“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-…
Are Young Women Leaving Religion Faster than Young Men?
Here’s what I think the value of pursuing a PhD is – it gives someone time to think about a single topic a whole lot. I know that sounds so incredibly basic and simplistic, but in my experience there’s no substitute…
‘Cloistering’ is not the answer to America’s great divide, Burge says
U.S. society will continue to fragment into ever-shrinking political and religious clusters as long as Americans continue to shun those with different perspectives, sociologist of religion Ryan Burge said in a Denver Seminary podcast. The trend has been highly visible…
Burge: Evangelicals remain outliers in opposing both homosexuality and same-sex marriage
Evangelical Christians remain the lone outliers among Americans opposing both homosexual practice and same-sex marriage, according to social scientist Ryan Burge. In a Dec. 16 post on his “Graphs About Religion” Substack, Burge explores the question of whether there are…
Burge sees danger in ‘political monoculture’ of evangelicalism
The problem with white evangelicals isn’t their close affiliation with the Republican Party but the homogeneity of their political thinking and culture, sociologist of religion Ryan Burge said during a conference hosted by Denver Seminary. “When a religious movement becomes…
Southern Baptists have voted heavily Republican in last four elections
Southern Baptists have voted consistently Republican in the last four presidential elections, researcher Ryan Burge says. In his analysis of 40 U.S. denominations, “the Southern Baptists and the independent Baptists are clearly the most Republican of the bunch,” he reported…