Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Ryan Burge is someone who wears many hats. A social scientist who studies American religious trends, he is the author of two books and the popular Substack, Graphs About Religion. Burge is also a professor at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis. His data analysis has appeared widely in national outlets such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and POLITICO, among others.
In addition to his personal accomplishments, Burge is also a lifelong rural resident (he has never lived in a town of more than 20,000) and a former rural pastor in his community of Mount Vernon, Illinois.
The Daily Yonder: I want to give you the opportunity also to plug your new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us.Why is now an important time to write such a book?
Ryan Burge: So the book actually sprung out of my own experience of living in rural America. I grew up evangelical. And then I sort of wanted to stay in the Christian tradition, but preferred to be mainline Protestant. A lot of the impetus for the book was the fact that my church was going to close, and I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going to end up for my own faith. And, you know, being in a county, a rural county of 40,000 people, there were not many options for people like me. And I think a lot of people are in the similar situation I was. They want to be part of a faith community, but they just can’t stomach evangelicalism for one reason or another.
My book is basically about the question, why is there only one really viable mainline church in my entire county right now? Because a lot of those moderate churches that were sort of the backbone of America in the 1950s are now closed or heading towards closure, and huge swaths of America are really only going to have two options for Christianity in the future. And that’s evangelicals or Catholics. And it didn’t used to be that way.
DY: So, what do you think is the effect of that? The subtitle of the book is that it’s hurting democracy, faith, and us.
RB: Your religion always serves sort of a social cohesion role. Now the churches that are left are either white Evangelical, which are 80% Republicans, or the Catholic Church, which is becoming increasingly Republican as well, especially from the pulpit. Almost all young Catholic clergy in America are conservative, and now even the white Catholic vote in America is moving further to the right: 65% of white Catholics voted for Donald Trump.
These institutions are basically becoming more and more politically homogenous. And I think it makes it harder for us to figure out how to compromise with each other. It makes us intolerant, makes us unable to function in a democracy. And I think that’s going to make it harder for us to govern ourselves as we go forward.
DY: I really enjoyed your recent post, Where Evangelicals Are and Where They Aren’t, which included several maps. And so I’m curious, what did you find in that data?
RB: I was really surprised that mid-size counties were actually still fairly evangelical. I guess I shouldn’t be, because I do a lot of work on suburban stuff, but the fact that 20% of counties that are between 100 to 50,000 population are evangelical. I think it’s interesting. Obviously they’re a big part of rural counties, but the fact that they’re still very significant in suburban counties strikes me as a story that we don’t talk about a lot.
I think their stronghold, increasingly so, is in suburban parts of the country, which is even more important, because that’s really where the elections are playing out. Urban areas are blue and rural areas are red. The suburbs are where candidates win or lose, and evangelicals have a stronghold in those areas.
DY: That seems intuitive. It’s kind of what I see a little bit when I look at political data. When you look at things just in a binary way, rural versus urban, there’s this huge gap. But actually it’s interesting that a lot of those mid-sized metros and suburbs, they kind of act how people, I think, expect rural to be, like the way that their voting behavior has changed over time. It doesn’t surprise me that religious affiliation might be similar.
You’ve talked a little bit about mainline attendance declining. [Mainline denominations are Protestant congregations that are not evangelical. Examples of mainline denominations include the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, among others.] And I’m wondering, what have you seen as far as growth? Like are there denominations that are growing?
RB: There’s a handful. Assemblies of God is the only large denomination in America that’s seen sustained growth. They’re a little over 3 million people now, but they were 1.2 million back in the 70s. So really kind of nice, consistent growth. Covid knocked them down pretty good, but they’re coming back.
Now the non-denominationals are growing, but they’re not a denomination. They’re exploding all over America. And they also cause methodological headaches for us because we don’t know how to attract them or classify them or anything.
This is like the new frontier of doing religion research in America, figuring out how to conceptualize non denominationalism.
DY: So are you saying that religious attendance or affiliation over time is going down, even though individual denominations – some of them – might be growing some?
RB: Yeah. It’s incontrovertible that attendance is down significantly. And really, you know, the idea that religion is coming back in America is not true.
DY: What do you think would revive religious affiliation and participation in the U.S.? Do you think anything could bring it back?
RB: That seems like a bazillion dollar question. Not really. I mean, I think that the only thing that would probably even come close is a macro-level shift in America in terms of socialization. People try to make this about religion specifically, and I try to resist that as much as I can and make it more about just socialization in general.
People are not hanging out. And they’re also not going to church. So why would you expect church to be up when everything else is down?
DY: Yeah, I’ve seen lots of things about [the decrease in] civic participation in general.
I want to talk about the small rural congregation that you pastored for a while. You said it closed its doors recently. Can you tell me more about how that affected you personally and emotionally? What was that like?
RB: I still struggle with it to this day, and it’s been a year and a half since it closed. And I still think about it on a regular basis because it feels like a failure. This is a church that has been around since 1868 that had thousands of members and millions of dollars spent, and buildings built, everything. And to be the person who shut the lights off on the last day was tough.
There’s people in that community who had been part of that church for forever, like, literally their entire lives. They had married their spouse, and had kids that were baptized there, and buried their spouses sometimes in that church. And now they’re not around, you know? Now they can’t have that final, full-circle moment where their casket is in the front of that church building. So, it’s tough. I mean, it feels like a failure.
DY: That’s heartbreaking. Can you remind me what town that is in?
RB: Mount Vernon, Illinois. It’s where I live, yeah, actually about a mile from where I’m sitting right now.
DY: Do you feel like what you’re seeing in the data was congruent with what you saw on the ground in your congregation?
RB: I didn’t just see it in the spreadsheet, I saw from the pulpit on Sunday for 18 years. We went from 50 to 30, and 30 to 15, you know? I mean, it was right there in front of me.
DY: Well, thank you for sharing that experience. That really does sound heartbreaking, your community splitting like that.
So I think the final question that I have for you is actually a nerdy question, for all the nerds out there who read my stuff. I was wondering – what is your favorite data set to work with?RB: It changes depending on what my interests are from day to day. And I sort of go through fads where I’m like, okay, I’m really gonna lean into politics stuff now, and so I’ll be on the Cooperative Election Study for that. Or I’m really interested in 50-year trends and attendance, and that’ll be the General Social Survey. Then, I’ll go, oh man, I really want to get back into maps more. So that becomes a Religion Census question. A lot of what I do recently is denominational reporting. Denominations will release their statistics in like these glossy reports.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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