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.

The amount of cynicism in the world is sometimes hard for my mind to grasp. I really struggle watching TV shows and movies that have a really bleak view of the world. I don’t want to watch The Golden Girls all the time (although it is a really great thing to put on the TV right before bed), but I just can’t spend a lot of my time meditating on the evilness of the human experience over and over again. I think it’s bad for my soul, to be honest.

The internet only makes it worse. During the college football playoffs, the Indiana Hoosiers went on an absolute heater. They were playing out of their minds. In the semi-final game against Oregon, they blew them out of the building, winning by 34 points. On the first play from scrimmage, an Indiana player (D’Angelo Ponds) intercepted a pass and ran it back for a touchdown. After the game had ended, an equipment manager from Oregon found Ponds on the sideline and presented him with the ball that he had intercepted to start the game. It was an absolute class act.

While most of the comments were positive, a few of them were so incredibly cynical.

“Staged. Only doing it because of the cameras and for clicks”
“He’s just doing that in the off chance that they get Ponds to enter the portal and transfer to Oregon next season”

It almost feels like there is a growing group of people who can see no goodness in the world. And that viewpoint is being celebrated and amplified on social media.

I get the foreboding sense that Americans just don’t trust each other anymore. They think that everyone is selfish, cruel, and without a moral compass. People don’t start a company to build a great product; they do it to make themselves a fortune. Politicians don’t run for office because they want to make life easier for their fellow citizens; they do it because they are power-hungry.

Well, the other day I was browsing the codebook for the 2024 General Social Survey on the Association of Religion Data Archives and was reminded of a really pertinent question to this discussion. It simply asks:

Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?

You know what, I am kind of surprised at how stable these lines are over time. It does look like there has been a decline in people saying, “others can be trusted,” but it’s a pretty subtle shift. For the Silent Generation, it declined ten percentage points across about five decades of data. For Boomers, it was rock steady from 1972 through 2010, then it dropped noticeably in the last couple of years.

But check out Generation X. If anything, their level of interpersonal trust has actually gone up over time, and now it’s at basically the same level as Boomers. Back in 2010, the gap between those two lines was ten percentage points. I need someone to explain that to me. And, while you are at it, figure out what’s going on with Millennials. I think trust is up, but it’s not a clear pattern.

Then, that Gen Z line is pretty easy to figure out: trust started out low and has only slipped from there. It was slightly above 20% in 2018. Now, it’s in the single digits. Oof. There’s no generation that is less trusting of other people than Gen Z.

I do feel like I need to zoom in on the last couple of years of data, though. Just to make this point plain.

I think this graph does a better job of showing the complete picture when it comes to interpersonal trust. Look at the middle three generations: Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. The share who say that “you can’t be too careful in trusting other people” is really similar: 62%, 64%, and 67%. It’s not like these folks have a huge well of goodwill toward random strangers. In contrast, the share who say folks can generally be trusted is around 30% among Boomers and Gen X, but is clearly lower among Millennials at 24%.

Gen Z is just on a different planet, though. The share who can’t trust others at all is 74%; that’s seven points higher than Millennials. The share who say others can be trusted is a measly 13%. That’s 11 points lower than Millennials and 17 points lower than Gen X.

This is an empirical fact: unless they experience a significant increase in trust (which we haven’t seen in fifty years of polling data), Gen Z will be the least trusting generation in modern American history.

Okay, that’s firmly established, right? Now we get to move to the unpleasant task of trying to figure out what factors have an impact on interpersonal trust. One that absolutely looms large is education. I just divided the sample into those with a high school diploma or less and those who have earned a four year college degree.

These gaps are huge, folks! The relationship between education and trust is just impossible to deny. Among Boomers with a college degree, 41% trust other folks. It’s just 23% among those who stopped at high school. For Gen X, those figures are 38% and 30%, respectively. But then they balloon back up for Millennials. Among those who stopped at high school, just 15% say that others can generally be trusted. It’s 40% of Millennials who have a bachelor’s degree.

Now, what can we make of Gen Z? Well, the first thing to note is that the baseline of trust for them is just so much lower than other generations. But the education gap is still there. Among members of Gen Z who stopped their education at 12th grade, only 5% say that other people can be trusted. But even among those who have earned a four year college degree, it’s 10%. Part of the problem here is that Gen Z is still working their way through educational attainment. So it may take a while for these education gaps to fully solidify. But even among highly educated Zoomers, trust is in short supply.

To this point, I haven’t even mentioned religion, which is an absolute travesty. We need to rectify that immediately. I do think that there are ample reasons to believe that trust is related to religious attendance. I mean, you have to be a bit more trusting to show up at a house of worship with lots of other people voluntarily, right?

There are certainly some gaps in trust based on church attendance, but they really aren’t as large as I would have guessed. For instance, among Boomers who go to church every week, 29% say that other people can be trusted. It’s 26% of those who never go to church. The gap on the “can’t be too careful” response is a bit bigger, though: 9 percentage points.

But then if you compare Gen X and Millennials, I just have to scratch my head a bit. There’s a huge gap in trust among Gen X. Among regular church attenders, 49% say that others can be trusted. It’s only 30% of the never attenders. However, there is no gap at all among Millennials on this question. Which makes no sense to me. It’s the only generation in which religious attendance makes no difference on this question. In every other cohort, the gap is consistent and large.

I do need to highlight the huge disparity with Gen Z, though. This is the biggest gap of all. Among Gen Z folks who don’t go to church at all: 88% say that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people. It’s only 50% of Zoomers who attend church regularly. That’s a chasm. Non-religious Gen Z folks are incredibly wary of their fellow citizens.

There are a lot of moving parts here, though. Many factors can impact trust: education, income, ideology, church attendance, gender and race. I wanted to try and isolate them from each other by pulling together a regression. What I really wanted to concentrate on was comparing Gen Z to older generations to see if trust “works” differently for young adults. Man, I was blown away here.

There were two factors that I identified that worked the same for the whole sample: education and church attendance. In both cases, they led to higher levels of interpersonal trust. The effect for Gen Z was larger than for older generations; that may be due to a smaller sample size. I think we can pretty much parse why education and socialization drive up interpersonal trust. It takes trust to go away to college and it also takes trust to show up to a house of worship each weekend. Non-social, untrusting folks wouldn’t volunteer to do stuff like that.

But then, the other two factors just don’t work the way I would have expected. For instance, take income. Among older Americans, higher income individuals are more trusting. For Generation Z, it’s the exact opposite. As income rises, so does distrust. And remember, that’s controlling for education. I don’t know what to make of that at all.

The other one that I will think about for a very long time is political ideology. Among older Americans who identify as liberal, they are more likely to trust other people. Among Gen Z liberals, it’s exactly the opposite. In fact, I struggled to find anything that had a more deleterious impact on trust among Gen Z than identifying as a liberal.

Now, this one has an interesting thought experiment behind it. Older Americans who are liberal are more trusting. Which makes some kind of sense. Liberalism is based on collectivism. It embraces the idea that “together, we can achieve more.” Things like universal healthcare rely on a sense of trust among large groups of people. So, yeah, I can see why liberals are more trusting for Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials.

However, why does it go in the opposite direction with Gen Z? Well, maybe liberals feel very slighted by the fact that Donald Trump has been on the ballot for president in every election in which they’ve been eligible to vote, and he’s won twice. Or it could be that they are more impacted by the cynicism of the internet than conservatives? Or maybe it’s because they report higher rates of depression and anxiety than the rest of the ideological spectrum?

I am just spitballing here. But, in my mind, this may be the most important thing I’ve uncovered in my newsletter in the last few months. Trust is an absolutely essential component of a functioning democracy. Without it, we return to the Hobbesian view of the world where we can accomplish none of the higher things in life because we are constantly worried about being assaulted, kidnapped, robbed, or murdered.

If this is the worldview of Gen Z, then the future of America is in real peril.

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.

Whenever I read a lot of chatter on the internet about people’s financial situations, the clear emotion that seems to come through is a creeping level of despair. People feel like they will never be able to get ahead. If their car breaks down, they won’t have the money to fix it. If their refrigerator stops working, they won’t have any way to replace it. They certainly can’t save for a down payment for a home nor can they really afford to have children. What a lot of them seem to believe is that their lives will be worse than their parents or grandparents.

I’ve always wanted to somehow measure despair, but I didn’t really know a good way to do that until Praveen Vissa, a bright student at John Burroughs high school in St. Louis reached out and wanted to propose that we work on a post together about a single question in the GSS aptly titled “goodlife.”

It simply states, “The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living -- do you agree or disagree?” Before we dig into how religion may play a role in shaping economic optimism (or despair), let’s start by just tracking how answers to that question have varied in the last thirty years.

This is clearly a question where I had absolutely no idea how the answers were going to look over time. I tried to hypothesize some reasons why economic pessimism would be higher or lower, but I just couldn’t fully conceptualize how someone would have answered this question in 1994 (the first time it was asked) or in the 2024 General Social Survey. What I found was that economic optimism is still fairly popular but it has taken a noticeable dip in the last 15 years or so.

In the 1990s, about two-thirds of Americans agreed that they had a good chance of improving their standard of living. That actually rose in a significant way as we moved into the early 2000s, when about three quarters of Americans believed that their economic future was going to be better than their current situation. But that was the high water mark. From there, things began to slide. By 2010, the share who took a positive view was around 60% and then it just continued to drop. In the last three waves of GSS (2021-2024), the share who agreed that they had a good chance of improving their standard of living dropped below 50%.

