Chapter 1: What is the current state of religion in America?
Today, the state of religion in America and the state of America. Perhaps you've heard the news. America is experiencing a religious revival, and it's concentrated among young people who are flocking back to church. From The Economist, quote, the West has stopped losing its religion. From The Washington Post, quote, why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.
From Reuters, quote, Catholicism spreads amongst young Britons longing for something deeper. And from the Wall Street Journal, quote, a church's campaign to teach lost boys how to be men. Big if true, as they say.
Chapter 2: How has the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans changed over time?
Since the early 1990s, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has been skyrocketing. This group is somewhat confusingly called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, which is a homonym for nuns, N-U-N-S, which describes, of course, extremely religious people. I don't know who came up with this word. I think it's a bad one, but it is a term of art, and so we're all stuck with it.
In any case, the story of religion in America has been the rise of the N-O-N-E-S nuns for decades. which makes it a big deal if that trend line, the long secularization of America, has hit the pause button. But as today's guest Ryan Burge tells us, the secular pause in America is much stranger than it initially looks.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the term 'nuns' in religious discussions?
And the forces behind today's weird religious revival, including the rise of new churches, the conflation of Christianity and the Republican Party, and the divergent ideologies of old and young Americans, are some of the most important trends in culture and politics. To understand the state of religion in America today is to understand the state of America.
Ryan is the author of a sensational substack called Graphs About Religion, which does exactly what it says in the tin, deep dives into the state of belief and identity in America to produce beautiful graphs about religion. So today's episode will be a little special for folks on YouTube and Spotify.
You'll be able to see the beautiful graphs that Ryan makes, graphs that really hammer home his deepest conclusions. And if you'd prefer to simply listen along, that's fine, of course. You can check out the full transcript of this conversation, along with Ryan's pretty charts, if you head to my Substack at DerekThompson.org, where this conversation will run very soon after it goes live here.
Thanks for listening and for watching, as always. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Ryan Burge, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me, Derek. Appreciate being here. We're going to do something fun on this show.
We're going to talk about the history of the state of the future of religion in America, and we're going to do it by showing audiences watching on Spotify or YouTube some of the really fantastic charts that you've published on your sub stack.
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Chapter 4: What factors contribute to the rise of new religious movements in America?
So if folks are listening rather than watching, have no fear, you're going to get 100% of the content here. but if you can watch, you're going to get 110% of the content because some of these charts are really, really fascinating, and you're gonna wanna maybe take a screen grab and talk about it on your group chats. Let's start with the biggest possible picture here. Throughout the 20th century,
America was, by all accounts, the most religious rich country in the world by far. 400 years after the scientific revolution. 100 years after Nietzsche declared God is dead. In America, God was not dead. We were still a very religious country. What's the deal with America and religion?
You are right, Derek. We are an insanely religious country, and it becomes even more prominent when you do a scatterplot of GDP on one axis and religiosity on the other axis because all the other wealthy countries on Earth, especially our Eastern, Western European neighbors, Scandinavian neighbors, they're significantly less religious than we are.
Our closest comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP, and only 17% of the Swiss say religion is very important. In America, it's about 50%. So we are three times more religious than we should be compared to our European neighbors.
Chapter 5: Why do some younger Americans identify as non-religious?
We're more religious than basically any industrialized country on Earth at this point. And so if I tell people I never get asked to travel outside the United States to talk about religion because I do so much American religion stuff, and it applies nowhere else on Earth. People around the world look at us and gawk at us and go, why are you guys so weird?
We really are a case of one when it comes to our economic prosperity, but also our religiosity. I mean, we are as religious as some of these, you know, sub-Saharan African countries on some metrics. In every possible way, the religiosity of America, there is no comparison case in the world right now.
You just answered the question statistically that we are three times more religious than the most religious other rich country. I still want to know why you think that's the case. And this might be, you know, a short answer that requires a book. But if you can make the book maybe like two and a half minutes long. Yeah. Again, why is America specifically so much more religious?
And why did our religiosity continue to hold on deep into the 20th century?
Yeah, so I think the Christian nationalists are going to hate this answer. But the fact that we did not have a state church at the founding, you can think really you can think Thomas Jefferson for this, by the way, who was not a Christian in any meaningful sense.
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Chapter 6: How does the relationship between religion and politics affect American society?
You know, the idea that we should not have a government sponsored religion. I always tell people, if you want them to hate something, make it part of the government. And so by the fact that people hate Amtrak, people hate the post office because they're run by the government, we don't have a state church. And people don't even realize this.
In highly secular Germany, there still is a state church, and you pay taxes to that church unless you opt out of it. And many Germans don't opt out because they don't even know – they don't understand where all the money is going.
There's a theory in this field called religious economy theory put together by Roger Finke and Stark in a book called The Churching of America, where they argue that the competition between religious groups in America, by not having a monopolized state church, that religion really had to compete to be the best, to be the most interesting, the most charismatic, the most attractive.
And we had the most robust religious market of any country in the Western part of the world. And because of that, we had one movement after another movement after another movement capture more of the American consciousness, right? Even add the Latter-day Saints in the conversation.
But the United Methodists and the Baptists, you know, dominated American religion in the 1800s with their circuit riders. They gave young men a Bible and a horse and said, go west and don't come back. Start a church.
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Chapter 7: What are the different subcategories of non-religious Americans?
And a lot of them had a lot of success. And even the modern iterations of these non-denominational churches. I mean, you can see constant evolution in the religious marketplace when, to be fair, in most of the rest of the developed world, religion is very stagnant. They're sort of worshiping the same way today they did 200 years ago.
Now, add to that the fact that America was founded by deeply religious people, by and large. I mean, a lot of us scallywags and weirdos and, you know, people got, you know, debt problems in Europe and came here. But a lot of people really came here because they thought it was the new Eden, right? It was the new world for them to express their faith.
And I, you know, we can't measure this, but it almost feels like a deep sense of religious belief and religiosity sort of like woven into the DNA of of Americans and into our culture. So I think that created the sort of fertile soil. And then the fact that we had this marketplace just allowed that soil to be even more productive.
And I don't think you'll ever see anything like this ever again, really.
The answer you just gave makes the next part of this story so much more surprising. That if you look at the share of Americans who said, I do not believe in any particular religion.
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Chapter 8: What role does community play in the lives of religious versus non-religious individuals?
I have no particular religious affiliation. It's a very flat line from like the 1940s when modern polling basically started to the 1980s to the early 1990s. And when you look at this graph of people saying I have no religious affiliation, sometimes called the nuns, not N-U-N, but N-O-N-E-S, and we'll return to this concept in a second.
When you look at this graph, it's like a flat savanna until 1990, and then suddenly it's Mount Kilimanjaro. It just starts going up linearly. What happened in 1990?
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. which allowed people to actually say what they really were online and then find other people that agreed with them. And that sort of gave people the courage when they were asked on polls to say what they really were.
The example I give is, imagine you were a kid raised in Mississippi in the 1950s and you did not believe in God. You're probably never going to tell another human being what you don't believe in. You might lose your job. You might get kicked out of your family. You might lose your spouse over something like that.
But now you can go online and find the Atheists of Mississippi Facebook group or subreddit or some online community, and that emboldens you to say what you really are when it comes to your religious affiliation. And then the last thing I'll say is it has to do something with politics. I mean— You can't look at the data and say that something didn't happen.
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