“Rise of the Nones” with Ryan Burge
Show Notes:
Ryan Burge’s Twitter bio says that he makes graphs about religion, but what Ryan does is so much more than making graphs. As a social scientist, Ryan studies the macro-level forces that are shaping churches across the nation--mostly in mainline Protestant denominations. The data that Ryan studies doesn’t show a surge of people coming back to mainline religious institutions, so what does that mean for churches? In Ryan’s view, it gives churches an opportunity to get back into local communities, lean into the diversity of the world around us, and do what the Church used to do well: build bridges to people who are different from us.
Ryan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Graduate Coordinator at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of The Nones and 20 Myths. The second of edition of The Nones comes out in May 2023. He is also the pastor of an American Baptist Church and has served at his current church for the past 15 years.
Resources:
Ryan’s website (ryanburge.net)
Find Ryan on Twitter (@ryanburge)
Email Ryan: ryanburge@gmail.com
Ryan’s Books:
Transcript:
Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 00:03
Today we have a great guest. We have Ryan Burge. He is a political scientist from Eastern Illinois University, which may sound like, Wwhy do we have him on the show?" but he's done a deep dive into statistics and research on church and people who come to church and don't come to church. He's written a couple books about it, and has a couple of books coming out.
Chris McAlilly 00:27
Yeah, he's a quantitative social scientist, and he studies the American religious landscape. So if you are interested at all in why people are religious, or why people are not religious, he looks at that and helps us to kind of get outside of our bubble and to observe what's really going on both historically, and then also looking at present. He also grew up in the Southern Baptist Church and finds himself in a dying community. And he's thinking about not just church growth, but church decline, and how to manage that and navigate that how to think about that what that says not only about religious communities, but about American society as a whole. This is, it's just fascinating. I talked to this guy for a very long time.
Eddie Rester 01:18
Yeah, we could talk to him forever. The book that some of you may be familiar with is "The Nones." That was his first book.
Chris McAlilly 01:23
You mean the Catholic nuns?
Eddie Rester 01:25
Not the Catholic nuns. The N-O-N-E-S.
Chris McAlilly 01:28 The nones.
Eddie Rester 01:29
He'll explain that to you. But then he has another book "20 Myths," kind of based around the same research, things we assume about religious people that really aren't true. So we don't get much into that. This is a long conversation we're going to have, but set aside the time. You're gonna... Buckle up. You're gonna like this one.
Chris McAlilly 01:50
Yeah. Just one takeaway for me. I'm, I was reminded of how social science can help you think about some of the macro level forces that are outside of your control. I was surprised that he kind of thinks of himself as an institutionalist.
Eddie Rester 02:10 Right.
Chris McAlilly 02:10
And he'll get into that. But I was fascinated by institutions, macro forces, the agency we have within all that, just, yeah. It was awesome.
Eddie Rester 02:20
It's a great episode. So enjoy it, share it. Leave us a review. Let us know what questions you have of him. We may--I think we're going to try to have him back sometime later. So if you have of him. We may--I think we're going to try to have him back sometime later. So if you
Chris McAlilly 02:34
[INTRO] Life can be heavy. So heavy, in fact that the weight we carry can sometimes cause us to lose hope.
Eddie Rester 02:43
But we've all come across those people in life who seem to be experiencing the same world we live in, except they maintain a great depth of joy and hope.
Chris McAlilly 02:51
A former generation called this "gravitas." It was their description of a soul that had gained enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with a gravitational pull.
Eddie Rester 03:03
Those are the people we want to talk to. On this podcast, we talk to pastors, entrepreneurs, artists, mental health experts, and many others.
Chris McAlilly 03:12
We'll create space for heavy topics, but we'll be listening for a quality of soul that could be called "gravitas."
Eddie Rester 03:19
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] Well, we're here today with Ryan Burge. He is an assistant professor of political science. He's at Eastern Illinois University. He's also a pastor. And he's written a book, a couple books that we want to talk about. So Ryan, thank you for being with us today.
Ryan Burge 03:36
Absolute pleasure. Glad to be with you guys.
Eddie Rester 03:39
Yeah, and you also have this great Twitter feed. So, and I know, your book "Nones," and part of the story of that is it started with a tweet. You've done a lot of deep dives into the statistics, the have more questions for him, let us know.
Ryan Burge 03:59
Um, you know, I tell people that I didn't figure out who I was and what I was about until I was in my mid 30s. You know, I went to grad school really not knowing what I was. At one point, I almost went to Divinity School. I almost got... I pursued a master's in theology. I mean, everything was on the table for me when I was younger. I almost went to law school. Took the LSAT twice, just didn't work out for me for whatever reason, and went to grad school in political science just because I just wanted to get a grad degree. I didn't know what it was going to be in. I didn't know why. I really wanted to just get a master's degree and stop. And then I wrote a thesis, and my dissertation advisor was like, "Hey, you're pretty good at this. You want to stick around and, you know, get a PhD?" And I was like, "I mean, I guess." I didn't have anything else going on my life. I was 25 years old at the time, and you know, didn't really have a direction and so I stuck around for PhD. And I wasn't really like a big time quantitative researcher until probably about five years ago. And then I started learning some new statistical techniques and some new software that I really wanted to get good at. And I thought, why don't I just showcase what I'm up to on Twitter and try to get some feedback, and maybe that'll help me be a better data analyst and thinker about religion. And that just sort of, for whatever reason, took off. You know, those graphs kind of just took on a life of their own. And then it sort of... You kind of figure out, Twitter's a great feedback loop, because you figure out what people want to read about and you figure what, like, I was talking to someone the other day about how my data visualization style has gotten just that much better over the last couple of years, because you realize how to be concise and precise and clear and comprehensive in 280 characters in one graph. Like that's a skill that you cannot--you're not born with that skill. You have to kind of develop it over time. And then it's turned into a whole thing where it's like, I've become, like, the bat signal guy. People are like, "Oh, Ryan Burge, check this out. Is this right?" Like, "I got this theory about something. Is it true?" And so then I have to go like, make a graph and kind of say, "No, probably not," or, you know, "It is," or whatever. And then, you know, you start doing that. And then people, like news outlets want to talk to you about stuff, because you seem like you kind of know what you're talking about--which is not true, but whatever. And you know, and then that leads to writing stuff, you know, for different outlets, Religion News Service, Christianity Today were kind of the first ones for me. And then that led to, you know, a query letter from a publisher about writing a book. And that led to a book.
