Where Will People Commune In A Godless America?
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I'm looking at you. I'm looking at you, Pastor. Melissa, no F-words, please. Thank you. I'll try to control myself. Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke.

Americans are becoming less religious, and two new surveys out just last week punctuate just how quickly that's happening. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 26% of Americans now consider themselves unaffiliated with any religion. That's up from 21% a decade ago and just 6% in the early 90s.

According to Gallup, the number of Americans who attend religious services weekly or nearly every week has fallen from 42% in 2000 to 30% now. And this isn't just generational churn. Most religiously unaffiliated Americans today once identified as religious, most commonly either Catholic or mainline Protestant.

As social science researchers can attest, the role of religion in America has historically stretched well beyond the specific teachings of one practice. It's played an important role in shaping communities, networks, and of course, politics. And we're only beginning to grapple with what this decline means for all of those parts of life, and also what, if anything, will take the place of religion.

Social observers have suggested a wide range of trends or obsessions could replace it, from work culture to cult-like exercise classes to new forms of spirituality and partisan ideology. To talk about how our loss of religion is shaping the country today and where we're headed, we've assembled an all-star panel of researchers in the area of religion and society. So joining me now is Melissa Dreckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa.

Thanks, Galen. Also here with us is Ryan Burge, professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and Baptist pastor. Welcome back to the podcast, Ryan. Always a pleasure, Galen. And also here with us is Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life. Welcome, Daniel. Good to be here.

So we're going to start with a simple question, but maybe a hard one at the same time. Melissa, your organization published those most recent data. So let's start with you. Why are Americans becoming less religious?

I think it's a variety of factors that are leading people to be less religious. The main factor overall is that people are simply just less likely to believe in the teachings of their faith that they grew up in. So Americans are just stopping believing in sort of religious teachings. But there's also something to be said for the treatment of LGBTQ Americans. We find increasingly that more Americans, as we've become, I think, more likely to have

LGBTQ people in our lives, the prevalence of LGBTQ people in American society is larger. There are many religious faith teachings, not all certainly, but many that essentially believe homosexuality is a sin. And so that I think has led some people who are embracing of gay and lesbian people in their lives to want to leave churches. In fact, we found in 2016 when we first asked why people were leaving church,

that about 30% cited their religions, negative teachings and treatments about gay and lesbian people. That's now up to almost half of Americans. And it's really pronounced among young Americans. So Americans who are 30 or under, 60% of those Americans have left religion because of the treatment of LGBTQ Americans. And so I think that's an important factor. And the final thing I'll say here is that we asked for the first time in this past survey that was released last week about mental health.

And we found about 32% of Americans said that they left church and religion because it was simply bad for their mental health. Interesting. Okay. Ryan and Daniel, how does that jibe or not with your own research on the question? Yeah, I think we got to talk about institutions too, though. I mean, I think there's this macro level thing that's happening in American life where we are rejecting a

with all institutions. So banks, unions, the media, the president, the Supreme Court, and religion is all tied up in this larger distrust we have, this larger cynicism. So the kind of stories we hear about religion, unfortunately, on the news are sex abuse scandal, financial improprieties, prosperity preachers,

And so, you know, the problem is the stories we're hearing about government is when it fails, when religion, when it fails. And again, a lot of young people are staying at home. They're tweeting alone, their Facebook, whatever Putnam saw in 1990 with bowling alone. We're seeing tenfold now in the last 30 years. It's so much easier to stay in our own little world to entertain ourselves at home now. And our parents and grandparents used to have to go do stuff to be entertained.

I think religion has sort of fallen by the wayside because all institutions are falling by the wayside, whether it be the Kiwanis or the Elks or the Moose or the Boy Scouts. And I think it's hard to correct that larger cynicism going on with America. And religion is being kind of caught up in this larger wave of anti-institutionalism that swept over America over the last 20 or 30 years. And there's very little that any institution can do to say, please trust us.

That means we're going to distrust you more. So I think in a lot of ways, there's really not much religion can do to push back into that larger narrative of distrust of all institutions. I would sort of endorse both those comments and add a little bit of additional context here. So there's been a profound change in American family life, too. So where do people learn their religious identity and learn what it means to be part of a religious community?

Typically they do from their parents and their immediate family. And what's happened over the last couple decades is people are being raised in different types of family structures, increasingly raised in single-parent homes. And so their formative experiences, particularly for this newest generation, Gen Z, are qualitatively different than previous generations. So they're not going to church or participating as much in religious education programs.

Praying at home, you know, all the kind of things that lead to people in adulthood to become religious adults, and they're just not doing as much, so they're drifting away much easier than they were in the past.

