(ANALYSIS) You can probably guess where this post is going. The Canadian General Social Survey is fielded every year, but it doesn’t ask about religion in every wave. However, it did include a battery of questions about religious affiliation, importance, and attendance in 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2020. This gives me ample data to test the theory of a religious revival in Canada.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Whenever you think about the very largest churches in the United States, what denominations come to mind? I think that most of you, if you’ve been following along with this newsletter for any amount of time, would think of non-denominationalism. Maybe a Southern Baptist church. And the data says that this is largely the case.
Read More(ANALYSIS) The Bible was such an integral part of my upbringing that it’s hard to describe. We did Bible quizzing drills and scripture verse memorization. By the time I got my driver’s license, I had a pretty good grasp on the meta-narrative laid out in the 66 books that make up the Old and New Testaments. I had Bibles from all kinds of translations, too.
Read MoreANALYSIS) What do we do with the time that we have? That’s one of the most important questions we face, in my estimation. It’s certainly something I struggle with on a day-to-day basis. I have a really hard time taking a vacation that lasts more than four or five days because I feel a deep sense of guilt that I’m not doing enough with my life.
Read More“How comfortable would you be talking about your mental health and emotional well-being with each of the following?”
Read More(ANALYSIS) Let me start by stating a fact that seems incomprehensible to even type out, but it undergirds almost every single graph that I produce: We don’t actually know the religious composition of the United States with any real precision. I know that sounds bizarre. The truth is that we are relying on a whole bunch of “best guesses” based on sound methodology and replication.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Confession time: My wife and I watch a lot of reality TV. I’ve always loved it, really. Even back to “The Osbornes” and “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica” on MTV. When I was in college, we had “Survivor” night. It was always Thursday. We would gather around in someone’s apartment, watch the show, complain about who got eliminated, then walk to the Vespers service across campus.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Religion in the United States “works” differently for Asian Americans compared to African Americans. The average white American doesn’t think about religion the same way, or practice their faith in the same patterns, as Hispanic Americans. Race is a central component of how religion operates in the American context.
Read More(ANALYSIS) I often think of religious traditions as a styrofoam cup. Each of them has a different level of water in them at any given time. However, that volume of water never stays fixed for long, because religious groups operate in a volatile environment with constant pressure to rise or fall.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Back in November, I wrote a post that I knew was going to cause a stir because it answered one of the most burning questions in my mind: “How Big is the Political Divide Between Mainline Clergy and Laity?”
Read More(ANALYSIS) Instead of just focusing on a single question and making a bunch of graphs that try to figure out that causal puzzle, I am going to share a few things that I’ve learned after doing this kind of work for the last 10 years.
Read More(ANALYSIS) There’s a running joke in American religious life that goes something like this: Ask 10 Catholics what the church teaches on a given issue, and you’ll get eleven different answers. It’s meant to be affectionate, a nod to the big-tent nature of a tradition that has managed to hold together nearly a billion people across wildly different cultures, languages and political contexts.
Read More(ANALYSIS) The share of Americans who indicate that their current religious tradition is the one in which they were raised is 66%. Most people living in the United States will die with the same faith into which they were born, and that’s been true for decades. But how people switch and why they switch may be changing.
Read More(ANALYSIS) Sometimes the doom scrolling really does pay off. I hate to admit it, but flicking through thousands of social media posts a week is a way that I can find interesting stories to write about for Graphs about Religion.
Read More(ANALYSIS) I feel like I got into a debate or a disagreement with someone about politics or religion on a near daily basis when I was between the ages of 13 and 25. I would fight with anyone about anything and I would often argue positions that I completely disagreed with because I just liked the intellectual gamesmanship of the whole exercise.
Read More(ANALYSIS) 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.
Read More(ANALYSIS) When I was in graduate school our program required each student to have two majors and a minor field. I knew one of my major fields was going to be American politics — that was an easy choice. I was also made aware that it was easier to get a job teaching public administration than traditional political science because the positions were relatively plentiful and the number of grad students with training in PA were low, so I picked that up as a second major.
Read More(ANALYSIS) It’s the “cry more, libs” approach for Republicans. A Democrat will demonize or mischaracterize the other side of the argument because this helps them justify their own voting choices. It really goes both ways. But now that we have data from the 2025 Cooperative Election Study, we can actually dig into how vote choices are relating to approval ratings of Donald Trump.
Read More(ANALYSIS) The amount of cynicism in the world is sometimes hard for my mind to grasp. I really struggle watching TV shows and movies that have a really bleak view of the world. I don’t want to watch ”The Golden Girls” all the time (although it is a really great thing to put on the TV right before bed), but I just can’t spend a lot of my time meditating on the evilness of the human experience over and over again. I think it’s bad for my soul, to be honest.
Read More(ANALYSIS) I’ve said offhand a few times that PR people are not my favorite folks on Earth and there’s a reason for that. Their job and my job are not the same job. Actually, many times they are diametrically opposed to each other. Folks who work in public relations want to cast their organization in the best light possible. I want to try and get to the unvarnished truth about what’s actually going on behind the headline numbers.
Read More
