Beyond the Numbers

What is really happening to religion in America—and where might the Church be headed?

In Episode 2 of Gather, EPN President Joe Swimmer talks with Ryan Burge, the data expert behind Graphs about Religion, whose research has made him one of the country’s most compelling interpreters of America’s changing religious landscape.

Ryan brings a rare perspective: political scientist, data analyst, author—and former pastor who helped close his own congregation.

Hear what the numbers actually say about religious decline and belonging. Discover why Ryan’s posts about the Episcopal Church are among his most popular. And look beyond next year or even the next decade: What might the Church look like in the years ahead?

It’s a provocative conversation about where we are, where we may be going, and what possibilities remain for renewal along the way.

Transcript

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Gather, Ep. 2: Ryan Burge, Graphs about Religion, and Joe Swimmer, Episcopal Parish Network

Joe Swimmer: Well, welcome everybody. My name is Joe Swimmer. I'm the President of Episcopal Parish Network, and I'm pleased today to be joined by Ryan Burge.

Ryan is one of the most influential interpreters of American religious life. Today, you know him from Graphs about Religion on Twitter and from the many books that he has published. He has another book coming out soon. But before he was doing Graphs about Religion and making us all wonder about what the next post would hold on American religious life, he was a pastor of an American Baptist Church and is now a professor at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University. 

And we had Ryan with us in Kansas City [EPN 2025]. Before we came on, we were talking about the barbecue you can get at the new Kansas City Airport and the fun of being downtown at the Westin Crown Center with all the Hallmark folks. Having Ryan tell us a little bit about what was happening in the church during that session and a little bit of what we're going to get into here today. So welcome, Ryan, to Gather, the Episcopal Parish Network's podcast.

We're glad to have you with us.

Ryan Burge: I love being with the Episcopalians, a great group of people.

Joe Swimmer: We do love having you with us, and we love talking to you about Episcopalians, but we want to get a little bit broader about you first. We want to talk a little bit about how is it that you came to Graphs about Religion? How is it that you got into demography, statistics, all those things that I ran away to a different discipline because they were scary and big numbers?

What is it that attracted a pastor like you, somebody who trained for the ministry. You had a small-town church. How did you end up going into Graphs about Religion? But first, how did you come to your being a pastor? How did you come into ministry? What was your call into your church that eventually you helped close that church? So, you've been part of American religious decline personally; so there's a lot baked into that, but tell us a little bit about how you got called into ministry.

Ryan Burge: Yeah, so this is gonna seem very foreign to Episcopalians listening to this, but in the Baptist Church, you basically become a pastor when a local congregation looks at you and says, you're our pastor now. We don't have to have credentialing. Obviously, you know, it is helpful to have a seminary degree, have background, you know, educational background in religion, but you don't have to have it.

And actually, as the sort of ministry pulpit is emptying out, you know, they're looking for more people to be pastors, and I just so happened to have a pretty extensive background growing up in an evangelical, you know, youth group and being very involved in church and then going to a Christian college. I kept falling into one job after another. Started as a youth ministry intern for three months, just thought I was gonna do it as a summer gig, just to kind of make a little bit of money, going, you know, trips with the kids, all that.

Yeah, that turned into three years, which turned into my first senior pastoring gig at 23 years old for a little big church in Marion, Illinois, called Water Street Baptist Church. And then I was, after I left there, I thought I was pretty much done with the ministry. I was just gonna do pulpit supply, you know, which is just coming into a church and just preaching on a Sunday.

And a church in Mount Vernon only called me to do that once, and I said, sure, and then they called me again to preach again. I said, sure, and then they called me, said, well, you want to be our interim pastor? I said, I mean, I guess, and then it turned into 17 and a half years.

You know, so I didn't really have that, like, big, you know, to-do moment, right, where, like, Isaiah 6, “here I am, Lord, send me,” or any of that kind of stuff. It just kept happening in my life, and I just kept saying yes. And I pastored a church for 17 and a half years until we closed down in, like, two years ago, July of 2024.

Joe Swimmer: And you've written a lot about that, the decision to close, the move towards that, the dwindling congregation that you had. Talk a little bit about that. And as somebody who was dealing with statistics about American religion, the history of American religion, all those pieces that you were teaching about at the same time, how was the interplay there? I mean, you were personally living it. You were teaching about it.

Ryan Burge: Yeah, it was a bizarre thing to see it in the graphs and then see it in the real world, you know what I mean? So, to me, it always became much more real, because I could see it, like, literally happening. When I took over the congregation in 2006, we had maybe 50 people on a good Sunday, and then somehow 50 became 30.

And then, you know, after COVID, we were down in the teens, you know, 15 to 18. And then we were down, you know, 8 or 10 on a good Sunday near the end. Like, the last year, we had one Sunday were actually, there's only four of us that showed up. I was like, I'm not even gonna preach today. We're gonna sit around and talk and drink coffee and then go home, because, like, well, you know, what are we doing here?

So, we kind of got to the point where, to our, you know, the thing that was working in our favor is we actually ran out of money. I know that sounds weird to say, but it was actually really true, that if the money's not the problem, then you've got to make a decision to stop, you know what I mean? The money makes the decision for you.

And we were down to, you know, probably, when we voted to close, we probably had $25,000 or less in all our accounts. And the day we closed, we had about $15,000 left. So, then we wrote a check to a local charity that we really appreciated, and that's how we closed our doors.

But the money is really the thing. And also, honestly, if your church is less than 10 people, you should really seriously think about doing something else. It's just not, it's not a good use of your resources, your time, your energies, your efforts. And it was actually a great burden lifted off me, you know, personally, thinking, like, having to carry that congregation through those moments. And, you know, I go through tough moments thinking about that. 

Now, it's like grief. It's like a loss, you know, like you lose a parent or a spouse. It's terrible. But, you know, the waves get smaller, right? You know, the waves of grief get smaller every year. And I'm thinking more and more that it was a good decision. And I'm glad, you know, the way it all worked out.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. So, what happened to the building?

Ryan Burge: The building is actually still there. It's like literally a mile north of where I'm sitting right now. And we gave it away to a private Christian school, a classical Christian school, which is one of those like new up and coming Evangelical schools.

They started in their church and then they outgrew the church building and wanted to sort of have a separate space for it. And we had 15,000 square feet. So, we gave it to them for a dollar. And for a while there, they were meeting Monday through Thursday because that's when their school week was, Monday through Thursday. And then we had the building on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So, we were kind of like a tenant in their building. And we pay them a very nominal, I think a hundred bucks a month, you know, rent. And they took care of everything. Maintenance, upkeep, utilities, insurance, that was all on them. And they just let us stay there. It was kind of a, in many ways, it was kind of a perfect arrangement for us because we didn't have to move, but we also didn't have the financial burden of taking care of an older, you know, very expensive building.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. So, they took on all of the aspects of running your campus. You all got access to it. And then eventually you just decided it's too small. We can't do it anymore. And we need to we need to move on to new pastures. Most of your folks found another church?