When we talk about America losing religion, there are different lenses that we can look at. We can talk about whether people believe in God. We can talk about whether they associate themselves with an organized religion. We can talk about whether they actually attend services. And beyond that, there's lots of data that we can dig into. What data do you each think sort of best represents where we are in America today?

When it comes to the question of religiosity and even the existential questions like God and the more worldly questions like, do we have a place to go in our community to commune?

When we talk about religion, Galen, in political science, we talk about the three Bs, behavior, belief, and belonging. I think it's really important for us to understand religion is so multifaceted. Like you can believe but not belong or behave. Or you can behave but not believe. So it's a combination of factors. The way I typically say is I think that the first thing that goes is the behavior piece. The going to church piece is the one where we drop out of fascists.

Depending on what survey you look at, 40% of Americans never attend religious services now. And the second level is belonging. So what is your present religion of any? Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, Buddhist. The share of Americans say they're non-religious according to the GSS is about 30% amongst Gen Z. It's over 40% now. But belief is the – actually the last one to go is belief.

The vast, vast majority of Americans still express a belief in God at some level. According to the GSS in 2022, only 12% of Americans said, God does not exist, or I cannot know if God exists or not. So you've got a whole bunch of Americans who never attend church, but

but a very small sliver of Americans who don't believe in God. So it seems like the external parts of religion are the ones that go away the fastest, and the internal parts of religion are the ones that are really sticky. Call that religious residue. That's a term being used in the literature now. It kind of stays with you even if you stop attending church, you still believe in God at some level in some way.

I would add to that, though, that we're seeing all these things decline kind of in tandem if there's been a little bit of a delay in belief measures. And the other thing is these things are really tricky to measure. So if you look at like Gallup polling over the last, you know, 80 years, there's been almost no change in the number of people who say they believe in God answering a yes or no question. I mean, it's deteriorated a little bit, but then you ask questions about doubts about

belief and you've seen that particularly among young adults have much greater doubts about the existence of God than previous generations.

I would just add, you know, something that Dan talked about a little bit earlier, like the changes in family lives. One of the things that's important to realize when you look at the religiously unaffiliated, we have this concept now of what some have called the cradle nuns, which are essentially people who are born into a household that has no religious experience whatsoever. They've never gone to church or synagogue. They really have no relationship at all to religion. And historically, it's always been the case that even if you grew up, you know, maybe even not

that faithful to church attendance. If you had children, there was a mechanism to return back to church. And increasingly, that's just not happening either. So because you have cradle nuns, and combined with people leaving who have some sort of tangential or an actual experience within a religious community, it doesn't bode well necessarily for, I think, changes for people becoming more religious.

One of the interesting things we found in our most recent survey is we asked those who have left a faith that are now completely disaffiliated, do you essentially see yourself longing for some sort of religion that will speak to you? I think more broadly, are you seeking for something that's a better fit? Only about 9% of religiously disaffiliated Americans said, yes, I'm still looking for that religion that fits me. So I think the religiously unaffiliated are really content to stay that way.

And what was notable about your survey that you just released, Melissa, was that we see some of the biggest increases in

in that unaffiliated bucket. And I should say here that when Melissa says nuns, she's saying N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S. So people who are born and raised with none as their religious affiliation. It was interesting that actually there was significant growth amongst atheist and agnostic identifying Americans over the past decade, as opposed to people who say, you know, I don't affiliate with organized religion, but I don't,

say that I cannot know or know for sure that God doesn't exist? Yeah, so it's not a huge number of Americans writ large. But there is an increase, right? So a decade ago, when we asked this question, we found about 2% of Americans said they were atheists. About another 2% said they were agnostic. It's more than doubled now, right? So we have 4% of Americans now saying they're atheists and 5% saying they're agnostic. But I think what's going on here is I think it's linked to social desirability bias.

I think historically in surveys, people have felt the need to say, yes, I'm something, because in society we are Baptist or we're Methodist or we're Jewish or there's some sort of affiliation that we feel like we need to say that we're part of in some kind of larger context.

You know, for larger reasons. I think as Americans are less religious, they're growing up with people who are not religious. There's suddenly not that kind of penalty to say that what you truly believe any longer. It's kind of like that residual effect that Ryan refers to, that we're seeing it start to filter, I think, into Americans increasingly to say maybe they're atheists or maybe they just don't know. And I don't think that was the case, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago.

In fact, a great data set to back this up is Gallup asks Americans, would you vote for a person of this identity for president? And it runs the gambit of, you know, gay, lesbian, over 70, Muslim, Black, Catholic, Hispanic. The lowest performing were atheist at only 60 percent, saying they would vote for an atheist and leftist.

