Derek Thompson

400 years after the scientific revolution.

100 years after Nietzsche declared God is dead.

In America, God was not dead.

We were still a very religious country.

What's the deal with America and religion?

You just answered the question statistically that we are three times more religious than the most religious other rich country.

I still want to know why you think that's the case.

And this might be, you know, a short answer that requires a book.

But if you can make the book maybe like two and a half minutes long.

Yeah.

Again, why is America specifically so much more religious?

And why did our religiosity continue to hold on deep into the 20th century?

The answer you just gave makes the next part of this story so much more surprising.

That if you look at the share of Americans who said, I do not believe in any particular religion.

I have no particular religious affiliation.

It's a very flat line from like the 1940s when modern polling basically started to the 1980s to the early 1990s.

And when you look at this graph of people saying I have no religious affiliation, sometimes called the nuns, not N-U-N, but N-O-N-E-S, and we'll return to this concept in a second.

When you look at this graph, it's like a flat savanna until 1990, and then suddenly it's Mount Kilimanjaro.

It just starts going up linearly.

What happened in 1990?