I do need to point out, though, that the rise in the share who disagree with that statement hasn’t really skyrocketed. It went from 20% of the sample around the time Barack Obama won the White House to 30% in the 2024 GSS. So, the optimism still exceeds the pessimism by 15 percentage points even today.

You know what we have to do at this point, right? Poke around some demographic variables to see if there’s any evidence that things like age or education have an impact on how people view the possibility of moving up the economic ladder.

When I look at this question by generation of respondents, I don’t know if I’m blown away by the result. That’s especially the case when considering the confidence intervals. The only thing that really jumps off the screen to me is the clear difference between Baby Boomers and everyone else. Only 39% of Boomers are convinced that their financial situation can be improved. Among younger generations, it was about ten percentage points higher.

There are two things that are worth considering here. One is that there’s a good reason Baby Boomers don’t think their financial situation is going to get better: they have just retired or are going to retire in the near future. That’s not usually a period in life when money becomes more plentiful. I looked back at prior periods in the GSS and found this same pattern — the generation that was closest to retirement was less apt to agree with the idea that their standard of living was going to rise.

The other thing that jumps out is that Gen X still feels pretty good about their ability to improve their financial state — really the same as Gen Z. I don’t know why that is, really. Is it a function of Gen Z just not being that optimistic about things? Or is it that Gen X just feels much rosier about their salaries rising? I don’t have a good handle on that.

The other big factor that could impact this is, of course, education. I just restricted my sample to folks born in 1965 or later. This means that age really has no impact on these results based on the prior graph.

What really comes through for me is that there is a clear cut-point in this data between those with graduate degrees and everyone else. Whether one just stopped at a high school diploma or earned a bachelor’s degree, the share who thought that their economic situation would improve in the future was statistically the same: just about 45%. To me, that’s fascinating because the data is crystal clear on this point: folks with college degrees make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than those who stopped at high school.

Maybe it’s just lifestyle creep? Maybe having a white collar job means living in an area with a higher cost of living? Maybe it’s student loan debts that are dragging them down? It’s hard to know, honestly. But those with a graduate degree are incredibly optimistic about the future: almost two-thirds believe that they have a good chance of improving their standard of living.

Okay, we haven’t even touched on religion yet. But let me do that now. I’ve written before about how religious people tend to report higher levels of happiness compared to those who claim no religious affiliation, so maybe those people are also more optimistic about their ability to move up the economic ladder?

One possible reason lies in how religion can shape a sense of hope for the future. A study found that religiosity is linked to higher levels of optimism and expectations that life will improve, which may stem from how belief systems shape a person’s outlook on life. If that’s true, we should at least see some hint of it in how people answer this specific question about their economic potential.

But, I certainly don’t see a huge difference in responses here. Among people who claimed any religious affiliation, the share who agreed that their economic future could be better was just slightly above 50%. The lowest score was among Catholics at 49%. The highest percentage was among Black Protestants and those of other faith groups at 55%. However, the differences between any of these religious groups was not statistically significant. In other words, we can’t really say if evangelicals have a more positive outlook compared to Muslims. It’s all right about the same level.

Now, I do think that the data is suggestive of the idea that the non-religious are a bit less likely to see a better economic future. Only 46% of the nones agreed to the statement we’ve been focusing on in this post. That difference, though, is not statistically significant. Compared to any of the other individual groups, but when I just collapsed all Christians together that tightened up the confidence interval in a way that made the nones clearly lower than Christians.

But, again, I’m not really bowled over by this huge finding about how religious people have a more hopeful economic outlook compared to the non-religious. That led me to poke around a bunch of variables in a regression analysis. I controlled for things like education, age, political ideology, and religious affiliation.

You can quickly ascertain what I found when I plotted these coefficients and confidence intervals: not a whole lot of anything, really. I do find that having a graduate degree is predictive of having a more positive economic outlook. But that’s really all I could ascertain from this analysis. There’s really no difference between generations, the gap between political liberals and conservatives is non-existent. And, like I just discussed earlier, the question about religious affiliation doesn’t really do much, either.

In other words, a whole bunch of “null results.” But then I threw in a different religion variable into the regression model and I hit paydirt. Frequency of religious attendance does have a pretty clear impact on this question of one’s likelihood of raising their standard of living.

Again, I controlled for a whole bunch of factors that could matter here like age and education, but what I found was unmistakable — people who go to church more often are much more likely to believe that they will have a positive economic future. Among never attenders, just 44% agreed that they could raise their standard of living. Among those who attended church once a week, it was 58%. That difference is both statistically significant and substantively meaningful. A fourteen point increase on this question is the largest we’ve seen across any variable.

Why does attendance have such a clear impact? I don’t know if I can point to one single causal pathway. One thing that came to mind is that maybe people who are more social believe that they can always rely on their network of friends and associates to help them get a job or move up in their career? Maybe more socially active people are just more optimistic about everything else in life?

One possibility is that attendance captures what affiliation alone misses: being embedded in a community. Showing up week after week builds trust, connections, and support over time. One paper shows that frequent attenders report greater life satisfaction and purpose in life, and that attendance predicted these outcomes more strongly than other forms of community involvement, suggesting that benefits come from social integration.

If religious social networks function as a safety net when things go wrong, it makes sense that frequent churchgoers would feel more confident navigating setbacks and more optimistic about their future.

I don’t know for sure. But I really do think that this analysis is going to be the impetus for some future data exploration, as socialness and optimism seem to run on the same tracks.

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 plan on the first mailbag post to run in late August, so get your questions in before August 1. If this goes well, it will become a recurring feature.

I’ve said offhand a few times that PR people are not my favorite folks on Earth and there’s a reason for that. Their job and my job are not the same job. Actually, many times they are diametrically opposed to each other. Folks who work in public relations want to cast their organization in the best light possible. I want to try and get to the unvarnished truth about what’s actually going on behind the headline numbers.

This is on full display when a university releases its enrollment numbers and they aren’t very good. The headline may be something like, “<UNIVERSITY> experiences a 7% increase in transfer students.” Then you actually read over the report and the first couple of paragraphs are about peripheral metrics that point in a positive direction. Buried near the end is the actual number that we all really care about: overall enrollment, which is often down by a significant percentage. The press release is not actually lying, it’s just burying the bad news under a mountain of words that could be seen as positive.

Denominational reporting tends to be less opaque, but it still tends toward emphasizing the positive trends. For instance when the Baptist Press released their annual article about updated Southern Baptist Convention numbers it had the headline, “Southern Baptists see attendance, baptism gains amid membership declines.” I can actually appreciate how this one was presented – the good news up front but also not totally minimizing the continued downward trend in SBC membership.

You can probably guess where I’m headed: I’m going to tell you the truth about what’s happening in the Southern Baptist Convention. I can summarize my views pretty succinctly – there’s nothing in the most recent numbers that changes my view of where the SBC is headed in the future.

Let’s start, as we always do, with the broadest look at SBC membership data. I started this chart right after the end of World War II.

I’ve said this on many occasions, but the rise of the SBC from 1945 through 1990 will never ever be replicated again in the history of American religion. The denomination recorded 5.8M members right as all those GIs were coming home from defeating the Axis powers. As the United States began the 1990s, the SBC had swelled to 15M members. In many years, they were adding a quarter million new folks per year. That’s five thousand people being added to the membership files every single week for a period of 45 years. Insane to consider that momentum.

But the good times didn’t last, of course. Religious historians will look back at 2006 as the absolute peak of denominationalism in the United States. The SBC enjoyed 16.2M members. Something that Convention, or no other denomination in the U.S., will ever see again.Then the cracks started to form. Slowly at first, and then the pinholes became the size of golf balls and the hull of the SBC began taking on water in an incredibly rapid fashion.

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So, that’s a 4.4 percentage point shift between 2022 and 2025. The nones were back to their levels from 2018. That’s a big deal, clearly. In that previous post, I noted that the General Social Survey also recorded a drop in the nones: down about 3 points between 2021 and 2024. This isn’t just a single rogue survey, it’s now two different instruments (with different methodologies) arriving at a similar conclusion.

If the nones dropped by 3-4 percentage points over the last few years, how did that happen exactly? That’s the goal of this post: trying to zoom in on a specific trend in the data that needs some more careful exploration.

The graph below was included in the previous post—it’s the share of each generation that reported no religious affiliation in the Cooperative Election Study in the last few years.

The generation that really jumped out to me for this post was the Baby Boomers. I’ve written about this group several times in the last couple of months on this newsletter. They are the most important generation in American religion right now for a couple of reasons. One is that they are numerically large. The second is that they are religiously active. And the final reason is that they are rapidly heading toward their twilight years now (the youngest Boomers are in their mid-sixties).

Notice their trajectory in the CES—it looks like the first portion of a roller coaster. A slow ascent, a clear peak, and then a rapid decline. In 2016, 23% of Boomers were non-religious. That rose to 28% by 2023. But the last two surveys have this figure at 24% and 21% respectively. That’s a return to levels seen in 2010. What in the world is happening there?

If I break this down into the three different types of nones, we can see much more granularity in the data. The share of Boomers who were atheists has never really been that high. It was 3% of the sample for a stretch that ran from 2008 through 2015. It did slowly creep up in the last decade, though, and in some survey years it was 5%. Agnostics were on a similar trajectory. But that noticeably reversed in the last two years. Now, atheists and agnostics are 3% each, down from a total of 9% in 2023.

But the bigger drop in this graph is that third category of nones: the nothing in particular. Notice how they’ve grown from 15% of Boomers to 19% in the 2023 data. That’s reversed significantly. Now, just 14% of Boomers are nothing in particular. That’s a five point decline in just two years. That’s a level of movement that is uncommon in the world of religious demography.