Ryan Burge: After we closed for a couple weeks, I didn't go anywhere. You know, I kind of wanted like a sabbatical for me because I've been going. I have been preaching almost every Sunday for 17 and a half years. Like that's not an exaggeration. Like I went 21 months straight without a break at one point. I mean, when you're in a small church, you don't have a backup pastor. You know, a backup preacher. Like if you if you're not there, you got to find someone else. And taking COVID out because we didn't meet for a while during COVID.

I bet you in 17 and a half years, I bet I took 20 Sundays off, maybe 25 Sundays off in 17 years. And so, I needed a break just to kind of cleanse my system. And I'd had several people reach out to me when they heard what was going on with the church locally.

Who, you know, would you come visit our church? Would you come, you know, just we would love to have you. And so, I visited a couple, including a local Episcopal church, by the way. And eventually I decided I wanted - the Episcopal church had eight people in it when I was there that Sunday - qnd I was like, I'm not doing that, man. Like I like I like Episcopal worship. I like the smells and bells. I like the liturgy, but I'm not, I can't go from ten to eight. I need to go to a place where there's more people and I can sort of blend in.

And so I started going United Methodist Church. And what's interesting is I preached yesterday at the United Methodist Church because the pastor was gone and he asked me to preach sometimes. And there were six people in the in the pews from First Baptist Church, my former congregation there. So over half of our congregation now is still worshiping together just in a different place.

Joe Swimmer: That's great. I mean, that's a that's a joyful thing. That's something that you can feel like, oh, these are my people and they found a new spiritual home.

Ryan Burge: It is great. I mean, honestly, like I said, it worked out. I'm getting more and more peace about it because of how it worked out, right? These people are not spiritually adrift. They have a great place, a great pastor, a great community. And I'm just glad to be one of the members of the community. You know what I mean? Not the leader of that community.

Joe Swimmer: Not having to preach every Sunday, not having to lead, not having to worry about the building, not having to worry about the campus.

Ryan Burge: And such a burden off my shoulders at this point.

Joe Swimmer: Now, when you were pastoring, you were at Eastern Illinois University, right?

Ryan Burge: Yeah, correct.

Joe Swimmer: OK. And you were teaching in the history of American religion and political science.

Ryan Burge: Yeah, my PhD is in political science. I'm a classically trained political scientist. I can talk about comparative politics, public administration, public policy. I did all that stuff for a very long time. Yeah.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. And what got you into the data side? What was it that made you, you always been a data nerd?

Ryan Burge: Well, I actually remember the exact moment when I became a data nerd is in social science, there's two wings of a methodology. There's quantitative and qualitative. 

You know, so qualitative is like deep interviews, ethnographies, you know, case studies. It's just a lot of non-numbers ways to investigate the world. And there's quantitative, which is all numbers.

Right. I wrote my very first paper in American Pro Seminar, my first semester in grad school, and it was the most work I'd ever done in my life; like 30 pages of writing about this deep case study of this guy named Alan Keyes and all this kind of stuff. And then one of my colleagues sitting next to me turned in a paper that was 12 pages because it was math and he got the same grade that I got. And I was like, I want to do more of that. 

And what's funny is I never really liked math. To this day, I'm not like a statistician. Like, I don't I can't do regressions by hand. I don't fully understand, you know, probability theory. But what I do, if you actually go read what I do, 95% of it is just cross tabs and frequencies and line drafts. Like there's nothing fancy to it. Like the kind of statistics I do, you could learn in like sophomore high school. Like it's nothing advanced beyond that.

But I the reason I got into data was because everyone on Earth has a hot take. You know, they have an opinion about something they can blather on about anecdotes and their perception of the world. And I can with data say, you know what? I don't care about your perception of the world. Here's what the world looks like. You know, here's what the data says. And that gives me the ability to speak into rooms where they don't they don't know what I am. They don't know how I'm coded left or right, you know, conservative or liberal. I can just say, hey, I can walk into the Episcopal church meeting and say, let me show you what's going on with the Episcopal Church based on your own numbers.

You know, and I don't, and here's the best part, have to provide solutions because that's not what I do. You know what I mean? My job is to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

And so my job is just to explain the world as best I possibly can. And I started doing that. I really found a huge audience, like a broad audience from like all segments of American life, because they really just wanted to understand the world better. And I really want to be sort of like the impartial referee of American religion and politics where you can't tell who I play for, what I believe in. You just trust that the numbers I'm showing you are the most accurate representation of what's actually going on.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. Well, let me drill down on that. How is it that you came to religious data or data about religion?

Because you could have chosen a variety of different topics in political science to go deep on with numbers, right? I mean, we see it every day with the polls on this or that, on topics or on candidates, but you chose religion. And was it like, oh, look over here, there's a big untended field, and that's an area that I could, you know, do some good work in.

Ryan Burge: Yeah, no, that's exactly what it was. I mean, listen, I am not going to give myself too much credit, right? Where it's like, oh, I saw the opening in the, you know, and I just I saw the hole between the line, you know, the guard in the center. And I went down that way. What I knew was this: I understand American religion better than almost every political scientist because I was a religious person. I grew up in church. I had that kind of unfair advantage that way. I love the material. Like I was just obsessed with the material. And you can't do this kind of job unless you love it, right? Like, I write a hundred and five posts a year. You can't do that unless you love it. I write, I wrote about 250,000 publishable words last year. You don't do that unless you love it, right? You've got to love it.

And I knew all the data sources because I'd learned about them in graduate school. You know, like, OK, if you're going to study this topic, the GSS is great. You must study this. The American National Election is great. You want to study this? You know, so I already knew I had a good general conception of like what data was out there. So, to me, there was a gap between what we knew in the academy and what the average person didn't know. And I thought, well, I could live between I'm a communicator. Like I was a pastor. I was a preacher. You know, like I love I got into academia to teach, which sounds crazy now. Like, I didn't even want to do a lot of research. Like I want to just teach. But what I realized was I could sort of bridge the gap between what the data says on one side and what the public wants to know on the other side. And I can sort of like keep the academic rigor at some level but also be much more translatable and much more interpretable by the average American.

And once I started doing that, like people ask me, how do you build your platform? I don't know. You know, like what I do know is when I started doing this kind of work, almost immediately I got traction. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't like overnight, but like every month was better than the prior month in terms of views and likes and shares and impressions and opportunities. Like it just kept going up and up and up. And what happens is when you realize you're like finding an unmet need, it's like, OK, now I'm going to keep doing, I'm going to, you know, like hone in on that and keep doing that.

