Ryan Burge

December 28, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Social Issues, Sex, Scriptures, Politics, Nones, Marriage & Family, Mainline, LGBTQ, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Churches, Baptists, Ryan Burge

More religion-beat trends from 2023: The top Ryan Burge posts that went viral

Ryan Burge

December 28, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Social Issues, Sex, Scriptures, Politics, Nones, Marriage & Family, Mainline, LGBTQ, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Churches, Baptists, Ryan Burge

More religion-beat trends from 2023: The top Ryan Burge posts that went viral

Editor’s note: It’s the time of year for year-enders, when newsrooms, think tanks and others post lists of the most important stories and topics from the previous 12 months. Thus, here are the five most-clicked Graphs About Religion items of the year from the omnipresent political scientist (and progressive Baptist) Ryan Burge. This list starts with his No. 1 post.

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(1) “Religion Has Become a Luxury Good — The formula: College degree + middle class income + married + children.”

This one was an absolute thunderbolt.

I published it the day I was driving back from officiating a wedding about four hours away and every time we stopped to get gas or use the bathroom I would check my phone and the social media traffic was just insane. It took on a life of its own and was shared and discussed for a long time. Which is exactly what I want to do with my work. In the end, this one got 50% more hits than any other post from this year.

In short, I argue that religion has become a haven for folks who have done everything “right.” They have college degrees, decent incomes, are married and have children. It’s become really homogeneous. That’s bad for American religion and American democracy.

I’m not done with this idea. I’ve presented it a number of venues over the last couple of months and the reception has been really humbling. People want to talk about this and think about it more deeply. It’s too early to announce anything, but I think you can expect to see these ideas expanded upon in more complete ways in the year to come.

(2) “Liberals Have Won the Culture War — Opinion on sex, drugs, and abortion have all moved left over time.”

This one was based on a graph that I had put together a while back that tracked the trajectory of a bunch of cultural issues: marijuana, same-sex marriage, abortion, pornograph and extramarital sex. Those are the Sexual Revolution issues that the General Social Service has tracked really consistently for the last several decades.

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Richard Ostling

November 30, 2023

Surveys & polls, Richard Ostling, Religious Liberty, Pope Francis, Politics, Mainline, Journalism, Hispanics, Got news?, Evangelicals, Church & State, Catholicism, Supreme Court

One more time -- GetReligion wants press to focus on white Catholic vote in 2024

Richard Ostling

November 30, 2023

Surveys & polls, Richard Ostling, Religious Liberty, Pope Francis, Politics, Mainline, Journalism, Hispanics, Got news?, Evangelicals, Church & State, Catholicism, Supreme Court

One more time -- GetReligion wants press to focus on white Catholic vote in 2024

Fellow GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge’s November 20 Substack column (“The Myth of the White Catholic Democrat”) was as informative as usual, with solid data that reinforce one of The Guy’s perennial contentions in these Memos.

Such as? Consider this previous headline: “Repeat after me: White Catholics voting in 2004. White Catholics voting in 2024 ...” If that isn’t enough, search through this Google News file for more. The Big Idea is that journalists should pay more attention to white Catholics, who’ll very likely decide who wins the presidency next November.

Those much-covered white evangelicals are important, but where they count is with intra-Republican primary maneuvers, whereas for decades they’ve given the party’s presidential nominee predictably wide margins. (White “Mainline” Protestants are weaker and divided. Hispanic and Black Christians are politically distinct from white co-religionists.)

The Pew Research Center defines the nation’s three major religious blocs as evangelical Protestants (25.4% of the population), Catholics both white and Hispanic (20.8%), and “Nones” without religious affiliation (22.8%). With evangelicals lopsidedly Republican and “Nones” overwhelmingly Democratic, the Catholics are always the swing vote to watch. World without end. Amen.

Burge reminds us there are tons of Catholic voters and they’re widely distributed around the U.S. as a factor in many states. Note Pew Research data for the Catholic populations in these swing states: Arizona 21%, Florida 21%, Michigan 18%, Nevada 25%, New Hampshire 26%, Ohio 18%, Pennsylvania 24%, and Wisconsin 25%.

White Catholics’ move toward the Republicans is one of the era’s most important political developments (and, as our own tmatt has stressed for years, something appears to be brewing with Hispanic Catholics). Their margin for the GOP is modest but increasingly dependable, and in states like Florida that really matters.

