Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned, I’m Preet Bharara.

Ryan Burge:

And what I found was super interesting, which is the idea that people who believe the Bible is literally true, are less tolerant. It makes sense, right? If I’m right, then you’re wrong, and why should I tolerate wrongness and sinfulness? That makes sense. But you know, who are the most tolerant people? The people who went to church every week because they built those bridges to people who are different than them.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Ryan Burge. He’s a leading data analyst on religion and politics and a Political Science Professor at Eastern Illinois University. He’s also been a pastor in the American Baptist Church for over 20 years. Burge looks for trends at the intersection of religion and politics and has found some pretty notable takeaways. Americans are less religious today than ever. Over the last decade, the portion of people who identify with a religion has dropped by 11 points and that has wide implications for society. So what’s going on? Why are people leaving religious institutions? How are religious groups becoming more polarized? And what does it all mean for our elections? That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now let’s get to your questions. We’ve got an email from listener Tony who has two questions. The first one is this, “Why should we care if Mark Meadows is tried in state or federal court?” Well, that’s a good question and something that we’ve been talking about in this podcast and also the Cafe Insider week to week, you’ll recall that Mark Meadows and some other defendants in the Georgia State case relating to the election in Georgia have moved to transfer their case to federal court removal to federal court it’s called in technical legal parlance, and it’s available to people who at the time of the conduct alleged in the indictment were federal officials, and the conduct in question was related to their federal work, their official duties. So the question is, the things that Mark Meadows was doing, did they fall within his official duties or outside his official duties? And if it’s the former, he has a shot at going to federal court.

You’ll recall that Donald Trump made the same kind of motion with respect to the state case in New York, brought by Alvin Bragg, the DA in Manhattan. And there, with respect to the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, a southern district of New York Federal judge, Alvin Hellerstein, ruled that the conduct in question was not related sufficiently to the President’s work as Commander-In-Chief or the head of the executive branch. And so the case would not be transferred. Now, Mark Meadows maybe has a better argument in so far as he’s saying everything he did with respect to the election and finding out about the election and calls he made to Georgia, were at the direction of his direct boss, the President of the United States, and that the ambit of the Chief of Staff’s job is very broad and almost everything that he’s doing, if not everything that he’s doing in his lawyer’s words, are “official duties.”

I don’t know if it’ll succeed or fail. I think he probably has the worst of the argument, but it’s a much stronger argument than Trump had in the Manhattan case. But back to your question, “Why should we care?” I don’t know that we care that much. The federal court, even if it does accept the case and transfer the case to federal court, will still look at the Georgia RICO statute as written, apply Georgia law. And so the kinds of witnesses you see in the testimony that we’ll hear about will largely be the same. There are a couple of things that maybe are different that maybe we should care about. One is, there may be a slight difference in the jury pool in the federal court case versus the state court case. And second, and maybe a big deal for a lot of people who have been commenting on this, in the Georgia State Court, the great likelihood is we’d be watching the proceedings on television.

They would be public and transparent, and I think the American public would get a chance to observe legal action literally in action. Much the way that I think we learned a lot in the country from the January 6th committee’s hearings that were done mostly open and in public, that in all likelihood will not happen if the case is transferred to federal court.

As for your second question, “Why would Meadows choose to testify in the Fulton County case as he did on Monday?” That’s another great question. Generally speaking, defendants don’t often testify at their actual trial on the merits, whether the jury is determining whether or not the person is guilty because you subject yourself to potentially withering cross-examination and all sorts of other contradictory statements. So it can be a rough road to testify at all in a criminal case. And here, it’s not even the trial stage, it’s just a preliminary stage relating to a motion he’s made to move the case from state court to federal court.

So he’s giving the government a preview through cross-examination of the kinds of things that he’ll say in his defense. Why did he do it? Well, I think the main reason is to give substance to the argument he’s making, that his role as Chief of Staff was broad, that all he was doing was following the instructions of Donald Trump and that it was basically all official business. To put meat on those bones, he’s probably the best witness, maybe the only good witness to do that because he’s talking about his job, his understanding of his job, and the scope of his job, not really a lot of other people who were able to do that at such a hearing. Whether that backfired or not, we’ll have to see.

So as you might imagine every week we get a lot of questions as we did this week, about the trial travails of Donald Trump, and they probably make up the lion’s share of questions we get, and that’s understandable given that Trump is under indictment in four different jurisdictions. And there’s a lot to talk about and a lot to unpack and think about. This week I think the Trump questions may have come in second place. In first place, a series of questions about how I enjoyed the Springsteen concert at MetLife Stadium last Sunday. Steve posted on Threads, “What was the highlight of the Springsteen show?” There’s a tweet from Jill, “How was Bruce last night?” There’s a tweet from Melissa, “How great was Springsteen last night?” Which is a little bit of a leading question. There was another tweet from Suzie who asked, “How fabulous was the concert?”

So everyone basically in agreement that it must’ve been amazing. The question is how amazing? Well, I’ll answer your question. Those of you who’ve been listening to the show for a while may be aware. My wife and I have three kids. The oldest one just graduated from college in May. Our middle son is in college and our youngest son we took to college for the first time last week. So it makes me a little sad. I’m very happy for them, very proud of them, all of them. But it brings you down a little bit. If you’re a parent and you’ve been living with your child for 18 years and you drop them off at college, no matter how proud and excited you are about that. So I think we needed a little bit of a pick me up. And Bruce provided that. I’ve been to a lot of Bruce concerts and I would rank this one up near the top of all concerts I’ve been to, the energy, the joy, the crowd was really unbelievable.

Highlights for me was as always Bruce’s rendition of my favorite song of all time, Thunder Road, never disappoints. And I thought it was particularly good last Sunday. And then, as a lot of people who were Bruce fans had been commenting, he played Jungleland, which is not routine at recent Bruce concerts. And in particular, seeing Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey is extra special. Jersey where I grew up. Asbury Park where my father practiced medicine for 50 years. And where Bruce Springsteen first made his name and where he hails from. Particularly special is how Bruce ended the show a little bit surprisingly, but goes over unbelievably well in the garden state. His interpretation of Jersey Girl, pretty special, pretty great. And if Bruce is playing to a stadium and a particular stadium in the Meadowlands, there’s a particular stanza in his song Wrecking Ball that goes over really monumentally. You may know it, it’s this.

Bruce Springsteen:

[Singing].

Now my home is here in the Meadowlands where mosquitoes grow big as airplanes. Here where the blood is filled, the arenas filled and Giants play the game. So raise up your glasses and let me hear your voices call. Come on. ‘Cause tonight all the dead are here. So bring on your wrecking ball, bring on your wrecking. Bring on your wrecking.

Preet Bharara:

And as I always say, when people ask me why I like Springsteen, I paraphrase John Stewart who once said on his TV show, “Do you like joy? If you like joy, go watch Bruce in concert.”

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Ryan Burge.

THE INTERVIEW

Religion can feel like a fraught topic in American politics, political science Professor and Pastor Ryan Burge cuts through the rhetoric and looks at the numbers. He’s been tracking recent trends in religious behavior. Professor Ryan Burge, welcome to the show.