Of course my wheels are spinning now, seeking out the reason why. One quick theory I had was that Republican Boomers are coming back to religion because they believe that to be a crucial part of being a member of the GOP. Republicans are the party of people of faith, so it makes sense to check that out.

This graph is not what I expected to see at all, honestly. Not even a little bit. In fact, it’s a graph that does not line up with my understanding of religion and politics in any meaningful way. The share of Republican Boomers who are non-religious is just 13%. That’s basically what it was four years ago. The baseline has been 12-13% for about a decade now. That’s not the story of how Boomers have shifted their religiosity.

Instead, the trend lines show a big shift in the lines for Democrats and the politically Independent Boomers. For Boomer Democrats, the rise in the nones is startling. It was just 21% back in 2008. By 2023, it had exploded to nearly 37%. That’s an increase of about a percentage point a year. But then it reversed itself and the share of Democrats who claim no religious affiliation dropped about seven percentage points in a span of two years. For Independents, it’s even larger: nearly eleven percentage points between 2023 and 2025.

If you even have a passing interest in demography you know that shifts like that should be met with skepticism. Change is best described as glacial. Two percentage points in a year is a lot of movement. Here we’ve got five points a year. It seems…off.

We have ways to validate the CES data, by the way. It’s pretty simple: just pull in another survey that asks similar questions and see if the trend lines there move in a similar pattern. That’s what I did below, just took the General Social Survey and calculated the share of Boomers who are non-religious over time. That survey was last fielded in 2024, by the way. So that’s as far as my sample can go.

In the GSS, the pattern is really stable over time. You can see that back in 2008, the GSS pegged Boomers at around 14% non-religious. That was about three points lower than the CES. The GSS trend line is exactly what we typically see doing this kind of work—a slow and steady change over a long time horizon. Even in 2024, the GSS estimate of Boomer nones is 16.5%. That’s not statistically distinct from the 2008 data.

The CES, in contrast, displays a consistent rise in the share of Boomers who claim no religious affiliation. The numbers do seem to see saw during a period that runs from 2012 through 2020, but the macro-level trend is an increase from 21% to 25%. Then a noticeable bump in 2023 and two years of decline. In other words, the lines don’t look that much like each other. CES shows a clear rise and fall. The GSS just shows a very gradual rise that’s not statistically significant.

Here’s the same analysis, but I broke it down by political partisanship.

Here, I just can’t see anything that resembles a consistent pattern across these two samples. I mean, the line for Democrats in the CES just has a completely different shape than that from the GSS. The GSS had a big spike in 2021, then a noticeable drop in the last two years. The CES had a spike in 2023 and then a drop in the two years after that. There’s just no consistency there. And you can see the same thing for Independents—the lines don’t make sense when compared to each other. The last few years of the CES is a massive decline. In the GSS, it’s a rise in the nones.

I think that the graph for Republicans is much less concerning. Both lines are definitely trending upward. They each show a little bump in the nones in close succession. But then both lines dropped back to baseline in the last few years.

Guys, this is why this job is hard! There’s not a consistent pattern in this data. Both surveys are not speaking with the same voice on a very basic question of religious demography. I can’t look at these last few graphs and make a clear pronouncement about the overall religiosity of Baby Boomers. I wish it was easy, but it’s just not.

There is one graph, though, that does seem to tamp down my anxiety a bit. It’s the share of Boomers who attend church nearly every week or more over the last fifteen years.

This graph looks much more plausible. Both samples have the weekly attendance rate around 30% over time. There is some separation between 2015 and 2020, but it’s not substantively large: maybe just three percentage points. Then the lines come back together for a couple of years before separating just a bit in 2024. But there’s a consistent voice that emerges from both surveys: the share of Boomers who report weekly attendance is likely around 30%. Is that changing over time? I don’t get a strong sense of direction from either instrument. In other words, attendance is pretty stable.

By the way, this last graph actually complicates the conclusions from the prior graphs even more. Remember, Boomers seemed to find faith again in large numbers in the last two years of the CES. If that were the case then why did Boomer attendance not change in any demonstrable way during that same period? We should theoretically see a jump in weekly attendance but it’s not there in the data.

That’s why this kind of work is maddening. There isn’t a clear narrative that emerges from this data. I’ve written recently about the two most prominent methods for survey collection recently: panels and probability-based surveys. The CES uses the former approach, while the GSS has employed the latter design for decades. That could be one explanation for the divergence. It’s just hard to know what’s the “right” answer here.

What both these instruments point to, though, is that the overall trajectory of American religion has changed over time. After decades of a consistent increase, that secularization era is over. The rise has turned into a plateau. Have the nones reversed? Yes, it seems like they have. But why has that happened? I just can’t put my finger on it.

And it’s driving me crazy.

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.

Man, I have been asked that question at least a hundred times across various social media platforms over the last couple of years. It’s really funny being in my position, because I have this really weird vantage point on what groups people really want to see visualized in data sources. There are a couple that pop up on a regular basis: Latter-day Saints are very interested in seeing themselves in charts and graphs. Members of the Presbyterian Church of America are also very much “reply guys” (and they are almost always male). And then the aforementioned Unitarians are frequently invoked in a comment.

Just for some quick background on our UU friends: Unitarian Universalism is a tradition that asks almost nothing doctrinally of its members — atheists, Christians, Buddhists, and pagans share the same pews, united by shared values around human dignity and social justice rather than creed. The UUA, formed in 1961, has always been small but culturally influential, claiming six U.S. presidents and a leading role in progressive social movements from abolition to marriage equality.

I’ve actually spoken at two separate UU gatherings. One was only a few blocks from my house and the other was in Nashville, TN earlier in 2026. I thought that the Nashville community had a great acronym: FUUN (First Unitarian Universalist of Nashville). When I was with both communities, the impression that I got was that there’s a lot of demographic similarities between the UU and many mainline denominations. They are usually quite a bit older and don’t have a ton of racial diversity.

That’s also reinforced in the data. The denomination has some obstacles in the future: shrinking membership, fewer congregations, and an increasingly narrow geographic and demographic footprint. There are some bright spots, of course, but many of the key trends facing the UU look strikingly like what’s happening with the Episcopalians or the United Methodists.

The Unitarians are nice enough to publish a “Certification Report” on an annual basis and that’s where almost all the data below came from, although, as you will see - I’ve also included some data from the Census Bureau as well.

Let’s start with the most logical metric: membership. Unlike most denominations which only count formal members, the UUA tracks two distinct groups: dues-paying members who have officially joined a congregation, and “non-member friends” — people who regularly participate and financially support a congregation but haven’t taken the formal step of membership.

The trend for both groups is absolutely in the downward direction. In 2016, the UUs counted a total membership of just over 151,000 and then the “friends” added another 99K to that total. So, there were about a quarter of a million Unitarian Universalists in the United States a decade ago. That means that there is 1 UU for 1,340 Americans (give or take). It’s just not a numerically large group, a fact that I will return to in just a minute.

However, as you can clearly see in the previous graph: both types of membership metrics are in pretty steady decline for the UUs. Membership held relatively constant between 2016 and 2020 - losing just 7,000 folks. But the “friends” dropped by almost a third during that same time period (from 99K to just 64K). In the last few years, both metrics have continued to slide. In 2025, membership is down to 130,000 and non-member friends are at 54,000. In other words, there are 66K fewer Unitarians today than just a decade ago. That’s a drop of just over 26%.

But, can I just put the Unitarians in the larger context of American religion really quickly? This has become one of my hobby horses in the last couple of years: the average American just has absolutely no idea how large (or small) many religious groups really are in the grand sweep of the American religious landscape. Unitarians, numerically speaking, are a rounding error in the bigger picture.

The Religion Census pegged them at just over 201,000 members when they did their data collection a few years ago. For context: for every UU in the United States there are sixty Southern Baptists, there are thirty Jews, and there are three hundred Catholics. The only survey that I’ve ever seen that really tries to assess the size of UUs using population based sampling is from PRRI, and they place them at .5% of the population.

In numeric terms, that’s 1.5-2M folks. Why the discrepancy? Well, it’s the classic case of members vs people who say that they are affiliated with a group. I have a sneaking suspicion that a whole bunch of Americans like the idea of Unitarianism but just can’t or don’t want to join a congregation. But according to their current membership data: UUs are less than half the size of the aforementioned PCA and are marginally larger than the Anglican Church of North America (who are in the 125K member range).

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This makes a lot of anonymous people on Twitter very angry, of course. I’m guessing that many of them are Catholics who believe that Catholicism, correctly measured, will exhibit results similar to their evangelical cousins. The replies are always something like, “No, show us what REAL Catholics believe on this issue.” Which I think is shorthand for: I want you to only compare weekly attending Catholics to weekly attending evangelicals. Their assumption is that if I do that, the statistical differences will disappear.

Well, let’s just put that to the test today, shall we?

The first thing we need to establish is that the reply guys are kind of right in one way: the average white Catholic doesn’t go to church with nearly the same regularity as the average white evangelical.

Back in the halcyon days of the early 1970s, Catholics were more devout than evangelicals — and by a fair amount. About 60% of white Catholics were going to Mass every week in 1972 compared to only 45% of white evangelicals. That’s not a small difference. But it didn’t last long. By 1980, the two lines had clearly crossed around 45%. But then the Catholic line continued to move downward while evangelical attendance rates held steady. By the late 1990s, evangelicals were more likely to be weekly attenders than their Catholic counterparts.