Joe Swimmer: So, would you think that there just wasn't a data source like yours, there just wasn't a popular or something that was popular? Popular is the wrong word. But available to the average person, the lay person that they could understand, that I could understand, that I can see. And added to that, putting it on a platform like Twitter, which is where I usually see you, it just comes up and it's like, oh, that's an interesting step. Yeah, that's an interesting factoid. That's something that I can use.

Ryan Burge: The problem with academia is it doesn't care about the average person. You know what I mean? Like there's like what amazes me is how many times I read through journals and go, oh, my gosh, like I know so many pastors would love to hear that.

But the way they package it, the way they visualize it, the way they talk about it is so like packed inside all these layers of jargon and academic nonsense that the average person will never be able to read and understand that. But you know what I can do? I can like distill that into like the simplest version of what they're trying to say and make a graph about it with better colors and better design and better labels and then put that on social media. So, I'm basically translating academic work, from behind the paywalls and behind the ivory tower into the real world. That's the part that always really infuriated me about what we're doing in social science is like what we, my understanding of social science, which might be wrong, I don't know, is that I think it should impact the average person. Like I think that we should be able to change people's hearts and minds and how they think and behave.

And unfortunately, academics don't really have that mentality. Like when I review journal articles now, which I do some, but not as much. My one of my constant critiques is I'm reading one. I read one this morning. I was like, oh, this piece would be so good if you just wrote it in less of a dense way. Like it would be so much more translatable to the average audience.

And even when I was in grad school, I would get comments on my paper saying your tone is not academic enough. Because they were trying to sort of like grind me into the mold of academia when I was constantly trying to do something different in academia. And I think that's the problem that I struggle with is academics want you to become their little disciples, right? To do the way they do, what they do. But I never wanted to do what they did. I wanted to do something different. And that's I sort of found my I was like Lewis and Clark here. You know what I mean? Like trailblazing my own way.

Joe Swimmer: It's interesting the way that you're positioning it to me makes me think it's almost as if there's a priesthood of a professor, right? There is we train people just like we do in seminary for three years to be ready for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church or for becoming a pastor in different churches or to become a rabbi, right? We give you religious studies training. You learn the Bible, you learn the Talmud, you learn whatever it is.

And that's what we're doing with social science as well. And what you've done with Graphs about eligion is break that apart and say, well, OK, I could present it to you with a bunch of jargon, but you're not going to understand it. So let's just give you some data that's going to be usable in your everyday life or in your ministry or in your work as a layperson interacting with clergy.

Ryan Burge: That's the secret sauce right there is. And I know like when someone's putting a conference together, they don't want to have six theologians in a row. You know what I mean? Like as keynote presenters, because like, are they all great? Yeah, they're probably all great. But do you need six? You know, like you need back-to-back like, oh, life application and, you know, all these like principles of, you know what you need? You need someone to break up the monotony of that. And that's me.

My job is to come in here and say, like, no, no, let me just show you something totally different you've never seen before. Let me show you graphs and charts. And so a lot of what I do is I use pre-collected data like that's been funded by the government, General Social Survey, National Election Study, Cooperative Election Study.

All those are funded by grants like National Science Foundation grants and Lilly grants and Pew grants, all these grants. But then what I've added on top of that, which I think actually has become sort of like my bread and butter in the last couple of years, is I'll do these denominational reports on my newsletter. So, I'll do like a deep dive in the United Church of Christ or the Episcopal Church or the Unitarians or Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh-day Adventists or Southern Baptists.

And a lot of that data I go get my own. Like I go I got to go like dig through the archives and these PDFs and all this nonsense to try to bring that forward and then make that a piece. Because a lot of these organizations, they don't really care about making their data translatable to the average person. And guess what I do? I make it translatable to the average person. 

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. So, you know, you're able to take this data. You're able to make it usable by a layperson like me, by clergy, by heads of judiciatories, by senior clergy, et cetera, which is so important because I think sometimes we just get overwhelmed. Like there's so much data out there. What are we going to do with this? Now, you move from Eastern Illinois to the John Danforth Center at Washington.

I want to hear a little bit about why you moved to the Danforth Center, but also in moving to Danforth Center, you know, John Danforth, former senator from the state of Missouri. 

Ryan Burge: Episcopal priest! 

Joe Swimmer: Yeah, an Episcopal priest. And, you know, does any of that infuse what's happening at the Danforth Center? I know it's much more of a personal philanthropic enterprise on his part, not necessarily related to his being an Episcopal priest. But do you see any of that?

Ryan Burge: Oh, I think that's one of the reasons I came to the Danforth Center was because the goal is public scholarship. Like that was that's in the charter of the Danforth Center is like it's a center of religion and politics. But it wasn't a center of religious politics to hire a bunch of academics to talk to each other, you know, at academic conferences and stuff. The goal is to have public facing events that, you know, like we bring in - we had Ross Douthat come in. We had Ta-Nehisi Coates come in.

You know, like we have sort of major thinkers and speakers and thoughtful people about religion. And they hired me specifically to do more public engagement, to write books that the general public would read, for me to write op eds in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and all those things like that is what I've always wanted to do. And, you know, at Eastern Illinois, which is a great place, I have no ill will against EIU.

They always treated me great. The problem was, as my career started to sort of go a certain direction, it didn't match the job that I took when I was 27 years old. You know what I mean? Like I was supposed to teach, you know, my classes and be a grad coordinator and do all this sort of like basic, very like, you know, down the middle academic stuff. But now I was traveling to D.C. and I was traveling to Salt Lake City.

Joe Swimmer: You were coming to EPN.

Ryan Burge: I was coming to EPN. Like I was doing all these things where like they didn't really care if I did that stuff. You know what I mean?

Joe Swimmer: They wanted you to be in the mold of the professor. 

Ryan Burge: Exactly right.

Joe Swimmer: They wanted you to be the…

Ryan Burge: Yeah. They wanted me to fill the curriculum. You know what I mean?

Joe Swimmer: The high priest of American higher education, right?

Ryan Burge: Exactly right. And the thing is, it kept growing, increasing. Like I was a square peg in a round hole. You know what I mean? Like I was just not I wasn't unhappy there. I could have probably stayed there the rest of my career, but it would have impeded my ability to do everything else, right.? To go write and speak and do everything that I do. And the Danforth Center, quite honestly, recruited me.

Like they really have a new director, Abraham, who's fantastic. And he said, we want to do more public scholarship. And you're the guy, you know, that we think would be really good in that. And so they came looking for me and offered me a position and, you know, kind of, you know, all the details of it lined up in such a way. And I was kind of agonizing a little bit because like I'm a commitment kind of guy. Like I'm an institutional guy. Like I committed to EIU. 