Ryan Burge:

Thanks so much for having me, Preet, really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

So I’ve been wanting to talk about religion and religiosity in America and in the world for some time and the way it intersects with our politics, and you’re the perfect guest to talk about that given all the different hats you wear. I guess my first question though is, as someone who is both a professor but also a pastor in the Baptist Church, what interested you in parsing these numbers and doing graphs about trends and religiosity and religion in the United States in the first place?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, I’ve always been obsessed with just explaining myself, why am I the way I am and where do I fit into the larger story of American history? And I grew up in the 1990s in the Southern Baptist Church, kind of like prototypical evangelical right wing, anti-abortion and I really wanted to figure out what was up with that? Was that weird? Is that normal? And what I understood after making thousands of graphs is one of the real joys I have in life is helping other people understand who they are and why they are the way they are in these big sort of macro level trends and changes in American religion and politics. I think it makes them feel like they’re not so alone, that there’s actually a lot of other people like them. It helps them go, “Oh, now I get why I’m that way.” And those moments of revelation are really what makes me keep doing this kind of work.

Preet Bharara:

So when we talk about, and you talk about in your work, religious versus non-religious people, let’s do some definitions. When you research this and you research trends and when other experts do the same, what definitions are they using of religion versus non-religion? Is it church attendance? Is it how they answer surveys? How do you define those things?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, so religiosity is really hard to define. It’s an amorphous concept. The way that most social scientists think about it is we call it the three Bs: behavior, belief, and belonging. So behavior is like I go to church, synagogue or mosque, I participate in religion, I pray, I give money to the church. Those are kind of behavior things. Belief things are like I believe in God or Jesus or heaven or hell. And then the last one is belonging, which is like how do you identify on surveys? If I ask you what’s your present religion of any? Do you say you’re Catholic? Do you say you’re Protestant? Do you say you’re Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist? Or do you say that your religious identity is atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular? So the people who identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, that’s the group we call the nones, N-O-N-E-S. They kind of represent non-religious people in America.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s interesting. I was going to ask you about those subcategories of the non-religious. My team showed me some of your graphs that you have posted and you have a religious breakdown of Generation Z. And according to this you have 31% of Generation Z believe in nothing in particular, 9% agnostic, 9% atheist. What’s the difference between those, between and among those three groups?

Ryan Burge:

So we think that we really classify atheist agnostics is one category and we call those people secular people. What that means is they have thrown off religion and replaced it with a secular worldview. Things like science and rationality. That’s what their worldview is based on. Now-

Preet Bharara:

Are they necessarily against religion or is it some subset of agnostics and atheists who might consider themselves to be anti-religion in some sense?

Ryan Burge:

So great question. I just got a huge grant from the Templeton Foundation to figure out if there’s different types of nones out there using a new categorization scheme. I’m thinking what I’m going to see is there’s going to be evangelical atheists, right? People who are atheists, but want you to be an atheist too and want to convince you why religion is bad.

Preet Bharara:

I like evangelical atheists. It’s-

Ryan Burge:

You like that phrase?

Preet Bharara:

That would make a cool band, I think.

Ryan Burge:

But I do think, and I think the early waves of atheism were like that, right? It was like, “I’m an atheist and you should be an atheist too. Religion’s bad. I hate religion. It’s a tool of oppression.” All those things. Very Marxian understanding. But there’s also libertarian atheists who are like, “Listen, I don’t believe in God and I think religion’s kind of bad, but if you want to believe in God and go to church, that’s on you. That’s your thing.” The nothing in particular group. The third group is actually to me, the most interesting group in America today because they’ve grown so rapidly over the last 10 or 15 years. A quarter of Americans now call themselves nothing in particular.

Preet Bharara:

So what does that mean?

Ryan Burge:

It’s a great question.

Preet Bharara:

How is that different from agnostic?

Ryan Burge:

So if you look at the difference between atheist, agnostic, and nothing in particular, 51% of atheists have a four-year college degree. It’s 25% of nothing in particulars have a four-year college degree, one third of nothing in particulars, have a high school diploma or less and make $50,000 a year or less. One third of them. So they’re at the very bottom of the SES spectrum. While atheist agnostics are near the top of the SES spectrum, atheists engage in politics at rates that far exceed the general population, far exceed white evangelicals. They’re easily the most engaged political group in America today, atheists are. Nothing in particulars are the least politically involved group in America today. They do not go to meetings, they don’t go to rallies, they don’t even put up yard signs. They want nothing to do with politics. So they’re really socially, and economically, and politically on completely different planets.

Preet Bharara:

So I want to get into a lot of those distinctions and levels of political involvement and participation across all groups in a few minutes. But I guess what I was asking more about was, was what’s the definitional difference between an agnostic and nothing in particular?

Ryan Burge:

So what agnostic says, “That I’m not sure if God exists or not.” So they think about God in some kind of way. When I think of nothing in particular, here’s what I think a shrug, a meh. I’m not this, but I’m not that. It’s the meh category, right? It’s like I’m not anti-religion, but I’m not pro religion either. I think the nothing in particulars are really anti-establishment. They don’t like institutions, education, politics, religion.

Preet Bharara:

So they don’t go to church, but they don’t necessarily reject the existence of God? Is that fair?

Ryan Burge:

One third of them say religion is somewhat or very important in their lives though. So they’re in a weird in-between spot between being atheist, agnostic and being Protestant or Catholic. They’re sort of in between.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I’m trying to figure out what I am, but I don’t really talk about my own personal religious beliefs, but it’s kind of interesting to see how these things get graphed and plotted out. So before we get to the United States and the internal numbers and metrics of religion and religiosity in the United States, am I correct, and I’ve read some time ago this was true, is the United States among western liberal democracies, by many definitions, the most religious country?

Ryan Burge:

Oh, easily. I mean by any-

Preet Bharara:

Number one?

Ryan Burge:

… Yeah, we are easily the most religious.

Preet Bharara:

So what are some of those metrics?

Ryan Burge:

Church attendance, the average church attendance in America is about 25% of Americans say they go to church every week. We know that a lot of them lie about it, but whatever. You have to just go, “Okay, that’s what you say.”

Preet Bharara:

Lie in which direction?

Ryan Burge:

Oh, they say, they go more yeah, there’s a really interesting study that’s in pre-print from the University of Chicago where this guy looked at cell phone tracking data and found that only 3% of Americans actually go to religious services every week using cell phone data. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but we lie in the upward direction a ton on attendance and European countries average is about 14%. So 25% versus 14%, we are definitely more likely to go to church. If you look at even belief measures, 85% of Americans still believe in God at some level now. Almost only 15% take an atheist or agnostic view of God. I don’t have numbers in Western Europe, but it’s got to be way lower than 85%. So we are in a totally different world when it comes to religion.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I have another one of your charts that talks about weekly religious attendance in the United States and Europe. And you say according to this chart, that the country of Poland has a higher weekly religious attendance rate than any state in the US at 44%. And the most religious attendance with respect to a state in the United States is Utah. And then at the other end of the spectrum you have Denmark with 3% weekly religious attendance. So what accounts for Americans by these metrics being more religious than their counterparts in western democracies?

Ryan Burge:

So one explanation is that we never adopted a state church in the United States. A lot of Western European countries have a state church you have to pay… In Germany, you have to opt out of paying taxes to the state religion.

Preet Bharara:

So there’s nothing to rebel against in the same way?

Ryan Burge:

If you want to make someone hate something, make it part of the government. You know what I mean?

Preet Bharara:

Yes.

