The Math On Orthodox Christian Growth Doesn’t Add Up (Yet)
(ANALYSIS) On my public Facebook page I receive (and this is not an exaggeration) about 900 comments a day. That’s a lot to process, and honestly only a small fraction feel truly instructive or insightful — maybe less than 10%.
A good chunk are people using the comments to air grievances about politics or religion, and another sizable group is asking for the data source, which is always listed in the bottom right of the graph.
But there’s one category of comment that’s become its own genre. Here’s how it usually goes. I’ll post a graph on mainline Protestants — seven denominations, five election cycles of data, a chart I’m genuinely proud of.
And the replies come in fast:
“Where are the Catholics?”
“Why do you ignore the Baptists!?”
“What about Latter-day Saints?”
I get something like 100 of these a day. But one group shows up with a consistency I can set my watch to: people who are upset that Orthodox Christianity isn’t in the graph. And in my experience, it’s almost always young men making this particular complaint.
So this post is for them. Let’s actually dig into the widely held belief that American Orthodox Christianity is experiencing a huge surge in converts.
Short answer: That’s a really hard claim to test with survey data, for a simple reason. There just aren’t that many Orthodox Christians in the U.S. to begin with. (Though judging by my comment section, a lot of the converts have found their way to me specifically).
The dataset I’m using is, by any objective metric, the best survey available for exploring migration patterns around Eastern Orthodoxy: the Pew Religious Landscape Survey. It’s a probability-based design, it was conducted fairly recently (2023–2024), and it has a huge sample size — nearly 37,000 respondents.
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.