Chris McAlilly 06:23 Right.
Ryan Burge 06:24
And that led to a second book. And that led to a third book. So for me, I've never been one of those kind of people, like, I have my whole life laid out in front of me. It's just, I did one thing, and that led to the next thing, and that led to the next thing, and that led to the next thing. So I mean, I extol the virtues of social media. I know a lot of people are down on social media, saying how awful it is. And it's awful. It's terrible. But I would not have the career I have right now without social media. So I'm very, very thankful for what it did for me personally, because it allowed me to have the outlet to kind of put my information out there in a digestible, interesting way to the average person, which is always what I'm interested in. And so that kind of allowed my career to take off to where I am today.
Chris McAlilly 07:00
You look at the American religious landscape. Why is social science a helpful discipline when looking at kind of the big picture? And then for folks that don't know what social sciences, kind of what is that? Why is it helpful when looking at religion in America?
Ryan Burge 07:16
So social science is like a huge umbrella, right? Like, it covers everything, from anthropology, to economics, to psychology, to sociology, to political science. I mean, we're all under this big umbrella of trying to understand human behavior. Hard sciences study, you know, things like cells and animals and plants and things like that. We study to human beings, trying to understand how we think, how we act, why we act the way we do, how we vote, how we organize in groups, that's kind of the goal of social science. And there's two real kind of main arms of social scienc now. There's qualitative work, which is not numbers. I'll describe that as like focus groups, interviews, ethnographies, deep dives into certain cases. And then there's quantitative social science, which is what I am, which is all about numbers. It's trying to quantify everything using simple numeric numbers, whether it be survey data, scraping Twitter, mapping, you know, whatever, text analysis, whatever it is. So, you know, and really, social science has been taken over by the quant segments over the last 15 or 20 years or so. And that really began with the computing revolution, because, you know, used to be to go to a mainframe with punch cards and like, put them in in a certain order, and you got like an hour a month to do that. And now you can run incredibly complex algorithmic models on a $75 laptop you bought at the pawn shop. So I mean, the world has changed. And now with with text being all digital, it's easier to scrape that text and put it into a database than ever before. You don't have to, like, type transcripts out and stuff like that. And then the tools have gotten better. They've got open source. They're much easier to learn now. There's all these tutorials online. So this all led to the quantitative revolution. You know, like you've heard the quants, right? Like the quants took over. Tthey've taken over everything, you know, whether it be Facebook, or the grocery store, or your kid's school or social science. And I think here's the real benefit for pastors and theologians and people who kind of are lay people in a church. No one has an objective view of where they are right now. Because we all live in bubbles, no matter how hard you try to not live in a bubble. You live in a bubble. Because social science tells us that you associate with people who are like you. You like to surround yourself with people the same age, generally, same gender, same political persuasions, same religious preference. And so no matter how hard you try to fight this, you're surrounded by a bubble. And if you grew up in New York City, you don't understand life in Nebraska. If you grew up in Iowa, you don't understand life in Florida. You don't understand life outside your bubble. What social science does is say, I'm going to show you what the world looks like, and in a more objective way, with people all over the country all over, you know, ages, races, genders, incomes, education, I can show you all that at one time. And not only that, I can show you what the world looked like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago and in a more objective way that even you remember it 40 years ago. So if you want to look at real change in society, I don't think there's any better way than looking at a long-term survey instrument and looking at how views of things like pornography or abortion or same sex marriage or religion have changed from, like, 1975 to today. That's a great--to me, that's like the best way to understand the world, is through the lens of quantitative social science. I think other people kind of... In a world where everyone has opinions, the data doesn't have opinions. The data is what it is. And that's what I tell people. I go, "The data doesn't care how you feel about it. It just is what it is." And so I think it's my job to kind of wade into these conversations and go, "I don't care what you think. Here's what the data says."
Chris McAlilly 10:41
So what does the data say about the American religious landscape right now? I know that there are lots of different ways that we could go here, but kind of why did you get excited about taking the tools of social science and applying them to this particular dimension of human behavior?
Ryan Burge 10:58
I just love religion. I've always loved it. I mean, I grew up in the church. I grew up Southern Baptist. I mean, in church, twice a week when I was younger, then four or five times a week when I was a teenager in the youth group. I just think about religion. When I was, like, 17 years old, one of my teachers asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I said, "I want to be a lawyer and a youth pastor." And she thought I was joking. And actually, I kind of ended up doing that in a weird way, like kind of halfway here and halfway there. I've always just been fascinated by religion, how important it is to people's lives and how unimportant it is to some people's lives, to be honest with you. And I think, you know, economics really does a good job with looking at GDP and inflation and jobs and housing and all those kinds of stuff. There's less good work out there about religion, quantitative religion over time. And I thought, "Man, that's a cool little area." And a lot of this, by the way, is totally selfish. It's me trying to understand the world for myself, and then kind of going... It's like, when your friend, you're sitting at the bar, your friend goes, "Look what I just found on the internet," like, "Look at this cool video." That's what I do, except I made the video or I made the graph. So that's really what I do on social media is say, "Look, I had this itch about something. I wanted to figure it out for myself. And then I want to show you what I've learned." So really, kind of my Twitter feed, oddly as it sounds, it's like a look inside my head. It's like a running thought process of what my inner monologue of what I'm thinking about right now.
Eddie Rester 12:15
So where do you get your data? Because, you know, you hear out there, "Oh, you can make the numbers say anything." You know, you hear people say that, that, you know, it's all skewed. So where do we get good data on what you're talking about?
Ryan Burge 12:30
So I use a couple different sources. One is the General Social Survey, which is like the gold standard of social science. It's been around since 1972. Founded by... Well, it's been funded by standard of social science. It's been around since 1972. Founded by... Well, it's been funded by the National Science Foundation from the very beginning. So it's like, the government funds it. The National Opinion Research Council conducts it. And you would have a hard time finding someone in the world who would tell you the GSS is not great. Like, it's just done well. It's really expensive to do. They really are rigorous in how they conduct it. They ask the same questions in the same way, which is actually really helpful, because then you can track actual change. People get mad because they ask questions in a way that makes sense from 1972. But hey, it's 1972. I mean, that's how we ask questions in those days. That's one I use for doing long-term trends, like 50 year trends, because that goes from 1972 to 2021. So you got like 49 years of data there. And then I'm using Cooperative Election Study, which has just been an absolute revolution in social science. For instance, that the General Social Survey is about 3,000 people per wave, okay, which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, a lot of smaller groups in America are one--like Mormons, for instance, are 1% of America. Muslims are 1% of America.