But I was talking to someone I trust very much who knew my situation very well. And she said to me, Ryan, you're dumb. Like in so many words, why would you, why would you not take that opportunity to go to work for Washington University with all the resources and all the cachet and all the prestige that they offer? You know, we know that you committed to this and that's fine. At EIU, the people at EIU were not going to be mad at you because you found something better came along. That's the ,you've got to look out for you at some point. And so, you know, a year ago I started at WashU and it's been, the opportunities you have at a place like WashU are hard to describe. It's almost like a fairy tale.

I walked her across campus my first day and goes, I can't even believe that I get to be at a place like this. You know, I'm a first-generation college student from a very blue-collar family. Did not go to a prestigious undergrad, did not go to prestigious grad school, did not teach in a prestigious university. And now I'm at one of the best universities on earth. I mean, it's really a dream come true.

Joe Swimmer: Well, and getting to be with people that inspire you and that can help fill in the gaps for you and that you can help fill in the gaps for them. And it does seem very much like ending up the Danforth Center is following in John Danforth's career as, you know, a public servant as well as an Episcopal priest, right? He brought that Episcopal priest being a senator. It was always imbibed in the work that he was doing.

Ryan Burge: We are kindred spirits in that way, I think, in many ways. Senator Danforth and I spoke several times about, you know, my career and my background. And he just read my most recent book, The Vanishing Church. And, you know, he wrote me a very nice note after he read the book. And to me, that was that was more important than anything I've had. You know what I mean? Because it's like, I'm actually it sounds so weird. But like whenever you go on this road that you don't know what the next step is going to look like for a long time. And then like the doors open up a certain way and go, oh, that's it. You know what I mean? Like, oh, that makes perfect sense of where. And I will say this for anyone listening to this.

The one thing I would tell people is don't feel like you have to do what everyone else in your discipline is doing. You know, like I would have never gotten to WashU if I was a traditional down the line academic, you know, publishing in journals, traditional journals. I could have published, outpublished, anyone and still not landed a place like Wash U.

I chose to go a different route. You know, it's a public scholarship matters more to me than sort of private scholarship. And therefore, I am going to lean into this as heavily as I can. And what I found was a glass ceiling. You know, it comes to like the traditional down the line academia. But if you're a public scholar, there is no ceiling. You can literally go as high as you want to go with your abilities and your hard work. And I think my career is evidence that I went to one of the lowest ranked Ph.D. programs in America, SIU Carbondale. And now I'm at WashU. You know, like that's unbelievable to think about.

Joe Swimmer: Right. But you're bringing relevant information, relevant learning to the populace, right, to the people in a way that others wouldn't if they just stayed within the confines of what was expected of being a professor or an assistant professor, an associate professor.

Ryan Burge: Yeah. And listen, you know, what's really gratifying when you write something that's read by 50,000 people or 100,000 people. Like I'll even tell you, I can tell you my villain origin story, which was I wrote an article for the Review of Religious Research, which is kind of like a mid-tier religion journal, academic journal, paywall journal, dah, dah, dah.

We wrote this piece, probably spent 50 hours on it, 75 hours on it, writing it. Me and a co-author. So, like over 100 hours of work on this piece, send it off, get accepted. We're all excited. Goes on our CV, another line, all that stuff. Right.

Six months later, I get an email. It's one of the most downloaded pieces in the journal that the last six months. And I'm like, oh, that's fantastic. And I go log into the dashboard. It'd been downloaded 66 times.

Joe Swimmer: As opposed to the 50,000 impressions you get on Twitter with one of your posts about...

Ryan Burge: Oh, yeah, I had one that got 2 million two weeks ago. So, it's like, you know what, man, like I'd rather in, by the way, academics are going to listen to this go, oh, my gosh, they're like repulsed right now. Like, I don't care. But like for me, I do care. I am vain that way. I have an ego. I want people to read my work. I want it to go widely and be popular and influential. And so for me, it just makes perfect sense. It aligns with how I think, how I view the world, my role in the world, my gifts from God that I should give to the world. Like, I think it just, when you find what you're supposed to be good at, it's a great feeling.

Joe Swimmer: Well, and, you know, there's a phrase in the law that how many angels can dance on the head of a pen. And that is the call of many to go and figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pen. And then there's the call of others to say, look how many angels are dancing on the head of a pen, which you're doing, right?

You're calling it out. You're not just sitting there counting. You're sharing it more broadly, which brings us to The Vanishing Church. The work that you've been doing most recently. Give us a general sense of what's going on from your perspective with American religion.

Ryan Burge: Yeah. So let me just kind of describe like the background of how the book came to be. I had been thinking about this book for a very long time because I understood that like what was happening in American religion was actually a polarization process where, you know, American religion has become very conservative over the last 30 years. And the non-religious sector of America has become very liberal over the last 30 years. And it leaves a lot of people like me out. Actually, the book end of the book is my own personal story of when my church closes because I was, you know, counting heads. I got 12. Like, what are we going to do when we close? Where am I going to worship when we close to I don't know where I'm going to worship when we close. Why is that? You know, why can't I find a place to worship like this church?

Why are they going away? Why are they disappearing? That really became the thread through how the book was created was really a thread because I because I knew the answer to the question, but I needed to like show my work, you know what I mean?

Like make that plain to other people. That's actually one of the things I struggle with the most in my work is I know things in my head from doing this work for 15 years that I just say something and people think I'm making it up. You know, like it's unsubstantiated. And I'm like, no, no, no, it is. But to lay all that out would take 250 pages of a hardback book to do. Well, guess what?

That's what I did with the book. I laid all the whole argument out the way I see it in my head. And basically, the argument is this: American religion and not just like evangelicalism, like almost all of American religion has become conservative, incredibly conservative over the last 30 years. That includes evangelicals, but also the Catholic Church, too. 65% of white Catholics voted for Trump in 2024. That's up ten points in 18 years.

If you look at the priesthood of the Catholic Church, almost 90% of them identify as conservative. Young priests identify as conservative. Even if you look at the mainline, by the way, the average mainline Protestant is a Republican. I know this is shocking to some people, but 60% United Methodist vote for Donald Trump in 2024. And the ELCA, PCUSA are 50-50 on election day. Like the only denomination that's not, the majority white denomination, that's not is the Episcopal Church. That's the only one out of like all the large white denominations in America that are clearly blue is the Episcopal Church. 

And then, you know, you talk about the Nones. You know, the Nones are largely a whole bunch of very liberal folks. Like there's no other way to look at it. And so the problem is a lot of us as Americans want to be religious, you know, vaguely religious or not so vaguely religious. But we also can't stomach the growing conservativism of evangelicalism. But we also want to reject the liberalism and the sort of secularism of atheist, agnostics, too. So what is left for us? 

And that's really kind of the thesis of the book is when these churches are hollowing out and you're losing a lot of the left-leaning people or the moderate people, it's actually hurting democracy. It's actually making it harder for us to get along, for us to find compromise, for us to find a middle ground. And I actually think it's going to make it harder for us to govern ourselves if we continue to go down this route. And so the book was actually written not just for church people. Oh, the church is declining. The church is polarizing. That's bad for church people.

