Ryan P. Burge (3:47)

Thank you, buddy. Actually, thank Brazos. They're the ones who wrote me the fact checked.

Dr. Dan Koch (3:51)

I'll text Caitlin Beatty. So the book argues that what's vanishing is not the church as a whole, but actually these kind of moderate, cross pressured religious spaces, different voices that kind of hold people together who have different politics, different class, different temperaments. You can still find this, of course, like in a, like I always think of St. James Cathedral, the downtown Catholic church in Seattle. You know, that's going to have a big mix. But if you go outside of those sort of, you know, big institutions, you're going to get these smaller self selecting congregations. Right. But it also, it's also, I mean, the bit is that it's about my stuff too. My first podcast was called Depolarize. That's not gone very well. In the last 10 years, I stopped doing progressive politics as theology. Drop in listenership. I started talking about issues going on with men and boys a couple years ago. Drop in listenership. These days I'm always kind of harping on like, hey, you know, it's like things that we kind of don't want to hear but that are true. And I go, oh, people are going to, people are going to like this. That I'm not just giving them the kind of tribal, tribalistic, you're great rah rah stuff that other people are giving them. Surely they're going to flock to me. Drop in listenership. I'm being a little bit obviously dramatic here for fun, but tell us about the book. Like, how well does that sort of sum up what you're actually doing there.

Ryan P. Burge (5:16)

Yeah, sorry, Dan. I'm killing all your members, your listenership, buddy.

Dr. Dan Koch (5:21)

No, no, you're. You're making me feel good for what I've already done to myself is how I would frame it.

Ryan P. Burge (5:26)

Yeah, I actually think that's actually cool, because part of what I do is that right there, it's like trying to explain to people, like, why the world feels different for them, like, why things aren't working or, you know, why the why line doesn't go up. Right. Like, why viewers aren't going up and why church attendance is going down or whatever. It is. Like, a lot of what I just explained stuff, like, in a macro, macro level. And the hard part about that is some people are outliers. You know, they always want to tell me they're outliers. I'm like, cool, congratulations. But I can't explain you. I can explain the middle of the distribution.

Dr. Dan Koch (5:56)

Zoom out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (5:58)

Like, that's a weird thing that always happens, by the way. It's like if I put a scatter plot up, people always want to talk about the point in the very top right by itself or the very bottom left by itself. Like, we're obsessed with outliers. But my job is to explain the middle, the fat part of the distribution. So really, the book's about my own kind of personal journey through. Through being an adult Christian. Thoughtful, moderate, ish. You know, trying to find a church. Because my church, I was pastor of a church for almost 18 years. That was kind of the church I wanted to be a part of.

Dr. Dan Koch (6:29)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (6:29)

Honestly, you know, this is the one

Dr. Dan Koch (6:31)

that recently closed down. Right.

Ryan P. Burge (6:33)

Closed in July.

Dr. Dan Koch (6:34)

I want to ask about that. Okay. Yeah, you're gonna have to go. Okay.

Ryan P. Burge (6:36)

Yeah. There needs to be, like, a therapist thing for this, by the way, Dan, of, like, pastors who close churches. Because it's.

Dr. Dan Koch (6:44)

I wouldn't mind. That's a nice little niche.

Ryan P. Burge (6:46)

That's a fun niche. And I tell you what's a really weird, like, fraternity to be a part of, because it's a bunch of weirdos like me. So my church was sort of like what I wanted to be. Historic moderate. We were mainline Protestant. We were American Baptist, which means we had. We really did believe in local church autonomy, you know, priesthood, the believer soul comp. We really took that seriously. So some churches in my denomination are completely open and affirming. Some are completely not open and affirming.

Dr. Dan Koch (7:08)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (7:09)

Somehow female pastors. Some would never have a female pastor. You know, it's like, it's like up to the local church, right? Which I think actually is my theology, is my polity, right. I think local church autonomy is the best way to do things. So my church closed. Actually, the start of the book is like, my church is going to close, and at the end it's like, it's closed. It's like, where do I go now?

Dr. Dan Koch (7:26)

Nice little arc there. That's good.