From there, the gap only widened. It was about ten percentage points by 2000 (45% vs. 35%), and the chasm has only increased in the last twenty years. By the 2010s, over half of white evangelicals went to church nearly every week compared to less than 30% of Catholics. In the data from 2024, 57% of white evangelicals were weekly attenders compared to 25% of white Catholics. So not controlling for attendance gives us a much different sample when analyzing evangelicals and Catholics. Keep that in your back pocket for now.

Now, there’s another variable at play here that needs to be considered: political conservatism. Are white Catholics more politically moderate than white evangelicals? The answer is: absolutely.

The graph on the left does not contain an attendance filter, so you’ve got an evangelical sample that is much more religiously active than the Catholic subgroup. There are clear differences in the political ideology of these two groups. I think it’s fair to say that evangelicals have always been more conservative than Catholics, although those gaps just weren’t that big back in the 1970s (less than ten percentage points).

That gap has widened over time in a very noticeable way. You can clearly pick out an inflection point, too: somewhere in the early 2000s the evangelical line began to shoot up while it rose much more slowly for Catholics. Today there’s just a huge ideological difference between the two. Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals identify as politically conservative vs. just 38% of white Catholics.

But remember how evangelicals are much more likely to go to church than Catholics? I controlled for that in the right panel by only including people who indicated that they attended church nearly every week or more. I don’t think this alters the general trend I just described in the “all attendance levels” graph. White evangelicals have always been more ideologically conservative than white Catholics. The gaps between the two lines on the left and the two lines on the right are almost exactly the same magnitude as well.

So let’s test out this idea that Catholics are just as socially conservative as evangelicals by pulling in both things that we’ve learned. I am going to show you three graphs: the entire sample of evangelicals and Catholics, only weekly attenders of those two groups, and finally only weekly attenders who also identify as politically conservative. That way we can control for those differences as much as possible.

Let’s start with a question about abortion. This one asks if respondents think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain an abortion if she wants it for any reason.

In the full sample, a pretty big gap emerges between evangelicals and Catholics on this issue in just the last ten years. Prior to that, evangelicals were about ten points more pro-life than Catholics. After 2012 or so, the Catholic line began to rise. Now, it’s very fair to say that the average white Catholic is twice as likely to support abortion access as the average white evangelical. But remember: we need to control for the fact that Catholics aren’t as likely to go to church and aren’t as conservative. That’s what I did in the next two panels.

If we restrict the sample to weekly attenders, the gap narrows. In fact, until just recently I don’t think we can make a strong claim about which group was more pro-life. But in the last couple of years, weekly attending white Catholics have moved in the direction of permissiveness on abortion while evangelicals haven’t budged. When we control for both ideology and attendance, the lines are basically right on top of each other. The sample sizes aren’t huge here (especially for Catholics), but when we compare just weekly attending conservatives, it’s fair to say that Catholics are neck and neck with evangelicals.

Okay, so let’s switch to a different dependent variable: same-sex marriage. The question is simply: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another. This is the share who strongly agree or agree.

The reason the lines look funny on the left-hand side is that the question was asked for the first time in 1988 and then not again until 2004, so I interpolated the trend line to fill the gap. Again, the top graph exhibits a strong divergence between white Catholics and white evangelicals, with Catholics being a whole lot more likely to support same-sex marriage. In fact, the average Catholic today is twice as supportive as the average evangelical (69% vs. 34%).

When we just look at weekly attenders, the overall level of agreement is lower but the gap between the two groups persists. For weekly attending Catholics, agreement reached 50% around 2016 or so and has stayed there consistently in the last decade. For evangelical weekly attenders, it’s never risen above 30% and shows signs of retreat in the last couple of years — down to 18% in 2024.

What happens if we just look at weekly attending conservatives? Well, for evangelicals, support is almost non-existent: just 9% in 2024. For Catholics in the same category, it’s much higher: 40%. Although the sample that fits this criteria is very small, so there’s a lot of uncertainty in the estimate.

One more question I wanted to highlight: If a man and a woman have sexual relations before marriage, do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all? This is the share who indicated that premarital sex is always wrong.

This is where a huge difference emerges. In 1972, 40% of Catholics said that premarital sex was always wrong. Today, that is down to just 7%. For evangelicals, there’s been a dip too, though it’s much smaller (from 58% in 1972 to 45% in 2024). Of course, that includes a whole lot of folks who say that they are Baptist or Catholic but don’t go to church that much.

The second graph is only weekly attenders, and the same pattern repeats. The drop for evangelicals is almost exactly the same: twelve percentage points between 1972 and 2024. For weekly Mass-attending white Catholics, a majority said that premarital sex was always wrong back in 1972. Today, that’s down to just 21%.

Even in the most restrictive sample of weekly attending political conservatives, there’s a chasm between white evangelicals and white Catholics. But what’s different here is that the trajectory of both lines is basically flat. About 70% of evangelicals thought premarital sex was always wrong. It was around 45% for Catholics.

Of course, there’s one more way to test this: a regression. I just threw in the most basic controls — gender, age, attendance, and ideology. The key thing to know here is the reference category: anyone who is white but does not identify as evangelical or Catholic. So the coefficients below are compared to that benchmark.

The further left the point estimates, the more conservative the view on these three social issues. On abortion access, an evangelical is about 10 percentage points more likely to oppose a woman’s right to an abortion than a Catholic. When it comes to same-sex marriage, an evangelical is also much more likely to disagree with the practice compared to a similar Catholic. And remember — we are controlling for the things that should matter most here, particularly their level of church attendance and their political ideology. So this is apples to apples, as best as we can manage.

The one that really blows me away is the question about premarital sex. Compared to white folks who aren’t evangelical and aren’t Catholic, evangelical respondents have a much more conservative sexual ethic. But look at the Catholic coefficient — it’s actually positive. That means the average Catholic is actually more permissive of premarital sex than the average white person who is neither evangelical nor Catholic. That’s staggering.

I think this is the best test I can devise to really compare devout, conservative Catholics to evangelicals in the same segment of the population. I just can’t look at these results and say that “real” Catholics are just as socially conservative as “real” evangelicals. They aren’t — empirically speaking — as conservative on these three core issues that I think do a good job of tapping morality questions.

The reply guys on Twitter aren’t entirely wrong to push back. Comparing all evangelicals to all Catholics really is an apples-to-oranges exercise given the massive differences in attendance rates and political ideology between the two groups. That’s a fair methodological critique. But when you actually do the work of controlling for those things — and I think this regression does that about as well as observational data allows — the differences don’t disappear. They persist, and on some issues they’re quite large.

What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right 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.

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.

Measuring happiness is a real problem for social scientists. It’s an area of intense interest because I think all of us would like to be just a little bit happier. But it all seems pretty subjective and transient at some level, right? I mean, if you took part in a social survey that asked you: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” How would you answer that question right now, and if asked again in four hours, would you give the same answer?

Take the often hyped-up “World Happiness Report,” published annually by Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre in partnership with Gallup. The report asks respondents to imagine a ladder with the best possible life at the top and the worst at the bottom, then place themselves on it. It’s elegant, but notice what it actually measures: not happiness in any rich sense, but a cognitive life appraisal. And each respondent is comparing their life to a “best possible life” that could be completely different from another respondent. When a Dane rates herself a 7.5, she’s not reporting a feeling so much as rendering a verdict. It’s a valid measure, certainly. But is it measuring the same thing as happiness? Are satisfied people always happy?

The report also tries to explain its rankings using six factors: GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption. Notice what’s missing? Things like religiosity, family structure, community belonging, a sense of transcendent meaning. Build the index around those variables instead, and the map of global happiness looks very different. For what it’s worth, the Human Flourishing research is doing a better job of leaning into a wider variety of variables. I’m excited for that data to become publicly available.

With that preamble, I want to focus on probably the best long-term measure we have of self-described happiness: the data from the GSS. The Association of Religion Data Archives has been hosting the General Social Survey files for a long time now. Lucky for us, the happiness question has been asked in every single wave of the GSS, all the way back to 1972.

We should start by just looking at how responses to that question have changed over the full time series.

There was a whole lot of long-term stability in these measures. It’s startling to see how flat these lines are across several decades. The share of Americans who said they were “very happy” was basically the same from 1972 all the way through 2000 — about one-third of the population. The “not too happy” line held in the 10-15% range, and the “pretty happy” line edged up just a bit, rising from the low fifties to the upper fifties between 1972 and 2000. I don’t think we can make strong claims about a big shift in happiness during this period.

But that’s certainly not the case in the last fifteen years. Happiness has clearly declined recently. The share of people who said they were very happy was 32% in 2004. It was 22% in 2024. The share who said they were not too happy rose about ten percentage points over the same period. There used to be a 20-point gap between those two lines. Now the gap is statistically zero.

There is a methodology shift worth mentioning here -- the GSS had to pivot to online administration because of COVID, and that subtle change can have big ripple effects on a question like happiness. But as Sam Peltzman argues in this paper, that shift can only explain part of the “happiness crash.” There really has been a happiness dip in the United States.

Let’s spend a bit of time trying to parse through the factors that would contribute to this pretty significant bump in the share of “not too happy” people. Obviously, we should start with religion. All I did was divide the sample into religious people — meaning they claimed any affiliation — and the nones.

The first thing I want to point out is how these lines tend to move in near concert with each other. When one starts trending downward, so does the other. That tells us that macro-level conditions in the United States tend to shift happiness for everyone. There’s really no evidence in the data backing the claim that non-religious people grew much less happy while people of faith remained more upbeat.

