The Rise of the Religious ＂Nones＂ (And What It Means for Society)
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Summary
In 1972, the number of Americans who described themselves as religiously unaffiliated was just 5%. In 2018, it was almost 24%. Why is the number answering none of the above to the question of religious affiliation jumped so dramatically in recent years? And what effect will the growth of these so-called nuns have on society in general? My guest explores these questions in his new book, The Nuns: Where They Came, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. His name is Ryan Burge, and he s both a pastor and a professor of political science. In our conversation, Ryan shares the data on which religions have risen and fallen, and explains why mainline Protestantism has taken a huge dive.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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In 1972, the number of Americans described themselves as religiously unaffiliated was
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just 5%. 2018 was almost 24%. Why is the number of people answering none of the above to the
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question of the religious affiliation jumped so dramatically in recent years? And what effect
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will the growth of these so-called nuns have on society in general? My guest explores these
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questions in his book, The Nuns, where they came from, who they are, and where they are going.
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His name is Ryan Burge, and he's both a pastor and a professor of political science. In our
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conversation today, Ryan shares the data on which religions have risen and fallen and explains why
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mainline Protestantism has taken a huge dive and why the number of people who have disaffiliated
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altogether from religion has grown to rival the number of evangelicals and Catholics in this
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country. We talk about the role that politics has played in this shift and the fact that while
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people once chose their politics based on their religion, they now choose their religion based
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on their politics. Ryan unpacks the demographic profile of the average nun, breaking it down
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into the category's three subgroups, atheists, agnostics, and those who label themselves as
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nothing in particular. We enter a conversation with what the future growth in the nuns may look
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like, the possible societal effects of an overall decline in religiosity, and whether younger
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generations may swing back to being more religious. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at aom.is slash nuns. All right, Ryan Burge, welcome to the show.
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So you got a book called The Nuns. That's N-O-N-E-S, not nuns, like flying nun, where they came
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from, who they are, and where they're going. This is about people who identify as not having
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a religion. And you are both a professor of political science and a pastor of a small
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Baptist church. So this book sort of is an intersection of those two parts of your life.
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This combination of political science professor and pastor is not something you see very often.
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How do you find your way into these pasts? And which came first? Was it the political scientist
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The pastoring thing actually came first. I was 20 years old and I got, somehow I fell into this job
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as a youth pastor at this little Baptist church about 30 minutes from where I grew up.
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And I really took the job because I couldn't find another job for the summer. And that was
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supposed to be a three-month summer internship. It turned into a three-year youth pastoring gig,
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which sort of turned into the next thing, which turned into the next thing.
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So I've been at my current church for over 15 years now, and I've always done ministry as sort
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of a side thing. I mean, it's never been my primary career. I've always had two or three things going
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on at once, going to grad school, being a professor. So I've always been sort of a pastor on the side,
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but in my mind, I see myself as a political scientist first, a college professor first,
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and a pastor second. And that actually, I think works well in terms of balance in my life,
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because now I don't put too much emphasis on one or the other, but both are sort of central parts
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of my identity. And I think they actually both complement each other and help me in both fields
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And I think the book actually reflects that balance. It's primarily written from your perspective
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as a political scientist. I mean, it's very empirical and data-driven. You did all the data
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analysis yourself. There are several dozen graphs in there. You did all yourself. And then just at
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the very end, you put on your pastor hat and offer some comments from that perspective too.
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But let's talk about the data you analyze, because that's the main thrust of your book.
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And the big statistic to talk about is that the number of Americans who say they have no religion,
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that number was 5% in 1972. It jumped to 24% in 2018. But there's a lot of nuance to that number.
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A lot going on with that statistic. And to unpack that nuance, I think it would be
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useful to talk about how social scientists measure religiosity in the first place.
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So start there. How do we know about the state of religion in America? I mean,
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are there certain surveys that we use that are sort of like the gold standard in measuring religiosity?
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Yeah. There is one gold standard survey that exists. It's called the General Social Survey,
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called the GSS. You'll often see it shortened too. It's been going on since 1972,
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and it's been put together by the National Opinion Research Council, which is based out of the
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University of Chicago. And they get NSF grant from the United States government every year to run
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their survey. And what's great about the GSS is it's been done the same way, using the same format
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since 1972. So it's really the only way that we have that exists today that we can track religion
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in a consistent way going back to the 1970s. And it uses a question about religious belonging.
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You know, what tradition do you find yourself in? Actually, the question asked, what is your
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present religion, if any? And it gives you several different options, Protestant, Catholic,
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other religion, or none is the first question you get asked. And so what's nice is if you ask the
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same question the same way, at least you have comparability year to year and decade to decade.
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A lot of times surveys change the way they ask questions over time, and they can have huge
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implications for how people answer them. So when I say 5% to 23%, that's a pretty objective measure of
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how much the nuns have grown. And by the way, they only went from 5% to 7% by 1990. And they went
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from 7% to 23% from 1990 to 2018. So almost all the growth in the nuns has happened in the last 30
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years or so. And so let's talk about this idea of religious. So the survey only asks, which do you
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identify with? And so they'll give you different options, different religions, Catholic, evangelical,
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other religion, or nun. But as you highlight in the book, you go deep into this, there's a lot more
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to religiosity than that. I mean, someone could say they belong to their Methodist, but they might
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not really. I mean, they don't go. So from a sociological perspective, how do we determine
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religiosity beyond just what someone identifies as?
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Yeah. So we use three separate questions. The one I was just talking about is the belonging
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question. There's also a behavior question, which is how often do you attend church? And
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the answers go from never to more than once a week. So we use that sometimes as sort of a measure
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of devotion. We know that people who go more often are more of whatever they go to. And the third one
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is religious belief. And that's oftentimes things like, what is your view of the Bible? Or what is
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your view of God? Do you believe God exists? Do you believe that Satan exists? Do you believe in
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heaven and hell? Things like that. Really, if you think about religiosity, it's the three
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Bs, behavior, belief, and belonging. But the reality is when we talk about the nuns, the
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one that I always use is belonging, because that's the one that people seem to respond to
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the most. But the share of Americans who do not believe, do not behave, and do not belong
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is only about 6% of the country. Over 90% of Americans still say they have some belief in
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God even today, despite the fact the nuns are at least 25% of Americans.
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So what we see typically happens is church attendance is the first thing that drops off.
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About 40% of Americans say they never attend church. 25% of Americans, 23-25% of Americans
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say they have no religious belonging. But only 10% of Americans say they have no religious
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belief. And some people have sort of a mix and match of those two or three of those three.
