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.

Who do you talk to when you’re struggling? When it feels like you’re carrying the weight of the world and there’s no way out of the mess you’re in—who can you turn to for an honest conversation? I’d bet that for a lot of us, the answer is “no one.” Many Americans are suffering in silence, without a spouse, a close friend, or even a co-worker they can lean on when times get tough. The loneliness epidemic has real casualties. Of that, I am absolutely sure.

I saw a video on Reddit a couple of weeks ago that got me thinking about this. It was posted in “HumansBeingBros,” a subreddit that exists to make you feel a little better about the world. A motorcyclist comes upon a man walking down the middle of the road, clearly in distress. The rider stops his bike, turns around, and engages with the man—at one point even asking if he needs a hug.

Later in the video, the two of them are sitting against a fence on the side of the road. Here’s the part I love: whoever uploaded it blurred the man’s face and captioned the moment with just a few words—”talked about his struggles.” No details. I can really appreciate that. We don’t need to know what the man was dealing with. He deserves his privacy. The video ends with the police arriving to offer him a ride home.

But it left me with a question: who can people actually talk to in an open and honest way? I’ve got some data from Pew that speaks directly to this. It’s a simple battery of questions from American Trends Panel 142, hosted on the ARDA. The preamble is straightforward: “How comfortable would you be talking about your mental health and emotional well-being with each of the following?” Then respondents rated several options:

• Close Friends

• Spouse/Partner

• Immediate Family Member

• Mental Health Therapist

• A Co-Worker

• Neighbor

• Religious/Spiritual Leader

Let’s start with the share of each religious group who said they were extremely or very comfortable talking about their mental health with each of those individuals.

One thing that is crystal clear from this data is that people truly rely on their spouses or partners when it comes to being honest and open about what’s happening in their lives. Among every religious group, the spouse scores the highest, often by a wide margin. The response levels are remarkably consistent, too: most are within a few points of 80%. An interesting outlier is the LDS community—nearly 90% say they are very or extremely comfortable sharing mental health issues with their spouse.

The other groups follow a consistent rank ordering. Close friends, mental health therapists, and immediate family members all rank similarly, typically in the 50-60% range for most religious traditions. At the bottom are co-workers and neighbors, who score poorly; people generally aren’t willing to be vulnerable around them.

But there was one blip in the data worth digging into: the responses regarding comfort levels with religious or spiritual leaders. For most respondents, this doesn’t rank high. Only about a third of non-evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and LDS members feel very or extremely comfortable speaking with their pastor about their struggles. But for evangelicals, that number jumps to 56%—putting clergy in the same neighborhood as immediate family or close friends.

That outlier led me to compare two specific options: speaking with a mental health therapist versus a member of the clergy. I wondered if certain religious groups favored one over the other. The graph below explores that comparison.

It’s clearly the case that the average person of faith feels more comfortable talking with a counselor than a member of the clergy. Among Catholics, half feel very or extremely comfortable talking to a mental health professional, while only 33% say the same about talking to a priest. For LDS members, those numbers are 52% and 25%, respectively. (This may be related to how the LDS Church is organized, as they do not have a traditional paid clergy). Across almost every group, there’s a clear throughline: people of faith aren’t always keen on talking to their pastors about their troubles.

However, evangelicals are the exception. They are actually slightly more comfortable talking with their pastor (56%) than with a therapist (51%) regarding their emotional well-being.

Part of this may stem from the fact that evangelicals attend church more frequently than other Christians. It stands to reason that being around someone more often makes you more willing to share your struggles. I can test this by breaking down the three largest groups by attendance levels.

One consistent finding is that church attendance has very little impact on how comfortable someone is speaking to a mental health professional. Across Protestants and Catholics, about half say they are very or extremely comfortable speaking with a counselor. Aside from low-attending Catholics, these differences fall within the margin of error.

However, frequent church attendance does increase comfort levels when speaking to a pastor. For evangelicals, comfort increases from 44% among infrequent attenders to 63% for weekly attenders. For non-evangelical Protestants, it rises from 27% to 49%. For Catholics, the jump is even larger: 19% vs. 57%. Clearly, more religiously active people are more likely to see their pastor as a resource for their mental health journey.

It is worth noting that among weekly attending non-evangelicals and Catholics, the comfort levels for therapists and clergy are nearly identical. For weekly attending evangelicals, however, the preference for their pastor over a therapist is clear.

I also wondered if age played a role in whether Christians are comfortable speaking with mental health professionals. Recent commentary suggests young adults are “The Therapy Generation”—seeking counseling at much higher rates than previous generations. This would suggest that younger Christians might feel more comfortable seeking out a counselor.

For evangelicals, there is a higher level of comfort among young adults. Of those aged 18-29, 55% are very or extremely comfortable talking to a mental health professional, compared to 48% among those aged 50-64. It appears the stigma is weakening within this group.

However, this trend isn’t as clear for non-evangelical Protestants and Catholics. There isn’t a smooth age gradient in either group. Among Catholics, for example, those aged 50-64 are the most comfortable with therapy. For non-evangelicals, it is the 30-64 age range.

The variation across these religious groups is difficult to pin down.

Many factors could influence openness toward a therapist or clergy member, including gender, race, education, income, and partisanship. To test this, I used a regression model to control for these factors simultaneously, looking at comfort levels with both mental health professionals and religious leaders.

There’s a lot to dissect here.

Regarding gender, men are slightly less comfortable talking to a therapist, but it makes no difference when talking to a religious leader. Race also has a differential impact: white respondents are generally more comfortable speaking with a therapist than with clergy. Age works similarly in both models: older individuals are more open to discussing mental health with both counselors and clergy (though the effect is more pronounced for the latter).

The most significant factor is religious attendance, which strongly correlates with comfort in speaking to clergy. Surprisingly, it remains a positive and significant factor for talking to a therapist as well. While identifying as evangelical increases openness with a pastor, it has zero impact on comfort levels with a therapist.

The variable that stands out most is Republican identification. It works in opposite directions depending on the confidant. A Republican is significantly more comfortable talking to a member of the clergy about their mental health, but significantly less comfortable opening up to a therapist. In fact, partisanship is the strongest negative predictor of therapist comfort in the model—surpassing gender, race, and education.

This holds true even after controlling for religious attendance and evangelical identification. It isn’t just that Republicans are more religious; even two people in the same pew every week will differ—the Republican remains measurably more wary of the therapist’s couch than the Democrat. Comfort with mental health care has become another facet of political sorting in the U.S.

Why Republicans are more averse to therapists is a question for another time. My more pressing concern is for the man in that video. Did he have no one in his life he could talk to? What would have happened if that motorcyclist hadn’t driven by?

Social atomization has real consequences, both seen and unseen. And as this data shows, the question isn’t just whether Americans have someone to open up to — it’s that even the answer to “who would you trust?” now depends on their politics, their education, and their pew. The doors people are willing to walk through are different. What matters is that they walk through one.

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 regardless of the actual provenance of the words – the ideas here are incredibly powerful because the sentiment expressed is the backbone of pluralism. Under this model, tolerance is the glue that holds societies together. We may not agree on everything (or almost anything), but what we do have to hold in common is the view that people have the right to speak their minds without fear of violence or criminal reprisal.

In other words, free speech needs to be free. And this is a concept that is tested on college campuses thousands of times per academic year when student groups invite speakers to give addresses, lectures, or colloquiums on hot-button issues. Should someone be able to come to an institute of higher learning and advocate for a very fringe belief? Or is it necessary and prudent for students to stop that event by whatever means necessary?

That’s tested with a short battery of questions that were included in FIRE’s 2026 survey of over 68,000 college students from more than 250 colleges and universities all across the United States. Let me just start by giving you a broad sense of where students stand on the acceptability of suppressing free speech.

When they were presented with the statement about “blocking other students from attending a campus speech”, 22% of respondents said that action was sometimes or always acceptable. On the issue of using violence to stop a speech, that figure was 15%. So there is certainly a small but not marginal group of college students who are willing to engage in what I would describe as extreme measures to stop a speaker from voicing their opinions.

The third statement was, “shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus” and received much more support than the other two. In fact, only 28% of respondents thought this was never an acceptable course of action and 35% said it was rarely acceptable. That leaves 37% of college students who believe that shouting down a speaker is sometimes or always acceptable.

But let’s break those three statements down by the political ideology of the college student who took part in the survey.

One thing that comes through in this analysis is that conservatives are more likely to say that blocking students from attending a speech or shouting down a speaker is never acceptable on their campus. For instance, in the “shouting down” scenario, 39% of conservative students said that this should never happen, it’s only 21% of liberal students. Just 28% of conservatives thought it was a behavior that is sometimes or always acceptable. Those two response options were chosen by 42% of liberal students.

What is noteworthy, though, is how ideology mattered so little when it came to the question about “using violence to stop a campus speech.” Whether I analyzed this among liberals or conservatives there was no real difference in the outcome: about two-thirds said that this kind of behavior was never acceptable. That was easily the highest share for any of the three scenarios. It’s pretty strong evidence that college students see a clear distinction between other forms of obstruction and actual physical violence when it comes to stopping a campus event.

Okay – I want to really zoom in on that question about “shouting down” a speaker, though. It clearly has the largest variation of the three. And, from my perspective, it’s the one that I seem to see the most often on social media. And let’s bring religion into the mix, now. Which traditions are the most willing to shout down a speaker and which ones aren’t?

What we see in the graph is that atheists are the most likely to say that it’s sometimes or always acceptable to shout down a speaker, nearly half of them (45%) fall into these two camps. That’s about eight percentage points higher than the full sample. Then, as you go down the list you have groups like agnostics, Jews, and Muslims. Each group is above the overall mean on this question.

Which groups are the least supportive of shouting down a speaker? It’s Latter-day Saints. Among the LDS, 38% say it’s never an acceptable behavior – that’s the highest of any religious group. Then you have the two biggest groups in the survey, Protestants and Catholics. For each, at least two-thirds say that shouting down a speaker is never or rarely acceptable.

But if you have been around this newsletter for any length of time you can make a pretty easy inference about the graph – it’s really political ideology that is doing the “work” here, not really religion. Atheists tend to be the most left leaning, followed by agnostics and so on. Then, LDS are more right leaning and so are Catholics and Protestants. So, this isn’t really about religion, it’s more about politics. So let’s just pull both those factors apart in the graph below.

This is where some really interesting patterns begin to emerge for me. Yes, it is certainly the case that liberals are more inclined to say it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker compared to conservatives. Oftentimes the gaps between the two subgroups are sizable. The largest one, interestingly enough, is among agnostics. Among the liberals, 46% say shouting down a speaker is acceptable. It’s half that rate among conservatives at 23%. But there are big gaps for Catholics and Protestants, too. It’s only among the smallest religious groups where the differences aren’t significant, and that’s more about statistical power than anything else.

But one thing I did want to flag here is comparing liberal Protestants and Catholics to liberal atheists and agnostics. Note how the latter group is more inclined to believe that shouting down a speaker is acceptable compared to the Christians? So, yes, there is something going on here with political ideology, but it is tempered (at least in some measure) by the religious tradition of the respondent.

I wanted to go a layer down on this, though. I was specifically interested in exploring the idea that Christians who go to church more often may hold to views of free speech that lean toward toleration instead of suppression. The very first paper I ever published found just that—regular churchgoers expressed higher levels of political tolerance compared to those who attended less frequently.

The data in that regard is pretty mixed. The throughline through this analysis is still replicated here, though: liberals are more inclined to believe it to be socially acceptable to shout down a speaker on campus compared to conservatives. The gaps between the two groups run between ten and fifteen percentage points among Christians. So, this is really a story about ideology.

But what about attendance? Well, among college students who are conservative, Christian, and attend church weekly – they are least likely to find it acceptable to shout down a speaker on campus. Only 23% indicated it was sometimes or always acceptable. But for liberal Christians, there’s really no discernible pattern when it comes to attendance. A never attender is at the same spot on the scale as a weekly attender. So I’m not sure that going to church more often automatically leads to more pluralistic views. It’s certainly conditioned on the ideology of the respondent.

There are just so many moving parts here that I’ve not explored to this point. What about the race of the respondent, their gender identity or their sexual orientation? I wanted to try (as much as I could) to really sort out what mechanisms lead to students being more open to free speech on college campuses. To do that I created an additive index of three questions from the battery I described at the beginning. Higher scores indicate a greater level of support for free speech.

Let’s work through the results of this regression model in sections, starting with religion at the very top. The reference category here is Protestants, so if the coefficient is positive that translates to “more protective of free speech compared to Protestants.” There’s only one group that this applies to: students who identify as nothing in particular. Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, and Hindus are all less protective than Protestants.

When it comes to politics, the result is pretty simple – when compared to Democrats, Independents are less supportive of free speech. But here’s a big surprise: in this model, there’s no difference in support for free speech when comparing Republicans to Democrats. But there’s a very good reason for that when you look down to the next section. It’s not Democrats who are less protective of free speech, it’s liberals. In all the models I ran, a conservative ideology was the most powerful predictor of protecting free speech rights. When you put both party and ideology in a model, it’s ideology that emerges.

Now, the bottom half of this graph really helped to clarify my thinking on this topic. Let me explain. Non-binary people are negatively signed – they are not as protective of free speech rights as men. The next set of coefficients indicates that people of color are also signed negative compared to white respondents. Then the section below is on sexual orientation. A non-straight person is also more inclined to find it acceptable to shout down speakers/stop someone from attending a speech than a straight person.

Do you see the pattern that emerges here? It’s incredibly consistent. The “majority” identity is more apt to protect free speech than the minoritized positions. A white, straight, cisgender person is the most protective of someone’s right to give a lecture on campus. Anyone who doesn’t fit into that mold is less supportive.

One has to wonder if the subtext of all this goes back to the old phrase, “It all depends on whose ox is being gored.” In other words, when a transgender college student is thinking of these scenarios in their minds, they are picturing that hypothetical speaker as one who says things like, “transgenderism is a mental disorder” and that’s why they are more willing to restrict speech.

So I’m not sure it’s liberalism per se that is what is leading to less support for free speech. It’s also probably tied up (at least in part) with the fact that lots of liberals are from these “minoritized” groups or at least allies to people in these groups.

I am reminded of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissenting opinion in United States v. Schwimmer. The case, decided in 1929, involved a woman who was seeking citizenship. However, she was a pacifist and was unwilling to affirm the section in the citizenship oath that required her to “take up arms personally” in defense of the country. Her application was denied, and she appealed to the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 decision, the Court affirmed that she could not become a citizen of the United States. Holmes vehemently disagreed, writing, “Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

May we strive to live up to that ideal.

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.

Others could hear that same sermon and can’t wait for the altar call to begin — not so they can head down front and make a public commitment to Jesus, but so they can get out of there as soon as possible. As they hear the pastor pound the pulpit and speak with such resolve, the question that keeps coming up in their head is, “How is this guy so sure that he’s right?” These are folks who are often consumed by doubts and second-guessing, and they struggle to know what “right” is in many situations because of their inability — or unwillingness — to just embrace certainty.