45% saying they would vote for a socialist for president. So, and that compares to when you ask about sort of different races, it's high 90s percentage of Americans say that they would vote for somebody of that identity. I want to ask about something that seems to have happened around the turn of the millennium. Back to the Gallup data, you know, they have

a data set looking at membership to a house of worship going back to the 1930s. And from the 30s to the 90s, membership remains pretty steady around 70% of Americans saying that they belong to a house of worship. But then something happens and there's this precipitous decline. Now just 46% of Americans say they are even members. What happened 20 years ago?

approximately, to really change things. Yeah. If you look at the GSS numbers, the General Social Survey, at 18 to 35-year-olds, the share identified as Christians dropped 13 points between 1991 and 1998, which is an insane change when religion was so steady for decades. The question is, what happened between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s? I think one thing that we constantly point to as scholars is the end of the Cold War.

To be an atheist was to be a communist when we were fighting the Red Scare. And when the threat of communism went away with the Berlin Wall falling and the Soviet Union cracking up, there wasn't that strong connection anymore between atheism and communism. So you could be an atheist and be an American. So I think it kind of lowered the social desirability bias on that question. But you also got to think about things like politics.

Politics was actually really jovial in the 1980s. Everyone, like Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan, like golfed together, even though they were the opposite party. And then we got Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America in 94. And just politics polarized very strongly in the early 1990s to the early 2000s. And we've got to talk about this game, the God gap or the Pew gap.

To be a Republican is to be a Christian, and to be a nun is to be a Democrat, almost by default, especially if you're white. This is really a white thing happening right now, but almost half of white nuns are Democrats now. We're so polarized on these issues, so I think a lot of people who used to be left-leaning politically but religious –

realize I've got to pick one or the other. And they're going to pick their politics over their religion. So they walked away from religion during that time period. And I think the one thing that we can't discount is the role of the internet. Yeah.

You know, I mean, it made things easier to transmit information about certain different faith groups, your faith group. You could read about everything wrong with other faith groups. And I think for a lot of people, it also helped them realize they weren't alone. You know, if I'm an atheist living in the South in 1950, I'm not telling anyone I'm an atheist because I'll be ostracized. But now you can go on Reddit or Facebook or wherever else and find a whole bunch of people just like you.

So now it's like, okay, I'm not weird. And I'll say what I am on surveys and what I really believe. And the more people that came out, it gave permission for more people to say what they really were religiously. So I think it's a combination of all kinds of factors. A preference cascade. We just talked about this on the podcast last week.

I think also to the rise of the Christian right and the role they played in sort of defining what religiosity meant, particularly in the public and political spheres, right? So being against abortion and homosexuality and opposing gay rights as attitudes, particularly among young people, were changing on a lot of these sort of sexual morality issues. And so I think you sort of started to see in that era, you know, in the 90s, there were lots of liberal Christians, right?

But the number of people who are identifying as liberal and Christian fell dramatically over the first couple decades of the century. Gailen, I have one statistic that you might find interesting. I love a statistic, so you know me. Of course, you know. So among people that have left religion, one of the reasons we gave in the survey that people could check was, have you left because your church or congregation became too focused on politics?

And so we found about 20% of Americans said that was a region that they left. And so I don't think it's high as some of the other reasons that we cited, because one, I think if there's too much intermixing of religion and politics, people just say, no, thank you. I'm just going to leave religion. But people have also sorted into religious communities that think like themselves.

politically too. So I think that's the other factor to kind of bear in mind. Like for, if you're a conservative evangelical, you're probably happy that people are having the same political views that you do. And even though your pastor might not be talking about it directly from the pulpit, everyone surrounding you is thinking the same thing politically. And so that sorting has taken place in some churches as well.

I was going to hold off a little bit longer before we dove directly into the politics question, but this is a politics podcast after all, and y'all are already there. So let's just get to it. And then I do want to circle back to some of the broader social effects of declining religiosity. But what effect does this have on politics? That's a super broad question. I promise I'll get more specific once we start talking. But if you had to put it

or sort of the biggest trends that you see. What effect do you see this having on politics? Oh, I think the Democratic Party has a huge problem brewing, and that is they're a coalition of Muslims and Black Protestants and old school white Catholics and atheists. Like, how do you keep all those groups happy at one time, especially on issues like the Equality Act?

You know, like there's no way you can make atheists and black Protestants happy on that issue. So I always tell Democrats – and the other problem, think about who was leading the Democratic Party the last couple years, a bunch of old white Catholics when the party does not look like that at the ground level. So there's this big disconnect amongst the Democratic Party between the leadership and the voters.

The Republican Party's problem is they're the party of white Christianity, which was great in 1970, is not so great in 2025, right? When we see white Christianity declining as a share of the overall population. So you can only win so many elections when you're riding on the back of white Christianity. The Democratic Party has got to figure out how to hold all these weird coalitions of people together. The Republican Party is how do you make your coalition bigger while not alienating the white Christian base, which has propelled you to where you are right now?