No, no, no. This is going to affect all of us, right? It's going to spill out away out of religion, into government, into society, into culture. And it's going to make it harder for us just to live as free and good Americans. And I'm really worried about that.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah, there are the anecdotes of the 70s, 80s, the Republicans, Democrats on Capitol Hill after they'd had a hard day's fight over whatever the legislative battle was, they'd get together for a drink. You know, Tip O'Neill and whoever his Republican counterpart was, they'd gather together in the House Cloakroom, right? And we don't see that anymore.

And then you hear the stories of the segregation that we're all doing individually by moving to where people we think are like us are. You know, we moved to a red state. We moved to a blue state. I mean, is that being borne out by the data that you're seeing and in religious terms specifically? Are you seeing that, you know, with denominational shifting or the disappearance of denominations overall, people just going like that church, that group meets my needs politically, sociologically, and so I'm going to go over there.

Ryan Burge: Yeah, I think that we want to think that people are much more thoughtful about, I want to think everyone makes a reasoned decision, a rational decision about where they worship, what they worship, how they worship. I don't think it's for many people, it's not very much of a conscious thing. It's certainly a subconscious thing, though, where they go, man, I want to go where I'm wanted, you know, and I want to go where my views are, you know, at least not even tolerated, accepted, right, is internalized. And so I think people subtly, over time just realize, like, man, if I'm a moderate person or a left of center person, evangelicalism is not super amenable.

You know, it's kind of it's pretty hostile to people like me. But then I think the same thing's actually happening, like the Episcopal Church, for instance, too, though. You know, a lot of people, let's say, who are right of center, if you watch what's going on at the top level of Episcopalians in America, like you don't want to walk into that. Like, can you imagine walking into a national conference, the Episcopal Church, and saying you voted for Donald Trump? Like, how well would that go over? Not well at all.

So, what you see is like people subtly figure that stuff out and they're going to go where they're wanted, where they're going to go, where like-minded people are. And I don't think that's a bad thing, by the way. I think it's a natural human emotion is to want to go to a place where your views are the majority views. I don't think there's anything inherently like evil or wrong about that. But the implications of that are bad, right? Because the thing is, you don't learn how to compromise unless you're around people who you have to compromise with.

You don't have to learn political tolerance when you agree with everybody on everything. You know, you have to learn by being in intolerant spaces with people who disagree with you. And that's my biggest worry, is we sort of lost, those muscles have atrophied, of compromise, of dialogue. Like, how many respectful dialogues have any of us had over politics in the last six months or year? I bet for most of us, the answer is zero or approaching zero. And to me, that's a real problem.

Not that you should be debating every day because that's annoying, but like every once in a while, you should get in a sparring match with someone and you respect that person. They respect you. You just disagree on policy and politics and all that approach. You know where you used to have those debates? Church. 

It's a fantastic place because you know what's nice about church? You could you could be arguing about whatever, and then you go up to take communion and you're right behind the person you just argued with 10 minutes ago. And then there's something about like, OK, let's set aside all this stuff, all the nonsense, all the temporal and focus on the eternal and the spiritual. You know, that's what religion does, it can do. It can actually make us lay down our arms, right? And then come into a common time of fellowship.

And unfortunately, we're not having that anymore. And I think it's actually really caustic for the church. I think it's caustic for America. I think it's caustic for our souls, too. Like, I actually think it degrades who we are as human beings.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. What are we losing by not being in conversation with each other? And, you know, I think you're right that many would look at the Episcopal Church and say probably pretty left of center. And yet many of our congregations are very purple. And, you know, I think those conversations are happening, which is one of those interesting things about the Episcopal Church and what I think makes the Episcopal Church unique for this moment.

The particular witness that we have that can contain those multitudes, that can contain both a person who votes right of center and a person who votes left of center and somebody who's right in the center. And that perhaps it's something about gathering around the Eucharist, something about gathering around common worship, worship out of the Book of Common Prayer that leads us to, “well, we're all part of this community together” Right? Even when we leave here, we've got different yard signs in our yards, but when we're in St. Something somewhere, we are the Body, right?

Ryan Burge: Yes, that's right. I mean, we're all, listen, St. Paul said it right? There's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female. You know, under Christ, we're all united. And we got to remember that, man. Like I get, nothing makes me more upset than saying, oh, you can't be a true Christian and blah. You know what I mean?

Like, oh, vote for this person or believe this thing. Like, where did we as the Body of Christ realize that, like, this is what's acceptable and this is not? I kept telling, at the end of our time at First Baptist Church, we actually said the Apostles' Creed every Sunday, which is not very Baptist, but whatever. But the reason I did that was I said, listen, my understanding is this is the dogma of our faith. This is the bedrock foundational things that we have to believe in to be called a Christian. You know, this is it. Everything beyond this is doctrine, and doctrine is negotiable. It's changeable. It is not a deal breaker.

As long as you believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ, only Son of our Lord, we play for the same team. Now, whether you vote for Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, I don't care because you're a Christian and I'm a Christian. Now, the way you live out your Christian values is different than the way I live out my Christian values. But my job then is not to cut you off or turn you off. Right? My job is to say, well, why is your understanding of the scriptures and your call different than my understanding the scriptures and my call? You know what I mean?

Joe Swimmer: And having that healthy and respectful dialogue together and then eventually joining together for communion. 

Ryan Burge: Exactly. Right. 

Joe Swimmer: We're all part of the Body.

Ryan Burge: I watched this great documentary one time. There's this Evangelical Christian had to go live with a Muslim for 30 days, which I thought was Dearborn, Michigan. You know, like it's an interesting experiment, right? Can you live? And they were in this huge fight about what's true and what's good and what's right. And all of a sudden the call to prayer comes on and the Muslim guy gets his prayer mat out and the fighting stops. And the Christian guy goes in his corner and says a prayer as well. And when that's all over, they come back together and they have a much more constructive dialogue in that moment.

Joe Swimmer: Fascinating.

Ryan Burge: You know what I mean? Like to me, like that's the ritual, the tradition, the liturgy has a way of interrupting what we're up to, you know what I mean? Giving us structure and meaning.

I just think there's something so valuable that this is what I think a lot of non-Christian, non-religious people miss is what the structure of liturgy and tradition and ritual bring into our lives. Like it really does make our lives full and rich in a way that we don't get anywhere else, really.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. One of my good friends who's clergy up in New York City, Zack Thompson, talks about, and I'm going to get this wrong, I'm paraphrasing here. He talks about every Sunday being gathered around the altar, that God is bursting into the world again. That God is bursting into the world again. And that just that thought, and we are there, we are witnesses to it. We are part of it. We are community with it. We are communing with each other. It's such a powerful, powerful thing. 