Ryan Burge:

And the fact that we’ve never… And also what’s really good about America is we have a lot of religious competition in this country. If you look at county level data, besides, obviously Utah is an outlier here with the LDS, I mean that’s a whole different world, but in most counties it’s not like we’re Catholics are 80% or 90%. You might have 40% Catholics, but then 30% Protestants, and 5% Muslims, and 10% Jews. We have a really nice mix in America of religion, and there’s a theory that actually is good for religion because those religions compete with each other to try to bring in new members. And that creates this sort of economy where they’re trying to bring in new people and that makes religion flourish because they are in competition with each other.

Preet Bharara:

But you don’t mean there’s not any real competition between Christianity, and Hinduism, and Islam? Do you mean denominations within particular religions or do you mean broad religions themselves?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, there’s not a whole lot of people who jump from say, evangelical to Hindu. That’s not a huge pipeline, but there are lots of Catholics who become non-denominational evangelicals, for instance. That’s actually a huge pipeline. One of the reasons the Catholic Church is fading is because a lot of them are becoming Protestant. So this competition, I think inside traditions, you don’t see people go from being LDS to being Buddhists. That doesn’t happen very often. But where a lot of people are going is going from being Protestant or Catholic to being none, being atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. And when religion gets complacent, that’s where it loses a lot more people. And there’s this tradition in America called the mainline, which is like Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, these old sort of really uptight churches, they’re going down rapidly and largely because they could rely on all this money they’ve made over the last, here’s an interesting stat for you, Preet. The Episcopal church owns most of Wall Street in New York City. They have it in a trust. And in 2017, according to the New York Times, the interest on that trust was over $300 million. So you might not have-

Preet Bharara:

That’s something I didn’t know.

Ryan Burge:

Yeah. So you might not have to be so interested in growth when you’ve got a $300 million income stream every year that will never go down. So competition, being desperate means you work harder. And when these traditions have a lot of money in the bank, they might not be so desperate, might not work so hard.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any truth to the conjecture that part of the reason America is more religious by these metrics is that our founding was in part based on the exercise of religion, free exercise?

Ryan Burge:

Well, there’s no doubt that a lot of the framers were religious, but their religion doesn’t really map well onto the current religion of America. You can’t look back and go, “Thomas Jefferson was an evangelical or Ben Franklin, or George Washington was an evangelical.” That’s just completely historically inaccurate. I mean, we definitely had a religious base in this country. Every colony had a lot of religious people in it. But if you look at the data from the colonial period, what you find is there were actually probably more teen pregnancies than there were weekly attenders in the colonies in the 1700s. People were not going to church that much, even back in the day

Preet Bharara:

They were doing something else.

Ryan Burge:

They were engaged in other activities on Saturday night, apparently that would not allow them to go to church on Sunday. We’ve never been as religious as we thought we were-

Preet Bharara:

Holier.

Ryan Burge:

… Very holy. But I think we create this myth, right, that we were founded by these pilgrims who were puritan, who never did anything wrong, who were always upstanding citizens. We were birthed out of scoundrels, and weirdos, and castoffs, and we had religious people amongst those people, but they definitely were not the predominant strain of American society. Even in the colonial period.

Preet Bharara:

Listeners send your letters and notes and complaints to Professor Ryan Burge. Scoundrels. That’s not a word you hear that often.

Ryan Burge:

That’s a word they use a lot back in the… I was just teaching about the colonial period in class. I mean the people came to America. If you had a good life in Western Europe, why would you go across the ocean and go to America? You could probably die.

Preet Bharara:

Were they also rap scallions?

Ryan Burge:

A lot of scallywags as well.

Preet Bharara:

I want to see a chart on those categories. So you mentioned earlier, that there is a certain amount of religious competition in the US, people move from one to the other, but it seems like a trend you’ve been examining and studying for some time now. Is the trend away from a particular denomination or religion, towards one of these other categories? Nothing in particular, agnostic or atheist. Can you describe what that trend has been?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, so I say that the denominational Christianity and the Catholic church are really under siege right now. So almost every Protestant denomination in America has lost a significant amount of its membership over the last 30 or 40 years. For instance, the Presbyterian Church, USA went from 3.1 million people in 1984 to 1.1 million people today. So I mean they’re a third the size they were. Even the Southern Baptist were 16.2 million in 2006. Now they’re down to 13.2 million. They’ve lost 3 million members in the last 16 years, 1.5 million in the last three years combined, probably the largest numerical drop. What really the challenge for those denominations are they’re being confronted with two problems. One is the nones, which we just talked about, atheist, agnostic, nothing in particular. We’re 5% of America in 1972, now are 30% of America, amongst generation Z. There are over 45% of America. But the other thing that we’re not talking enough about is the rise of non-denominational Protestant Christianity. In the 1970s, only 3% of Americans identified as non-denominational. Now 15% of all Americans identify as non-denominational. They’re the only Protestant family that grew over the last 10 years, not the Lutherans, or the Baptist, or the Methodists. The Presbyterians, non-denominational are the only type of Christianity that’s growing in America today right now.

Preet Bharara:

So is this a trend that matches what’s going on in other countries or is it unique to the United States?

Ryan Burge:

It’s very unique to the United States.

Preet Bharara:

Professor, explain it to me. What’s causing this shift?

Ryan Burge:

Well, I think a lot of it is, if you think about American society, we’ve become a much more bottom up culture than we’ve ever been. Social media has sort of democratized everything about life.

Preet Bharara:

But social media wasn’t around 40 years ago.

Ryan Burge:

That’s true.

Preet Bharara:

And you’re saying this trend began 30 or 40 years ago.

Ryan Burge:

So the nones really started rising in the 1990s. They went from 5% to 7% between 199-

Preet Bharara:

It’s so confusing every time you say nones.

Ryan Burge:

I know. I’m sorry. N-O-N-E-S, nones.

Preet Bharara:

Got it, okay.

Ryan Burge:

Between 1972 and 1991, they went from 5% to 7%. So like nothing just around it. But from 1991 to today, they’ve gone from 7% to 30%. I mean, just an absolute hockey stick growth, just an explosion. And I really traced it to a couple things. One, is in the 1990s, if you think that’s when Newt Gingrich in the contract with America happened in 1994, where he was willing to say that the Democrats are not only wrong, they’re evil, right? The other party is awful. Polarization really kicked off the 1990s with Newt Gingrich. But you also got to think about this. You know what happened in the early 1990s, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War was much more than about politics. It was about religion too. It was about those Godless, atheist, communists and us good, upstanding, God-fearing Americans. And when Communists-

Preet Bharara:

Wait, so you’re saying when that battle ended, people lost interest in religion?

Ryan Burge:

No, what I’m saying is it was okay to be an atheist after that. There was no communist connotation. No one… If you say you’re an atheist, no one goes. “You got to be a communist now, don’t you?” No one connects those two things together. But in the 1980s especially, yes, communists and atheists were hand in hand.

Preet Bharara:

I’m a little confused about the Newt Gingrich reference. Are you saying in a sense that when politicians began to have religion intrude into politics, people became discouraged about religion rather than politics?

