That simply wasn’t the case not too terribly long ago. As I’ve become accustomed to saying when talking about the book — “It’s not always been this way.” For younger adults, they just don’t know a religious world that is not dominated by the Religious Right. However, if you take a peek at the partisan composition of white Christians as far back as we can (1972), you see a much more complete portrait.

In 1972, a clear majority of white Christians (regardless of their denominational affiliation) were Democrats. That, by itself, is downright shocking to many audiences when I show a version of this graph. It is important to note here that these weren’t the types of Democrats that we know in modern political discourse. These were Southern Democrats (often called Dixiecrats) who felt a sense of alliance to the party because of FDR’s New Deal policies but held incredibly regressive views on racial issues. However, I do want to point out that by 1980, the share of white Christians who were Democrats had dropped below 50%.

By the late 1980s, white Christianity was essentially perfectly politically divided between Democrats and Republicans, but that didn’t last very long. As we moved into the 2000s, the Republican ascendance was already visible — hovering around 50%. There was a bit of a lull in the trend lines through 2010 or so, but from that point forward, the two trajectories headed in opposite directions. In the last few years, white Christians have become more politically unified around the GOP.

From a social science standpoint, there are only two ways for this to really happen. One is called generational replacement. Remember those Dixiecrats I mentioned above? Well, if they were dying off in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s and their children were coming into adulthood as more Republican-leaning, that would easily explain the overall shift. But there’s another possibility — white Christians simply began to change their minds about politics as each year passed. Those Dixiecrats realized that they could no longer support the Democratic Party, were won over by politicians like Ronald Reagan, and then started voting for the GOP.

Teasing that apart is going to be the point of this post: was it generational replacement that made white Christianity so Republican? Or was it just millions of Protestants and Catholics changing their minds?

One easy way to explore those possibilities is to do a cohort analysis of white Christians over time. So, let’s test that out. I am replicating the prior graph but this time breaking it down into the four most recent generations (I am leaving out Gen Z here because there just aren’t enough survey years for them).

This graph provides clear and compelling evidence to bolster the second theory under consideration: the reason for the white Christian shift toward the Republican Party is that a whole bunch of people just happened to change their minds at nearly the same time. How do we know that? Well, it’s readily apparent by just taking a look at the graphs for the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers in the top row. Their trend lines look almost exactly like what we saw in the first graph. Democrats were ascendant in the 1970s, but by the late 1980s the lines had begun to cross. For the next couple of decades, the Republican line held pretty steady around 50%, but then it began to rise again after 2010. That’s essentially a carbon copy of what we saw in the full sample with every age group included.

For Gen X and Millennials, we obviously can’t trace their timeline as far back as the older generations. There is no clear “crossover” moment that we can really discern, although you can kind of see it when looking at the mid-1980s for Gen X. However, both generations of white Christians have been plurality (if not majority) Republicans for the last 35 years. It feels like they came of age when the connection between white Christianity and the GOP was already well established, and they just fell in line.

That’s an important point to note, by the way, and something I want to visualize in a simpler way. If you look at the “entry point” for the younger generations of white Christians, you see that they come into adulthood with a much more Republican-leaning outlook than their parents or grandparents.

When Gen X entered the GSS sample in large enough numbers (around 1988), they were already 46% Republican. In 1972, when we have the first year of data on Boomers, they were only 31% Republican. Millennials were actually slightly less Republican when they started showing up in the data with a decent sample in 2006 — about 43% of them identified as Republican.

However, take a look at white Christians who are members of Generation Z. Although the oldest ones were born around 1996, we can’t really compile a decent sample until 2022 or so. But when they start showing up in the data, 58% of them are Republican. That’s essentially the same level of GOP allegiance that Baby Boomers have now — and they are all in their retirement years. The idea that younger white Christians are more politically diverse is simply not empirically supported.

But I can actually examine all of this with a much larger sample through a much shorter timeline using the Cooperative Election Study. It was first conducted in 2008, and the sample sizes are often twenty times the size of the General Social Survey. So instead of looking at generations (which often span 15 years), I can zoom in on five-year birth cohorts. I restricted my sample to two groups — white Christians and white non-religious folks — and then tracked the share who identified as Republican over time.

What we are really looking for here is the trajectory of the lines — we want to be able to discern if there are “in-cohort” changes in political partisanship. You can most definitely see that across the top row of graphs when it comes to white Christians. Their movement toward the GOP is sort of stunning to consider given that we are only looking at a timeline that goes back sixteen years. Among folks born in the early 1940s, a bare majority of white Christians were Republican in 2008. By 2024, that figure had risen to about 70%. You can see that the inflection point for many in this cohort is right around the time Donald Trump was first elected to the White House.

If you take a look at the second row of graphs, you can also see that 2015 or 2016 becomes a clear demarcation point. In the last ten years, there’s evidence that white Christians who are members of Gen X have moved toward the GOP as well. However, it’s not nearly as dramatic as the top row.

The bottom row is not so simple to describe with a broad brush. It does look like older Millennial white Christians have drifted to the right, but that’s not really replicated among younger generations. In fact, among white Christians born in the 1990s, they have actually moved away from the Republican Party in the last ten years.

Let me simplify this by just showing you the two endpoints for this time series: 2008 vs 2024.

You can see those huge Republican spikes among older white Christians in this data. For the early 1940s cohort, it rises seventeen points. But the jump across the top row is all double digits, to be fair. In fact, the GOP gained at least ten percentage points among white Christians in every birth cohort from 1940 all the way through 1969 — so that’s a lot of white Christians in Gen X who have shifted significantly to the right since 2008.

However, you also see shifts that are nearly that large among younger white Christians, too. It was eight points among those born in the early 1970s and nine points among those born between 1975 and 1979. If you exclude the very youngest cohort, the white Christian vote has shifted toward the GOP by no less than seven points among any age group.

I have intentionally left out a really interesting finding up to this point, though — one you may have picked up on if you carefully looked at the other part of this analysis: folks who claim no religious affiliation. Yes, white Christians have shifted to the right over time. But guess what? So have some white non-religious folks.

In fact, there is not a single birth cohort in this entire analysis where the nones have not become more Republican between 2008 and 2024. The size of the movement is smaller than it is among Christians, but it’s still there. In many of these cohorts, white non-religious folks are 4–8 percentage points more likely to identify as Republican today compared with 2008.

In other words, white people — regardless of religion — have become more Republican since 2008.

I do feel like I need to zoom in on that just a little bit, though. It’s really one specific type of none that has warmed up to the GOP: “nothing in particulars.”

Atheists are really strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. If you’ve hung around this newsletter for a while, you know that to be the case. Agnostics are slightly less Democratic-leaning, but it’s still about 70% of them in 2024. But look at those “nothing in particulars” — that’s what is moving the aggregate number in the prior graph. In 2008, about half of them identified as Democrats. By 2024, that had dropped to just about 40%. Meanwhile, the GOP share rose from 25% to 35% during this same period.

Why is this group so consequential? Because they are enormous in number. Nearly one in five Americans describes their religion as “nothing in particular.” That ten-point movement could yield more votes for the GOP than anything happening among atheists and agnostics — simply because there just aren’t that many atheists and agnostics.

So, what have we learned here?

1. The white Christian shift toward the GOP is more about people changing their minds than generational replacement. That conclusion is exceedingly clear from this analysis.

2. However, there is a possibility I didn’t even discuss: one reason white Christianity has become so conservative is that a lot of white moderates and liberals have started identifying as non-religious over the last few decades. I will explore that in a future post.

3. The GOP gains have not been limited to Christians, though. There’s good evidence here that white non-religious folks have also shifted toward Republicans over the last fifteen years or so.

This is a story not just about religion — it’s also deeply intertwined with race. The Republican Party’s grip on white America is strengthening, regardless of whether they go to church or not.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

But in the next 15-20 years, that changes. As more and more Boomers receive their heavenly reward, the pews of American churches are going to thin out with startling speed. I’m not sure any denomination is truly prepared for how fast that’s going to happen.

As you might expect, I got a lot of feedback on that post. Most of it was kind. But one objection kept coming up: Isn’t this just normal generational replacement? Churches have weathered this before. My answer is the subject of this entire post, but let me state it plainly at the top: what American religion will experience in the next two decades is something it has never seen before.

There Has Never Been a Generation Like the Boomers

Start here: numerically speaking, the Baby Boomers are without precedent. If you don’t believe me, read this piece by Derek Thompson and look at the first graph. The U.S. fertility rate exploded between the mid-1930s and early 1960s in a way we will never see again. You can see the downstream effects of that in the General Social Survey. All I did was calculate the generational composition of each GSS wave going back to 1972.

Focus on the green line — that’s the Boomers. In the early waves of the GSS, they were less than a quarter of the sample, with the Silent Generation accounting for a third and nearly half the respondents born before 1925. But watch that green line climb. By the late 1980s, Baby Boomers made up nearly 45% of the GSS sample. Pause on that for a second: one 18-year birth window representing nearly half the adult population of the United States.

The pattern is consistent across generations — a quick rise, a peak, then a slow decline. But the peak matters enormously. Boomers crested at 45%. Gen X never broke 33%. Millennials never broke 30%. There were simply millions more Baby Boomers than any generation before or after them.

Between 1980 and roughly 2022, Boomers were the largest generation in the GSS. They’ve only recently been eclipsed by Millennials.

Who’s Actually in the Pews?

So what about the people who actually show up to church? You probably already know the answer.

Those green bars just keep showing up. Baby Boomers have dominated churchgoing in this country for the vast majority of the last fifty years. That might seem counterintuitive — didn’t a lot of Boomers walk away from faith when they were young? Shouldn’t they be out driving RVs or sipping frozen drinks on a beach somewhere? The data says otherwise, I will get to that in a minute.

To make that even clearer, I built a bump chart. For each year of the GSS, I ranked the generations by their share of weekly attenders.

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What I find intriguing about the debate on immigration is that there are Republicans who make the argument that allowing a modest amount of new people to enter the United States would be a good thing. This is certainly the position of the Cato Institute, which argues that it will increasingly become the only way to fund the social safety net that is ballooning in the United States. Particularly as tens of millions of Baby Boomers will swell the membership rolls of Social Security and Medicare in the decades to come. With decreased fertility rates among native-born Americans, the only way to inject more workers into the economy is to import them from somewhere else.

There’s another argument for increased immigration that I see every once in a while on my social media feed, though. It’s that immigrants tend to be more religious than people whose family has been in the United States for generations. So, if we bring in a lot of new immigrants, that will move the needle on overall religiosity in this country and stem the tide of secularism that has been increasing since the late 1990s.

But is that actually the case, though? I mean the entire presupposition of that argument is that immigrants to the United States are significantly more religious than folks who already live here. I can test that.

The Cooperative Election Study has been asking a question about immigration status of respondents since 2010. Given the enormous size of the survey, I can actually get pretty fine grained with my analysis here. The question is simply: Which of these statements best describes you?

1. I am an immigrant to the USA and a naturalized citizen

2. I am an immigrant to the USA but not a citizen

3. I was born in the USA but at least one of my parents is an immigrant

4. My parents and I were born in the USA but at least one of my grandparents was an immigrant

5. My parents, grandparents and I were all born in the USA

I am going to collapse the first two response options for simplicity’s sake.

So, are immigrants to the United States more religious than people who have been here for multiple generations? Not really. Among folks who said that they came to the United States themselves, 51% identify as Protestant or Catholic and 35% say that they have no religious affiliation. The remaining 13% are distributed across a whole bunch of smaller religious groups: Jews, Hindus, Muslims, etc. The religious composition of children of immigrants looks almost exactly the same as people who immigrated themselves.

You do see, though, that things begin to shift quite a bit more in the second generation of immigrants. The share who are Christians jumps up to 59% and the non-religious are a bit lower at 33%. But then when we look at folks in the survey who can trace their lineage back on American shores for at least three generations, there’s a whole lot more movement. Among this group, 45% are Protestants - that’s 23 points higher than immigrants. And this “third generation” subgroup is 16 points less likely to be Catholic. But here’s what is ironic about all that: the share who are non-religious is 38%. Among immigrants, it was 35%.

The idea that immigrants are just way more religious than folks who can trace their American ancestry back a hundred years is empirically false. At the highest level, the differences just aren’t that large.

But what happens if I do the same bit of analysis but break it down by the race of the respondent?

There’s a lot going on here, and yet not that much — all at the same time. For instance, the top set of graphs are white respondents. Among immigrants, the Catholic share is low (18%). Among third generation respondents, it’s even lower - 14%. But then in the middle two categories, about a third are Catholic. The share of white immigrants who are nones is 41%. The share of white folks who have been here for generations who are nones is 37%. So, again, bringing in people from majority white countries is not going to make America more religious.

The rest of the racial groups have a few data nuggets here and there. For instance, among Black immigrants, just 26% are non-religious. For African-Americans who can trace their lineage back for multiple generations in the United States, it’s 36% nones. But for Hispanics, there’s basically no change in the nones at all across each type of immigrant. The only thing that jumps out for me is that Hispanics who have multiple generations in the United States are about ten points more likely to be Protestants and ten points less likely to be Catholics.

Remember, though, that the Cooperative Election Study has been asking this question about immigration status for decades. So I can use this data to figure out if immigrants from 2010 looked a lot different in terms of religious composition compared to immigrants from 2024.

There are a couple really subtle patterns here that are worth some study. For instance, the Protestant share of immigrants has slowly been eroding over time. It was 28-29% back in the early 2010s. Today, it’s about five points lower than that. At the same time, the Catholic share has gone down too. But the drop here is more modest - about three percentage points when comparing 2010 to 2024.

The one trend that is completely unmistakable is that immigrants to the United States are noticeably more likely to be non-religious now than immigrants in 2010. In 2010, just 5% of immigrants to the United States said that they were atheist or agnostic and another 19% said that their religion was “nothing in particular.” In 2024, the share of atheist/agnostic immigrants soared to 12% and the nothing in particular portion was up 3 points as well. In total the numbers have risen a full ten percentage points in the last 14 years of data. Again, the idea that immigrants to the United States are particularly religious is just not supported by the data.

I did want to check these numbers against some kind of “reference case”, though. I needed to know if immigrants were becoming secular at a rate that was faster than folks who had been in the United States for generations.

I like this graph because it generates a clear contrast between the two groups. Immigrants are just not very Protestant. In 2012, only 28% of folks who came to the United States said that they were Protestant. For those who had been in the United States for generations, it was 52%. Both groups are less likely to be Protestant now, but the overall gap has narrowed to about 20 points in the 2024 data. The Catholic share among immigrants is noticeably higher than folks who have been here for generations - 31% vs 14% back in 2012. Neither number has moved that much in the last decade.

I don’t think that anyone is surprised to see that immigrants are much more likely to come from the “world religions” category. This includes faith groups like Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. As I wrote in the American Religious Landscape, these are largely “immigrant religions” in the United States. There just aren’t that many third generation American Muslims. But I think people would be surprised to see that only 14% of immigrants to the United States come from one of these religious groups. That’s lower than Catholics and Protestants.

But the lines for both types of nones are almost the same as each other. For both groups, the share who are non-religious has risen over time and at nearly the same rate. Among immigrants, 12% identify as atheist/agnostic. It’s 14% for the “third generation or more” group. The gap for the nothing in particular category is three percentage points in 2024, as well. Taken together, 39% of folks whose families have been in this country for decades are non-religious. It was 34% of those who immigrated themselves.

