Ryan Burge

And I don't think you'll ever see anything like this ever again, really.

I call it the venture capitalist graph, right?

Like every venture capitalist will see a company like no users, no users and like boom inflection point.

And then like hockey sticks up and like all the money comes in and all the recognition.

The nuns were sort of hanging around for a very long time.

So there was a paper written in 1968 by a sociologist and called the nuns the neglected category.

of analysis.

No one was even thinking about it, writing about it, because it was 5% of America, right?

It's like, you know, interesting aside, but there's not enough data to study the nuns, really, in America until the 1990s.

And, you know, I wrote about this in my new book, like, what happened in the 1990s that allowed religion to sort of fade so quickly and the nuns to rise so rapidly?

I do think it's a multifaceted thing.

The one that a lot of people who do this kind of work point to is the fall of the Berlin Wall,

The younger set who's listening to this right now, if you grew up in America in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s, you could not say you were an atheist.

Because when you said you were an atheist, you were a communist.

Those things were like linked together in the American consciousness.

And so a lot of people were sort of closet atheists.

And when the Berlin Wall fell, now that whole we're not in the Cold War anymore and atheism is not so – you don't want to be blackballed.

And you were blackballed if you said you were an atheist in the 50s.

In the 1990s, that sort of started fading, and you could really say what you were in a way.

And what accelerated that was the rise of the internet.