Ryan Burge:

They felt like they had to decide what they were. And so now if you look at the modern Democratic Party, the modern Democratic Party is about 45% non-religious people, atheist, agnostic, nothing in particular. And about 55% religious people. But it’s almost no White Christians, it’s Muslims, it’s Hindus, it’s Buddhists, it’s Black Protestants, it’s Hispanic Catholics and Hispanic evangelicals. And the Republican Parties become the party of White Christianity. 75% of Republicans today are White Christians. And so what happened was people felt like they had to sort themselves out. If you look at the data from the late 1980s, and you look at an evangelical church, half of those congregations were Republicans and half were Democrats in 1988. So evangelicalism was evenly divided even in the late 1980s. And from that point forward, it was a purge. All the Democrats left White evangelical churches and now White evangelicals are 80% Republican. So people thought they had to sort themselves out politically, it’s really hard to be a White evangelical Democrat today, and it’s really hard to be an atheist Republican. So now people align their politics and their religion together, which has driven people away from religion, especially if their politics lean to the left.

Preet Bharara:

Haven’t some of these other things like social media taken hold in other western countries as well? And yet they haven’t seen the same shift, or maybe they already shifted before the onset of this technology?

Ryan Burge:

If you look at the post-war period in Western Europe, they were secularizing rapidly in the 1960s and 70s when we weren’t. So really we were just like 20 or 30 years behind what was going on in Western Europe. But if you think about what America is, we are at a little-d democratic country. Everything’s bottom up in these non-denominational churches I was telling you about. They’re started by guys in basements who have four or five couples come over and start Bible study, and all of a sudden 10 years later they’ve got 10,000 people. That’s how American religion is changing. It’s not top down where you got to go to divinity school and get all these credentials and go through all this work. It’s just a guy starting something. And you know where he grows his base more often than not? On Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok, that’s where he grows his congregation.

Preet Bharara:

Can any of the shift away from religion and in particular away from religious institutions be laid at the feet of religious leaders themselves? For example, the Catholic Church scandals, did that have any bearing on people’s views of religion in America, you think or not?

Ryan Burge:

That’s really hard to parse because we’ve actually asked survey questions. Do you think children are more likely to be abused in religious context versus non-religious like school or preschool, like a non-religious context? And people are evenly divided on that question. So what I think about that is, the Catholic Church did itself no favors by how it handled the sex abuse scandal. But it’s really hard to test the theory that if that never happened, if they would still be in a worse spot or a better spot than they are right now. I think for a lot of Catholics that they were already slipping away from mass anyway, and it’s just an easy way to have a dinner- Well, “I’m Catholic, but I don’t go anymore. Why? Well, because the pedophilia scandal.” Okay, next conversation, right? It’s a good way to pivot to the next thing. Now I’m not downplaying abuse at all. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s awful what happened there. And the cover-ups even worse in many ways. But I think for a lot of people, they use that as an easy way to bat away a question when they don’t want to get to the real thing about how they feel about God, and Jesus, and religion and all that stuff.

Preet Bharara:

Are certain denominations facing more exits than others? And I asked the question, I wonder if there’s some connectivity between the idea that as America becomes in some ways more socially liberal, denominations that advocate for conservatism, both in how families are structured and other things, abortion, same-sex marriage, those kinds of things, does that have an effect on the exit or is that not relevant?

Ryan Burge:

So what’s really interesting is the tradition that’s actually doing the best in America is evangelicalism. There are probably more evangelicals in America today than there were in the 1970s. They’re still 22% of America, so they’re still doing relatively well compared to the main line, which is the one I just told you about, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopals, the ELC, these are traditions that are pro LGBTQ, pro-women pastors kind of left of center politically. They’re the ones in absolute free fall. They’ve lost the Mainline in 1975 was 31% of America. Today it’s 10% of America, it’s probably going to be 5% of America. And the next 10 years, because the average Mainline Protestant now is over 60 years old, they’re dying off rapidly. So it’s actually the liberal religious traditions in America, they’re doing the worst and the most conservative traditions in America are doing the best, which kind of goes against what you would think as our society’s change and become more liberalized on issues. You think those churches would do well, but they’re not doing well.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Do you have an explanation for that?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, this is like the million-dollar question in the field I work in. It’s like why is the mainline not catching some castoffs from evangelicalism who are liberal, socially liberal, let’s say? And I think for a lot of it is, a lot of people go, this is just a social club, the Mainline. It’s not really making us do anything hard, hard religion does well because it makes it really hard to leave. You build tall walls around yourselves, right? You create your own little enclaves. That’s what evangelicals have done a really good job of creating its own subculture with its own heroes, and its own celebrities, and its own media. So it’s really hard to leave that sort of warm embrace of evangelicalism. The Mainline never did that. They were always like one half into the world and one half not. And for a lot of Mainliners, they go, “I can just take one step this way and not have to go to church every Sunday morning. And that’s good because I can sleep in. So I’ll just step out.”

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting. You said at the outset when I was asking you about definitions and how you define religiosity, and you said the three Bs: behavior, belief, and belonging?

Ryan Burge:

Correct.

Preet Bharara:

In this regard, with respect to evangelicals or other groups that are more successful in retaining members, can you rank those three in order of importance?

Ryan Burge:

Oh, I think that belonging is easily the most important from a social science perspective and-

Preet Bharara:

Then next behavior and then last belief?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, I actually care the least amount… As a social scientist, I care about belief the absolute least. I think belonging is easily the most important.

Preet Bharara:

And why is that? Because religion is about community?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, I think religion has become a cultural and political marker in 21st century America. It’s more about where you put yourself in social space, who am I with and who am I against? And so if you look at measures of… Okay, I’ll give you a good example. We’re seeing a rise in the share of Catholics who self-identify as evangelical. We’re seeing a rise in the share of Muslims who self-identify as evangelical, and Jews who self-identify as evangelical in surveys. And it seems like that would just be a mistake, right? A survey mistake, they click the wrong button. But if you look at the data, what you see is it’s consistently among people who are conservative or Republican who say, “I’m an evangelical.” Because the word evangelical now has a political and cultural moniker to it more than a religious or theological moniker. So they’re saying they’re evangelical because they don’t like abortion, or gay marriage, or transgender. That’s why they’re evangelical, not because they believe in Jesus Christ.

Preet Bharara:

Is there something, you mentioned that the atheists are very politically active and vote in high proportions, but among the people who consider themselves to be religious in America, are there any trends with respect to who votes the most or the least?

Ryan Burge:

So it actually runs on demographics more than it runs on religion. So if you look at the groups that are the most highly educated, so for instance, Jews are very highly educated, so are Muslims, so are who are Hindus. They vote at very high rates. The issue though with those groups is they’re very small. About 2% of Americans in surveys identify as Jewish and 1% identify as Muslim. And even like the Latter Day Saints, they’re 1% of America, they vote like crazy, but they only really impact the election in one state. And that’s Utah. So most groups, White Christianity is still predominant in America. White Christianity is still the plurality of religion in the United States even today. So they still hold a ton of sway at the national level on electoral politics.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a war on religion?

Ryan Burge:

There’s always been a war on religion. And evangelicals invite that war though. That’s what makes them thrive. I grew up in an evangelical church where you heard every single day that we’re under attack. And that’s good. That means you’re actually living out your faith. And I heard it all the time growing up, religion grows the most when it’s being persecuted. So what evangelicals do is look for evidence of persecution and then throw that log on the fire to make their faith grow. So I think evangelicals are always looking for, I don’t know what actually exists or not, but I think it actually serves both sides very well that there is a scene or a imagined war on religion.