Just because I’m sure people are going to ask - here’s religious attendance in those two groups in 2010 and 2024.

There are some small differences in attendance patterns to be seen. For instance, in 2010, 41% of immigrants said that they attended a house of worship less than once a year. It was 48% of the “third generation” crowd. At the same time, though, weekly attendance rates were almost identical: 29% vs 28%. So those immigrants were more likely to go a couple of times a year, but the gap isn’t huge.

In the most recent data, the same general sense emerges. Immigrants are less likely to be in the never/seldom categories. It was 50% of them in 2024 compared to 55% among the “third generation or more” crowd. However, weekly attendance rates were a statistical dead heat: 25% vs 26%. I just can’t walk away from this and think that immigrants are particularly devout. They may be slightly more religious than the rest of America, but not by a huge amount.

To pull this all together into a single bit of analysis, I just calculated one statistic using two samples. The metric I focused on was the percentage of people who identified as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. I calculated it using the full sample, then I did the same thing but only kept respondents who indicated that their families had been in the United States for at least three generations.

And guess what I found? The differences are just not substantively significant in any meaningful way. In every single year of the survey going back to 2012, the difference is just a single percentage point. In 2012, the full sample was 27% non-religious. If I just looked at people who had been here for a very long time, it was 28%. In 2024, the two numbers were 35% and 34%. Notice how both lines rise and fall in near parallel? That’s even after tens of millions of immigrants have landed on American shores in the last 12 years.

So, why won’t immigrants move the needle in any real way on American religiosity? Two reasons, really. One is that they just aren’t that much more religious than native born Americans. We’ve seen that across all kinds of metrics. The other reason is that there just aren’t enough immigrants to really move the aggregate number that much at all. Yeah, immigrants are about five points less likely to be nones compared to those who have been in the United States for generations. But guess what? Those first and second generation immigrants have nearly the same religious composition as the folks who have been here for three generations or longer.

In other words, the data says that immigrants are assimilating in a very important way - they are leaving religion behind. Just like Americans who have been here for generations are doing.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

Several years ago, Canada began a program called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID). It’s a government initiative that’s beginning to reshape how Canadians are facing end-of-life situations. An article published in The Atlantic in August of 2025 titled Canada Is Killing Itself reports 5% of all the deaths in 2024 that happened in the country were through physician assisted suicide.

This is a topic that will garner increasing attention in the United States as medical aid in dying is already legally permissible in 13 states and Washington DC. And the March/April 2026 issue of Christianity Today includes a piece by Kristy Etheridge titled, “Death is Not a Right.” Given this interest, I wanted to see if I could provide some empirical background on how views of suicide have changed over time, particularly across the religious landscape in the US.

The General Social Survey has been asking a four question battery about suicide (with various justifications) for decades now. Luckily, the Association of Religion Data Archives makes it easy to search the codebook for the GSS and pull out the relevant questions. They all start with the same preamble - Do you think a person has the right to end his or her own life if this person…

There are four scenarios:
1. The person has an incurable disease

2. The person has gone bankrupt

3. The person has dishonored their family

4. The person is tired of living

Here’s the share of the entire sample who supported a person’s right to end their life given the above circumstances.

It is clear that the American public has been much more open to the idea of suicide in the case of incurable disease compared to the other three situations. In 1977, 37% of the sample supported someone ending their own life if they had a disease that couldn’t be cured. That rose quickly through the next 15 years, crossing the majority support threshold by the late 1980s and rising to 60% in favor by the mid-1990s. It stayed there for a while but then rose again after 2010 and it’s now at an all time high: 69% in favor.

The other three scenarios have never garnered anywhere near the same levels of support in the general public. The share who favors a right to suicide for people who go bankrupt or dishonor their family has never been robust: 6-7% back in the 1970s and creeping up very slowly over time to where it now stands, around 15%.

The question about suicide when a person “is tired of living and ready to die” gets a bit more support, though. It was 12% back in 1977 and that share has doubled in the last couple of decades. Now, a quarter of Americans favor an individual ending their own life if they just don’t want to live anymore.

As I was poking around this data, I had to wonder: is there some kind of combination between these four scenarios that is the most popular? Or are people pretty absolutist about this: they either favor suicide in all cases or reject it in all cases?

The most popular option was an individual saying that they would favor suicide in the case of incurable disease but in no other circumstances. That position comprised 42% of the sample. In second place, with 31% of the sample were folks who simply said “no” to each of the four circumstances. They were not in favor of suicide no matter the situation. That’s much higher than the portion of the sample who took a more libertarian view and would allow someone to end their life in all four scenarios previously described (14%).

The impression that I get is that most Americans do not take a “black and white” view on suicide. Only 45% of all adults said “none of the above” or “all of the above.” Instead, the clear impression that emerges for me is that there’s a lot of openness to the idea of suicide when someone has a terrible illness. So, this does feel like situational ethics.

Turning to religion, the dominant view in Christian circles is that suicide is an affront to God’s gift of life and is strongly discouraged. Both Augustine and Aquinas condemned suicide in the strongest possible terms. Protestants tend to not see suicide as an “unforgivable sin” but still a tragedy in which humans try to usurp God’s ownership of life. Both the Quran and Hadith have explicit prohibitions for suicide in the Islamic faith. I broke the sample down into larger religious families and then tracked their answer to suicide in the case of incurable disease and for people who are just tired of living.

The general sense I get is that views of suicide have become noticeably more permissive over time and that’s true across basically every religious group. However, the overall level of support between groups can vary quite a bit. For instance, only 41% of Black Protestants support suicide when there’s an incurable disease. That figure for evangelicals is only slightly higher at 46%. Those two figures stand in stark contrast to mainliners at 78% and Catholics at 70%. This is a divide I see time and time again when I look at all kinds of questions: Black Protestants and evangelicals are very similar while mainline Protestants and Catholics tend to have similar views.

The non-religious are easily the most supportive of suicide in both these cases. In the “incurable disease” scenario, it’s overwhelmingly in favor: 86%. Even in the situation where the person just doesn’t want to live anymore, nearly half of the non-religious would allow suicide in that case: 44%. It’s important to note that this figure is basically twice as large as any other group in the prior analysis. The nones certainly stand alone on these questions.

I again looked at all the combinations that can emerge when looking over these four questions about suicide, but now across the six religious traditions from the previous graph.

Note, again, how Black Protestants and evangelicals are pretty similar in their responses. A majority say that they do not favor suicide in any of the four scenarios. Then another quarter say that the only permissible situation is when an individual has an incurable disease. It’s amazing how these two graphs look almost exactly the same in this analysis.

Meanwhile, 60% of mainline Protestants said that they would permit a person suffering from an incurable disease to end their own life while only 22% were opposed to suicide in all four scenarios. That’s a bit different from the Catholic analysis. In the case of American Catholics, a slim majority (52%) supported suicide only in the situation in which an individual has an incurable disease. However, a third rejected suicide in all four cases. That was 12 points higher than mainliners.

The non-religious are by far the group that was the most likely to say “yes” to all four questions. A quarter of them would permit suicide in all cases. That was 15 points higher than any other group in the sample. In contrast, only 14% of the nones rejected suicide in each of the scenarios. That’s 20 points lower than any other group.

I did wonder, though, if there are differences in responses if we divide the sample by level of church attendance.

The evidence here is clear and convincing: Christians who go to church weekly or more are more likely to oppose suicide in the case of incurable disease compared to those who attend less often. The gaps are sizable, too. Among weekly attending evangelicals, support was just 36%. For those who attend with less regularity it was 23 points higher. The gap for mainline Protestants was even larger across these two attendance categories: it was 18 points back in 1977. In 2024, it had swelled to 24 points. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t put too much stock in that result for Black Protestants - there just aren’t enough in the sample to draw meaningful conclusions.

However, I do want to highlight the bottom right graph that visualizes the Catholic response to the question about suicide in the case of incurable disease. In 1977, 20% of regular Mass attending Catholics favored suicide. It was 44% of those who didn’t go to Mass with that same regularity. However, the 2024 figures are much higher. Among weekly attenders, support had risen to 50% while it was 77% among Catholics who didn’t go to Mass every week.

Finally, how might Christian groups think about assisted suicide compared to other “life” issues? To probe that a bit further I added two questions to the mix. One asked folks if they supported abortion if the woman wants one for any reason. The other asked, “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”

I love this graph because none of these three groups looked the same. (I excluded Black Protestants because of sample size issues.) For instance, the most popular combination for evangelicals was support for the death penalty but rejection of abortion and assisted suicide. This cluster represented 31% of evangelicals. The next popular response was support for both the death penalty and the right of an individual to take their own life if they had an incurable disease.

For mainline Protestants, the most popular option (30%) was support for assisted suicide, the death penalty, and access to an abortion. A slightly smaller share (25%) favored the death penalty and assisted suicide but not access to an abortion. What really jumps out to me for the mainliners, though, is that 17% of them supported abortion and assisted suicide but not the death penalty. That was easily the highest of any group.

What about Catholics? Well, the Catholic Church teaches that life should be protected in every possible way. Thus the official position would be opposition to all three. However, only 14% of Catholics are in agreement with the Church on these topics. Nearly double that share (27%) hold positions on assisted suicide, abortion access, and the death penalty that all stand in direct opposition to their church’s teachings.

So, what to make of all of this? It appears that the American public has shifted in the direction toward permissiveness toward suicide if someone is struggling with an incurable disease. That has clear majority support now. However, beyond that, there’s quite a bit more resistance to other possible scenarios. It seems likely that if a referendum on the topic was placed on the ballot in every state, but limited assisted suicide to those facing an incurable disease, it could pass in almost all of them. It would face some opposition in regions of the country with high concentrations of evangelicals, but it might still garner majority support.

This seems like a topic in which religious arguments are not carrying the day. Instead, views have consistently liberalized over time. The more I look at data on issues like this the more I realize that the average American’s view is quite libertine: let people make up their own minds about how they want their lives to end.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

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In the midst of that post, I also opined a bit about a question regarding religious attendance and what it’s actually measuring. Here’s my bloviating:

But that’s not how this question works. Instead, people read it and ask themselves, “How do I see myself in relation to this?” Choosing something like “seldom” doesn’t mean the person attends once every three years. What it actually signals is this: I do go to a worship service sometimes—more than “never.” “Never” is the clear line in the sand: I despise religion, and I never take part in it. “Seldom,” on the other hand, means, “I really don’t go much, but I might under the right circumstances.” That’s a subtle but important difference.

In the comments, David Durant took exception to my characterization of never attenders as being much more anti-religion than those who report seldom attending. And that’s worth exploring, right? Do seldom attenders have a different posture toward organized religion than those who choose “never”?

Before I get to that question, though, I need to start with a much more basic one: what share of Americans report that they seldom attend religious services?

According to the Cooperative Election Study, this group made up about a quarter of the population back when Barack Obama took up residence in the Oval Office. In fact, it stayed at 24% or higher through 2012. After that, the figure began to slowly decline over time. And by slowly, I mean slowly. It was 23% through 2016, and then it dipped to 22% all the way through 2023.

In the 2024 results, 21% of respondents answered the religious attendance question by saying “seldom.” Functionally, that means they go often enough to not be never attenders, but they also aren’t attending on a yearly basis. These aren’t Easter-and-Christmas folks—this is one click below that. They might go to a Christmas Eve service once every two or three years.

What about the General Social Survey? One complication is that it offers eight response options, while the CES only provides six. That means I had to fiddle with the categories a bit. Still, I think I found a pretty direct corollary in the GSS data: people who attend “less than once a year” or “about once or twice a year.” I know the wording doesn’t line up perfectly (this is a huge problem when comparing different survey instruments), but the percentages are in the same ballpark.

You can see that just over 20% of the sample falls into this “more than never but less than three times a year” crowd. And that figure stayed unbelievably stable for a very long period of time. It hovered around the 21–22% range from the mid-1970s all the way through the early 2010s. It’s remarkable to me that this number barely budged over a four-decade window, even as the overall religious composition of the United States shifted so dramatically.

Now, there is a bit of a wiggle in the 2021, 2022, and 2024 results. The “seldom” category jumped to an all-time high of 26% in 2021, but that’s almost certainly about the weirdness of COVID and the fact that the GSS had to change its methodology. You can see that in the last two surveys, the ‘seldom’ share has started to drift back toward its historic baseline. Still, both the CES and the GSS are in the same general vicinity here: a bit more than 20% of Americans land in this ‘seldom’ category of attendance.

But I had to check one more thing: how never attenders compare to seldom attenders in both surveys. If the ‘seldom’ share has been this stable for so long, then what’s going on with the percentage of people who report never attending religious services?

Here’s the big upshot for me: the “never” attenders have not been stable over time. They’ve risen dramatically in both surveys. In 1972, just 12% of the sample said they never attended religious services. That was about ten points lower than the share of seldom attenders. By 2004, though, those percentages were exactly the same—20%. Over the last 20 years, the never-attending share has continued to climb, and now it exceeds the seldom attenders by about ten points.

You see this same basic pattern in the Cooperative Election Study. The lines cross a bit later—around 2012—but the trajectory is clear: the ‘never’ line moves steadily up and to the right, while the ‘seldom’ line declines just slightly. In the CES, the never-attending share now sits at 34%, about two points lower than what the General Social Survey reports.

Just sit with that result for a second. Never attenders have exploded in size, while seldom attenders have basically held steady. Why would that be? One possible explanation is that Americans are simply sliding down the attendance scale. Weekly becomes monthly, monthly becomes yearly, yearly becomes seldom, and seldom becomes never.

But you can’t go lower than ‘never.’ So that bucket just keeps filling up, while the ‘seldom’ bucket is continually replenished by people moving down from higher attendance levels. Or it could be that a lot of Gen Z is skipping the whole downward slide altogether and speed-running straight to the bottom. That would be the case if weekly-attending Boomers are dying off and being replaced by never-attending Gen Z.

I’m going to explore that question another time.

So, who is most likely to be a seldom attender? You might reasonably guess that it’s mostly non-religious people. But that answer isn’t quite right.

For instance, the group most likely to report that they ‘seldom’ attend religious services isn’t any type of none. Instead, it’s groups like Buddhists, the unclassified, Jews, and mainline Protestants. Among the most devout groups—Latter-day Saints and Muslims—the share who say they seldom attend is pretty marginal, usually under 10%.

For the nones, the reality is that “I never attend religious services” is by far the most popular response. Among atheists, 90% choose this option, and 73% of agnostics fall into the same category. There just aren’t many respondents in these groups who have a spouse they go to church with once a year.

For those who say they are “nothing in particular,” the share of never attenders is 60%. That’s 13 points lower than agnostics and 30 points lower than atheists. Still, in total, about 84% of nothing-in-particulars are attending less than once a year, compared to 97% of atheists and 93% of agnostics.

Now we can circle back to the core question. Are seldom attenders a different group than atheists? More specifically, does attending just a little bit make a non-religious person more religiously engaged—or at least more open to religion—compared to nones who never attend?

Let me start by showing you a question about prayer frequency among the non-religious. In the next couple of questions, I’m just comparing never attenders to seldom attenders.