Ryan P. Burge (7:27)

Yeah. And so the middle part of the book is based, like, where do people like me who want to be Christian, right. Want to be part of the faith community that we feel increasing, like, we can't find a faith community, you know, to go to where we don't hate most of what we're hearing. And so the book's really about how American religion, especially white American religion, really the books about white Christianity more than

Dr. Dan Koch (7:48)

anything else, because black Christianity, for instance, black and Asian Christianity and actually Latino Christianity, right? Like, have their own kind of paths, their own cultural stuff attached to it, right? They sort of. You need to analyze them kind of differently. Again, at the fat middle of the bell curve distribution, you need to look at them with different lenses.

Ryan P. Burge (8:10)

And I think that's the base critique of my book, which I will take wholeheartedly, is you left out non white Christians. The answer is I did. Because honestly, the. The book's not long. I can't make the book long enough to include all that stuff. So white Christianity is incredibly conservative now. And the thing is, it's not just evangelicals. I think we all know evangelicals are conservative, no big deal there. The white Catholic vote is now 66% for Trump. So it was 55% for McCain. So that's moving to the right. One of the big findings in the book is about clergy in Catholic churches. Priests, they're almost all conservative now.

Dr. Dan Koch (8:46)

It's like a self selection there or something, right? What do you think is going on?

Ryan P. Burge (8:50)

I mean, if you look at like priests from the 60s or day in the 60s, it was like 40% progressive, 20% moderate, 30%, you know, liberal. It's like, boom, boom, you know, nice, nice, mix exactly what you want. And now if you look at Priest or Die in the last five years, it's 85% conservative, 10% moderate, 5% liberal.

Dr. Dan Koch (9:07)

I was just watching that Martin Scorsese Apple TV documentary, Mr. Scorsese. Last night I was watching the first episode, and he talks about this local priest in Little Italy where he grew up, and I think it was Little Italy. And like, he was this, like, rock and roll, you know, progressive dude. He would like you know, show the kids films and like Scorsese, he was like a big part of Scorsese's like not only getting interested in art, but also as a guy who had a complicated relationship with Catholicism. Like, I think his relationship with this like progressive and like exciting priest like kind of kept a foot in. And thank God because we get all these incredible movies like Mean Streets and Goodfellas and you know, all the stuff that, all the stuff that Scorsese does with his Catholic upbringing and it's like, yeah, and I was hanging out the Jesuit that I sometimes talk about, Father Paul, you know, he passed away earlier this year in his early 90s. He was of that ilk. He was like big time Vatican II didn't think it went far enough. You know, wanted female priests, like all that kind of thing. And that's just not who's going into the priesthood in Catholic orthodox type churches now.

Ryan P. Burge (10:24)

And it's going to be. I mean, listen, you're not going to go to a church where you hear a bunch of stuff from the pulpit. You don't like, like, I mean we just, we self select. And by the way, the data goes back to the 90s on this in South Bend, Indiana. What they found was that pro choice Catholics went to pro choice parish and pro life Catholics went to pro life parishes.

Dr. Dan Koch (10:42)

Like even before, even within Catholicism, people are self selecting, not just their neighborhood parish, but they're going where they agree.

Ryan P. Burge (10:50)

Yeah, but here's the problem though with all that, Dan. There is still at some level a diversity of thought like elk across these parishes. But when you get 85% conservative priests coming forward, there's gotta be no variation there. So the pews, like if you're a Dorothy Day style social justice, like pro immigrant, you know, says Arab is Catholic. Where, where's the church for you in America? The answer is there is none. And then you got Pope Leo who's like actually trying to say like nice things about like immigrants are good and d d It's like, no. The bishops are like, no, they're not like we, we. You know, I actually wrote a post about this. If you control for partisanship, you know, the difference between a white Catholic and a white evangelical is on immigration.

Dr. Dan Koch (11:28)

Zero.

Ryan P. Burge (11:29)

Zero. Yeah. Once you control for Republicanism, like there is no like the idea of like religion can pull you away from, from like your party's orthodoxy is not true. Like this is like goes back to the idea of like partisanship rules everything now. And like religion is downstream of that.

Dr. Dan Koch (11:44)

Yeah, exactly. I was just gonna say Religion is, is downstream from sociopolitics. And yet yet another data point there.