So if you do 3,000 people, you're gonna get about 30 of them in a sample. And you can't do anything with 30 people statistically. You can't cut it by age or gender or race, or, you know, education or anything. The Cooperative Election Study was started in 2008, based out of Harvard. Their first survey was 33,000. And the 2022 survey is about 65,000. So, you know, there's more in one wave of the Cooperative Election Study than there were in 50 years of the General Social Survey, which means now I can look at Latter Day Saints, and I have 800 of them. So now I have a sample that's big enough to look at age, gender, race, these kinds of things. So I can track these groups over time. The downside of that is it only started in 2008. So I only have 13 years I can track the Cooperative Election Study. But man, I think I'm so jealous of like people coming up in 20 years, because they're gonna have this General Social Survey that goes back, you know, 75 years, and they're gonna have a Cooperative Election Studay that's gonna go back 30 or 40 years, and you can track the views of 18 to 29 year olds with a huge sample size going back 20 or 30 years. It's an amazing resource. It doesn't ask a ton of questions about religion, but the basic ones, I which I love, you know, what tradition you are, attendance, prayer, religious importance, things like that. And that opens up a whole world, you know, to you in terms of statistical analysis. So those are the two I use primarily, there's other ones I use on the side. But really, I'm just a collector of data. Like I always want to have... I always, if people ask me a question, I always want to be able to answer it. And so I'm always looking for new data, trying to find. And a lot of what's nice about this is it stays publicly available. You can go grab it right now for free. You can analyze it for free. You don't need any fancy, you know, statistical analysis. You don't have to pay. So I mean, and also, that's nice for me too, because I go check my work. If you don't believe me go check. Like, I'm not... You know, this is open for everyone.
Chris McAlilly 15:21
So one of the books that you published, is, the way I think about it is, it's called "The Nones." And so the category nones, we'll get you to describe that in a moment. I think of that this is kind of a Pew Research Center driven thing. But I may be wrong about that. Where does the term nones come from in terms of religious affiliation? And why did you write that book?
Ryan Burge 15:46
It's been banging around for a long time. You know, we're always looking for ways to shortcut things, like this bigger concept into a simpler concept. And I swear, if I had five cents for every time I had to say N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S, I would be a very rich man. I'd probably make more off of that than I would the book sales at this point, because it happens all the time, in every talk I ever give. And that's my failing, because I just assume everyone knows when I say "nones" what I'm talking about because I wrote a book about it, and I talk about it a lot. But then new people don't know me. So they don't know what that word means. It's been going around for like 25 years, though. And it just, it comprises three groups for me: atheists, agnostics, and people who say their religion has nothing in particular. And that group of Americans was about 5% of the country in 1972. And today, it's probably close to 30% of Americans in 2021. And amongst the younger generation, generation Z, it's probably in the mid 40s, 45%, is what the current data kind of puts us at. To me, it's the most seismic change in American life over the last 50 years, besides the fact we've become more racially diverse, which is important, don't get me wrong. We've also become more much religiously diverse, in that we've become much less religious. So you know, when I went to write the book, I thought, why write about something that no one cares about? It's clear to me that people care about this. They want to know about this, and they want to know about this in an accessible way. That's the problem is most social science is completely inaccessible to the average viewer, listener, reader. And so I wanted to write a book where I kind of bridge the divide between the average person and what we know on the social science side. And that's really what the book was written for. It's written for not academic people. And I think that's one of the reasons the book has done reasonably well is because it's not written for academic people. And now I'm hearing people who are assigning it in their Bible study in church, in small group. Or I'm hearing, like, high school teachers are assigning it to their world religions class. And like, to me, that's exactly what I wanted to happen. I wanted the average person to read the book, learn from the book, and maybe understand the world around them a little bit better.
Eddie Rester 17:42
As you dive into the data, and you look at that growth, because I remember when I came out of seminary in 1997, somebody, one of my teachers pointed to the Pew Research Forum and said this number seems to be growing. But at that point, it wasn't even much growth, but it really has shot up, it feels like, over the last 20-30 years, this group of you know, atheist, agnostics, people who don't affiliate in any way. What does the data say to us about why? Or does it help us understand that?
Ryan Burge 18:16
Yeah, I wish there was an easy... You know, that's the problem with social science, is nothing's simple. There's not one simple reason why this is leading to that because you think about how complex the world is, and how all these factors are sort of bearing on us at one time. In the book, I kind of lay out like eight different reasons I think the nones have risen so quickly. And I think some of them are--like secularization is one. It's just the idea that as we become more educated, we're gonna become less religious. And that's basically been the story in Western Europe for, you know, post war period. So that was gonna happen. We're gonna become less religious. That's just a fact. But then there's other things to add to it. Politics, for instance, we can't discount the role of politics. Liberals are much more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than conservatives, by much. I mean, like 12% of conservatives and like 45% of very liberals are nones. So I mean, it's just daylight and dark difference. But then there's stuff like the internet. Internet sounds so good. Like, it sounds like that's the reason. But from a social science standpoint, a causal standpoint, it's actually really hard to figure that out, because the internet rose so quickly. And there was no control group. We didn't go to half of America, "You're not going to get the internet for five years. Let's see what happens." You know, we all adopted it in a three or four year window, it went from, like, 10% adoption to 80% adoption. So like, it just happened overnight. And the people who didn't get the Internet are a very weird subset of Americans. Probably poor, probably rural, probably more conservative, anyway, politically. And so you can't really test those theories. But in the book, I kind of lay out a bunch of different thoughts. It could be the breakdown of the family. It could be the decline in social trust that we have amongst institutions. So you know, it's a bunch of things all at one time, and not everyone got to being a none through the same pathway, but I think for most people, you could probably see a little bit of this and a little bit of that a little bit of the other thing that got them there. And for many of them, I'll tell them, you know, they'll read the look and go, "You know what? It helped me understand my journey a lot better, my moving away from faith journey and why that happened a lot better." And I love that. To me, that's awesome, because I'm giving people language and structure and scaffolding to understand their lives. And I think that's really one of the values of social science is trying to put you in a larger narrative, saying, "You're not a weirdo. You're going with what everyone else is doing. And here's why you're doing that."
