I’ve often thought that the one of the most caustic emotions that I can have is despair. For me, despair is that terrible, unwavering feeling that no matter what I do in my life, things just won’t get better. It’s…
What’s Happening with America’s Seminaries?
Fun fact — I almost went to seminary. In my last year of undergraduate I took the LSAT twice, didn’t love my scores, and applied to a handful of law schools. I didn’t get into any of them. (For those wondering, this…
“I Go to Church a Little Bit”
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about folks who report that they attend religious services multiple times a week. They make up about 6–8% of the country, and they are a qualitatively different group than people who…
Burge documents who watches what brand of broadcast news
Ryan Burge has documented a truth of America news media consumption that has become gospel in the last 30 years: Republicans and conservative evangelicals are vastly more influenced by Fox News than other Americans. However, Burge unearthed a surprising data…
It’s hard for most Americans to find a progressive church
I hear from progressive Christians all the time who tell me they cannot find a congregation where they fit in and feel comfortable. As one reader said, “I believe we are created to be in relationship, and my spirit desires…
‘When are half your members going to be dead?’
In the concluding chapter of American Mainline Christianity: Its Changing Shape and Future, Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney predicted this: The churches of the Protestant establishment, long in a state of relative decline, will continue to lose ground both…
Burge says this is why nondenoms have advantage over SBC
Nondenominational churches will continue to have an advantage over Southern Baptist churches because their members are younger and more ethnically diverse, predicts religion data analyst Ryan Burge. In a new Substack post titled, “Those Nondenoms are Just Southern Baptists, Right? ”…
Why Religion, Not Income, Predicts the American Vote
Here’s one advantage of being a professor that I’ve only really started to appreciate in the last couple of years: if you sit with an idea long enough—thinking about it repeatedly for days on end—you eventually find a new way…
Burge’s Vanishing Church shows high costs of politicized churches
Ryan Burge, perhaps our top “quantitative scholar of American religion,” makes numbers speak, and in his latest book they tell the sad story of how politics trumped creed in evangelical churches, leaving “no place for moderates,” many of whom departed….
Are women leading or leaving the church?
Having spent some time earlier this year meeting potential romantic partners through the popular Christian dating app Upward, I’ve been consistently confused by the state of Christianity among my generation. The Millennial and Zoomer profiles around my age, which I…
Boys Line Up on the Right, Girls on the Left
Let me start off by saying that I got the inspiration for this data exercise from reading Dan Cox’s excellent newsletter American Storylines. It was specifically his post from March 20, “The Gender Gap in Church is Growing.”
Does Religious Affiliation Make Someone More Resistant to Societal Changes?
As some of you know, the church I pastored for 17 years held its last worship service last July. I wrote an essay for Deseret last year, which received a bit of attention. They asked me to reflect on that a year later, which…