Ryan P. Burge (11:52)

But people, what's funny is when I say that people automatically reject that because they want to believe that religion still, like it has this transformative. And it does for some people. Right. I think we all know people like that who really are, do have a religious worldview, but that's a minority position even among Catholics and, you know, evangelicals and mainline. And by the way, so we talk about Catholics becoming conservative. Talk about evangelicals already. Very conservative mainliners.

Dr. Dan Koch (12:17)

Right.

Ryan P. Burge (12:18)

Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians. The thought there was always like liberal, mainline, like that's what you always hear. Right. The liberal mainline. Guess what? 60% of United Methodists voted for Donald Trump in 2024. That's after the split, by the way. ELCA, which is a big liberal domination. 50%.

Dr. Dan Koch (12:36)

Meaning you're saying after the split. That's after the conservatives left.

Ryan P. Burge (12:39)

Yes. There's still 60%. Because think about what United Methodist is like demographically. It's old white, upper middle class folks living in rural America. Many of them.

Dr. Dan Koch (12:49)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (12:49)

Which by the way, that's the Republican base now. Now, I don't think they're the same Republicans as like the we hate immigrants, you know, kind of Republicans. They're more country club Republicans, but they're still Republicans. So there really is no, there is no space for white left of center Christians to worship in many parts of America today outside of like major metro areas.

Dr. Dan Koch (13:12)

Major metro areas, yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (13:13)

But if you go like out into the hinterland, which is where I live in my county, there's 40,000 people, been 40,000 people for 75 years now. Really? Like, I'm not joking there.

Dr. Dan Koch (13:23)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (13:24)

There are four mainline churches left in this county and of the four, the Episcopalians. I went to the Episcopal Church for a Service. They had 10 people there, including me. The ELCA and the PCUs actually meet in the same building now because they couldn't afford to have separate buildings. And they have two different services on Sunday morning. And I've been told each of them has 30 to 40 on a good Sunday. And then the United Methodist Church is where I go now, has about 125. So that's. There's a really good possibility that in my county in 10 years there'll be one mainline church functioning in an entire county of 40,000 people. That's. And meanwhile, about a mile away from my house right now is a mega church, an evangelical megachurch. That's 1800 on an average Sunday. And over Christmas, they had a series of services. They had 12,000 people across those services in a county of 40,000 people, in a city of 15,000 people. So really your choices were going to be in my county, evangelical, Catholic or none. And the book was written for people who don't want those options. You know what I mean? They want something else, but they don't have that option anymore.

Dr. Dan Koch (14:27)

Okay. I want to try and bring in this kind of topic that I mentioned at top earlier than I thought because you're giving me a sort of a different lens for thinking about it, this idea of self worth and life satisfaction. And I'm pulling those terms from a recent substack of yours at graphs about religion, which does have words, not only graphs, just so in case people have never read it.

Ryan P. Burge (14:53)

One or two.

Dr. Dan Koch (14:54)

Yes, yes, you do have captions under the graphs.

Ryan P. Burge (14:57)

Yeah, yes, I do.

Dr. Dan Koch (14:58)

But so there's this idea and I'm pulling from, you know, Daryl Van Tongren, friend of friend of the pod and mutual friend of ours, as well as other, you know, kind of existentialist therapists and these, these types of a view that I find very plausible, which is that religion is powerful. One way of thinking about why religion is so powerful, why it's so sticky, is that it provides the type of things that human beings naturally claw after and thirst for and desperately want to be able to navigate life in a variety of ways. And self worth and life satisfaction are within that soup. Right. So you asked this question. The question that you asked in your essay, which we can come back to, is about non religious people. Because of course you and Tony are talking about the nuns. You do a lot of work looking at non religious folks. Do they have similar levels of self worth and life satisfaction as religious Americans? So that's interesting. I'd like to come back to that. What I'm thinking now is like, okay, if I imagine churches over, let's say a 10 to 20 year period or longer, becoming increasingly tribal, increasingly self selected, increasingly homogenous, basically. Right. Within their own boundaries. I'm thinking that the sort of short term effect of this is that it will provide even more of that life coherence, all things being equal, than a more stratified, diverse, heterogeneous church would do. So and the reason for this, I'd love your thoughts on it, is like, I'll go through a couple different bullet points here for the types of things that a church community or religious worldview offers a coherent narrative of life events. Right? You think about, you get people together who all agree that narrative is only going to increase in coherence at least as long as you stay within that group. Right. If you need, for instance, under that heading of coherent narrative, you might have frameworks for understanding suffering or answers to like, the ultimate questions of why we're here and all that stuff. The fewer people who disagree, you know, your, your group looks more and more at a psychological level like a high demand religious group, at least insofar as it may not actually demand anything of you explicitly. The way that, like, if you're a Jehovah's Witness and your child leaves the church, you are explicitly encouraged to cut them off and shun them. Right. You might not have that explicit encouragement in a local evangelical church in, you know, in your county in Indiana or whatever. But the narrative, those frameworks for how we think about this stuff, the answers to those questions, I would think are going to get more and more, you know, the same basically as people self select and that in the short term will produce a bunch of people who feel like their lives are better essentially as, as this trend that you and I are looking at and going, this is not good, you know, like, like I, I think people will experience it as a benefit. And like, I don't, I don't love that. What do you, what do you think?