Chris McAlilly 20:23
So I wonder... Put us in that context. So we're United Methodists. United Methodism, just use that as the test case, if you don't mind. So if you think about, you know, a lot of the conversation in the United Methodism, as a denomination began in 1968. There are kind of two camps. One camp says, we've been in decline basically since then, you know. And that decline has a number of different... There are a number of different arguments that are out there about kind of why the decline is happening. One is we've lost our lost touch with the Bible. We've lost touch with Jesus, as, you know, a theological divine and human and the Savior of the world. And then the other camp is we've lost touch with our culture. We're irrelevant, and there are different people that kind of pitch it in different directions. It's, you know, I think simply defined as kind of a conservative/liberal divide, but it's not just that, because there's some conservatives that are doing some crazy things with worship. There's some liberals that are... You know, they're just some different ways in which you can construct being culturally relevant. So I wonder, kind of, you know, for United Methodists or any other kind of denomination, how do you begin to think through that from an objective, social scientific kind of perspective?
Ryan Burge 21:43
Yeah, so United Methodists are what we would call a mainline church, you know. And there are seven sisters in the mainline. United Methodist is the largest of those sisters, so United Methodist Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ, American Baptists, which is what I am now. You've got the Episcopalians, you know, those are the kinds of denominations--oh ELCA and PCUSA are the other two, Evangelical Lutheran and Presbyterian Church USA. Those seven churches used to dominate American life. I mean, I've seen statistics back into the 1950s that say that almost half of Americans were affiliated with one of those seven denominations. So like half of Americans are mainline. And what do I mean by mainline? They're called mainline because they used to be on the main line of most towns across America. They were the downtown strip, right? You drive through most rural parts of America, and you see the Methodist Church, the American Baptist Church and the ELCA, and the PCUSA, all lined up in a nice row. And now they've gone from 50% of Americans in the 1950s to 30% of America in 1975. And now about 10% of Americans are affiliated with a mainline church. And I think it's very likely it'll be 5% of Americans in the next 20 years, because the average mainline Protestant now is over 60 years old. Which means that death does a lot of things to demography, and so a lot of those people are going to die off. The question is why? If you look at evangelicalism, it's actually a holding pretty steady, the share of Americans who are evangelical today, the number of Americans who are evangelical today, is the same number as it was in 1993. About 75 million American adults are evangelical. So why is the mainline going from 30 to 10, or 50 to 10? And why is evangelicalism staying around 20 or 25%? There's a bunch of different... This is like one of the things that haunt us in the social sciences. We don't have a great answer for it. But a lot of the kind of discussion is the idea that there's like a continuum of religion, right? So there's evangelicals on the far right, let's say. There's a mainline in the middle, and then there's the nones on the other side. And you need to have a buffer between you and nothing. And evangelicals have that because they've got the mainline in the middle sort of serving as the buffer between them and nothing. Mainliners don't have that. They have them, and they have nothing. And so for a lot of people, as we got away from religion, religion became less of a socially desirable thing to do. It was like, "Why do I go? I don't really believe that stuff anyway." Because evangelicals are, you know, very fervent. They're literalists. They believe in the actual resurrection. They're, you know, very clear on these certain doctrinal beliefs. Mainliners are much more moderate. And when you're moderate like that, there's not a lot of... It's like, "Well, it's just like a social club. I don't really believe in the Jesus thing, anyway, the salvation, the resurrection, and all things that come along with that." So you know what? It's a lot cooler to go golf on Sunday morning than it is to go to church because I am getting the same thing out of both--the social interactions, all those kinds of things. For evangelicals, they thought, "If I don't go here, I'm going to die and go to hell." And the mainline is like, "I don't know, you might go to hell you might not." And that kind of ambiguity is what led a lot of people away from the mainline and then you know, like, decline leads to decline. You know, that's the way that the world works. Like, it's fun being a growing organization or a growing church. It's not very fun to be a declining organization or declining church. And so for a lot of people, they look around and go, "Man, this place is kind of clearing out. I'm going to clear out, too. I'll go somewhere else where there's more people." And so I think it kind of fed on itself in that way. We're sort of living in the residue of what happened 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.
Chris McAlilly 24:58
Yeah, no, that's super helpful.
Eddie Rester 25:01
Yeah, I was gonna say, I have heard the, you know, "Eddie, I get as much going golfing or sitting in the woods hunting on Sunday morning." I'm like, "Well, thanks, I guess." So...
Chris McAlilly 25:10
It's also the case that Baptists make the best Methodists. I think that's... This is a claim that I'm beginning to get more comfortable with. Because I do think, what you said, that there's a buffer between evangelicals and the mainline--I tend to think of, you know, a Southern Baptist that between evangelicals and the mainline--I tend to think of, you know, a Southern Baptist that becomes a Methodist as somebody who really does believe this stuff, but who has a generosity of spirit and kind of an openness to the world. And that's a good combination, in terms of someone who can live in our tradition really well. But I had never thought about is like, there's a buffer between evangelicals and none.
Ryan Burge 25:50
And like, I think that's what the mainline used to be--the net, that would catch people as they were falling towards nothing. And now the net has huge holes in it. Because, you know, like, now there's like... Okay, I'll take take my community, all right. I live in a little town, a little county called Jefferson County, Illinois, which is about 40,000 people, right about. In my county, there are four mainline churches total now. There's mine, the American Baptist Church. There are about 10 of us on a good Sunday. There is the Episcopals, who don't even meet anymore, because they can't find a priest. There is the PCUSA and the ELC actually had to move into the same building because they couldn't afford separate buildings any longer. So they actually share Sunday morning. One has church at 9:15. One has 10:30. And they're both really small, like probably 30 people or less on each side. And then there's United Methodist Church, which is one of the larger churches in town, really kind of the established mainline church in town. And they're going to have a vote on, you know, whether to stay or whether to go in the next, probably, year or so. And that's going to rift that church big time, because there's a strong faction on both sides, from what I've heard from the outside. And so, you know, there's one, there's really one viable mainline church, in my community of 40,000 people in my county. Think about that. I mean, for that one mainline Bible, mainline church, there's probably at least 20 to 25 evangelical churches that have 200 or 300 members every Sunday. So there's just no... People in rural areas now think to be religious is to be conservative, politically, theologically, spiritually, culturally, all those things, because they don't know that there's another option out there, because that option has basically disappeared from most of American life. I don't know if you could find a church in my county that would do a same sex marriage right now. And when you know, probably two thirds of my county is in favor of same sex marriage, you can't find a pastor or a priest in my county to do a same sex marriage. So there's this dramatic disconnect between like what the people want and what the religious community is providing. And I think one of the reasons the mainline is going away is because people just don't know there are options out there besides conservative, evangelical Protestantism.