I think about the nature of belief a lot and have always wished I could wrap my head around it in an empirical way. Asking questions in this area is hard. No one ever seems to like the response options to a query about what folks believe about God, or evolution, or the existence of the soul. We all hold positions that seem to land between two response items instead of being perfectly captured by one of them.

Well, I was tinkering around in the Pew Religious Landscape Survey the other day and came to the conclusion that it contains more questions about belief than anything else I have available, and it was fielded to a larger sample to boot. I was wondering if I could begin to model dimensions of faith — hoping to clearly identify whether there are two, three, or four ways that people seem to orient themselves to belief items.

I think I’ve stumbled upon something that may be helpful in understanding belief among American adults.

Here’s how I did it. I pulled ten belief items into an exploratory factor analysis, which is a statistical technique for understanding how a group of items “hang” together. What I ended up with is two dimensions that made the most sense.

The first dimension is what I’ve come to call “doctrinal commitment.” The items with the darker blue circles all loaded on the same factor and it was pretty clear they were focused on propositional claims — the kinds of questions that show up in creeds and catechisms. Folks who are sure that people who don’t believe in God can’t be moral will score high on this dimension. There were six items that fit the bill here.

The second dimension focuses on what I’d call an existential understanding of faith. To be a little colloquial, these are the “woo woo” aspects of religion and spirituality. They tend to focus on the idea that we all have spirits and that we can’t be entirely certain God really exists in a concrete, definable way. When I looked over the data, I got the distinct impression that these are folks who would say things like, “I just feel that we are all connected somehow.” People who load high on this dimension have a softer and more diffuse perspective on faith. They aren’t bound by a specific doctrine or creed.

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We fielded our survey through Qualtrics in August of 2025 and we managed to collect a total sample of 557 respondents. Not bad, right?

One concept that kept bubbling up during our discussion was the idea of self-improvement. Young folks have a term for this: “maxxing.” For instance, some young men are devotees of “jaw-maxxing,” which is a series of facial exercises to make them have a more defined jawline. There is also a corner of the internet that is obsessed with sleep-maxxing. These folks track their sleep patterns obsessively, always looking for ways to catch a few more minutes of shut-eye.

It’s pretty clear that the typical American is always on the lookout for ways to improve their lives on a whole bunch of different dimensions. We wanted to focus on that topic in a more philosophical way in our questionnaire. We asked them: How close do you feel you are to being the kind of person you ought to be, morally speaking?

Our goal here was just to get a sense of the level of self-reflection going on in the average American.

Because our sample size isn’t that big, we have to be careful about how we subdivide this data, so breaking it up into three age categories is about as good as we are going to do. But you can clearly see that there’s a distinct age effect on the question when it comes to people reflecting on their moral character.

Among the youngest adults, a significant portion (38%) say that they are “very far” or “somewhat far” from being the person that they ought to be from a moral standpoint. In contrast, almost none of them feel like they are “already there.” But as you move down the graph, the bars begin to shift in the opposite direction. Among the middle age bracket, only 28% place themselves in the bottom two categories.

But look at those who are 55 or older! Just 6% say that they are “very far” from the person that they want to be and 8% said “somewhat far.” In contrast, about half of them said that they were “pretty close” or “already there” when it came to the process of moral refinement. Older folks seem pretty content with the person that they’ve become.

However, there were other questions in the survey that focused on this process of self-improvement.

How often do you make a deliberate effort to improve your character?

How often do you reflect on whether your actions were right or wrong?

The graph on the left is the share of each age bracket who said that they made a deliberate effort to improve their character on a daily basis. Again, there’s a clear upward trend. Older folks are about 11 percentage points more likely than younger adults to say that they are trying every single day to improve their character. Think about that in conjunction with the prior graph where older folks were likely to say that they were closer to the person that they were supposed to be.

Here’s a possible explanation: people who’ve spent decades consciously working on their character feel closer to the person they want to be. Trying harder and feeling more arrived can genuinely go together. In other words, all that hard work is actually translating to a perception that they are making moral progress.

But what’s also interesting is that older folks are clearly less likely to ruminate on their actions frequently. Among those who were 55 or older, only ⅓ of them said that they were reflecting on their behavior most of the time or always. So it seems like something important happens as we age: we try hard to be better people, and lots of us feel like we are getting closer to that goal. However, older folks just let things go more easily. They don’t dwell on every single thing they said or did during the course of the day.

To this point, though, we haven’t mentioned religion. There does seem to be ample reason to believe that religiously engaged people would reflect on their actions, right? I don’t think it takes a huge leap in logic to assume that people who sit in a house of worship on a regular basis will have more opportunities to think through their behaviors during the previous week.

Because the sample size wasn’t that big, we could only divide our sample into three groups: those who are practicing religious folks (attendance at least monthly), non-practicing religious (those attending yearly or less), and then the non-religious.

And you can see an unmistakable pattern in each of these three graphs – active religious folks are much more likely to think about the morality of their actions than those who either are non-practicing or non-religious. The gaps among the youngest adults are pretty large. Among the non-religious, 27% say that they think about the morality of their actions “most of the time” or “always.” It was 53% of those who were religiously engaged. It’s pretty hard to miss the conclusion that an hour in a sanctuary that includes some preaching does lend itself to moral reflection.

What we do want to highlight, however, is that self-reflection does tend to wane among older religious respondents. For instance, among the practicing religious people who are under 35, 53% were thinking about their actions constantly. It was 44% among those who were 55 or older. There was also an 8-point drop among the non-practicing religious respondents, too.

Let’s do the same basic analysis but now make the dependent variable that first question we analyzed: How close do you feel you are to being the kind of person you ought to be, morally speaking? This is the share who said that they were “pretty close” or “already there.”

Now this is fascinating based on the previous bit of analysis! Among the youngest adult respondents, it was the most religious who were the most inclined to say that they were closer to the person that they ought to be. And the gap is pretty large – 19% among the non-religious and non-practicing for 34% among the young adults who attended church at least once a month. The one big change in the middle-aged bucket is that the non-religious are much more likely to say that they are closer to the person that they ought to be than their younger counterparts (19% → 30%).

However, the data for the oldest adults is just an entirely different story. The percentages are much higher across the board, regardless of religiosity. But the bigger shift is that now it’s the non-religious who are more likely to feel like they are the person that they are supposed to be. Among older nones, nearly 6 in 10 say that they are “pretty close” or “already there.” It’s 47% among the other two groups.

To finish up this post, we thought it would be fun to combine two metrics into a single bit of analysis: moral confidence minus actual reflection. A negative number means people are doing more soul-searching than their confidence would suggest; a positive number means their confidence has outrun the habit of checking their own behavior.

This is where it really becomes apparent who is engaging in a whole lot of soul-searching while not feeling super comfortable with their moral position. Among young adults, the bars are very much in the negative territory for the religious respondents. They are far away from the person that they want to be and they are reflecting on their actions frequently. Among young nones, those two metrics are pretty equally balanced.

For middle-aged respondents, the metrics for the religious are basically in the same spot. There’s a lot of moral dissatisfaction happening there. They are constantly monitoring their behavior and not really feeling like they are landing in a good spot. Meanwhile, the number for middle-aged nones moves in a much more positive direction. They are growing content with their moral character and not scrutinizing every action.

The results for the oldest people in our sample indicate that everyone seems to be growing more content with who they are, but it’s not the same level of contentment across all three groups. Among the religiously active, the number is still solidly negative. However, among the oldest nones, it’s easily the most positive. No one seems to be closer to feeling that they have “arrived” in a moral sense than a non-religious retiree.

Now, of course, the issue looming over all of this is that everything is self-reported and subjective. The first question, “How close do you feel you are to being the kind of person you ought to be, morally speaking?” does not presuppose that there’s some type of ideal moral plane that we can achieve through self-improvement. Everyone’s ideal for morality is probably just a bit different. And that may be why older nones are in a different spot on these metrics compared to religious folks.

If you’ve ever been a part of a church community, you have probably been admonished hundreds of times to become more Christ-like. That same theme runs through basically every religious tradition. Does that create a different (possibly higher standard) to a question about becoming the person we are supposed to be? It’s hard to know.

What is self-evident from this data, however, is that self-improvement is a young person’s game. Older folks just seem happy to be where they are in life. They probably aren’t going to get obsessed with jaw-maxxing or sleep-maxxing. They just want to enjoy however much life that they have left.

Code for this post can be found here.

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

Let me start by stating a fact that seems incomprehensible to even type out, but it undergirds almost every single graph that I produce: we don’t actually know the religious composition of the United States with any real precision. I know that sounds bizarre. But the honest truth is that we are relying on a whole bunch of “best guesses” based on sound methodology and replication — and we have no way to know for certain if any of them are right.

The reason is simple: the United States made it illegal to ask about religious affiliation on the Census back in the 1970s. (This short piece from Pew explains the whole mess well.) That puts researchers like me in a real bind, because without a Census benchmark there’s no authoritative reference point to weight our surveys against. We know exactly what share of Americans have a four-year college degree because the Census tells us. We have no equivalent anchor for Catholics, or evangelicals, or the religiously unaffiliated.

To their great credit — and great expense — Pew has tried to fill this void with the National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), and it’s a genuine methodological achievement. But everyone working in this space knows that what we really need is a Census benchmark, and we don’t have one.

In a post from February, I pulled back the curtain on survey methodology — specifically the difference between probability-based polls and opt-in panels. I’m not going to rehash all of that here, so I’d strongly encourage you to go read it first. But in short: probability-based surveys like the Pew Religious Landscape Study randomly select respondents from the full population, while opt-in panels like the Cooperative Election Study draw from volunteers — and that distinction can produce meaningfully different pictures of American religion.

How meaningfully different? That’s exactly what today’s post is about. Let’s start by comparing the two surveys on the basics: religious attendance and religious affiliation across the full sample.

It doesn’t take long to find a meaningful difference between the two instruments. In the CES, 34% of respondents say they never attend religious services, compared to just 25% in the Pew data — a nine-point gap that would be genuinely alarming if it held up across the board. But zoom out a little and the picture gets more complicated. Pew actually records a higher share of “seldom” attenders than the CES — 25% versus 21%. Add those two bottom categories together and the gap shrinks considerably: 55% of CES respondents attend less than once a year compared to 50% in Pew. That’s a five-point difference, which is not nothing, but it’s hardly a chasm.

What I find most reassuring is the right side of the graph. The share of CES respondents who attend weekly or more? Exactly 25% — the same figure Pew produces. On the measure that matters most for congregational health and religious vitality, the two surveys are in complete agreement.

The non-religion picture tells a similar story. In the full CES sample, 34.5% identify as religiously unaffiliated compared to 29.4% in the Pew data — that same five-point gap showing up again. But the more interesting question isn’t the overall margin, it’s where that gap comes from. Here’s what it looks like when I break it down by birth decade.

It’s certainly the case that older Americans are much more likely to be recorded as non-religious in the CES compared to the Pew RLS. Among those born in the 1950s, the figures are 25% versus 17%. The gap is eight points among those born in the 1960s, and seven points for those born in the 1970s — 36% versus 29%. These are real, substantive differences that are impossible to simply wave away.

When we dig into the type of none, though, a clearer picture emerges. The primary driver of the divergence is the “nothing in particular” category — older CES respondents are considerably more likely to land there compared to the Pew sample. The atheist and agnostic gaps exist too, but they’re modest by comparison.

I’ve turned this over in my head many times and I can’t fully resolve it. My first instinct was social desirability bias — the idea that Pew respondents were more likely to be talking to a live interviewer and therefore less willing to disavow religion. But Pew’s own methodology indicates that 97% of RLS participants completed the survey through a web browser, just like CES respondents. That levels the playing field and takes my best explanation off the table.

The most I can say with confidence is that address-based sampling and opt-in panels are recruiting fundamentally different kinds of older Americans, and those differences show up in how they answer questions about religious identity. But I’d be overstating my certainty if I claimed to know exactly why. Sometimes the honest answer is that the data surfaces a question I can’t fully resolve.

What makes this even more puzzling is what happens at the other end of the age spectrum. Among the youngest Americans — those born in 1990 or later — the two surveys are essentially in agreement, never diverging by more than a couple of points. If the gap were simply a product of opt-in panels attracting a certain kind of respondent, you’d expect it to show up across all age groups. The fact that it’s concentrated among older Americans suggests something specific is happening with that cohort, not a universal feature of how these two instruments measure religion.

With that caveat on the table, let’s press on. I pulled together Pew’s estimates for the share of various religious groups with a four-year college degree and compared them to the same figures from the CES.

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One of our all time favorite subjects for reality television was a huge family who lived in Northwest Arkansas named the Duggars. Their first iteration of their show was 14 Kids and Counting. A later iteration? 19 Kids and Counting. Of those 19 children, 13 are currently married and there are at least 40 grandchildren so far.

It’s a family that is not without controversy. Their oldest son, Joshua, had an account on the infamous cheating website Ashley Madison. He was subsequently convicted of possessing child pornography and is currently serving a 12.5 year prison sentence for the crime. Another Duggar child, Joseph, has also been arrested for molestation of a child under the age of 12. One of the daughters has accused their father of financial exploitation because he demanded that his adult children agree to be filmed for the television series without compensation. There’s a lot of drama there.

But what’s always in the background of any discussion about the Duggars is their religious beliefs. They were adherents to the Institute for Basic Life Principles – an extremely conservative evangelical organization. The IBLP, founded by Bill Gothard in the 1960s, teaches a strict hierarchy of authority in the home: children submit to parents, wives submit to husbands, and everyone submits to God. Gothard’s organization discouraged dating in favor of parent-guided courtship, promoted homeschooling through its own curriculum, and placed enormous emphasis on female modesty. (Gothard himself resigned from the ministry in 2014 after dozens of women accused him of sexual harassment.)

But the teaching that made the Duggars famous was the family’s embrace of what is often called the “Quiverfull“ ethos, drawn from Psalm 127 - children are arrows in the hand of a warrior, and “blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” No birth control of any kind. Every pregnancy is a blessing from God, and family size is left entirely in His hands. That’s how you get to nineteen kids.

And that’s the image that pops into most American minds when they see a family with a whole bunch of children at the grocery store or piling out of a fifteen-passenger van in the church parking lot. They assume that mom and dad are deeply devout people who are having all those kids for Jesus. It’s a tidy little stereotype. The only problem is that the data doesn’t really back it up.

Let’s start with this question, though: how many American families are large? I just looked at folks in the Cooperative Election Study who were at least 45 years old and had at least one child.

The only child family is not that widespread – less than a quarter of parents said that they had just one kid. The modal outcome, unsurprisingly, is having two children. Forty percent of households have a pair of kids and another 22% have had three children total. That means that 85% of all families have between one and three kids.