On the question of prayer frequency, I think it’s pretty clear that seldom attenders are significantly more religious than never attenders. Among atheists, agnostics, and nothing-in-particulars who report that they never attend religious services, 68% also say that they never pray. Among those who seldom attend, the share who never pray drops to just 21%. Put differently, 85% of never-attending nones pray less than once a month, compared to only 59% of those in the ‘seldom’ category.

You can also see a big gap at the top end of the scale. Among non-religious people who never attend a house of worship, just 7% say they pray daily. Among seldom attenders, that figure is nearly three times as high—20%. The evidence here is pretty clear: when a non-religious person goes to church even a little bit, they are much more likely to pray.

What about religious importance? I used the same setup here as well—restricting the sample to non-religious respondents who report their attendance as either seldom or never.

Among never attenders, nearly three-quarters say that religion is not at all important in their lives. For seldom attenders, only 29% choose that same option. In contrast, 36% of seldom attenders say that religion is somewhat or very important to them. Among the never-attending subgroup, just 9% fall into those top two categories.

Put simply, seldom attenders aren’t just slightly more religious than never attenders—the gap is substantial on both prayer frequency and religious importance. It would be hyperbolic to say that seldom-attending nones are warm to religion, but they certainly aren’t ice-cold toward religious practices or the idea that religion plays a meaningful role in their lives.

I can test this further using another set of questions from our Making Meaning survey. We asked a battery of statements designed to capture how non-religious Americans think about religion in public life. As before, I split the sample into seldom attenders and never attenders.

You can see across all three statements that seldom attenders are much less hostile toward religion than non-religious people who never attend religious services. Among seldom attenders, only 16% agreed that “religion has no place in the modern world,” compared to 30% of never attenders. The gap on the statement “religion is a form of child abuse” was 11 percentage points, and it was also 11 points on “religion needs to be eradicated.”

In each case, a majority of seldom-attending nones disagreed with the statement. The share who disagreed ranged from 51% to 54%. Among never attenders, disagreement was 12–14 points lower. The conclusion is pretty straightforward: seldom attenders express noticeably less opposition to religion than never attenders.

Now, I should say that I don’t actually think a huge swath of never attenders “hate religion,” as I wrote earlier. I got out over my skis a bit on that one. That’s the Baptist pastor in me—hyperbole is apparently baked into my DNA. I’m working on it.

Still, I think I’ve made a strong case that among non-religious Americans, going to a house of worship even occasionally signals something more. There’s clearly greater openness to religion, along with more hesitation to dismiss its value in American life altogether, compared to never attenders.

So even that atheist who goes to Easter Mass with their spouse is a categorically different person than one who never sets foot in a house of worship for any reason.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

Of course, I can’t offer a full history of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but here’s a really brief introduction. The Jehovah’s Witnesses trace their background to the Bible Student movement that emerged in the late 19th century, closely associated with the teaching and publishing work of Charles Taze Russell.

One of the most important figures in the early institutional development of the movement was Joseph F. Rutherford, who succeeded Russell as president of the Watch Tower Society and moved aggressively to centralize leadership, standardize doctrine, and expand the organization’s evangelistic efforts. One key aspect of Jehovah’s Witness theology is their rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, a belief that places them outside the boundaries of orthodox Protestant and Catholic Christianity.

Sociologically, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are an interesting group because they engage in aggressive “boundary maintenance” with the rest of the world. JWs are incredibly engaged with congregational life and the denomination has a strict code of conduct that can often lead to disfellowshipping. They are supposed to be politically neutral, in fact they are not supposed to salute a national flag or engage in military service. Education is also not a primary emphasis of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

How many Jehovah’s Witnesses are there in the United States? Well, it’s a group that is pretty hard to estimate from pure survey data. The Cooperative Election Study is one of the few datasets that has a large enough sample size to capture them in any meaningful numbers.

As you can see, even with a survey sample that often exceeds 50,000 respondents, they are still just a very small sliver of the United States population. In some years, they make up about .5% of the entire dataset. The numbers do vary a bit when tracing the estimates from year to year, but that’s to be expected when it comes to a group that small. Because of that, it would be unwise to make some type of claim about their growth or decline from survey analysis.

What I think we can say is that in the last few years of the CES, the share of the sample that identified as Jehovah’s Witnesses has been around .8% of the population. If you extrapolate that out to the entire American population you get about 2.75M Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now that’s just one angle on this. Let me pull in another dataset to cross validate that.

The 2020 Religion Census is a different approach. The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies just contacts a whole bunch of denominations and religious groups and asks them to pass along their statistics related to congregations and membership. The Jehovah’s Witnesses just so happen to be in the database of the Religion Census.

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For those of you who don’t know Suze Orman, she basically did what Dave Ramsey does now—yell at people who call into the show and need advice on their financial situation. A popular segment was “Can I Afford It?“ Spoiler alert: the answer was almost always a resounding no. But I’ve always been deeply interested in how people spend their money because it’s not a situation where people can just “opt out” of the conversation. We all have to make money; we all have bills to pay. It’s just fascinating to me on all kinds of levels because it seems that no two people have the same approach to money.

There’s this question battery in the Cooperative Election Study that asks about the respondent’s financial situation in an intriguing way: Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current financial situation, how would you pay for this expense? Then they are given this long list of possible options, and they can check all that apply (but they do have to check at least one box). This is how respondents answered that question in the 2024 survey.

The most popular way to pay that $400 emergency expense was to just pull it out of cash on hand or a savings account. In this survey, 37% of folks would be able to find $400 without too much trouble at all. Then another 31% said that they would put the expense on their credit card and pay the bill in full when it came due. To me, that’s some pretty compelling evidence that the average American does have at least a small semblance of a financial cushion. Over two-thirds of us can just pay a small bill without going into debt.

One in five Americans would put that expense on their credit card and pay it off over time (accruing interest), 17% would just be completely unable to find $400 right now, and 10% would have to ask a family member or friend for the money. I think we can all agree that the folks who chose these last three options are in some kind of dire financial straits. A $400 expense is certainly nothing to sneeze at, but it’s not like it’s a furnace replacement that could cost ten times that amount. You can’t even buy a decent refrigerator for $400 now.

But that got me thinking: are these numbers actually good or bad? Like, is the average respondent more able to pay for a small expense today than just a couple of years ago? Lucky for us, the CES asked that question back in 2020 as well. The survey is always conducted around election time, so this was still in the throes of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and most of us had been handed a fat check from the federal government to stimulate the economy. For many, this was a time of (relative) financial abundance.

I just looked at what I consider the best and worst options here: “I would just pay the bill out of my excess funds” and “I can’t pay this bill at all.”

It’s interesting to see which religious groups seem to be doing better in 2024 compared to 2020 and which ones were doing worse. For instance, white evangelicals seem to have a deteriorating financial situation. In 2020, 45% could pay the bill with cash. That dropped to 38% in the 2024 data. That’s also true of mainline Protestants—down seven percentage points. There’s also a four-point dip among white Catholics. But what’s funny about those three groups is that the share who just flat-out can’t pay didn’t really change too much during this time period.

There are some groups that have an increase in cash on hand, though. That’s the case for non-white Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. All are slightly more likely to just write the check to pay the bill in 2024 compared to 2020. But I think that stasis is pretty widespread when comparing these responses over time. No huge swings between these two surveys.

I did want to point out that the gray lines (those who just flat-out can’t find $400) are almost always flat or pointed slightly downward. I can’t find a single religious group in this data that is more likely to be in a precarious financial position in 2024 compared to 2020. That’s actually really encouraging news and counters the narrative you often hear about how the United States is in a quiet recession.

So, what share of each tradition is most able to weather a financial storm? I calculated the share of each tradition that could basically pay for a $400 expense without much trouble. They would either just write a check or put it on their credit card and pay in full at the end of the month.

Almost every group is above 50% on this metric, and many groups are far above a majority. For instance, 80% of Jews would have little problem with an unexpected expense. They are followed by atheists, Hindus, and Buddhists. Anyone who has followed my work for the last couple of years knows why these traditions show up at the top of the graph—they tend to be on the upper end of the income spectrum.

The groups at the bottom also basically follow this same pattern when it comes to having lower incomes. About half of Muslims could come up with the funds in a pinch, and the same is true for nothing-in-particulars. The only groups that fall below 50% are the unclassified and Black Protestants. But even among these groups, the percentage who could come up with the cash in a pinch is pretty robust—about 48%.

I thought I would show you the full range of data in the sortable table below. This is every tradition and every option when it comes to how they would come up with the cash. Remember that folks could select multiple options for this question. So they could say that they would both borrow some money from a family member but also pay the rest off with cash or credit, too. Feel free to point out some notable things in the comments. There are certainly a lot of data nuggets that appear here.

But to get back to the question of how income relates to coming up with an emergency expense, I tried to visualize what that relationship looks like in the scatterplot below. On the x-axis, I calculated the mean household income for every religious tradition. On the y-axis is the share of each group that said that they would be completely unable to pay a $400 expense if one popped up.

I don’t think anyone is going to be too surprised at seeing the downward trajectory of the trend line. Traditions with higher incomes are more likely to be able to come up with $400. You can see that with both Jews and Hindus. In each case, less than 10% couldn’t find the money in a pinch. They also both have incomes that are closer to $80K per year.

It’s pretty interesting to me how many traditions stick really close to that trend line across the range of income values. Groups like white evangelicals, white Catholics, and mainline Protestants are basically exactly where one would expect them to be based on their average income. But that’s not to say that there aren’t a few outliers that did jump out when looking at this graph.

For instance, just 8% of Orthodox Christians said that they couldn’t come up with $400. The trend line says that should be closer to 15%. So this group has more fallback plans than would be expected. That’s also the case with Muslims. They don’t have a ton of income, but only 13% of them said that they couldn’t pay that unexpected expense. The trend line predicts this figure to be closer to 19%.

So that was an interesting result to me because it got me wondering: what kind of situation does someone need to be in to not be able to come up with a few hundred dollars via any means, especially asking a friend or family member for the funds? That’s one way religion works, by the way. It becomes a kind of mutual aid society where people give a regular donation, which then flows out to help needy folks in the community. But sometimes those givers are in a financial pinch themselves and need those funds to flow back to them.

Of course, this is going to be conditioned on the income of the respondent. So I just looked at folks who made no more than $50,000 per year and calculated the share who said that they would ask a friend or family member to loan them $400 for that emergency expense.

I think this is a fascinating result because I have absolutely no idea what to make of it, honestly. I went into this thinking that religions that tend to have a stronger communal component—like Islam and Latter-day Saints—would be more able to tap into social networks to come up with the money. The data does point to this reality. Both those groups are at the top of the list, along with Black Protestants, which logically follows.

But then at the bottom of the list, you’ve got Jews, white evangelicals, white Catholics, mainline Protestants, and then a couple of types of nones. It’s not every day where you see those disparate groups being so close together in a graph on any dimension. I mean, I can absolutely believe that white evangelicalism is near the bottom here. There’s most certainly a “personal responsibility” ethos in this tradition. That’s probably also present with mainline Protestants. But why are Jews at the bottom? Is there just an unspoken rule in Jewish culture to not ask others for money? Someone help me out in the comments.

This has been a fascinating data exercise for me. In some ways, it’s confirmed what I know about many of these groups. In other ways, it’s made me realize just how little I know about American religion—especially when it comes to money. I think there are more than enough threads to pull on in future posts about faith and money in American society.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

There’s this interesting little pattern that happens with large polling firms, the media, and people like myself. The polling outfits will have collected some information about changes in American religion that they want to disseminate to the larger public. They will send a draft of their results to a bunch of trusted journalists with the express instructions that the data should not be published until the embargo is lifted, usually in a couple of days. That gives those reporters a bit of time to look over the data, talk to a few academics and then publish their story when the data becomes widely accessible.

Sometimes, the reporters will call me. It usually goes something like this,

Reporter: Hey, have you read the new data from (insert polling firm here)?
Me: Nope, I haven’t seen it.
Reporter: Oh, it’s embargoed right now, but can you provide a bit of analysis or commentary on these results?
Me: Briefly tell me what the new data says, please.

Then, I have about thirty seconds to collect my thoughts and provide some context to readers about how this new result fits into long running trends we know about American religion. It’s a semi-regular occurrence in my world and it always gives me a chuckle because, seemingly out of the blue, I get several media requests in a very short window of time. I do really like talking to my journalist friends, though, because we inevitably start discussing all kinds of other stuff.

I distinctly remember that happening in 2021 when Gallup released a report with the headline, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.” They had been tracking religious membership all the way back into the 1930s and it had remained above 70% of the sample through the mid-1980s. But then the share of Americans who were members of a congregation just kept dropping. Eventually landing at 47%. It’s certainly a “canary in the coal mine” kind of number.

I just looked through the archives and I don’t think that I’ve ever actually written about membership as a measurement of religiosity. But the ARDA has uploaded Pew’s newest Religious Landscape Study. It contains a pretty simple question, “Are you personally a member of a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or other house of worship?” In the full sample, just 37.4% of folks indicated that they were members of a house of worship. That’s a full ten points lower than Gallup’s data from 2021.

There is so much to explore with this question in order to figure out what factors drive church membership and the impact church membership can have on something like religious attendance.

Let’s start by just doing a generational analysis of church membership. The Religious Landscape Survey only affords us the ability to look at age through the lens of “decade of birth” but that’s more than sufficient to generate a portrait of how age impacts church membership.

I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised to see that older folks are much more likely to be church members than younger adults. Among people born before 1950, nearly three in five say that they are on the membership rolls of a church, synagogue, mosque, etc. But among folks born in the 1950s, a majority are not members of a local congregation. The numbers only decline from there.

Among respondents born in the 1970s, membership rates drop to just 38% and then there’s this really noticeable inflection point in the data. For respondents born in 1980 or later, the share who are members of a house of worship drops to 25-30%. There is a bit of variation between the decades, but not a whole lot. I think it’s fair to say that the “floor” on this metric seems to be around 25% or so. Maybe the youngest adults will drop below that as they age through the life course, but it seems like the free fall has largely abated.

However, any casual social scientist will look at the above result and say, “Of course membership drops among younger cohorts, they are a lot more likely to be non-religious.” And that’s correct, empirically speaking. So let me control for that reality by just excluding the non-religious and running the same analysis.

These numbers are quite a bit more robust than the prior graph. Here, church membership rates stay above 50% for folks born in the 1970s or earlier. That’s a noticeable uptick from the first graph. But the same general trend does seem to appear that we discussed before: older folks are more inclined to become members at a house of worship. That’s not so commonplace among younger respondents.

I mean, think about this simple fact: among religious people (of any faith background) born in 1980 or later a majority are not members of a church, synagogue, mosque, etc. It definitely feels like membership has fallen out of favor with younger folks, regardless of their faith background.

Let me show you the same analysis but for the Protestants and Catholics in the data.

So, the way that this works is that people are asked to indicate their religious “family” and then we use a scheme called RELTRAD to sort them into the appropriate categories. From these results, it does look like a whole bunch of people say that they are Protestants or Catholics but then also indicate that they don’t have a membership at a local church.

That’s certainly the case for both mainline Protestants and Catholics. I mean, neither group has particularly high membership rates. For mainline Protestants, the trend line is a bit less linear. However, I think we can plainly state that a majority of younger Methodists and Episcopalians are not actually members of any local church. For Catholics, the trend line is in a pretty clear direction: downward. Among Catholics born before 1950, two-thirds are members of a local parish. For Catholics born in the 1990s or later, it’s much lower. I think it’s fair to say that younger Catholics have a different conception of membership than older Catholics or Protestants.

