The Nones Are Everywhere: What Decades Of Data Tells Us
(ANALYSIS) I’ve lived in rural America for literally my entire life. I was born in a town of 8,000 people and lived there throughout all of my childhood. I attended college in a place that was even smaller than that. Maybe not in terms of population but we didn’t even have a Walmart in Greenville, so we had to drive about 20 minutes away to avoid paying twice as much for groceries at the local IGA.
When I went to graduate school, I never actually lived in Carbondale. I lived about 15 minutes away, so I could be closer to the church I pastored and now I live in a town that has about 15,000 residents in a county that has seen zero population growth in seventy years.
Being around academics for my entire working career has taught me that most of them grew up in highly populated areas and want to live in close proximity to large population centers. I never really wanted to do any of that. I’m happy to live in a small town where housing is cheap, crime is low, and traffic is non-existent. But I also realize that my environment shapes my work. I understand American religion through the lens of a guy who has lived in the rural Midwest for four decades.
Many of the reporters I speak to have grown up in the Beltway bubble for their entire lives, so their understanding of religion is based on their experience living in a highly cosmopolitan, rapidly growing part of the country.
Neither perspective is completely accurate, of course. That’s why data is great, though. It helps us move beyond our own bubbles and see the full sweep of American religion.
What I wanted to focus this time is that issue I just spoke of: geography. I wanted to explore whether religiosity has faded more quickly in densely populated areas of the United States or if rural America has secularized faster than suburban areas.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
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.