Ryan Burge
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of Political Science as well as the Graduate Coordinator at Eastern Illinois University, teaching in a variety of areas, including American institutions, political behavior and research methods. His primary research focuses on the intersection between religiosity and political behavior (especially in the American context). Burge has published more than a dozen articles in a number of well regarded peer reviewed journals including Politics & Religion, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Review of Religious Research, the Journal of Religious Leadership, Representation, Politics, Groups, and Identities, the Journal of Communication and Religion, the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture and the Social Science Computer Review.
In addition, his research has been covered in a variety of media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, Vox, 538, Christianity Today, Religion News Service, The Daily Mail, Deseret News, World Magazine, Relevant, C-SPAN and GetReligion. Burge is co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. Finally, he is a pastor in the American Baptist Church.
I don’t know if you knew this or not, but there was a bit of a dustup in Iowa’s Capitol building a few weeks ago. Here’s a quick summary.
The statehouse has a policy that allows different groups to put up a display for a period of time. The Satanic Temple made a written request to use this opportunity to display a Baphomet statue. After some back and forth on details, it was approved.
The display went up and folks got angry. The governor urged folks to pray over the building.
A Mississippi man, Michael Cassidy, drove across the country, entered the State Capital and destroyed the display with a hammer.
Cassidy was charged with a crime for his actions. However, there is a small (but very vocal) contingent of true believers on X (formerly Twitter) that believes Cassidy to be a hero and that all charges should be dropped.
The following tweet is illustrative of that (and click here for tmatt’s GetReligion post on the media coverage). But, I would argue that Ben Zeisloft has a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the religious composition of Iowa. In fact, Iowa is not some throwback to when America was very religious. Just the opposite - it reflects the overall movement away from religion in places where it used to dominate.
It’s bizarre to even type these words, but the COVID-19 pandemic began almost five years ago in the United States. Lockdowns were instituted in March of 2020.
That’s such a weird time capsule for lots of us. I know that we all could write a book about the emotions we experienced and how that period of social isolation impacted our lives.
But, I’m a social scientist, and for all the death and destruction that COVID-19 brought to the United States and every other country on Earth, it also gave us a tremendous window into how folks handled mental stress in near real time.
In fact, the Pew Research Center put a poll into the field in late March of 2020. That was less than a week after many states began to shut down schools and businesses as a mitigation strategy for the spread of COVID-19. They made the data publicly available for download.
I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s Substack over the break, specifically this post: “Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.” He highlights a specific question, “Has a doctor or healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” His post is mostly about topics like gender, age and partisanship.
However, the Pew poll also asks about religion — so let’s get to digging.
I broke the sample down into liberals, moderates and conservatives and then again by larger religious tradition. Here’s the share who said that they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition.
Editor’s note: It’s the time of year for year-enders, when newsrooms, think tanks and others post lists of the most important stories and topics from the previous 12 months. Thus, here are the five most-clicked Graphs About Religion items of the year from the omnipresent political scientist (and progressive Baptist) Ryan Burge. This list starts with his No. 1 post.
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(1) “Religion Has Become a Luxury Good — The formula: College degree + middle class income + married + children.”
This one was an absolute thunderbolt.
I published it the day I was driving back from officiating a wedding about four hours away and every time we stopped to get gas or use the bathroom I would check my phone and the social media traffic was just insane. It took on a life of its own and was shared and discussed for a long time. Which is exactly what I want to do with my work. In the end, this one got 50% more hits than any other post from this year.
In short, I argue that religion has become a haven for folks who have done everything “right.” They have college degrees, decent incomes, are married and have children. It’s become really homogeneous. That’s bad for American religion and American democracy.
I’m not done with this idea. I’ve presented it a number of venues over the last couple of months and the reception has been really humbling. People want to talk about this and think about it more deeply. It’s too early to announce anything, but I think you can expect to see these ideas expanded upon in more complete ways in the year to come.
(2) “Liberals Have Won the Culture War — Opinion on sex, drugs, and abortion have all moved left over time.”
This one was based on a graph that I had put together a while back that tracked the trajectory of a bunch of cultural issues: marijuana, same-sex marriage, abortion, pornograph and extramarital sex. Those are the Sexual Revolution issues that the General Social Service has tracked really consistently for the last several decades.
I was thinking a bit today about the idea of subgroup composition in the world of politics and religion.
For example, evangelicals could be the same share of the population today as they were in the early 1980s, but that doesn’t mean that the composition of the group hasn’t changed significantly during the previous four decades. In fact, it would be pretty shocking if the racial composition of evangelicals hadn’t shifted and the average educational attainment hadn’t climbed, given the overall macro-level movement in American society.