Evangelicals and Black Protestants to a lesser extent seem to buck this trend, though. Membership is just high across the board for these two groups. Even among the youngest evangelicals, a majority are members. That’s nearly double the rate for Catholic young folks.

Attendance has to be part of this puzzle, though, right?

It absolutely is a huge part of this puzzle. The more someone goes to church, the more likely they are to indicate membership at a church. For never attenders, membership rates are just 10-15%. It rises to 30-45% among yearly attenders but then jumps up with each successive increase in attendance in a pretty discernible way.

For older weekly attenders, 85%+ of them say that they are members of a local congregation. That share does slip a little bit for the younger respondents, though. Among Christian folks born in 1990 or later and who attend weekly, the share who are members is closer to 75%. You also see that among those who attend multiple times per week. That’s a truism that clearly shines through in this data: younger people are just not as inclined to join a church compared to their parents and grandparents.

I wanted to really zoom in on the question of: what factors tend to drive up membership and which ones go in the opposite direction. To do that I threw a bunch of variables in a regression that predicted membership and then visualized the “odds ratio” for each one. If the odds ratio is 1.0, that means that it has no impact on membership. If it’s 1.5, that means that it increases membership chances by about 50% above the baseline.

The important thing to know here are the “reference cases” listed in the subtitle above. For instance, the odds ratio for folks who are married is about 1.7. But that is in comparison to people who are divorced. Said simply, holding a bunch of stuff equal, a married person is about 70% more likely to be a church member compared to a divorced person. You can also see that women are about 20% more likely to be church members compared to men, all things being held equal. Also, Black people are slightly more likely to be a church member compared to white people.

However, there are a number of factors that lead to a lower likelihood of being a church member. The data indicates that both Asians and Hispanics are about 50% less likely to be members compared to white folks. The data also indicates a strong negative relationship between age and membership. Among people who are born in the 1980s, they are 50% less likely to be a church member compared to someone who was born in the 1940s (the reference category).

However, I know that a lot of pastors and ministry leaders read this newsletter and want to be even more specific about the relationship between church attendance and church membership. So here’s what I did. I just pulled together a hypothetical average person: a married, white, female, evangelical born in the 1970s who finds the Bible very important. Then I cloned that person into an exact replica. Person A is a member of a local congregation and Person B is not a member. What’s the likelihood of Person A being a weekly attender vs Person B?

The answer is a real chasm! Person A is represented in the dark blue bars on the left. The data indicates that there’s a 57% chance this person attends a church on a weekly basis. The light-blue bar on the right is the exact same person except the only difference is that she is not a member of any congregation. The data predicts that there’s only a 14% chance this hypothetical person is a weekly attender. That church member is about three times more likely to come to church every week compared to the non-member. That’s a huge difference.

So, what have we learned here about membership in a local house of worship?

1. Young people are not too keen on joining organizations. That’s even among young people who still identify as religious. Which means that church membership is going to inevitably decline in the decades to come.

2. Evangelicals and Black Protestants seem to do a better job at pushing membership than their mainline and Catholic counterparts.

3. Several factors predict church membership: marriage, age, and gender all exhibit strong, positive relationships with membership.

4. Being a member of a local house of worship is incredibly predictive of being a regular attender at a church, synagogue, mosque, etc. This data indicates that a member is three times more likely to be a weekly attender compared to a non-member, even after controlling for all kinds of other factors.

This does feel like another example of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis. The long term trends in American civil society is in the direction of “not joining stuff.” That was true for the Elks, the Moose, and bowling leagues several decades ago. That same social phenomenon is hitting houses of worship now.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

Just a reminder — my book The Vanishing Church was released about two months ago. If you like the content you see on this newsletter, then you will love the book.

And if you’ve read the book (and hopefully liked it), would you please consider leaving a review on Amazon? It helps with sales. And, thanks as always, for all your support, in whatever fashion.

I think that I’m a lot like the folks who read this newsletter - I don’t actually watch the news that much anymore. I used to be a regular viewer of our local news station that is based close to Carbondale and covers our county, but then they literally fired all of their meteorologists and outsourced that part of the broadcast to some command center in Atlanta or some such place. That annoyed me to no end. So, I stopped watching it altogether now. Yes, you can conjure the Grandpa Simpson meme “Old Man Yells at Cloud“ right now.

But I rarely watch the nightly news on a major broadcast network and I bet I may consume an hour of the 24-hour news channels (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) in an average month. I just don’t feel the need to watch the news anymore. Sometimes when there’s a breaking news story, I will throw it on while I doom scroll social media, but that doesn’t happen too much. I do watch 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning (which is probably my favorite journalistic program). However, that’s the extent of my viewership habits.

What prompted that little discourse about my media consumption habits is a series of questions that the Cooperative Election Study began asking in 2020 about television network news. It’s a pretty simple setup: in the past 24 hours, which of these networks did you watch? And it’s got all the major broadcast news stations (ABC, CBS, NBC) but then it has the three 24-hour news channels along with PBS and then an “other” option. People can check all that apply.

This is the share who checked the box for each of those news outlets in the 2020, 2022, and 2024 datasets.

I wanted to start with this analysis to see how much “bounciness” there is in these numbers. When I first looked at these questions, I really thought that answers would be all over the board and there wouldn’t be a whole lot of reliability to be had, but after looking at the graph I think that this data is actually pretty trustworthy, really. The variations from year to year are basically what one would expect - no big shifts, but a little bit of movement here and there.

For instance, the share of folks who are watching NBC News is basically 33-35% of the country. That passes the sniff test, I suppose. The numbers for ABC are just a bit higher but don’t change that much either (36-38%). There’s just not much numeric change from one survey to another and there’s really no rhyme or reason to any change. It’s not like viewership consistently slid between 2020 and 2024.

There is one outlier, though - it’s CNN. In the 2020 data, about 39% of the sample said that they had watched the news network in the prior 24 hours. That dropped to 35% in the 2022 and 2024 data. So, I think we can say that CNN has slipped just a bit over time. That’s not necessarily the case for any of the others.

Now, let me show you media consumption in 2024 by generation of the respondent - this one is really fun.

There are a couple of things that really jump out to me in this one. First, it’s the absolute dominance of Fox News with nearly every age group. Obviously they are crushing it with old folks. About 55% of the Silent Generation and 44% of Boomers watch Fox News every single day. But they are also doing some big numbers with younger adults, too. I mean, the data indicates that a majority of Gen Z are watching Fox News! Look how MSNBC fares compared to this - very low. Which tracks well with Nielsen ratings data, for what it’s worth.

I do need to point out that network news consumption does rise among younger adults for a bunch of networks though - you can see it for ABC, CBS, and NBC. The jumps are modest, but they are clearly ticking upwards. However, look at that rise for CNN. Among Boomers, just a quarter are watching Anderson Cooper and company on a daily basis. For Gen Z, it’s their favorite network (just barely ahead of Fox News). In contrast, MSNBC does worse with Gen Z than with Millennials or Gen X.

But we haven’t discussed religion yet, so you know we need to get to that.

The color coding helps a lot here to get a quick sense of what news people like to consume and which ones they avoid. No one really watches a whole lot of PBS, honestly. Especially white evangelicals. But no large group is much above 15%. Although Buddhists are a fun outlier there.

When it comes to network news, I just don’t see a really strong discernible pattern. One thing that does jump out is that Black Protestants are more likely to watch ABC, CBS, or NBC compared to other Christian groups. But I just don’t think we can make big claims about Catholics vs. Protestants here. Those networks are in the 30-40% range across the board.

But the Fox News vs. MSNBC divide is on full display in this visualization. Among white evangelicals, 20% watch MSNBC and 62% watch Fox News - a gap of 42 percentage points. For non-white evangelicals, the gap is a single point. You can basically overlay political ideology on top of these two columns and it all makes a lot of sense: right-leaning groups prefer Fox News, those on the left are partial to MSNBC. I will come back to that in a minute.

How about changes in viewership habits over time? I calculated the share who watched each option in 2020 and then in 2024. A positive number indicates increased viewership.

This is why I think this data is pretty good - there aren’t a whole lot of big swings from these two surveys. In many of the cells, the overall change in percentage is pretty modest - less than five points in many cases. You can see that among the network news options the most. Some modest gains for ABC and CBS, but people are just not changing their viewing habits a whole lot from one election cycle to another. Which makes sense in my mind.

I do see a whole lot of negative numbers in that CNN column, though. Outside of the Latter-day Saints, CNN saw big losses across the entire religious spectrum. Among agnostics, viewers were down by nearly 7 percentage points. They were down about the same share with Jews. And there were big drops for Protestants and Catholics, too. Just a really bad result for CNN.

But let me revisit that whole “Fox News vs. MSNBC” debate now. I think it’s important to see just how big the media divide is among many of these religious groups.

The groups at the top of the graph are those that favor Fox News and it’s the usual suspects up top there. Among white evangelicals, Fox News has a 49-point advantage. That’s the biggest divide (in either direction) of any religious group. The group that follows white evangelicals are Orthodox Christians at +32 for Fox News, white Catholics at +29, and they are followed by Mormons at +27. Then a bunch of groups that are in the 10-16 point range like mainline Protestants and non-white evangelicals.

There are only five religious groups that are more inclined to watch MSNBC. Atheists lead this category at +32 for MSNBC, followed by agnostics at +21 and Black Protestants at +14. However, I do need to point out that none of these groups at the bottom of the graph are that large. They combine for about 20% of the entire population of the United States. Evangelicals, by themselves, are that large.

I mean, there’s a reason that Fox News has 13 of the 15 most watched news programs in the United States.

But I wanted to bring age back into the conversation just a little bit and there’s a reason for that. According to Nielsen, the average watcher of Fox News and MSNBC is about 65 years old. Is there any evidence that Fox is going to find a new tranche of viewers from young white evangelicals?

I love this graph because it shows how polarized media viewing is among older Americans. I mean, look at those from the Silent Generation. If they are Christians, they prefer Fox News. If they are non-religious, they favor MSNBC. It’s as clear as possible. You can also see that among Boomers, too. That same divide is there: Christians watch Fox, the nones watch MSNBC. But then that trend begins to break down a bit with Gen X and then really starts to collapse among Millennials.

To me, the most telling part of this graph is the atheist/agnostic Millennials. They do favor MSNBC over Fox News but only by a small margin (13-14%). Compare that to Boomer atheists/agnostics when those numbers were 46% and 30% respectively. That’s also clearly the case with Gen Z atheists/agnostics. They just don’t watch MSNBC that much at all - their margin drops into the single digits. Meanwhile for younger Christians, they are still lapping up Fox News programming.

If I were an executive at MSNBC (recently rebranded to MS Now), this would terrify me. Who is the most likely person to watch Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow’s replacement in 15 years? It would be young atheists/agnostics. They just aren’t showing up in big numbers in this data. Young nones aren’t going to buoy the liberal networks going forward. However, Fox News seems like it will be doing just fine for decades to come.

Of course, I think we can all say that networks, whether ABC, PBS, CNN or Fox News don’t seem like they matter as much as they did 20 years ago with the rise of social media. But don’t expect them to go away any time soon. But when Boomers exit the stage, the relevance of those night-time talking heads may just go with them.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

One of the surveys that I use on a regular basis is called the Cooperative Election Study. It’s conducted every year in October and November and the data is released in March. That’s exactly what happened earlier this week: the survey from 2025 was released and there’s a lot to chew on in terms of the size and trajectory of key religious groups.

Let’s start with the biggest headline finding: the share of the sample who identifies as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular has dropped again. That’s a continuation of an ongoing trend that started in 2023 where the nones have declined in a slow and steady way. In 2022, the percentage of Americans who identified as non-religious was 36.2% in the CES. It was 35.6% in 2023, 34.1% in 2024, and then the data from 2025 puts the nones share at 31.8%.

That’s almost back to the levels recorded in 2017 and 2018.

The key thing to know about this change is that it is statistically significant. The samples that the CES collects are enormous by any standard. In election years, the total number of respondents is 60,000 or more. (The CES is primarily focused on political science questions, so there’s ample reason to ramp up data collection during an election year.) The off years are smaller, but they are always above 15,000 folks. For comparison, the General Social Survey’s typical sample is around 2,500. So, even in the “down years,” the CES is just orders of magnitude larger than the GSS.

The statistical verdict is clear: the recent decline in religious nones falls outside the margin of error, regardless of how you test it. Whether that decline matters is a different question — and one the data alone can’t answer.

This is not the only data source that points to a decline in the nones, by the way. The aforementioned General Social Survey records a drop in the non-religious in the last few years, too. In 2021, 28% of people indicated no religious affiliation. But that was a weird year for the GSS. They had to change methodologies because of COVID, which caused problems with capturing a good sample (see here for a discussion about that).

But the GSS does point toward a decline in the nones, too — down to 25.2% in 2024. They are putting another wave of the GSS in the field this year, I’ve been told, so we will have an update on this in probably a year from now.

So that’s two surveys pointing to a drop in the nones. That’s not nothing. Let’s dig deeper.

There are three types of non-religious Americans under the Pew typology (which is used in the CES): atheists, agnostics, and people who claim no religion in particular. Here’s how those three groups have changed over time.

The first thing that I always point out with this graph is that most nones are not atheists or agnostics. Instead, they claim that their affiliation is “nothing in particular.” If there are five nones in a room: one is an atheist, one is an agnostic, and three are nothing in particular. All three groups have grown over time.

However, that growth has been arrested — if not reversed — in the last couple of surveys. Atheists were 6–7% of the sample between 2015 and 2024. Agnostics were in the 5–6% range during this same time period. Nothing in particulars clearly rose between 2015 and 2023, though: from 20% to 24%. That’s not what we see in the 2025 data.

The share of atheists and agnostics dropped to 5% each. They were 13% of the sample just last year and 12% in 2023. The nothing in particular percentage has dipped down to 21% in both 2024 and 2025. That’s lower than it was back in 2019. So it’s really a decline among all three types of nones.

There’s clearly been a numerical decline in the nones. That seems pretty hard to ignore now, and it’s showing up in multiple data sources. Where are those drops coming from?

One source is partisanship.

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Just a reminder — my book The Vanishing Church was released about two months ago. If you like the content you see on this newsletter, then you will love the book.

And if you’ve read the book (and hopefully liked it), would you please consider leaving a review on Amazon? It helps with sales. And, thanks as always, for all your support, in whatever fashion.

Are you the same religion right now as the one you were raised in? I bet for readers of my newsletter, “switching” is probably a whole lot more common than among the public at large. Why do I make that assumption? Well, all you wonderful folks who manage to find your way here are not just a random sample of all Americans. Religion has to matter to you at some deep level. Which means you are, statistically speaking, outliers.

The more I look at data, the more I’m convinced that this is not the median American. In fact, when it comes to something so basic as whether an individual is retained in the religion of their youth, what I’ve come to conclude is that inertia may be one of the most powerful forces in the social world. It’s just easier to stay the same than it is to change.

So, then, we just have to assume that religious switching is a process that takes work, and many folks just don’t have some kind of burning desire to seek out a different faith tradition. And we won’t judge that here, okay? That’s something I want to make exceedingly clear—I don’t begrudge anyone for not thinking about religion that much. It’s a huge part of my life, but that doesn’t mean that the way I think about the world is the only way (or the best way) to consider my humanity. Everyone can just live their life however they want, and it’s my job to try and make sense of that.

