(ANALYSIS) It’s become my hobby horse at this point — non-denominational Protestant Christianity. I swear, it’s somehow gotten more legs than the “nones” in the larger cultural discussion about religion.
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(ANALYSIS) I’ve been thinking a whole lot about social isolation recently. It’s probably because it’s this unspoken concept in a lot of the work that I do and many of the questions that I’m asked about religion in the United States. I swear I bring up Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” about twice a week when I’m doing interviews or giving presentations about data on religious attendance.
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(ANALYSIS) When we’re asked, “Are you religious?” There are a number of different ways someone might justify an affirmative answer. It could be that they attend a house of worship regularly or pray frequently. It could be that they hold specific beliefs about Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Those would be behavior and belief measures of religion. But there’s a third dimension that often gets overlooked: Belonging.
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(ANALYSIS) I’m a bit enamored recently with the life of Ernest Hemingway. He was obviously a tremendous writer, maybe one of the finest in our country’s history. But he also lived a life that could charitably be described as “chaotic.”
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(ANALYSIS) Beyond the debate over who is polarized in the U.S., there’s an adjacent, and perhaps more critical, discussion I want to tackle today: What drives polarized views? There is ample reason to think that religiosity impacts views on topics like abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender identity.
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(ANALYSIS) One of the “evergreen” topics on social media when it comes to religion is what’s often called the Billy Graham Rule. The idea comes from the famous evangelist, who was deeply concerned with living a life beyond reproach. Graham wanted to avoid even the appearance of impropriety that could undermine his work as America’s most prominent preacher.
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(ANALYSIS) Buckle up, readers, because we’re about to do a deep dive into an important but difficult-to-grasp concept in the social sciences. It’s called age-period-cohort (APC) effects. Let me start by showing you a simple graph.
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(ANALYSIS) Where are there lots of evangelical Christians in the United States, and where is it hard to find one? That’s actually a really difficult question to answer from a methodological perspective. Very few surveys offer enough granularity to provide rigorous state-level estimates, let alone data at the county level. But because of the rapid acceleration of Artificial Intelligence, I can actually provide you all with a really good answer now.
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(ANALYSIS) It’s the most important feature of American religion and politics that I wish more people understood: The God Gap.
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(ANALYSIS) There’s this well-worn phrase you hear in Christian circles: “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.” It’s often used by pastors to remind people that simply showing up on Sunday isn’t enough to be a faithful Christian. The point is that authentic faith is more than just checking a box once a week.
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(ANALYSIS) The most important piece of data analysis in that post came from the Nationscape survey — a weekly study conducted between 2019 and early 2021. The total sample size was over 477,000 respondents, which means there were nearly five thousand Latter-day Saints in the dataset.
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(ANALYSIS) Boy, do I have a treat for you all today! Do you ever wonder how the partisanship of people who work for religious organizations varies compared to folks who work in other industries?
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(ANALYSIS) Has there been a noticeable decline in the share of 18–22-year-olds who identify as transgender over the last couple of years? The answer is unequivocal: Yes.
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(ANALYSIS) Here’s what I love about my “job” now — people actually go out of their way to send me updated denominational statistics. I used to have to hunt for them across all kinds of websites and online resources.
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(ANALYSIS) (ANALYSIS) So, there’s this verse you sometimes hear in an evangelical worship service. It’s from 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
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(ANALYSIS) One of the most important cyclical events in my life as a data analyst of American religion is the semi-regular release of the General Social Survey.
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(ANALYSIS) I can pretty much pinpoint the moment I got the inspiration for this post. I was riding my spin bike in the basement, watching a series on my phone called “Band of Brothers.” I know, I know — I should have watched it multiple times by now.
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(ANALYSIS) I keep a little list in the notes app on my phone — just a running log of potential ideas for the newsletter. Most of them are only a few words, just enough to remind me to poke around in the data when I get back to my computer. If I’m being honest, about 75% of those ideas go nowhere. Either the data doesn’t tell a compelling story, or that “great dataset” someone mentioned turns out to be nothing like they described.
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(ANALYSIS) One of the most important questions we are trying to answer in The Nones Project is: Do non-religious people have feelings of self-worth and satisfaction that are similar to traditionally religious Americans? In many ways, this may be the most important issue to address when talking about the rising share of nones in the United States.
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(ANALYSIS) During the Renaissance, it was a common motif in paintings. There would be a skull in the background or possibly an hourglass.
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