Ryan P. Burge (18:38)

No, I think it's like, you got to take your medicine is what this whole conversation feels like, right? Like, I know it's not going to be easy, but you got to go to a diverse space where people are different, you know, age and gender and race and economics and education and politics. Like, but that's kind of what the book's about. If you really sit back and think about it like, it's really about, like, I know the easy thing to do, the part where you're affirmed and you're patted on the head, it's like, yeah, you're good, life's good, everyone's fine. Like, that's what you want to do. And it does feel good in the moment. And I do think it probably would render some, you know, sort of short term psychological benefits, actually long term psychological. But it is more, I think about it, but like, that's not good for democracy, right? And I think that's the problem is like what I constantly call people to, which is what pastors are supposed to call people to, by the way, is like to do the hard thing, even though it's, it's hard knowing that the, the benefit of that might not even be your benefit, right? It might be a larger communal benefit for your community or your family. Or your country. But you've got to do the hard thing, because otherwise you don't get to. To reap. You know, it's like. It's like diabetes. The problem with diabetes treatment is everyone's like, ah, you know, it's fine. Like, it'll. It'll be fine. Like, me losing my foot is, like, out there in the ether somewhere. You know what I mean? Like, they don't think about, like, the. Like, I'm not gonna die tomorrow from diabetes.

Dr. Dan Koch (19:58)

Right.

Ryan P. Burge (19:59)

So. So they don't do the. They don't do the little, like, the little annoyance things, which is check your sugar and make sure you stay stable and all that stuff. But eventually what happens is you lose your. Your sight and you lose your feet, you know? And I think that's where we are right now in this whole conversation is like, nah, man, it's fine. Like, I can go to a church. Everyone agrees with me, and I can work at a. Everyone agrees with me. It's all good. And actually, I feel kind of good right now, because when you eat the sweets, it does feel good to eat the sweets.

Dr. Dan Koch (20:22)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (20:23)

But at the end of the day, you're gonna have to chop your toes off because you didn't do the little tweaky things right now that could have put you in a better spot or 10 or 20 years from now. I think that's where we are. And it's like, you know what we realize with diabetes, most people are not going to do a good job of being disciplined with it. They're not going to control their diabetes, and they're going to end up with these really bad outcomes, and you're going to say, I told you so. But at some point, like, what is that?

Dr. Dan Koch (20:44)