Eddie Rester 28:01
One of the things about your book is that, as I read through it, and I watched a couple of your videos, your presentations, there were just things that surprised me. When you when you talked about poverty and its impact on the nones. When you talked about gender and different things. As a social scientist, as you began to pull the data together, what really caught you off guard? What was surprising? I know, you wrote a second book called "20 Myths," and I want to talk about that in just a second as well. But what what really kind of caught you by surprise?
Ryan Burge 28:32
I don't think people fully realize how much American religion has shifted over the last 30 years or so. We have a really bad memory, and I'm young. So I mean, I don't know what the world looked like in 1985. I wasn't aware. I was born in 1982, so I wasn't really aware of the social world around me. If you look at the data, like in the late 1980s, like 1988, 1989, if you look at the political partisanship of weekly attenders in the mainline, half are Democrats, half Republicans. In the evangelical church, half were Democrats, half of Republicans. In the Catholic Church, half were Democrats, half were Republicans. So if you walked into a Christian church in America in 1988, you are just as likely to sit next to a Democrat, as you are to sit next to a Republican. And now if you go into any evangelical church in America, there's an 80% chance you're going to sit next to a Republican and a 20% chance you're gonna sit next to a Democrat. And if they're white, it's probably even more, the divide is even larger in terms of Republican versus Democrat. The Catholic Church has even become more Republican leaning over the last 10 or 15 years, especially white Catholics. White Catholics used to be one of the tent poles of the Democratic coalition. And now like 55, 60% of Catholics, white Catholics are Republicans and voted for Donald Trump in 2020. So we've seen this unbelievable... And even by the way, there is no real counterbalance to the Republican evangelical coalition in American Christianity. It does not exist. So like people say with a lib, they always use the word "the liberal mainline." That's what evangelicals always say, "the liberal mainline." And I look at the data and go, "Where? Show me where that liberal." At the elite level, at the leadership level, it is absolutely true. At the laity level, it is absolutely false. 55% of United Methodist identify as Republicans, and only about 38% identify as Democrats. I would not call that liberal mainline. Like, the Episcopal Church is probably 60% Democrat, but remember the Episcopal Church in America, half, about half a million Episcopalians go to church every Sunday in this entire country. Half a million, okay? There are 75 million evangelicals in this country. And there are half a million Episcopalians going to church every Sunday Like it is David and Goliath. There is no counterbalance in American life to the Republican evangelical establishment. There is no liberal strand of American Protestant Christianity that comes even close to what the Republican numbers are. And I don't think people realize it's not always been that way. You know, 30 years ago, it was very... We were very evenly divided in this country when it comes to politics and religion. And now there is no divide. It is to be religious is to be a conservative Republican. And to be non-religious is to be--we call it the God gap, or the pew gap. It's this idea of the parties are sort of sorted on religious lines. And it's really a tragedy that we don't talk about enough is how polarized people are, not just not just politically, but also religiously as well. And we're not better off or worse off for it.
Chris McAlilly 31:28
One of the things that the last chapter of "The Nones" book--and we can push forward to the myths book--but the last chapter is what can we change and what can we not, and just kind of give an overlay of kind of where you land there.
Ryan Burge 31:43
So every church I've ever been a part of is smaller today than it was whenever I first got there. I mean, and that's not easy for me to say. Okay, every church I've been a part of. My first church I ever pastored is closed now. Like, they literally close the building down. The pastor, the church I'm at right now is gonna close in the next two years. And so that chapter is basically trying to be me talking to myself, because you know, if you're a young pastor... I thought I would, to use the old Wesley phrase, set yourself on fire, people will come to watch you burn. Like, if I preached really well and did a really good job as pastor, my church is gonna grow. It's just that simple. I tried to do all those things, and my church didn't grow. So I'd sit around at night going, "What is wrong with me?" You know, "Am I broken?" Like, what, what is going on here? And what I want to tell pastors is, it is really hard to grow a church in a dying community. This is a really toxic, difficult environment to grow a church, unless you're in an area, like a suburban area that is growing very rapidly, you know, like maybe around metro Atlanta or Charlotte or Phoenix, or, you know, in Texas somewhere. It's easy to grow a church there, because people are moving in left and right. It's easy to kind of suck them in and bring them in. If you're in a community where a pretty stagnant population is not moving, good luck. You're going to struggle. And so I make this claim that like, globalization is a thing that politicians have tried to stop for literally 40 years now. You know, like, we're gonna bring jobs back to America. And every year more and more jobs go overseas, because it's cheaper to make stuff in China or Vietnam than it is in the United States of America. That's just a fact. People go. Capital is mobile. It goes where the labor costs are cheapest. You can try to stop it. It's not going to stop. Same thing with secularization. It was going to happen to America. Now, why is taking so long is a good question, but it is going to happen. So you are facing headwinds every single day. And a lot of the reason your church is not growing or not growing as fast as you want to be is probably macro level stuff outside your control. You know, one thing that political science has taught me is to be an institutionalist. We all have agency, right? We all move. But we all move inside the box that's put around us by the institutions that surround us. And the macro level forces dictate a lot of where we get to in life, and you can only go so far inside that box. But you need to see the box, understand the box, and then understand how far you can move inside the box. If you try to get outside the box, you're going to be you're going to be frustrated. And so a lot of that chapter is trying to say, hey, the box looks like this. You can work inside this box, but just understand you are still constrained by these larger macro level forces around you.
Chris McAlilly 34:04
I want to make sure I understand this, and Eddie has a question about the other book. So, you're saying one of the things that you're trying to do at the end of the book, and really kind of through your research for yourself and for others--particularly pastors, but people that are experiencing American life on the ground, wherever they're experiencing it--is to help, to allow the social scientific research to kind of make us a bit more aware of the macro level forces. So that's one thing I heard you say--that are outside of our control--but also to recognize that we have agency. And you made an interesting claim, and I think you and I are similar in age. And so I find myself, as I grow older, more interested in institutions, thinking institutionally, living within institutions. I think that's a shift from my parents' generation in a lot of ways. And so I just wonder what you mean by that. So if there are lot of macro forces that are happening, we do have agency, but for you, you're recognizing the need to exercise agency within institutional life. Just say a little bit more about that.