Preet Bharara:

So maybe that’s part of the answer to the next question I’m going to ask you, because I for the life of me don’t understand, I know a lot of experts, but I’m not even an expert. I’m a lay person, but I follow politics. How can it be that the Republican Party nationally, remains in many people’s eyes and beliefs, the party of religion and religiosity when they’re standard-bearer who has something like 80% or 90% support among evangelicals is perhaps the least religious president we’ve had ever, but certainly in generations when on any of these metrics that you mentioned before, behavior, belief, and belonging. He’s nowhere on the map. Explain that professor.

Ryan Burge:

Okay. Well, let me give you an interesting fact first, you know what president has gone to church the most during his time in the White House. Going back to Jimmy Carter, which president has been the most religiously active? What do you think?

Preet Bharara:

Obama?

Ryan Burge:

Nope. Not even close.

Preet Bharara:

Bush.

Ryan Burge:

Nope.

Preet Bharara:

Going back to Carter?

Ryan Burge:

Going back to Carter, which president has gone to church most with the most frequency while in the White House?

Preet Bharara:

Biden?

Ryan Burge:

It’s Biden by a long shot. He’s gone to mass 100 times so far in his first two years. Carter only went to church 82 times in his four years as president.

Preet Bharara:

Since these numbers off the top of your head, how many times did Trump go?

Ryan Burge:

It was less than 10. Obama went 9. I know that for a fact.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I thought Obama went more. Okay.

Ryan Burge:

No, he didn’t go. He’s like a classic Mainline Protestant, which is like, I say I’m a mainline, but I don’t go to church hardly ever. That’s the classic Mainliner. Trump didn’t go hardly at all though. I just thought that was really interesting that Biden went that much. Anyway, back to the-

Preet Bharara:

You’re dodging the question, sir.

Ryan Burge:

I am dodging the question. So I think at the end of the day that evangelicals care about power, and if you ask an average evangelical, would they prefer a candidate who was an evangelical, like a very religious, very devout evangelical? They would say yes. But if the choice was between an evangelical who got nothing done, which they would say George W. Bush is a class example of an evangelical who got nothing done for them, or someone who was not evangelical but got something done for them tangibly, they would pick option two every day of the week. And they don’t like Trump as a person. I don’t think many evangelicals really do like what he’s up to.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know.

Ryan Burge:

But at the end-

Preet Bharara:

Are you saying that they’re voting based on what their political agenda may be? And if you’re an evangelical, who is your whole life been and your community, their whole lives have been against abortion, obviously Trump is going to be your standard-bearer because it’s due to his appointments to the Supreme Court that the right to abortion has been taken away. Is that a fair assessment?

Ryan Burge:

Trump has made more progress for the evangelicals than any president in the last 50 years, and they want to reward him for that.

Preet Bharara:

And it doesn’t matter that he’s not a billboard for religion?

Ryan Burge:

What they would say is that we’re saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies every year in America. And that’s more important than the personal morality of one guy.

Preet Bharara:

Where do you see these trends going? In other words, are we continuing with this shift or will there be some disruption of these shifts? How do you think we’re going to be talking about this in 10, 15, 20, 30 years?

Ryan Burge:

So it’s really interesting that if you look at the data, you see that the curve for the non-religious people is sort of leveled off amongst the youngest people around 45%. I don’t think we’re going to get to a future, at least in the next 20 years, where 45%-50% of Americans are non-religious. I think it’s going to stick around 45% and not go up from there. But I think what we’re going to see is sort of a religious polarization. We talk about political polarization all the time. I think religious polarization is happening even more, and you’re actually already seeing some evidence of that. For instance, up in Michigan, there was a situation where they were talking about book bans in the local library, and it was evangelicals speaking to ban these books about transgender and LGBTQ and all that kind of stuff.

But they were locked in arms with conservative Muslims at the podium to argue for these books being removed from the public school. So I think what you’re going to see is conservative religious groups are going to understand that a lot divides them theologically like what God they prayed to and what they believe, but they’re united on these culture war issues. So they’re going to lock arms and work together knowing they’re going to probably be more successful working in tandem, on the other side of the aisle is going to be a lot of non-religious people who want religion completely out of the public square in every possible way. So it’s really going to be a ton of really conservative, very far right people on one side and a whole bunch of nones on the other side, and not very many Americans in the middle of those two polls.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Ryan Burge after this.

So as I mentioned, you’re not just an academic and a teacher, a professor, you’re also a pastor. So you’re not, if I can borrow the phrase, you’re not agnostic about these issues, although you cover them at some remove. How do you feel about these trends and overall, is it harmful to society, beneficial to society, net neutral? Does it matter?

Ryan Burge:

Listen, I think religion’s a net positive for society, but I don’t think all of religion’s a net positive. I think the tribalism, the belonging piece we just talked about, I think is actually the worst part of religion, and it’s really the only part of religion that we talk about anymore. If you look at the social science data on religious attendance, it provides all kinds of positive benefits to society and to people psychologically, socially. The more you go to church, the more likely you are to be politically engaged. So getting involved in one thing gets you involved in many things. You build these bridges with other people. And so it really worries me that we’re becoming more socially atomized. We’re not hanging out with other people. We’re not mixing in mixed company anymore, whether it be racially, religiously, politically, economically, educationally. And I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re so suspicious as a country of other people. Why we’ve lost trust in our fellow man is because we don’t hang out with anyone who’s different than us anymore. Religion in America used to be one of the very few places in society where you could see people who were different than you, where-

Preet Bharara:

There was a verse, I think you have written that not that long ago if you sat down at a mass at a Catholic Church, you were just as likely to be sitting next to a Democrat as a Republican, is that right?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah. And now, I mean, White Catholics are 60% Republicans now and continuing to trend to the right. I mean every White religion, especially in America, has become overwhelmingly conservative and that’s bad.

Preet Bharara:

So it used to be the case. So if I understand this, it used to be the case that even if you went to a church within a denomination, which by definition you would, there’s a lot more diversity politically and otherwise in that congregation than there is now?

Ryan Burge:

Absolutely. I mean now we’re monocultures. It’s all conservative and the problem is it’s left and right too. By the way. You go to the Episcopal church, it’s going to be almost all Democrats and liberals. You go to the Southern Baptist, it’s going to be almost all conservative Republicans. There’s not a lot of… It’s echo chambers again, and that’s bad for democracy. I think we don’t, religion going away is bad in some ways, but for democracy, I think it’s really bad because where else do you see people who are different than you?

Preet Bharara:

This may be an unfair question, but is that the job of religion to help democracy flourish?

Ryan Burge:

As a social scientist, I would say yes. I would say that religion has many people-

Preet Bharara:

I haven’t thought about it before. It’s an odd thing because we talk in this country about the separation of church and state. You already earlier, and I thought it was very wise comment when explaining the trends in other countries. The easiest way, I think you said, to have someone dislike something is mandate it by the government, and yet there are people who want to mandate or allow much more blurring between government and religion, but we often talk about it in one direction, right? Interference with their imposition of religion by government. Is there any downside to suggesting I don’t think there is, but I just want to flesh it out, in advocating for a role that religion might play in the flourishing of democracy? I asked it a slightly different way.