It doesn't matter. I told you so. Well, and, oh, my gosh, so many ways to go with this. But, yeah, okay, so, yeah, like, that I want so badly the catharsis. Like every new Trump headline, this has happened to me 75 times across the two terms, where it's like, I read this thing and I desperately want the catharsis of one of the. Only one of the very few Trump supporters in my life. You know, I want to send it to them and have them go, oh, you're right. You were right. I shouldn't. You know, and it's happened. It happens over and over and over and over again, and I will never. It is best for me to assume, I should say that I will never get any such catharsis from these Trump supporters, because I have a very occasionally Had a person say, yeah, I supported him first time, and then I voted against him because I realized I was wrong. That's happened. Like, I could counter on one hand of all the people I know in my life. And so it's very rarely you get a little bit of it. But the desire for that catharsis is so strong. And it's kind of one of those things that I am just starting to think of as this is just an inevitable limit of human psychology and maybe sociology, whatever, you know, pick your, pick your individual group level, whatever that I'm not gonna get it. That's just not how it's gonna work. I have enough data now to resolve that and it's become for me more about accepting that. And a lot of clients are working through very similar things of like, accepting the reality that they are not gonna get that cathartic moment where their loved ones admit that they were wrong and all this stuff. And in that sense, it's like both your book and my podcast are actually kind of aimed at people for whom they'd really love that catharsis. They're not going to get it. And they're kind of, you know, I was joking about listenership dropping. It hasn't, it's not been that dramatic. And in fact, the patreon is still the same. But I have noticed drops around those things. I think the people who are still listening now to you and I are the people who are like kind of in, roughly in this group of wanting a mature way forward is one way of putting it, which is what I want. And I guess, yeah, I'm kind of interested in this idea of like, so let's say I'm such a listener. I do want this kind of catharsis. I'm coming to realize I'm not going to get it. I'm seeing loved ones go further into these more self selected church environments like you're describing, where there is more ideological coherence. And maybe what I brought in about, like, and they seem to be even more satisfied with their lives. Like, they seem happier and like they are engaging in, you know, volunteer activities with more gusto or something. You know, whatever. They're making more friends at their small group or something. And like, you know, they're reading the Duck Dynasty guy's book together in their book club and they're all just having a great time, like for, for the listeners seeing that, like, do you have, is there, is there any salve, is there any like, balm that you can offer us of like, or is it Just. Yeah, dude, we're in it together, you know, like, Like, I don't know. Where do you take that?

Ryan P. Burge (24:12)

Yeah. So actually the project Tony I were working on is called Making Meaning in a Post Religious America. That's actually the title. The.

Dr. Dan Koch (24:17)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (24:18)

Title. And a lot of what we want to do is try to figure out those questions, like meaning and purpose and self worth and like, are the nuns actually like, struggling? You know what I mean? Like, that's one of the big questions that we were trying to really grapple with is like, because if you grew up in the church, you know the spiel, right? Like, no Jesus, no peace canoe, Jesus canopies. Right?

Dr. Dan Koch (24:37)

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (24:38)

You know, like, you got to have this. Like you have a God shaped hole. Right? Like Tycho Brahesa. No, Blaze Pascal. Blaze Pascal said we have a God shaped hole.

Dr. Dan Koch (24:45)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (24:46)

And you know what, the data says that actually a significant number of nuns don't have a God shaped hole and actually aren't really that worse off for it, you know, so, like, not to go too far, like, there's a typology we created or like four types of nuns, and the one that really is like prevalent in this conversation is a group we call the Duns D O N E S. Yeah, I know Darrell Van Tongren uses the word done too. But like, this is sort of a different. This is. These are people who are as far away from religion as we could possibly find. Right? Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (25:18)

In Darrell's book, because we've talked about that, he's saying people who are in his book, it's like anybody who is. Who has left organized religion, but they might, you know, they might have spirituality that lingers. Right. Isn't that how he. His group is a little bigger because he's trying to apply it to a larger group.

Ryan P. Burge (25:34)

And he uses the term religious residue. Right. Which are like people who like, still have like the tendrils are still like stuck in you somehow and you're still like in there somewhere.

Dr. Dan Koch (25:42)

My average listener is. Is more that kind of a religious. If they are not religious anymore and they listen to this show, they probably were at one point. I mean, there may be a few people who just find it fascinating and didn't grow up with it at all and dude, shoot me an email. I'd love to get to know you, but most of us here have that kind of background and we have those tendrils still from our upbringing that you're talking about.

Ryan P. Burge (26:05)

No, I told. And so what's interesting is if you were listening to our Podcast right now you still care about religion, at least at some level, right?

Dr. Dan Koch (26:14)

Like I should hope so or else. What are you doing here? What are, what are you doing? I've got some other podcast recommendations for you if you're not.

Ryan P. Burge (26:21)

If that's true of you, like, don't listen to that. This is a really key point though in our research is so the duns ones we just talked about. Third. A third of the nuns are the duns are the duns.

Dr. Dan Koch (26:35)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (26:36)

That equals out to about 10% of America because the nuns are 30% and a third of that's about 9%. So you know, like 1 in 10Americans, what we call dun. And interestingly enough about the duns, they're the oldest of the four types of non religious people. So these are the kind of people that I would like describe as like the people who joined the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Yeah, you know, like, oh, they were like boomer atheists, but couldn't say they're atheists till they were like in their 50s and 60s because it was like,

Dr. Dan Koch (27:00)

you can't be right. So they have a bit of that like closeted life experience maybe on average.