Ryan Burge 35:11
Yeah. So like, if you think about like the guys who started the tech revolution, like Bill Gates is a great example. One of the reasons Bill Gates is who Bill Gates is because his parents were rich, A, and he got access to a computer before almost anybody else. If you look at all those guys who started, like, Oracle, and Steve Jobs starting Apple, those guys all were born within like a three or four year window of time, and grew up around technology at a very young age before everyone else was around technology. So were they geniuses? Were they, you know, great businessmen? Were they innovators? Were they were they tech junkies? Absolutely. But they also had--the macro-level forces were at their back, not their face, you know? And so could they have been as successful as they are today? Maybe, but probably not. Because the macro-level stuff impacts where you are in life. You know, I am part of a mainline denomination that's dying. I mean, that is just a fact. If I would have been born 20 years earlier, we would not be dying as fast as we are. At this age, they would still be doing okay. But if I was born 20 years later, the denomination probably wouldn't exist anymore. That's what I worry about. If I was born 20 years later, where do guys like me go, who grew up religious but didn't want to be evangelical? Where do I go? Because there was no, there would be no options for me and 20 years. So that's sort of macro-level forces: You were born in a specific moment in time, and that shapes how you think, how you act, how you do, where you end up. You still have agency, right? Like, I'm not saying, like, I'm not a Calvinist. So you are not predetermined in your life path. You can still make your life path, but the number of options that are available to you varies depending on what your circumstances look like around you. And that could be age, gender, race, education, all those things. So you do have the ability to move inside that box, but we're all gonna hit ceilings. We're all gonna hit floors. We're all gonna hit walls on the left and right. And you know, every member of Congress goes in there going, "I'm gonna change the world." And after a year, they go, "Wow, the rules don't allow me to change the world." That's kind of the world we live in, except we don't see those invisible walls, oftentimes until it's too late. And so part of what we do in social science is say, "Look, there's walls here. You don't see them, but they exist."
Chris McAlilly 37:16
So I just want to press it one more little bit, because that seems like an argument against institutions. If you recognize the walls, you see them there.
Ryan Burge 37:25 Yeah.
Chris McAlilly 37:26
Why then... How do you get from recognizing the walls to being like, "Yep, I need the walls,"?
Ryan Burge 37:31
So here's, I actually think the internet's made it... We got rid of gatekeepers. That's what the internet's done. And in my case, it helped me tremendously because I didn't go to a great Ph. D. program. I don't teach at a most prestigious institution on Earth. I'm not at Harvard, okay. I'm at Eastern Illinois University in the middle of nowhere. I would have never been who I am without the internet, because it allowed... Good stuff rises on the internet, I feel like it's like a sorting mechanism thing, where it's like survival of the fittest. But it also allows nutty people to get bigger audiences when they would not have had those audiences. And maybe I'm the nutty person, I don't know. 20 or 30 years ago, right, there's no gatekeepers. That's good. And it's also terrifying at the same time. And I think that's the institutional argument that I make in my mind all the time is, you know, you guys are in the Methodist Church, to become a pastor in the Methodist Church takes a long time. You got to go through a seminary training, you got to go through all this process and all this thing. I became a pastor because my church looked at me and goes, "You're it. You're our pastor." I have very little theological training. I had almost no background in religious leadership. Think about these non-denominational churches, by the way. They're run by, you know, started by insurance agents, real estate agents, mechanics, who, I mean, their only education is listening to Christian talk radio. And that's how they started. It's only church to grow to be 10,000 people, but with a guy who has almost no background in leadership or training or organization or anything like that. So like that, to me is great and terrifying at the same time, but we need institutions. Here's why I'm an institutionalist. Think about what's happened in America last five years or so. We had almost an armed insurrection on the Capitol steps on January 6, and guess what? The institution held. Like, if we didn't have an institution where it would... We've got to believe in these institutions at some level, because they're what hold us together. They're what's going to exist after we're long dead. And they carry on the values--the things that we care about--those institutions carry those along. A lot of Republicans stood up to Trump because they believe in the institution of the government more than they believed in him as a person. And that's kind of the conflict of our time, I think is, do we believe in institutions? Or do we believe in people? Which one do we put above the other? If we want to endure for 500 years, you've got to believe in institutions first, because people will be born and people will die every single day. But institutions will live hopefully forever. And I think that's why we have to put our trust in institutions.
Chris McAlilly 39:46
That's so helpful. Thank you for answering that.
Eddie Rester 39:49
And just to back that up, there's a lot of writing right now. Yuval Harari, a few years ago, wrote a book about this. Robert Putnam's book, "The Upswing," which is really about how did we come out of the Civil War era? How do we become the United States that we knew in the 20th century? And he points to the establishment of a lot of institutions that were durable, over the course of time. And, you know, we could launch through there for a long time. Let me ask you, I mean, I understand that we live within this box. And one of those lids for us, that Chris and I were talking about before we got started, is that there's this cliff coming in a couple of years, where--I'm on the board of small United Methodist college--and there's this cliff coming where the birth rate dropped during the late 2000s, 2008 and forward. And that's another piece of the puzzle, I think, for churches, when they look around and say "We're don't have kids," well, there just are fewer kids than there used to be. So as we think about all of that, where's our hope? Where's the right next step for local churches, in your mind?
