A Christmas Discount!

And a thank you to all my readers.

Nov 28, 2025

Hey All-

As always, I am eternally grateful that so many of you have chosen to wade through my graphs and prose over the last 12 months. So far in 2025, I have published 102 articles, which means I’ve written at least 150,000 words for this newsletter in just the first 11 months of the year. Since my average book is about 60,000 words, that is roughly 2.5 books’ worth of content on Graphs about Religion.

This newsletter now reaches more than 26,000 email addresses when a new post is published—an increase of 10,000 from this time last year. In the last couple of months, the content has averaged about 10,000 views per day, putting us on track for 3 million views in 2025. I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it.

As you can probably guess, I get a lot of feedback. Most of it is good, but a few folks are not too happy with me for one reason or another. I wish I could say that I put those out of my mind easily, but negativity bias is a very real thing. I’m working on it. I also have to say this: I simply cannot respond to every comment, tweet, DM, or email. At some point, I just had to give up on that.

Speaking of feedback, I’ve made a big change this year. I have restricted the comments section to paid subscribers only. I did this for two reasons. One is simple: I want more people to become paid subscribers. I am a capitalist at the end of the day.

The other reason was in response to a comment I received a while back: “Ryan’s Substack has the largest divergence in quality of content to quality of comments I’ve ever seen.” And, you know what? That person was correct. The comment section had become just random, anonymous people throwing toxicity around. I made the shift a couple of months ago and I must say—I actually like reading the comments now. The quality has improved 100-fold.

Since we are on the topic of paid subscribers, it’s time for me to offer my annual Black Friday discount.

20% Off An Annual Subscription

You can get an annual subscription for just $48. And here’s the best part—it will automatically renew at that rate for as long as you stay subscribed.

But what if you need more than one? How about getting a subscription for your entire church staff? Or maybe your academic department at a divinity school? Or maybe you want to lead a small group discussion about the data? Well, I am offering something new this year—a steep group discount.

If you can find 3 people in your organization who want access, I will lower the price to just $40 per year. You can take advantage of that group discount here:

Take Advantage of a Group Discount

Paid Posts — I write about 28 posts per year that go behind the paywall immediately. These tend to be more “in the weeds” of data about religion. If I do a deep dive into a denomination like the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, or the Episcopal Church—that’s almost always behind the paywall. But you also get a nuanced exploration of topics like who is attending church online and what we can learn from the fastest-growing churches in the United States. These posts are longer, typically over 2,000 words. They often contain more graphs, as well—many have 8 graphs instead of my normal 5 or 6. I want you to feel like you are getting your money’s worth.

Full Archive — Most of my posts go behind the paywall after being on the website for three months, which means I have a huge volume of stuff in the archive now. If I had to guess, it’s close to 250 posts and at least 300,000 words. You are basically getting access to 4 or 5 books’ worth of material.

Ability to Comment — As previously mentioned, this was a change I made late in the year and it’s one I will be sticking with for the future. Because I get fewer comments now (and they are often a fruitful avenue for further exploration), I am much more likely to respond with a follow-up bit of analysis.

I promise that this will be the only time of year that I will harangue my readers about becoming paid subscribers. I appreciate all of you, whether you can contribute to the cause or not. And if you ever need a single article for a research project, a class assignment, or to include in your syllabus—just ask! I’m more than happy to send you a PDF of what you need.

Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. All that good stuff.

-Ryan