Neither of the parties have a really good strategy on how to do those things. Brian, you're awfully pessimistic for a pastor. What's going on here? I would say that when it comes to the challenges that Ryan's absolutely right, the Democratic Party has a real challenge mobilizing some of its most likely supporters, the unaffiliated folks. Where do you go to reach them? You've got to maybe go online on Reddit, but you're not able to go to brick-and-mortar.com

places or spaces where you can find folks that then register or get them to vote. And for the Republican Party, the white evangelical support has been critical. One of the challenges for the GOP, though, is that that group on a number of issues is out of the mainstream when it comes to, you know, views on abortion and those kind of questions. And so how do you sort of carve out support for these constituencies, but also don't alienate the middle?

I would say, though, to Ryan's point about the Democratic coalition and religion, you know, I think the advantage that Democrats have right now is that everyone in that coalition is very much opposed to Donald Trump. So so it'll be a question of once Trump is no longer in the picture, then I think that question of how the Democratic Party, you know, tries to get all these very diverse views together. But that very diversity is very much, I think,

is drawn together because of their opposition to really the rise of Christian nationalism within the GOP. And so I think that right now, currently, I don't think the Democrats have to worry as much about keeping those folks together. I think they have to worry about turning out certain voters in certain states in the battlegrounds, and that's another conversation. But I don't think it's necessarily about religious diversity as being the problem per se, as long as Trump is a uniting force for those folks.

It's interesting. I made the joke about you being a pessimist, Brian, but I think you're speaking to things that we've covered pretty heavily on this podcast.

which is that there are clear divisions within the Democratic Party and the sort of college educated liberal doesn't necessarily have all that much in common with the 90 plus percent of black Americans who are voting for Democrats when it comes to thick questions specifically about religion and some of the values that stem from there. And the same may be true for Hispanic Catholics and increasingly Hispanic evangelical Protestants as well.

And at the same time, there's a challenge on the Republican side because, you know,

while people may be identifying as Christian, and in some ways the two things have a little bit become conflated, I think we've seen in surveys in particular that people will identify as Christian once they identify as Republican because they understand that it is part of the political identity. That doesn't necessarily mean these are people who are going to church or practicing in a conventional way that we think of Christians as practicing.

And so I want to maybe drill down on that question for a second, which is that we saw a recent report in The New York Times talk specifically about the sort of Christians symbolism that Trump uses. The title of their piece was The Church of Trump, how he's infusing Christianity into his movement. He's now selling a USA Bible for $60. It's called the God Bless the USA Bibles. Where does that fit into politics?

all of this? Is he speaking to people who are devoutly religious, or is he speaking to something else in society? So there's this thing called cultural evangelicalism now. I have to kind of admit I might be one of the big pushers of this new idea, which is evangelicals don't go to church. They self-identify as evangelicals. So in 2008, 16% of self-identified evangelicals attended never or seldom

In 2022, it was 27% of self-identified evangelicals attend, never or seldom. I think we're seeing the rise of cultural Christianity, right? Which is like, it's a tribal label. It's almost like a cultural marker. And so what we're seeing is like religion has been stripped of all the good quote unquote parts, which is like the going to church part.

If you look at the data, going to church does all kinds of good things for you in terms of tolerance, volunteerism, participation. People are not doing that part. The part they're doing is saying, I'm an evangelical, which is the tribalism, the us versus them thing. If you look at who the Trump coalition is, he's managed to hold serve with high attending, high education folks, so really religious and really educated folks.

But he's brought in a lot of low education, low attendance folks who maybe used to vote for the Democrats 10 or 15 years ago are now full on Trumpers. So the guy with a high school diploma who attends church less than once a year, that's who Trump brought into the coalition, the

cultural Christian. And I think that's what, you know, we're seeing the lines between religion and politics blur more and more every day. And the word evangelical is more of a political moniker and a cultural moniker now than it is a, you know, I believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ thing.

You know, from the very beginning, there was, I think, a lot of consternation about how Trump could ever appeal to white evangelical Christians, just given his background and his lifestyle. But I think something that Trump had that was kind of a Trump card was that he was kind of outside the system. He was an outsider. He was not respected by elite institutions, you know, the media.

academia. And so he kind of felt the same kind of thing. And he projected this in a lot of his speeches that he was one of you, even though he's a New York billionaire philanderer. But he said, like, you know, these people don't respect me. These same people are not respecting you either. They don't respect your views, your values, your way of life. And they're not only do they don't respect you, they're after you. They want to make all these sweeping changes to

And I'm going to protect you from them. And I think that was such a powerful message. And he continues to employ it, you know, eight years after his first campaign.