And making sense out of how often people change their religious affiliation is what we are going to do today, along with where they manage to land. Let’s get to the graphs.

What I wanted to do to start was trace retention at the highest level possible. I did this by separating the sample into the three largest groups: Catholics, Protestants, and the non-religious. These three combine for about 90% of all Americans. The way that I can generate this analysis is that the General Social Survey asks both about current affiliation as well as the religious affiliation of one’s youth.

I’ve categorized retention here in a broad way. If someone moves from one type of Protestant to another type of Protestant, that’s not a switch. Here, I’m interested in movement between major religious families, not denominational reshuffling. But if someone becomes Catholic, non-religious, or anything else besides Protestant, that counts as a change in religion.

Using this criteria, the retention rate of the entire sample in 1973 was a whopping 89%. Yup—just about one in ten Americans had changed religions in the early 1970s. Today’s retention number is 74%, which is probably surprisingly high for folks who read this newsletter. If you grabbed four Americans right now and asked if they were still affiliated with the same religion today as the one from their youth, just one would report a change. Inertia is strong!

Given that baseline, it should come as little surprise that the trend lines for the other three groups don’t really dip and dive or rise and fall in some dramatic way. For adult Catholics who took the GSS back in 1973, 85% reported that they were raised in a Catholic household. The data from 2024 indicates that retention has dropped to 65%. That’s a 20-point decline compared to a 15-point drop overall. So we can definitely say that Catholic retention is worse than average.

For Protestants, retention was 92% back in the 1973 data, and it dipped to 79% in the most recent survey. That’s about in line with the national average, but Protestants have consistently been more stable than the baseline.

But the nones are the biggest story here. Back in 1973, just 43% of the currently non-religious were raised in non-religious households. In the 2024 survey, that had jumped to 79%—exactly the same retention rate as Protestants. In other words, being raised non-religious is incredibly predictive of being non-religious as an adult.

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They do point to some tangible policies that they believe would drive the marriage rate back up. For instance, a couple that decides to marry before age 30 would get a $2,500 deposit in an investment account. They also suggest a tax credit for married parents with newborn children. But their most controversial proposals revolve around restricting no-fault divorces and moving toward a default 50-50 custody arrangement for children after divorce.

One of the most prominent throughlines in that Heritage document is the role of religion in the decline of marriage rates in the United States. In fact, when I did a CTRL+F search of the document, the word “religion” showed up forty times. They point to studies which find that church-going couples have a divorce rate that is 50% lower than those who don’t go to a house of worship on a regular basis. Reading through that document got my wheels spinning, of course.

I think we can all admit that there’s some kind of relationship between the decline of religion and the decline of marriage in the United States. Every major religion in the United States encourages parishioners to find a partner, get married, and have children. But how much of the marriage rate decline in the United States can be laid at the feet of the rise of the nones? I think I can actually come up with a fairly robust answer to that question using a couple of different data sources.

To start out with, though, I thought I would just visualize how marriage rates have plummeted in the United States using data from the General Social Survey. It’s been asking, “Are you currently--married, widowed, divorced, separated, or have you never been married?” since the very early days (1972), so we can track this with a ton of specificity over five decades. This is just the share of people who say that they have never been married.

In 1972, the share of respondents who had never been married was a shockingly low 15%. Pretty amazing to think that 85% of all adults in the United States currently had a husband or wife (or at least had one at one point in their lives). In other words, if you had never found a partner, you were a statistical oddball back in the 1970s. But as you can tell, that didn’t last that long. By the early 1990s, the rate rose to 20%, then it was about 25% by 2010. In the most recent wave of the GSS from 2024, just over 30% of all American adults had never been married. Double the rate from five decades earlier.

And we can certainly blame men for this problem! That’s another consistent finding from the GSS—male respondents have been noticeably more likely to always be single compared to their female counterparts. In the 1970s, the gap was just about eight percentage points (10% vs. 18%). And it’s maintained a pretty healthy gap for most of the last five decades. Although, I do want to point out that it’s narrowed noticeably in the last few years. In 2024, about 33% of men had never been married compared to 29% of women. You can chalk a lot of that convergence up to the female line rising faster than the male line.

But I wanted to come up with another metric that would help make this concept seem more “real” to us. So, here’s what I did—I calculated the age in the data at which the “never been married” rate dropped below 50% for the first time for each year of the GSS. So this is basically the “tipping point” for marriage over time.

It’s wild to say this, but in the early 1970s, the age at which most women had walked down the aisle was right around 20 years old. That’s crazy to consider, especially compared to men, who were around 22 or 23 years old before most of them had tied the knot. But that female tipping point did begin to shoot up pretty quickly. By the 1990s, the age of marriage for women was about 24 years old, and for men it was around 26-27 years old.

From that point forward, both lines begin to rise in near parallel. You can see from the trendline that somewhere around 2016, most men had gotten married by their 30th birthday. For women, that took until just the last couple of years. But here’s the one stat to think about—in 1972, the average person’s first marriage happened right around 23 years old. Today, it’s about 28 years old. There’s no denying this fact: people are delaying marriage much longer now.

Now, let’s inject religion into this equation. This is just that question about “never being married” across three groups—Protestants, Catholics, and the non-religious.

The upshot here is consistent and straightforward. The non-religious are way more likely to never have been married compared to Christians. That was true in the 1970s, and that’s true in 2024. The gap is really large, too. When comparing the nones to Catholics, the gap runs somewhere between 10 and 15 percentage points. It has narrowed at some periods, but then it just opens back up again. In 2024, about 43% of the non-religious had never been married compared to 27% of Catholics.

I do feel the need to point out that Catholics have always been less likely to tie the knot compared to Protestants, too. I don’t know if I would have guessed that. It’s pretty noteworthy how the lines just seem to run in parallel, too. No matter what year you look at, a Catholic is about five percentage points more likely to say they’ve never been married compared to a Protestant.

But any astute reader of this newsletter will know that the above graph has a real problem. Put simply: it’s age. The nones tend to be a lot younger than Protestants or Catholics. In the 2024 data, the mean age for Protestants was 50.5. It was 51.7 for Catholics but only 41.9 for the non-religious. Of course, getting married is largely a function of age, so we need to correct for that.

I age-standardized the data to account for the fact that the nones are much younger than Protestants or Catholics. What that means is that I calculated the share never married at each age for each religious group, then applied a standard age distribution across all three groups. This removes the confounding effect of age differences. And, as you can see, this does narrow the distance between the groups somewhat.

But it doesn’t eliminate the “marriage gap.” The finding that the nones are still less inclined to get married persists even when we control for age. Interestingly enough, the gap between the nones and the Christians has actually widened somewhat in the last twenty years or so. Using our age-standardized model, the share of the non-religious who have never married is just above 35%. That’s 5-7 points higher than Protestants and Catholics. It’s just empirically accurate to say that religious people are more likely to get married compared to non-religious folks.

I am going to pivot to the Cooperative Election Study for the rest of this analysis, though, because the sample size is just way bigger. That means I can loop in smaller religious groups like Latter-day Saints, Muslims, and different types of Protestants and the non-religious. What I did was calculate the share of each tradition that had never been married at a number of age checkpoints like: Under 25, Under 30, Under 35, and so on. That way we can see (with a great deal of specificity) when marriage begins to become widespread among these groups.

I’ve got to say—I love this graph. I’ve stared at it multiple times over the last couple of days because I always see something really interesting. For instance, the Latter-day Saints just jump off the screen for me. Only 67% of them were still single by their 25th birthday. The next closest group on this metric is Muslims, and 72% had not walked down the aisle by this checkpoint. All those tropes about Mormons and marriage really are accurate—they get married YOUNG compared to everyone else.

But, speaking of those white evangelicals, you can really see how they are just qualitatively different from other types of Protestants and Catholics when it comes to marriage. By forty years old, 47% of white evangelicals had never gotten married. For white Catholics, that number was 52%. For non-white Catholics, it was even higher: 64%. By 45, just 43% had not tied the knot. That’s 10-15 points lower than any other group in the top two rows.

However, we’ve got to talk about the non-religious now—particularly the atheists and agnostics. Just think about this one data point: at 25 years old, just 6% of them had gotten married. By 30 years old, it was only 14%. By 40 years old, two-thirds of atheists and agnostics had not walked down the aisle. The “nothing in particulars” aren’t far behind on this, either. By age 45, a strong majority of them (65%) had never tied the knot, either. Again, this data points to a pretty strong conclusion—the rise of the nones has led (at least in part) to a decline in marriage rates.

I wanted to really dig deeply into this idea, though. My goal was to estimate (as much as we can) the impact of being non-religious on getting married or not. So, I pulled together a regression model that included a couple of demographic factors like age, gender, education, and race. I also threw an ideology variable in there alongside a dichotomous measure of non-religion. Then I predicted the likelihood of never being married.

I found a bunch of factors that drive up marriage rates—those are at the bottom of the graph. The most predictive was being a college graduate. Someone with a four-year degree is about 15 percentage points more likely to have tied the knot compared to someone with less education. Obviously age was a strong predictor of marriage rates, but so was political ideology. Compared to a liberal, a conservative was about 10 percentage points more likely to get married. A moderate was about 6 points more likely, as well. And, as we observed before: women are more likely to get married compared to men (by about 7 percentage points).

There were only two measures that I put in my model that predicted a higher rate of singleness. One was race. Holding all other variables constant, an African American was nearly 15 percentage points more likely to have never been married compared to someone of another race. For comparison, that’s the same impact as having a four-year college degree (just in the other direction).

The impact of being non-religious on marriage rates was actually fairly modest once we controlled for other factors. If we took two people who had exactly the same age, level of education, gender, race, and political ideology but one was a Christian and the other was a non-religious person, the none would be about 5 percentage points more likely to never be married. That’s not nothing, but it’s not a huge difference, really.

So, why is that coefficient not larger than 5 points? Well, I think a good answer is that political ideology is doing a whole lot of the work here. Liberals don’t get married at nearly the rate as conservatives. And a whole bunch of atheists and agnostics are very liberal folks. Which means that ideology is doing a lot of the work here, not really religious affiliation.

Said simply—if the secularization rate of Americans returned to 1970s levels, it’s not like marriage rates would go back to that baseline. To actually get back to the point where 85% of Americans had been married would also require a whole bunch of political liberals to become political conservatives. Good luck with that.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

If you’ve ever taken a sociology course in college, there’s a good chance that the instructor spent at least a little bit of time talking about the power of symbols in a society. They can be nothing more than a single word or just a short phrase that can convey a world of meaning, purpose, and solidarity.

I found an incredibly funny video about the power of symbolic ritual on Twitter the other day.

For those who can’t watch, a white politician was giving a speech in a Black church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he casually said, “God is good.” The entire congregation responded, “All the time.” He didn’t know what to do at that moment. Later, one of the leaders of the church got up and instructed him how to finish the symbolic chant. After the congregation says, “All the time,” the speaker must say “All the time,” and the congregation responds with “God is good.” It may be the most frequently repeated phrase in many Black churches.

This is a symbol of shared identity. Rituals like that make the congregation feel unified and give the speaker a sense of dialogue with the crowd, not just a monologue. It’s a subtle but incredibly powerful feature of group dynamics.

But symbols aren’t just words—they can be tangible objects. A tree or a building can convey an incredible amount of meaning by its sheer existence. In the world of politics, symbols are all over the place. One of the most visible manifestations is often a flag. It’s nothing more than a piece of brightly colored fabric that often hangs on a pole, but it has the power to convey history, pride, and unity all in just a 3-foot by 5-foot square. When that flag is unfurled before a basketball game, people stand up, put their hand on their hearts, and often sing along with the National Anthem. That moment has a lot in common with the aforementioned call and response in the Black church.

Those symbols can sometimes be contentious, though. When I was browsing through the recent additions to the Association of Religion Data Archives database, I came across a new dataset from PRRI called the Religion and Public Spaces Replication Survey. It contained a battery of questions that really piqued my interest because it was about the symbology of the American Confederacy.

There was a list of five examples given to respondents, and they were supposed to indicate whether they were “more a symbol of Southern pride or more a symbol of racism?” One was about the Confederate Flag. Another asked about monuments to soldiers who fought in the Confederacy. Here’s how the entire sample felt about each of the reminders of the Civil War.

The first thing that must be pointed out is that a majority of Americans disagree that each of these are a symbol of racism. I think that’s an important finding from this survey—there are not majorities of Americans who believe that monuments to Confederate soldiers are inherently racist. In fact, just one in three adults embraces that viewpoint. The same share indicates commemorating the birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is a racist activity. In fact, over three-quarters of Americans see no problem with Civil War reenactments.

There’s really only one symbol here that divides the American public when it comes to remembering the Civil War, and it’s the most straightforward one: displaying the Confederate Flag. In the full sample, 53% of respondents believed that it was nothing more than an indication of Southern Pride and thus was not inherently racist. Because of the margin of error, the most accurate description of this data is that the “Stars and Bars” evenly divides America on whether it’s a symbol of racism or not.

I found that breaking the sample down into a handful of the largest religious traditions was really helpful to see how opinion varies in these five instances.

The first thing I must point out is that there is very little resistance to folks engaging in Civil War reenactments. I don’t think anyone is shocked by the fact that 80%+ of Christians see it as Southern Pride, but what was a bit more intriguing was that nearly seven in ten atheists/agnostics took no issue with this activity. Given their political inclinations toward progressivism, this level of support was not at all what I expected.

I should point out, though, that this is the only issue where a majority of atheist/agnostic folks chose “Southern Pride” over racism. A significant majority of them believed that monuments to Confederate soldiers were an example of racism, and basically the same share objected to celebrating Robert E. Lee’s birthday. When it came to displaying the Confederate Flag, over three-quarters of atheists/agnostics said it was a symbol of racism.

Speaking of that question, it’s clearly the most likely to generate mixed feelings of this entire battery of survey statements. Among evangelicals, about two-thirds believed that the Confederate Flag was an example of Southern Pride. It was 59% of Catholics and 56% of non-evangelical Protestants. Given the divided opinions on this specific question, I wanted to make it the focus of the rest of the post.

I wondered if age played some kind of role in this debate. I know that when I was growing up in rural Southern Illinois in the 1990s, I would encounter the “Stars and Bars” every once in a while on a classmate’s truck or in their garage. Those kinds of sightings have become more infrequent as I’ve grown older, and it made me wonder if it’s just fallen out of favor with the younger set.

The data is crystal clear on this point: younger Americans are much more likely to say that the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism compared to their older counterparts. In the full sample, just 39% of 18-29 year olds chose the “Southern Pride” option compared to about 60% of respondents who were 45 or older. So, there’s definitely a generational difference in this data.

You can also see it when broken down by religious tradition. Among younger evangelicals, 53% see the flag as denoting Southern Pride. That’s about ten points higher than young adult Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants. But you see that same stair-step pattern across the top row—each successive age bracket is more accepting of the Confederate Flag compared to the previous one.

Among atheists/agnostics, acceptance is just lower across the board. There’s no group that is more likely to say that the flag is racist than young atheists/agnostics—nearly 90% of them hold that position. But even among those who are in their sixties or seventies, just one-third believe that the flag is a symbol of Southern Pride.