But the other conclusion is hard to miss: non-religious people are more likely to say they are “not too happy” compared to religious people. That gap is statistically and substantively significant, and it’s persistent — averaging about five percentage points across the full time series. In 1972, 18% of nones were not too happy compared to 14% of the religious sample. In 2024, the numbers were 25% and 19%, respectively.

So, a pretty plain result: religious people tend to express higher levels of happiness than non-religious folks. But we all know there are confounding factors that can complicate that. Non-religious folks tend to be more politically liberal, and a persistent finding in the data is that liberals are just not as happy -- though some recent work has complicated that narrative.

Let’s check with our GSS data.

And this is the absolute definition of a null result. The gaps between liberals, moderates, and conservatives are basically non-existent across the full 52-year sequence. In 1972, 13% of conservatives said they were not too happy — the exact same share as liberals. Moderates were just slightly lower at 11%. I do find it interesting that the conservative line dropped noticeably over the next few decades, with the “not too happy” share falling into the single digits from about 1980 through 2005. That wasn’t the case for moderates and liberals, who stayed in double digits throughout.

The last fifteen years are really about convergence. By the late 2010s, there was no substantive difference in the share of each group saying they were “not too happy.” The trend line is unmistakably upward. Between 2010 and 2024, the share of liberals who were not too happy basically doubled — but the same thing happened for conservatives and moderates. Everyone just got grumpier in the last decade, regardless of politics.

So we have a mixed bag. Religious people are noticeably happier than non-religious people. But we can’t chalk that up to politics. Let’s keep digging by tracing how each generation answered the happiness question as they aged through the life course.

Again, stability is the big takeaway. When the Greatest Generation aged through the back half of their lives, the percentage who said they were “not too happy” was remarkably consistent: 12-14%. For Silents, the share actually dipped a few points as they aged, then jumped noticeably in the last life stage — which makes sense. Many were probably dealing with health concerns and the loss of a spouse, both of which tend to alter happiness.

Boomers are a fascinating pattern. They really have gotten less happy as they’ve aged. When they were between 30 and 44, only 10% were not too happy. By the time they reached their sixties and seventies, that rose to 17%. The back half of life has not been kind to Boomers. But Gen X seems to be speed-running this. At 45-59, they are already less happy than Boomers were at that same age.

For Millennials and Gen Z, we obviously don’t have as many data points since they haven’t reached as many life stages yet. But it’s unmistakably clear that Millennials are less happy than their parents or grandparents were at similar life stages — though we haven’t seen a big sudden bump. They just started at a higher baseline. And speaking of baselines, look at those Gen Z numbers. Oof. Among the youngest adults, 29% say they are currently not too happy. That’s nearly double the rate of Millennials at the same age. Gen Z is starting out adult life as the unhappiest generation in American history.

There are a lot of moving parts here, though — age, religion, political ideology. I need to hold some of that constant while testing the impact of something like church attendance or education on happiness levels. That’s exactly what I’ve done below. I built a model with controls for gender, partisanship, education, religious affiliation, religious attendance, and income — all factors that could have a big impact on happiness. I’m showing just the two ends of the spectrum: the predicted probability of saying you are “not too happy.”

The variables at the top don’t pop. There’s really no difference in happiness levels between men and women — just one percentage point. The same is basically true for Democrats vs. Republicans. A Democrat is about two percentage points more likely to be “not too happy” compared to a Republican, holding everything else constant. So we can’t chalk it up to gender or religious differences.

As we move down the list, though, the gaps widen. A person with a graduate degree is about five percentage points less likely to be “not too happy” compared to someone who didn’t finish high school. The biggest gap is on income. Holding everything else constant, about 31% of people in the bottom third of incomes said they were “not too happy,” compared to just 13% of people in the top third. Does money buy happiness? It does seem to help quite a lot.

What about religion? A non-religious person is about five points more likely to be unhappy compared to an evangelical — and remember, we’ve controlled for ideology, so we can’t attribute that to political differences. But an even bigger factor is attendance. Among those who attend services at least weekly, only 23% report being “not too happy.” For those who never or seldom attend, it’s 31%. The data paints a pretty clear picture: religious folks — however you measure the concept — are less likely to report being “not too happy.”

Of course, measuring happiness is difficult, as I noted at the top. Maybe religious people are just conditioned to put on a happy face in ways that non-religious people aren’t. If your tradition teaches you that suffering has meaning, that gratitude is a virtue, and that contentment is next to godliness, you may simply be primed to report greater happiness, regardless of how your life actually feels from the inside.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: the World Happiness Report consistently ranks Finland — one of the least religious countries on Earth — as one of the happiest. Yet religious Americans report greater happiness than non-religious ones.

Social science is hard. More job security for me, I guess. Which makes me…happy?

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.

It’s hard to poll on trans issues because the debate takes on so many forms. There are battles over bills designed around bathroom access, legislation about whether high school students can compete in sports that don’t match their birth gender, and strong debate over whether teachers can use different pronouns with students without notifying their parents. In the previous dustup about homosexuality, the question really centered on one thing: should a same-sex couple have the right to marry one another?

A couple of months ago, The Argument pulled together a really extensive poll about transgender rights. The title of the report tells the whole story: The trans rights backlash is real. A majority of voters would support a national law requiring people to use public restrooms that correspond with their birth sex. Sixty percent believed that high school athletes should be required to compete with people who share their birth sex. What was even more surprising was that the latter question almost evenly divided Kamala Harris voters: 38% were in favor and 41% were opposed.

One thing we don’t have a lot of in this arena is longitudinal data about how opinions have moved over time. Because of the newest release of the Cooperative Election Study, I can now compare answers to the same question from October 2023 to October 2025 — before election season had really heated up, and then a year after it was over.

The question under scrutiny here is: “Make it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition.” And I think we can see a bit of movement in the direction of permissiveness over the last few years. In the full sample, support for the ban went from 66% in 2023 to 63% in 2025. Obviously not a huge shift, but it is statistically significant.

The reason for that is a big movement among Democrats and Independents. For Democrats, opposition dropped from 45% to 39% in two years, but it declined even more among Independents — from 70% to 64%. It’s important to note, though, that even today almost two-thirds of Independents favor a ban on medical care for gender transition for minors. Notice the opposition among Republicans, though. It’s rock solid and near unanimous. It’s basically orthodoxy in the GOP now. I can’t imagine a Republican running for office in 2026 who won’t make it a centerpiece of their campaign.

When I analyze the results by generation, I see essentially the same pattern as the previous graph: opposition has declined, but by a very marginal amount for most groups. The big exception is Boomers. In 2023, 71% of them favored a ban on gender transition for minors. By 2025, that was down to 66%. That’s not nothing. There’s also a three-point dip among Gen X. You can make a reasonable argument that older Americans have moved more on this than younger ones.

Among Millennials and Gen Z, the shift has been barely noticeable — just two points for Millennials and a single point for Gen Z, which was not statistically significant. It’s also worth keeping the overall levels in mind. Even a majority of Gen Z favors a ban on gender transition for minors. This data largely comports with the polling from The Argument.

Speaking of generations, I wanted to verify an interesting finding from an earlier post where younger men are significantly more socially conservative than younger women. Among people born in the 2000s, young women were sixteen points more likely to agree that “Acceptance of transgender people is a positive change” than men of the same age.

Among older generations, the story isn’t that interesting. Boomer men are more in favor of the ban than Boomer women — that was true in both 2023 and 2025. As we’ve seen, though, there’s been an erosion of opposition across the board for Boomers, down 4–5 points. For Gen X, the same general pattern holds: men express more opposition than women, but the drop in that share is much smaller than it was for Boomers.

The bottom row, however, reveals a trend worth highlighting. For Millennials in 2023, the gender gap on this question was just two points — not significant in any way. In 2025, it widened to four points, though it’s still not statistically significant. Millennial men are more supportive of a ban on gender transition for minors than Millennial women.

But check out the big movement in Gen Z. In 2023, there was a substantial gender gap: men were eight points more conservative than women. In 2025, that gap has narrowed to just three points and is no longer statistically significant. Why did the gap close? Gen Z women moved two points in the conservative direction — I would have never guessed that before doing this analysis. Meanwhile, men moved three points to the left. So maybe the social issues divide in Gen Z is a bit overblown. We need more data.

Let’s bring religion into the mix.

The big thing I see here is that macro-level shift we noticed up top: the share of Americans who oppose gender transition for minors has dipped ever so slightly in the last couple of years. There aren’t any massive movements in these comparisons — just a gentle wave pushing nearly everyone a bit to the left. White evangelical support for a ban has dropped by three points in two years. It’s down four points among the mainline. For white Catholics, the drop is two points, though it’s not statistically significant.

There’s also movement among atheists, with support for the ban sliding from 35% in 2023 to 29% in 2025. It’s also down four points among nothing-in-particulars. The biggest drop by far, though, is among non-white Catholics. In 2023, 69% of them favored a ban. In 2025, it was only 61%. Make of that what you will.

Not a single group in this analysis has seen a statistically significant increase in support for the ban. In very small groups, the point estimates do rise — nine points among Orthodox Christians and six points for Buddhists — but those samples are small, fewer than 200 in each survey year, which means the confidence intervals are enormous.

Let’s throw partisanship in with religion now. I had to eliminate some groups because the sample sizes were just too small to tell us much.

The hollow circles are the 2023 estimates; the filled ones reflect 2025. It’s readily apparent that Democrats have seen an erosion in support for a ban on gender transition for minors. Among non-white evangelical Democrats, it’s down about six points. It’s down even more for Catholics — 13 points for white Catholics and 15 points for non-white Catholics. For atheists, it’s a four-point dip. It’s really across the board — except for LDS Democrats, where opposition actually rose a bit, though this is a very small group.

