(ANALYSIS) Every once in a while, someone would ask me how I became a pastor. I completely understand the impetus for the question, by the way. If you didn’t grow up around religion, the pathway to ministry can seem somewhat opaque. Let me just quickly lay out my story.
Read More(ANALYSIS) To create our new typology of the nones, we used a bit of machine learning. In this case, it was k-means clustering. It’s a pretty simple process, really. You pick some variables that you think that might be meaningful in creating categories and then let the algorithm find commonalities in the dataset.
Read More(ANALYSIS) When someone says the term “Culture War,” the first issues that usually come to mind are access to abortion or same-sex marriage. These are two of the most well-known ‘social issues’ in American religion and politics over the last several decades.
Read More(ANALYSIS) My first book was entitled “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.” It was published — what feels like a lifetime ago — in 2021. I’m pretty proud of that little volume because it established my approach to thinking about non-religion in the United States.
Read More(ANALYSIS) PCA folks, it’s your moment — few denominations punch above their weight online like you do. Here’s why.
Read More(ANALYSIS) 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?
Read More(ANALYSIS) I think the best description of attitudes toward gene editing is ambivalence. About 30% of the public thinks this is a good idea, and the exact same share thinks it’s a bad idea. The plurality response was “not sure” at 40% of the general public. That’s a pretty good indication to me that the average person is not spending a whole lot of time thinking about the implications of gene editing.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Evangelicals struck a middle path. They did not make the mistake of turning inward completely, nor did they capitulate to the larger culture either. Instead, they still managed to interact with the world just enough while maintaining their cultural distinctiveness on things like sexuality, abortion, divorce, etc.
Read More(ANALYSIS) When I think about the 2024 election, the biggest sentiment that comes to my mind is a simple malaise. It’s like all the momentum went out of the room and it was impossible to get it back. And guess what? That’s exactly the story that emerges from the data.
Read More(ANALYSIS) My working hypothesis is that in areas like immigration, there won’t be a really strong slope to the line — never attenders will basically feel the same as those who attend religious services on a weekly basis. While issues with a clear theological angle will see a line that tilts pretty steeply (in either a positive or negative direction).
Read More(ANALYSIS) There’s a really big problem with just using religious attendance as a proxy for religiosity. It masks a way more interesting feature of American life — a never-attending person who identifies as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular is a completely different species compared to a never-attending person who still identifies with a religious tradition.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Maybe what stands out here is that no matter how much the country has changed socially, religiously and politically, none of that has really shifted the overall relationship between Jews and the Democratic Party.
Read More(ANALYSIS) A common assumption is that religious leaders get in the pulpit and speak from a deep well of conviction and surety about where they stand on matters of religious belief. But maybe not — at least according to data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders.
Read More(ANALYSIS) I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating here: Whenever I tweet a graph that contains a couple of the largest religious groups (evangelicals, Catholics, nonreligious), the first question that comes in the comments is inevitably, “Where are the Latter-day Saints?”
Read More(ANALYSIS) The Black church in America is an entirely different culture than the average White evangelical or mainline tradition. Anyone who has attended a worship service in a Black church tradition knows that to be true. But beyond a difference in worship styles, there are many ways that the Black church should be considered its own category.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Data shows a positive relationship between education and church attendance in the U.S. But does that same relationship exist in Europe? I’ve never tested it, but data from the European Social Survey makes it possible to do this type of analysis pretty easily.
Read More(ANALYSIS) The discourse around the “spiritual but not religious” person is that they are becoming a larger share of the population. But I wanted to test that really basic claim with data from the General Social Survey.
Read More(ANALYSIS) One of the most important questions that one has to ask in doing data work is pretty simple: “Compared to what?” Sure, religiosity in the U.S. has dropped over the last half-century, but how does our religious behavior compare to Europe?
Read More(ANALYSIS) One of the most interesting lines of survey research in the last couple of years has been led by Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard. It’s focused on a fairly simple but incredibly consequential aspect of life — human flourishing.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Here’s a religion and politics story from the 2024 election that I hadn’t really thought about until recently: J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, converted to Catholicism in 2019.
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