The Most Popular Posts of 2024
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We have now entered that “no man’s land” between Christmas and New Years. You don’t know what day it is. You don’t know when you will leave the house next. You aren’t sure when you showered. I don’t want to hit you all with a heavy post on December 26. So instead, I will just give you a quick summary and some thoughts on the five most popular posts from 2024.
I will also be unlocking these posts for the next few days so that anyone can read them, regardless of whether you are a paying subscriber or not.
Number 5:
I like this post a lot because it’s a line of inquiry that I have been nibbing around for at least four years now. It actually is a subtle storyline from the first version of The Nones. There are a growing number of Americans who are just completely fed up with all the traditional structures of American life. They don’t claim any religion (and they aren’t atheists, either). They don’t say that they are Democrats or Republicans, Liberals or Conservatives. They don’t engage in the political process. They are just done with it all.
And, they worry me very much. If you want to want a documentary on this subject, I recommend Join or Die which is available to stream on Netflix.
Number 4:
Before I die, I want to totally dispel the myth that there is grand liberal religious tradition in the United States. There are, of course, a lot of non-white Christians who vote for Democrats in large numbers. But among white Christianity, you can’t really find many churches where the most devout are also the most politically liberal. I could only find two in my entire analysis.
American religion (especially white religion) is overwhelmingly conservative now. That is having profound implications for our society and it’s something that I wrote about in great depth for my upcoming book with Brazos that will release in early 2026.
Number 3:
Fun behind the scenes little fact about this post - it got a huge amount of traffic when it was posted on the front page of The Drudge Report. Remember that website? It’s still a huge driver of clicks. In fact, 35% of the all the traffic to this post came from Drudge. In comparison, less than 1% came from all social media sites combined. That’s one of the reasons that this post landed in the top five.
In my mind, this is one of those really basic “textbook” style bits of writing. I am not making some big theoretically nuanced argument. It’s just a simple approach: let me show you where the Democrats and the Republicans land on various dimensions of religiosity (belief, behavior, and belonging). Sometimes you gotta be as direct as possible. And I also like how this one dovetails with the previous post in this list.
Number 2:
To me, this is the biggest religion story of the entire year and it’s one that could change the trajectory of my career in the medium term. I mean, my first book was about the rise of the nones. And now that rise is over (at least momentarily).
I was really hesitant to write this one for a long while because I didn’t have enough confidence to make this bold of a claim. But as the different surveys began to pile up, it became clear to me that this wasn’t just measurement error in one survey instrument - this was a systematic thing. How long this plateau lasts, is anyone’s guess. But it has definitely changed the narrative around the non-religious.
Number 1:
What can I say? People like to read about sex. This post was read 2.5 times more than any other post that I wrote in 2023. I would have never guessed that this one would become the runaway hit. What’s funny is that the post is not explicitly about religion. I try to stay in my lane, but sometimes I drift into adjacent areas. This time it worked out.
I guess this one works because people have been hearing the story that social interactions are down and were looking for another data point to back that up. This certainly fit the bill. What strikes me the most about this entire analysis is that sex is down even among married people now. That’s wild to think about. And yes, I definitely think it’s due in large part to the smartphone. Steve Jobs killed our fertility rate. Maybe.
Again, thanks for reading my nonsense in 2024. It was a huge year of growth. I added about 10,000 free subscribers in the last 12 months. Unbelievable. I am humbled to be clogging up your inbox in 2025.
Onward and upward.
Politics and Religion are kind of your bread and butter; funny that adding in sex (to complete the dinner part ruining triad) was so popular.
Re: #5. My own personal experience was that it began earlier, and went beyond people joining groups like the Elks. In the late 1970s and the '80s, I lived in two older neighborhoods in Cincinnati, OH. One was built in the 1920s, the other before WWI. But all the houses on those streets had front porches--not just a 4x4 concrete step, but wooden-floored porches that ran across the whole front of the house. And in the evenings during the warm months of the year, people sat out on those porches and talked back and forth. Back then, air conditioning was not universal yet, and while people watched television, it wasn't as dominant as it became later. And back then, before cable took over, most of the TV shows in the summer were reruns anyway. So people sat on their porches and talked to each other and to anyone walking by.
There were changes in housing design after WWII. Most modern houses did not have porches, just a concrete front step that wasn't big enough for one folding chair, much less space for the whole family to sit out front. Yards were larger, making it harder to talk to your neighbors if they were outside. And of course, the rise of air conditioning and the increase of available programming on television, followed by computers in the late '80s and after, kept people inside more. (We got our first home computer from Radio Shack in 1983).