Ryan Burge

They've grown consistently now for 30 years, and I think they're going to continue to go up.

But I think the Orthodox Church is probably going to do relatively well.

But by relatively well, I mean they might add 25% membership in the next 30 years.

We're never going to see a mega denomination like the Southern Baptist Convention or the United Methodist Church ever again.

I see the role of the Internet actually being somewhat destructive to American religion in that it shows you all the bad things in a very compelling way.

You know, like, why do they not believe this or why are they inconsistent on this thing?

Or did you know the church's history on this is bad?

You know, what's really interesting is, so we had COVID.

We're like, we're going to move church online.

And over 90% of church were streaming online right after COVID.

And what we realized is that online church does not do any of the positive things that we thought in-person church.

And I think we did, oh, we're going to work from home.

And guess what?

Now everyone's back to working in the office three or four days a week.

Like nothing that we've seen created online seems like it has any legs to it.

Even among young people who attend online and in-person churches,

two thirds of them prefer attending in person and 15% prefer online and the other 15% don't care either way.

Like, so even young people are not drawn to digital anything.

Listen, religion's endured for all of Western civilization because it works for lots and lots of people.

And no matter how much we try to remake it with technology and AI and the internet, showing up on an average Sunday with a bunch of people and singing some songs and saying some creeds and hearing a sermon is transformative and will be for all of human history as far as I can tell.