It’s pretty darn rare to have a family with at least five kids – that encompasses just 6% of all those households. Out of a total sample of 60,000, only 23,700 had ever had a child. Of that, just 113 had eight or more. That’s less than .5% of all parents. Even a family that is half the size of the Duggars is a statistical oddity.

And, of course, that is becoming even more of an outlier with each passing generation.

I did the same analysis across the three oldest generations in the data – Silent, Boomers, and Gen X – to see how much family sizes have changed over the last fifty years, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how consistent the results were across generations. For instance, having two kids was the most likely outcome for parents who were born in the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s. In each case, that was about 40% of families. Large families are about as commonplace, too. Among Silent Generation folks, 20% had families of at least four kids; it was 15% of Boomers and Gen X.

Here’s the only difference that seems substantively significant to me: having just one child. Among the Silent Generation (born 1925–1945), only 15% of parents had a single child. It was 22% of Boomers and 27% of Generation X. And, although not all Millennials have gotten to the end of their childbearing years, when I just look at those born in the 1980s, 31% have only had one kid and 38% have had two kids. So the family size trend will just continue on.

Let’s dig into two possible explanations for this decline – politics and religion. I am going to start by just looking at the partisan distribution across family size. One caveat here: I’m only looking at people who have at least one child and we know that those on the left side of the political spectrum are less likely to have children.

Yeah, I’m not blown away by this result. I think it’s fair to say that Democratic parents are slightly more likely to only have one child compared to their Republican counterparts (26% vs. 20%). But I wouldn’t call that a huge difference. When it comes to having two children, the partisan gap is completely nonexistent (40% of both groups have two kids). There is some evidence here that Republicans tend to have slightly larger families but, again, the differences are not huge.

Among Republicans, 39% have a family with at least three children – which is also the same percentage for political Independents, by the way. For Democrats, it’s 34%. So, yeah, there’s a substantive difference there, but it’s not like Republicans are just outbreeding Democrats on a massive scale. The average GOP family is 2.46 kids compared to 2.29 for Democrats.

What about religion? Let me show you attendance two different ways. First, this is the family size breakdown by level of religious attendance.

For families who never attend religious services, 27% have had only one child, while 13% have at least four children. Among those who attend religious services more than once a week, 20% have just one child and 20% have at least four. That’s not what I would describe as a substantively large difference. The idea that those super-religious families have a whole brood of kids is just not even close to what the data shows. In fact, less than 10% of them have five or more kids. They are twice as likely to have one kid compared to five-plus.

The changes are also pretty subtle once you get to the “yearly” level of attendance. 60% of families at this attendance band are one to two children and 16% are four or more. Those numbers are within five percentage points of those most devout. In other words, the perception of non-religious families having one kid while the local Baptist church parking lot is full of Sprinter vans with five car seats is not borne out here.

Here’s that same data another way – how is the religious attendance of parents of four-plus children compared to families of any size?

I think it’s fair to say that large families are more likely to go to church, but not by that much. Among families who have had four or more children, 33% said that they go to church at least once a week. For families of any size, the weekly attendance rate is 29% – four points lower. A slim majority of all families report that they go to church less than once a year. Among large families, the seldom/never attendance rate is 46%.

You see what I’m saying now? The religious differences between big families and all families are pretty miniscule in the grand scheme of things. All things considered, I think that the average family of four is probably three to five percentage points more likely to be attending less than once a year compared to a family of six. Embracing an approach to religious renewal by encouraging fertility doesn’t seem like a strategy that will move the needle in a significant way.

What about comparing the religious affiliation of larger families versus families of any size? That’s what I did below.

In almost every dumbbell plot, the two point estimates are almost exactly on top of each other. For instance, Catholics made up 20% of the largest families. They were also 20% of families of any size. That was also true for people who claimed no religion in particular (~14% for both family sizes). In fact, the average gap was less than two percentage points across every religious tradition.

There were a couple of outliers worth flagging. Among families of all sizes, evangelicals were 29.5% of the sample. Among the largest families, they made up 32% of that subgroup. Evangelicals are overrepresented among families like the Duggars, but only by a handful of percentage points. For Latter-day Saints, those two figures were 1.3% vs. 3.6%. So, yes, there is empirical support for the idea that LDS do have larger families, but in pure numeric terms, only about 1 in 30 families with at least four kids are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Outliers have an unbelievable hold on our imaginations. We see a family like the Duggars and think that they represent essential features of that entire phenomenon. When in reality, they are outliers even among outliers. Yes, religion does seem to have an impact on the decision about the number of kids a family will have, but it’s a very minor difference.

Comparing evangelicals to atheists and agnostics – the widest religious contrast the data offers – and controlling for age, race, education, and sex, the gap is about 0.6 children. Real, robust, and the single biggest demographic divide in American family size. It’s also just over half a kid. So, yeah, religion matters here, but it’s not all that counts.

Code for this post can be found here.

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

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

One of the most common critiques I hear about survey research on religion is that it flattens something that is deeply personal and profoundly complex. Questions about belief certainly fall into this trap. The General Social Survey has questions about a respondent’s view of God and the Bible that only allow a handful of response options. A common response is, “I don’t really fit cleanly into any of those boxes.” And honestly? That criticism is right on target. Asking someone “do you believe in God?” and forcing them into just a couple of potential boxes misses an enormous amount of nuance. But that’s the nature of survey research — we trade depth for breadth.

That’s why I’m always happy to see a survey that goes one step further on a belief question. The Pew Religious Landscape Survey does just that and it’s easy to see how it’s broken down on the ARDA website. It first asks, “Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?” But then the very next question is, “How certain are you about this belief?” But here’s what I really appreciate about this setup — everyone gets the second question, no matter how they answered the first one.

Which means not only can we assess the certainty of believers, we can also get a good sense of how certain non-believers are in their position as well. That distinction matters — a lot. A faith held with ironclad certainty looks very different from one held with a kind of hopeful tentativeness. And as you’re about to see, where Americans land on that spectrum varies dramatically by generation, by ideology, and by how often they actually show up to worship.

First, I’ve got to just start by laying out how the sample falls across those eight possible response options.

A majority of the sample falls into the “I believe in God with absolute certainty” category — that’s 55% of all respondents. Clearly, over half of Americans have a deep well of religious belief. Another 22% are in the “I am fairly certain about my belief in God” camp. That means that nearly four in five respondents score quite high on this belief metric.

The share of Americans who are absolutely certain that God does not exist is a bit less than 6%, and then another 7% say that they are fairly certain that God (or a universal spirit) does not exist. Said another way, for every person who is pretty sure that God doesn’t exist, there are six who are fairly certain of the existence of a Higher Power. Non-believers are statistically rare.

I did want to explore how much that had shifted from one generation to the next, though. So this is the same analysis but I just divided the sample into the birth decade of the respondent.

It should come as little surprise that older Americans are more likely to espouse a certain belief in God. Among those born before 1970, almost two-thirds can be found in the top left of each heatmap, and 85% are in the two squares in the top left. But that begins to erode when we move down to younger birth cohorts. The real drop off occurs among people born in the 1980s, when less than half believe in God with absolute certainty. And it declines even further from there — 42% among those born in the 1990s and 39% for folks who were born in the 2000s.

This raises the question: if certain belief drops by ~25 points, where do all those folks end up? The answer is clearly not in the “I certainly don’t believe in God” option. Even among the youngest respondents, only 6% are found in the bottom left square and a total of 16% are fairly certain or completely certain that God doesn’t exist. There’s a noticeable shift in the share of younger cohorts who fall into the “I’m fairly certain God exists” box. Which means that they aren’t sliding all the way to the other side of the spectrum. Instead, they are just moving one level down.

One thing that could be driving the differences in the above heatmaps is politics — younger folks are more likely to be ideologically liberal and older folks tend to lean conservative. Could that possibly have an impact on these results?

One rock solid finding from my analysis is that ideologically conservative folks are more likely to hold a certain belief in God compared to moderates and liberals. Among older conservatives, about 80% hold to a certain belief. It does erode a bit among younger conservatives, but even among the youngest adults, it’s still two-thirds of them who say, “I believe in God and I’m absolutely certain of that.”

Moderates are consistently 20 points lower than that. Among the oldest moderates, 60% are in the certain belief camp and it dips down to 40% among the youngest moderates. It’s interesting to me how the 1980s birth decade stands out as the pivotal one. For conservatives, certain belief drops by ten points while it’s 8 points among moderates.

Liberals are much lower than conservatives. The gap is consistently 35-40 percentage points when comparing one cohort to another. Among the youngest ideological liberals, only ~20% of them say that God exists and that they are certain of this fact. That’s 45 points lower than conservatives from the same age group.

But one thing to also note here – the drop in certain belief is the same size for both liberals and conservatives. It’s 15 percentage points when comparing the oldest respondents to the youngest. So, certain beliefs are eroding in a pretty consistent way from one generation to the next. It’s just that the baseline is so much lower for liberals.

I wanted to go one layer deeper on this and really try to figure out where liberals ended up on the belief continuum. I visualized that below based on the birth decade of the respondents.

What is striking to me is that while there are a significant number of liberals on the right side of this heatmap, it’s nowhere close to a majority of them. For instance, among liberals who were born in the 1980s, 30% of them said that they were fairly certain or absolutely certain that God doesn’t exist. In contrast, 29% were certain of the existence of God. So, it’s just not empirically true that younger liberals are atheists — the data clearly says that’s not true for 70% of them.

Instead, a whole bunch of liberals can be found in the “I’m fairly certain God exists” camp. What’s interesting to me is that among those born in the 1990s, the share who are in the fairly certain camp is about the same as the absolutely certain camp, and it even reverses among the youngest liberals with 27% being fairly certain of God’s existence and 21% being completely certain.

To this point, I’ve only focused on looking at the belief question by ideology and age of respondent. There are two other dimensions of religiosity that should be explored: belonging and behavior. The most conventional measure of behavior is religious attendance. I wanted to focus specifically on folks who attend church less than once a year.

What I really wanted to sort out for us is this question: is the decline of religious behavior related to a decline in religious belief? And I think the answer is a qualified “yes.” For older Americans who don’t go to church that much, belief is still really robust. In many older cohorts, 70% of low attendees are in the top two categories of belief in God. Meanwhile, only ~20% are in the bottom two buckets. So, older Americans may not show up to church often, but there’s still a robust belief system there.

For younger respondents who seldom or never attend religious services, the level of belief is undoubtedly much lower. Among those born in 1990 or later who go to church less than once a year, 47-48% say that they are absolutely or fairly certain of God’s existence. That’s at least 20 points lower than their grandparents’ generation. However, look at the columns on the far right — even among young adults who rarely attend religious services, less than 30% of them say that they are absolutely or fairly certain that God does not exist.

If we were looking for a subgroup where atheist views would be widespread, it’s the bottom right corner of this heatmap, and even there, it’s still less than one in three.

Speaking of atheists, I wanted to just visualize how the three types of non-religious Americans (atheists, agnostics, and nothing in particular) fall on this belief continuum.

Among people who say that their present religion is atheist, 53% indicate that they are absolutely certain that God doesn’t exist and another 31% say that they are fairly certain that there is no universal spirit. Of course, very few atheists land on the left side of this graph. But that’s not the case for agnostics. In fact, 45% of them fall above the midpoint on this analysis by saying “yes” to the first question about the existence of God or a universal spirit. For comparison, only 40% fall into the bottom two boxes.

It couldn’t be more apparent, however, that “nothing in particular” folks have a much more robust belief in God than their atheist or agnostic counterparts. Among these nothing in particulars, 54% say that they are fairly certain or absolutely certain of God’s existence. Just 8% said that they were sure God didn’t exist and 13% were fairly certain of God’s non-existence.

I think that the overarching conclusion that I can derive from this data is that it’s pretty rare to find an individual who says that they have a great deal of confidence in their belief that God doesn’t exist. In the full sample, that’s just 13% of folks. Even among the youngest adults who never or seldom attend religious services, it’s less than 30% of them. The only group where this belief reaches majority status is among atheists. For agnostics, it stands at 40%.

Americans may be 25 points less likely to identify with a faith tradition today compared to 30 years ago, and over 40% say that they never attend religious services. But almost 80% of Americans agree that God or a universal spirit exists.

The United States may no longer be a country of people widely engaging in religious behavior or religious belonging. But it certainly has a whole bunch of religious believers.

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.

There are a couple of books in the sociology of religion that always stick in my head, too. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving is one I will never forget. Another was released a few years ago that keeps coming back to mind — Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century. It’s an edited volume, and I bet you can guess the subject matter just from the title.

Religion in the United States “works” differently for Asian Americans compared to African Americans. The average white American doesn’t think about religion the same way, or practice their faith in the same patterns, as Hispanic Americans. Race is a central component of how religion operates in the American context. But despite those varied expressions, I wanted to try to answer, with as much data as I can muster, a deceptively simple question: which racial group is the most religious?

To do that, I’m going to use the Pew Religious Landscape Study, because it has a huge sample size (~37,000) and asks a ton of questions about the various manifestations of religion, which are primarily along the dimensions of behavior, belief, and belonging. For more on this, I will always link to this post: What Does it Mean to Be Religious?

Let’s start with the religious composition of each racial group.

Huge differences emerge right away. Which group is the most likely to be Protestant? That’s Black respondents, by nearly twenty-five percentage points. The most likely to be Catholic? Easily Hispanics at 42% — again, about twenty-five points higher than any other group.

Asian Americans are far and away the most likely to identify with another faith tradition, a category that includes Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and the like. In the rest of the population, those groups rarely combine for more than 10% of the sample. What about the nones? The “All Others” category leads the pack at 37%, followed closely by Asian Americans at 34%. I also need to point out that Asian Americans are the only racial group that is not majority Christian, too.

What about religious importance? This is where a clear pattern starts to emerge.

Black respondents are, by a long shot, the most likely to say that religion is very important to them — 58%, compared to 30-40% for every other racial group. In fact, only 18% of Black respondents say religion is not too important or not at all important to them. That’s ten points lower than any other group.

By contrast, 22% of white respondents say religion is not at all important, the same share as the “All Others” category. Among Hispanic respondents it’s only 13%, and among Asian respondents it’s 18%. Looking at this graph in totality, it’s fair to say that African Americans are the most religious, Hispanic Americans are next in line, and then it’s basically a tie between white Americans, Asian Americans, and everyone else.

When I analyzed a question about belief in God, the same pattern came up again.

Black respondents are undoubtedly the most likely to believe in God without a doubt — 75% of them. The share of African Americans who say they don’t believe in God at all is tiny, about five percent. You get a clear sense from this graph that African Americans, on belief metrics, are just in a different world than every other racial group in the United States.

Then the next question becomes: who is the least likely to believe? The answer is Asian Americans. Only 37% believe in God with absolute certainty — fifteen points lower than white Americans, who come in second-to-last on this measure. At the same time, 25% of Asian respondents say they don’t believe in God at all, easily the highest of any group.