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And so it's very rare for someone to not do any of those three at the same time. So the
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So I guess that's pretty hard for a political scientist to really kind of pin down what does
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it mean if someone has no religion or if they have a religion. Because I mean, for example,
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I think 25% of those who say they are evangelical Christians, they don't attend church. So from
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your perspective, would you say they're religious or not?
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So that's a great, great, great question. Measuring stuff is super hard. Whenever I teach
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my grad students, I spend two hours in my grad method class just saying over and over again,
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measuring stuff is really, really hard. So for me, there's this question on a survey that says,
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are you, do you identify as born again or evangelical or not? It just says yes or no
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question. And my whole, my whole approach to that question has changed over time. It used to be,
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I would say that you cannot be an evangelical unless you say you're evangelical, but also say you're
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Protestant or Christian. Like it's impossible to be an evangelical Muslim, let's say.
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Right. But the most recent data analysis I've looked at, and I've done a lot of analysis in
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the last couple of weeks, what you're seeing more and more is that people are saying yes to
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the evangelical question, despite the fact they never go to church or despite the fact they're
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not even Christians. There are evangelical Jews, there are evangelical Mormons, there are evangelical
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Muslims, there are evangelical Catholics now. So I've taken a new approach to the whole thing.
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Here's what I say. When people tell you who they are, you believe them. So if you tell me you're
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an evangelical Mormon, I say, great. That is fantastic. Let's figure out why you chose
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both to identify as an LDS, but also as an evangelical. And what you find if you dig into
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the data enough is people are not as crazy as you think they are. They're actually picking that
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evangelical identity for a very good reason. And that reason now is they see themselves as
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conservative politically, but they also see themselves as aligning more and more with the
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Republican party. For instance, Muslims who go to mosque more than once a week and identify as
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Republicans, half of them also identify as evangelical. So what you kind of see is you
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see a logic starting to form in the heads of Americans and they're seeing like the word
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evangelical as meaning a political identifier and a cultural identifier, just as much as they're
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seeing it as a theological identifier. And I know a lot of my past friends go, no, no, no, no,
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you got to do an evangelical. You got to be a Christian. You got to be a Protestant. You got
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to go to church a lot. And I would say, yeah, but these people don't believe in evangelicalism
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the same way you do. And they're not wrong for doing that. So that's the problem with measurement
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is what I think something means is not what the average person thinks something means.
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I'm much more sliding toward the perspective of when those people say they're evangelicals,
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I have to trust they know what that means. And they're picking it for a very good reason.
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And yeah, maybe we can get to this intersection of politics and religion that's happened in America in the past 30
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years. That's sort of changed things the way we think of religiosity. But let's talk about, you know,
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sort of the state of religion in America today in general. With the best surveys, what have the
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numbers looked like for the big religions in the United States? I mean, are there ones that have
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held steady? Which ones have seen the biggest decrease, et cetera?
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Yeah. You know, religion is, religion's demography is glacial. That's how I describe it in the book.
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You don't typically see big shifts like in a year or two years or even five years. So you're looking at
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10-year trends, sometimes 20-year trends. If you look at things like evangelical
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evangelicalism, like people who identify with an evangelical tradition, so Southern Baptists,
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Assemblies of God, Pentecostals, people like that, they were 17% of America in 1972.
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They jumped to 30% of America in 1993. And now they're down to about 23% of America.
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It's interesting when I tell people that, a lot of people applaud the fact they're declining from
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1993, but they forget the fact they're actually up from 1972. There are more evangelicals in America
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today than there were 40 years ago. Catholics are very, very steady over the last 40 years,
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incredibly steady, never really going above 25% and never going below 20%, just sort of
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seesawing up and down around 22%, 23%, 24%. Now, the real decline you're seeing in American religion
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is a group that I call mainline Protestants. And those are people who are like United Methodists,
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or Episcopalians, or United Church of Christ. These are the kind of churches where they have female
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pastors, where they are open and affirming to LGBT people, where they're focused on things like
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social justice. They don't pound the pulpit and tell you you're going to hell. They're a little
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bit more moderate on social issues. In 1975, 30% of Americans were mainline Protestants. It was the
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largest religious tradition in America. Today, that share has dropped from 30% to 10% and is very likely
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going to go to 5% over the next decade because mainline Protestants are dying off very quickly because
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they're older. So, that's really the big shift in American Christianity is Black Protestants have
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held steady. Evangelicals have held steady. Catholics have done just fine. Mainline Protestants
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have gone from 30% to 10%, while the nuns, like we just talked about, have gone from 5% to 24%.
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So, you know, that's really what's happened is a lot of moderate Christians are no longer
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Christians anymore. They say they're nuns on surveys, and that's led to the decline of mainline and the
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huge rise of the nuns. Yeah, I think it's interesting that idea of mainline
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Protestantism going on. Because I remember when I was a kid in the 90s, you go to school and some
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kid was like, oh, I'm Methodist, I'm Lutheran, I'm Baptist, I'm Episcopalian. I don't hear that
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anymore. It's like, well, I just go to this mega church and that's it. Yeah, it's, I don't think
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we fully understand what that means for the future of America. Those institutions used to dominate
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America. I mean, in all facets of American life, the Methodists were very strong, the Episcopalians
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are very strong, and now all you've got is a lot of non-denominational Protestant Christians.
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Back in 1972, only 5% of all Christians were non-denominational, and now it's 25% and rising
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rapidly. It's the only tradition in American Christianity that's grown over the last 10
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years. Baptists are down, Methodists are down, Episcopalians are down, Presbyterians are down.
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The only group that's grown are non-denominational churches, and they are eating denominational
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Christianity, and they represent this entirely different way to do faith because they have no
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accountability. They have no organizational structure. A lot of them started with a guy
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in his basement and a couple of families and grew to a mega church of 1,000 or 2,000 people
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who don't have a ton of accountability, a ton of history, a ton of connection. It's a radical
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rethinking of American Christianity, and again, we don't really fully understand what that means
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Why do you think people have left mainline Protestantism and maybe joined a large mega
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church or non-denominational mega church? What do you think is going on there? Any insights?
