The fastest growing “religious” group in the US is the “nones”, those with no religious affiliation. Who are these “nones” and what accounts for their religious disaffiliation over the last 30 years? We’ll answer these questions and more with our guest, political scientist and pastor, Ryan Burge from his updated book called “.”


Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of numerous books and journal articles and is a pastor in the American Baptist Church.



Episode Transcript

Scott: The fastest growing religious group in the United States is a group called the N-O-N-E-S, those with no religious affiliation. Who are these Nones and what accounts for their religious disaffiliation over the last 30 years? We'll answer these questions more with our guest political science and Pastor Ryan Burge from his updated book called “The Nones.” This is part two of our discussion. We talked last week about his book, “The Great De-Churching,” and this is part two of that. We look forward to our conversation. I'm your host, Scott Rae.

Sean: And I'm your co-host, Sean McDowell.

Scitt: This is ThinkBiblicaly from Talbot School of Theology at ŷַ. Ryan, welcome back for part two. We're looking forward to the discussion.

Ryan: Thanks so much for having me, guys. How did you get so interested in studying the nones? You're both a pastor and a political scientist, so you've got a little skin in the game here. But there are a lot of political science subjects that you could have focused your research on. What's so interesting about this group, “the nones?”

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I've been in the same church for 17 years now. Actually, when I was in grads, my second year in graduate school, I took over the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, and we had 50 people when I got there. And then five or seven years later, we had 30 people. And now we have 10 or 12 on a good Sunday. Every church I've been a part of is smaller now than it was when I was there. And that might be because I'm a terrible pastor in the program.

[Scott and Sean laugh]

Scott: We weren't going to go there.

Ryan: Well, I mean, maybe I'm just bad luck. But the thing is—I wanted to know if my experience was the experience. Is this a universal thing or is this a unique-to-me thing? And I knew that I had these tools that most other pastors don't have at their disposal of getting all this graduate training in methodology and data analysis. And I thought, you know what? I want to try. I'm going to scratch my own curiosity itch. And then other people can come along for the journey and see these graphs I make and maybe learn something alongside me. And that's really where the seed of the nones idea came from was a tweet that I sent out before COVID—in the “before times,” as we call it now. And I was a no name account; I only had a couple hundred followers. I was just tweeting grass about religion over and over. And this one just went viral. Everyone wanted to talk to me about it—New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London. I made the front page of Reddit, got 70,000 upvotes.

Sean: Wow!

Ryan: Yeah, it was like my life turned upside down in a very short period of time. And all of a sudden I became like the guy to call about American religion, especially American religious disaffiliation. So, when I was approached about writing a book, I thought, well, why not write about what people care about? And it's been exceedingly clear to me that they care about the rise of disaffiliation and what that means and why it's happening. And so, that's exactly why I wrote “The Nones” because I knew this is what there's already a groundswell of desire for more information about this, and I thought I could provide some in a digestible, easy to understand way.

Scott: Well, you are definitely our go to guy. That's for sure. I'm a little disappointed you didn't mention to ThinkBiblically podcast with The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Ryan: Well, obviously—Oh, I was on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper too. That's probably below you guys, right?

[Sean and Scott laugh]

Sean: For sure. No, no debate about it. Well, tell us what you mean by the term the nones and how it's different than the de-churched?

Ryan: Yeah. So, nones are people—It's a religious belonging question, right? So, what is your present religion, if any? That's the question. And then when you're given a list of 11 different options and they range from Protestant to Catholic to Mormon to Orthodox and there's Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim. And the last three are atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular. And those are the nones. People who say they are atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular. They are the fastest growing religious group in America today. In 1972, 5% of Americans were nones. In today, 30% of Americans are nones. And amongst Generation Z, it's over 40% of Generation Z are nones. So, it is changing everything about American religion. The fact that the nones are rising so rapidly and it's having ripples and impacts on literally every aspect of American society.

Scott: Now, Ryan, it sounds like that has something to do with belonging, but it sounds like that also has a lot to do with belief.

Ryan: Oh. So, what's really interesting is belief and belonging don't run on the same tracks all the time. You know, I think, you know, one of my former colleagues at EIU was talking about religion—because obviously we talk about religion because it's what I do. And he goes, you know, I've been going to church for like 30 years and I don't believe in any of that stuff. You know, I just go because I like the socialization, I like the good work the church is doing in the community. So, he's a belonger but not a believer. And there are people who are believers, but not belongers, right? They believe in God without a doubt and they believe in Jesus Christ and the Bible is literally true, but they don't go to church at all. You know, the behavior, belief, belonging circles for some people overlap in very odd ways. You know, they might belong but not believe or behave, or vice versa. So this, the none specifically, was looking at the belonging measure first, which I think tells you a lot.