On religious importance, African Americans are clearly in the lead. On belief in God, it’s African Americans again — but for the other groups, it’s hard to settle on a rank ordering. Maybe questions about religious behavior can break the tie.

When it comes to religious service attendance, Black Americans are the most likely to report weekly attendance at 30% — six or seven points higher than white, Hispanic, and Asian respondents. In total, 61% of African Americans say they attend church at least yearly. That’s about five points higher than Hispanic respondents, who come in second.

At the bottom end of the scale, 27% of white respondents say they never attend. It’s 29% among “All Others,” and 22% for both Hispanic and Asian respondents. Those numbers are close enough that it’s hard to say definitively which group is the least likely to darken a church door.

Prayer frequency follows the same script. African Americans are clearly in the lead — nearly two-thirds of them pray every single day. Among Hispanic respondents, 48% pray daily and another 17% pray at least weekly, which means about two-thirds are praying on a weekly basis. That’s roughly ten points higher than white respondents and eighteen points higher than Asian respondents.

So on religious behavior, the picture is: African Americans, and then everyone else in a muddled pack.

But what happens when I combine all four of these items into a single composite measure? I constructed the scale to run from 0 to 10, with 0 indicating the least religious and 10 the most religious. This additive index brings some real clarity to the question.

For anyone paying attention to the prior analysis, it should be no surprise that African Americans score the highest — 7.2 out of 10. The share of African Americans scoring at least a 9 on this index was 28%, which is eight points higher than white Americans and ten points higher than Hispanic respondents. No matter how I measure it, African Americans lead on the question of which racial group is the most religious.

The comparison between the white histogram and the Hispanic histogram is the most statistically interesting one in this graph. Hispanics post the higher mean on this index — 6.1 versus 5.5 for white respondents. Yet look at the far right edge of each panel: there are clearly more white respondents maxing out the scale than Hispanic ones.

So why is the Hispanic mean about half a point higher? It’s the middle of the distribution. Nearly 71% of Hispanics score at least a 5 on this index, compared to just 59% of white respondents. Meanwhile, 26% of white respondents land below a 3, compared to only 16% of Hispanics. Said another way: white America contains a smaller group that is incredibly religious and a much larger bloc that isn’t religious at all. Hispanic religiosity doesn’t have that hollowed-out bottom — the typical Hispanic respondent sits comfortably on the religious side of the scale.

And when it comes to the question of which racial group is the least religious, I think this graph makes it clear: Asian Americans, with a mean of just 5.1. Only 52% of Asian respondents score at least a 5 out of 10, which is seven points lower than any other group. And here’s a startling data nugget: for every Black American who scores near the bottom of this index, there are more than four who score a nine or higher. Among white Americans, the bottom group is actually larger than the top one

But what happens when I throw age into the mix? Maybe the religiosity gap is closing among young Americans?

One macro-level trend that’s hard to deny: each successive birth cohort is less religious than the one before it, and that’s true across all racial groups. Among the oldest African Americans, the mean score is about 8 out of 10. Among the youngest, it’s only 6.

However, the gap between African Americans and everyone else persists across nearly every birth cohort in this data. There’s one aberration among people born in the 1970s, where Hispanic and Black respondents post essentially the same level of religiosity. In every other cohort, Black respondents score noticeably higher than anyone else.

I also have to point out the white respondents, especially those born in 1980 or later. Among these younger white adults, the average score is 4 to 4.5 on a ten-point scale — about a point lower than Hispanics from the same birth cohorts and roughly two points lower than African Americans born in the same decades.

But the overall rank ordering holds. African Americans are easily the most religious, followed by Hispanic Americans. In the full sample, white Americans were about half a point more religious than Asian Americans, but I’m not sure that’s going to hold up in future generations.

So there you have it. African Americans are significantly more religious than anyone else, whether you measure it through behavior, belief, or belonging. It holds up among older respondents and younger ones, too. That’s the clear thread running through all this data.

But it’s also hard to deny this: a young African American — while notably more religious than their peers — is still significantly less religious than the average Baby Boomer.

Secularism is coming for us all, and I wonder if there will be a new edited volume someday: Non-Religion Is Raced.

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.

How successful is that program? Well, it depends on who you ask. The Church’s own report is that each missionary baptizes about 4 new converts per year of service. But how many of those converts “stick”? A report (PDF) in 2022 indicated that only 30% of those new converts are actually still engaged in the church 12 months after their baptism. So a missionary working full time for a year may actually yield a single new convert. That’s not a great ROI.

But here’s the brilliance of the LDS missionary program – retention. The chief aim of such an apparatus is not to bring that many new people into the faith. Instead, the goal is to keep young men and women deeply rooted in the church at a time in their life when we know religiosity tends to wane.

Retention is the most important metric for any church or denomination. Having kids and keeping them as active members as they age into adulthood is the most important thing a faith community can do to sustain itself for decades into the future.

That leads me to the question that drives today’s post: what factors in a child’s life make them more likely to stay committed members of their faith? The Pew Religious Landscape Survey asks all kinds of good questions about a respondent’s childhood in regards to religious attendance, religious importance, etc.

Start with the most basic question – if a child was raised in any type of religious faith, what’s the likelihood that they identify with any faith community as an adult?

The data points to this simple fact: if a kid is raised as a Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim or any other faith tradition, the likelihood of them identifying as non-religious is pretty small. In the Pew sample, 77% of folks raised as religious are still religious as adults. Only one in four kids who were raised religious end up as adult nones.

What about the converse of that – folks who were raised non-religious who end up joining a faith community later in life? That number is just 26%. The “retention rate” is about the same for both groups. Three quarters of kids raised religious are still religious, and three quarters of kids raised without a faith background will be non-religious as adults. Inertia runs in both directions equally — the secular household is just as effective at producing secular adults as the religious household is at producing religious adults

There’s an old line from Proverbs that keeps coming to mind, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

That said, not all religious upbringings are equal. One question asked people to reflect on how important religion was to their family when they were growing up.

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There are also a ton of tropes about which departments tend to have the most liberal and conservative faculty. I know that when I was at EIU, the folks who led the faculty union almost always came from the humanities departments (particularly English and History). In contrast, the professors in the business school had next to nothing to do with the rest of the university. They had the nicest cars, the most up-to-date building, and the lowest level of union membership.

That got me wondering if the students can sort of suss those things out when it comes to choosing their college major. Do the Alex P. Keaton types know that they should gravitate toward a degree in finance, while the more hippy inclined students know that they can find a lot of like minded individuals in the arts? I get asked all the time if more religious students tend to cluster in one type of major vs another and I’ve not really been able to answer that question with any real specificity until now.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been doing an annual survey that I just love because its focus is squarely on college students. The most recent version has a sample size in excess of 68,000, and they are drawn from more than 400 institutes of higher learning spread throughout the United States. There’s a section of the survey that asks students to indicate their major, with about fifty possible options.

Let me just start by showing you the basic religious composition of the twenty-five largest majors according to this dataset. I tried to sort this where the least Christian majors are at the top and the most Christian ones are at the bottom.

The two most “teched up” majors are the least Christian: data science and computer science. Just 27-28% of these folks identify as Protestants, Catholics, or generic Christians. In contrast, about 30% say that they are atheist/agnostic and another 13% are non-religious. In other words, they are about fifteen points more apt to be nones than Christians.

But they actually aren’t the most likely to be strictly atheist/agnostic. There are two majors who clearly lead in this regard: English and Environmental Studies. In fact, Environmental Studies is the most secular of all with 61% of students claiming that they are atheist, agnostic, or claim no religion in particular. English is at 60% on this metric.

What majors are at the bottom of the list? Well, there are two that are clearly outliers: Finance and Nursing. Among the latter group, 68% identify as Protestants, Catholics, or generic Christians. It’s 62% among the Finance majors. For each group, less than a quarter are non-religious. You can see quite a bit of “business” adjacent majors near the bottom of the list, things like marketing, general business, and accounting are all fairly religious.

Of course, I can’t provide all the nuance that I want in just a simple bar graph. For instance, I bet some of you are guessing that a lot of those computer science majors are actually Hindus, Muslims, or Buddhists and you would be correct in that. Those types of majors tend to be popular among immigrant students.

To provide even more granularity, here’s a sortable table to poke around this data a whole lot more.

The hunch about how computer science/data science students are more likely to be Hindus is absolutely confirmed in this table. In fact, those majors have more Hindus than Catholics. There are lots of fun little oddities to explore in the table (like one third of Finance majors are Catholics). So, have fun with that.

Let’s move on to religious attendance now.

I sorted this so that the groups that they were the least likely to never attend were up top and we see basically a repeat of the findings from the first graph: Finance and Nursing are some of the most religiously active majors on college campuses. In fact, no one goes to church more than aspiring nurses: 23% are attending weekly or more. That’s more than double the rate of the full sample (10% weekly attenders).

You shouldn’t be surprised to see those English and Environmental Studies folks at the bottom here, either, based on what we observed in the previous analysis. A majority of both groups say that they attend a house of worship less than once a year. What I did find notable is Anthropology majors. Just 8% were weekly attenders - that’s the lowest I can find.

But you get a clear impression from this graph that college students are not a particularly religious group, overall. If you pick a random major the chances of sitting next to a non-church goer is at least twice as likely as sitting next to a student who attends on a regular basis.

Let’s combine both these metrics now into a single scatter plot. The x-axis is the share who never attend religious services and the y-axis is the share who have no religious affiliation. I also added several more majors to the list, I included all those with at least 100 respondents. I also color coded them by general disciplines and the size of the circles is related to the number of respondents in the sample.

It’s pretty amazing how well these two metrics track each other, right? I mean it does make sense that the most secular major was also the most likely to have a huge share of never attenders. But it is surprising how there are no real outliers from the trend line.

Who’s in the top right? The performing arts: studio art, fine arts, and film and media studies. I think I can definitively say that this is the most secular discipline in academia. There are also a bunch more of those green circles in that general quadrant, too: music, art history, and digital media design. But there are a number of other disciplines, too: English, Environmental Studies, Math, and Earth Science jump out. A strange combination, right?

What about the bottom left? Well, it’s a whole bunch of students in the business school. You can see a lot of darker green circles: Finance, Accounting, Business and Marketing. But also nursing, as we’ve discussed earlier. However, there are some interesting outliers, too. Archaeology and African-American Studies are down in this quadrant. Pre-Med being in this part of the scatter plot is also very intriguing to me.

Now, I do feel like I am only showing you one side of the coin here. It’s been all religion to this point—belonging and behavior. But we all know that those two factors are intimately related to political viewpoints. I write about this ad nauseam now, but to be Republican/conservative is to be religious. And the opposite is true for the left side of the political spectrum: there are a whole lot more nones among the ranks of liberals.

Let me just visualize partisanship and ideology across all those majors.

Isn’t it amazing how straight that line is across the diagonal of the plot? Of course ideology is related to partisanship and vice versa but it’s still visually stunning to see just how strong the correlation is between the two factors. There are basically no majors that are significantly above or below the trend line.

There is one clear outlier, though: Finance majors. They are, without a shadow of a doubt, the most right leaning and Republican of any group on a college campus. And by a significant margin, too. They are about half a point away from the next most conservative group: Agricultural/Food Science majors. There are a whole bunch of green circles in the top right, aren’t there?

The bottom left is also a bunch of majors that fit the stereotype: Theatre, Film Studies, English, and Environmental Studies are all pretty far to the left. I also feel like I need to point out that there are a number of purple circles down there—that’s social sciences. Fields like public policy, anthropology, and sociology are all pretty far left of center. Do note, though, that political science is a bit more centrist than those other social science disciplines.

To cap this off, I wanted to throw both religion and politics into a single graph. So I just built an index for each based on the four measures we have discussed previously. I used the most right leaning and the most left leaning majors as the anchor points and I think this does a good job of visualizing the relationship between the two.

Of course, it’s a bit easy to draw a trend line in this graph but the points are not so tightly clustered around the middle like what we observed in the previous graph. That means that more conservative majors tend to be more religious but there are a number of circles that do deviate quite a bit. For instance, look at nursing. They are one of the most religious majors, but their political views are just slightly right of center. When you compare them to Finance majors you realize that they are just totally different groups of students.

African-American studies also deviates from the norm in a way that I could have probably hypothesized. Lots of those majors are Black college students. Which means that they are both left-leaning politically but also pretty religious. That’s why it’s so hard to classify Black Protestants in the larger landscape. They don’t fit neatly into any one box.

There are lots of other things that I can point out on this graph, but I will leave it up to you to pull out the choice bits in the comments.

I love this kind of data because it helps shine a flashlight into a darker corner of social science. We know that some majors on campus tend to be more religious and/or conservative but it’s nice to actually put numbers to our assumptions.

As you can probably guess - there are some majors that fit the stereotype perfectly. There are others that really surprised me. That’s the fun of working with data.

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.

I often think of religious traditions as a styrofoam cup. Each of them has a different level of water in them at any given time. However, that volume of water never stays fixed for long, because religious groups operate in a volatile environment with constant pressure to rise or fall.

The most unavoidable pressure is generational replacement. People will die and new people will be born every single day. The new births add a bit of water to the cup, while those funerals poke a little hole in the side of the styrofoam and allow water to leak out. Congregations that are poised to grow usually have a lot of young couples whose new babies add to the community and not so many people are being lost through death. In other words, the water flowing in the top will more than offset that small hole that is forming through death.

But there are other ways to change the water level of the cup in either direction. One way to add volume is to convert new people into the tradition. Many religious groups including evangelicals and Latter-day Saints put a tremendous amount of emphasis on sharing their faith with outsiders. But conversion is incredibly hard. Very few door knocks produce converts.

The most often overlooked part of this experiment is the way that the largest holes form in the cup: lack of retention. While a young couple who has a new baby and brings them to church adds some liquid to the styrofoam vessel, what happens if that child grows into a teenager or young adult who stops attending entirely? To stick with the metaphor, this forms a little hole where water begins to flow outwards.

Most congregations can’t really do much about the holes created through death, but they can have a more direct impact on the losses that occur through retention.

So which traditions are doing the best on this metric, and which are hemorrhaging water? Well, the Pew Religious Landscape Survey (hosted at the ARDA) makes it really easy to do a simple calculation to sort this out.

The two groups with the highest retention rates may surprise you: Jews and the non-religious. In both cases, roughly three quarters of people raised in that tradition remain there as adults. Protestants are just a tick lower at 71%.1 After that there’s a notable drop off -- Catholics clock in at just 58%, meaning more than four in ten people raised Catholic have since left the faith.

But when I showed this graph to a couple people, every one of them mentioned the exact same thing: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a real retention problem. Just a bare majority of kids raised LDS are still LDS as adults (54%). And whenever I get a flood of questions about a single finding like that, it prompts me to explore it in further detail.

For instance, here’s the overall retention rate of LDS, Protestants, and Catholics broken down by the decade of birth of the respondent. This helps us see whether retention is fading faster for one group than another.