For Republicans, the movement is hard to characterize. For a whole bunch of groups, it’s essentially nonexistent — that’s the case for evangelicals, Catholics, and Latter-day Saints. A handful of groups actually grew more supportive of the ban over time: Black Protestants, atheists, and agnostics. The only group that really moved left was mainline Protestant Republicans, whose opposition to a ban dropped by five percentage points between 2023 and 2025.

So what do we make of all this? It’s fair to say that support for a ban on children’s gender transition has softened just a little in the last few years — 2–3 percentage points. Not enough to change how the country feels on this in any meaningful way, but it’s noteworthy that opinion on this topic seems to be liberalizing at all, given how politicized the discussion has become.

What really sticks with me is that this is yet another example of partisanship driving a wedge into the electorate. Democrats have moved left on this issue. Republicans have either held their position or become slightly more conservative. This is not being driven by religious affiliation.

You know how I know that? Look at the two groups that were closest on this issue in 2023: Black Protestants and non-white Catholics. The gap between Democrats and Republicans was about thirteen points in that first sample. You know what it is now? Twenty-seven points for Black Protestants and 23 points for non-white Catholics. The parties have sorted themselves out on this issue, and the voters are falling in line.

These aren’t debates about culture. They are debates about partisanship. And the rank and file are lining up behind their teams.

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, due to my work tracing American religion and politics, I have a lot of interaction with seminaries. I’ve given more talks and webinars at graduate schools in religion, theology, divinity, etc. than I can count. And I think that tracking seminaries is actually a very worthwhile endeavor because it gives us a sense of where things are headed in the future of religious leadership in the United States.

After futzing around with Claude Code for a couple of hours, I managed to pull in and merge most of the Data Tables that the Association of Theological Schools posts on their website. I don’t want to spend too much time describing this process except to say: it’s a tremendous pain in the butt, even with the help of artificial intelligence.

That’s true for two reasons. One is that the information is published in PDF format — a fact that will make any data analyst shudder in horror. The other impediment is that these ATS reports don’t all follow the same format in successive years. New columns are added, others are removed. Again, that just makes the job of scraping and cleaning much harder.

But with a lot of effort and too many Claude tokens, I’ve managed to organize a fairly clean spreadsheet with data going back to 2007. Let me start with this interesting nugget: the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) students in ATS programs has increased just slightly over the last 17 years, from 49,915 in 2007 to 50,259 in 2025. That’s a .7% increase. That’s actually not bad at all, considering everything else happening in the world. During the same time period, the share of Americans with no religious affiliation rose by about ten percentage points. So, not bad compared to that benchmark.

What follows is basically this — I poked around in the data a whole bunch and found a lot of interesting little nuggets to think about when considering the future of seminary education in the United States.

The first thing I noticed? The SBC is doing well. For those who didn’t grow up in the orbit of the Southern Baptist Convention, you need to know that the SBC owns six different seminaries located all over the United States. They are:

• Gateway Seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention in Ontario, California

• Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri

• New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in New Orleans, Louisiana

• The Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina

• The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky

• The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas

The Convention sends a significant amount of money to these institutions each year, making tuition more affordable in hopes that they will crank out the next generation of men to fill the pulpits of the 40,000+ SBC churches across the country. In the 2023–2024 cycle, the Southern Baptist Convention sent over $40M their way.

By any metric, this has been a huge success.

Of the top seven largest seminaries in the ATS database in 2025, five of them are the ones mentioned above. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (often considered the flagship of the system) had 1,964 FTE students, and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary came in third with 1,587 FTE. Behind Liberty University (which we will talk about in a minute), there are no larger graduate schools training up pastors in the United States.

The only non-SBC exception besides Liberty is Dallas Theological Seminary. It’s really impressive to consider that the SBC is training over 7,400 people across these institutions. To put that in perspective, the United Church of Christ had fewer than 90 people graduate from seminary last year. This is a system that is clearly working.

That becomes even more apparent when you look at the overall change in enrollment among the largest twenty seminaries. For almost all of them, I can trace the change in FTE going back to 2007, but in a couple of cases these institutions didn’t join the ATS until later, so I used the first year they appeared as the baseline for comparison.

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On the Republican side, the most prominent example of a pro-choice Republican finding electoral success is Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, who won two terms in a deep blue state while maintaining a pro-choice position. Susan Collins of Maine represents another case. She has won four Senate elections in a state that leans Democratic in presidential years while consistently supporting abortion access. But let’s be clear about something in the case of Baker and Collins - the states that they represent aren’t the reddest in the Union. It makes me wonder if their success reflects genuine cross-pressured voters or simply the fact that pro-choice Republicans can do well in a handful of states in the Northeast.

It’s even more difficult to find a pro-life Democrat, though. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania built a career as one of the last prominent pro-life Democrats in the Senate, though his 2024 reelection loss to Dave McCormick raises questions about whether his brand of cross-pressured politics had finally run its course in a nationalized electoral environment. Tim Ryan, who ran a competitive Senate race in Ohio in 2022, moderated his historically pro-choice position during the campaign, suggesting that even candidates in red-leaning states felt pressure to move toward the party mainstream after Dobbs.

For whatever reason, I see a lot of pontificating on social media about what the Democrats and Republicans should do on abortion, and I thought I would try to inject some signal in all that noise by just tracing how abortion has shifted over time and whether candidates are capable of actually splitting the votes of pro-life or pro-choice people in any effective way.

First, let me just show you a couple of graphs that lay out the long term trends surrounding access to abortion. Since 1977, the GSS has been asking, “Do you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants one for any reason?” The trend is certainly in the pro-choice direction.

Obviously the non-religious stand out on this metric. Even back in the late 1970s, the vast majority favored abortion access. That share has only grown over time and now 81% of the nones think a pregnant woman should be able to obtain an abortion if she wants one for any reason. The “other faith” category went from slight majority support (54%) to strong support (67%) over this 45 year window of time.

Every Christian group has moved to the pro-choice side on this question over time. For some groups, the shift has been large, for others it’s been relatively small. Among mainline Protestants, the movement was 15 points to the left —now a bare majority support access (56%). For Catholics, they went from strong opposition back in 1977 (only 32% in favor) to being almost evenly split on this now: 53%. Evangelicals have moved the least of any group: 24% back in 1977 to 32% today. They are the only religious group where a majority did not favor abortion access.

But I have to point out those Black Protestants. Their line looks like no other trend in this graph. For a long time, their views of abortion lined up with Catholics. They moved in almost perfect unison between 1977 and 2007. However, it looks like the election of Barack Obama was an inflection point. Catholic support for abortion did rise, but much slower than Black Protestants. Just think about this: in 2008, about 35% of Black Protestants favored abortion access. That figure in 2024? It was 67%.

I think there’s a good reason for that: access to abortion services has become a part of the “core orthodoxy” of the Democratic party. To give a window into that, I just calculated the share of pro-life voters and pro-choice voters who identified as ideologically conservative over time.

What really should jump out to you is the comparison between the percentages back in 1977. If someone was pro-life, they were just as likely to identify as conservative as someone who favored abortion access. I mean, look at the evangelical graph. 41% of pro-lifers said that they were conservative. It was 36% of pro-choice evangelicals. The gaps for the mainline was 4 points. It was non-existent among Black Protestants and Catholics. You could be pro-life and not necessarily be a conservative. That’s certainly not the case anymore.

But the movement over the last 45 years has been oddly asymmetrical. You can see it among evangelicals. Among pro-choicers, the share who are conservative has actually risen over time to 40% now. A move of 4 points. However, the pro-lifers have become 33 points more conservative during this time period. For Catholics, the movement for pro-choices has been six points. It was 26 points for pro-lifers. It’s becoming increasingly the case that to be pro-life is to be conservative.

Let’s pivot to vote choice now. I wanted to focus particularly on the last three elections because we can hold a very important variable constant: the name of the candidate on the ballot. Trump was at the top of the ticket all three times.

Back in 2016, the pro-choice subgroup was about two-thirds for Hillary Clinton and 27% for Donald Trump. So there were quite a few folks who supported access to an abortion who also cast a ballot for the GOP. But that didn’t last long at all. By 2020, the pro-choice vote went from D+40 to D+63. Biden won 80% of the pro-choice vote and only 17% of them favored Trump. The 2024 election was largely a copy of the 2020 result: Harris got 78% and Trump got 20%. I think it’s very fair to say that pro-choice voters went from a forty point advantage for Democrats to a sixty point cushion in just a couple of election cycles.

But the same thing also happened among pro-lifers. Back in 2016, Clinton got 22% of voters who did not favor abortion access, while Trump received 71% of their ballots. So, basically R+50. But by 2020, that margin swelled to R+64. However, 2024 was an even larger gap. Among pro-life voters, 89% favored Donald Trump while only 9% voted for Harris. That’s a gain of nearly thirty percentage points for the Republicans during this time period.

To summarize:

• Pro-Choice voters went from D+40 to D+58 between 2016 and 2024.

• Pro-Life voters went from R+49 to R+80 between 2016 and 2024.

The voting blocs are “purifying” themselves over time. There aren’t as many cross-pressured voters when it comes to abortion. If you favor access, you vote for Democrats. If you don’t, then you support the GOP.

What happens when I break it down into a couple of religious groups?