I was going to say something similar. This idea of cultural grievance, this idea that the rights of Christians are the most maligned group in American society, he is feeding into that because he has an audience within his base. The question is, to what extent is that going to be appealing to most Americans? Because we know that most Americans are not that religious in terms of the typical measures we use in terms of religiosity, going to church.

being devout, all those sorts of things. So Trump's own personal religiosity is beside the point. I think for many conservative Christians, he has delivered on policies in ways that, for example, George W. Bush, who is an evangelical, never really did. I think there's a sense among many very conservative right-wing Republicans that

that also Ronald Reagan just paid a lip service to the cultural views of this base demographic. But Trump has really been willing to, in fact, enact policies, appoint justices that are doing the policy changes that he wants.

But again, I think there's a limit because most of those changes have not had broad support among the general public based on whatever polls that we're looking at it, whether it's abortion rights, attitudes or LGBTQ rights, all those sorts of things. So there has to be, I think, at some point a limit to which this these sorts of appeals happen.

you know, of talking about the decline of Christianity and its role in society, I think there's a limit. There's kind of a ceiling to how far that can go. And I'm not sure if it's after this election, we'll see that it'd be less effective, but he's using it for all he can because he knows that that base is sticking with them and he needs them to turn out and vote, especially in those battleground states.

Well, I think we've seen something of a shift in American politics. And I wonder if it has anything to do with this shift in religiosity. And in some ways, it sounds like politics and religion becoming conflated.

which is that you conventionally used to think of American elections as a contest of ideas. How should we administer health care or child care or retirement services or infrastructure or make sure that businesses can prosper? And it's become something more of a debate about what the American way of life should look like.

And your side is trying to protect your American way of life. And the other side is trying to destroy your American way of life. And I think both parties feel this intensely in this moment.

And oftentimes, sort of that intensity of worldview and way of life is more associated with a religion, perhaps, than an actual party identity. So, you know, do you agree with that sort of analysis? Does that make sense? Is this a product of the decline of organized religion? Yeah.

I know that's kind of an interesting question. I think back that the idea of looking at identity in terms of religion and politics, I think of the work of people like Lilliana Mason, a political scientist who looks at social identity. And I think what has made those appeals

by Trump so powerful for conservative evangelicals, is we now have a situation where Americans view their religion and politics and partisanship and racial, I think, grouping as well as sort of a mega social identity. And so that is, I think, what gives

Trump, you know, the license to kind of continually talking about sort of the end of, decline of, and threats to Christianity. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but I do think that I don't know if it's a function of the collapse of organized religion. I mean, I think that in our surveys, for example, our data on Christian nationalism, we find that those people who are the most fervent Christian nationalists, people that essentially believe America was founded as a Christian nation and should remain so, and that American government policy should privilege those sorts of views are

the views of conservative Christians. I mean, those are often the most devout people that we see. They're more likely to go to church than average Americans. So there is a religious component to this as well. I think, too, something that Ryan said at the outset is pretty relevant here, right? So if people are broadly suspicious of government at all levels, of the media,

It's just, you know, much easier to sort of say, well, this guy, you know, they're all crooks, but at least this guy is going to advocate for me. And I think that's what a lot of conservative Christians think about Trump, that he may not be a great guy, but at least he's our guy. And, you know, everyone else is not trustworthy anyway, so we might as well go with him.

Yeah.

of Americans are in a mainline church. United Methodist Church lost 25% of its members in the last 18 months over a schism that's happening right now. Evangelicals are actually a larger percentage of the population today than they were in 1972.

So evangelicalism is doing fine. It's the moderate middle where you sat next to Democrats and Republicans on a Sunday morning. You had a lot more economic diversity in the pews, educational diversity. Those are the kind of churches that are going away because we're seeking like purified spaces, politically purified spaces.

And so what we're doing is if I'm a liberal and I'm going to a Southern Baptist church to talk about abortion all the time, I'm going to stop going to that church. Like I'm not sticking around and having my identity challenged all the time. Or if I'm a mainliner, I'm a conservative, I'm not going to an Episcopal church. They talk about LGBTQ issues and trans issues and things like that. So what we're seeing is we're purifying all our third...

spaces, quote unquote. And we're only hearing messages through the media, through our social media and through our environment that, you know, serves our master identity of partisanship. And I think that's really one of the problems we have now is we don't know people of a different political stripe than we are because all our spaces are all one note, whether left or right. And we don't have friends across the aisle.