If you’ve been following along with this newsletter for a while, you know that there’s a latent variable here that’s probably doing quite a bit of the “work” in driving views of the Confederate flag: political ideology. So, let me address that now.

You can absolutely see the huge political divide on the symbolism of the Confederate flag in this graph. In the total sample, just 19% of liberals said that the Confederate flag was just a manifestation of Southern Pride; for conservatives, it was sixty percentage points higher. Among moderates they were nearly perfectly divided: 53% chose the Southern Pride option.

But those divides manifest even more when adding religious tradition to the mix. I do need to point out one oddity in this data, though. The one that really jumped out to me was liberal Catholics. One-third of them said the Confederate Flag was Southern Pride. That was eleven points higher than any other liberal group in the data. But then only 76% of conservative Catholics took the same stance, which was near the bottom of support. I just don’t know what to make of that, really.

Overall, however, these results tend to shake out the way one would expect: liberal atheists are more likely to see the flag as a symbol of racism than other liberal groups.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking right now—”Ryan has left out the most important variable of all when it comes to an analysis like this.” And you would be right. We most certainly can’t explore views on Confederate symbols without taking into account the location of the survey respondent. Folks who are living in the South probably have a different perspective than those who are living in the Northeast or the West.

But guess what? Region actually didn’t matter all that much in this data. In the full sample of 5,784 respondents, the difference was not statistically or substantively significant. Among folks living in the South, 54% believed that the flag was a symbol of Southern Pride. For those living in any other region, it was 52%. The confidence intervals overlap, too. That was a real shock to me.

You can see that lack of difference when breaking the sample down into religious tradition, too. Among Catholics and Protestants, there’s no statistically significant difference between those living in the South and those living anywhere else on the question of the symbology of the Confederate Flag. In fact, there was only one group where the error bars didn’t overlap: atheists/agnostics. For those living in the South, 30% believed that the Confederate Flag was a symbol of Southern Pride compared to 20% of those living anywhere else. I guess I need to do some more digging into Southern atheists in a future post.

I’ve thrown a lot of variables at you so far: religion, age, ideology, and region. However, each bit of analysis is not controlling for the other variables. Let’s fix that now. I specified a regression model with all the usual suspects as controls: ideology, age, education, gender, race, and income.

The unadjusted numbers are just the simple percentages I showed you above—I’m not controlling for anything there. The adjusted numbers are controlling for all those factors that I just listed. They essentially are showing us, “What would the percentage be if all religious groups had the same ideology, age, education, gender, race, and income distribution?”

For instance, among white evangelicals, you can see that the adjusted number is about seven points lower than the unadjusted statistic. This means that ideology, age, etc. are really what are driving up the support for the Confederate Flag. For atheists/agnostics, things go the other way—the adjusted support is much higher. Why? Well, it’s because their political liberalism is “holding down” their support for the Confederate Flag. If their ideology, age, education, etc. matched the general public, support would rise about sixteen percentage points.

Here’s what we learned from this regression: Religious differences in Confederate flag views are largely driven by ideology and demographics, not religion per se. If an evangelical and an atheist have the same ideology, age, education, etc., their views of the flag wouldn’t totally converge, but they would come much closer together.

I think we can put this in the category of “It’s not religion that’s doing the work here, it’s almost certainly politics.” Clergy are not frequently talking about the power of symbols like the Confederate Flag or the legacy of racism in the country. (A paper published in 2021 found that just 3% of sermons addressed the topic of civil rights). When they aren’t doing that, something else has to fill the void. For most Americans, it seems like politics is doing the work.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

In fact, I contended that the issue of immigration may be the “bright line” in evangelical politics. The data seemed to point to the reality that white evangelical Republicans would be more likely to support a politician who was in favor of legalized abortion but took a hard-line stance on immigration, compared to the reverse.

Well, it’s been a very long time since I wrote that post, and I feel like I have to revisit that general argument to see if it still stands up. But this post has two key differences: I am going to use vote choice in the 2024 presidential election as my dependent variable, and I’m going to focus on more groups than just white evangelicals. I am going to include all Protestants, Catholics, LDS, and Orthodox Christians. That should provide a more complete picture of what’s actually going on when it comes to issues and vote choice.

So, let’s start by showing how each of those groups feels about four different facets of immigration policy:

1. Building a wall between the United States and Mexico

2. Providing permanent resident status to children of immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents (also known as Dreamers), including a pathway to citizenship if they meet the requirements and have committed no crimes

3. Increasing the number of border patrol agents on the U.S.–Mexico border

4. Granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes

I broke the sample down into people who voted for Kamala Harris and those who supported Donald Trump on Election Day.

As you can quickly sort out based on the graph above, there are some questions that generate a huge partisan divide and others where the gap between red and blue is pretty small. For instance, when it comes to building a wall on the southern border, the two sets of dots are just miles apart. It’s basically orthodoxy among Trump voters that a wall is a good thing—support is 90%+. For those who voted for Harris, it’s much lower (typically around 20–25%). I do need to point out that Black Protestants are far more supportive than other Christian groups, though.

But when it comes to increasing border patrols, you can see that the gap is incredibly small. Again, Republicans are in almost lockstep on this: 90–95% of most groups support more border agents. But even among many Harris voters, this is seen as a good idea. It’s supported by about three-quarters of large groups like white Catholics and white evangelicals who voted for the Democrat.

You can generally see what’s happening here, right? Trump voters are in favor of strong borders and more walls and aren’t huge fans of creating a pathway to citizenship for people who came here illegally, either as children or adults.

Now let’s do the same thing, but with four questions about abortion:

1. Always allow a woman the right to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice

2. Expand access to abortion, including making it more affordable, broadening the types of providers who can offer care, and protecting access to abortion clinics

3. Make abortions illegal in all circumstances

4. Permit abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger

I come away with the same general impression from the previous graph—there are some aspects of this debate that are strongly polarized, and there are facets of abortion that aren’t really that divided by whether someone voted for Harris or Trump.

In the latter category, you can see this when it comes to a complete ban. That’s a position that very few people seem enamored with. Among white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2024, only 27% want to see abortion made completely illegal in the United States. That’s basically the ceiling for support.

However, compare that graph to the one directly to its right, where the question is about abortion access in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger. You can see that the partisan gap is also pretty small here, but support among both Harris and Trump voters is much higher. But I’ve never liked this question, and here’s why: if I’m a completely pro-life person, I say “oppose” to this question. If I’m a completely pro-choice person, I also say “oppose,” because it restricts abortion to only certain scenarios.

You do see the classic partisan divide on the question about expanding abortion access, though—huge gaps between the two parties on this one. In many cases, it’s a sixty-point difference, if not more. So I think the abortion debate is really about specific battlegrounds rather than an “across-the-board” type of thing.

So here’s where things get fun for me. I wanted to figure out where all these groups line up across these two policy areas. I used just two statements for this analysis: Always allow a woman the right to obtain an abortion as a matter of choice and grant legal status to all undocumented immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.

(And yes, I fully understand that people are going to quibble with me for reducing this to pro-abortion and anti-abortion. But guess what? I tried to figure out a better way to do this for an hour, and this is what I landed on, because it was immediately clear to me what each square represented when I looked at the heatmap.)

Here’s what may come as a shock to people: just a bare majority of white evangelicals said that women shouldn’t have access to abortion if she wants one for any reason and that there shouldn’t be a pathway to citizenship for people who came here illegally. It was only 53% of them. This is why I love statistics, really—they provide a more complete understanding of what groups actually believe.

However, I do need to note that this 53% figure is easily the highest of any group. Among white Catholics, just 34% are in the top-right square. In fact, I was struck by how the top-right and bottom-left squares (the latter being pro-pathway and pro-abortion) are pretty evenly distributed for a number of groups. For non-white evangelicals, it’s a five-point difference. For mainliners, it’s a 12-point gap, and for white Catholics, it’s a single percentage point. That’s interesting to me.

It’s also worth flagging that the share of “cross-pressured” people is not that high for many groups. These are individuals who hold two positions that don’t clearly map onto the partisan divide—people who are pro-pathway and anti-abortion, or the reverse. For most groups I looked at, only about one-third of the sample falls into either of these two squares. The orthodoxy of each party does seem to nudge people toward holding “consistent” positions based on mainstream political views.

Now, here’s where it gets a bit more complicated—but hopefully more insightful. I took those four groupings and then calculated the Trump vote share for each of them across policy positions on both immigration and abortion.

Let’s just get two squares out of the way right now. The top right are people who already agree with GOP views—they don’t support a pathway to citizenship and they don’t support access to abortion. Almost all of them voted for Trump. It was 95%+ in many cases. But do note that Black Protestant outlier! And the bottom left are clearly people who align more closely with the Democrats. They support a pathway to citizenship and access to abortion. Almost none of them voted for Trump, either. And also note the white evangelical outlier here, too!

So the real action is the top left (pro-pathway/pro-life) and the bottom right (anti-pathway/pro-choice). Among evangelicals, there’s a ten-point difference in Trump support. The bottom-right category was 77% for Trump. You see that same spread among non-white evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and non-white Catholics, too. Trump did about ten points better among a Christian who was pro-immigrant and pro-life compared to one who was anti-immigrant but pro-choice. That may be pointing to the fact that abortion can move the needle, right?

But this finding is not universal. White Catholics and Latter-day Saints certainly buck this trend. Among white Catholics, Trump did three points better in the bottom-right square compared to the top-left one. For Mormons, the gap was even larger: 21 percentage points. It seems like immigration is the issue activating these two groups.

So I had to put this to a really simple statistical test—a regression. I ran one for each group and used Trump vote as the dependent variable, allowing me to hold constant immigration policy views when looking at abortion support, and vice versa.

You notice that there’s a whole bunch of traditions that are just to the right of center? These are Orthodox Christians, Black Protestants, mainline Protestants, white and non-white evangelicals, and non-white Catholics. Here’s what the result of this regression tells us.

If you take two people from one of these religious groups—one who is pro-life (but supports a pathway to citizenship) and one who is anti-immigrant (but is pro-choice)—the pro-lifer is 9.3 percentage points more likely to vote for Trump. In other words, for this part of the sample, abortion is a significantly stronger “pull” toward the Republican Party than immigration is. Being conservative on abortion does more heavy lifting for Trump than being conservative on the border.

There are two groups that buck this trend, though. One is white Catholics. The model couldn’t find any evidence of either issue being predictive of a Trump vote (that’s why the error bars overlap with zero). The only group where the coefficient ran in a clearly different direction was Latter-day Saints. For them, anti-immigrant sentiment was a stronger predictor of voting for the GOP in 2024 than abortion. I’m going to let someone else try to figure out why that was the case.

So why does this result seem to refute my prior analysis from five years ago? Well, part of it may be that I’m measuring vote choice here. In that previous post, my dependent variable was Trump’s approval rating. I’m of the mind that lots of people can vote for a candidate and then not be huge fans of that person once they’re in office. For instance, what about the “I didn’t vote for Trump, I voted against Harris” crowd?

My plan is to circle back on this when we have good data about approval of Trump when he is halfway through his second term.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

The UCC is a really interesting denomination because it was once a genuine powerhouse in American Protestantism. The UCC was formed in 1957 through a merger of two older traditions—the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. And for the record, Congregationalism mattered a lot in early American history. In The American Religious Landscape, I make the point that Congregationalists likely represented the single largest religious tradition during the Revolutionary era.

Today, the UCC is best understood as a mashup of Congregational polity—especially its strong emphasis on local church autonomy—and German Reformed theology. It’s one of the so-called Seven Sisters of the Protestant mainline, known for a broad understanding of theological orthodoxy and a long, visible commitment to social justice. That combination helps explain both its influence and why it often feels very different from more doctrine-driven or centralized denominations.

One of my subscribers passed along a link to their most recent statistical report (PDF), which was chock-full of good data. This is my attempt at pointing you all to some cool stuff that I found buried in those glossy graphs that the United Church of Christ has provided.

I think it’s always helpful to start these write-ups by giving folks a good sense of the size and trajectory of the UCC. So what I’ve done is calculate the number of UCC congregations and members, and then calculate the ratio of membership to congregations.

For those of you who have been around this newsletter even a little bit in the last couple of years, you know that the mainline is in really bad shape, and these figures from the United Church of Christ do nothing to disabuse us of that notion. This overall report is very bad for members and admirers of the UCC. In fact, there’s not much here that I could point to as a clearly positive indicator.

For instance, both congregations and membership have taken an absolute nosedive since the early days of the UCC. It’s pretty apparent that 1960 was the apex of the United Church of Christ, when they boasted about 2.25 million members and over 8,000 churches. From that point forward, decline was the norm. That’s something I want to make crystal clear here: the UCC has been moving in a downward direction for over six decades now.

The most current data indicate that the number of congregations has dropped to 4,485. That’s a decline of about 46%. The most recent membership number for the United Church of Christ is 683,936. In percentage terms, that’s a dip of just under 70%. Just think about that for a moment. For every 10 UCC members in 1960, there are three today. Just staggering stuff.

In 1970, the UCC reported its highest ratio of members to churches: 291 to one. That’s actually a really healthy number. But now the figure has dropped to only 152 members per congregation. In other words, they aren’t closing churches fast enough to keep that ratio up. To maintain a ratio of 291, it would require the UCC to have only 2,350 churches. That would mean shutting the doors of over 2,000 congregations.

How did they get here? Well, the UCC has a graph that charts inflows and outflows from the denomination at various points over the last sixty years. I charted a few of them below.

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I think that the idea of the afterlife is one of those things. It seems pretty common to reject the idea of Moses parting the Red Sea or to question whether Jesus died and actually resurrected. Lots of folks cast serious doubts on those types of miraculous events. But then when surveys include questions about concepts like having a soul and what happens to your existence after you die, that religious residue reemerges, and you can see that lots of Americans do tend to have some type of supernatural belief.

Pew added this little battery of questions to their Religious Landscape Survey that probed these general concepts, and I thought I would poke around those ideas in today’s post.

For instance, they asked, “Do you believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body?” It’s certainly not definitively predictive of whether someone has a deep well of spirituality, but it seems telltale that holding to the concept of a soul is pretty widespread in the data.

In the full sample, 88% of folks said that they did believe that each being possesses both a soul and a physical body. I look at survey data all day, and here’s what I know: it’s hard to get 88% of Americans to agree on anything, really. If you tried to pull together a battery of ten public policy proposals, it’s very unlikely that any of them would get 88% support. But the data tells this story clearly: almost all Americans believe that there’s something happening beyond our physical bodies.

And that belief is absolutely widespread among nearly every religious group in the survey. It’s at least 95% of every single Christian group. And even among non-Christian faiths like Islam and Buddhism, it’s at 90% agreement. The religious tradition that is the least likely to believe in a soul is Jews, at just 75%. I think this may be due, in no small measure, to the fact that lots of Jews are essentially secular in their religious beliefs. They embrace Judaism from a cultural/ethnic perspective.

Among the non-religious, there’s also a huge divide on this question. Among nothing in particulars, 80% believe in a soul. That’s just a few clicks away from the national average. Agnostics score 11 points lower than nothing in particulars. But then take a look at atheists—just one-third of them believe “in a soul or spirit in addition to their physical bodies.” When I say that not all nones are the same, this is the graph that makes that point exceedingly clear. The overall spiritual beliefs of atheists are significantly different from agnostics.