Ryan Burge:

Yeah. Okay. So here’s my thing. I don’t think we realize that religion has provided a social safety net in America for hundreds of years. Clothes closets, food pantries, soup kitchens, all that stuff. And some of it’s backed by the government. Some of it’s not. Some of it’s done independently. But here’s the problem that I have with that. If religion goes away, is government going to step into those cracks and fill the voids? Are those kids and those people on the fringe of society going to fall through those cracks and be worse off for it? There’s no appetite in America for increasing the social safety net. We’ve seen that over the last 10 or 15 years. So if that’s not being increased and religion continues to decrease, then what is going to happen to the people who need help? Who is going to help them? I’m worried about those people.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. You talk about the corrosiveness of political uniformity in churches. You’ve written, “When religion becomes so politically uniform, it can have corrosive effects on democracy.” And then further you say, “The conservatism of white Christian churches has helped to lead tens of millions of liberal Americans to leave religion behind entirely and join the ever-increasing ranks of the non-religious.” You think that’s entirely fair?

Ryan Burge:

I think it’s mostly true. I think a lot of people I went to college with, I went to a Christian college too, where we had to go to chapel three times a week and follow a lifestyle state where we couldn’t drink, and swear, and have sex, and all these kinds of things. Most of my friends who I went to college with are non-religious now, and it’s because they’re left or center politically.

Preet Bharara:

Is that the same principle we’re talking about before that sort of required obligatory religion causes some subset of people to walk away from it?

Ryan Burge:

I think so. I think for a lot of those kids that grew up, pastor’s kids or missionary kids, and they had no choice in the matter. You know what I mean? Now they’re like, “Wait a minute, I don’t believe any of this stuff.” But can I just say my big argument for religion is not theological? I don’t think theology convinces anyone of any… There’s this great quote-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not about the belief part.

Ryan Burge:

Exactly. It’s not about Phillip Yancy said, “No one becomes a Christian because they lost the argument.” You know what I mean? It doesn’t work that way. The reason that people join religious communities is because the community part. Pastors need to focus as much on the horizontal as they do the vertical. The community part is really, really important, not just to the church, but also to the community. If you can build bridges to people and help them out, you are not only doing good things for your faith and your church, but you’re also doing good things for your community and your world. Let’s think about that a little bit more.

Preet Bharara:

I agree with that. I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s a little at odds with the other point you’ve been making, which is that when religion becomes mostly about community and that community becomes non-diverse because people walk away who are of different opinions and views on other things, then that siloed community that’s religious is not a net positive, right? So how do you square the downsides of religion being about community mostly with the upsides of community coming as part of religion?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah. That’s the inherent tension here is, most churches want to be, they want to be monocultures. It’s easier when it’s all the same kind of people believing the same kind of things, that everyone’s unanimous in all the meetings to vote yes on. Everyone’s all in one accord. But the thing is, institutions are supposed to be diverse and religion does best when it is the most diverse, but you have to fight the urge to only recruit people who are like you because that’s how you grow religion. If you look at Joel Osteen, I know we can talk about Joel Osteen all you want about the money and the prosperity gospel and stuff. But if you look at his congregation, it’s religious, it’s racially diverse, it’s economically diverse, it’s educationally diverse because they’ve been intentional about doing that stuff. Most churches don’t think about that. They want to become all White, higher income educated people. That’s bad. They have to fight that desire. And if you become too much, that’s hard. Listen, if you walk into a church, it’s a bunch of people wearing suits and driving range rovers and you drive a beat up dodge, you’re not going to come back anymore. How do you fight that? That’s not easy.

Preet Bharara:

Well, certain trends are reversible. Certain trends are hard to reverse. A trend towards siloing, and segregation, and balkanization is very hard to reverse. How do we do that?

Ryan Burge:

I think you have to be intentional about finding people that are different than you and start, here’s what I think. Maybe start a second service or maybe, so here’s what the problem that I see is if you look at the data, the people who are the most likely to go to church today, are people with four year college degrees making between $60,000 and $100,000 a year. That is who is in church right now, is upper middle class people with college degrees. That’s who’s showing up. Find ways to reach out to people who have to work on Sunday morning or Saturday night, have a midweek service, have a Tuesday night service, have a Monday afternoon service. Find ways to be more amenable, but also, you know what? Give stuff away. Create carnivals, back to school bash.

Preet Bharara:

I’m a big fan. I am not agnostic on carnivals. So I’m very pro carnival.

Ryan Burge:

I’m pro potluck. Okay? That’s my platform. I’m a Baptist and potlucks a great thing-

Preet Bharara:

It depends on if the people in your community can cook well or not.

Ryan Burge:

Well, listen, I grew up Baptist and my wife’s Catholic when we got married, I go, “Listen, when you go to potluck, don’t bring your JV dish, bring your varsity dish, all right? The thing you know is the best thing you can make because all these women are going to do the same thing. Don’t try something new out. Bring your best.” And man potluck. We need to have more potlucks in America. That would change a lot of things

Preet Bharara:

Are people who identify as religious. I don’t know if there are polls to this effect, but are people who identify as religious happier than people who don’t or not?

Ryan Burge:

Generally speaking, yes. But that’s always self-reported stuff, right? And part of that’s tied up with the idea that liberals in America, there’s a mental health crisis in America, especially amongst liberals. They catastrophize lots of things. Jonathan Haidt’s written about this before, for instance, that they’re much more likely to seek mental health services. Now, that doesn’t mean that conservatives don’t need mental health services, don’t seek it out. But if you look at the polling data right now, it does look like that religious people tend to be more content, and more happy, and have better mental health and people who are not religious.

Preet Bharara:

We’ve touched on this a little bit, but what’s the current polling or understanding of the trend with respect to tolerance? We’ve talked about this on this podcast and it’s a big problem. There’s a rise in antisemitism. There’s a rise in certain kinds of bigotry in the country. In the current moment, are we trending towards less tolerance of other people’s religious beliefs and behaviors or more?

Ryan Burge:

So we’re definitely moving in the direction of less tolerance, unfortunately. My very first paper I ever published was on tolerance actually in religion intolerance. And what I found was super interesting, which is the idea that people who believe the Bible is literally true, are less tolerant. It makes sense. If I’m right, then you’re wrong, and why should I tolerate wrongness and sinfulness? That makes sense. But who are the most tolerant people? The people who went to church every week because they built those bridges to people who are different than them.

Preet Bharara:

So hold on a second. I like your taxonomy. Behavior, belief and belonging. The people who had the most belief were the least tolerant and the people who had the most religious behavior, in other words, going to church, were the most tolerant?

Ryan Burge:

Exactly right.

Preet Bharara:

Is that intuitive?

Ryan Burge:

That’s the hard thing about social science. It seems like nothing’s intuitive.

Preet Bharara:

Because my understanding, and I’m trying to keep this as a sort of intellectual conversation and not get into religious doctrine, because I am no expert on any of this, but my sense has been always, that Jesus was a pretty tolerant fellow.

Ryan Burge:

Well, he did say a few pretty intolerant things. He says, “I’m going to put brother against brother and sister against mother.” And all those kinds of things too, right? There’s some edge to the gospel that’s pretty divisive if you really want to get down to it, right? “I’m the way, the truth, and the life, no one gets to the father except through me.” Does not sound very tolerant for where I come from. Sounds like there’s a pretty narrow way to get to heaven. So there’s both. I mean, that’s the thing about the gospel. So I wrote a paper in college about how Jesus is like, he’s like smoke. You try to figure out what it looks like a cloud. You try to figure out what it looks like and it looks like something else in five minutes you can kind of read into him whatever you want to see in him.

Preet Bharara:

Going back to politics for a moment, how do you think religious themes are going to play out in the 2024 presidential election, and how are religious constituencies going to turn out or not turn out?