One pattern holds across all three traditions: Catholic and LDS retention are pretty similar to each other, while Protestant retention runs noticeably higher. Among the oldest respondents to the survey, LDS retention was 68%, Catholic retention was 73% and the Protestant number was much higher – 83%. That’s repeated in the next couple of bar graphs, as well.

Retention has dropped across the board — this isn’t a uniquely LDS problem. From the left side of the graph to the right, Protestant retention is down by 25 points, it’s dropped 23 points among Catholics, and it’s off by 21 points for LDS.

The LDS retention decline is real, but it tracks Protestant and Catholic losses almost exactly with all three falling roughly 21-25 points across generations. The real issue is that the LDS started at a lower baseline than Protestants and Catholics and then all three figures declined at essentially the same rate from one generation to the next.

A big question is where did all these Latter-day Saint “defectors” go if they left the Church? It’s important to point out that we don’t have a huge sample to begin with – just 730 folks said that they were raised LDS. And remember that most of them (54%) stayed LDS as adults. But here’s where the other ~300 ended up.

A quick glance at the graph and you quickly arrive at this central conclusion: the vast majority of them (almost two-thirds) joined the growing ranks of the non-religious. The other landing spot for a significant number was Protestant Christianity, about one in five ex-Latter-day Saints.

There were only about 40 in total who ended up becoming Catholic or joining one of the smaller faith traditions like Islam or Buddhism. But it’s hard to make sweeping claims about these folks because they are so rare.

One question we can ask is if those ex-LDS who became members of a Protestant or Catholic Church become actively involved in their new faith community. To test that I plotted the reported church attendance of adult LDS against those who went from LDS to other forms of Christianity.

Adult Latter-day Saints are among the most religiously engaged groups in America. In fact, 70% of LDS indicate that they attend church services at least once a week compared to only 10% who say that they go less than once a year. They are, by any objective metric, one of, if not the most, engaged religious groups in the United States today.

That is not the case, however, among folks who leave the Latter-day Saints and become Catholic or Protestant. Among this group of defectors, attendance is significantly lower. Just 28% indicate that they attend their new church on a weekly basis compared to 36% who go less than once a year.

It seems pretty clear to me that the habit of regular church going that is developed growing up Latter-day Saint does not carry over to people who leave the LDS and join another faith community.

To this point, I’ve not really delved into the question of “why do folks leave the LDS church in such significant numbers?” The survey doesn’t ask that directly, but we can get closer by examining political ideology among stayers versus leavers.

That’s a pretty stark result. For those people who have been LDS their entire lives, conservatism is the norm, with 44% saying that they are conservative and another 13% indicating that they are “very conservative.” It’s hard to find a liberal among lifelong Latter-day Saints, it’s less than 10% of them.

For those who left the church behind, the liberals outnumber the conservatives at 36% vs 27%. The share who are very liberal is actually larger than the share who are very conservative (12% vs 10%). LDS leavers are fundamentally different politically than those who stayed.

Whether politics was a proximate cause of departure is impossible to determine from this data alone — but the ideological gap between stayers and leavers is too wide to ignore

Another potential reason for someone to leave the Church is if they grew up in a Latter-day Saint environment that was not particularly religious. The Pew Survey asks about religious importance for both the individual and the family unit when the respondent was a child.

The top right cell is the one that is clearly the outlier. These are folks who say that when they were kids, religion was very important to both them and their family. In this environment of their youth, only about one third of those kids left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when they became adults. Remember that the retention rate in the full LDS sample was 54%.

What is striking though, is how low retention was among people who were raised in an LDS home but never really internalized their faith. In each case, 80% of these subgroups left the Church at some point in adulthood. It didn’t matter at all whether their family treated religion as central -- if the child never internalized the faith personally, roughly 80% left regardless.

But there’s another variable we can check out that gives us a window into the childhood of folks raised in the LDS Church – how often they attended religious services as a child.

There are certainly differences in the distribution of attendance for those who stayed LDS versus those who left, but I wouldn’t call them dramatic. Among those who were retained, 92% said that as a child they were attending religious services at least once a week. Among those who left the faith, weekly attendance rates were 72%. Twenty points lower, yes — but 72% weekly attendance as a child is still a remarkably high baseline by any measure.

There are differences at the bottom end of the attendance spectrum, too. Among those who left the LDS church, 7% went to church less than once a year compared to 2% of those who stuck around. But, again, it’s not true to say that the average ex-mo was not going to church that much to begin with, when in fact most of them were there every single week.

Among those raised in the LDS faith where religion was very or somewhat important to both their family and themselves and they attended church weekly, retention was about 68%. What about those raised in an environment deficient in at least one of those factors? Retention was a paltry 25%.

I know that it seems tempting to latch on to that second figure. When three quarters of folks leave a faith tradition, that’s a huge defection rate. But I am more stunned by the first number. Even when an LDS family raises their kid in a manner that would lead to the highest level of retention, still one third of those kids leave as they become adults.

What makes that 68% figure even more striking is that roughly two-thirds of all people raised in the LDS faith checked every single box of a deeply committed childhood. And even then, a third of them left.

There are many leaks forming in the styrofoam cup of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Retention rates have always been lower than other religious groups and they keep falling with each successive generation. This is a problem that a high fertility rate just can’t fix. The holes in the bottom of the cup are widening each year.

While conversion may be able to add a bit more liquid to the cup, it’s numerically impossible to add people at a rate fast enough to balance out the losses from defection.

If LDS leaders are paying attention to the data, this imbalance is the problem that demands the most urgent attention.

Code for this post can be found here.

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

In my community, the church I attend has a tremendous mission called Angels on Assignment. They own a small building that’s just across the street from their sanctuary. At least once a week they are open for business, which is to give out clothes and food for folks who are in need. They also have a financial aid operation. On Fridays they have a food pantry that opens at 9am. A line will be forming down the sidewalk two hours before that.

But that’s the kind of ministry that is hard to miss. There are all kinds of other stuff that churches do that is often overlooked – they provide a place for folks to vote in local elections, host blood drives, and allow outside groups to meet like Alcoholics Anonymous. I worry about where these types of organizations will set up shop if lots of houses of worship close their doors.

I was thinking about this problem the other day and was wondering if I could actually quantify something like that. What follows is my best effort to put numbers to ideas.

Here was my question: could I actually figure out what share of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings happen in churches? It became something of a methodological mountain for me to climb. AA has no central database of meeting locations in any clean, analyzable format. The organization’s famously decentralized structure, a feature for those in recovery, turns out to be a significant obstacle for researchers. Meeting finder websites exist, but the data is user-generated, meaning addresses are inconsistent, outdated, or simply wrong. After several dead ends, I had to ask myself whether the question was even answerable.

But I did figure it out, at least partially. It turned out that a subset of AA intergroup websites publish their meeting listings as server-rendered HTML tables, which meant they were scrapeable with standard tools. After probing dozens of intergroup sites spread across the country to identify which ones were accessible, I scraped the venue names directly and ran them through a keyword matching algorithm that flagged religious language, both generic terms like “church” and “chapel” and specific denominational names. It is an imperfect method, but it got me to an answer.

Some caveats, though.

1. This list is only ~25 intergroups. It doesn’t represent the entire country. The coasts are largely missing.

2. This is totally biased toward groups that made it easy to scrape their websites.

3. Using keywords to guess religious venues for these meetings is imperfect. There’s no way around this unless you want to read through 10,000 meeting descriptions.

I’m not going to try and publish this anywhere. But I really do think that we can learn a lot from this limited data collection. So, with all that explained – let’s show you what I found.

Let’s just start with visualizing how many meetings I was able to analyze across all these cities.

There’s a ton in Dallas, Texas. Which makes perfect sense because it was the largest city that ended up on the list. They had over 1,500 meetings currently listed as active in their database. Which is obviously staggering to think about. I wonder how many places like New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles have compared to Dallas. But other larger cities on the list have a lot of active meetings including 974 in San Antonio and 826 in Minneapolis.

But there are also a high number of active AA meetings in towns that aren’t so large. For instance, Mobile Alabama has a population of 187,000 but it has 95 meetings in their database. Boone, North Carolina is just 20,000 folks but I found 68 active meetings on their list. When I was writing this piece, I just pulled up the AA meetings happening that day and there were 13 - running from 6:45am to 8:00pm. So, the 68 active meetings number does seem very plausible to me.

Now, what about the share of those AA meetings that are happening in houses of worship? I ran a classifier that flagged terms like “church”, “sanctuary”, “saint”, “fellowship hall” and a lot of other terms. What I found, when running this across a list of 25 cities, was that about one-third of AA meetings happened in houses of worship. I feel relatively confident that 33% is the “floor” on the right number. I’m certain that other meetings are happening in churches but they aren’t marked as such in the online directories.

What parts of the country have the highest share of church based AA meetings? There’s not a clear indication from this data. In Baldwin, Alabama 84% of the meetings were happening in churches, but that’s an outlier based on a small sample size (N=49 meetings). But there were other cities where a majority were happening in houses of worship. Those included Summit and Mahoning Ohio, Monroe PA, Wilmington NC, and King county in Washington state. Again – there’s no regional pattern to be found there.

Because my list has a clear bias toward Southern locations, you can see those orange bars at all parts of the graph. While Virginia Beach has half its meetings in churches, it’s only 22% in Cumberland North Carolina and just 7% in Miami-Dade county in Florida. My overall impression is that the connection between AA and meeting in churches is largely idiosyncratic, probably based on some relationships that existed decades ago between AA organizers and local religious leaders and that has just carried on throughout the years.

Now, this is where I tried to get a little bit fancy by bringing in another dataset – the 2020 Religion Census which provides all kinds of information about the religious composition of folks at the county level. What I wanted to try and sort out is whether counties that had a higher share of AA meetings in churches had a larger share of evangelical or mainline Protestants. The evangelical graph is below.

You can see that the trend line is undoubtedly in the negative direction – said simply the counties that have the highest share of church based AA meetings had the lowest share of evangelicals in the local area. The overall correlation was -.55 and I was surprised to see how tightly the data points were located around the trend line. There just weren’t that many true outliers.

One thing that jumps out of this graph is that there’s a whole lot of orange counties on the right hand side, these are classified as being in the South. There’s a lot more blue Midwestern counties across the middle of the scatterplot. That reflects the reality that I think we all basically understand: evangelicalism has a strong base of support in the South and loses influence as we move away from the Bible belt.

Then I did the same bit of analysis but just substituted the mainline share in each county. Here the trend line is headed in a more positive direction.

While church based AA meetings were less common in deeply evangelical counties, the opposite is true here: if a county has a greater share of mainline Protestants, that means that it likely has a higher percentage of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings being held in churches, synagogues, or mosques. The correlation is basically the opposite of the previous graph: +.61.

Now, I certainly don’t want any reader to overinterpret this finding. There are a dozen factors outside of religion that can have an impact on church based AA meetings, but I do think it’s worth reflecting on why evangelical counties have fewer AA meetings in a religious setting.

One possibility is logistical and cultural — evangelical churches tend to be larger, programmatic institutions with controlled access to their facilities, whereas mainline congregations often have underutilized fellowship halls and a long tradition of opening their doors to community groups. A United Methodist church with 150 members and a basement they’re not using on Tuesday nights is simply a more natural host than an evangelical church that is already bursting at the seams.

There’s also a theological dimension worth considering. Mainline Protestantism has historically emphasized social gospel work and community service as core expressions of faith, making hosting a recovery group feel like ministry. I’ve been around a lot of evangelicals in my life, and grew up Southern Baptist. I don’t think that I’ve ever heard anyone mention Alcoholics Anonymous, let alone the possibility of hosting a regular meeting in the church.

Finally, the infrastructure of secular recovery in evangelical areas may simply be more developed. Cities like Dallas and Miami have large networks of AA clubhouses — member-owned secular spaces built specifically for recovery meetings — which emerged precisely because church space wasn’t as readily available. The absence of AA in churches doesn’t necessarily mean less AA; it may mean the recovery community built its own parallel infrastructure.

You can also see suggestions of that evangelical/mainline divide if I just do a keyword search of the church names that hold AA meetings.

I couldn’t classify about a third of them because their names didn’t contain any clear identifications with a denomination. But after that the next four that pop up are primarily associated with the mainline tradition (United Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian). The Baptists barely show up on the list and so do the Catholics. Part of the issue there is that many churches in each tradition don’t explicitly include “Baptist” or “Catholic” in their name. But even given this syntax issue, I’m not sure that Baptists are holding as many AA meetings as their Methodist counterparts.

There’s no doubt in my mind that houses of worship provide key community services in a variety of ways. That’s absolutely the case when it comes to AA meetings. One third of them are being held in churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc. Would it be possible for the AA community to move those to other gathering spaces? Maybe if it were only 2 or 3 churches that closed. But what happens if it’s 20-30 in a smaller community? The houses of worship that remain may just not have enough space in their buildings or time in the day to give it out to groups like AA.

Then what happens? I don’t want to consider the possibilities.

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 became one of the most widely read posts on my newsletter, and I still get asked about it on a near-weekly basis. The findings are pretty much what most people guessed: mainline clergy are way more politically and ideologically left-wing than their congregants. For instance, 45% of mainline clergy are liberal Democrats, compared to 24% of people sitting in the pews. And the laity are three times more likely to be conservative Republicans compared to their pastors.

There was some pushback, of course. Any time you write something that gets read tens of thousands of times, it’s going to happen. Some of it was actually really thoughtful, though, and I wanted to focus on one specific criticism that I hadn’t wrestled with too much: mainline clergy have a unique mix of demographic factors that make it difficult to compare them to the folks sitting in the pews. Namely? Almost all mainline clergy have graduate degrees. In the PRRI sample, over 90% of them had an MA or more.

That’s a critique that I want to tackle head on in this post, but let me walk you through a bit of data exploration before we get there.

What I discovered by poking around the archives at ARDA was that PRRI had replicated some of the questions on the mainline clergy survey in other data collection efforts. For instance, they have often included this question: Is America a Christian Nation?

Among mainline clergy, only 6% said that America has “always” been a Christian country. Is that high or low? I wanted to compare those mainline pastors against a bunch of different reference groups, which is what I did in the graph above. And guess what? That’s incredibly low compared to almost everyone else in American society.

In the full sample of the general public, 36% of people agreed that America has always been a Christian country. Heck, even among the non-religious, it was 26%. The numbers are particularly higher among Christian churchgoers, too. Among mainline churchgoers, 44% say that America has always been a Christian country. That’s seven times the rate of their clergy.

So the differences that I made plain in the prior post about ideology and partisanship are not just confined to those two questions. The data says that the mainline leadership holds views on topics like this that are far out of step with almost all other groups in the United States.

But let’s zoom out to a whole question battery that was included in that mainline clergy survey as well as another PRRI instrument - the 2022 Health of Congregations study. Its total sample size was nearly 5,900.

