Does Religious Affiliation Make Someone More Resistant to Societal Changes?
(ANALYSIS) As some of you know, the church I pastored for 17 years held its last worship service last July. I wrote an essay for Deseret last year, which received a bit of attention. They asked me to reflect on that a year later, which was published over the weekend.
It’s titled, “The church I led closed a year ago. I’m still not over it.”
One of my least favorite words in the English language is “nostalgia.” There are a number of translations for the term, but my favorite is the most literal version from the Greek root words.
“Nostos” meaning return, and “algos” meaning ache. Or to put it simply, it’s an ache to return to a previous way of being. It’s something that I think is deeply embedded in the American psyche right now, and you often see really compelling examples on social media. Posts like this from Jon Harris are pretty commonplace.
The commentary on these images is usually divided into two camps: “I wish we could go back to a simpler time,” or “Stop trying to reimagine the past — it was racist, sexist and xenophobic.”
If you wanted to kick a hornet’s nest, it’s a fine way to do it. For my money, we should just label this as “nostalgia bait” and move on. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t go back to another era. So, it’s a moot point.
But there is an underlying social force behind all this — the world is changing rapidly. The share of Americans who are White is declining by the year. The portion of Americans who claim no religious affiliation is up six fold from the early 1990s. The share of people in the United States who were immigrants was higher in 2023 than it had been for a century.
Things are moving in another direction, no doubt. Some people embrace that change and look forward to a more diverse America, while others pine for a country that they think existed five or six decades ago.
But what portion is in each camp? New data from the Pew Religious Landscape Survey can help us answer that. The total sample is nearly 37,000 and the data was collected in 2023 and 2024. So this is an ideal dataset to do this type of analysis.
Pew asked people if a number of changes in the United States has made society better or worse. They were greater acceptance of transgender individuals, a growing population of immigrants and more women in the workforce. Here is the top level finding for each.
When it comes to the question of changing views on transgender Americans, it’s pretty clear that the public is evenly divided. About 2 in 5 say it’s a good thing for society, another 2 in 5 think it’s made things worse, while the remainder say it hasn’t made a difference.
The question of immigration is almost equally divisive, too, as 35% of folks say more immigrants has made society better, while 38% said it’s made the United States worse. About a quarter of the population has no opinion either way.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, 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.