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Ryan Burge

September 13, 2023

Women, Surveys & polls, Supreme Court, Social Issues, Sex, Same-sex Marriage, Ryan Burge, Politics, LGBTQ, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Catholicism, Abortion, Nones

The poll numbers keep supporting this headline: Liberals have won the culture war

Ryan Burge

September 13, 2023

Women, Surveys & polls, Supreme Court, Social Issues, Sex, Same-sex Marriage, Ryan Burge, Politics, LGBTQ, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Catholicism, Abortion, Nones

The poll numbers keep supporting this headline: Liberals have won the culture war

Anyone remember Pat Buchanan?

He was a far-right conservative who ran an insurgent 1992 campaign against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination. When Bush announced his desire to run for a second term, it was assumed that he would have no real challenger in his own party. But Buchanan was a bomb thrower and excoriated Bush for being too moderate. America needed a strong voice that didn’t want to compromise on core issues.

Buchanan actually had a strong showing during the primary, despite the fact that he was facing an incumbent president. He earned 38% of the votes in New Hampshire, just 15 points behind Bush. In most early states, Buchanan received 25-30% of the vote and hung around for a lot longer than many would have assumed.

Once Bush locked up the nomination, he did the traditional party building gesture of inviting his opponent to speak at the Republican National Convention. On August 17th, 1992, he delivered a speech that will be remembered for decades. Buchanan stated:

The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs.
…[M]y friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

This was quickly dubbed the “Culture Wars” speech and set the tone for electoral politics for three decades. Buchanan (a Roman Catholic) gave that speech right as Protestant evangelicalism was hitting its peak in terms of both raw numbers and political influence. It seemed like every discussion was about abortion, homosexuality, pornography or the role of women in a changing society.

Buchanan and his supporters wanted, at a minimum, to stop the leftward drift that they believed was happening in the United States on social issues. If not push the country in a more conservative direction. Well, I’ve looked at the data from the General Social Survey and it’s clear to me that Christian conservatives failed miserably in this endeavor. On every single social issue, the average American is more liberal today than they were just two decades ago.

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Ryan Burge

August 9, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Social Media, Sexual abuse, Ryan Burge, Politics, Nones, Mainline, Got news?, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Demographics, Christianity

Mind-blowing statistics: Four dramatic shifts in American faith over the past 50 years

Ryan Burge

August 9, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Social Media, Sexual abuse, Ryan Burge, Politics, Nones, Mainline, Got news?, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Demographics, Christianity

Mind-blowing statistics: Four dramatic shifts in American faith over the past 50 years

One of the true gifts of being a quantitative social scientist in 2023 is that I get to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before me.

A handful of scholars fought hard to get a series of religion questions added to the General Social Survey when it was first fielded in 1972. Then they had to fight to keep those questions on there over the last five decades.

I wouldn’t be able to do this kind of work without the unnamed and all too quickly forgotten contributions of those academics who knew that those kinds of questions were going to be useful someday. This post is a tribute to those efforts to trace American religion since the early 1970s.

After staring at this data for the last decade I wanted to compile four examples of trend lines in the data that still blow my mind. These are short little periods of time when American religion changed dramatically and has largely been overlooked. I think they can offer some insights into how American culture has shifted in the last couple of decades.

The Evangelical Surge (1983-2000) — It feels like evangelicals are everywhere. Hardly a week goes by without some type of national news story about what they are up to, but that’s especially the case when an election draws near. No denominational gathering is covered as extensively as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Annual Meeting. People, for whatever reason, are just fascinated (and sometimes horrified) by evangelical Christianity.

But, if you look at the share of Americans who were evangelical in 1980 and in 2018, there’s basically been no change. They were 24% in 1980 and about 23% in 2018. The same is true when look at 1983 and 2000. About 23% of America in those two years.

But between those two dates, evangelicalism experienced an unbelievably swift rise and then an even faster decline. Between 1983 and 1993, evangelicalism grew by 6.6 percentage points. Then, in the next seven years, it gave back almost all those gains by losing 6.3 percentage points. At its peak, three in ten American adults were evangelicals.

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Ryan Burge

July 26, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Ryan Burge, Methodists, Mainline, Pentecostal-Charismatics, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Demographics, Churches, Baptists, Academia

After the Nones, there's no bigger religion-beat story these days than all those Nons

Ryan Burge

July 26, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Ryan Burge, Methodists, Mainline, Pentecostal-Charismatics, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Demographics, Churches, Baptists, Academia

After the Nones, there's no bigger religion-beat story these days than all those Nons

A few months ago, my wife and I were driving into St. Louis and were about 10 miles away from downtown in a suburb on the Illinois side of the river. We drove by this large commercial building next to the interstate that had a fairly nondescript sign with a single word on it, “Ascend.”