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Man, that's the question that keeps me up at night because I'm a mainline Protestant. I'm a pastor
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in the American Baptist Church, and we were an offshoot of the Southern Baptist Church, and we
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split over the issue of slavery in 1860s, right before the Civil War. So my tradition is declining
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very rapidly. The church that I'm a part of had 300 members in the 1960s, had 50 when I took over in
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2006, and now we had 10 last Sunday. So we are part of this mainline decline. I think it was a lot of
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things. I think a big part of it was evangelicals got really popular in the 1990s, and a lot of my
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parents' generation, let's say, became evangelicals because it was the thing to do, and it leads to
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this perpetual cycle of the fewer people go, the fewer people go, right? So it goes down and spirals
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downward and downward. And now if you look at the mainline, they are in serious trouble. For instance,
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the Episcopal Church, which used to be one of those powerful churches in America, only have about half a
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million people who come to church every Sunday, half a million people, and a nation of 330 million
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Americans. I mean, they're going to go away in the next 20 years. So I think that what happened was
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those churches got older, they got grayer, and because of that, young families don't want to join
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a church with a bunch of 60 and 70-year-old people. When they have kids, they want their kids to play
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with other kids. There were no kids there. So I think it's sort of fed on itself and perpetuated on
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itself. And once you get to a certain point, it's almost impossible to turn a church around because you
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just don't have a whole lot to offer when the church down the road has three youth pastors and
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a gymnasium and a beautiful sanctuary with lights and sounds and smells. And your kids want to go to
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that because all their friends go to that. So I think all those things together led to the death
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of the mainline. And I really do think American Christianity and American society, by the way,
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is worse when you only have one flavor of Protestant Christianity left in this country.
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Yeah. I think we do underestimate the power of sociability when it comes to people's
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religious affiliations. I remember if you can go further back, I know there weren't surveys done
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about religiosity in the 40s and 50s. But from what I understand, after World War II,
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that's when the mainline Protestant denomination saw this huge uptick. And it was what you were
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supposed to do. You had to join a church. And so people became mainline Protestant because that's
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what everyone else was doing. Absolutely. People came back from the war and said,
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well, I need to put down roots in my community. And you know what? The Methodists are nice. They're
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fine. They don't yell at me. They want to do soup kitchens and clothes closets and food pantries and help
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the community. And I can deal with the theology piece of it because I believe in Jesus, but I don't
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know about Jonah and the whale and Noah and the flood and all those kinds of things. And those
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churches preach that corner of the sun a softer gospel. And a lot of people found that very,
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very appealing. The other thing about the mainline is they're very hierarchical.
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Like the United Methodist Church, they pick who your pastor is at your church. You don't do that at
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the individual level. So it's very, very top down, not bottom up. But think of the kind of
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Christianity that's surviving right now. Non-denominationals are a radical democratization
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of religious hierarchy. It's all bottom up. There's no top down anymore. The top down churches
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are dying and the bottom up churches are succeeding wildly now because they don't have that structure.
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There are no gatekeepers anymore. So anybody can get a pulpit, get a microphone, get a field somewhere
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and start preaching. And all of a sudden they have a church in two or three years. You can't do,
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as a United Methodist, you have to go to college to be a preacher. You have to have a degree and a
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certification, all those things. It seems like that whole entire structure has sort of fallen
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by the wayside. And now it's, well, anyone can get a microphone. Anyone can lead a church. And it
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just changes how we think about Christianity and religion in general.
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So we've talked about Christianity, Christian denominations. What's the state of like Judaism
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Yeah. Those traditions are really, really hard to find on surveys. About 1% of Americans are Muslims,
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which is 3.5 million people. We have 3.5 million Muslims in this country, but you have to do a
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really large survey to have enough Muslims to really see them in a way that you can do statistical
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analysis on, right? So Mormons are 1%. Muslims are 1%. Buddhists are 1%. Hindus are about one half of
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1%. Jews are, depending on the survey, it's really hard to survey Jews because a lot of them kind of,
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they can't figure out whether they're religiously Jewish or culturally or genetically Jewish. So you
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kind of get all that together at the same time. But if you add all those traditions up together,
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you get about 6% or 7% of Americans kind of fall in those other religious traditions.
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We know that Muslims are the youngest religious tradition in America. The average Muslim adult in
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America is 33 years old, when the average American adult is about 50 years old overall.
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So Muslims are young. They're having lots of children. And so they're growing pretty significantly
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in the United States. But what's interesting about Muslims especially is they're very geographically
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concentrated in certain pockets around the country. For instance, in Dearborn, Michigan,
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there's a huge Muslim population, but there are many counties in the United States. There's not a
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single Muslim that appears in any census data. So these communities are growing, but they're growing
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sort of in these little pockets, especially on the coasts, not throughout the heartland. They're
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getting larger, but that's also, they're becoming a larger part of American society because of
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immigration as well. Most people who immigrate to this country are not Protestants. There's a huge
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growing number of Hispanic Catholics, obviously, but there's also people coming from the West and
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the East and they bring their different religions here. So America is becoming less Christian over
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time. It's just happening very, very slowly over your lifetime, not over the next five years,
00:19:00.480
All right. So let's go back to the nuns specifically, because that's the topic of your book.
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When you first ran your analysis showing the significant increase in nuns, I mean,
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were you surprised by that? Or did you already have a hunch as a political scientist and a minister
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that the number of people who don't consider themselves religious had been increasing in the
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Yeah. It's always showed up in the survey data, but you never know where a tweet's going to go,
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right? So I started the book with a story about that tweet that really kind of made me into what I
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am today. I just showed this graph. The GSS had just come out with 2018 data,
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and the nuns for the first time were now larger than evangelicals or Catholics. And I just tweeted
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this graph out and I said, big news, the nuns are 23% now, which is at least the same size as
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evangelicals and Catholics. And it seems like everyone wanted to hear that at the time.
00:19:47.480
I mean, it just took off. I mean, I looked down at my phone, I'll say it's 75 retweets in the first
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10 minutes. And within the next week or two, I've been called by basically every news media outlet in
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America and the world. We're interested in American religion and what was changing in American
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religion. And part of me was thinking, this has been going on for 30 years now. Why are you all
00:20:05.060
keying on this right now? But I think we've sort of hit this inflection point where it used to be
00:20:10.580
to have no religion in America was not the thing you would say. We were a generically Christian
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country. We have something called American civic religion, which is the idea that God we trust is
00:20:20.660
on the money and that's totally cool. And we opened Congress with a prayer from a pastor and that's
00:20:25.040
totally fine. But as the number of nuns get larger and larger, it becomes more and more socially
00:20:30.260
acceptable to say you have no religious affiliation. And I think that's fed on itself. And so I think
00:20:34.880
we got to this point where we all looked at each other and went, oh, wow, this is a real thing.