Well, I know we don't have too much longer, but I want to touch briefly on the Episcopal Church. You told me when we first met a few years ago that the posts that you do about the Episcopal church end up being some of the most popular that you put out.

Speak to that a little bit. Why is it that we are so popular? Is it just because we love talking about ourselves? Or is it that we have people who are interested in us that is far out stripping the size of our 1.5 million denomination?

Ryan Burge: I think it's all that, right? I think one is like, okay, let the prototypical Episcopalian sort of like a college educated, upper middle-class sort of data-driven type of person. Like, let's be clear about that.

Like, you know who my most fervent followers are? Like accountants, you know what I mean? Cause like nerdy people, office people, white collar people, because they're obsessed with data in their own job with a Fortune 500 or whatever they work at.

They want to see that sort of rigor translated into the religion space. I think they, I think they appreciate that. And the Episcopalians, you know, the Episcopal Church is not that large in the grand sweep of American religion, but a lot of people sort of use it as a bellwether, you know, like are adjacent to the church about like what's going on with Non-Evangelical Protestantism.

Like they would think the Episcopal Church is probably one of the churches they would say that's a canary in the coal mine of what's going on with non-evangelical Christianity in America, which is right. I mean, to me, it's the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church, the two that I would say, like, those are the two barometers outside of Evangelicalism.

So, I think it has a lot of like sort of watchers, you know what I mean? Observers of Evangelicalism. And I think, above all things, I think a lot of people love to hear other people who are not one of them talk about them. You know what I mean? 

Like when your own people write about the Episcopal Church, like, oh, of course they're going to write about it because it's their one, it's the one, you know? It's like your family gives a report on family genealogy and you kind of roll your eyes. Now, someone else comes in and, you know, talks about your family story, all of a sudden your ears perk up and you're like, wait a minute, you know, like, what does this guy have to say about us? Cause I think they appreciate the fact that I'm not trying to play for any team. I'm not trying to like, you know, make them look good or bad or indifferent.

I'm just trying to tell the truth about, you know, the data as best I see it in the most unbiased way. And that's honestly the nicest thing I get told after those reports is, “Ryan, I don't love everything that you've shown me right here, but I can appreciate the honesty in which you've portrayed it. You know, in the neutrality, objectivity that you try to bring, to the job that you do.”

And so I think all that kind of combines for like the Episcopal Church outkicks its coverage in a lot of ways, you know, in its stature in American life. That's like Unitarians are that way too, by the way. Unitarians are crazy online. Like where are the Unitarians at? I'm like, you guys are a hundred thousand people. All right. So stop it.

Like the Episcopal church is 10 times the size Unitarian Church, you know, largely. So I think it's interesting. Certain denominations are very obsessed with themselves. And I think the Episcopalians are very high on that.

Joe Swimmer: I'm sure that that's the case, you know, I'm sure that's the case. Well, let's back up and talk about the numbers around the Episcopal Church, cause I mentioned 1.5 million. We do a really good job, and I've heard you say this as well, keeping our parochial reports. So, the data is pretty rich.

You can go back years and figure out what's going on. Thank you to the General Convention Office, to Molly James and that team, who pull all that information together every year. So, what do you see happening in the Episcopal Church and specifically through the lens of we were talking about this before we got started?

+Matt Heyd recently wrote an editorial for Religion News Service, the Bishop of New York, and he talked about rather than decline, renewal in the Episcopal Church. And I'd love to get your take on that and, you know, the spirit moving at ground level, as he says, and that there's something happening here. Give me your sense. What do you see out of the numbers? And what should we be looking for as Episcopalians? Cause you're speaking now to a largely Episcopal audience.

Ryan Burge: Yeah. So, ASA is always, you know, average Sunday attendance is always like a great metric for, you know, membership is really like a noisy metric. I think we can all admit that like, and everyone lies about membership, by the way, like, oh, my denomination is bad at this.

Guess what? Every denomination is bad at membership. Okay. There's no incentive to clean the rolls up. They're just a mess. They're always a mess, but guess what? Everyone's a mess. So, we just let it go. 

ASA is down from over 700,000 in 2009 to about 415,000 today. So that's, you know, a drop of more than a third, obviously not good, you know, long-term trends. COVID was interesting cause it really, you know, walloped the Episcopal Church, knocked them down to the lowest level ever recorded, you know, like in 2021.

Cause the way you guys collect data was actually before COVID happened in 2020. So you didn't actually see the drop until 2021. And then there was like these, these big spikes coming out of COVID. So, 21 was low, 22 was better, 23 was better. And then what's interesting is the rise happened last year, but it was only 3000 ASA. So, it went from like 411 to 414,000.

So, what I'm telling you is that COVID bump is probably over now, you know, you've sort of like that, that you've dug out of that hole and now you're sort of back to what baseline would be. Now COVID did hurt the Episcopal Church. Remember, you know, if you, if you would take a trend line and shoot it through attendance before COVID - so like 2009 to 2019 - and then predict what it would look like in 2025, the Episcopal Church is down probably 8% below what we would expect. So there, there, there still is a lag.

Joe Swimmer: So COVID, there was a, there was a COVID impact, a lasting COVID impact.

Ryan Burge: Yeah. And I think it's probably in the order of 30,000 ASA, which is not nothing. I mean, obviously, but it's not huge either.

Interestingly enough, we always think with the Episcopal Church as being sort of a very financially well off denomination in some ways it is. I think, you know, Trinity and all that stuff. What's interesting is the giving has gone up consistently year over year and actually where it really looks good is the average giving per person. That's actually gone up like 75% in the last 15 years. So what that means is the actual amount the Episcopal Church takes in every year has actually gone up slightly over time.

The problem with that though, is it's not beating inflation. If you take that 2009 number, it's still lagging inflation. And the reason for that very simply is it's hard to outrun ASA declines, you know, from 700,000 to 400,000. So, everyone's giving more who's still there, but they're still missing 300,000 people. And it's like, you all, no one can give enough to make up the gap for what what's missing on ASA side. So even financially, I think the church is not as healthy as some people think it is in terms of like an operational budgetary standpoint.

The other thing that I really worry about the Episcopal Church, which is I worry about this for like almost every church now, it's not unique to the Episcopal Church, is age.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. Demographic collapse. 

Ryan Burge: The demographic collapses. I wrote about this in a piece, my most well-read piece last year, or maybe this, this year was, When's Half Your Membership Going to Be Dead? That was the title of it. And basically, it was just making this point that the Baby Boomers are like propping up American religion right now and have been for a very long time. And the oldest Boomer now is 80 and the youngest is about 60, you know? So, guess what? In 15 years, most of the Boomers are going to be dead and the ones that are going to be alive are not going to be active, engaged, volunteering members of your congregation.

Joe Swimmer: There won't be much of that ASA, right? Yeah.

