Ryan Burge

It all comes if you can follow this person or that person.

And I think that reversal, that destroying of the hierarchy and destroying of leadership and all the structures that we had are leading us into a new era that's going to change everything about how we think about what authority feels like and looks like and who we listen to and what the truth is.

And I think American religion, whether it realized it or not, led that charge by the rise of these non-denominationals.

Yeah, so I got a Templeton grant.

We did a survey of 12,000 non-religious Americans because for those of you who don't follow this work closely, for a long time, the nuns were just one group.

It was like a monolith.

You were non-religious.

And it was like, yeah, the nuns, that's it.

And when you're 5% of America, you can be a monolith, like empirically speaking, no one really cares because there's not enough people to have diversity there.

But you can't go from 5% to 30% and we still call you the nuns.

Like there's got to be sort of internal categories there.

So we did this Templeton grant.

12,000-person survey of non-religious Americans.

And we created this four-part typology, myself and Tony Jones, my co-author.

One is called SB&Rs, so spiritual but not religious.

We all know that category.

It's sort of been bouncing around a lot in the literature.

These are people who, I call them like the woo-woos.

You know what I mean?

Like they don't believe in Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha, but they want to know your astrological sign.