Right. And it hardens tribal identities, right? So I'm a Baptist Republican and I go to regular services and I hear the same kind of political messages and I'm meeting the same kind of people who have the same kind of beliefs as I do. And a few people are questioning. And, you know, we haven't talked about the rise of sort of conspiracies, but something that's also fueled by this idea that I'm not confronted with people who are challenging my beliefs and these ideas. And so I say, well, you know, everyone I know believes this, so it must be true.

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Go to GiveWell.org to find out more or make a donation. Select podcast and enter 538 politics at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Again, that's GiveWell.org to donate or find out more. What happens next? So Ryan, you mentioned that we have more evangelical identifying Americans today than we did in the 1970s, which gets at the fact that

Throughout American history, we've had religious revivals and we've had all sorts of sort of fervent practices pop up, die off. Some of the states that we call home today, particularly the early states, were founded on many different sort of fervent religious practices. Who's to say that we won't find ourselves 20 to 30 years from now on a podcast or whatever they have in the future saying, wow, like religiosity really grew quickly when we thought it was all falling apart.

Yeah, so I just signed a contract for a book called The Big Church Sort, where I argue that religious polarization is actually probably more pronounced than political polarization now. I think what the future looks like is,

is on the right, you're going to have evangelicals grab arms with traditional Catholics and Orthodox Jews and Muslims. We're actually seeing this right now, by the way. There was a book ban situation in Michigan, and evangelicals went to the meeting, and right behind them in line were Muslims speaking in favor of book bans. That's what the future of religion looks like. We don't agree on theology, but we agree on culture stuff, so we're going to link arms with

And on the other side, it's going to be a whole lot of nuns who are very liberal and very anti-religion, a lot of them, and want to see a lot of the protections that religion have eroded in many ways. And there's going to be very few people in the middle. The mainline I was talking about used to be 50% of America. They're 10% of America. They're going to be 5% of America in 20 years because the average mainland Protestant is 60 years old now. So there's going to be very little in the middle of American religion. There's going to be a lot of people who want to be religious.

but could not find a community that's not really far right to join. They want to have a nice moderate and there's no place for them. And the point of the book is that's bad. It's bad for you personally, spiritually, emotionally, relationally. It's also bad for democracy.

I think American democracy thrives when you have a robust religious marketplace. And in the future, we're not going to have that because the only thing the market's serving is one very specific flavor of faith that some people will embrace, but most people will reject and leave religion entirely. And I don't think that's productive in a situation where you need a compromising democratic society.

Well, who's to say that we don't just find ourselves in a situation similar to Europe where very few people are, you know, practicing Christians or whatever religion it may be, and people become secular and that's just the way of life? My first answer to that question, you know, kind of what's next, and I think for the short to medium term, it's religious polarization of the type that Ryan suggested. But I think it's not just about politics. It's about geography and generation as well.

So if you look at a state like Vermont over the last 10 years, it's gone from a place that had a lot of Catholics

a fair number of Protestants, and now half the state is religiously unaffiliated compared to Mississippi, which over the last 10, 15 years has barely changed at all in terms of its religious demography. If you look at generations, the youngest generation is far less religious than the oldest generation. That's always been true, but the gap between the oldest and the youngest is larger now than it's ever been. And then when it comes to liberals and conservatives,

I said earlier there's plenty of liberal Christians back in the day, not even that long ago, and now there are very few. And so we're sort of seeing across all these different facets religious polarization that's going to play out in, I think, kind of unpredictable ways.

Gail, I was just going to add, I think that we're probably inching more toward a European sort of model, frankly. I think for many years there was this notion that America was exceptional, that the larger secularization trend that we saw happening in Western Europe was just not happening here because of the rich history have of religious diversity, the religious marketplace, all of those sorts of things. But I think it's important to remember in our analysis of looking at

the growth patterns of different faith traditions, none of the major religious traditions are growing. I mean, at best, I think white evangelicals are sort of their retentions has gotten a little bit better, but they've still lost, you know, there's, you know, I know that Brian goes back to the early 70s, but if you look back a decade, you know, they were a larger percentage of the U.S. population. They've kind of declined.

I think that with the rise of education, with other things to fill our time, whether it's Peloton, as you see my thing in the back, or pickleball or pick your poison, I guess. But I think that there are other things happening in our lives that are making religion sort of less relevant. I think it will always be there.

We find, for example, with Gen Z, I know Dan's done a lot of great work on Gen Z as well. People are still searching for meaning in their lives, you know, and for some it's going to be religion. There are like I think we found 40 percent of Gen Zers nationally said that they found some meaning from religious institutions. It's not a majority. I don't expect it to be a majority anytime soon. So people are hungering for meaning and what they want community. What that looks like, I don't think we really have the exact answers to right now.

