Ross Douthat

And our director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat.

And this is Interesting Times.

In the early 2020s, something unexpected happened.

America stopped becoming less religious.

The share of Americans with no religious affiliation had been rising for decades.

Suddenly, that increase stopped.

And all over the media, there was talk about religious revival, about trad wives and orthobros, about Gen Z potentially being more religious than their parents.

My guest today is the perfect person to talk about what's really happening in American religion.

Ryan Burge is an ordained minister who witnessed American Christianity's decline close up.

In 2024, he had to close the doors of the church that he'd been pastoring.

He's also, in my own opinion, the best data analyst tracking trends in American religion right now, with a new book, The Vanishing Church, How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us.

Ryan Burge, welcome to Interesting Times.

It's my absolute pleasure to be here.

So I wanna start just by talking about the big recent religious trends in American life, and especially the claim that secularization might be going into reverse, or even that revival is in the air.

But before we talk revival,

I want to start by defining a very important term for understanding what's been happening in the US for the last 20 years.

And that term is nun.

And I do not mean Catholic nuns, but something else.

What is a nun?