Read more

I see people make assumptions about data and statistical analysis that just make me scratch my head. So, this is a rant of sorts. A short list of things that come up again and again when I post any type of graph on social media.

You better believe that I’m going to be dropping this link into my replies on dozens of occasions in the future.

1. The average rate of public opinion change is much slower than people anticipate.

I can’t tell you how many times I will post a graph that has data collected in 2024 and shows no major changes in public opinion and someone will reply, “If you had data from 2026, I’m sure it would show a lot of movement.” That kind of response is just so divorced from how public opinion actually works that I feel like I need to take some time to really lay out how wrongheaded it is.

For those aspiring data analysts out there who are just learning how to code and make graphs, let me give you a piece of advice — if you see a survey question that has been asked with regularity over a long time move more than 3-4 points in a short window of time (less than two years), then you need to check your code again. It is highly unusual for stuff to shift that much that quickly.

Take, for instance, the General Social Survey’s question about allowing a woman to have access to an abortion if she wants one for any reason.

If you track the individual points over time, there’s one really weird aberration between 1978 and 1980 when support for abortion jumped 8 points. In terms of actual percentages, it was 33% to 41%. But here’s the other part of the story — in 1982 it was already down to 37% and then it declined to 33% in 1983. So a complete reversal in a span of five years. You see this same thing happen between 1991 and 1998 — a temporary rise, then all those gains were given back.

You know what the average change is year to year in this graph? It’s 2.6 points. Which is inside the margin of error for most samples. But as you can tell in how I annotated the graph — something happened between 2016 and 2018. I think we all know what I’m talking about right now. In that two-year window, support for access rose from 44.8% to 49.9%. A full five percentage points. Now, that could have just been polling noise, right? We would be right to be cautious about writing a story with a headline about the huge surge in pro-choice views.

But here’s how we know that’s the real deal — the trend has continued. In 2021 it rose again to 53.1%, up nearly four more points from the prior survey. Then in the last two years it was 57% and 58% respectively. Which is more plausible: that every year of the GSS from 2018 through 2024 has just “missed” on this question in the same way? Or did an external event (or series of events) lead to a macro-level change in opinion?

Also, don’t let me forget to point out the fact that the last couple of surveys have “calmed down” on the movement after a whole bunch of rapid change. There was a total of ten points of change in four decades of polling. Then, we see a clear directional shift that can be easily traced to an external set of political events.

2. The average person thinks that THEIR world is THE world.

I get a version of this email about once a week. A reader, usually a thoughtful one, writes in with a question they’re sure is right in my wheelhouse. Here’s a recent example: “Have you worked on the question of whether the error of Christian Zionism and/or Dispensational theology is waxing or waning in American or global Christianity? Seems right up your alley.”

I understand why people think this is a survey question. It’s about religion. It’s about change over time. Those are the two things I write about every single week. The person that emailed is probably an evangelical pastor and went to seminary. They can read Hebrew and they listen to podcasts about minute details of Koine Greek. A lot of their friends are pastors and they stay up late at night debating pre-trib vs. post-trib.

In other words, they come from a very specific subset of the American population. Which makes a question like this basically unanswerable with survey data, and the reasons why tell you a lot about what surveys can and cannot do.

Think about what happens if I field a general population survey of 1,000 Americans (which would cost thousands of dollars) and try to say something about dispensationalism.

Start at the top: about 60% identify as Christian. We’re already down to 600.

But dispensationalism is a particularly evangelical phenomenon. Catholics don’t teach it. I don’t think that the local Episcopal Church is holding a mid-week Bible study on the rapture. The Orthodox have never heard of it. So we’re really talking about the quarter or so of the country that’s evangelical. Now we’re at roughly 230 (maybe even less).

But a belief system doesn’t transmit itself — somebody has to teach it to you, and that means being in the room. Less than half of self-identified evangelicals are in church on a given weekend, and regular exposure is what it takes to absorb an entire theological framework — not just watching Kirk Cameron in a low-budget movie about eschatology.

We’re now down to 110 people.

Now, of those 110, how many attend a church where the pastor actually teaches dispensational eschatology? Plenty of evangelical pulpits — and nearly all of the non-denominational megachurches absorbing everyone these days — are functionally agnostic about the end times. The pastor is vaguely premillennial, never preaches Revelation, and would rather talk about your marriage or how to raise decent kids. When’s the last time Joel Osteen preached about this topic? Without googling it, I’m going to say “never.” But I’m going to be generous and say half. We’re at 55.

And then the final cut: of the people sitting under that teaching, how many could articulate it well enough to answer survey questions about it? Knowing your church believes in the rapture is not the same as holding a position on the timing of the tribulation. Maybe half again, and I think that’s on the high side.

So my survey of 1,000 Americans contains perhaps 25 or 30 people capable of telling me anything meaningful about dispensationalism. The margin of error on a subsample of 30 is plus or minus 18 points. I could field that survey twice and “find” that dispensationalism doubled. Any trend I claimed to detect would be statistical noise wearing a headline.

This is the part of survey research nobody tells you about: the questions get harder to answer not because they’re more profound but because the denominators get smaller. I can tell you about Christians with great precision. Evangelicals, very good precision. Weekly-attending evangelicals, decent. Weekly-attending evangelicals in prophecy-teaching churches who know what pre-tribulationism is? At that point I’m not doing statistics anymore. I’m doing anthropology with extra steps.

3. The average American is really bad at guessing the size of religious groups.

If you’ve hung around here enough, you’ve heard me bellyache about this one on a regular basis. So much so that I wrote a full post entitled, “Why I Can’t Tell You How Quakers (or Unitarians) Voted in 2024.” I just can’t tell you the number of comments I get on a weekly basis that ask me to include groups like the Unitarians, Latter-day Saints, Anglican Church of North America, or Presbyterian Church in America. (And yes, I chose those specific groups on purpose, by the way, because those are the ones that appear in my replies with the highest frequency.) In contrast, it’s very rare to have someone ask me about Buddhists or Hindus. The social media crowd is not a complete representation of American religion.

Before I go any further, I want you to stop and in your mind just estimate the sizes of the four groups that I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph. I know the answer to this because I get asked about it all the time:

UUs have 130,000 members. The Latter-day Saints are comparatively large at ~7 million. The ACNA is 125,000 and the PCA is 405,000. The only one that gets to 1% of the population is the LDS. The other three groups are rounding errors in the grand scheme of things. You want to guess how many Protestant denominations have at least one million members? It’s around 15 of them. How many are larger than 5 million members? It’s one — the Southern Baptist Convention.

A couple of years ago YouGov did this really fun polling experiment where they asked respondents to simply guess what share of the population met a whole bunch of criteria. For instance, what share of Americans are transgender? The YouGov sample said it was 21%. The actual percentage is certainly below 1%.

Well, there were a couple of religious groups that were asked as part of that battery.

You can see the only one that they got even close on was Christians. The median guess among the respondents was that the United States was 57% Christian. According to YouGov’s numbers back in 2022, it was 70% (which is not right, by the way). The Pew estimate in 2023-2024 was 62%. So, that’s not too bad at all. And even when it comes to Catholics, the public wasn’t off by that much. The median guess was that 39% of Americans are Catholic. The real number is closer to 20%.

But when it comes to really small religious groups, things just go sideways. The median guess as to the share of Americans who are atheist was 28%. It’s about 5% in actuality. Americans think that a quarter of our country is Jewish when it’s really about 1.5%. And then the median guess regarding Muslims was 20%, when it’s really closer to 1%.

This touches on something that I have been thinking a lot about lately — people LOVE the idea of outliers. Their minds fixate on the one person who bucks the trend or the one religious group that they don’t know much about but have seen a few TikToks that describe them. There are shows about the secret lives of Mormon wives. There aren’t shows about a bunch of Methodists living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The LDS seem exotic for some reason.

Whenever I post a graph that points to the fact that a significant majority of Americans will die with the same faith that they were born into (65-70% of us), you know what the first comment will be? “Well, I grew up a fundamentalist Pentecostal, then converted to Orthodox Judaism, and am now a pantheist who dabbles in Buddhism.” Americans hate being average. They want to be different and they are very proud of that fact.

My job, though, is to describe the median outcome, not the odd one. The work of quantitative social science is to generalize. That really rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Such is my lot in life.

After all that, I can only say one of two things: “You’re welcome” or “I’m sorry” for taking you through what the world looks like from my perspective on a day-to-day basis. It’s fun. And frustrating.

I’m probably going to be doing this for the rest of my life. Maybe one day I’ll get used to it.

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.

Here are three different datasets, all collected in a pretty similar time frame, that just test that relationship.

You can see that in the Cooperative Election Study, the relationship is a positive one: an individual with a graduate degree is four percentage points more likely to attend a house of worship weekly compared to someone who stopped at high school. In the General Social Survey, there’s not a clear pattern at all. It’s 24% among high school grads compared to 25% among those with a graduate degree. That’s inside the margin of error.

In the 2023-2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study, the relationship is not clearly linear. Attendance is 25% among those with a high school diploma or less, then it dips slightly among those with some college credits, only to rise among those with a four-year degree and go even higher for folks with a master’s degree. Among the most highly educated in Pew’s sample, 28% go to a house of worship on a weekly basis.

Thus, it’s empirically false to say: people with less education go to church more. There’s zero evidence of that in the best data we have. It’s also accurate to say that the relationship is likely mildly positive — those with higher education are more likely to be frequent worship attenders. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s persistent.

Now let me simplify and expand this using Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey because they also included a question about frequency of attendance at online worship.

The bars on the left should come as little surprise based on the previous graph. Among folks who have at least a four-year college degree, 26.2% attend a house of worship weekly. For those who stopped at high school, it’s 24.8% — a difference of just 1.4 points. But look at the online attendance difference. For those whose education stopped at high school, 20.3% say that they watch a service online every week. The college-educated crowd is much less inclined to participate this way: 11.6%.

Now wherever I post either of the above graphs on social media, I get the same comment over and over again. People believe that the discrepancy can best be explained by the fact that those without a lot of education have to work on the weekends, while those with a college degree work a traditional Monday through Friday schedule.

I must admit that the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that addresses this is incredibly muddy. Which frustrates me to no end. And I don’t know of any survey that asks about this possibility directly. So that’s where the best part of my job kicks in — I have to get creative. One possibility was to just limit my sample to those who are retired. That would absolutely control for the “working on Sunday” confounding variable.

The problem with that is: people who are retired are old. When they were growing up, educational access was much different than it is today. Thus, people with a four-year college degree (let alone a graduate degree) were a very specific type of individual. It wasn’t just a general cross-section of the American public who went to college in the 1970s. I had to set that idea aside.

I wanted to attack the problem from a different angle. After doing data analysis for nearly twenty years, I’m pretty convinced that education really runs on the same causal tracks as being pro-social. Educated folks are just more likely to be engaged in all kinds of social activities. They serve on school boards. They volunteer at their local library. They’ve just built a thicker, more robust social network than those who stopped at high school. I’ve used this phrase a lot — “Dropping out begets dropping out” — and I really do believe it’s true.

But after poking around the data a whole bunch for this post, I’m convinced of something very important. If a person at the lower end of the educational spectrum can become a regular churchgoer, it opens a door for them to engage in much more pro-social activities. And it will actually make their lives better and close that “drop out” gap in some very meaningful ways.

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The Catholic Church is one of the most doctrinally specific institutions in the world. The Magisterium — the Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops — has issued detailed guidance on everything from the mechanics of salvation to the appropriate use of birth control to how often a faithful Catholic should receive the sacrament of Reconciliation. These aren’t suggestions. They are, in the Church’s own framing, the authoritative teachings of an institution that believes itself to be guided by the Holy Spirit.

And yet, anyone who has spent time around American Catholics knows that the distance between official Church teaching and the lived experience of the average Catholic in the pew can be considerable. This isn’t a new observation — sociologists of religion have been documenting it for decades. But it raises a genuinely interesting empirical question: just how Catholic, in the doctrinal sense of the word, is the average American Catholic?

This is actually a pretty hard question to answer because most surveys of American religion are “general purpose.” They ask about things like religious attendance because that’s fairly universal across traditions, but they aren’t going to dig into the weeds of specific Catholic beliefs and practices. However, I managed to stumble upon a dataset called the American Catholic Laity Poll. It was conducted a while ago (2017), but I think it can still offer us insights into the specific practices and beliefs of Catholics.

For instance, this survey asked specifically about the act of Confession: “How often, if ever, do you participate in the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession)?”

The typical Catholic isn’t walking into the confessional booth with any regularity. In fact, just 4% of Catholics say that they go to confession once a month or more. For comparison, the percentage of Americans who attend religious services multiple times per week is in the 6-8% range. In actual numeric terms, there are about 2-3 million American Catholics who go to confession a dozen times per year.

In contrast, a clear majority (56%) describe their confession attendance as “seldom” or “never.” Another 16% indicate that they are going into the booth less than once a year. That means almost three-quarters of Catholics haven’t gone to confession for a very long time. It’s just not part of normal religious practice for most American Catholics.

Of course, I had to break that down by the Mass attendance rates of the Catholic laity. We could easily assume that more Mass attendance leads to more confession participation, but it’s nice to confirm a hunch with actual numbers. In this case, there is a positive relationship between both religious behaviors. Among weekly attendees, 36% say that they go to confession at least a few times per year, and a majority go at least once every twelve months.

But among those who go to Mass less often, confession is not a regular part of their religious routine. Among monthly Mass attendees, almost two-thirds indicate that confession happens seldom, never, or less than once a year. For those who don’t go to Mass much, confession is just not happening at all — 79% say that they never or seldom go. For those wondering, 42% of Catholics are in the never/seldom category for both Mass attendance and confession participation.

Another Catholic distinctive is the concept of the Magisterium. It’s the idea that the leadership of the Church is the authority on matters related to doctrine, practice, and views on controversial political issues. There are two intriguing questions on the survey worth exploring:

1. Catholic bishops often speak out about politics and elections, as well as about policy issues like healthcare, immigration, and foreign affairs.
2. Catholics can disagree with aspects of Church teaching and still remain loyal to the Church.

It’s pretty clear from the graph above that the average rank-and-file Catholic does not feel beholden to the teachings of the bishops on issues related to politics and policy. In the full sample, only about 1 in 10 Catholics said, “I try to follow the bishops’ guidance and instructions on political and public policy matters.” The modal position was clearly the middle path: “I consider what the bishops have to say about politics and public policy, but ultimately I make up my own mind.” However, note that among those who don’t go to Mass much, nearly half say the bishops’ views are completely irrelevant to them.

On the question about whether Catholics can disagree with the Church’s teachings and still be loyal, the differences between those who go to Mass every week and those who don’t go at all are pretty small. Even among the most religiously active Catholics, a strong majority (81%) agree that “Catholics can disagree with Church teaching and still remain loyal.” Among those who go less often, it’s north of 90%. So, it looks like the average Catholic extends a whole lot of grace and flexibility to their brethren.