Yeah, what fills that void? In preparing to talk to you all, I read several different theories of what comes next. And for some people, it's like the occult. And for some people, it's workism, which is an obsession with work. I hope not. Good grief. That doesn't sound good. For others...

For others, it's partisan ideology, and we've already talked a bit about that. But one of the theories that I heard is like the desire for belonging and meaning remains at the same level, whether people are participating in organized religion or not. And so if organized religion isn't there to provide answers and community, then people are just going to look for those things in other places, and maybe they'll find them and maybe they won't.

And so I guess my question is, will they find them? And if they don't, what's the downside to that?

Well, I think one of the challenges, and there's been a lot of good research coming out on this topic recently, but it's social media and the time that young people are spending on apps and social media platforms. And they're trying to find and build community virtually, which I think just doesn't have the same kind of benefits. We saw that during the pandemic, people who were tuning into religious services online weren't getting the same kind of benefits of in-person services online.

And so I see the same thing of like building communities online, the same kind of limited way that you can forge connection and establish community. What has to happen for this younger generation is thinking about institution and community building

And unfortunately, there hasn't been a lot of they haven't had a lot of practice doing so. This is a generation that hasn't really been adept at reforming institutions. It's about been more about kind of tearing them down, criticizing what has to happen is sort of a, you know, shift towards building and building up.

Speaking of building, Gail, and there's something called Sunday Assembly that was really kind of popular about five or 10 years ago. It was church for atheists, basically is what like the tagline was. It was, let's get a bunch of atheists together on Sunday morning. Let's rent out a space. Let's do pop songs that we all sing along with and have like a Ted style talk for the sermon, right? So basically church without God. And they popped up in major metropolitan areas around the country. There were over a hundred Sunday Assemblies at one point, and most of them have closed. And

And that was before the pandemic. And one of the reasons they cited was they were afraid to ask for money because it felt too much like religion.

And, you know, it takes money to rent a space and hire musicians and hire a speaker. We're trying to recreate religion in other ways. We're trying to like kick out parts we don't like, but it's like, no, the reason religion endured is because it did all these things. Like you can't kick out one leg of the stool. Hopefully not all of them. Well, hopefully not all of the things have to endure. Yeah. But when it comes to money, you've got to ask for money to, you know, logistically make that work. And I think the problem is, I think

I think the atheist community is going to figure out a way to do this. I don't know what scale it's going to be, but right now they're going through these trial runs of trying to recreate community without the religion piece. And I hope they're successful for democracy sake. I hope they're successful.

Yeah, I mean, and I'll cite here data from Pew that found that Americans who believe in, quote, nothing in particular are less likely to vote and less likely to volunteer in their communities. And so when you said, Ryan, earlier, the good stuff about attending church, I think you were talking about

ties to community and civic responsibility. Let's be clear about that, Galen, too. The more you go to church, the more politically active you are. That's just a truism in the empirical data. The more engaged you are in your community period, the more politically active you are. Nothing in particular are incredibly disengaged. Atheists are the most politically active group in America today, by the way.

They engage in more protests, march, sign putting up, going to meetings, voting, working for campaigns. Nothing in particular are the least politically active. So atheists have all the pieces there to be very involved in the political process. It's just the social piece too. Like how do we integrate all those things together into a cohesive whole? Yeah.

So I think with atheists, they are incredibly involved in politics, but they're highly educated. They're among the most highly educated Americans. And we know as political scientists that education is a big driver in people's willingness to engage in politics across the board. We're talking here about like possibilities, but is it clear from looking at the data what people are doing? People who aren't sort of going to church or identifying with a religion, are

Are they seeing sort of negative impacts on their feeling of belonging or meaning? Or are they finding these things, whether it's SoulCycle or brunch or, you know, and I say that flippantly, but like maybe also work or what have you? Yeah, there's a class gap now, right? So you go back 20, 30 years and

Americans with a college degree weren't much more likely to belong to a religious denomination or attend regularly than folks without a degree. But over the ensuing couple decades, we've seen a significant difference in religious participation. And I think that same is true elsewhere, right? So civic and community activities, there's a greater gap in volunteerism by education than we've seen previously. And what's happened that we've seen in some of our research

is the college-educated folks are able to cobble together outside religion, social outlets, whether it is SoulCycle or Orange Theory or Pickleball, other types of activities or book clubs. So they have these kind of independent ways of coming together and building community that for folks further down the socioeconomic ladder, because they don't have enough resources and enough time,

are unable to do so. So you see a sort of growing class divide in American civic life that religion at one point kind of helped bridge.

