For the past 17 years, your GetReligionistas have written about a growing trend in religion polls (here’s the late George Gallup Jr., 15 years ago) that has obvious implications for American life in general.

Here it is: When looking at the spectrum of American life — in terms of religious beliefs, as seen in the practice of faith — the number of “traditional” believers is remaining remarkably stable, while the number of atheists, agnostics and the religiously unaffiliated has risen sharply.

What’s vanishing is sort-of believers in the middle of the spectrum.

Young people in that cohort tend to grab the headlines, since that is the future.

But check out this week’s charts from political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University (who is also a progressive Baptist pastor. Religion-beat pros and news consumers need to bookmark the Religion in Public website — especially to dig into the details of the General Social Survey data that he uses, along with other polling sources.

So, let’s ask fearful religious establishment leaders: Are the kids the only problem out there? Maybe the infamous Baby Boomers have something to do with all of this angst?

Read on.

It’s been a while since we had a good GetReligion drinking game.

So here’s the rule for this one: You take a drinking of an adult beverage whenever a GetReligion post mentions demographics, birth rates or, what the heck, “81 percent.”

These discussions may increase in the future, because a very interesting progressive Baptist fellow, who is also a political scientist, has said that it is fine with him if your GetReligionistas reproduce some of this fascinating charts that focus on religion, politics and, often, religion and politics.

The main thing is that these charts often point to valid news stories. Here at GetReligion, we like that. Here’s a large chunk of a recent “On Religion” column that focused on this scholar’s work. This is long, but essential:

Earlier this year, political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University dug into the 2018 General Social Survey, crunched some data and then took to Twitter to note that Americans with ties to no particular religious tradition were now about 23% of the population. That percentage is slightly higher than evangelical Protestantism and almost exactly the same as Roman Catholicism.
"At that point my phone went crazy and I started hearing from everyone" in the mainstream media, said Burge, who is co-founder of the Religion In Public weblog. "All of a sudden it was time to talk about the 'nones' all over again."
Burge recently started another hot discussion on Twitter with some GSS statistics showing trends among believers — young and old — in several crucial flocks.