Those Non-Denoms Are Just Southern Baptists, Right?
(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.
Whenever I do any kind of analysis of denominational statistics, there’s always a chorus in the feedback: what about those non-denoms? It’s like folks can’t get enough of this new phenomenon. For those of you who want a longer-form essay from me that contains no charts or graphs, I’d point you to “The Demons of Non-Denoms,” which I published in Asterisk Magazine a couple of months ago.
But this is my Substack, after all — and it’s called Graphs about Religion — so I’m going to try to trace the contours of non-denoms across a few arenas that I’ve really examined a lot over the years: racial composition, a bit of age analysis, and then a deeper dive into the religious views and attendance patterns of non-denoms compared to other Protestant groups.
However, I have to start at the very top level and show you the latest General Social Survey data on the rise of the non-denoms. The GSS has been asking about religious affiliation from the very beginning of the survey, way back in 1972. It’s really the only dataset that exists that can track this phenomenon across a five-decade time horizon.
For followers of this newsletter, you’ve seen this graph before — but without the 2024 data included. The share of all Protestants who were non-denominational was just 5% in 1972. It was little more than a rounding error in the grand sweep of Protestantism.
Today, about 30% of Protestants are non-denoms. But that number has been really unstable over the last four survey cycles.
It was 23% in 2018, then jumped a full ten points in the 2021 survey to 33%. It ticked up again to 34.7% in 2022. The most recent estimate dropped a full six percentage points to 28.7%. That’s just a very noisy metric.
I’m not fully convinced that the 2022 number wasn’t a bit too high—or that the most recent figure isn’t a bit too low. I still think the statement “about 30% of Protestants are non-denoms” is empirically defensible.
You can read the rest of this post at 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.