00:20:39.680
They're not 10% of Americans. They're 25% of Americans now and growing rapidly. And that's
00:20:44.720
changing America in ways that we can never fully understand. And a lot of these reporters wanted to
00:20:49.560
talk with me about the implications of what that means, not just now, but for the future of America
00:20:54.740
when we're 30% nuns or 40% nuns or 50% nuns and how that changes. Every situation in American life
00:21:02.020
is going to change because America's religious composition will look in 30 years like nothing
00:21:07.000
we've ever seen before. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:21:10.820
And now back to the show. Okay. So the number of nuns has, is increased with about the same as
00:21:19.180
Catholics or evangelical Christians. So the question I'm sure people ask you is like, why,
00:21:22.740
what's going on? What, what is causing people to disaffiliate with a religion? So when they're
00:21:28.420
asked, are you, what religion do you belong to? They're going to say none. Like what, what are,
00:21:35.460
I wish I could give you like a bumper sticker reason. And I, you know, in the book I try to,
00:21:39.340
I lay out a whole chapter where I give sort of eight different reasons, potential reasons,
00:21:42.760
and I could probably add eight more reasons on top of that, that I thought about in the last
00:21:46.060
couple of years about why there's so many nuns. But I'll, I think the first one, I think this is
00:21:49.980
really the overriding one that a lot of people have not really thought about because they haven't
00:21:53.020
read, you know, 1800s social science, which is this idea called secularization. Max Faber,
00:21:58.200
who's this really famous German sociologist basically argued that as society becomes more
00:22:02.540
educationally advanced and has higher levels of income, they're going to naturally become less
00:22:06.960
religious. And he actually had a term for this. He called it demagication. He said that the world,
00:22:12.080
you know, three or 400 years ago was all magic. It didn't make any sense at all. Like why did it
00:22:15.740
rain? Why was there an earthquake? Why was there a flood? Why did my crops not grow? Everything seemed
00:22:20.080
magical. We didn't really understand cause and effect or geography or geology or climatology or
00:22:25.500
anything else. So everything just sort of seemed like it was spiritual. And then science comes in and
00:22:29.800
sort of says, well, here's why it's raining or not raining. And here's why your crops die or don't die.
00:22:33.800
Here's why you died of that disease. It's called viruses and bacteria, not because of God's trying
00:22:38.140
to smite you or something like that. So what Weber said was, the more we learn about the world,
00:22:42.540
the less we need God. So he, you know, this is called secularization theory. And, you know,
00:22:48.060
he was really, he was proved right by what happened in Western Europe. If you look at Western European
00:22:52.260
countries, places like Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, those countries are almost entirely
00:22:57.040
irreligious now. We're talking about 10, 15% of those folks go to church at least once a week. I mean,
00:23:02.060
very, very few religious people in those countries anymore. And it was sort of inevitable in my mind
00:23:07.120
that what happened in Europe was going to come across the ocean and wash across American shores.
00:23:11.760
We just didn't know how long it was going to take. And in our case, it took probably about 40 years
00:23:15.540
for the waves really starting to crest across America in the early 1990s. And so we were bound
00:23:21.280
to be secularized. It just took longer and went slower than a lot of people anticipated. And I don't
00:23:26.680
think we're done yet. Secularizing, I don't think we're ever going to get to the level of Europe
00:23:30.380
where, you know, 80, 90% of those people are not religious, but we're definitely going to look a
00:23:34.320
lot more like Europe in the next 30 years than we did in the last 30 years.
00:23:37.780
And what role do you think politics has played in the decline in religion?
00:23:40.880
It's hard to mistake the fact that 40% of people who identify as very liberal also identify as
00:23:47.140
religiously unaffiliated. It's only 10% of people who are very conservative. So 40% of very liberals are
00:23:53.720
nuns, only 10% of very conservatives are nuns. I think what's happened is that we have forced
00:23:59.080
people to sort themselves into all kinds of camps. And we say, you can't, you have to have a
00:24:03.580
congruent identity. So for instance, it's really hard today to be an evangelical and a Democrat when
00:24:09.540
80% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. It's very, very hard on the other hand, to be a
00:24:15.380
conservative, politically conservative atheist, because 85% of atheists voted for Joe Biden in
00:24:20.940
2020. So what's happened is people have felt like they need to align all facets of their
00:24:26.180
personality, their religiosity, their political views, their cultural views, even where they live.
00:24:31.260
They want everything to line up in such a way that it's all congruent with each other.
00:24:36.880
And so, and there's actually been some political science work on this is we're seeing more and more
00:24:40.340
people are picking their religion based on their politics, much more than they're picking their
00:24:45.620
politics based on religion, which is really mind-blowing because for the last 50 years in social
00:24:50.780
science, we always assumed that religion was the first cause. It was the first lens that we looked
00:24:56.040
at the world through and politics was sort of downstream of that. But there's been a lot of
00:25:00.620
evidence in the last five years that says it's the opposite, that everything, that politics is the way
00:25:05.040
we look at everything in the world, including what kind of church we go to. Evangelicals have
00:25:09.660
benefited from this. They brought in a lot of conservatives, but mainline Protestants have been
00:25:13.480
hurt by this because they're not so politically cohesive. There's a lot of Republicans and Democrats in those
00:25:18.200
churches. So people are sorting themselves out and the mainline were sort of the casualty of all that.
00:25:23.060
That is interesting that there's these findings that people are choosing the religion based on
00:25:26.740
their politics. That seems like the tail wagging the dog. I mean, you think, you know, it's the
00:25:30.620
spiritual would help you decide you're earthly, but it seems like the earthly is helping people decide
00:25:34.980
they're spiritual. And you know what? I had a pastor tell me one time he goes, listen, I get them for
00:25:38.800
30 minutes every Sunday, if I'm lucky, you know, if they pay attention to me, they go home and watch
00:25:42.820
Fox News or CNN for six hours a day, seven days a week. I can't compete with that. You know, so where are they
00:25:47.460
getting the gospel more from? Where are they getting, you know, religious ideas more from? Probably the TV
00:25:51.380
than me. And so, you know what a lot of pastors have done, interestingly enough, because of this
00:25:54.960
polarization is they stop talking about politics in the pulpit entirely because they don't want to turn
00:25:58.940
off anybody in the congregation. So when you leave that void in people's lives, they're going to fill
00:26:03.520
it in some other way. Like, how should I think about abortion or immigration or gay marriage or,
00:26:07.720
you know, DACA or whatever it is, they're going to listen to somebody. And pastors sort of gave that
00:26:13.300
away over the last 30 years. And now the people who talk to them are people like Anderson Cooper
00:26:17.200
and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and people like that. So they're getting it from somewhere
00:26:21.180
else. It's not from the pulpit. It's from the TV each and every night.
00:26:24.900
All right. So secularization is one theory of the decrease in religious affiliation. Politics
00:26:29.820
in America has played a role. You also talk about this idea of social desirability bias.