She looked at me and said, “Is that a church?” I honestly had no idea. So, she Googled it. Guess what Ascend is? It’s a marijuana dispensary.

Illinois just legalized marijuana for recreational sale a few years ago and there are lots of new stores opening up all over the state. That’s the world we live in right now, not entirely sure if that new big warehouse by the highway is selling recreational drugs or preaching Jesus.

That little anecdote is indicative of a much bigger trend happening in American Christianity. The First United Methodist Church is out, Elevation is in. There are very few new Southern Baptist Church buildings springing up across the United States, but there are at a ton of Journey/Lift/Resolution churches being planted every week across the country.

Obviously, the rise of the Nones (the “religiously unaffiliated”) remains the biggest story in American religion right now, but the second most important shift in the landscape is the unmistakable rise of the Nons. The only religious family that has grown over the last decade is non-denominational Protestant Christianity. There’s little reason to believe that their ascendance will slow at any point in the near future. (See this 2022 Richard Ostling Memo for more information.)

If the future of American society is a shift away from institutions, there’s no bigger beneficiary of this trend in the religion space than non-denominational evangelicalism.

In 1972, less than 3% of all American adults indicated that they were non-denominational. That share has only risen from there.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the growth rate was undoubtedly small. It took until 1996 for the share of Americans who were non-denominational to surge past 5%. But from that point forward that line has only gotten steeper.

The Nons niche reached 7.5% of the population in 2004, then 10% of the sample by 2012. The most recent data says that nearly 13% of all adults in the United States are non-denominational Protestant Christians. There are more Nons in the U.S. today than mainline Protestants.

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Ryan Burge

July 12, 2023

Worship, World Religions, Surveys & polls, Academia, Atheists & Agnostics, Baptists, Catholicism, Evangelicals, Godbeat, Mainline, Nones, Ryan Burge

How many believers exit their childhood faith? And where are they headed these days?

Ryan Burge

July 12, 2023

Worship, World Religions, Surveys & polls, Academia, Atheists & Agnostics, Baptists, Catholicism, Evangelicals, Godbeat, Mainline, Nones, Ryan Burge

How many believers exit their childhood faith? And where are they headed these days?

Being an academic is an exercise in the absurd.

That’s what I’ve realized after doing this for the better part of two decades. For instance, I have devoted thousands upon thousands of hours to trying to untangle a very difficult puzzle: When people are asked about their current religious status on surveys, what is the mental process they go through to arrive at an answer?

For some, it’s pretty straightforward. They go to Mass every Sunday and have for years. They are a Catholic. On to the next question.

But what about the person who was raised Southern Baptist and used to go twice a week as a kid, but now hasn’t darkened the church door in a few years?

Are they still a Southern Baptist or are they a none? I mean, it’s up to them to decide. Not anyone else. And, my basic premise in social science is simply this: when people tell you who they are, you have to believe them.

That’s what makes religious switching such a fascinating topic. It’s happening every single day. Thousands of times. Without any fanfare or big declarations, people leave religion behind or chose a different faith when taking a survey. And yet we only have a very basic understanding of the mechanisms that make all that happen.

Just how often is switching happening? And are there certain traditions that seem to be more porous than others? For journalists and news consumers, these are very relevant questions.

I used the General Social Survey to answer those questions. Luckily, since the very beginning of the GSS in 1973, they have been asking, “In what religion were you raised?” That means that we can track switching over nearly the last 50 years.

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Ryan Burge

June 28, 2023

Worship, Women, Surveys & polls, Ryan Burge, Marriage & Family, Godbeat, Got news?, Academia, Mainline, Nones

Women are still more religious than men? Maybe, the times they are a-changin'

Ryan Burge

June 28, 2023

Worship, Women, Surveys & polls, Ryan Burge, Marriage & Family, Godbeat, Got news?, Academia, Mainline, Nones

Women are still more religious than men? Maybe, the times they are a-changin'

If you walked into my Mainline Protestant church last weekend, you would be struck by several things.

The first is how few people are in the pews each Sunday. We are lucky to get to double digits many weeks. The second is how few men there are among the faithful. An average Sunday may have eight women and four men. There have been weeks where there are two men.

