It’s certainly been a volatile year on social media (#DUH).
Twitter is my platform of choice. It does exactly what I need it to do because it’s such a visual medium.
Post a graph. Write 50 or 60 words and then wait a few minutes to see what happens.
In many ways, it’s the antithesis of what it means to be an academic. We are taught to qualify every statement, to never engage in hyperbole, to use 1,000 words when 500 would do. Twitter has been teaching me over the last five years about how to visualize data in the simplest manner possible. It’s taught me that if the average reader can’t understand the point I’m trying to make in 280 characters, then it’s probably not worth making.
Then, Elon Musk bought the whole company. I can’t say that I agree with every decision that he is making in steering the Blue Bird Site, but I honestly don’t have a great alternative. So, I will go down with the ship, I suppose.
But, the end of the year always offers a nice opportunity to pause and reflect on what “worked” on Twitter. Out of the nearly 1,400 tweets I sent this year, I wanted to take the opportunity to catalog the five tweets that got the most retweets in 2022. Here they are in reverse order.
5. Education and Religion
I swear I could post a variation of this one once a month and it would get a ton of attention. It’s a really simple bit of analysis, to be honest.
The conclusion is straightforward and widely known among quantitative scholars of American religion. Folks with a higher level of education are more likely to align with a religious tradition and less likely to say that they are a religious “none.”
This reality replicates in every dataset that I’ve ever seen. Yet, it comes as an absolute shock to people on Twitter. Why is that? Any thoughts?
4. The God Gap
One of the most persistent and important trends in American politics and religion is the fact that secularization is not happening evenly across the population.
Instead, it’s mainly concentrated among one specific subset of the population — white Democrats. That’s where this graph came from — a desire to visualize just how much of an outlier this population group has become when it comes to American religion.
In 1988, about 5% of white Democrats took an atheist/agnostic view of God. It’s about a third today and it’s not showing signs of slowing down. Maybe just the opposite.
Need I say that this fact is relevant in quite a few political news stories? That’s past, present and future.
3. Do people become more politically conservative as they age?
This is a weird one because it doesn’t have anything directly to do with religion, but definitely has some larger impacts on American society. This graph works because of how clear the pattern is. Among older birth cohorts, they have become more politically conservative over time.
Among those born in the 1950s, there’s really been one measurable change in political ideology.
However, for those born in the 1970s or 1980s, they have clearly become more leftist as time has passed. It’s a fascinating corrective to the idea that people become more conservative as they age.
2. Fertility drops over time
This is a more recent one that I can’t help but think about all the time: Democrats are just having fewer children than Republicans. Think of this as another twist on that “pew gap.”
In 2021, about 50% of Democrats in their late 30s are parents. It’s 60% of Republicans in the same age bracket.
Some of this is clearly linked to religion. Atheists are the religious “tradition” that is the least likely to be parents in their late 30s, while groups like Latter-day Saints and evangelicals are much more likely to produce offspring.
It creates a lot of interesting questions for the future of American politics and society. For example, ponder the future of the embattled churches in the mainline Protestant “Seven Sisters.”
1. What happened in the 1990s?!?
Between 1991 and 1998, the share of young people who identified as Christians dropped by 14 percentage points, while the share who said that they had no religious affiliation rose by 12 points. It’s the largest shift in religious affiliation in the last 50 years, as far as I can tell.
This graph turned into a much longer exposition at Religion News Service, where I try to make sense of that happened in that time period. I don’t know if I was able to fully grapple with all the societal shifts during the early 1990s, but it’s something that I am thinking about a lot more as time passes. Hopefully it will become part of a book length project at some point.
In conclusion, sometimes people ask me what it takes for a tweet to go viral. I think that if anyone would know how to answer that question it would be me.
Honestly, I have no idea.
I’ve sent out graphs that I thought were just terrific. Then they went nowhere. Some of the graphs that get hundreds of retweets aren’t even that good, to be honest. My best advice is that it’s just a numbers game.
The marginal cost of sending out more content is basically zero (besides the time it takes to produce a graph). So, there’s not a real downside to trying different things out. Who knows if Twitter will still exist in its current form a year from now, but hopefully we can do this again in December of 2023.