The Plateau Of The Religious Nones Continues
(ANALYSIS) There’s this very much overused saying in my line of work: “Data is the new oil.”
When you hear someone giving a “hype” speech at a data science conference, that line usually comes up one way or another.
The assumption here is that with the right kind of data, the right kind of analysis and the right kind of interpretation, it’s possible to make decisions that can save lives, lower carbon emissions, avert wars and make the world a better place.
My aims in life are a whole lot more modest — just describe the wonderful and maddening world of American religion. That’s it, really.
But even in my little niche of a subfield of social science, I still need oil. I can’t tell you how many times that I am in the middle of a talk and I’m pointing at a graph, describing a result and thinking, “Man, I wish I could have an even more recent data point to figure out this trend line.”
Well, that day has come, my friends. The 2024 Cooperative Election Study has been released. It’s Christmas, New Year’s, Easter and my birthday — all on a random Tuesday.
Here’s why this is a big deal: The CES is the largest longitudinal survey that exists. During an election year, its sample size is at least 60,000. When I combine every single CES data file from way back in 2006 through 2024, the result is a dataset of nearly 700,000 Americans.
You can expect me to strip mine this new 2024 data over the next year or so, but before I get into the weeds, I wanted to provide you all with a high-level overview of how much (or how little) has changed in the last year.
Let’s start with the top line finding for me. I continue to double and triple down on a statement that I made about a year ago: The rise of the nones is essentially over, for now. Let me show you what I mean.
In 2008, about 21% of the entire sample identified as atheist, agnostic or no religion in particular. Just six years later, the share of the sample who were nonreligious was 28% — a jump of seven percentage points in a very short window of time.
Another ix years later, it was up to 34% — up six points from 2014 and a 13 point increase since 2008. The nonreligious share of the population was growing about as fast as anything in the world of demography.
But look back at that bar graph for both 2019 and 2020. The overall share of nones was 35% during that time period. For the samples collected in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the portion who were nonreligious was between 35% and 36%.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
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.