(ANALYSIS) I always want to kick the tires of religion data, take a look under the hood. And I had a great chance to learn from some new data released by the team who runs the Cooperative Election Study. They surveyed 61,000 folks in the fall of 2020. Then, they recontacted 11,000 of them in the fall of 2022.

Guess what that means?

I can tell you how much religion changed at the individual level using a really big dataset. That’s awesome. Let’s get to it.

Here’s the share of each religious “tradition” that gave the same response option in both 2020 and 2022.

Latter-day Saints are the big winners here — 94% were retained by 2022. But let’s be clear, there weren’t a lot of them in the recontact portion of the data — just 119. Lots of large traditions have retention rates that run above 90%, including Catholics and Protestants, though.

Overall retention in the entire sample was 86%. Or, another way to look at this is 14% of folks gave a different answer in Round 2 of this data compared to Round 1. That’s a fair amount of religious switching in a short window of time.

Who switched the most? The nones, really. About 23% of people who described their religion as “nothing in particular” in 2020 did not do the same in 2022. Agnostics were even higher — about a third of them were no longer agnostics when asked to fill out a very similar survey in 2022.

I know what you are all thinking right now: Well, where did all those nonreligious Americans end up if switching was so high among them? Well, let me show you that.

To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.