I say this without a sense of exaggeration: if our church didn’t have women take over leadership roles, we wouldn’t exist right now. They are backbone of our congregation.

For many years, the conventional wisdom has been that women are just more religious than men. A Pew study looked at religiosity around the world and found exactly that, “Women are generally more religious than men, particularly among Christians.”

Pew has a very nice summary of some of the possible reasons for the gender gap in Chapter 7 of their report. The Pew team notes a mixture of explanations that are both genetic and environmental which drive women to seek out religious community. It’s likely a highly complicated mix of a variety of factors that don’t work the same for every person.

But recent data from the Cooperative Election Study may be casting some serious doubts on that long held assumption about religion and gender in the United States. Let’s start with the graph that launched this entire investigation.

This is the share of women and men who identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular based on birth year. I am showing you every election year in the CES because the sample size is particularly large during those collection periods.1

Notice anything?

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Ryan Burge

June 7, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Ryan Burge, Politics, Nones, Mainline, Race, Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Church & State, Evangelicals

A reporter asked: With the rising tide of nones, why aren't Democrats winning everything?

Ryan Burge

June 7, 2023

Worship, Surveys & polls, Ryan Burge, Politics, Nones, Mainline, Race, Books, Catholicism, Christianity, Church & State, Evangelicals

A reporter asked: With the rising tide of nones, why aren't Democrats winning everything?

Sometimes you get a question from a reporter that stops you dead in your tracks. That happened to me recently.

The question was a seemingly simple one, but I had never considered before: If the nones are rising so quickly, then why aren’t Democrats just mopping the floor with Republicans?

Well, that’s a good question. And it’s not super easy to answer. But let me walk through how I am thinking about it.

The underlying assumption is two things:

(1) The nones are an increasingly larger share of the American electorate.

(2) They prefer Democrats on election day.

Let’s quickly justify both of those assumptions with data.

The nones are clearly rising. They were in the doldrums from 1972 through 1990. The share of Americans with no religious affiliation only increased from 5% to 7% during that stretch. But from that point forward, they just exploded in size. By 1996 they were in the double digits. By 2006, they were above 15%. Eight years later they were north of 20%. In 2021, the nones had reached an all-time high in the General Social Survey at ~29%.

In 1972, one in twenty adults were nones. In 2021, it’s almost one in three. That has to have major implications for politics, right? Well only if those non-religious folks tend to vote in large numbers for one party. Is that true?

Yes. Clearly it is. In the 2020 election, 86% of atheists voted for Joe Biden — just 10% were Trump voters. Eighty percent of agnostics also went from the Democrat, just 17% voted for the Republican. Those are solid blue blocs, without a doubt.

Nothing in particulars do tend to lean toward the Democrats, but not as much as the other types of nones. In 2020, 63% of nothing in particulars went for Biden, while 34% backed Trump. In 2016, just 55% of nothing in particulars voted for Hillary Clinton. This is a blue-ish bloc, but not nearly as homogeneous as atheists/agnostics.

The second assumption is generally true, though. The nones are an important constituency for any Democrat who aspires to win an election. But just how important?

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Ryan Burge

February 1, 2023

Surveys & polls, Social Issues, Sex, Scriptures, Ryan Burge, Politics, Marriage & Family, Mainline, LGBTQ, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Ethics, Demographics

Religious doctrines on sex? Beliefs are changing -- big time -- in American culture

Ryan Burge

February 1, 2023

Surveys & polls, Social Issues, Sex, Scriptures, Ryan Burge, Politics, Marriage & Family, Mainline, LGBTQ, Godbeat, Evangelicals, Ethics, Demographics

Religious doctrines on sex? Beliefs are changing -- big time -- in American culture

There may not be a more salient, newsworthy intersection of religion, culture and politics than sexuality and sexual behavior.

Religion-beat professionals know that this creates news — in religious traditions that are shrinking, as well as those that are stable or growing.

This brings us to politics. If one considers some of the major fights surrounding the so-called Culture Wars — abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage — they are all related, in one way or the other, to clashes between traditional forms of religion and the Sexual Revolution.

Yet, the data surrounding these types of issues all point in the same direction — the American public is liberalizing at an incredible rate.

The bottom line: It’s hard to find an issue area in which the average adult in the United States holds a view that is to the right of the average American even 10 years ago.

For instance, consider how this first graph demonstrates how public opinion has shifted on same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization since 2004.

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