Let’s take this a step further, though. I wanted to create a “conformity index” based on a whole bunch of questions from this survey of Catholic laity. I pulled together an additive index that touched on four broad areas of investigation: behavior, belief, moral authority, and institutional allegiance. I put them all in the table below so you can see the detailed question wording.

Some of these factors have a fairly high “conformity score,” like being a registered parish member (60%) or believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ (64%). But there are other questions where only a very small percentage of Catholics conform. For instance, only 9% of Catholics say the Church has the final say on birth control issues, and only 13% say the same regarding abortion.

I indexed each respondent on a scale of zero (meaning conforming on no items) to 10 (conforming on all ten listed in the table above). I visualized the distribution in the graph below. The mean conformity score for the full sample was 2.9/10.

Nearly 30% of Catholics scored a zero or one on the Catholic conformity index. Half of them scored between zero and two. In contrast, only 6% scored at least a seven. As you can quickly tell from the bar graph, the modal score was 3/10, followed closely by 1 and 2. In other words, the average Catholic is not regularly engaging in practices or holding beliefs that are distinctly Catholic.

Of course, that varies noticeably when I break it down by the average level of Mass attendance. (I do understand that one of the items in the additive index is about Mass attendance, so this does confound things a bit — but I still think it’s a helpful way to think about committed Catholics vs. cultural ones.)

Among Catholics who don’t go to Mass much, the mean score on this scale is just 1.75 and the modal score is one. The average Catholic represented by the red bars at the top of the graph is really not that Catholic in any meaningful way. I would love to see how the typical Protestant scores on this scale and compare it to never-attending Catholics, but alas, I am data-limited here.

For Catholics who report monthly Mass attendance, the mean is a full point higher (2.9) and the modal score is 3 out of 10. You can still see that the bars are heavier on the left than the right, though. Over 40% of monthly attending Catholics score no higher than a two on this index.

What about the most active Catholics? Well you do clearly see a much higher mean (5.1). Which is nearly double the rate of the monthly attendees. This graph is fuller on the right side of the plot than the left side. Among weekly Mass attenders, 18% score at 7-10, three times the rate as the full sample of Catholics. There’s no doubt that this group has the highest level of conformity to Catholic doctrine and behavior.

I thought you all would appreciate some more granularity on this one, so I recreated the table from above but I did it for each level of Mass attendance.

In terms of behavior, you can clearly see that those most active in attendance are also the most likely to engage in regular confession and be registered as parish members. There’s also a clear gradient on beliefs. For instance, 74% of weekly attendees believe in transubstantiation, compared to 42% of those who attend Mass seldom or never. The gap on belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus was 25 percentage points as well.

But where Catholic conformity drops significantly is in the last two categories: moral authority and institutional fidelity. Even among weekly attendees, the scores are incredibly low. Only 26% of Catholics who attend Mass weekly say that Church leaders should have the final say on abortion, and it’s just 22% for homosexuality.

And because I am trying to be more innovative, I built a whole widget that allows you to “choose your own adventure” in determining what percentage of Catholics are conforming to the Church’s teachings.

That widget can be accessed by clicking on THIS LINK.

You can test combinations to your heart’s content. For instance, the widget indicates that the share of Catholics who attend Mass weekly and go to confession at least once a year is 17%.

How average is the typical Catholic? I think the answer depends, at least in part, on how often they go to Mass. If they rarely show up to Church on the weekend, they don’t hold to a lot of distinctively Catholic behaviors or beliefs.

If they attend church on an average Sunday, they are more inclined to go to confession and to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and transubstantiation. But even among these folks, individualism still dominates their decision-making. They don’t defer to the Church’s authority on matters of public policy, and they don’t look askance at other Catholics who question the Church, either.

What this data convinces me of is that in the phrase American Catholic, the most important word is probably the first one, not the second.

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 an old saying that bounces around from time to time: “Change is hard. Not changing is harder.” It’s often invoked by counselors helping clients alter their behavior, particularly regarding substance abuse. But outside that specific context, the opposite is often true. In fact, the strongest force in the world of social science is inertia. What’s the strongest predictor of where someone will live? It’s where they were born. The strongest predictor of one’s partisanship? The political affiliation of their parents.

And if one were to guess a random person’s current religion, the answer is almost always the same: whatever religion they were raised in. We stick with what we know.

The share of Americans who indicate that their current religious tradition is the one in which they were raised is 66%. Most people living in the United States will die with the same faith into which they were born, and that’s been true for decades. But how people switch and why they switch may be changing.

Let’s first tackle the first part of that question: what does religious switching look like in American religion? The alluvial diagram below maps the flow of Americans from their childhood faith to their current one, based on the 2023-24 Pew Religious Landscape Survey (hosted on the ARDA). The color of each band represents a person’s childhood tradition, and the thickness represents how many people travel a particular path.

The thickest bands tell the clearest story. The vast majority of folks who were raised Protestant stay in that same faith tradition throughout their lives, and the same is true for Catholics and smaller faith traditions. But notice the size of the blocks on the left compared to the right. More people were raised Protestant than are currently Protestant. Catholics show an even steeper drop.

The one group that clearly bucks this trend is the “nones.” Their bar on the right-hand side is over twice as large as the bar on the left. The non-religious have far more inflows than outflows, which is how they have grown to roughly a quarter to a third of the American population.

Switching happens, of course, but it’s certainly not the norm. In fact, about six in ten current nones came from Christian backgrounds—roughly a third from Protestant traditions and a quarter from Catholic ones.

Which groups are best at keeping their own, and which ones have a high rate of defection? It’s easier to get a handle on that by calculating retention rate, which is simply the share of each tradition whose childhood faith matches their current religious affiliation.

Jews lead the way here. About three-quarters of people who were raised in a Jewish household still claim Judaism as their present religion. The non-religious are statistically in the same spot: three-quarters of Americans who were raised with no faith tradition are still nones into adulthood. Couple that with the data from earlier indicating that 60% of current nones are Christian defectors, and you can quickly ascertain why the non-religious have exploded in size over the last three decades.

The Latter-day Saints had the lowest retention of any group—just over half—which should send alarm bells through church headquarters in Salt Lake City.

Let’s go one layer down now, by checking how retention rates have shifted based on the birth decade of the respondent.

For both Protestants and Catholics, retention has taken a nosedive among younger adults compared to their parents or grandparents. Among people born before 1980 and raised in a Protestant household, 75–80% still identify as Protestant. Catholic retention among that age group is noticeably lower (60–65%). However, defection among younger adults raised in those faiths has accelerated sharply. Now, half of young people raised Catholic are no longer Catholic; among Protestants, it’s closer to 40%.

The trend for the nones stands alone. Among the oldest Americans raised without religion, almost half found their way into a faith community as adults. Today, 80% of young adults raised as nones are still nones. For comparison, Amish retention has been estimated at 85%. The “none” identity is incredibly sticky now.

So we’ve spent some time poking around the “what” question. It’s time to pivot to the “why” question, and I want to zoom in on a single explanation for religious switching: politics. In 2002, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer published an article in the American Sociological Review titled Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations. For anyone who works in this field, this is considered canonical reading.

The abstract describes the conceit of the piece: “The increase in ‘no religion’ responses was confined to political moderates and liberals; the religious preferences of political conservatives did not change. This political part of the increase in the ‘nones’ can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.”

In other words: politics caused people to drop out of the church. Let me provide an updated version of the graph that appears on page 181 of that piece using data from the General Social Survey through 2024.

That result is about as clean as it gets in the world of social science. In the late 1990s, about 15% of liberals were nones compared to 5% of conservatives—a clear divide, but not an impassable chasm. That’s no longer true. Now, 43% of ideological liberals say they have no religious affiliation compared to just 12% of conservatives. A ten-point gap has tripled in size, and there’s no evidence these trend lines will converge anytime soon.

Does that thesis bear out with the switching data? I had a simple hypothesis to test: are people who grew up Protestant or Catholic but became non-religious more left-leaning than those who stayed in that same tradition?

Among Catholic “stayers,” 39% are Republicans and 36% are Democrats. For Protestants who stuck around, those numbers are 47% and 29%, respectively. But among those who switched from Protestant to Catholic or Catholic to Protestant, a clear pattern emerges: switchers inside Christianity are consistently the most Republican of any subgroup examined here.

But what about people who left Catholicism or Protestantism to become non-religious? Among the Catholic-to-none sample, 46% say they are Democrats and only 15% are Republicans. For Protestant-to-nones, it was basically the same: 44% and 16%, respectively. This is strong evidence that politics is wrapped up in why some people leave Christianity to become secular.

However, are people who defected from Christian groups more left-leaning than folks who have been nones their entire lives?

And here’s where I had a “holy cow” moment. The types of nones who are the least Democratic are those who have been non-religious their entire lives. Only 38% say they are Democrats, 42% identify as politically Independent, and 20% align with the GOP. In contrast, among ex-Christians who become nones, roughly 45% say they are Democrats—seven points higher than the “always nones.”

This is fascinating because it suggests a mismatch between what drives people to leave Protestantism or Catholicism and what it means to have never been religious at all. People who actively exit a faith tradition aren’t just drifting; they’re making a decision, and that decision appears correlated with a particular political worldview. Leaving a church isn’t religiously neutral; for many people, it seems to be a political act.

The “always nones” tell a different story. They weren’t pushed out of anything; they simply never had a religious identity to begin with. Without that experience of exit, there’s no corresponding political signal. They’re secular by default rather than conviction, and their politics reflect that—more Independent, less reliably Democratic, and harder to categorize.

Let me lay one more variable on top of this: age. I wanted to test whether politically motivated exit was widespread among older Americans while younger cohorts are switching for reasons that extend beyond the ballot box.

Among the youngest birth cohorts of “always nones” (those born 1990–2004), just a quarter identify as Democrats. For always nones from the Baby Boomer generation, 40% say they are Democrats. Protestant-to-none and Catholic-to-none defectors exhibit the exact same trend line. Among the youngest adults who left their faith behind, only about a third identify as Democrats. For Christian-to-none defectors in their retirement years, a bit less than half say they are Democrats.

This is where Hout and Fischer’s argument becomes both confirmed and complicated. Looking at the older cohorts, they were right. Among Baby Boomers who left Protestantism or Catholicism, nearly half identify as Democrats. These are people whose exits tracked closely with the culture war battles of the 1980s and 1990s. For them, leaving the church and voting Democratic were part of the same identity package.

But among those born in the 1990s and 2000s who left Christianity behind, only about a third identify as Democrats. The political premium that came with religious exit has nearly vanished. These younger “dechurchers” don’t look like political refugees; they look more like people who simply stopped going—gradually, quietly, without it meaning much ideologically one way or the other.

Hout and Fischer weren’t wrong; they were describing a real mechanism operating in a specific historical moment. What they couldn’t have anticipated is that mass secularization would eventually normalize religious exit to the point where it no longer carries a strong political signature. When leaving religion is something a third of your generation does, it stops being a statement and starts being a default.

The story of the nones, in other words, has changed. The first wave left with conviction. The second wave just drifted out the door.

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 not this time. I noticed a single line in the article that caught my eye,

“As part of the process, the Detroit archdiocese released information online in March about parish finances and attendance data in workbooks that provide a detailed look at the conditions of churches, showing how some are doing well with revenue while others struggle.”

Jackpot. It’s time to get to work.

The Archdiocese of Detroit has pulled together a really impressive website about the process that the Church is undertaking over the next couple of years. They have a relatively new Archbishop - Edward Weisenburger. He was installed as the leader of the Detroit archdiocese in March of 2025. My read of the situation is that he was primarily chosen to secure the organizational and financial future of the Archdiocese. That’s the goal of this discernment process.

The real treasure trove for me is a series of workbooks for the 224 parishes that exist in Eastern Michigan. They are organized across 15 different planning areas and they are posted for anyone to download on this page. The PDF files are awesome because they provide unprecedented access into what is happening at the parish level across hundreds of churches in Michigan.

So here’s my plan. This post is going to just introduce you all to the 30,000 foot view of the Archdiocese of Detroit based on the metrics provided in these workbooks. If this article does well, I plan on writing a series of reports about Mass attendance, sacramental activities, and the finances of these 200+ parishes for my paid subscribers. I think there’s just so much to learn about what is happening in American Christianity through the granular study of this one Archdiocese.

First, I need to frame the rest of this discussion around a misconception that I had about what’s happening in the Detroit area. I, like many of you, have read dozens of stories about how the Detroit metro area was undergoing a population collapse. I mean, the city of Detroit went bankrupt. And that, statistically speaking, WAS the case for a long time. Between 1950 and 2010, the population of Detroit declined by 61%. But now there’s a new reality - metro Detroit has actually experienced some modest growth in the last fifteen years.

The six counties that make up the Archdiocese of Detroit grew by 2.2% between 2010 and 2024 — modest, but not certainly decline. Wayne County did lose residents, dropping about 49,000 people over fourteen years, but that’s a far cry from the hollowing-out narrative that defined Detroit a decade ago. The region has stabilized.

But there are counties in the suburbs of Detroit that have experienced solid growth recently. Oakland and Macomb counties are north of the city center and have seen increases in population of 7.9% and 5.4% respectively. Monroe county is just to the south of downtown, and it’s up 2.6% during this same time frame.

The crisis facing the Archdiocese of Detroit isn’t really about what’s happened in the last decade — it’s about an institution still reckoning with the massive population exodus of the mid-to-late 20th century. The infrastructure, the parish footprint, the number of churches — all of it was built for a city and a Catholic population that no longer exists at that scale. The most recent Mass attendance data makes clear that the reckoning isn’t over.

In 2011, the average weekend Mass attendance in the Archdiocese was about 231,000 people. That dropped below 200,000 by 2015, it declined to 163,000 by 2019. The most recent data that these workbooks provide is from 2024, when Mass attendance was just under 140,000. According to their own reports, the Catholic Church in Detroit is recording an attendance decline of 4% per year.

The PDFs contain this data nugget as well, “At the current rate of decline, one-third of today’s Mass attending Catholics will no longer be attending within the next decade.” That means that Mass attendance will drop below 100,000 by 2035.

If Mass attendance had simply kept pace with population growth since 2011, roughly 236,000 Catholics would show up to a Detroit-area parish this weekend. The actual number is 139,000 — about 40% lower. The archdiocese is currently filling about 29% of its available pew space on a given weekend. If current trends hold, that number could slip below 20% within a few years. That’s a church with an empty building problem.

That’s a common theme when looking through this data and reading the Archbishop’s letter: there’s too much capacity in the system. The average Catholic Church is not the right size to meet the needs of the congregations. There’s no simpler way to say it. They built these houses of worship to accommodate thousands of “butts in seats” every weekend. And now they have a huge problem with maintaining these buildings.

Their own data says that the average parish has under 600 regular Mass attendees. They have 62 parishes where weekend attendance is less than 300 and another 76 parishes where 300-600 folks show up on an average weekend. In contrast, 34 parishes have a Mass attendance that is north of 1,000 people.

