Derek Thompson

And the forces behind today's weird religious revival, including the rise of new churches, the conflation of Christianity and the Republican Party, and the divergent ideologies of old and young Americans, are some of the most important trends in culture and politics.

To understand the state of religion in America today is to understand the state of America.

Ryan is the author of a sensational substack called Graphs About Religion, which does exactly what it says in the tin, deep dives into the state of belief and identity in America to produce beautiful graphs about religion.

So today's episode will be a little special for folks on YouTube and Spotify.

You'll be able to see the beautiful graphs that Ryan makes, graphs that really hammer home his deepest conclusions.

And if you'd prefer to simply listen along, that's fine, of course.

You can check out the full transcript of this conversation, along with Ryan's pretty charts, if you head to my Substack at DerekThompson.org, where this conversation will run very soon after it goes live here.

Thanks for listening and for watching, as always.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain English.

Ryan Burge, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, Derek.

Appreciate being here.

We're going to do something fun on this show.

We're going to talk about the history of the state of the future of religion in America, and we're going to do it by showing audiences watching on Spotify or YouTube some of the really fantastic charts that you've published on your sub stack.

So if folks are listening rather than watching, have no fear, you're going to get 100% of the content here.

but if you can watch, you're going to get 110% of the content because some of these charts are really, really fascinating, and you're gonna wanna maybe take a screen grab and talk about it on your group chats.

Let's start with the biggest possible picture here.

Throughout the 20th century,

America was, by all accounts, the most religious rich country in the world by far.