During my years as a journalism professor (now over), I must have told my students the following a thousand times: Pay close attention when one of your sources consistently offers information and insights that (a) fit the actual facts on the ground, yet (b) anger (or at least puzzle) people on both sides of the hot-button issues that make headlines.
For several decades, my classic example of this phenomenon has been political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron, best known for years of consulting work with the Pew Forum team. A few years ago, I added religious-liberty specialist David French to that list. Sociologist James Davison Hunter, author of that “Culture Wars” classic? Ditto. How about the notorious scholar Karen Swallow Prior?
Then that Ryan Burge guy (@RyanBurge) started lighting up Twitter with chart after chart backed with data on religion and public life. He’s been a GetReligion contributor, in a variety of ways, for several years now and was a big hit when he Zoomed into a December religion-news program at the Overby Center at Ole Miss.
If you agree with Burge on everything, then you aren’t paying attention. That’s a compliment. Like Green, Burge is a man of the mainline-church world, but he’s consistently candid about the trends that he sees on left and right.
How he has another book out — “20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America” — and readers are sure to disagree with one or more of his myths. But the numbers he spotlights are always worthy of attention, especially for journalists who cover religion, culture and politics.
I’ll note some new Burge appearances on audio and video podcasts, as they roll out in the weeks ahead — starting with the one at the top of this post. He also did a Religion News Service Q&A the other day with Jana Riess that ran with this provocative headline: “Evangelicalism isn’t dying, and Catholics are going Republican.”
The first question is exactly what you’d expect, if you’ve been following Burge in recent years:
Your first chapter says that rumors of evangelicalism’s death are premature. Could you talk about that?
It’s a Rorschach test: If you’re an atheist or agnostic, you want to start the graph at 1994. From that it looks like a decline — that evangelicals are free falling. But if you’re an evangelical, you look at the graph from when the data started in 1972, and you see it actually might be up a little bit from 1972 to today. There were more evangelicals, both by percentage and by raw numbers, in 2020 than there were in 1972.
And if you look at the share of people who say that they’ve had a born-again experience, it’s higher today than it was 30 years ago.
If you put those pieces together, you get a clear picture. There’s just no statistical evidence that there are fewer evangelicals in America today than there were 30 or 40 years ago.
So what is going on? The Big Idea: The middle ground continues to shrink in American life, especially when it comes to matters of morality and culture. That’s a big theme in the work of Green, French and Burge.
Here is some classic Green material from a decade ago, when that first Pew Forum study on the rising tide of religiously unaffiliated Americans inspired a billion or two headlines about “nones.” This is from one of my “On Religion” columns at that time:
The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the "Nones" skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
"It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. "If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties."
With that in mind, plug in this new Burge material from the RNS interview:
What we’re seeing, which is something I want to explore in future projects, is a religious polarization. On one side, you have a strong group of very conservative, very devout people, whether they be evangelicals or Catholics or Latter-day Saints or Muslims. And on the other side, you’ve got the growing number of nones: atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular.” The people in the middle are being forced to sort themselves.
It’s true that mainline Protestantism and liberal Catholicism are in an absolute free fall right now, but devout, conservative religions are doing well by comparison and actually might be growing over time. So conservative religion is up and secularism is up, and there’s not a whole lot left in the middle.
So who is happy after reading that quote?
The Q&A ends with the totally logical question:
Finally, what are some big changes or trends that we can expect in the next five to 10 years in American religion?
More polarization. I think there’s going to be a stronger alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelicals because in many ways, they have a lot in common, especially white Catholics. White Catholics are very quickly moving to the right.
On the other side, I think we’re going to see more secularization. Honest-to-goodness atheists and agnostics are still a very small portion of the population. By belief, it’s only about 10% of Americans. Here’s an interesting statistic: Among people who never attend church, if you ask what they believe about God, a bigger share says they believe in God without a doubt than don’t believe in God at all.
So I think we’re going to see an interesting conflict on the left. Most nonreligious people are left of center but not liberal, while fully secular people are incredibly liberal. So for the secular left to have any success, they need to draw in people from the middle of the spectrum, and I don’t know if they can do that.
Thoughts?
Read it all. Then ask questions and leave comments.