America’s Religious Revival Is a Mirage

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Ryan Burge about why the U.S. has historically been so religious and what started to change that.

Derek Thompson: We’re going to do something fun on this show. We’re going to talk about the history of the state of the future of religion in America, and we’re going to do it by showing audiences watching on Spotify or YouTube some of the really fantastic charts that you’ve published on your Substack. So if folks are listening rather than watching, have no fear, you’re going to get 100 percent of the content here. But if you can watch, you’re going to get 110 percent of the content, because some of these charts are really, really fascinating, and you’re going to want to maybe take a screen grab and talk about it on your group chats.

Let’s start with the biggest possible picture here. Throughout the 20th century, America was, by all accounts, the most religious rich country in the world by far. Four hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, 100 years after Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” in America, God was not dead. We were still a very religious country. What’s the deal with America and religion?

Ryan Burge: You are right, Derek. We are an insanely religious country. And it becomes even more prominent when you do a scatterplot of GDP on one axis and religiosity on the other axis, because all the other wealthy countries on earth, especially our eastern, western European neighbors, Scandinavian neighbors, they’re significantly less religious than we are. Our closest comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP, and only 17 percent of the Swiss say religion is very important. In America, it’s about 50 percent.

So we are three times more religious than we should be compared to our European neighbors. We’re more religious than basically any industrialized country on earth at this point. And so I tell people, I never get asked to travel outside the United States and talk about religion because I do so much American religion stuff, and it applies nowhere else on earth. People around the world look at us and gawk at us and go, “Why are you guys so weird?” We really are a case of one when it comes to our economic prosperity, but also our religiosity. I mean, we are as religious as some of these sub-Saharan African countries on some metrics. So in every possible way, on the religiosity of America, there is no comparison case in the world right now.

Thompson: You just answered the question statistically, that we are three times more religious than the most religious other rich country. I still want to know why you think that’s the case. And this might be a short answer that requires a book, but if you can make the book maybe, like, two and a half minutes long. Again, why is America specifically so much more religious, and why did our religiosity continue to hold on deep into the 20th century?

Burge: Yeah. So I think the Christian nationalists are going to hate this answer, but the fact that we did not have a state church at the founding. Really, you can thank Thomas Jefferson for this, by the way, who was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. The idea that we should not have a government-sponsored religion. I always tell people, if you want them to hate something, make it part of the government.

And so people hate Amtrak, people hate the post office because they’re run by the government. We don’t have a state church. And people don’t even realize this—in highly secular Germany, there still is a state church, and you pay taxes to that church unless you opt out of it. And many Germans don’t opt out because they don’t even understand where the money’s going.

There’s a theory in this field called “religious economy theory” put together by Roger Finke and [Rodney] Stark in a book called The Churching of America, where they argue that the competition between religious groups in America, by not having a monopolized state church, that religion really had to compete to be the best, to be the most interesting, the most charismatic, the most attractive. And we had the most robust religious market of any country in the Western part of the world. And because of that, we had one movement after another movement after another movement capture more of the American consciousness, right?

We even had the Latter-day Saints in the conversation. But the United Methodists and the Baptists dominated American religion in the 1800s with their circuit riders. They gave young men a Bible and a horse and said, “Go west and don’t come back. Start a church.” And a lot of them had a lot of success. And even the modern iterations with these nondenominational churches. I mean, you can see constant evolution in the religious marketplace when, to be fair, in most of the rest of the developed world, religion is very stagnant. They’re sort of worshipping the same way today they did 200 years ago.

Now, add to that the fact that America was founded by deeply religious people, by and large. I mean, a lot of them were scallywags and weirdos and people who got debt problems in Europe and came here, but a lot of people really came here because they thought it was the new Eden, right? It was the new world for them to express their faith. And we can’t measure this, but it almost feels like a deep sense of religious belief and religiosity is sort of woven into the DNA of Americans and into our culture. So I think that created the sort of fertile soil. And then the fact that we had this marketplace just allowed that soil to be even more productive. And I don’t think you’ll ever see anything like this ever again, really.

Thompson: The answer you just gave makes the next part of this story so much more surprising: that if you look at the share of Americans who said, “I do not believe in any particular religion. I have no particular religious affiliation,” it’s a very flat line from the 1940s, when modern polling basically started, to the 1980s to the early 1990s. And when you look at this graph of people saying, “I have no religious affiliations,” sometimes called the nones—not n-u-n, but n-o-n-e-s, and we’ll return to this concept in a second—when you look at this graph, it’s like a flat savanna until 1990, and then suddenly it’s Mount Kilimanjaro. It just starts going up linearly. What happened in 1990?

Burge: I call it the venture capitalist graph. Every venture capitalist wants to see a company, no users, and boom, inflection point, and then it hockey sticks up and all the money comes in and all the recognition. The nones were sort of hanging around for a very long time. So there was a paper written in 1968 by a sociologist that called the nones the “neglected category of analysis.” No one was even thinking about it, writing about it. Because it was 5 percent of America, right? It’s like an interesting aside, but there’s not enough data to study the nones, really, in America until the 1990s.

And I wrote about this in my new book. What happened in the 1990s that allowed religion to sort of fade so quickly and the nones to rise so rapidly? I do think it’s a multifaceted thing. The one that a lot of people who do this kind of work point to is the fall of the Berlin Wall. The younger set who’s listening to this right now, if you grew up in America in the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s, you could not say you were an atheist—because if you said you were an atheist, you were a communist. Those things were linked together in the American consciousness.

And so a lot of people were sort of closet atheists. And when the Berlin Wall fell, now we’re not in the Cold War anymore and atheism is not so—you don’t want to be blackballed, and you were blackballed if you said you were atheist in the ’50s. In the 1990s, that sort of started fading, and you could really say what you were, in a way. And what accelerated that was the rise of the internet, which allowed people to actually say what they really were online and then find other people that agreed with them. And that sort of gave people the courage when they were asked on polls to say what they really were.

The example I give is, imagine you were a kid raised in Mississippi in the 1950s, and you did not believe in God. You’re probably never going to tell another human being what you don’t believe in. You might lose your job, you might get kicked out of your family, you might lose your spouse over something like that. But now you can go online and find the Atheists of Mississippi Facebook group or Subreddit or some online community, and that emboldens you to say what you really are when it comes to your religious affiliation.

And then the last thing I’ll say is it has to do something with politics. I mean, you can’t look at the data and say that something didn’t happen. And I really do think Newt Gingrich is one of the worst politicians we’ve had in terms of the trajectory of America. I argue in my book that he decided that he’d rather win than be a good person, and so to drag the Democrats through the mud was the way for him to win. And by the way, proof’s in the pudding: Republicans won the majority in the House in 1994 for the first time in years by going in the mud. The Democrats did the same thing back and forth, and then the Republican Party started calling the Democrats evil because they’re not the party of evangelicals. And then the Republican Party started courting evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

And I think that sort of set off what we call the “God gap” or the “pew gap,” which is the idea that the Republican Party is the party of people of faith and the Democratic Party is largely becoming the party of not faithful people. And I think that’s going to continue going forward. I think it actually might be the most important political religious phenomenon in America, this huge divide religiously between the two parties right now.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Ryan Burge
Producer: Devon Baroldi