Ryan Burge 41:07
Yeah, I think that one thing that church... Growing is fun. Like, it's easy to grow. It's easy to add budget. It's easy to hire new staff. It's easy to build new buildings and have new programs. It's very hard to die and get smaller. And I think we have to fight the urge to continue to say that we should operate the way we were 15 years ago, when the conditions on the ground do not look like they looked like 15 years ago. If you can course correct now, a little bit, you don't have to course, you don't have to... If you do micro, careful surgery now, you don't have to do amputations 15 years down the road. And I think that's the problem is, people live in this sort of delusional world where it's like, "Just one more hump, and we'll be over the hump. Things are gonna get better in five years, if this, this, and this happens." If you look at all the writing on the wall, when it comes to religious institutions, there is no "There's a better something on the other side of this thing." It's how are you going to decline well, and how are you going to manage the resources of your congregation well, in a way that makes sense--whether it be facilities, or staff, or programs, or whatever it is. I think that churches kind of wait too late to kill things. You know, if you have a program that's had, like 50 or 60, people participating for a long, long time, and all of a sudden, the last two or three--take COVID out of the picture--and now it's down to 15 or 20 people, you might want to think about reconfiguring that program, because it's probably not working. Or if your youth pastor leaves and you only have 12 kids in youth group, you might want to think about hiring a part time youth pastor or maybe not filling that position for a while. And those are not fun conversations. I'll be the first to say that. Like, that is not fun to do. My church has had to figure out how to die over the last 15 years. But here's something I've never heard a pastor say this, "I need to be a hospice pastor." Okay, like, that's, there's no glory in being a hospice pastor. There's a glory in starting a church from nothing and making it 10,000 people. There's so much fun and media attention on that stuff. There is no media attention for a pastor who hangs around and preaches every Sunday to eight people, half who fall asleep, because he knows when they have their funeral, that he's going to be the one that preaches, because he's known them for the last 15 years of their lives. Like that is the kind of mentality that we need to have, is that growth is not the only outcome. And it's not, it might not even be the best outcome. We need to grow well, and we need to decline well, and I think a lot of churches get so hung up on grow, grow, grow, they forget that you can decline well, too. Organizations have to ride the ups and the downs. And there's nothing in the data you see that's going to say, "Wow, there's a lot of people coming back to church in five or 10 or 15 years." Really just the opposite. So what does your church look like when it's a third smaller in 15 years? How do you operate? Can you manage your building in 15 years? How many staff do you need? Those are the kinds of conversations that churches need to have, and no one wants to have them. And by the time you have to have them, it's too late, because you have to have them. You don't get to plan. You've got to do it now. And I think that's where we're--this is such a guru thing to say--don't be reactive, be proactive. And I think churches are proactive only in the positive direction, not the negative direction, and they should be.
Eddie Rester 44:16
I remember one time when as a young pastor, we needed to kill off a Sunday night service, because it had dropped down to eight or nine very faithful people meeting in a small room, not even in the sanctuary anymore. And when I brought that up to them, it was like I was taking away their best friend. And a retired pastor in the group finally saved me and said, "Eddie, why don't you let me just meet with these folks on Sunday nights.?" And he saved me because those folks were... They had sharpened their knives to come at me, in a very literal sense, because I was taking away a friend. Churches don't do what you're talking about very well because they take it as a sign of failure and not faithfulness.
Ryan Burge 45:02
Do five things well, as opposed to 12 things poorly. You know, like, there's nothing wrong with that. You only have a limited amount of time and resources use them to do the things that actually... There's the Pareto principle, which is the 80-20 rule is also what's called. 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. 80% of your growth comes from 20% of your customers. Churches need to think about that. 80% of the vitality you have in church probably comes from 20% of your activities. So focus on those and cut the other ones by the wayside, because they're really not doing a lot for you. I think there's nothing wrong with that. You've got to... Whenever the body goes into shock, all the blood goes to the core, because that's where all your vital organs are. You don't have room for your fingers and toes and your brain stops working, you know. So like, I think that's the kind of mentality that churches need to have is, fingers and toes are important, don't get me wrong. But man, if your heart stops pumping or your brain stops working, you've got nothing left. So let's huddle up and figure out what we're good at and focus on what we're good at.
Chris McAlilly 45:59
So for churches, pastors, you know, leaders of faith-based organizations that are hearing this, thinking about thi,s and trying to kind of figure out the next steps. How do you think about the role of social science within kind of a larger set of things that you would need to do if you're doing discernment? Because ultimately, it's, you know, discernment, typically, we read our Bible, we pray, we sing Kumbaya, and then we make a decision. What is the role of social science? What could it do as one of the tools that folks use as they discern kind of what needs to be cut? What needs to be killed off? What needs to die? And what needs to... where do we put our resources that could lead to the most faithfulness and health?
Ryan Burge 46:54
So pastors, God love you guys, you're trained to think that everything's vertical about the world. Why isn't your church growing? Because God is not, you know, we're not praying hard enough. We're not preaching well enough. We're not... the work for us is not designed the correct way. You know, everything's like a vertical problem. I'm a social scientist. For me, everything is a horizontal problem. Like it's, why is your church not growing? A lot of pastors go, "Because I'm not preaching hard enough, or we're not doing enough outreach, or evangelism or whatever." For me, it's, "you're probably in a declining community." Like that's just how my brain thinks. I'm always thinking like a horizontal solution to your problems, or a horizontal reason for the things that are happening to you. I think there are two ways to look at every problem, right? And I'm trained a different way than you all are to think about things around you. And if you think about your community around you, it makes you think differently about the problems that you're facing, right? Like if you're in a county where your population has declined 10% over the last 10 years, that's going to tell you a lot about what's going on. So if your church has declined 10%, you go, "Well, we just declined because the county declined. It's the same number of people." So you know, for me, when I think about social science stuff and what it teaches me as a pastor is like, here's what we need to do more as churches, not everything has to be about Jesus all the time. Like, I love when I'm sitting there talking--well, I don't love it. I actually hate it--when I'm talking to someone before church starts, I go, "Well, it's 9:30. We've got to go to church now." What if we're having a good conversation? What if we're having a good dialogue? And now the church service gets in the way of that good dialogue. The most important part of the church service for me as a social scientist is the 15 minutes before and the 15 minutes after the service actually happens. Because that's where community is built, connections are built. It's where you make plans to have dinner together, or, you know, babysit my kids ,or you take me to the doctor's appointment that I need to go to, where we convey information about our families, where we build bonds. That to me, is where churches need to focus more on and just having opportunities for social connection, horizontal connection, not necessarily vertical connection. And I've been telling churches I think you need to have a social budget, straight up social budget, not social so we can do a evangelistic sermon or have a praise and worship time. Like literally just a potluck, where we're gonna, everyone's gonna bring a little bit of food. We're gonna provide some food at the church, y'all sit down and talk for as long as you want to. If that's two hours, if that's three hours, let your kids run around the church and get in trouble. Let the parents sit there and have a moment to themselves with another couple who's going through the same things they are. Make it easy to create social connections with each other. I think you're gonna see your church do better that way, because people are going to... People come to church for the wrong reasons: free food, babysitting, you know, those kinds of things, that's why they come. But they'll stay for the right reasons. Because they'll make horizontal connections, build bridges to each other, and then make it into the worship space because they want to see why we are all here. They want to see your church is not full of bunch of weirdos. And how do you prove that? By just hanging out. And churches are really bad at hanging out. They think everything has to have a spiritual purpose and it does not. There's no law in any book I've ever read that said church has to be church all the time. It can just be a social space sometimes. You know what churches have a lot of? Gyms, cafeterias, classrooms, places to run around, yards. Use that stuff for the community. And I'll be amazed at seeing what your church is going to do when you get that opportunity out there.
