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…
Find purpose beyond church growth or decline, Burge urges CBF
“Your church probably is not growing, and that’s OK,” Ryan Burge, a leading analyst of politics and religion, told a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship gathering June 24 in St. Louis. But that doesn’t signal a cause for apathy or despair, he…
SBC’s losses exceed membership in other denominations, Burge says
The Southern Baptist Convention has lost more members in the last two decades than many other denominations have in total membership, according to religion data analyst Ryan Burge. “The convention is down nearly 3.6 million members since its peak in…
Children in the marketplace
Jesus said it: But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not…
Shall the fundamentalists yet win?
In 1922, a Baptist minister serving a Presbyterian church in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village kicked a hornet’s nest with his Sunday message. Far from the first, or for that matter, last Baptist preacher to do so, he pleaded to those packed…
Burge documents Trump’s gains with non-white evangelicals
Donald Trump’s gains with nonwhite evangelical voters is one of several explanations Ryan Burge offers for what happened in the 2024 presidential election. The story of white evangelical support for Trump has been documented time and again, but what made…
Is Christianity’s statistical decline slowing?
Between the New Atheist movement of the 2000s, clergy shortages in the Catholic Church, and the demographic collapse of Mainline Protestant sects in the United States, the story of religion for the past 35 years has been one of persistent…
Burning down the church
Just prior to the 2008 presidential election, 52% of American adults attended worship. As the 2024 election approached, only 31% of the white American population was regularly in church, a decline of 21 percentage points. In 2008, 68% of 18-…