00:26:36.300
What is social desirability bias and what influence do you think it has had on religion surveys?
00:26:41.380
Yeah. So social desirability bias is really a fancy way of saying that people lie on surveys. We know
00:26:47.220
this. We've known this forever that people are really, really prone to lying about certain things
00:26:51.500
in their life. Questions about things like sexuality. Do you masturbate? Have you ever cheated on your
00:26:55.200
partner? How many sexual partners have you had? Do you do drugs? What kind of drugs do you do? Have
00:26:59.720
you ever stolen, lied, cheated, sealed? All those kinds of questions. Are you racist? Are you sexist?
00:27:04.680
Those kinds of questions, you never get the right answers. You always get the answer that people want you
00:27:09.160
to hear, not the real answer. And we know that when it comes to religion, that social desirability
00:27:14.200
bias is a huge problem because people want to seem more religious than they actually are.
00:27:19.420
I talk about in the book about this county in Ohio, Ashtabula County, Ohio. It's this little rural
00:27:24.680
county in the middle of the state. And this survey team sent a survey out to about a thousand people
00:27:30.100
living in that county, asked them how often they went to church. About 37% of respondents said they went
00:27:34.940
to church every Sunday. So they checked. They went around to every church in the county every weekend
00:27:40.560
and they counted cars in the parking lot or they asked the pastor. They called them up and said,
00:27:45.400
how many people do you have in church last Sunday? They tabulated all that and they figured out the
00:27:49.280
share of people in that county who went to church every Sunday was about 20%, not 37%. So half the people
00:27:55.060
who say they go to church every Sunday lie about it on surveys. And so what that means for us,
00:27:59.960
though, is as it's become less and less taboo to be a nun in the 21st century, we actually might be
00:28:06.840
seeing the real answer to the religion question, not the socially desirable answer. And so there's
00:28:12.520
a real possibility, and we'll never be able to figure this out with any certainty, but there's a
00:28:15.900
real possibility that we've never really been that religious. It's just people lied on surveys a lot in
00:28:22.000
the 1970s and 80s to over-inflate their own religiosity when really they never went to church.
00:28:26.600
But today they're giving us the real answer or an answer that's closer to real and honest.
00:28:32.300
So we're actually seeing the real numbers today, not the over-inflated numbers we saw 30 or 40 years
00:28:36.960
ago. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point that maybe Americans have been less religious
00:28:41.000
for a long time. And now we're just knowing because people are just being honest with the surveys.
00:28:45.500
And I think I've read history books about the history of Christianity in America, where they talk
00:28:50.360
about where they actually look at church roles. And you look at the number of people on a church role
00:28:55.700
compared to the number of the population. And the number of people on a church role is like
00:29:00.420
20 to 30% of the actual population of a colony or an early state. So I mean, it's probably been
00:29:07.960
smaller than we... Actual religiosity has been probably in the same range for a really long time.
00:29:13.520
I think generally, we were never as religious as certain people think we were. But I think we're
00:29:20.100
less religious today than we were 30 or 40 years ago. But I don't think that number is as big as we
00:29:24.660
think it is. But again, we'll never be able to figure out this question with any certainty,
00:29:29.640
which is really obviously troublesome for me. But it's also problematic for social science,
00:29:33.160
because we can't say, are we more religious today than we were 50 years ago with any sort
00:29:36.620
of empirical data? It's maddening. Yeah. So let's talk about the demographics
00:29:40.940
of nuns. What do they look like? Are they more or less educated than average, more or less income,
00:29:45.900
male-female breakdown? Can I just give us a thumbnail sketch of a nun?
00:29:49.480
Man, they're all over. They're everywhere. And they're everyone. I think that if anything comes
00:29:54.040
out of the book, I hope people realize that it's not... The trope that we have in our heads,
00:29:57.860
it's always like a white male philosophy professor who makes a bunch of money and has a PhD.
00:30:02.440
That is not the nuns anymore. Now, the other thing in the book that I think is really,
00:30:07.000
really important is I break the nuns down into three distinct categories, right? Atheists,
00:30:11.760
agnostics, nothing in particular. Atheists are 6% of the population. They have very high levels
00:30:16.660
of education. Almost half of them have a four-year college degree, which is insane because only about
00:30:20.660
30% of Americans have a four-year college degree. So very, very highly educated. They have incomes
00:30:25.020
that are much higher than the national average. About 47% of atheists are white men, which is
00:30:30.760
obviously a disproportionate amount. 60% of all atheists are males. And I talk about in the book,
00:30:35.440
if you go on Amazon and look at the bestseller list for the atheist category, almost all of it is white
00:30:40.060
men. So it's a very white male-dominated space. Politically, they're incredibly liberal.
00:30:45.620
They think they're to the left of the Democratic Party now, and they see themselves trending even
00:30:49.640
further to the left of the Democratic Party. They're incredibly politically active. They show
00:30:54.300
up to meetings. They go to rallies. They hold protests. I mean, they put bumper stickers on
00:30:58.080
their cars. They put up yard signs. They do all that stuff. They're actually the most politically
00:31:01.740
active group in America today are atheists. Agnostics are a little, I call them like atheist light.
00:31:07.040
They're also 6% of America. They do have higher levels of education, but not as high as atheists.
00:31:10.980
They have higher incomes, but not as high as atheists. They're politically active,
00:31:13.660
not as much as atheists. And they're liberal, but not as liberal as atheists.