Ryan Burge: Exactly. So, to me, that's like anything I hear about renewal, I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't doubt that some congregations are seeing renewal and seeing young people move in, but you've got to think just to keep your number level for every Boomer who dies or leaves, just adding one new person doesn't grow. It just keeps the boat level. So, I think it's really hard to outrun this demographic cliff that's going to hit, I guess, not just the Episcopal Church…

Joe Swimmer: But a lot of the denominations, right?

Ryan Burge: Yeah. 

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. I actually, your study, your post about that, Poulson Reed, the Bishop of Oklahoma posted, I think it was, is it 27% that you see in the Episcopal Church that in the next 10 years is a decade, right?

Ryan Burge: Yep.

Joe Swimmer: And you know, what do we do with 27% missing? And that is a question around renewal. What do we do? Are we looking to replace them? You know, the cigarette company has always had this famous replacement smoker thing where when they'd killed off one smoker, they needed a replacement smoker. So where do we find our replacement churchgoers? Or do we? Or is renewal about right-sizing the church in some way, becoming smaller, nimbler, more vital?

You know, you don't have to have an opinion on it, but I invite you, if you do as to, you know, what you would think in that regard, 

Ryan Burge: You know, and I've said this, I said this at EPN, and I'll say this here again, I think the only chance for renewal for the mainline, generally speaking, is to really take a page out of the Evangelical playbook when it comes to church planting. Like I really think the mainline is, “oh, we don't do that. You know, like that's an Evangelical thing.” Listen, that's all ,the only reason Evangelicalism is not declining right now is because of church planting.

Like non-denominationalism is taking over America. And by the way, the Southern Baptist Convention is actually planting more churches than anyone else right now through what's called the SEND network. I think the mainline needs to really think carefully about what it means.

Here's who I think about a lot when I think about the Episcopal Church. Imagine you're a priest, right? Or you're working to become a priest. You started out, you went through seminary, dah, dah, dah, dah. You're 27, 28 years old. You're bright, young, you know, vibrant person.

You want to take over a local parish. What happens when the bishop stuffs you in a parish of 75 people who are all 65 years and up in a town that's not grown in 50 years? I don't care how good of a priest you are, you are facing so many headwinds in a congregation like that, that you'll probably never get your head above water. 

Why not stake you and say, “Hey, you're going to give you X amount of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars to start your own congregation. We're going to, you know, rent you a building. We're going to get you whatever you need to start that congregation. And if you come, if you need more money, come back. Because you know what you're doing there. You're starting from scratch. You're not starting with all the institutional memory and all the stuff from that other church with all the stuff they got.” 

Not saying they don't deserve a pastor because they do, but if you want the church to survive 30, 40, 50 years from now, to me, that's the only thing that makes sense in terms of renewal. You don't see a lot of like dying churches, like turn it around. Instead, what you see is new churches starting and people started going to that new congregation while the other congregations continue to decline. I just, I know that sounds awful from like a kingdom perspective. And as a guy who pastored a dying church, I believe that everyone deserves a pastor. Like everyone deserves a priest.

Joe Swimmer: But at the same time, you, you mentioned, you know, your congregation ended up at the local UMC.

Ryan Burge: Exactly. Right.

Joe Swimmer: You can have hope that these folks will find their next place, right?

Ryan Burge: And you know what, they're being spiritually fed and they've got, you know what I mean? They've got, they're surrounded by a great community of people there. And they have new friends in that new church and they're going to Bible study in that new church.

And it's like, we didn't die. We just sort of like evolved. You know what I mean? Like we morphed into something else. I just don't think that like throwing more and more resources down a hole of congregations that really have no hope. And let's be clear about this. Like the problem with Christianity and the beauty of Christianity is we're hopeful people, some like irrationally hopeful people. 

And my job is to sort of temper that a little bit by saying, “hey, if you're like 30 people and you've been declining for 50 years and the average age is 70 years old, the chances of you actually turning it around numerically is really small. Like, let's be real about that. So, what do you do? You know, what do you do with your resources and your time and your energies? Maybe think about starting something new.”

And maybe, and the thing is, if you're an Episcopal priest, if you go to a congregation like that, it's going to grind you down to dust. It's going to probably make you not want to be a priest anymore. But if you start a congregation that starts with eight people meeting on a Sunday and all of a sudden it's 50 people in two years, guess what?

That's a great story. And it also creates, it changes the narrative macro level for the Episcopal diocese of that region. Now it's like, oh my gosh, we've got this green shoot popping up over here.

Maybe we should replicate that green shoot. I just think you've got to think radically, you know, you've got to think differently about what you're doing. Because let's be clear, if you, if the church doesn't do anything dramatic or radical at this point, the data is very clear on what the future looks like. And this is not me being like a prophet of doom. It's just me being a realistic person who understands how data works. It ain't going to go from 400 to 800,000 ASA without some radical changes from the leadership.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. Pragmatism. Pragmatism as to what gets us to growing again.

And it's actually reclaiming a heritage that we had because, you know, beginning of the 20th century, you would have Episcopal churches planting other Episcopal churches. You know, I come from Tulsa and in Tulsa, Trinity, the downtown church, planted three other churches. Trinity, New York planted however many churches up and down the isle of Manhattan, right? And so this is something that we've done before. It's just a matter of gathering together again and saying, “this is our future. This is the opportunity that's ahead of us.” 

Well, let's speak of macro just real quickly on, we're talking 30 years from now, what is American religion look like then? What's your best guess?

Ryan Burge: My best guess is that the mainline as a tradition is very much smaller than it is right now. I mean, if you look at the data, 5% of Millennials are mainliners and 5% of Gen Z are mainliners. And I think that that's the best it's going to get. Right now, the mainline is about 9.5% of America. So, dropping in half from even where it is right now, I think a lot of those denominations are not going to exist functionally in 30 years. 

You know, like Disciples of Christ is 275,000 people right now, membership-wise, not ASA, membership-wise.So, think about what that means, right? Now, you're talking, you're down to 125,000 people, which, by the way, there's mega churches, there's, there's a church in Oklahoma named Life Church. It's more than that by itself. So, now you're the size of a large mega church, not a denomination. I think a lot of them are going to merge. Not a lot. I think there's gonna be some merging, some sort of cooperation agreements that happen between some of these congregations. I think that Southern Baptist Convention is going to continue to decline. Like it's going to be below 10 million in the next 10 years, probably, which is insane to think about because there were 16 million just 20 years ago.

And the, really the big change is going to be non-denominationalism. Like that's, you know, it's eating American Christianity right now. 35-40 million Americans are non-denominational. It's only going to grow with younger generations, I feel like. And where are they going to, where's that market share coming from? It's coming from the Baptists and the Lutherans and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and the Episcopalians.