For instance, if I'm a Protestant or I grew up Protestant, let's say, and I haven't been to church in five years, when I'm asked the question, what's your present religion, if any, if I say Protestant, that's a whole lot different than me saying nothing-in-particular. Because it still says I identify socially with what Protestants are. And they're my people, even though I don't go to church anymore. If I instead say I'm an atheist or agnostic or nothing-in-particular, I'm saying I've rejected everything that has to do with religion. And to me, and you can look at the data, that's a big leap from being a never attending Protestant to being a nothing-in-particular.

Scott: So Ryan, how large a group is the nones in terms of absolute numbers?

Ryan: Yeah. So, 30 million Americans are nones and there's about 330 million Americans total in this country so about 100 million people now identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular. But if we compare that, let's say, to Western—I can only give you attendance measures with Europe, that's the data I have. About 25% of Americans attend church every week, it's about 14% of Europeans. What's really interesting though is if Poland was in the United States, it would be the most religious state in America. 44% of Poles go to church every Sunday. But then on the other end, only 3% of people in Denmark go to church every Sunday. They'd easily be the least religious state. So, America is sort of, the average American is more religious than the average European, but not by much and the gap seems to be closing over time. I don't think we're ever going to get to the space where we're as irreligious as Western Europe, especially as Scandinavia, but I think we're trending in a much more secular direction now than we were 30 or 40 years ago.

Scott: Can you break down the nones a little bit? Because it almost seems strange bedfellows to have the three groups that you described. Who exactly are they? What do they have in common? How do they differ, even though they fall under this larger umbrella of the nones?

Ryan: Yeah, so there's atheists and agnostics. I almost grouped them together in my mind because we call them “secular people.” And I think that's a really important distinction that I want to highlight. Secular people have thrown off religion and replaced it with a secular worldview, right? Humanists, rationalists, science, all those things. They have a framework to think about the world. You can agree with it or not, but they have one. Nothing-in-particulars are a completely different animal because they've thrown off religion, but they haven't replaced it with anything else. We call them non-religious people because they're not secular and they're not religious. So they're almost defined by what they aren't instead of what they are. Atheists and agnostics are defined by what they are. They've embraced this secular worldview. But here's the most important part. Most nones are nothing-in-particular. About 60% of nones are nothing-in-particular and about 20% are atheists and about 20% are agnostic. So, when we talk about the nones, especially when I talk to evangelical crowds, they want to think that, well, that's about, that you're talking about atheists here. I'm actually not talking about atheists here. I'm primarily talking about nothing in particulars, and the differences between, let's say, an atheist and a nothing in particular demographically cannot be any bigger. Okay. 51% of atheists have a four-year college degree. 51%, they're the second or third highest educated group. The lowest educated group, religion educated group, is nothing-in-particular. 25% of them have a four-year college degree. So, 50% versus 25%. When you look at economics, like you add the economics and education together, one third of nothing-in-particulars have a high school diploma or less and make $50,000 a year or less as a household, one in three of them. Amongst atheists, it's only 12%. So, from a pure demographic perspective, one group is doing very, very well. Atheists are doing very, very well. And nothing-in-particulars are doing very, very poorly and falling behind every year on all these factors that we know matter, education and income specifically. So, there's a lot of concern there from a social science perspective about nothing-in-particulars and how they fit into American religion and American society.

Scott: So Ryan, help our listeners understand a little bit more without getting lost too much in the weeds on this. How do you measure religious affiliation and disaffiliation?