00:31:17.500
But they're sort of in that direction of atheism. But the third group is this group called nothing
00:31:23.080
in particular. And I think this is the group that sort of goes understudied, underconsidered,
00:31:27.320
and underthought about. About 22% of Americans today identify as nothing in particular, which is
00:31:32.160
about the same size as evangelicals. These people have the lowest education of any religious group in
00:31:38.120
America. Only 20% of them have a four-year college degree. 60% of them make $50,000
00:31:43.320
a year or less as a household, which means that most of them live in poverty. They are left out,
00:31:48.520
left behind, lost. They don't vote. They don't go to meetings. They don't participate in the
00:31:52.780
political process at all. I think they're really the tragic figures of the 21st century in America
00:31:58.400
because they are not economically prosperous. They're not culturally advancing. They feel like
00:32:02.960
they're isolated and unmoored from the rest of society. And the funny thing is, most of the nuns
00:32:08.380
are nothing in particular. Three in five nuns are nothing in particular. And yet, it seems like
00:32:12.800
all the attention in the media on the nuns falls on the atheists and agnostics when really the nothing
00:32:17.380
in particulars are so different than they are and larger than they are at the same time. So,
00:32:21.380
I think we need to spend a lot more time thinking about that third group than nothing in particular
00:32:25.300
group. Yeah. I thought that was an interesting point in the book. So, going back to the theories of
00:32:29.840
what's causing disaffiliation, we talked about the secularization theory. As you become more educated,
00:32:34.180
the less likely you're going to be religious. And that would make sense for someone who's atheist
00:32:39.400
or agnostic. But as you noted, nothing in particular is they're not as it. They're not
00:32:43.980
very educated. So, what's going on there? Is secularization playing a role? What's causing
00:32:49.500
them to disaffiliate? My best inclination with them is they are dissociating themselves with every
00:32:56.040
part of American society. I think if you look at the data, a lot of them tried to go to college,
00:33:00.460
but just didn't make it for whatever reason. I bet it's probably because of things like
00:33:03.760
finances or logistics or things like that. These are people who are just, I think,
00:33:09.320
these are the kind of, in my mind, here's who I think they are. These are the kind of people who
00:33:12.300
wanted to live the same lives their parents did. And they tried to do the same things their parents
00:33:16.180
did, which would go to high school, get a degree, and then go work at the local factory. Except the
00:33:20.320
local factory their parents worked at doesn't exist anymore. It closed down and got offshore to
00:33:24.260
somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, the life they wanted to live, they can't live anymore. And the money
00:33:28.800
they wanted to make, they can't make anymore. And they just don't feel like there's any way for them to move
00:33:33.080
forward. They feel like every part of society has left them behind, whether it be education,
00:33:38.080
whether it be politics, and whether it be the church. They are antisocial. They have no reason
00:33:43.700
to be social because nobody can do anything for them. They are really sort of in despair in American
00:33:48.920
society, and they're rapidly growing. And I think their numbers are going to continue to grow
00:33:53.080
because I think for a lot of people, they don't want to reject religion and take on all the negative
00:33:57.640
stereotypes that atheists have in American society. But they also can't be religious either because
00:34:02.100
they're antisocial largely. So, they're sort of caught between the real hardcore nuns on one
00:34:08.000
side and the real hardcore evangelicals on the other side and go, I can't do either of those things.
00:34:12.460
So, I'll just be stuck here in the mushy middle.
00:34:15.100
So, these are the people that Robert Putnam was talking about in Bowling Alone. These are the
00:34:20.220
Absolutely. They're bowling. But I think Putnam, if Putnam wrote his book today, he should call it
00:34:24.460
tweeting alone or Facebooking alone or Instagramming alone, right? The internet has accelerated our
00:34:29.320
ability to stay at home and still be entertained in ways that we don't even fully grasp.
00:34:34.140
So, people are doing fewer social things. Even back in Putnam's day, he blamed it on cable TV.
00:34:39.640
I mean, think about what Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and all these things have done for us and TikTok
00:34:43.920
and Instagram. Now, we never have to leave our house. And I think for certain people, that's really
00:34:48.740
sort of cut them off from any potential economic prosperity, relational prosperity. And people used to
00:34:55.520
go out and see other people and hang out and enjoy company and things like that. Now, they just stay
00:34:59.480
home and watch Netflix on a Friday night. And I think there's a lot of reasons to believe that
00:35:06.480
And also, another point you make about the nothing in particulars is, unlike atheists who say, yeah,
00:35:10.800
there's no divine being out there. Agnostics are like, well, I don't care. Maybe, maybe not.
00:35:16.100
The nothing in particulars, when you ask them, they might not associate with a religion. But if you ask
00:35:21.280
them, are you, do you believe in a higher power? They might say yes. And some of these folks even
00:35:26.440
attend church every now and then. That's right. About 30% of nothing in particular say they go to
00:35:31.460
church at least once a year. So, they're not anti-anti-religion like your atheist or agnostics
00:35:36.460
are. Less than 3% of atheists or agnostics go to church at all. So, there's a huge divide. And 40%
00:35:43.260
of nothing in particular say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives.
00:35:47.420
We've talked about education and income of nuns. What about age? Is there a general age or an
00:35:54.820
average age of a nun? Yeah. So, nuns are, the conception that they're a bunch of young folks
00:36:00.600
is actually not that empirically true. They are younger than the average American, but only by a
00:36:05.680
few years. And nothing in particular is actually, their median age is very, very similar to the median
00:36:10.380
age of the average American. Now, we have 18-year-old nuns. We've got 85-year-old nuns. So,
00:36:15.600
it really spans the gambit. It does lean towards the younger generation just because generational
00:36:20.740
replacement change and things like that. But what we're seeing is, if you look at the data
00:36:24.420
on Generation Z, which are people who are born in 1995 or later, the oldest members are now moving
00:36:30.320
into adulthood so we can survey them. We're seeing that the rate of nuns amongst Generation Z now is
00:36:36.060
way over 40%. I've seen 42% or 44% nuns amongst Generation Z. So, think about this. Every day in America,
00:36:43.820
baby boomers are dying off. 18% of them are nuns. But every day in America, someone now from Gen Z is
00:36:49.440
moving into adulthood and 44% of them are nuns. So, we're seeing this rapid shift in that old people
00:36:55.380
are dying off who are more religious while young people are entering American life who are much
00:36:59.340
less religious. And that by itself is going to change the composition of American religion without
00:37:03.920
anyone converting or deconverting at all. Just generational replacement is going to do more work than any sort
00:37:09.480
of conversion or deconversion ever could. Well, let's talk about predictions for the future.
00:37:14.240
So, have political scientists made predictions about the number of nuns what'll be like 10,
00:37:19.040
20, 40 years from now? So, I get asked that question a lot. And, you know, prediction is
00:37:23.080
obviously a very, very treacherous place to go into because American society can shift. And if you're
00:37:28.040
a Christian, you believe in revival and awakening and those kind of things. And when America's seen two
00:37:33.080
of those, we saw two great awakenings in our history where massive amounts of people, millions and
00:37:37.000
millions of people became Christians overnight, basically, because of, you know, this cadre of
00:37:40.380
preachers who are very dynamic. I have to say, assuming that won't happen, and, you know, there's
00:37:45.160
no way to assume it will or won't happen. I think what we're going to see in America in 50 years is
00:37:49.560
probably 45 or 50% of Americans are going to be non-religious. So, half secular, half not.
00:37:57.500
Christianity will probably be 35 or 40% of America, and there'll probably be 10 or 15% of America who are
00:38:02.840
everybody else, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, all making up that other 10 or 15%.