That got me thinking quite a bit about a specific group — those who never attend religious services.
In 2008, according to the Cooperative Election Study, about 20% of all respondents reported that they never attended religious services. By 2022, that share had risen to 34%. A fourteen point jump is a whole lot of folks, by the way. In fact, in real numbers that’s over 45 million Americans.
But the composition of never attenders has also changed as that group has grown so much larger. What I really wanted to do is help readers better conceptualize this group — especially when it comes to politics.
One of my hobby horses recently has been trying to convince people that they need to stop thinking about Republicans as incredibly religiously active and Democrats are the ones who have nothing to do with religion. The Republican coalition is looking less and less religious every year and this is going to have big impacts in the elections to come.
Let’s start broad — with the share of each party identification that never attended religious services between 2008 and 2022.
In 2008, Independents were the most likely to be never attenders — bet you wouldn’t have guessed that.
Twenty-eight percent of them checked the “never” box, which was four points higher than Democrats. There were very few Republicans who were never attenders back when Barack Obama faced off against John McCain for the White House — just 10%.
I’m in absolutely no sense a biblical scholar. I’m nothing more than a lay preacher who was called by a local American Baptist congregation because I was willing to fill the pulpit each Sunday. I took about five courses in the Bible in undergraduate.
I don’t remember a lot about those courses, but a handful of things have stuck with me. Let me get just a little bit preachy for a second. (And forgive me for any heresies).
One idea that I just can never shake is that one of the central themes in the Gospel of Luke is the great reversal. It’s most succinctly stated in 13:30, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”
It’s all over the text. The Magnificat of Mary, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.” (Luke 1:52). “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14:11) And, of course, “Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’” (Luke 5:31-32.)
The way that I understand Christianity is that Jesus was especially concerned with people on the margins of society. The sick, the poor, and the outcasts were high on his priority list. Thus, churches (being the extension of Jesus’ ministry), should focus their efforts on those exact same people.
But the data says that is not happening. Just the opposite in fact.
Religion in the 21st Century America has become an enclave for people who have done everything “right.” They have college degrees and marriages and children and middle-class incomes. For those who don’t check all those boxes, religion is just not for them.
I’m going to stop quoting scripture now (not my strong suit) to describing the data (which is way more comfortable for me). The conclusions are unmistakable: religion has become a luxury good, and that’s leaving most of society on the fringes, yet again.
Let’s start with that old chestnut that I roll out from time to time — the basic relationship between education and religious disaffiliation.
I write a lot about religion and politics.
That’s led to some speaking engagements about my research to a wide variety of groups. I wish I could list all the audiences I have spoken to but it’s really run the gamut. I’ve given talks to some of the most liberal Protestants in the United States, but also to Southern Baptist church planters. I’ve spoken to non-religious groups in a variety of contexts including major corporations and members of Congress.
One thing that I try to do when I’m asked to give a talk is show up before my scheduled engagement and get a sense of the room. I want to see what type of people are gathered, if they have any reading materials handed out to participants and eavesdrop a little on conversations happening among attendees. I need to figure out the political and theological viewpoints of folks before I plow through my material — which can sometimes cause friction.
I mean, I talk about religion and politics. It may not go over well with every attendee in every room.
I would like to think that we all do things like that in our own lives when we are confronted with a new environment. We need to get a lay of the land before we strategize about how we fit in.
That’s certainly the case with the college experience. I think most students want to desperately fit in (it’s something we all do), and one way to make that easier is to make sure your politics aligns with the politics of your local environment.
That’s really the point of this post — trying to understand the political climate of college campuses right now and how individuals fit in to those larger environments. I am using the terrific dataset from The FIRE that I’ve been exploring in several posts this month. Like prior sets of analysis, I restricted my sample to just 18-25 year old folks who are attending a college or university in the United States.
Let’s start with a basic, yet important, question: what is the political partisanship of young folks based on their religious affiliation?
Pretty clearly there are two groups with a strong contingent of Republicans.
A few months ago, I wrote a post about falling marriage rates and the possible link to religion: “Marriage rates are falling. Is the decline of religion to blame? (behind paywall).
But when I read over those graphs I think I had a big blind spot — gender.
Obviously marriage rates aren’t the same for men and women for a wide variety of reasons. For instance, an article in the New York Times in late July was focused on how online communities have sprouted up to help other women know that specific men they find on dating apps are safe to be around.
