Ryan Burge

speaker

1,121 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 8 Apr

Ryan Burge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Plain English with Derek Thompson · America's Religious Revival Is a Mirage · 8 Apr 2026 podcast

And if you pull one leg out, it's going to fall apart.

I think that's what a lot of people are doing with religion right now.

It's like walking down the buffet line of American religion, like picking one piece here and putting it on their plate, and one piece here, putting it on their plate.

And that has no legs to it.

That doesn't endure.

And so these SB&Rs are interesting, I think, but they're also conceptually really difficult, by the way, because they're not spiritual in the same ways, nor are they not religious in the same ways.

So you can't put a blanket on all these SB&Rs because some are super astrology, some are super meditation, some are super both.

Some just say they're very spiritual, but do nothing about it.

So this is what makes this job really hard.

Measuring religion is really hard.

Measuring spirituality is even more difficult than that.

And I think that's what we're going to struggle with going forward is how to make this amorphous group into a more tangible group.

And we don't have the tools to do that, I don't think, at least at a massive scale.

Yeah, I think this might be the most worrisome trend I see in all the data from a macro level sense.

And religion for me is the keyhole to understanding like attachment and being part of things.

But what we see over and over, so the keyhole for me was there's a group called Nothing in Particular that Pew uses in their surveys.

So, you know, you get like, you get 12 options for what your present religion is and you get, you know, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, you know, Buddhist, all those.

The last three are atheist, agnostic, and nothing in particular.

And so 20% of Americans now say their religion is nothing in particular.

And if you compare nothing in particulars to atheists on things like education, atheists are twice as likely to have a four-year college degree as nothing in particulars.

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