Ryan Burge

Elevate.

Like we drove by this factory-looking building on the interstate, and my wife goes, hey, what is that?

That's new, and it was called Ascend.

And I go, what if that's a church?

Go look it up.

And so she Googles it.

It's a marijuana dispensary.

You can never figure it out.

But guess what?

The kind of people who would go to the non-denominational church are, you know, like suburban, white, upper middle class educated folks.

That's what religion has become in America is it's the top end of the spectrum, not the bottom end of the spectrum.

And I think the problem here is we get a lot of our theories from Europe.

And in Europe, it's the opposite.

The educated people are the least likely to go and the less educated people are the more likely to go.

So religion in America does not work at all like religion in Europe does.

I do think that there's a future in which their religiosity does increase, but I'm not sure that we can pin it on just like their belief in the Bible or God is what's driving that.

Religion is obviously a theological pursuit.

Absolutely.

Right.

It's also a social pursuit, though.