Dan Cox, from the American Enterprise Institute did some polling and found that younger women (18-29) were significantly more likely to report that they were single in 2022 compared to 2020 (45% vs 38%). And a book published in 2015 called, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” found that educated women just didn’t have that many options when it came to finding a potential mate because the share of men going to college has declined sharply in recent decades.
So, I wanted to explore that gender gap on marriage a bit. But also I wanted to see how all of that related back to religion.
I think it goes without saying that lots of people have found their current spouse at a house of worship. But is being single driving women further away from religion than unmarried men? These are questions worth some analysis and reflection.
Let’s start with the broadest question: are women more likely to report that they have never been married compared to men?
In 2008, about 20% of all women in the sample reported that they had never been married — it was 30% of all men. That’s not a small gap and it’s persisted for the entire length of the Cooperative Election Study. Both trend lines have slowly edged up every year.
However, I would be remiss to point out that the line for women has stayed relatively stable beginning in about 2018 when 26-27% say that they were never married.
For men, the number continues to climb. In the most recent data collected from 2022, about 37% of men say that they have never been married. The overall conclusion is pretty unmistakable: singleness is on the rise for both men and women, but women are still 8-10 points less likely to never be married.
This is clearly a function of age, of course. Older people have just had more opportunities to get married compared to younger ones.
I know people will be surprised to hear this, but it’s rare for me to get my hands on some new data. I basically use two or three surveys for everything you see on this Substack and my social media.
But last week was a very good one because I got data that is a bit different, but very interesting, and quite newsworthy.
It comes from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which is an organization that fights for the ability of individuals (students and faculty) to be able to freely exercise their First Amendment right to free speech. If someone on a college campus is punished for nothing more than their speech, FIRE often steps in and sues the university. You can read several examples of this on their Wikipedia page.
One of the major research projects that FIRE undertakes is an annual survey of college students to gauge how they think about the issue of free speech and if they feel like they have to stifle their speech because of hostility on campus. Often, this includes speech connected to religious beliefs.
This is a real treasure trove of data about how the next generation thinks about all kinds of topics. Their full report of their results (which runs to 85 pages) is here. The survey that they collected contains a total sample size of 55,102 respondents who had to be currently enrolled at an institution of higher learning in the United States. A thorough description of the methodology used is here and here.
I am making one adjustment to this data — I restricted my sample to just those who are between the ages of 18 and 25 years old. While I do think the views of 40-year-old graduate students are important, I wanted to just focus on college aged folks for this bit of data analysis. That means my sample is a bit smaller — 39,178. That’s still more than enough to analyze, though.
I am going to write a series of posts with this data, especially topics related to free speech and allowing speakers on campus that generate controversy, but I gleaned so much from just the demographic variables that I had to write about them specifically.
The theme here is simply three variables: sexual orientation, gender identity and religion among college-aged folks.
What really kicked this off was a report from Brown University that indicated that 38% of their student body identifies as homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning or other. When that same poll was conducted ten years earlier, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an outlier here? Or are huge percentages of college students not straight and/or not cisgender? Are these issues linked to religious beliefs, or the lack thereof?
Anyone remember Pat Buchanan?
He was a far-right conservative who ran an insurgent 1992 campaign against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination. When Bush announced his desire to run for a second term, it was assumed that he would have no real challenger in his own party. But Buchanan was a bomb thrower and excoriated Bush for being too moderate. America needed a strong voice that didn’t want to compromise on core issues.
Buchanan actually had a strong showing during the primary, despite the fact that he was facing an incumbent president. He earned 38% of the votes in New Hampshire, just 15 points behind Bush. In most early states, Buchanan received 25-30% of the vote and hung around for a lot longer than many would have assumed.
Once Bush locked up the nomination, he did the traditional party building gesture of inviting his opponent to speak at the Republican National Convention. On August 17th, 1992, he delivered a speech that will be remembered for decades. Buchanan stated:
This was quickly dubbed the “Culture Wars” speech and set the tone for electoral politics for three decades. Buchanan (a Roman Catholic) gave that speech right as Protestant evangelicalism was hitting its peak in terms of both raw numbers and political influence. It seemed like every discussion was about abortion, homosexuality, pornography or the role of women in a changing society.
Buchanan and his supporters wanted, at a minimum, to stop the leftward drift that they believed was happening in the United States on social issues. If not push the country in a more conservative direction. Well, I’ve looked at the data from the General Social Survey and it’s clear to me that Christian conservatives failed miserably in this endeavor. On every single social issue, the average American is more liberal today than they were just two decades ago.