For the Protestants that are reading this, these numbers seem huge, right? The median attendance in the Protestant world is about 70 folks on a Sunday. Catholics have always had fewer parishes with more people in the pews. That model requires huge sanctuaries. The median capacity of a parish in Detroit was about 650 people. I am going to guess that the average Protestant church could probably accommodate 300.

But here’s the number that should be keeping archdiocesan leadership up at night: the median parish fills about one-third of its seats at a typical Mass. Two out of every three chairs are empty. These buildings were designed for a Catholic population that no longer shows up — and no amount of consolidation changes that math if attendance keeps falling.

That causes two problems. One is logistical. Maintaining a huge building with a massive sanctuary is a money pit (ask me how I know). The heating bills in the cold Detroit winters for a room that has 75 foot ceilings has to be astronomical. And let’s not even discuss the maintenance and upkeep of buildings that are 80-100 years old. Boiler replacements can easily run into the six figures.

The other problem is less tangible - it feels really bad to be in a huge space that’s only 25-35% full. Again, ask me how I know. When my church got below 30 people we actually stopped worshipping in the sanctuary and moved to a larger classroom in the educational wing. You can get a sense of that in this NBC Documentary which contains some footage of our worship service back in 2019.

These aren’t easy problems to solve. These houses of worship are just being used for less…worship.

You can see that clearly by analyzing sacramental activities. The Catholic Church is very good at recording a bunch of metrics outside of Mass attendance. This report includes five key statistics: infant baptisms, first communions, confirmations, marriages, and funerals . The workbooks included data on these activities in both 2000 and 2024.

The percentage declines are noted above each bar. None of them are good. I write often about the basic math of religious retention — a church needs to be adding members faster than it’s losing them. Baptisms and confirmations have to outpace funerals. In Detroit, every one of those trend lines is moving in the wrong direction.

Think of Catholic membership like a pipeline. Infant baptism is the top of the funnel — if you don’t capture people there, you’re looking at a smaller committed Catholic population in 20 to 30 years. In Detroit, infant baptisms are down 67% since 2000. It follows logically that first communions are down 61% and confirmations down 54%. The pipeline isn’t just leaking, it’s running dry at the source.

What’s striking, though, is that those three numbers have converged. In 2000, infant baptisms, first communions, and confirmations formed a clear funnel — each step smaller than the last, with about 5,000 fewer confirmations than baptisms. In 2024, all three sit in a tight band between 5,000 and 6,000. The funnel hasn’t disappeared; it’s just gotten much smaller. Fewer people are entering at the top, but a higher share are making it through to confirmation. The pipeline is narrower but less leaky.

But notice which figure has declined the least? It’s funerals, by a long shot. Only down 38%. In 2024, there were 6,030 funerals conducted by priests in the Archdiocese. The number of first communions? It was only 5,983. It doesn’t take a fancy demographic model to convey this simple fact: that’s a very bad trajectory.

And what may be an even more pressing problem, as highlighted by the workbooks, is the age distribution of priests in the Archdiocese.

The Archdiocese of Detroit has 224 active priests serving its parishes. Three of them are under 30. Six are over 80. Just 14% are under 40, and nearly half have already passed their 60th birthday. The age cliff is coming fast — and it’s steeper than it looks, because the Catholic Church requires priests to step back from parish ministry at 70 and assume senior status at 80. The median Detroit priest is already on the back half of his active ministry. There is no cavalry coming.

The report included this projection model which estimated the number of priests in the next decade or so.

In 2024, the Archdiocese of Detroit had 224 parishes and 224 active priests — a ratio that sounds reasonable on paper. But the distribution tells a different story. Thirty-four parishes draw over 1,000 people to Mass on a typical weekend, and 71 see at least 600. A 1:1 priest-to-parish ratio assumes every parish is roughly the same size. They aren’t.

The trajectory makes it worse. The archdiocese’s own projections show the active priest count falling to 134 by 2034 — not in a generation, but in ten years. That’s a loss of nearly 40% of current clergy. With 224 parishes and 134 priests, roughly half of Detroit’s parishes will have no resident priest within a decade.

And I haven’t even touched on some of the other problems in the report. There’s one parish in the diocese where only 18% of those who attend Mass there live with the parish boundaries. In other words - the building doesn’t match the neighborhood anymore.

I applaud Archbishop Weisenburger’s courage and initiative to face these realities head on. I say this all the time: it’s pretty easy to lead an organization when it’s growing. Hiring new people, planning the construction of new buildings, and expanding programs is a lot of fun. You know what’s not so fun? Consolidating resources, closing parishes, and ending ministries.

But it must be done. The ledger doesn’t balance in the Archdiocese of Detroit (and in many other metro areas, as well).

And like I wrote earlier, if there’s some enthusiasm for this macro-level analysis, I plan on getting deep into the weeds of the problems facing many of these parishes. I have already scraped these reports for trends in baptisms, attendance and financial health.

It’s my best chance to trace religious decline in a meticulous way. I look forward to the challenge. And my prayers are with the over 900,000 Catholics who make up the Archdiocese of Detroit.

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.

First, just a bit of background on the Seventh day Adventist movement. The SDA church traces its roots back to the mid-1800s, arising from the Millerite movement, named after William Miller, a prophet who believed that Jesus Christ would return to earth in short order. From the aftermath of that failed prophecy, a number of groups spun off, including what would become the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The SDA denomination has a few distinctives: worship on Saturday rather than Sunday, a strong emphasis on health and diet (a significant share of Adventists are vegetarian), and a robust global missionary infrastructure that has made them one of the fastest-growing denominations worldwide. They also operate one of the largest hospital systems in the United States - AdventHealth.

Let’s just start this whole thing by giving you a sense of the size of Seventh-day Adventists.

The data here is remarkably consistent - somewhere between .3% and .5% of all adults in the Cooperative Election Study identify as SDAs. I think there’s some evidence here that the trend line is moving in the downward direction, but I wouldn’t stake my career on that claim. When you are dealing with a group that is this small, it doesn’t take much to send a trend line downward. In fact, it probably only takes 20-30 fewer respondents identifying as Seventh-day Adventists (out of a sample of 60,000) to move the overall trends.

Of course, it’s always nice to have a type of “reference case” to compare the SDAs. They are about the same share of Americans as Hindus. They are likely half the size of Latter-day Saints or Muslims. And for every Seventh-day Adventist there are three Jews in the United States. So, pretty small in the grand sweep of American religion.

There’s another way to get at the size estimate, though: the Religion Census. It just goes to individual religious denominations and asks for a copy of their membership records. That provides another way at figuring out just how large they are compared to other well known religious groups.

Obviously the Catholic church dominates. I’ve written about this plenty. There are nearly 62 million Catholics in the United States. The non-denominationals are listed at 21.1M, but I’m almost certain that’s an undercount. About 14% of all Americans identify as non-denominational. That works out to 35-40M folks. Then we have the Southern Baptists and United Methodists below that.

But if you take your eye down to the bottom half of the graph you can see a whole bunch of denominations that are tightly clustered between 1M and 1.8M. You’ve got a lot of the most widely discussed groups here: Missouri Synod Lutherans, Episcopalians, PCUSA and American Baptists are all pretty similar in size. This is exactly where the SDAs land: 1.3M members back in 2020. They are essentially the same size as most mainline denominations. Again, not tiny, but also not that consequential in our larger understanding of Protestantism.

But where are Seventh-day Adventists in terms of geography? Let me show you one way to visualize this and then another way. I think both are helpful to get a more accurate picture of this religious group.

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I feel like I got into a debate or a disagreement with someone about politics or religion on a near daily basis when I was between the ages of 13 and 25. I would fight with anyone about anything and I would often argue positions that I completely disagreed with because I just liked the intellectual gamesmanship of the whole exercise.

In short, I was a pretentious jerk. I’m very glad that I outgrew that phase of my life.

But if I look back on the last decade of my life, I think that the pendulum has clearly swung in the other direction and in a really severe way: I hardly ever get into a disagreement with anyone about anything. (Insert hacky joke with the exception being my wife and sons). I really don’t get into any type of verbal conflict anymore. And I can’t say that I am pining for my teenage years when I seemed to be geared up to be a disagreeable snot-nosed kid on an hourly basis.

There’s a practical reason for that, by the way. I generally don’t hang out with people that I strongly disagree with on important matters. And even if I do manage to find myself in that type of company, both parties are smart enough to know not to talk about topics that will raise our blood pressure. We are middle aged, after all.

I also teach on a college campus. One of the most prestigious in the United States, empirically speaking. And it’s got students from all over the country (and a bunch of international students, too). They come from about every background you can imagine and they have very different political and religious experiences.

But they are incredibly reluctant to actually disagree with me (or other students) in class. It’s super frustrating because my understanding of the classroom is that it’s exactly the space where free speech should flourish. It doesn’t. Everyone seems so afraid of saying something that will be recorded and reposted on social media. Thus, we sort of cosplay a rich debate. We don’t actually do it.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been doing an annual survey of college students where they ask questions about which topics are particularly hard for them to discuss in various environments on campus.

They were given a list of twenty items and asked to indicate which ones were particularly difficult to talk about on their campus. Here’s the ordering of those twenty topics.

The “third rail” of discourse on college campuses is the conflict in the Middle East. Over half of all those who took part in the survey said it was hard to have an open and honest conversation about the war between Israel and Hamas. You have to remember that this survey was conducted about a year ago, when this was still a very ongoing war between those two entities. I don’t know if (and how much) that percentage would decline if FIRE includes this question again on this year’s questionnaire.

What else scores near the top? I think I would call them “the usual suspects”: abortion, the 2024 election, and transgender rights. They were all in the 41%-46% range. I don’t think that anyone would be particularly surprised to see those issues float to the top of the list. Adults don’t want to talk about them either.

I also need to mention the issues that don’t raise so much hesitation that appear at the bottom of the list. Students don’t seem to be wary of discussing: climate change, crime, the Supreme Court, or China. It’s interesting how there aren’t really any “culture war” issues at the bottom of this graph.

That got me thinking, though: I wonder if Christian college students have a different idea about what topics are unwise to go near compared to Muslims, or atheists. Below, I just visualized what items were in the top three for about a dozen religious groups.

This graph is really boring, honestly. I would have hoped that for one of these religious groups there would be a true “wild card” issue that they find pretty difficult to talk about. Instead, it pretty much follows what I would have expected. For all but two groups (generic Christians and LDS), the Middle East conflict scored at the very top. What’s also notable about those two aforementioned groups - the conflict doesn’t even appear in the top three for either.

But it’s basically the same issues showing up over and over again. Abortion is on every single graph. The 2024 election shows up in nine of the twelve. The transgender issue is there for five of these religious groups. But it doesn’t appear on the list for any of the non-religious college students in the sample. Again, I don’t know what to make of that one.

I really did want to dig into the most “unique” issue for each group. To do that, I just compared the overall scores for all twenty items to the scores for each religious group and then plucked out the one topic that deviated the most from the overall percentage. That’s what is in the table below.

For both Catholics and Protestants, abortion is the one issue that they are more reluctant to talk about than the average college student. They are the only two groups where abortion is the outlier. The other huge thing that jumps out to me is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that appears a bunch of times in the middle of the table. For Jews, Muslims, atheists, and agnostics it’s the big outlier in their responses.

Notice the largest delta between the two figures, though? It’s Jewish students and the Middle East conflict and it’s in the expected direction. In the full sample, 53% of students found it difficult to discuss. For Jews, 74% found it uncomfortable. Agnostics were also in double digits on this one, too.

However, for a bunch of groups, the deviations from the norm are just non-existent. For instance, the biggest outlier for Latter-day Saints was climate change. But even then, they were less than three points away from the baseline. And for nothing in particulars and Hindus, they were about as average as you can get.

To this point, though, we haven’t discussed the fact that the political partisanship of respondents can have a big impact on whether they are willing to discuss an issue on campus or not. So that’s what I tried to visualize below: I rank ordered all 20 topics across the political spectrum. I tried to highlight the ones that were the most important or had the greatest amount of movement from left to right.

First note that abortion and transgender rights almost always rank at the top, no matter the personal politics of the respondent. But I do need to point out that the lines go up from left to right. That means that Republicans are more reluctant to talk about both compared to Democrats. In contrast, the Middle East conflict goes in the opposite direction: it’s the most difficult topic to discuss for those on the political left but it ranks sixth among strong Republicans.

I was also struck by the variation in a couple of other lines that I highlighted. For instance, look at “gay rights.” Among the strong Democrats in the sample, it ranked 11th out of 20 issues. For strong Republicans, it was 3rd. I think you can probably figure out why a strong Republican is less likely to bring it up. Then, sexual assault goes the other direction. It’s 7th among strong Democrats but 13th among strong Republicans.

You can probably assume the next logical step, right? Let’s try to parse out how political partisanship and religious affiliation impact reluctance to speak out on certain topics on college campuses. I wanted to begin by looking at the three largest Christian groups and how they felt about three topics that tend to be central for them: abortion, gay rights and transgender rights.

There’s a consistent finding across this analysis: Republican college students are more likely to hold their tongue compared to independents and Democrats. Among Protestant respondents, the gap was noticeably large. On abortion, 62% of Republican Protestants said it was difficult to talk about compared to just 49% of Democrat Protestants. The divide was 12 points on gay rights and 15 points on transgender rights. It doesn’t take a lot of wild guessing to figure out the reason: those Republican college students have an opinion that is outside of widely held views on college campuses.

There is a gap between left and right among Catholics, but it’s noticeably smaller. It’s five points on abortion, eight points on gay rights and seven points on transgender rights. I don’t know if I can easily explain why the divergence between Republican and Democratic Catholics is not so severe compared to Protestants, but it’s a very consistent finding in this data.

Let’s do the same kind of thing but for a topic that stood out on the left: the Middle East conflict.

Here the partisan gap is reversed from the previous graph. Instead of Republicans being more hesitant to speak out, it’s the Democratic students who are more prone to keeping their mouth shut. Think about this: 80% of Democratic Jews said that they found the conflict between Israel and Palestine to be hard to discuss on their college campus. That was 27 points higher than the full sample. I think I may have found the hottest of hot button issues for a subgroup of American college students.

But even among Muslims and atheists and agnostics, it’s pretty much the “third rail” of discourse at universities across the country. At least two-thirds of the Democrats say that they just don’t want to talk about it. I do find the partisan gap among atheists interesting, though: only 43% of atheist Republicans don’t want to talk about the Middle East Conflict.

Are colleges and universities bastions of free speech? In my experience, not really. They are certainly more open to the idea of honest discussion than the average workplace or sideline of a soccer field. But everyone is terrified of getting cancelled. Myself included.

Maybe there needs to be a concerted effort to introduce Chatham House rules in some form or fashion on college campuses. But I don’t think that’s even feasible.

Instead, the cosplaying of ideas will continue full speed at colleges across the United States for the foreseeable future.

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.