I would just say too that we have this larger crisis of connection. We don't have as many face-to-face interactions. There's new research coming out by Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, looking at how phones have really changed childhood in America. And it's left many younger people far less happy. They're anxious about it. I mean, his citing data showing that on average, young Americans are spending five hours a day on social media. And that's not including the time they're spending on homework.

et cetera, et cetera, online. And so in a world where we're increasingly by ourselves, right, you know, and not having face-to-face interactions, that's really not good for the health of our community or the health of our democracy. Because if you're forced to be spending time with people face-to-face, you know, you modulate what you say. You can't hide behind anonymous walls where you say things that are mean or could be misinterpreted. And we know that also, you know, not having those face-to-face interactions leads people to

be less trustful, I think, and they lead people to kind of have suspicious ideas about what their political opponents are doing or viewing. That's also being fed by algorithms that lead us to kind of following things that really reinforce our views. We're increasing in echo chambers. I'm not sure how this is getting to religion, but I think the larger point is that we're not connecting in face-to-face forums any longer. Religion used to be a powerful way that we did that.

And so we're still, I think, struggling to find out what that means in American society in terms of finding those forums where we're connected with each other. I haven't seen anything in the data that's suggesting that it's one thing or the other and where this ends up. I'm not necessarily sure. But I don't necessarily think it's wanting to find more spiritual opportunities or more religion. I just don't see our data showing that people are looking for an organized, you know, a church or a spiritual home. Maybe that'll change. Who knows? Things can change.

And what does it mean if people find that in partisan ideology? Pastor Ryan, at your service. I mean, politics is not redemptive, Galen. Like, there's nothing redemptive about politics. It actually makes us more of our base self, like our reptilian brain kicks in there. And I think religion at its best transcends those things, right? Saying we're all in this together. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You know, the golden rule. Like, politics is win, win, win at whatever cost, right?

Politics will not save you. Like, it just won't. And in many ways, I think it makes us the worst version of ourselves. And so I caution my students who are political science major, I go, do not make this your entire life. You

You know, politics is important. It matters to all of us. Yes. Who wins, who loses, who gets rights, who doesn't get rights. But at the end of the day, you're not going to be happy with yourself when you're 65. If you watch, you know, 20 hours of cable news every day, that is not going to make you a fulfilled person. Politics use, or at least we hope it used to be downstream of other things, ideals and culture and religion and values and ethics.

And unfortunately, it seems like it's become the – it's in the center of the room all the time now. And I don't think that's healthy for a functioning democracy. I don't think it's healthy for us personally, spiritually, relationally, emotionally. And I don't think – I don't know how we survive as a democracy if we all distort ourselves into Republicans versus Democrats, especially in a 50-50 country, which is largely what we are right now.

I think there's also been a move from paying attention to local politics to everything's become nationalized. So religion by its nature is a local community-based activity.

And so participating in religion meant you were going out in your community, meeting people, engaging with folks. So in the past, if you were doing that on a local political issue, that would have the same kind of effects. But if it's transformed towards posting on social media about national political issues, that's offering very, very little. And I think, too, just to kind of close this loop here,

Please also remember that in terms of our politics, religion can be used for ways that I think reinforce negative biases and understandings. And so I and it could be, in fact, undemocratic, not necessarily broadly democratic. So if you look at Christian nationalism, which is having, I think, a disproportionate influence among Republican circles, that's

You know, these are folks who are, I think, actively trying to have a vision of society that is not a multiracial, multireligious, you know, sort of country. When, in fact, you know, I would argue that the best of religion, the best of our civic institutions are ones that try to make sure that everyone has a place to a role to play at the table, a place at the table, so to speak. And I'm not sure that necessarily there are a lot of religious groups doing that today. Yeah.

Well, I appreciate everyone's thoughts. Pastor Ryan, in particular, your point that politics should not be your life. In fact, maybe my deepest, darkest secret is, although this is literally my livelihood—

I don't engage that much in politics when I go home and turn the microphone off and hang out with friends. It's just a- That sounds healthy. It's a job. It does. And you're hanging out with friends, which is great. Yeah. I would encourage people to keep listening to this podcast despite that, but that, yeah, it's important to not like-

make it your identity. A guy told me one time, expertise and passion are inversely related to each other. And I think that's been the truism of my life. The more I learn about politics and religion, the less passionate I am about those things. Most political scientists are not political junkies. They study it. It's part of our lives. It's part of what we think about and write about, but it's not... I don't go to dinner parties and talk about this. I actually don't tell people what I do for a living most of the time because I don't want to talk about this outside of work. But

I mean, politics matters, but it should not be all-consuming. It just should not. It's not healthy for you or your society or your family or anyone around you. I have a rule against talking about politics until at least the third date, so...

You know, I try to enforce that in my personal life. But anyway, thank you, Melissa, Ryan, and Daniel. Thanks, Galen. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Galen Druk, our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. Jesse DiMartino is on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Bye.

Woo!