It’s too easy to assume that our world is the whole world. Wherever you get your information doesn’t matter; it’s partial. The more connected your information is to a social media drive source, the more biased it is. The bots have your heart and your mind and they feed you what gets you riled up.
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
Which is why you and I need studies that work as hard as possible at eliminating bias and basing views on researching data. I’m talking sociologists and political scientists who know more than the average blogger with an opinion and have less passion about what the pastor wants to be true enough that he or she can convince the congregation that the world really is falling apart if we vote for this party or that party.
Which is why every pastor, every professor, every church leader and every internet magazine needs to read Ryan Burge’s new book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.
Burge is an American Baptist pastor with Southern Baptist roots; he’s a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University; he has been writing for magazines for quite awhile. I put Burge alongside Christian Smith and Brad Wright as a leading source of solid information for what’s going on in the church. This book takes all those studies of his and puts them in accessible form – lots of graphs that (as you know) tell the story in color. It’s based in social sciences but it’s written up in accessible prose. I was privileged to see an early copy, to blurb the book, and to know that this is one we have to read together and discuss.
The book – wait for it – should become formative for the next decade of intelligent, context-based ministry.
Most pastors don’t know this stuff. Most pastors need this stuff. It’s too easy to pick up a tweet or a blog post and run with it.
However, one of the valuable things I learned in graduate school was how little I – and all of us – know about most of the world, which is why data in untrained hands can be a dangerous thing.
Burge straddles two worlds – the pastoral and the social scientific – and this qualifies him to help us all. He uses the General Social Survey (GSS), which I first saw used carefully in Christian Smith, and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). In other words, polls on a Twitter page do not an accurate study create.
Here’s a fact: the Nones – or the religiously unaffiliated – have grown. In 1996 they were at about 10 percent, 2006 they were at 15%, in 2014 they reached 20%, and the are now the same size as Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Thus, “the religiously unaffiliated were statistically the same size as the largest religious groups in the United States.”
Of Behaviors, Beliefs, and Belonging, Burge focuses on Belonging as an indicator of religious commitment. He examines the seven religious traditions in the USA:
Evangelical Protestants: 17% in 1972, 29.9% in 1983, in 2018 21.6%.
Mainline Protestants: 1972 at 27.9%, peaking in 1976 at 30.8%, in 2018 at 11%.
Black Protestants: in 1972 at 14% and staying relative the same at 9-10% in a slow deline to about 6.2% in 2018.
Catholics: 27.3% in 1972 and relative slow decline from 2006 (27.3% again) to 23.3% in 2018.
The Nones: in 1972 were 5.1% and have seen nothing short of a steady climb, especially since about 1993, to 23.7% in 2018.
The Pew Center is more specific than the GSS on the unaffiliated, and the CCES has studied this intensively. They categorize four types: in 2018 Nones (c. 27%), Nothing in Particulars (20%), Agnostics (6%), and Atheists (6%).
Burge shows that there are 31.3% of Americans with no religious affiliation.
Two groups have changed the most: mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated.
Why? Join us next week.
Doing ministry in the Bay Area means we must understand the nones. Now the increasing in nones in the US as a whole means we need to do some deep listening here. So many of the nones have experienced abuse in the church and want nothing to do with it.