Ryan: Ya know, it's honestly not that complicated. You just ask people the question, what is your present religion, if any? And they get to check whatever box that the spirit moves them to check. And that can be complicated sometimes because you're like, wait a minute, how can you—for instance, evangelicals, you say you're Protestant, you say you're evangelical, two separate questions. And then you say you never attend church. A lot of people go, wait a minute, you can't do those things, evangelicals have to attend church. And my approach to surveys is very simple. It's a paraphrase of Maya Angelou, which is when people show you who they are, believe them. For me, it's when people tell you who they are, believe them. So, if you want to tell me that you're a never attending evangelical, it's not my job to say you're not an evangelical. It's my job to figure out why you said that, why you made those selections, what was going on in your mind that got you to that place. And so when we talk about, you know, why does someone pick nothing-in-particular, instead of picking Protestant or Catholic, I think they're making a very important declaration about how they see themselves in the world and who their people are. You know, they don't, I don't hang out with Catholics anymore. I don't think like Catholics anymore. Even though I grew up Catholic and I got baptized Catholic and I went through communion as a Catholic, I am not a Catholic anymore. That tells me something very, very important about how they see themselves and position themselves in the social and political landscape of America. So, I'm a big believer in just asking people straight up, what are you and just letting them go from there.

Sean: Well, what factors account for the growth of the nones? Because I could imagine you could have people being born into a second, third generation, non-religious home and that growing. I can imagine people being de-churched. Where is this group of the nones coming from, and why is it growing so significantly?

Ryan: Yeah, so the most important thing I want people to know is that most nones are made, not grown. Most people in America are still growing up in religious households. Obviously that's declined over time, but even amongst the youngest adults today, 80% of them say they grew up in a religious household of one type or another. So, most people who are nones were not nones from the cradle. They were not second or third generation atheists. They became non-religious. What we know is that typically we ask people, actually in “The Great Dechurching” book, at what age did you consider yourself the most religious? The average answer was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old. So, young teenage years, youth group years, and then something happens along the way. To me the boat gets the leakiest between 15 and 25 years old. That's where most people drift away from the religion in which they were raised for all kinds of reasons, by the way. It could be politics, we cannot discount the role of politics in religion. The pew gap or the god gap, what are you going to call it, has never been larger than it is right now. Amongst people who identify as politically conservative, only 12% of them are non-religious today. Amongst people who identify as politically liberal, 50% are non-religious today. So, for people who are left or center politically, especially if you're white, you have a really hard time being a Protestant or Catholic because you think the church is continuing to turn to the right and you don't want to be associated with those things. So, I think politics is playing a huge role in this. We also can't discount social media and the internet is a really interesting one. People bring it up to me all the time like, "I know the answer. It's the internet." I go, "I think you're probably right, but I can't prove it." Because almost everyone in America got the internet in a five year window of time. It happened so quickly. There was no reference group. They were like, "Okay, you people can't get the internet for 20 years. We're going to figure out what the internet did." I mean it sounds so good. I can't prove it empirically, but I do think there's a value in saying it's easier to learn about other religions today than it ever has been before. You can go on YouTube and say, "What do Muslims believe?" You have a wonderfully produced video by a scholar of Islam who gives great information that's very detailed and very accurate. It used to be able to go to the library and dig out the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system. So, exposing people to other religions might be part of it as well or learning about their own religion in a different way might be part of it as well. It's a myriad of factors that's leading to the rise of the internet. It's not just one simple trick that's making people lead religion.

Scott: Ryan, we've had several conversations on our podcast here in the past about the phenomena of people who are deconstructing their faith. Is there any data that helps us understand what percentage of the nones have actually completely left the faith that they grew up with? I mean, obviously the atheists and agnostics have, but that other group of the nones— how does that connect with this phenomena of faith deconstruction?

Sean: By the way, you're using deconstruction in terms of deconversion.

Scott: Deconversion, that's right.

Sean: In that terms.

Ryan: So, in “The Great Dechurching,” one of the interesting findings we had was one thing, two things actually, that young people can do to make it less likely for them to leave church is to regularly attend a church when they're in college and also be part of a college ministry. Those two things were almost like an immunization. It was like a vaccine against de-churching because it kept them on the right track. It is very easy to fall away from religion in 2023, because you have so many more options and ways to entertain yourselves. I don't think we fully understand how much society's changed and how easy it is to entertain yourself and how hard it was 30 or 40 years ago. Robert Putnam wrote a book called “Bowling Alone.” It was published in the early 1990s where he basically makes the argument, "We're not joining stuff anymore." Whether it be the Elks or the Moose or bowling leagues—that's actually where the title of the book comes from is we bowl alone now, not with other people. He blamed it on cable television because it was like 1991. For them, it was like, "We can watch 30 channels now. This is really exciting." The updated version to me is like tweeting alone, Facebooking alone, Instagramming alone, Netflixing alone, TikTokking alone. We can entertain ourselves more than ever before. And I think when we talk about this deconstruction idea, I think for a lot of people, the reason they're deconstructing or de-con