00:38:08.980
I don't think we're ever going to get to the place where Europe is today, where it's, you know, 80%
00:38:13.140
secular, 90% secular. I think we're stubbornly religious in this country, and we always will sort of
00:38:18.100
have this very strong core of religious belief, and probably 40% of Americans will be Christians or
00:38:22.940
whether it be very conservative Catholics or Christians or Jews or Muslims, whatever it is, they will
00:38:27.680
still exist even in 50 or 60 years. Well, going back to this idea that, you know, Gen Z, 40% of
00:38:33.680
them are saying they're nuns. You know, they don't identify with religion. Going back to this idea,
00:38:38.260
also, you said earlier that religious demography changes very slowly, and one reason it's changed
00:38:45.080
slowly, I think social scientists have noticed that, okay, young people will, you know, become less
00:38:49.320
religious in their early years after leaving home, but then they become more religious again when they
00:38:54.640
settle down and have their own families. The projections you just gave, it sounds like that's
00:38:59.340
not going to happen. Yeah. There used to be this model called the life cycle model, and it said that
00:39:04.280
when you were a kid, you know, under the age of 18, you were fairly religious because your parents took
00:39:08.320
you to church. You did youth group and church camp and all that kind of good stuff, but when you went
00:39:12.980
into, you know, your 20s, you went to college, you partied a little bit, you know, sowed your wild oats,
00:39:16.920
and you became less religious, but then when you moved into your late 20s, early 30s, you would find a
00:39:21.180
partner, you would get married, you would have kids, and then you would want to raise them in
00:39:25.020
the same sort of religious upbringing that you grew up with, so you'd go back to church and take
00:39:28.580
your kids back to church. Well, that held for the baby boomers. They actually did do that. They came
00:39:33.540
back to church when they were in their, you know, late 20s, early 30s through their 40s. That is not
00:39:37.940
happening at all amongst younger generations. You know, in the book, I show these graphs where it's
00:39:42.540
just up and up and up. There is no dip when people are supposed to have kids and come back to church.
00:39:47.380
They don't come back to church ever. And so, we're actually seeing this, interestingly enough,
00:39:52.020
in every birth cohort. So, people born in the 50s are doing the same thing. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,
00:39:57.180
are all doing the same thing. As they age, they're becoming less religious over time. So, there's
00:40:01.940
really, you know, pastors have sort of held out hope, oh, and the kids, you know, come back from
00:40:05.440
college and they get married, they're going to come back. I see zero evidence of that in the data.
00:40:09.720
They're just getting less and less religious as every year passes.
00:40:13.780
So, as a minister, you've seen the interest in religion firsthand in your small
00:40:17.360
congregation. As you said, it started out at 350 when you took it on. Now, you had 10 people
00:40:22.440
at church last Sunday. Besides shrinking church congregations, what are the larger social and
00:40:28.620
political implications of the increasing number of nuns for our society in which only, you know,
00:40:33.540
60% of people, some of the projections you gave, say they're religious?
00:40:38.500
Yeah. So, I think we have to think about the social safety net in this country. And, you know,
00:40:42.500
I think we forget about all the invisible things that churches do to make life less awful.
00:40:47.200
Even little things like, you know, the Southern Baptists have this disaster relief core. It's a
00:40:50.880
bunch of guys with chainsaws that come out of places that have tornadoes and hurricanes and
00:40:53.840
cut down trees for you and haul them off. Little things like that. Things, you know,
00:40:57.580
like my church, for instance, I packed 210 brown bags this morning to deliver to kids over the
00:41:01.420
weekend in our school district because our poverty rate's 85%. So, they have food to eat over the
00:41:05.680
weekends because a lot of those kids just frankly starve in our community. So, little churches do
00:41:09.960
little things like this all the time to make life less awful. So, where are we going to fill those
00:41:15.140
gaps in from? I would love if the atheists would come together and create social service organizations
00:41:20.740
that would help on a large scale. I think that would be the most amazing thing ever, but I don't
00:41:24.320
see a whole lot of evidence of that working right now. So, I don't know who's going to fill in the
00:41:28.880
social service gap, but also just from a political science perspective, church used to be this place
00:41:33.720
where you would sit with people who have a different political view than you do, but you still love
00:41:38.620
them and trust them and care for them as part of your family because they're part of your church
00:41:41.960
family. So, you know, in the 1970s and 80s, even in evangelical churches, the number of Republicans,
00:41:47.620
the number of Democrats was almost exactly equal, even in the 1980s. So, you would sit next to people
00:41:51.600
who had completely different views than you did and voted for completely different candidates,
00:41:54.320
but you still saw them as human beings. You didn't demonize them like we're seeing today.
00:41:58.740
And now, when you never come in contact with someone who votes differently than you do or thinks
00:42:02.740
differently than you do about political issues, you automatically think the worst of the other side.
00:42:06.860
You sort of other them. You create this sort of mirror image in your head of everything that's
00:42:11.560
good about you is bad about them and vice versa. So, what that does is creates these larger divides
00:42:16.680
in American society between Republicans and Democrats. Churches used to be what we call
00:42:21.040
bridge-building institutions. They built bridges from your world to their world. People from the
00:42:25.820
other side of the political aisle, there are not many bridge-building institutions in America anymore,
00:42:30.860
and I think we're all going to be worse for it, and polarization is only going to get worse for it,
00:42:34.620
and we really are going to feel more and more like we're living in two separate planets when
00:42:38.400
Democrats talk about something versus Republicans because we don't even talk to each other anymore.
00:42:43.320
Besides the sort of the dwindling social service component that churches offer and maybe the sort
00:42:48.640
of the buffer of polarization that churches once offered, I mean, another role that the church has
00:42:52.420
played in at least in American life, it was a socially organizing role. You'd go there and you'd make
00:42:57.500
friends. You'd find mates. You could improve yourself. There was, you know, this history throughout
00:43:02.440
American Christianity and even Judaism where you'd have these mutual improvement associations within
00:43:07.180
churches that was for free, was all volunteer, and it was sort of that Alexis de Tocqueville idea of
00:43:12.800
we're doing it on our own. We're going to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We don't need the
00:43:16.100
state or a large corporation to do this for us. If that's gone, how are people organizing themselves
00:43:21.820
in the same way that churches once organized people?
