It’s been a while since we had a good GetReligion drinking game.
So here’s the rule for this one: You take a drinking of an adult beverage whenever a GetReligion post mentions demographics, birth rates or, what the heck, “81 percent.”
These discussions may increase in the future, because a very interesting progressive Baptist fellow, who is also a political scientist, has said that it is fine with him if your GetReligionistas reproduce some of this fascinating charts that focus on religion, politics and, often, religion and politics.
The main thing is that these charts often point to valid news stories. Here at GetReligion, we like that. Here’s a large chunk of a recent “On Religion” column that focused on this scholar’s work. This is long, but essential:
Earlier this year, political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University dug into the 2018 General Social Survey, crunched some data and then took to Twitter to note that Americans with ties to no particular religious tradition were now about 23% of the population. That percentage is slightly higher than evangelical Protestantism and almost exactly the same as Roman Catholicism.
"At that point my phone went crazy and I started hearing from everyone" in the mainstream media, said Burge, who is co-founder of the Religion In Public weblog. "All of a sudden it was time to talk about the 'nones' all over again."
Burge recently started another hot discussion on Twitter with some GSS statistics showing trends among believers — young and old — in several crucial flocks. For example, "19.9% of young people are evangelical, compared to 22.9% of those over 65." At the same time, "21% of young people are Catholic. Compared to 24.3% of those 65+."
Those stats show some decline, but not collapse. Then again, Burge noted that, "4.5% of those under 35 are mainline Prot. vs. 20.6% of those 65+."
See any stories in there?
With that, I will be quiet and let you look at a pair of Burge charts. My goal is to feature one of these each week. Sometimes, I may simply post them — link to the source — and say, “Discuss.”