Ryan Burge

You are right, Derek.

We are an insanely religious country, and it becomes even more prominent when you do a scatterplot of GDP on one axis and religiosity on the other axis because all the other wealthy countries on Earth, especially our Eastern, Western European neighbors, Scandinavian neighbors, they're significantly less religious than we are.

Our closest comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP, and only 17% of the Swiss say religion is very important.

In America, it's about 50%.

So we are three times more religious than we should be compared to our European neighbors.

We're more religious than basically any industrialized country on Earth at this point.

And so if I tell people I never get asked to travel outside the United States to talk about religion because I do so much American religion stuff, and it applies nowhere else on Earth.

People around the world look at us and gawk at us and go, why are you guys so weird?

We really are a case of one when it comes to our economic prosperity, but also our religiosity.

I mean, we are as religious as some of these, you know, sub-Saharan African countries on some metrics.

In every possible way, the religiosity of America, there is no comparison case in the world right now.

Yeah, so I think the Christian nationalists are going to hate this answer.

But the fact that we did not have a state church at the founding, you can think really you can think Thomas Jefferson for this, by the way, who was not a Christian in any meaningful sense.

You know, the idea that we should not have a government sponsored religion.

I always tell people, if you want them to hate something, make it part of the government.

And so by the fact that people hate Amtrak, people hate the post office because they're run by the government, we don't have a state church.

And people don't even realize this.

In highly secular Germany, there still is a state church, and you pay taxes to that church unless you opt out of it.

And many Germans don't opt out because they don't even know – they don't understand where all the money is going.

There's a theory in this field called religious economy theory put together by Roger Finke and Stark in a book called The Churching of America, where they argue that the competition between religious groups in America, by not having a monopolized state church,