Ryan Burge:

So I think obviously, evangelicals are going to turn out like crazy for Trump. 80% of them voted for him in 2016 and 2020, but also 80% voted for McCain in 2008. Let’s not forget that part. They’re diehard Republicans. We’re going to see White Catholic shift again more towards the Republican. They were 55%. Now they’re 60% for Trump, and I think they’re going to go even above that in 2024, I think, where the election is won and lost. Is that nothing in particular group I was just telling you about? They’re 24% of Americans now. They don’t engage in politics very much, but in 2016, only 55% of them voted for Clinton, so they were not huge Democrats. They turned out big numbers for Biden in 2020, got 64% of their votes. Biden’s got to do that well again with that group and to get them to turn out.

Preet Bharara:

That’s an interesting fact that I did not know. Why the surge as between 2016 and 2020?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, I think nothing particulars thought they liked Trump because he said, “I’m an outsider like you are.” And nothing in particulars feel like they’re outsiders. No one speaks for them. No one thinks about them. No one’s in it. No one really looks at them and Trump was like, “I’m going to drain the swamp. I’m going to reform Washington.” And then what they realized four years later was he was just like every other politician. He did not drain the swamp. He was a bureaucrat just like everyone else. And so they went back to, they voted for Biden at the same level they voted for Obama in 2012. The nothing in particulars did, because they realized, okay, we’re generally Democrats. We kind of got duped in 2016 by the Trump thing. We’re not going to get duped again.

Preet Bharara:

You talk about some other trends on the state level and there are some states where religiosity, depending on how you define it, is increasing in other places where it’s decreasing. That has a parallel political effect where it’s increasing that’s good news for Republicans running for office, and the opposite is true of course as well. And the particular stat that I was struck by that I also hadn’t known at this level of detail, was Florida and how Florida, once upon a time, I think people thought it was a purple state. It’s really a red state, and part of that, I think you attribute to the increase in religiosity and religious affiliation and you talk in particular about the huge gap over the last number of years in Miami-Dade. Could you explain that?

Ryan Burge:

So Miami-Dade County, really, Democrats have to run up the score in Miami-Dade, they’re going to lose the rural parts of Florida. That’s the game.

Preet Bharara:

The only hope of winning Florida is to crush it in Miami-Dade, right? For a Democrat?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, you’ve got to build up a huge league. Once you get to the panhandle, you’re going to get killed. That’s basically how it works politically. But Miami-Dade has become a lot more religious over the last 10 years, and that’s especially I think with Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, and they are culturally conservative. A lot of them are Cubans too, by the way, which is cultural, Catholicism, Cuban, all that stuff goes together, and so what happened was Biden did a lot worse in Miami-Dade in 2020. I think a lot of it’s because Miami-Dade got a lot more religious over the last 10 years. The other place that’s really interesting is the southern border of Texas. If you look at those, there’s all these weird stories about these little counties like Star County, Maverick County, which are on the southern border of Rio Grande Valley, where they went like 30 or 40 points. They swung 30 or 40 points in the last two election cycles. If you look at their religiosity, some of those counties became 30% more religious between 2010 and 2020. So where religion’s growing, it helps the Republicans. I don’t think Texas is turning blue at any point in the near future because of how the influx of Hispanic Catholics who tend to be culturally conservative.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I think Democrats, would you agree that the people who say Democrats have a blind spot on this are correct? Because typically Democrats think that the Latino vote, the Hispanic vote is theirs for the taking and they misunderstand. Tell me if you agree with this criticism of Democrats’ vision. They misunderstand the role that religion plays in certain of these communities?

Ryan Burge:

I think that they have such a cultural blind spot because they don’t talk about… I did an analysis of the tweets of Democratic primary candidates in 2020. They didn’t talk about Jesus at all. They talked about Islam more than they talked about Christianity on their Twitter accounts, guys.

Preet Bharara:

Isn’t there a reason for that? Also, you don’t want, because maybe you can give some political advice based on the data analysis that you’ve done so extensively, but if a bunch of your base is non-religious and arguably assertively so, doesn’t it make sense arguably not to talk about Jesus and religion too much?

Ryan Burge:

Listen, atheists are not going to vote for Donald Trump. They’re just not. You know what I mean?

Preet Bharara:

You’re saying, and this is the thing that political experts talk about all the time, be careful of taking constituencies for granted like Black Americans, and that is a debate we’ve been having for a long time. Are you sort of saying, professor, that Democrats can take atheists for granted?

Ryan Burge:

I don’t think you should take for granted, but I also think you shouldn’t be allergic to talking about Jesus, and the Bible, and Christianity. I think there’s ways to do both and do them well. I think Obama did very good at riding the line between those two things of not acting secular but also not acting like super evangelical at the same time. But if you look at the Hispanic vote on things like transgender, they not on board with democratic orthodoxy on issues of transgender. They’re just not. If you look at the polling data on this, if you look at same-sex marriage, it’s amazing how fast that issue moved from opposed, to in favor. I mean we’re talking 10% in favor of 1988 to 65% in favor today. It moved that fast, and it moved almost always in one direction, which is towards the left on that. If you look at transgender polling, it’s actually gone the other direction the last two years. People are less likely to say there are more than two genders today than they were two years ago, so you can’t push that issue with the Hispanic Catholic vote or the Black Protestant vote. They are not going to respond to that. You can talk about LGBTQ and inclusiveness and all those things, but there are certain issues that the public is not ready to follow you on.

Preet Bharara:

We talked about the fairly quick adoption and supportive same-sex marriage on the podcast before, and you just mentioned it obviously again, what’s the reason for that? Because other civil rights and humanitarian victories in the country, we all know based on tragic experience have taken a lot longer. Why is it that that was so fast?

Ryan Burge:

I think it’s social contact theory, which is this really well-studied idea in social science, which is if you know someone of an outgroup, you are much more tolerant of that group. If I don’t know any Muslims, it’s easy to not like Muslims. It’s just an abstract idea. Muslims are just a concept, but if you work with a guy and he’s a Muslim, he’s a good dude, works hard, cares about his family, cares about America, you go, “Hey, you know what? Muslims are so bad because that guy’s not so bad.” When a few people started coming out, then that gave permission for more and more people to come out, and then more and more people came out. It was almost impossible to not know someone who was gay, and it’s easy to say, “Gay people shouldn’t get married.” If you don’t know any gay people, but now you almost have to know someone who’s gay and go, “You know what? Steve’s a good dude. If he wants to marry his boyfriend, that’s totally fine with me.” And I think that’s how it changed just that fast. Everyone got really comfortable with it. They knew someone they loved who was gay.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve written a lot on these topics, not just online, but also in books. Last year you wrote a book called 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America. What are some of your favorite myths that you debunked?

Ryan Burge:

Oh yeah. One is that Trump was not the favorite of churchgoing Republicans during the primary process. .

Preet Bharara:

We’ve already rebutted that.

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, that one’s garbage. Trump won everybody. He won every attendance level except those who attended more than once a week, and he only lost by six points to Cruz.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s pause on that for a second, so I can sort of understand your argument now that based on a four-year record in office in which among other things, Trump appointed super-conservative, ultra conservative supreme Court justices, and Roe was overturned. Then on that on that track record he has delivered for a certain subset of religious people, evangelicals included, but in the primary when I think he was reliably reported that at prior times in his life, Trump was actually pro-choice, he had given to Democrats. What was the basis on which evangelicals and deeply religious people trusted Trump back then?