00:43:25.360
They aren't. I think that's the long and the short of it. I mean, I think there's some online
00:43:28.900
organization that goes on, but I think that the evidence is overwhelmingly in one direction,
00:43:33.100
which is that online interactions are not as good as in-person interactions, whether it comes to
00:43:37.660
friendship or community building or social trust or social capital. We're not seeing those being
00:43:42.340
replaced by anything else. And by the way, churches used to be really good about training people about
00:43:47.060
how to run meetings and how to fundraise and how to organize an event, let's say. They used to learn
00:43:51.300
those skills in church, then use them in the community to fundraise for a candidate or fundraise for
00:43:55.820
something good in the community to help someone who got cancer, let's say. So these civic skill
00:43:59.680
building exercises that churches used to teach are sort of falling by the wayside now and nothing
00:44:04.560
is stepping in to take over. I'll give you a good example. So there's this atheist movement for a
00:44:09.540
while called Sunday Assembly, where it would be a bunch of atheists coming together on Sunday and
00:44:13.960
basically having their form of church where they would sing pop songs and they would hear some sort
00:44:18.120
of inspirational message from a speaker. But most Sunday Assemblies failed. And the reason they fail
00:44:23.440
was because they felt bad asking for money because a lot of atheists are very skeptical of anyone
00:44:27.620
asking them for money, even if it seems quasi or pseudo-religious. So most of them closed down
00:44:32.360
because they couldn't pay the bills. So these other organizations are trying to do what church did,
00:44:37.320
but for whatever reason can't replicate the social aspect, the political aspect, the cultural aspect
00:44:43.100
that churches do. And I just don't see anything in American society that comes close to replicating
00:44:48.200
what happens in church every Sunday across America.
00:44:52.320
Yeah. I mean, I think something I've heard you bring up in another podcast is like this hypothetical,
00:44:57.300
like what will society look like when it's nuns for three generations back? So like grandparents were
00:45:02.300
nuns, their kids were nuns, and their kids, those kids were nuns. Like the kids of those kids were nuns.
00:45:08.700
It's going to, I think there's actually going to be a swing back the other direction.
00:45:12.440
And the reason I say that is because we know that young people always don't rebel against
00:45:16.480
whatever their parents are up to. And for generations, their parents have been up to
00:45:20.420
Christianity, largely in America. So they want to rebel against that and become a nun. But
00:45:24.000
isn't the most rebellious thing to be religious when your parents aren't in some weird way?
00:45:28.500
I do think we're going to see sort of a resurgence. I don't think it's going to like bring
00:45:32.160
Christianity back to where it was 30 years ago or whatever. I think that's overshooting the mark.
00:45:36.180
But I do think there's going to be the sort of counterculture thing that happens
00:45:38.620
when you're second or third generation nun, and you're going to look around and go,
00:45:42.780
you know what? I kind of like the idea of being religious. I kind of like the feeling of being
00:45:47.460
spiritual. I want to think the world is bigger than me, and I want to be part of something bigger
00:45:51.220
than myself. And I want to think there's something beyond all these things. I do think that some
00:45:55.260
people, for whatever reason, are wired towards spiritual things, and they're going to drift their
00:45:58.900
way back into church. Even though their parents never really got them in church in the first place,
00:46:02.880
they're going to seek it out on their own because they're going to want that spiritual void being
00:46:06.540
filled somehow. So I do think there's going to be sort of a backlash against the nuns. I don't know how
00:46:11.720
large it's going to be. I don't know when it's going to happen, but I do think it's a very real
00:46:15.480
possibility in the next 20 or 30 years we're going to see first-generation Christians again.
00:46:20.180
Well, that guy's kind of related to that Strauss-Howe generational theory. In America,
00:46:25.220
there's sort of this cycle of generations that happen. There's a lot of swinging from back and
00:46:28.920
forth, like one generation is rebelling against the other generation or the previous generation.
00:46:34.840
Yeah, we do see that. Religion waxes and wanes in different places. Over the last 200 or 300 years,
00:46:40.480
we don't see that in the last 50 years as much. We see only one direction. But there's plenty of
00:46:44.420
reasons to believe that Americans are not just going to become not spiritual at all in 50 years.
00:46:49.420
And for a lot of them, we're already seeing this, by the way. We're already seeing people fill up
00:46:53.120
their spiritual void by things like tarot cards and astrology and palm reading and crystals and
00:46:58.680
healing and all those kinds of things. So people are always going to be spiritual. How they express
00:47:03.780
that really depends on what these institutions do in response to the changing religious landscape in
00:47:08.880
America today. Yeah, I think that's going to be the... I think people will always be religious.
00:47:12.580
It's... Yeah, I think it's on an institutional level. Will it be like it was in the 1950s or 60s?
00:47:18.520
And that's... Yeah, that's the key though, is use the right word, institution. I think people
00:47:22.340
become anti-institutional in America. And I do wonder if that's going to come to an end though.
00:47:27.040
And we're going to start believing in institutions more and more because we realize without them,
00:47:31.340
we get the current political and religious landscape of America where it's a bunch of people who got
00:47:35.720
famous online for saying odd things and how bad that is for American democracy.
00:47:41.080
Institutions, I've changed my mind on a lot of this stuff. I think institutions are actually good.
00:47:45.060
I think gatekeepers are actually good. We got to keep the crazy down in this country because the
00:47:49.240
internet's basically giving the crazy people a megaphone. And we've seen what that's done to us
00:47:53.860
in the last 10 years. Yeah, that's one of the things, predictions that the Strauss-Howe
00:47:58.300
generational theory makes is that we're due to like a resurgence in institution building,
00:48:02.860
supposedly. We'll see if it shakes out. As I say about... You know about prophets. You've studied
00:48:07.400
like most prophets get killed. So... I do not see myself as a prophet, but I will say I think
00:48:13.140
that institutions are going to make a comeback because to go back to the Episcopal church,
00:48:16.420
they have no people. They have one point... They take in $1.5 billion a year and their endowment's
00:48:21.200
like around $10 billion. They got money. They just need the people to show up. And a resurgent
00:48:25.460
group of young people wanted to become Episcopalian. I'm sure they would roll out the red carpet
00:48:28.360
for them. So there's a possibility there. It's just how do we get there? I have no idea.
00:48:33.580
Well, Ryan, this has been an interesting conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:48:35.860
more about the book and your work? You can go to... I'm big on Twitter. I post
00:48:39.700
graphs every day at Ryan Burge, R-Y-A-N-B-U-R-G-E. RyanBurge.net is my website. My first book,
00:48:45.940
The Nuns, Where They Came From, Who They Are, Where They're Going is on Amazon.com right now. And I
00:48:49.500
have a new book coming out next March, March of 2022. It is called 20 Myths About Religion and Politics
00:48:55.880
in America. And you can pre-order on Amazon right now.
00:48:58.980
All right. Well, Ryan Burge, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:49:02.680
My guest today was Ryan Burge. He's the author of the book, The Nuns, Where They Came From,
00:49:06.100
Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:49:09.560
You can check out our show notes at awm.is slash nuns, where you can find links to resources.
00:49:21.520
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check our website at
00:49:25.260
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