Ryan Burge

Yeah, so nuns, N-O-N-E-S, are people who identify with no religious tradition.

What that means is we ask a question about affiliation and they describe their religion as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular.

And that third piece is the one that we forget about a lot.

These are people who look at all the options, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Mormon, and they kind of just shrug their shoulders and say, I'm not a Christian, but I'm not an atheist either.

And they just click none of the above.

So the nuns are those three groups together, atheist, agnostic, nothing in particular.

And that group has grown from 5% of America in 1972 to about 30% of America today.

It's the biggest social movement happening in America or happened in America over the last 30 years that we just don't talk about that much.

I think we're moving into a new era of what's happening with American religion.

So it was rapid secularization from 1991 to 2020.

Now we're in a period of stasis.

Share of Americans who are non-religious has really stuck at that same level, around 30%.

The share of Americans who are Christians is in the low 60s, maybe 63 or 65%.

And it's been that way for the last five years now.

This is a plateau, not a reversal.

This is not a revival.

The directions are not going, they're not reversing themselves.

They're just staying where they are right now.

Yeah, the way I think about it is, you know, there's a bedrock of American religion that I don't think exists in any other Western country.

You know, what's happened over the last 30 years is a lot of people were loosely affiliated.