Change the world or do the dishes?

The Gist: Interviewing Ryan Burge about American religion.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Ryan Burge, a religious demographer at Washington University who also spent more than 20 years as a mainline Protestant pastor - including 17 years leading a small Illinois church until it closed in 2024; his Substack, Graphs About Religion, and his X posts are worth checking out.

He first gave an overview of this slidedeck - some highlights include

1. Mainline Protestants went from the majority of Americans 75 years to less than 10% today.

2. Evangelicals went from 18% of Americans in 1970 to 19.5% today - but peaked at 29% in 1990. Yet because the country grew, a flat share conceals an absolute boom: tens of millions more evangelicals walk America today than in 1970. Within evangelicals, nondenominational churches have taken off.

3. Black Protestant share has collapsed in the last 50 years - less than half of what it was as a national share, and a plummeting share of large metro areas.

4. Despite some predictions 50 years ago that America would become Catholic, instead it has veered more toward no religion at all. The American share of Catholics has declined over the last 50 years from 27% to 22% - and worse, the share of those going to mass nearly every week has collapsed from over 50% to under 25%.

5. Of Christians, Evangelicals are 35%, Mainline Protestants are 17%, Black Protestants are 12%, and Catholics are 36%.

6. “Nones” peaked at 28% around 2020 and have seen a slight decline since - the first sustained pause in decades. That looks more like a plateau than a reversal: younger cohorts remain markedly less affiliated, so generational replacement could eventually push the none share upward again. But most of the nones are not so much hostile to religion as indifferent. Crazily enough, 69% of agnostics and 33% of atheists believe they have a soul.1 Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus are 1-2% of the country each. Despite the headwinds, Burge projects that 50 years from now, the United States will still be substantially religious, much more so than developed international peers

7. 59% of very liberal Americans have no religion, but only 12% of very conservative Americans have no religion - politics is increasingly a decent predictor of religiosity.

8. An absolute majority of many churches’ membership is baby boomer, which will present lots of problems in the coming years - “By any standard metric, Gen Z is the least religious we’ve seen in modern polling.”2

I asked Ryan: what can we learn from previous Great Awakenings in the United States? There have been ebbs and flows of religion in the past - and he said, unfortunately, we don’t have great data about them, so it’s hard to know. Pure demography doesn’t offer a clue to another Great Awakening, but prayer might nevertheless lead to one.

We talked about his data showing that Christianity has become increasingly upmarket in the United States: people with graduate degrees are more likely to go to church than those who never graduated high school3, A students are the most likely to be in church4, weekly church attendees are the least likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition and are most likely to be happy (and very happy)5. Ryan pitches the unchurched the join up and enjoy the benefits today - and I asked how would he spend $100 million to evangelize? He would create wholesome fun social events at churches to draw people into community - and then evangelize as friends, not strangers. Ryan “tell[s] the story about a church service I attended in college. Young guy comes in late with his girlfriend and baby. During Prayers of People he speaks up and says, ‘I lost my job and I’m not sure I can pay rent.’ ‘Lord in your mercy, Hear our prayer.’ As the service ends, an older guy comes up to that young man and says, ‘I own the lumber yard and you can come work with me tomorrow.’ It’s not magic. It’s how faith communities operate”6

Ryan worries that the conservatism of the church is turning away liberals; I countered that while everyone of all politics should seek a relationship with God, society has moved so far left that to stay true, churches have been placed on a conservative side that was mainstream only a few years ago. Notably, Evangelicals are about the only ones that have held the line on social issues - the only ones who still reject by large majorities gay marriage, for example.

We also talked about Catholicism in the United States - Ryan is married to a Catholic and goes to mass weekly, which is more often than the vast majority of self-identified Catholics in the United States (only 29% do). Ryan has data that younger priests are more conservative, but, as demonstrated above, the laity has become much less devout. I occasionally get into conversations with Catholic friends - including readers of these emails! - in which data about how, say, Catholics use birth control at the same rate as the general population is not a good indicator because you need to look at weekly mass-attending Catholics. Ryan has explored that group specifically with his Catholic Doctrinal Conformity Explorer, and finds, for example, that about 80% of weekly mass attending Catholics believe Christ physically rose from the dead. 58% of weekly mass attending Catholics go to confession at least once a year. 74% believe that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ during mass.

There’s a perception in some online circles, and in elite conservative legal groups, that Catholic conversion is on a roll. Ryan says: “I’ve got data on this. Here’s the share of folks who were raised Protestant who ended up Catholic. Evangelical: 3% Mainline: 5% Black Protestant: 2% Meanwhile, about 13% of folks who were raised Catholic ended up as a Protestant in adulthood.”7 For every Protestant who crosses the Tiber, several cradle Catholics swim the other way.

What’s the call to action for young Christians as Boomers head to heaven? “Everyone wants to change the world but nobody wants to do the dishes.” Burge thinks Millennials and Zoomers need to invest in local institutions.

And the best news for Christian parents who are obligated to pass along their faith?: “Just 2% say they had a very religious childhood and left early. In reality, religion is usually passed down. Your parents’ faith tends to become your own.”8

The lumber man is still hiring, the faith of the parents still becomes the faith of the child, and the American church is still being handed down, one job, one dinner table, one pew at a time. But we have a lot of work to do.