Eddie Rester 50:13
Two quick thoughts here. One is that what you're talking about right there is what the church lost during COVID. We didn't even get to talk about COVID. I had a whole article to ask you about.
Chris McAlilly 50:20
We're just gonna have to... This is good, and we're gonna have to do a second conversation.
Eddie Rester 50:25
As you talk about that, getting to know, I remember when people started coming back, I realized those 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after, that's what I learned who was going to the hospital, who's having surgery, who's struggling with something, "Eddie, you need to call so and so." And as pastors and church members, we had missed that, during that whole, whole season. The other thing, I can't remember what I've... I'm getting old here. I'm the old guy in the conversation. I've just lost my train. But I feel like that, oh, I know what it was. The early church, that's what they did. They got together, they talked about Jesus, they sang songs, then they ate a meal together. It wasn't pass by, drive by communion. It was we're gonna eat together. And it was this group of people in the early church that would, under no other circumstances, would have ever hung out together. They would have never been in the same room together, the same home together for a meal, because the social structures of the day said, "Absolutely, you can't be together." And yet that was the strength of the early churches. We read it in Scripture.
Ryan Burge 50:25
Wonderful. And the social scientist in me goes, you know, that social contact theory says if you know someone from a different group, you're gonna be more tolerant of that group. So now, a Democrat is not just someone you see on Fox News, who they yell about, it's my friend who sits next to me in the pew every Sunday. And I like him. He's a good guy. He's got a good family. He's a good moral person. Or a person of a different race than you, right? "I don't know any Black people. But I sit next to a Black guy at church, and he's a good dude, I like him." So it builds these bridges between you and other people. And I think that's amazing. That's what church used to do, guys. It used to build bridges to people of different races, different economic backgrounds. There's a recent study that came out of Harvard, where they looked at the social connections of 40 million people on Facebook, and what they were looking for, one of the
things we know about economic growth, to move up the economic ladder, is you got to know people who are at the higher level, right? So if you hang around a bunch of poor people, the chances of you getting out of your poverty is actually really low. So you want to have an economically diverse friend group. What they found was, at school, you don't get that because schools are based on geography, right? So poor schools and rich schools are segregated. Neighborhoods, same way, right? Rich neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods. Workplaces? Factory workers hang out with factory workers and doctors hang out with doctors. That's just how it goes. The one place they found where you could find economic diversity in your friend group was religious organizations. I mean, religious organizations give you more diversity than almost any social organization on Earth today. And why are we chopping that off? Why are churches restricting that part of what they are? We should have more of what that is. Churches are like, "Well, church ends at 10:45, and Sunday school begins at 11." Like, stop that. Like, once a month, go "No Sunday school. Social hour hangout." You know what I mean? Hang out for as long as you want. We'll, you know, leave the church doors open for you. If you want talk for an hour and a half, go ahead. You know, that's what church needs to be more of. They'll get the Jesus, don't worry. They'll get the Jesus. You don't have to force it down their throats all the time. Let them hang out and see what happens. And you might be amazed at how much growth you see by not even preaching.
Chris McAlilly 53:35
That's a great place to stop for a couple preachers. We'll leave it right there. Ryan, thanks a lot for taking the time to be with us. And we will, we didn't get to the second book. We gotta get to that. And we'll have to have you back.
Eddie Rester 53:51
If you're listening, the two books, go pick them up. One is "The Nones" and the second one is the "20 myths".
Chris McAlilly 53:58
Where else can folks find you Ryan, if they want to kind of follow up on this? Twitter, I know, but what's your handle for that?
Ryan Burge 54:05
@ryanburge, R-Y-A-N B-U-R-G-E, you can find me on Twitter. All I do is post graphs about what I'm thinking about, like, literally my entire feed is just graphs. I don't do anything else. You can find me ryanburge.net is my personal website, ryanburge@gmail.com. I mean, I'm easy to find. If you need to contact me, I'm not on of these people who hides behind all this different stuff. I'm very accessible. I do have two books. "The Nones" version one came out in 2021, and "20 myths came out in 2022." There's a second edition of "The Nones" coming out in May, which has got about 65 pages more of content, about 25 more graphs, about 15,000 more words. I devoted an entire chapter to COVID and what I think COVID did to American religion. That will come out in May from Fortress Press. So I actually really do think that book is not just a money grab on my side. I really think that's a better book than the first version, because I got to talk about that book for two years, and I learned a lot by those conversations about what I left out and what I need to talk about more. So I really do think it's a better book. It comes out in May. And then in August, I have a book called "The Great Dechurching," which is coming out, which we did three surveys of people who left religion and trying to figure out why. We use some algorithms, some machine learning to figure that out. And it's with Michael Graham and Jim Davis. I'm the with author on that book. I did all the data analysis for that book. And I also did these inset boxes in each chapter, kind of giving some flavor and some context and some broader looks at what the data is trying to say. That book is called "The Great Dechurching." It comes out in August from Zondervan. So that's really what... Oh, I'm also the research director for a group called Faith Counts. It's a nonprofit, nonpartisan, inter-denominational organization. My job is just to show people the positives of religion in their lives in American society. So I basically make short videos and do posts about cool things that religion does in people's lives, makes it better, increases happiness, increases satisfaction, all those kinds of things. Because all the stories we tend to hear about religion or negative stuff: scandal, sex abuse, corruption, da da da da da. My job is to counter that narrative a little bit, saying there is some good things to be had about religion, from a scientific perspective. There's some good things about religion out there, you just don't know about them. So it's my job to kind of make those known to the average person. So that's my deal.
Chris McAlilly 56:20 Awesome, man.
Eddie Rester 56:21 Awesome.
Chris McAlilly 56:21
Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Thanks for being with us on podcast today.
Ryan Burge 56:26 Absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Eddie Rester 56:27
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.
Chris McAlilly 56:35
If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]