I think that the same general impression comes through here. The gaps for every one of these subgroups is getting larger over time when comparing pro-choice voters to pro-life voters. Among pro-life white evangelicals, Trump’s margin went from 87% in 2016 to 94% in 2024. It increased 24 points for non-white evangelicals, too: 56% to 80%. For mainline Protestants who don’t favor access to abortion, Trump won a whopping 89% of their votes in 2024. It was 90% of white Catholics. You can even see that rightward movement among Jews and non-religious groups, too. Fewer and fewer voters believe that one can support restrictions on abortion and not vote for the Republican.

But what may be even more fascinating to me is that Trump didn’t really seem to lose too much ground among pro-choice voters. I mean, look at the non-white evangelicals: he got 15% of their votes in 2016 and 14% in 2024. He went down about 8 points among pro-choice mainline Protestants and six points among white Catholics. So, pro-life voters have moved 15 or 20 points in his direction and he’s only lost pro-choice voters by an additional five points over time.

However, that also means that the gaps between pro-choice and pro-life Americans at the ballot box have increased over time. It’s 19 points wider among mainline Protestants in 2024 compared to 2016. It’s up 23 points among white Catholics. Again, we just aren’t seeing a whole lot of cross-pressured voters here. Pro-life voters aren’t even considering the Democratic party anymore. Meanwhile, pro-choice voters do seem to be moving away from the GOP but at a much slower rate.

Here’s the point that I really want to make on this issue: the Democrat party has moved a whole lot more on the question of abortion access compared to the Republicans.

In 2014, 79% of Democrats said that they supported access to an abortion if a woman wanted one for any reason. In 2024, that had risen to 91%. I don’t know if there’s a definition of “party orthodoxy” but I think when over 90% of your voting bloc aligns on one position, that makes a pretty strong case. So, a pro-life Democrat is going to hold to a position that will please about 1 in 10 of his or her voters and anger almost all the rest.

Among Republicans, there’s a bit more diversity of thought on this question. In 2024, 34% of Republicans favored access to an abortion. In the next decade, the total amount of movement was 3 points. By 2024, 31% of Republicans favored abortion access. So, 9% of Democratic voters are pro-life and 31% of Republicans are pro-choice. There’s just a whole lot more evidence to support the viability of a pro-choice Republican than a pro-life Democrat.

A couple things are worth summarizing at the end of this post.

1. It’s empirically true that views of abortion have liberalized over time. That’s the case with every single religious tradition in the data. The only religious group that I can find where a majority aren’t in favor of abortion access are evangelicals.

2. Pro-choice voters have become more Democratic over time. Pro-life voters have become more likely to vote for the GOP. But pro-lifers are more uniform in their support of the Republicans than pro-choicers are in support of the Democrats.

3. The pro-life Democrats and the pro-choice Republicans are becoming harder to find with each passing year. However, there’s more diversity of opinion on abortion among the GOP rank and file than among the Democrats.

To me, this is a classic example of partisan sorting. When writing this post, I was reminded of a great paper from Karol and Thurston entitled, “From Personal to Partisan: Abortion, Party, and Religion Among California State Legislators.” Before Roe was decided, legislators in California held abortion opinions that reflected their own religious background. But after 1973, things began to shift. They found that over time the effect of religion waned as partisan affiliation came to supplant the role of religion in predicting abortion support. This was partly due to incumbent politicians shifting their voting behavior and partly due to retirement and replacement of older legislators with those more in tune with their party’s position.

Partisanship rules everything around us.

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 phrase I heard over and over again growing up in a Southern Baptist Church - “don’t be unequally yoked.” It’s a reference to a verse from 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” In my experience it is always used in the context of finding a spouse. The admonition is to find someone to marry who has the same faith background as you. The worry for my evangelical group leaders was that if one of us married a non-believer, our spouse might lead us down a path toward secularism.

But the general admonition is the same in many faith communities: try to marry someone who shares your faith background. That’s certainly a well-established norm in Jewish communities. According to Kiddushin 68b, marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew is prohibited under Jewish law. In Islam, there’s not an outright prohibition on marrying a non-Muslim, but the Quran only permits people to marry other “People of the Book.”

There are theological reasons for this, as was commonly invoked in my evangelical upbringing. Each spouse can edify the other’s faith and grow closer together as they grow closer to God. But there’s also a really important sociological reason for it, too: kids who are raised by two parents who share the same faith background are more likely to be raised in a consistently religious home. This likely increases the chances a faith is passed down from one generation to another. This is a powerful reason religious groups might discourage interfaith marriages.

The ARDA is hosting the most recent wave of the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which was conducted in 2023-2024 and it has a whole host of insightful questions about who folks are marrying and how much they talk about faith in their home. It includes a variable indicating whether respondents’ current religion matches that of their partner’s. If a Catholic married a Protestant, that would not be defined as a match. If a mainline Protestant was married to an evangelical, that’s still a match because they are both Protestants. A Muslim marrying a Jew wouldn’t be a match and so on. You get the picture.

The groups most likely to marry someone of the same faith background are Hindus (86%), evangelicals (83%) and Latter-day Saints (81%). They are followed closely by Black Protestants at 79%. Then there’s a pretty noticeable gap and a whole bunch of traditions are clumped right around 70% including Catholics and the non-religious.

What really jumps out is that Jewish intermarriage rates are strikingly high. Only 58% of Jews marry a fellow Jew. Given Judaism’s strong norm against marrying outside the faith, it’s noteworthy that so many Jews find a partner from another religious background. I know what you all are wondering: what is the religious background of their spouse? I can’t answer that. The Pew survey did ask that question, but they didn’t include it in the publicly available dataset. So, it’s going to remain a mystery.

But let’s get back to the idea of being “unequally yoked.” I wanted to know if those who said that religion was very important to them also married a spouse who had the same view of religion. Or maybe people who just didn’t care about it that much managed to partner with someone who had the same general outlook.

The heatmap plots respondents’ own sense of religious importance against their perception of their spouse’s. The big thing that jumps out to me is the bottom left corner of the graph: over a quarter of all married respondents said that religion was not at all important to them and reported that their spouse felt the same way. In fact, over half the sample is located in the bottom left corner of this heatmap: they don’t think religion is very important at all and neither does their spouse. I think it’s fair to say based on this graph, that half of married couples aren’t placing religion at the center of their relationship.

In contrast, only 12% of married respondents said that religion was both very important to them and their spouse. The four squares in the top right account for 28% of the entire sample. So, just over a quarter of couples place a high value on religion.

The other thing that struck me was how hard it is to find a discernible pattern in this data. I expected most respondents to cluster along the diagonal. People who said religion was somewhat important to them would also marry someone who said the same. But that’s just not what we see here. Only three cells reach double digits — which tells you how diffuse the distribution actually is.

Let me show you that data in a different way, though.

The top row of this graph is people who said that religion was very important to them and 63% reported marrying someone who considers religion equally important. Another 21% said their spouse considers religion somewhat important.Taken together, this is strong evidence that highly religious people overwhelmingly partner with someone who shares that priority.

You can also see the reverse of that pattern among people who say that religion is not at all important to them. Two-thirds of them partner with someone who doesn’t place any importance on religion at all and 22% say that their spouse rates religion as “not too” important. So, 84% of the top row are in the two highest categories and 89% of the bottom row are in the lowest two categories. People tend to marry someone who agrees with them on matters of faith.

The share of people who are deeply religious who marry a non-religious spouse? 3%.
The share of people who are not religious at all who marry a deeply religious spouse? 3%.

People tend to want to marry people who have the same views of faith as they do.

Folks who took part in the Religious Landscape Study were also asked, “How often do you and your spouse or partner talk with each other about religion?”

The pattern is clear: theologically stricter groups dominate the top of this chart. About half of Jehovah’s Witnesses said they talked about religion every single day with their spouse. That was easily the highest of any religious tradition. Next were Latter-day Saints - 35% were speaking with their partner about religion every day and another 39% were talking about their faith on a weekly basis. Muslims and evangelical Christians were in this same general range.

Who doesn’t talk about faith that much? Well, I don’t think any of us would be surprised to see atheists and agnostics at the bottom of the list. Less than 8% of those respondents talk about religion on a weekly basis and nothing in particulars were just a bit higher than that. What really struck me, though, were the mainline Protestants. Just 28% said that they were talking with their partner on a weekly basis about religion. But Catholics weren’t that much higher than that, though, at 30%.

But any astute reader of this newsletter will know that the prior analysis is likely deeply related to the data I presented in the first graph of this post: people in interfaith marriages are less likely to discuss religion regularly than those who married within their tradition. That’s exactly what the data indicates.

Among evangelicals who married a non-Christian, just 21% of those couples talk about religion on a weekly basis. If an evangelical is married to another Christian, then faith is discussed on a weekly basis in 71% of those households. But the gap is not that large for other Christian groups, though. For mainline Protestants, it was discussed weekly in 10% of mixed-faith marriages compared to 36% when both partners were Protestants. For Catholics, the comparison was 17% vs 35%. So, it does appear that evangelicals (and Black Protestants) are in a different category on this metric compared to mainline Protestants and Catholics.

The Jewish graph is striking, too. When a Jew marries a non-Jew, religion is discussed rarely in about two-thirds of those households. Among Jews married to other Jews, that share drops to 38% — still notable, but meaningfully lower. This is a truism across every faith group: if you marry someone who shares your background, then religion is a regular topic of conversation. If it’s an interfaith union, it rarely comes up in discussion.

There’s a foundational concept in social science that helps explain these results: homophily. It’s pretty simple – people like to associate with people who are similar to them in as many dimensions as possible. That explains why neighborhoods are often stratified by race or income. But it’s also incredibly powerful when it comes to marriage (where it’s termed homogamy). It’s easier to spend your life with someone when you have a shared set of experiences and beliefs about the world.