Now, let’s move to a pair of questions that asked about the existence of heaven and hell. For those wondering, the full question wording is:

• Do you think there is a heaven where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded?

• Do you think there is a hell where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished?

I thought it would be most insightful to look at how respondents fell across both axes at the same time; that way, we could isolate the share who believes in heaven but not hell, for instance.

Just a bare majority of Americans (55%) believe in both heaven and hell as described in each question. That’s surprising given that about 70% of the full sample is aligned with some type of religious tradition. The corollary to that is that 29% of folks do not believe in either heaven or hell. It’s just a coincidence that this is exactly the share of respondents who claim no religious affiliation. I will break these results down by religious tradition a bit later.

That leaves about 16% of folks who believe in one, but not the other. Easily the most popular combination is “heaven exists but hell does not.” That encompasses 14% of all Americans. In contrast, a bit less than three percent of Americans believe in the existence of hell but do not believe in heaven. I can’t say that I’ve met too many folks like that in all my travels and discussions about religion in the United States.

When I analyzed this by birth decade, I found a really interesting trend that is worth some reflection.

For clarity’s sake, I just plotted the share who believed in both heaven and hell and the share who said that neither existed. Among older Americans, the gap in beliefs about the afterlife is really large. Nearly 60% believe in the existence of both destinations, while about a quarter don’t believe in either. That’s a gap of about 35 percentage points.

When we get into folks born in 1970 or later, you can see that beliefs begin to shift. For this birth cohort, 57% believe in both and 28% believe in neither—a gap of 29 percentage points. But then the gap gets a whole lot smaller in the next two birth decades: 18 points among people born in the 1980s and 11 points for respondents born in the 1990s. You can see that this narrowing is occurring because both points are moving toward the center.

But then something interesting happens among respondents who were born in the early 2000s: belief in heaven and hell jumps back up. It’s 52% of the youngest adults. That’s four points higher than those born in the 1990s. And the share who believe in neither drops by five percentage points. So maybe this group of folks does have a bit more belief in spiritual things. But then again, that may wane as they move into their late twenties or early thirties.

How do these responses vary by religious tradition? That’s below.

The group that is the most likely to believe in both heaven and hell is Black Protestants, at 84%. In contrast, just 5% don’t believe in either. That’s a gap of 79 points. For evangelicals, that gap is 72 points (79% vs. 7%). For Catholics, the gap is 60 points, and it’s 47 points for mainline Protestants.

But one result that should really jump off the page comes from the Latter-day Saints. A bare majority (53%) say that they believe in both heaven and hell. That’s right in line with the national average. But then 39% say that they do believe in heaven but do not believe in hell. That’s easily the highest percentage in the bottom-right square of any religious group in the data. I don’t have the space (nor the expertise) to fully explain this finding, but some cursory research indicates that the conception of hell for LDS is just different than for many other groups.

What about the non-religious? Well, it’s fair to say that nothing in particulars have a completely different posture than atheists or agnostics. About one-third of them believe in both heaven and hell, while half say that neither exists. For agnostics, 82% believe in neither, and it’s a whopping 94% of atheists. It’s worth pointing out that atheists have more homogeneity on these issues than any Christian group.

I did wonder, though, specifically about the existence of hell. I think for lots of churchgoing folks, that’s the one that is harder to really embrace. It’s quite a bit easier to believe in the existence of a place where good people are eternally rewarded than to believe in a place of eternal punishment.

I really like this graph because it tells a compelling story about the impact of church attendance on beliefs. Among both evangelicals and Black Protestants, the share who believe in hell does rise as church attendance becomes more frequent. But the effect is pretty minimal: 12 points for evangelicals and 11 points for Black Protestants when going from never attending to more than once a week. So even non-attenders hold to a pretty orthodox view of things.

For mainline Protestants, the story is a bit muddier. Belief in hell has a real inflection point—going from never attending to being a seldom attender raises belief by 11 percentage points. From that point forward, there’s not much change. Among weekly attending mainliners, about two-thirds believe in hell. That’s 20 points below evangelicals.

But check out that Catholic graph in the bottom-left corner. That result is as pretty as a picture. Each step up the attendance ladder leads to an increased belief in hell. Those bumps are incremental and statistically significant from one level to the next. The total percentage increase among Catholics from the bottom of the scale to the top is 38 percentage points. That’s easily the largest change in this data.

So here’s what we know.

1. Almost everyone believes in a soul—except for atheists. They are the clear outlier on this question.

2. A bare majority of Americans believe in both heaven and hell, while about 30% believe in neither. Belief in the afterlife is really high among older Americans but is waning among folks who are middle-aged.

3. When it comes to religious tradition, the results look about how one would expect—lots of Christians believe in both, but that’s not the case with the non-religious. Latter-day Saints are a big outlier here.

4. Church attendance does seem to drive up belief in hell for pretty much every group, but the impact is larger for some (Catholics) than others (evangelicals).

I think there’s some pretty compelling evidence that religious beliefs are still very sticky in the psyche of lots of Americans. Even as the pews empty out, the share of folks who believe in the afterlife won’t fall at the same rate.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

One of the books I’ve read in the last couple of years that has really stuck with me is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. It’s a distillation of a lot of his work on how people manage to puzzle their way through tricky moral situations. For instance, he discusses the classic Heinz dilemma.

A man’s wife is dying. A pharmacist has a drug that could save her, but charges far more than Heinz can afford. Should Heinz steal the drug?

Some people would say that stealing is always morally wrong, even if it’s done for a noble cause. Others contend that the ends justify the means in situations like this. Stealing may not be morally acceptable, but letting someone die is even worse.

So how do people decide what the right thing to do is? What cognitive resources do they tap into to justify their actions—or their inactions? And do non-religious folks have a different mental framework when it comes to morally complex issues compared to Christians, Jews, or Muslims?

The Pew Religious Landscape Study, which is hosted at the Association of Religion Data Archives, includes a four-question battery that begins with the following preamble: How important are each of the following to you when making decisions about right and wrong? The items listed are religious teachings and belief, logic and reason, practical experience and common sense, and scientific information.

Here’s how the entire sample respond to each of these four:

You can quickly notice that “logic and reason” and “practical experience” are easily the most popular responses in the survey. A clear majority (about 56%) say these two factors are extremely important when making decisions about what is right and wrong. Another 37% say they are very important. It’s fair to say that almost all Americans tap into these two resources when faced with having to work through something difficult.

You know what doesn’t show up nearly as much? Religious teachings. Only 28% of respondents said that leaning on their theological background was extremely important to them, and another 25% said it was very important. By contrast, about a quarter said that religious teachings were not too important or not at all important when they were faced with difficult moral questions.

Leaning on scientific information was quite a bit more popular than religion. In total, three-quarters of Americans believed that science was extremely or very important when making moral decisions. That’s 22 points higher than religious teachings. And only 4% of Americans chose the bottom two options for this question—the lowest share for any of the four statements.

Let me explore this a bit more deeply by calculating the share of each birth decade who said that each of the four statements was extremely important to them.

If you look across the top row of graphs, what you find is a lot of similarity in the mental frameworks of people born in the 1960s or earlier. The most popular option is “life experience,” which makes sense given that those in these birth cohorts have had decades under their belts. The second most popular choice is logic and common sense. Both science and religion are about equal with each other—roughly a third of each cohort says they are extremely important.

But notice what happens with the “science” responses as you move from older cohorts to younger ones: the share continues to increase. You can see this clearly in the second row of graphs. Among those born in the 1970s, 35% say scientific knowledge is extremely important when making decisions. For those born two decades later, that figure rises to 42%. At the same time, the percentage who rely on religion drops from 30% to 23% between these two cohorts.

Let’s bring religion into the mix now.

For those who follow this newsletter, it should come as no surprise that evangelicals prioritize their religious convictions over other sources when making decisions. In these data, 56% of evangelicals said that religious teachings were extremely important when it came to helping them make difficult moral decisions. The only other group that comes close is Black Protestants, at 48%. Compare that to mainline Protestants and Catholics, where the figure is just 25%. This pattern is reminiscent of what I showed in a previous post about the religious beliefs of clergy.

What’s striking as well are the results for the question about using scientific knowledge to make decisions. Given our understanding of evangelical theology, it would logically follow that evangelicals would place less emphasis on science. But what stands out is that no Christian group leans on science all that heavily, either. Among Catholics, the share who say scientific knowledge is extremely important is only nine points higher than among evangelicals. Even among the non-religious, just 49% said that scientific knowledge was extremely important.

That last graph got me wondering: can I identify distinct types of mental frameworks that Christians use when making difficult moral decisions? To explore this, I put together a very simple k-means clustering algorithm based on these four questions. Nothing fancy here—I just guessed at four clusters. As you’ll see in a minute, I really only found two that were especially intriguing.

One of the clusters was made up of Christians who simply chose “extremely important” for all four statements. That’s not all that exciting. Then there was another cluster who didn’t think that any of the four were especially important. Together, those two groups accounted for about 70% of all Christians in my sample. Again, I don’t find either group especially illuminating.

But the other two groups really did pique my interest. One was a group I labeled “low on religion,” shown by the green line in the graph above. They rate logic, experience, and science as very important in how they make decisions. However, when it comes to religion, their average score is only about 2.5 on a five-point scale. This group made up 17% of my Christian sample.

The other notable group consists of Christians I describe as “low on science.” They score religion, logic, and experience very highly, but then rank science much lower—just 2.7 out of 5. This was the smallest of the four clusters, representing 13% of the Christian subsample.

I find these two groups fascinating because they appear to locate their moral reasoning along very different axes. One group seems to take their religion seriously and, when confronted with a difficult choice, thinks, “What does the Bible say about this?” The other group of Christians appears to pay much less heed to the theology of their faith tradition.

I want to explore the differences between these two groups over the rest of the post. First, let me show the distribution of Christian traditions in each of these two clusters.

This is where the picture really came into sharp focus for me—these clusters are being generated from totally different sectors of Christianity. For the group that places a lot of emphasis on science, Catholics and mainline Protestants are way overrepresented. In my full sample of all Christians, 20% were mainline and 32% were Catholic. Among the cluster that was low on religious foundations, those figures jump to 31% mainline and 48% Catholic.

For the cluster that didn’t put much weight on science, evangelicals were dramatically overrepresented. Among all Christians, evangelicals made up 39% of the sample. In this “low on science” subset, a whopping 55% were evangelicals. Again, this tracks well with what we already know about how evangelicals navigate their lives—there’s a strong emphasis on faith and less enthusiasm for scientific discoveries.

You can also see a really noticeable difference when comparing these two clusters in terms of educational attainment.

For the cluster that didn’t think religious teachings were all that important when making moral decisions, the distribution of educational attainment doesn’t deviate much from the full sample of Christians. For instance, 22% of both the overall sample and this “low on religion” cluster had earned at least a graduate degree. In total, 47% of this group held a bachelor’s degree or more—just one point lower than the full Christian sample.

But for those who placed much less emphasis on science, educational attainment was markedly lower than in the rest of the Christian sample. In this cluster, 43% had stopped at high school, which is a whopping 23 points higher than the full sample of Christian respondents. By contrast, only 23% had completed a four-year college degree—about half the rate of the full Christian sample.

Looking at church attendance across these two clusters is even more fascinating. The folks who don’t lean on scientific knowledge very much are highly religiously active—43% report attending church every week. For those who don’t put much emphasis on religious teachings, attendance is far more infrequent. In fact, among this cluster, 58% say they attend religious services less than once per year, while only 8% report going every single week.

So what do we see when we compare these two clusters?

1. Low on Religion.
This group is disproportionately made up of mainline Protestants and Catholics. Their level of educational attainment closely mirrors that of the full Christian sample, but their church attendance is strikingly low.

2. Low on Science.
The majority of this group consists of evangelicals (55%), with relatively few mainline Protestants or Catholics. Their level of educational attainment is noticeably lower than the rest of the Christian sample, and they are much more likely to be frequent church attenders.

I think the evidence here points to a clear conclusion: not everyone is a Christian in the same way. Evangelicals (and, to a lesser extent, Black Protestants) stand apart from Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants. The former group takes their faith very seriously. Not only do they attend church frequently, but they have deeply internalized the theology of their tradition. For a sizable share of other Christians, faith does not play a central role in how they make moral decisions.

It may sound like an obvious statement, but sometimes it needs to be said again: religion doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

I was thinking back on that time in my life the other day and wondering if everyone was so obsessed with meaning and purpose like teenage Ryan. This is a common theme in my thinking, by the way: “Was I just a weird kid, or was it totally normal to be thinking these thoughts?” That’s probably a big motivation for this whole newsletter, really. And today, I actually have a really good answer to this question about meaning and purpose.

Pew included a question on their Religious Landscape Survey that was really simple: “How often do you think about the meaning and purpose of life?” The response options ranged from “never” to “at least once a week.” This was absolutely an example of a time when I had zero idea how folks would respond to a question like that.

Come to find out, lots of people seem to be ruminating on meaning and purpose on a regular basis. Nearly half the sample (47%) said that this was a thought they had at least once a week. (As an aside, I think the response options should be expanded to include an option for “every day,” but that’s neither here nor there.) But the distribution of responses to this question certainly tilted in the direction of higher frequency—two-thirds of respondents said that they thought about meaning and purpose at least on a monthly basis.

That means that very few people are at the bottom end of the distribution. Only 3% said that they never thought about the meaning and purpose of life, and another 12% said it was a seldom occurrence. In other words, almost all American adults are thinking about these “big picture” philosophical questions on a pretty regular basis.

The next logical step here is bringing age into the equation. I was always under the impression that thoughts of meaning and purpose were especially prominent when you were trying to navigate the big decisions in life—where to go to college, what kind of job to work in, who to marry, etc. Then, once your life got settled, questions of meaning and purpose began to fade.

Yeah, that hunch about how the world works is pretty much incorrect based on this data. Among the oldest folks in the dataset (those born before 1950), the share who thought about meaning and purpose every week was 49%. Just 18% chose the seldom/never options. And honestly, those percentages don’t change that much at all when looking at younger birth cohorts. Among folks born in the 1970s, 46% are thinking about meaning and purpose every week—that’s just three points less than the oldest respondents.

You do see that “weekly” number decline just a little bit among younger folks, but it’s not by a huge amount. Among respondents who were born in the early 2000s, 44% were thinking about meaning and purpose every week. That’s five points lower than those born sixty years earlier. But then an even bigger share (24%) say that they think about these topics every month. So, if you add together the monthly and weekly shares among the youngest cohort, it’s 68%. For the oldest respondents, it’s 64%.

Taken together, I just don’t know if it’s reasonable to conclude that existential questions become more or less commonplace as we age. In reality, it doesn’t seem like it makes much of a difference overall.

You know what time it is, though—we have to throw religion into the mix.

Now, I don’t really know what I expected when I pulled this bit of analysis together, but I was surprised by how clear the results were from this question about meaning and purpose. Atheists are easily the least inclined to think about these types of questions. Only 26% of them said that this was a weekly concern of theirs—that was 21 points lower than the full sample and nine points lower than the next group in line (Buddhists). You can see that agnostics are near the top of the graph, too. They’re in the same general neighborhood as Buddhists, Jews, and those who identify as nothing in particular. But it’s undoubtedly true that non-religious folks are thinking about these questions a whole lot less than the average American.

