getting this like feeling of like, is it ever gonna happen? But listen, I'm I've got, you know, my substack was read 1.1 million times this first year, I've got almost 10,000 subscribers, like I've had more success in my life and a kid living in a first generation college family in rural Illinois could ever expect. So I'm just happy to be here, man. It's been a great ride. And I'm just so pleased people actually care about what I'm writing about. At the end of the day is all I really cared about going to grad school, I wanted to write what people needed to read and understand about the world. And explaining things to people is really my gift on this planet. I just want to share it as widely as I can. So I appreciate everything you've done for me, and giving me the platform.
Yeah for sure man. You're blessed and we're blessed to have you so I will see you online later.
Ryan Burges: Thanks guys
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