If you wanted to read some of the literature about this concept I would recommend Kalmijn’s canonical work in the Annual Review of Sociology. Or Sherkat’s piece in Social Science Research which focuses more on religion.

One has to wonder how the rates of intermarriage will change based on a number of shifting societal patterns in the United States. With the rise of the nones religious individuals will have a smaller potential dating pool to draw from for a future mate. But because those who remain in faith communities tend to be “true believers,” their desire to find a partner from their own religious background will likely be heightened. These are two factors working in tension with each other. Whichever factor wins the day will say a lot about where American religion is headed in the coming decades.

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 last one is the one that is often the hardest to parse: religious belief. If belonging is sociological, then belief is primarily psychological. It’s the mental schema that one has in their head when they think about supernatural and philosophical things. The most widely used question to measure this dimension of religiosity is about belief in God. But it’s also the question that gets the most criticism, because it’s so amorphous. And no one loves the response options.

There’s this other question that hangs out in surveys, too, that I don’t know if I have ever thought about that much — it’s religious importance. It’s pretty straightforward: how important is religion in your life? A respondent can indicate that it’s very important, somewhat important, not too important, or not at all important. I’m not sure which “B” this one falls into. Probably belief, but maybe not entirely.

I’ve been forced to think about it a whole lot more as a result of a recent Gallup poll.

The headline, “Rise in Young Men’s Religiosity Realigns Gender Gaps“ points toward a huge finding: among young adults (age 18–29), there’s been a weird shift in religious importance. For young men, the share who said religion was very important was 28% in 2022–2023. In the most recent data it shot up to 42%. For young women, those figures went from 32% to 29%. A 50% increase in importance among young men in less than two years is a bit eyebrow-raising. For those who study long-term trends through survey data, it’s not every day that you see a measure move 10+ points in such a short period of time.

So what I’m going to do here is just explore religious importance through the Cooperative Election Study, which has been asking that question of folks for nearly twenty years. I want to determine the contours of such a question and then I will zoom in on that young adult result to see if the CES validates what is happening with the Gallup result.

First, here’s the broadest look at the data — how the full population has answered that question over time.

The “very important” line has always been off by itself at the top of the graph. Back in 2008, 46% of Americans said that religion was very important in their life. That figure has slowly eroded over time. Notice how there hasn’t been any major wiggle in the data? As I just stated — that’s the norm in this kind of work. Movement is glacial and deliberate. The “very important” line has dropped to 38% over a period of 15 years — about half a point per year.

The only other shift worth discussing is the “not at all important” line. Back in 2008, that was just 14% of the sample. Today, it’s 22% of Americans. The volatility in this line is low, with the biggest shift being three points from one year to the next — a total movement of eight points, the same as the “very important” group. The other two response options — “somewhat” and “not too” important — are about the same.

One question I had when looking at the previous graph was: how did these lines actually change? Was it generational replacement? That’s the idea that older folks are more religious than younger people, and when they die they are replaced by the next generation. It’s pretty easy to test in this case because I can just track how each generation has answered this question over time.

What may be surprising to some readers is that both the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers have become less likely to say religion is very important to them over time. For Silents, the drop is about four percentage points between 2008 and 2025. For Boomers, the drop was nearly the same magnitude (51% in 2008 to 45% in 2025). So it doesn’t look like it’s just generational replacement happening here — there are noticeable declines in religiosity inside those two older generations.

But for younger generations, the decline in the “very important” response is much smaller. For Gen X, it’s only been two percentage points — though that’s due to a big spike in the 2025 data compared to 2024 (up four points), so it may just be a weird blip. For Millennials, it’s a whole lot more stable: their “very important” share is down three percentage points over the last 17 years. And for Gen Z, it’s at 33% in 2025, but the two years before that it was around 30% — exactly the same number recorded back in 2016. So I don’t know if we can make big claims based on just the 2025 data.

Overall, though, I am more convinced that generational replacement is doing the heavy lifting here. The Silent Generation is about twenty points more likely to say that religion is very important to them than Millennials or Gen Z. When those older Americans die, it drags down the aggregate numbers on importance.

Speaking of Gen Z — let’s pivot back to that Gallup poll. The first thing I’m going to do is try to replicate the findings in the Cooperative Election Study. I am using the same parameters: 18–29-year-olds who say that religion is very important to them, broken down by gender.

For the most part, the trend lines in the Gallup data are replicated in the Cooperative Election Study. For both men and women, there was a drop over time. The Gallup numbers were consistently higher than the CES data, but in most years the difference was small. I’m not terribly alarmed by that gap — I think we can chalk it up to Gallup always reporting higher overall levels of religiosity compared to the Cooperative Election Study.

But I’m sure your eye was drawn to what is happening in the graph on the right. That’s young men. The CES data looks pretty darn stable. In the 2022 data, 27.2% of young men said religion was very important to them. In the 2024 data, it was 29.7% — an increase of 2.5 points. That’s certainly within the tolerances of normal survey noise and nothing to write home about.

However, the Gallup numbers have it at 28% in 2022 (exactly the same as the CES) but then push it up to 42% in 2024. As you can probably guess — that’s way outside the bounds of normal. A move of 14 points is the largest ever recorded in this time series for Gallup, though there were two 12-point drops for women on this metric.

Now, I can’t fully investigate what’s happening with the Gallup numbers because I don’t have the raw data, but I can do a bit of poking around in the CES because they post their files on the Dataverse for download. Before I do that, I need to point out something — I had to pool the CES data to match the years listed in the Gallup survey online.

If I just look at individual years in the CES, here’s the share of young men who say religion is very important to them over the last couple of surveys:

• 2022 — 24.4%

• 2023 — 32.4%

• 2024 — 28.2%

• 2025 — 34.2%

That’s a lot of bounce. And here’s some inside baseball: the odd-numbered CES samples are a lot smaller than the even years. For instance, 2024 was 60,000 respondents; 2025 was just 17,000. So that may be doing some of the work here.

Beyond that, I wanted to see how religious importance interacted with religious attendance among these youngest adults. The graph below shows the share of weekly attenders who said that religion was very important to them.

What’s super interesting to me here is that among young adults who go to church often, the share who say religion is very important to them has declined by about ten percentage points between 2008 and 2025. Maybe it’s because non-denominational churches have taught young people that they aren’t “religious” — a common refrain in those spaces is, “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.” That sentiment could be changing how young folks interpret this question.

The other thing worth highlighting is the line for young men. In 2022, only 65% of weekly churchgoing young men said that religion was very important to them. By 2024, that was about twelve percentage points higher — a huge shift in a short period of time. That said, young men and young women are now at basically the same level in the last couple of years.

But what about the other end of the attendance spectrum — those who report seldom or never attending? This is where things get super weird.

The aberration here is pretty hard to miss. Among men who reported going to church less than once a year, religious importance is predictably low — just 6.7% of this subgroup said that religion was very important to them back in 2024. But then in a single year, that figure rose to 17.1%. That’s both statistically significant and substantively huge. The confidence intervals between men and women are still overlapping here, but not by that much.

So what in the world is happening in the Gallup data? I can’t say for certain since I can’t replicate this analysis with their spreadsheets. But what I can say is that a clear contributor to the rise in religious importance among young men in the CES is a growing number of folks who like the idea of religion but don’t go to church that much.

It’s belief without behavior. They like what religion stands for, but they can’t manage to put their butt in a pew on Sunday morning.

Cue the think pieces.

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.

Pew’s Religious Landscape Study is an exception. It’s a rich treasure trove of information about many aspects of American religion. The only downside is that it doesn’t go into the field that often: 2007, 2014, and 2023-2024 are the three waves of that instrument.

That’s why the grant that Tony Jones and I received from the John Templeton Foundation is so incredibly important, because it allows us to pull together a long survey that was given to a large sample which focuses specifically on unexplored topics surrounding American religion.

One thing that has always intrigued me is how little we know about how the non-religious actually feel about religion. It’s just not a topic that appears that much in many of the most widely used instruments. It’s a bit too niche for their liking. But we included a short battery of statements to the nones in our sample (over 12,000 of them) that tried to get a handle on a pretty straightforward question: Do the non-religious actually hate religion? And, what factors drive up (or tamp down) disdain for religion?

Let’s start by just giving you all a sense of how the non-religious responded to three statements in the survey.

The overwhelming sense you get from this data is that the vast majority of nones are just not carrying around a huge amount of resentment when it comes to religion. In the full sample of the non-religious, just 26% agreed that religion has no place in the modern world, only 25% said religion was a form of child abuse, and just 22% said that religion needed to be eradicated. I would not describe that as overwhelming evidence of antipathy toward religion.

Now, that’s not to say that it doesn’t vary somewhat by the type of none that responded to each statement. Without a doubt, atheists are the most antagonistic toward religion. When it comes to the statement, “Religion has no place in the modern world” nearly half of them agreed (49%). Those numbers were lower for the other two statements (42% on each), but that’s still a sizable minority.

There is a clear line of demarcation between the atheists and the other two types of non-religious, however. For agnostics, agreement with those statements was 20+ points lower than the atheists and the nothing in particular category was even a bit lower than that. In fact, the “nothing in particulars” seem downright warm to religion across these three statements.

However, we aren’t just going to end there. There are a bunch of moving parts that I want to explore when it comes to antipathy toward religion. Let me start with age. For all the work that I’ve done on this survey data, I have a clear impression that anger toward religion abates with age. I wanted to check that here.

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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.