Which means that a lot of really religious groups can be found at the other end of the graph. The two groups that think about these existential questions the most are Latter-day Saints and Black Protestants—two-thirds are thinking about this stuff on a weekly basis. Then there’s a bit of a gap before evangelicals show up at 58%. But it’s fascinating to me how there’s a clear connection between religious groups that have a high level of engagement and groups that also think about meaning and purpose a whole bunch. It’s like those two things run hand in hand with each other.

Let me combine the last two graphs on religious affiliation and age of respondent into a single bit of simplified analysis. I’ll use just two religious groups—Christians and the nones—and focus on the oldest two birth cohorts and the youngest two as well.

The group that clearly thinks about meaning and purpose infrequently is older nones. Just 28% said it was on their minds every week. Meanwhile, 34% said that they didn’t think about these questions even on a yearly basis. Older Christians are completely the opposite of that—they are basically twice as likely to think about these issues on a weekly basis (54%). It’s wild to think that older folks can be so incredibly different in how much they think about purpose and meaning.

When looking at younger folks, the divide between Christians and the non-religious is a whole lot smaller. Among Christians born in 1990 or later, 51% are thinking about meaning and purpose every single week, compared to 39% of the non-religious. The gap here is 12 percentage points. It was 26 points when comparing these two groups in the older age cohort.

But here’s something else worth flagging—older Christians think about meaning and purpose with greater frequency than younger Christians. Among the non-religious, it’s the exact opposite. Retired nones rarely think about these questions, while younger nones are considering them often. I don’t have a good explanation for that, honestly.

Why would a Latter-day Saint think about this stuff more than an atheist, though? Or maybe even more probing—why do Black Protestants score higher on this question than Catholics? I had a theory: Black Protestants go to church a whole lot more than Catholics. Let’s just test that one out.

And we have hit paydirt here. That’s an incredibly clean result across every single group that I tested on this question. The more often folks attend church, the more likely they are to be thinking about meaning and purpose on a weekly basis. You can often see a clean break in the data when looking at weekly or weekly+ attendance. Looking at evangelicals makes that really plain. For those who attend monthly, 51% are thinking about meaning and purpose with high frequency. Among weekly attenders, it’s 63%, and then it rises to 74% among those who attend multiple times per week.

For mainline Protestants, the divide is between weekly (57%) and more than once per week (73%). You can also see a jump among Black Protestants who are attending more than once a week, as well. For Catholics, there’s a clear connection between Mass attendance and thinking about meaning and purpose—it rises nine percentage points when going from monthly to weekly attendance, and then it goes up a whopping 18 percentage points for those who go to Mass multiple times per week.

Even though the Latter-day Saint sample is not very large, you can see that those who go to church on a weekly basis are thinking about meaning and purpose a whole lot more than those who attend less frequently. This is basically a universal conclusion from this data: attending church opens one up to thinking about the higher things in life.

Before I close up, I just wanted to check one more thing: does going to church online have the same impact as attending in person? I restricted my sample to just the six groups included in the prior graph and looked at each combination of online and in-person attendance.

Given the prior graph, it should come as little surprise that the top-right square (weekly attendance for both online and in person) scores the highest—73%. No other grouping really comes close, honestly. Dropping down to monthly in-person attendance results in a decline of nearly ten points. So that’s a finding we can take to the bank: sitting in a pew creates space for existential questions.

Look at the top-left square in the heatmap. This is folks who never attend in person but watch online all the time. Among this subgroup, 60% of people think about meaning and purpose on a weekly basis. Now look at the bottom right—these are people who go in person all the time but never attend online. The percentage here is 58%. That’s actually really surprising to me because it suggests that being heavily involved in worship, whether online or in person, doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to people contemplating the big questions in life.

Of course, doing both is still more conducive to internal contemplation, but this is a situation in which online attendance does seem to be doing some “work” on other variables. That doesn’t happen very often.

So, who is thinking about the higher things in life? Generally speaking, there’s not much of an age difference when looking at the entire sample. But when you bring religion into the mix, there’s a clear delineation between non-religious folks and those who are part of “high-intensity” Christian groups. That difference is really because of regular church attendance. Engaging in regular worship is incredibly predictive of thinking about meaning and purpose on a regular basis.

Or maybe it’s the opposite: folks who are always thinking about meaning and purpose are more inclined to seek out opportunities to ponder those ideas on a regular basis.

That’s a great question for another time.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

Let me start by showing a simple data point: the share of the public who says that they have no religious affiliation. But I’m going to give you that figure across six different surveys that I can find strewn all over the internet. They include the Cooperative Election Study, the Pew Research Center, the Nationscape Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute survey, the General Social Survey, and the Gallup Survey.

Here’s what they all basically agree on—the share of Americans who are non-religious has been increasing over the last fifteen years. That’s just undeniable, no matter what instrument you look at. But here’s where they disagree: the actual percentage of nones in the United States. And these differences aren’t small, either. Here are five estimates of the share of nones in 2024:

CES – 34%
Pew – 29%
PRRI – 28%
GSS – 25%
Gallup – 22%

If you use the CES estimate, the number of nones in the United States is about 115 million. If you use the Gallup statistic, it’s about 75 million. That’s a difference of 40 million people—basically the population of the state of California. These surveys, which all use different methodologies, different questions, and different response options, lead to widely different conclusions about the actual share of non-religious Americans. I actually wrote a paper about this a few years ago, making the case that the GSS figure is too low: How Many “Nones” Are There? Explaining the Discrepancies in Survey Estimates.

So, I’m pretty familiar with the nuances of how these different surveys approach this topic. But I want to zero in on a finding that I’ve sort of made “popular” over the last couple of years about the relationship between education and religion in the United States. The measurement of religion that I’m focusing on here is clearly belonging—how someone answers the question, “What is your present religion, if any?” Respondents are then given a bunch of options like Protestant, Catholic, LDS, Jewish, etc. But the last few are typically atheist, agnostic, and nothing in particular.

Here’s that result from the Nationscape Survey, which surveyed over 477,000 people in the United States using a survey instrument that was deployed weekly from mid-2019 through the first few weeks of 2021.

For long-time readers of this work, there’s no surprise here—educated people are less likely to be religious nones. These differences are pretty linear, too. Among folks who stopped at high school, 28% are non-religious. For those who finished a four-year college degree, it’s four points lower than that. But the level of education that yields the lowest percentage is clearly folks with master’s degrees. Only 20% of them are nones.

That’s a pretty striking finding, right? And it upends a whole lot of preconceived notions about how religion works in the United States.

But here’s the thing—variables about religious affiliation and education are in almost every single survey that’s being conducted right now. So let me show you that same relationship (education and religious affiliation) across three other survey instruments: Pew’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study.

I’ve mapped 84% confidence intervals on each of these bars—a choice that allows us to visually identify statistical significance when intervals don’t overlap.1 I also collapsed education into three levels to keep the subgroup sample sizes robust. This is as rigorous a test of this relationship as I can muster across multiple instruments.

What does NPORS tell us? In 2021 and 2023, the relationship between education and non-religion is positive: highly educated folks are more likely to be atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” compared to those with a high school diploma. In other years, the confidence intervals overlap, meaning there’s no clear relationship. Crucially, however, you cannot use this data to claim that educated people are more likely to be religious.

The GSS data leads us to the same basic conclusion. In 2016 and 2021, there is a clear positive relationship between higher education and being unaffiliated. In other years, the results are a wash. Again, there is zero evidence here that education correlates with religiosity; if anything, the evidence points toward the opposite.

However, the Cooperative Election Study (CES) results across the bottom of the graph tell a completely different story. Here, the conclusion isn’t mixed at all. In every single survey year, folks with four-year degrees are significantly less likely to be non-religious. Because the CES sample size is so massive, the confidence intervals are tight and do not overlap. The unmistakable conclusion from the CES—and the aforementioned Nationscape—is that educated folks are actually more likely to be religious.

Do you see the contradiction? In two surveys (NPORS and GSS), education predicts being a “None.” In two others (CES and Nationscape), education predicts being religious. My simple regression analysis of the impact of education on non-religion confirms this fundamental disagreement between the datasets.

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I was clearly responding to the zeitgeist of the time, which was apparently crying out for very crunchy hair. But the zeitgeist is more than just cargo shorts and Tamagotchi pets. It’s also about which ideas we think are worthy of debating ad nauseam. American religion is certainly not immune to the spirit of the times, and when I was growing up in a Southern Baptist church, one of the topics that seemed to be endlessly debated was evolution versus creationism.

For those unfamiliar with the contours of this debate, let me describe it this way: to believe that human beings evolved from other, inferior species of life would be to reject everything that the Bible has to say about basically everything else. The reason? Because you are turning away from literally the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, where the scriptures state, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.”

So if you toss out the literal creation story, you are headed down a slippery slope that could lead one to question other parts of the Bible, like the parting of the Red Sea, Jonah and the whale, or, most grievously, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if you start to reject the Easter story, then you are essentially no longer a Christian.

But what’s interesting about that whole line of argumentation is that I really haven’t heard it much recently. In fact, I just don’t see creation versus evolution being discussed that much at all on really any social media platform. So when I was scrolling through the codebook for the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, I was struck by the inclusion of this question: “Which statement about the development of human life on Earth comes closest to your view?”

There were three response options.

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (I call this the “pure evolution” response).

2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (I call this intelligent design).

3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (I call this the creationist view).

Here’s how the full sample of nearly 37,000 respondents answered that question.

The plurality response was the middle path—the idea that evolution is a very real thing, but that it was guided by God’s hand. This accounted for just under half of the sample (48%). The next most popular response was a belief in pure evolution. One-third of respondents said that God had no role in the evolutionary process. If you include the “don’t know” responses, that’s well over 80% of all answers.

That means the share of Americans who espouse a purely creationist view is just 17%. I know that words can often be subjective, but I think it’s fair to say that a position held by fewer than one in five Americans could reasonably be described as “a small minority.” This is why I love statistics, by the way, because they get us much closer to an objective answer to a question like: What share of Americans completely reject evolution?

So, let’s peel this back one more layer and look at responses to that same question, this time broken down by the religious tradition of the respondent.

I sorted the columns so that the groups with the highest percentage of creationist views are at the top and those most likely to reject creationism are at the bottom. There were only two groups in the sample where creationism comprised at least 20% of respondents: evangelicals at 26% and Orthodox Christians at 23%. When I say that creationism is a minority view, I mean that it’s not even a significant share of evangelicals. That’s something to keep in mind when one of these debates tends to pop up.

Which groups are most likely to reject creationism? Well, the non-religious were pretty easy to guess, right? Two-thirds of them take the “pure evolution” stance, and just 11% say that they believe in creationism. But what really struck me was that Jews and the nones had almost exactly the same distribution of responses to this question.

I also feel like I have to mention how few Catholics and mainline Protestants embrace creationism. Among Catholics, it was just 17%, and for mainliners it was even lower—13%. But note that a majority of both groups embraced intelligent design. Fewer than a quarter of either group believes in “pure evolution.”

Let me throw an age variable into the mix now. Because some of these samples weren’t that large to begin with, I had to collapse age into three categories based on decade of birth.

What really jumped off the screen when I made this graph was how little age really mattered within many of these traditions. I guess I had assumed that creationism was a viewpoint embraced primarily by older folks and that it was falling out of favor with younger adults, but often the differences across birth cohorts were incredibly modest.

Among evangelicals, there was just a four-point difference from the oldest to the youngest. For mainliners, it was six percentage points, and for Catholics it was only five points as well. There are a couple of outliers here and there (Black Protestants and Orthodox Christians), but beyond that, generations just don’t seem to matter that much.

I also want to make this point plain: it’s essentially impossible to find a subgroup where a majority take a creationist view on this topic. I mean, look at evangelical Protestants who were born before 1970. If there were a group that tended to take a more literalist view of the Bible, this would be it, right? Even among them, only 28% are creationists, while about two-thirds believe in intelligent design.

There are, of course, a whole lot of factors that could lead someone to embrace creationism. I could spend all day making graphs of different variables like age, race, gender, religious devotion, and so on. Instead, here’s what I did: I pulled together a regression analysis to determine what factors increase the likelihood of holding a creationist view. The model predicts whether someone holds a creationist view while simultaneously accounting for age, race, gender, religious practice and belief, and political partisanship. In other words, it allows us to see which factors matter most after holding the others constant.

Let’s stick with the topic of age, since that was discussed in the prior analysis. Here’s the impact that age has on a creationist viewpoint after controlling for a whole range of demographic, political, and religious factors.

The model predicts that older Americans are more likely to be creationists compared to their children and grandchildren. Among those born before 1950, about 27% are predicted to hold a creationist view. That percentage declines in a fairly consistent way across successive birth cohorts: for those born in the 1970s, the model predicts that about 24% are creationists, while among respondents born in 1980 or later the predicted probability falls to roughly 21%.

It’s important to pay attention to the error bars for these estimates, which often overlap with adjacent cohorts. Still, we can say with some confidence that younger adults are less likely to be creationists than older ones—even after accounting for differences in religious practice, belief, and political identity across generations. The decline isn’t dramatic (on the order of five percentage points), but it is consistent.

When I was building this model, the first thing I did was run the regression with just demographic variables. That can give us a sense of how things like race and gender play a role in predicting a creationist viewpoint before adding factors like church attendance, which can overwhelm demographic effects. In the first model, gender really popped off the screen. Women were noticeably more likely to hold creationist views compared to men.

I initially thought that this finding would “wash out” when I threw in a bunch of variables related to religion and politics. But guess what? Even in the full model, female respondents were noticeably more likely to be creationists compared to men. In percentage terms, about 29% of women were predicted to be creationists, compared to just 21% of men. That’s a finding that is both statistically and substantively significant.

Why is this the case? I don’t even want to speculate. So—fire away in the comments.

Before I wrap up, I have to show you how both religion and politics shape creationist views. Of all the variables included in the regression, the one that consistently produced the largest coefficient was a question about the importance of the Bible in the life of the respondent. That tracks, right? But let me illustrate how that question interacts with political partisanship to predict a creationist viewpoint.

First, let’s point out that Democrats are the real outlier here. Among political independents and Republicans, there’s no statistically significant difference in the coefficients. For those two groups, the predicted probability goes from about 11% among folks who place no importance on the Bible to about 20% among independents and Republicans who say that the Bible is very important.

For Democrats, the likelihood of believing in creationism does double when moving from left to right, but the actual percentage-point change is much more modest (from 6% to 12%). But let highlight something that is really fascinating: among Republicans who say that the Bible is not important, 11% are creationists. Among Democrats who say that the Bible is very important, 11% are creationists. There’s a kind of theological conservatism baked into Republicans that defies traditional religious variables. Even Republicans who express no affinity toward religion seem to hold to some pretty traditional, literalist values.

From all of this work, I think I’ve come to a couple of conclusions about the issue of creationism versus evolution:

1. The share of Americans who take a strict creationist view is very low—easily less than 20% of the population. And it’s hard to cut the data in any way that makes that percentage rise significantly.

2. Some of the factors that predict a creationist view are not that surprising: being older, being politically conservative, and believing that the Bible is very important to your life. However, the result for gender is one that I’m going to be contemplating for a while: women are more likely to be creationists than men.

But for anyone who manages to get to the Creation Museum, it seems pretty likely that a significant majority of people perusing the exhibits and taking pictures in front of a full-sized replica of Noah’s Ark don’t actually believe in the biblical account of either event.

Code for this post can be found here.

Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.