So, to me, that's what the future looks like is a whole lot less denominations. Period. You know what I mean? Like every stripe and every background and a whole lot more of non-denominationalism. I still think Christianity in America is going to be relatively robust, though. I wouldn't be surprised if it's still, most Americans are still Christians in 50 years from now. I wouldn't be surprised by that.

That's what the data says, that even among Gen Z, 45% are Christians, 45% are Nones and 10% are everybody else. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Christianity is still majority, plurality, certainly in America.

Joe Swimmer: Question, do you think that the decline of denominationalism is a reflection of the anti-institutionalism that we see overall in American society, at least what's purported to be out there with Gen Z, with Gen Alpha. You know, something about the COVID period helped break the idea that institutions were important or that they had authority or that they spoke with authority and that, you know, we're moving away from denominationalism just as we're moving away from the Elks Club being important or the Moose or the Rotary Club.

Ryan Burge: Yeah. I think that anti-institutionalism sort of baked in the cake of America for the last like 50 years. Like, I think COVID certainly didn't do any favors to institutionalism. I think we're going to look back and go, well, that was the, you know, the last nail in the coffin of any institutional thinking in America. But I think Americans have always been obsessed with the sort of shiny new object out there. And that's what non-denoms are, right? They built a big new building and they got all the growth and, you know, growth, growth feeds growth is what I've realized. You know what I mean? Like people want to go to anything that's growing, growing town, growing company, growing church, whatever, they want to go and decline feeds decline.

Like no one wants to be part of an organization that's declining in size and scope and power. And I think non-denoms have this sort of new and shiny thing, but what happens when they become institutionalized? That's my question, right? Like now they're shiny and new and interesting and weird. And you know…

Joe Swimmer: They fall prey to the same forces that Southern Baptists did. As you said, 20 years ago, how big was my grandmother's Southern Baptist denomination, right?

Ryan Burge: And what's going to happen is like all these, I think there's actually an effort to sort of create pseudo denominations. A lot of those non-denominationals sort of joining like loosely affiliated networks, but you know what happens? We know this. I was a political scientist, studied institutions for a long time. You institutionalize over time. The movement is always toward institutions.

Once you start like an organization, it gets more professionalized. It gets more bureaucratized. It gets more, you know, top down. And then what that happens is now you're back on this treadmill, right? Now it's like, okay, now we institutionalize on somebody. We're going to go, “Oh no, no, no. We can't be part of that anymore. We got to start something new.” So, I think it's, we're sort of in, in the up, the up, you know, in the up part of non-denominationalism. We're going to get to a point where it's like, hmm, people are going to reject that too, because it's going to feel too institutional.

Joe Swimmer: Yeah. And then what, what's birthed out of that? What's the new thing that comes next?

Ryan Burge: I can't even begin to imagine. Like people talk about house churches, you know, sort of like very bottom up. I don't think that's what's next. I do wonder if we return back to like, maybe old institutions were good. Like I was actually talking to my boss at the Danforth Center, Abram, the other day about, we should teach a class called In Defense of Institutions. You know, that makes the argument to our students of why institutions matter in American life, whether it be religious institutions, governmental institutions, cultural institutions, like that's what's built.

Joe Swimmer: An institution like Washington University where they're learning right now. Right?

Ryan Burge: Exactly right. Like you can't just start like, you know, like throwing rocks at every institution in America when guess what held us back from the worst impulses of Donald Trump? Institutions are what stopped all that nonsense.

Like let's be clear, the institutions held during COVID. Yeah, they kind of falter, but they did not fall. I mean, institutions are what during the banking crisis of 2008, guess what? The FDIC bailed us out and the Treasury Department bailed us out. We got over it. Like there's a lot to be said for institutions.

Institutions like the Episcopal Church have fed and clothed and served literally tens of millions of people all over the world. And we can't forget that. Methodists and Baptists have sent missionaries all over the world to serve people who need help.

And I think we can't forget that the institutions are what sustain us, what make us, and I think this current mode of like anti-institutionalism is so ahistoric. And that's what makes me angry about it. It just, it's like forgets everything that America was for the last hundred years. And for this interpretation of like, no, it's all bottom up and you can be your own, you know, person. Like, come on, man. You are part of a great country that was built by great people on great institutions and what a blessing that is.

Joe Swimmer: Right. And, and it's sustained us today. Even, even in difficult times, challenging times when we're divided, we've still got institutions that sustain us.

This has been fascinating conversation. You've given us more time than I expected, Ryan, I'm really grateful. It's nice to have you join EPN again, this time virtually. We're going to have you back to EPN in person sometime soon. And, you know we'll all be looking for your next post about the Episcopal Church, which inevitably will be one of your most popular because people looking at us or us looking at ourselves, we love reading about the Episcopal church and Graphs about Religion.

Is there anything you want to mention? You've got a new book coming out, right?

Ryan Burge: So, I had a book just come out called The Vanishing Church in January. Y’all go buy a copy of that, which we talked about, you know, at length. If you haven't picked up a copy, please pick up a copy. I'm the most proud of that book of anything ever, because it has more of me in it than anything I've ever written, which I think is hard to do sometimes. 

And then I have a book coming out next April called The Great American Church Migration. We surveyed a hundred thousand Americans and asked them full religious history. So, we actually trace American religion with the specificity and the depth that we've never been able to do before. And this is sort of the first effort at tracing, like how the mainline collapsed, how Evangelicalism stayed relatively strong. Why do people leave the Catholic church? How does belief change? How does belonging change? How does behavior change over the life course?

That's, what's amazing about this is we can like look at young men, you know, like Gen Z men, like how they've changed. We can look at Millennial women and how they've changed across their lives. It's almost like an embarrassment of riches with that data set, and we're only scratching the surface in that book. It's a great introduction to how the American religious landscape has changed over the last 50 years or so. So please pick that book up. I'm really proud of it. That book comes out in April. You can pre-order now. 

And then obviously if you want more stuff in the in-between, Graphs about Religion is my Substack. I write there on Mondays and Thursdays. Most things are free initially. A few things are paid, like my denominational reports, because people love to read those.

So, those come out and I've written about, you name the denomination, I've probably written about it at this point, but I always like to write about the Episcopal Church once a year when the new data comes out. So, you'll see something like that every year.

Joe Swimmer: Well, we will pre-order the book. I'm definitely going to get online and make sure I've got it. And, I just appreciate the effort and the work that you put into tracking this for us, Ryan. It's really important and it's helpful for us looking at ourselves and looking at generally religious data. So, it means a lot. 

Ryan Burge: Thank you very, very, I always appreciate you, Joe, and EPN. Love the Episcopals. You know, you guys are great, cause you like to count things. And I like people who like to count things and there's a lot to be learned from when you count things. So, thanks.

Joe Swimmer: We want to learn a lot from those numbers. Thanks so much, Ryan. You take good care.

Ryan Burge: Thank you.