Ryan Burge:

Yeah, that’s actually another myth in the book is that evangelicals think abortion’s like the number one issue for them politically. If you ask them, they even tell you that it’s not, only 25% of White evangelicals say abortion’s a deal breaker for them as a candidate. They would only vote for a candidate who is anti-abortion. So it’s not a deal breaker. I think, and the data actually says this, that immigration is just as important an issue as abortion is amongst White evangelicals.

Preet Bharara:

And has nothing to do with religious belief. That’s just a political belief?

Ryan Burge:

Oh yeah. There’s very little discussion. The culture war is not about immigration. That’s more of a political belief, a cultural thing, a racial thing than it is a religious thing. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

How about another myth?

Ryan Burge:

Oh my gosh, there’s so many. For instance, that pastors talk a lot about politics from the pulpit. That’s one you hear a lot from the left, especially you see it blasts on social media. You’ll find one example of a pastor being super political from the pulpit and it becomes like, look at all these evangelical churches, they’re basically political rallies. People who say that have not gone to an evangelical church very much. We ask people weekly churchgoers. We ask them, “Okay, here’s 10 issues. Check the boxes of which one your pastors talked about in the last 12 months.” And it was everything from healthcare, and immigration, to abortion to even voting. The number one response option was, none of the above. 33% said they had not heard a single political issue from the pulpit in the last 12 months, and 52% said 0 or 1 political issue from the pulpit in the last 12 months. Most pastors do not talk about politics in the pulpit, there’s no advantage for them doing that.

Preet Bharara:

What do you talk about from the pulpit?

Ryan Burge:

Jesus told us to love and forgive, try to be better neighbors, better friends, that we should try to be better versions of ourselves, kind of self-improvement, but-

Preet Bharara:

Not politics?

Ryan Burge:

Oh, good gracious. No, I avoid that because I’m not changing anybody’s mind on politics. These are 75 and 80 year old people. They watch politics six, eight hours a day. I’m not going to change their mind in 20 minutes on a Sunday morning.

Preet Bharara:

We talked about younger generation, Millennials, Gen Z, who are increasingly identifying as non-religious or not anything in particular. In your studies over time, what’s the trend of young people being non-religious, converting to religiosity later in life? Is there some significant trend line just generally speaking over time in that direction, or once you’ve decided by the time you’re in your twenties, you’re not really affiliated or you’re agnostic, you remain that way until the end?

Ryan Burge:

There’s a really convincing paper that came out last week that I just read that says that the reason we’re becoming less religious is because children are being raised in less religious households. So actually religion transfers very well from generation to generation. That’s how most religion hangs around. But the problem is that more and more people are non-religious, raising their kids in non-religion, and they never really pick up religion as they go along.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t talk about religion that much publicly, except the only time that I have, and the only context in which I have, is to talk about from time to time the religious diversity in my own house, and I ventured into an area that’s I think very fraught, which is to make a joke involving religion. You can be very careful about that, but I would tell the following, and you got a good reaction. Shall I share it with you and you can tell me what you think?

Ryan Burge:

I would love to rate your joke, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve never told this joke to an actual pastor before.

Ryan Burge:

Oh, gosh.

Preet Bharara:

And I would say that in my house, there’s a lot of diversity of religion, this is all true, in religious tradition. My children at the time I was telling these stories, had one Hindu grandparent, one Sikh grandparent, one Muslim grandparent, and one Jewish grandparent, which I think if I’m doing the math correctly, makes them Episcopalian.

Ryan Burge:

That’s pretty good, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Pretty good, right?

Ryan Burge:

I’ll give you a solid A- on that, buddy, well done.

Preet Bharara:

That was mine. That was not ChatGPT. I wrote that jooke all by myself. Got a surprisingly good reaction. So yeah, it’s all true.

Ryan Burge:

That’s incredibly religiously diverse household, by the way. Holy cow. That is insanely diverse no one has got that.

Preet Bharara:

It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to talk about religion on the show because it’s fascinating to me. I would like to have you back and talk more about these issues and these trends. It’s surprising to me how little we talk about these things in the public square. I mean, I guess we do a little bit of the polling and the political stuff in election season, but religious trends and what it means for people, and how congregations are changing and how they’re becoming less different. All these things that you think about and talk about I think are very important. So thank you for your work and thanks for being on the show.

Ryan Burge:

It’s been an absolute pleasure, Preet, really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ryan Burge continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss how classrooms are being impacted by ChatGPT.

Ryan Burge:

One of my students had written several other papers for me, so I knew their writing style fairly well, and then they turned it in a final paper for a class, and the writing style for that paper was completely different than how they wrote.

Preet Bharara:

Was it better?

Ryan Burge:

Oh, much, much better. Yes, much, much better. And they were using terms and ideas that I knew that I had not taught them, that they probably didn’t learn on their own.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

Preet Bharara:

Every week I end the show urging you all to send your questions, comments, and thoughts to me and our team here at Cafe, and some of you may think we don’t see them, but every week we read all those messages. There are times when your emails move us so much that I just have to share them with all of you. Other times a listener email cracks us up, and this is one of those times. So I want to read you this message we received last week in response to a comment I made during my conversation with Chuck Rosenberg on Stay Tuned.

To refresh your memory, Chuck and I were discussing the reasons to appoint a special counsel in a case when Chuck said,

Chuck Rosenberg:

All my friends at Main Justice are going to hate me for this, but there is a salutary benefit.

Preet Bharara:

And then he said, “Are all benefits salutary?” To which I responded, “Yes, I think, right? You shouldn’t say naan bread. It’s redundant.” And what I meant by that was naan N-A-A-N is a type of Indian bread and by definition, naan is bread. So it’s redundant when people go to restaurants or they talk about food they’ve eaten in Indian cuisine and say naan bread. That’s what I meant. So our listener, Jeff, had this to say in response to my exchange with Chuck, “Preet, it took me a night of restless sleeping, trying to figure out what in the world is redundant about non-bread, spelled N-O-N-bread, and then 20 minutes of Googling the next day to figure out, you said naan bread N-A-A-N bread. It stuck with me.”

The listener goes on to say, “I listened to you say it like 20 times thinking he can’t be saying non-bread N-O-N, what’s redundant about non-bread? But no, you were. But why? Why even if it were redundant, would he pick that redundancy to complain about? And I was going through hell trying to make non-bread redundant. I couldn’t. So at 5:00 AM I Googled, is non-bread redundant? Then English grammar: is non-bread, redundant? And finally, what the fuck is redundant about non-bread? I thought I was missing some cultural reference, like some TV show everyone watches that you’ve never heard of till just then, or that some non bread revolution was going on I was unaware of. Finally, thank God, Google asked me, did you mean naan bread? N-A-A-N bread? I almost cried. Naan bread. Naan bread. Of course you said naan bread. Now I feel culturally insensitive and I’m dealing with that. I love your show, but I’ve lost a day and a half I’ll never get back and all because I’m culturally insensitive, which I didn’t know. But that Google, I can tell you, has a whole hell of a lot to say about, thanks and you’re my go-to podcast because you’re reasonable when you’re not calling me culturally insensitive. In this crazy world, I feel I must add the obvious, I’m just kidding. Love your show. Please keep them coming.”

Thanks Jeff for your email and your message. I can tell you that you had the entire team here at Cafe, as they say LOL-ing.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Ryan Burge.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay tuned, is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. And the Cafe team is Noa Azulai, David Kurlander, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.