Ryan P. Burge (27:08)

Exactly. But here's what's fascinating about them. They don't try to convince other people to leave religion.

Dr. Dan Koch (27:13)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (27:14)

This is a key point that we asked. We threw this one question in thinking it wasn't going to do anything. Ended up actually being like this really interesting like keyhole to see, like. So we call it like we break the four group. The top two groups are Nino's nuns in name only because they're actually really religious and they just don't say they are. So like their prayer frequency is actually as high as Protestants and Catholics. They go to church, like somewhat. They're just misclassified. The second group is espnrs. Spiritual but not religious. What I'm sure a lot of people, you know, those two groups combine for about 60% of the nuns. Okay.

Dr. Dan Koch (27:45)

Okay.

Ryan P. Burge (27:45)

The bottom two groups are 40% of the nuns. And then the duns, the ones we just talked about, are part of that. The other part, which is the smallest group is just 10% of the nuns. So 3% of America is what we call zealous atheists.

Dr. Dan Koch (27:56)

These are like, they're like evangelistic about their atheism. Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (28:00)

That one question I was telling you about is have you tried to convince someone to leave religion in the prior 12 months?

Dr. Dan Koch (28:05)

That's a great question. I'm glad you put it in there.

Ryan P. Burge (28:08)

I am too. I thought I was not going to do Anything. We actually ended up putting like a range where it was like, you know, zero, then 1 to 2 and then 2 to 3.

Dr. Dan Koch (28:13)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (28:14)

The only question really matters is yes or no right there. Like it's really binary. It's a binary.

Dr. Dan Koch (28:19)

Have you done it in the last year or not?

Ryan P. Burge (28:20)

Yeah, exactly. Have you tried to convince someone to leave religion? Because that tells you it's like it's a. The more you think about, the more you realize that's something like saying not only are you non religious, like you think the world would be better if people were like you.

Dr. Dan Koch (28:31)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (28:31)

Right. And, and so those. Here's what's really fascinating to go back to that well being stuff.

Dr. Dan Koch (28:35)

Yeah. Self worth meaning satisfact.

Ryan P. Burge (28:38)

Self worth meaning guess. Of the four types of nuns, which group is doing the worst on every possible question we asked?

Dr. Dan Koch (28:46)

The zealous atheists would be my guess.

Ryan P. Burge (28:48)

The zealous atheists, the Duns, are actually doing really well. Almost exactly the same as Protestants or Catholics are. Like on a hundred point scale the Duns are two points lower than Protestants or Catholics. So that's, that's substantively it's basically nothing. Yeah, yeah. Zealous atheists are about 7 points lower than that on a scale from 1 to 100. So that's a noticeable difference.

Dr. Dan Koch (29:14)

Here's my theory based hypothesis for that if you see what you think. So from a psychological perspective, I would say if somebody is in that. If somebody is in the zealous atheist camp, there are two possibilities for that. One which is less likely is that they were raised to be zealous atheists the way that I was raised to be a zealous evangelical. And what we know of in American atheism is that's not very common. Maybe if you grew up in Berkeley with two professor parents or you know, some shit, or you're Daniel Dennett's daughter or something. But like mostly that's not how atheism works in the United States anyway. It's more of a, it's more of a stance of abstaining than it is of sort of fighting back. Right?

Ryan P. Burge (29:59)

Yes.

Dr. Dan Koch (30:00)

So the larger group of that would just be someone who. People who are to some degree still experiencing some sort of crisis, they had some change and it's not resolved for them yet. Whereas especially given that you're saying that the truly dones are older, well that tells me that they've had more time. And so if they were raised religious and left it and are now at a point, let's say in their 50s, 60s or 70s where they're like, yeah, I'm completely. That's just not a part of my life. Well they've had decades probably to sort of figure that out and find other sources of self worth, find other sources of life satisfaction and meaning. You know, existential psychology does not say that. You can only find it in religion or what it says, and I think it's right to say is that it's easy to find it. It's sort of prepackaged in a way in religion to the extent that you buy it. And so it's a bit more of piecemeal kind of long term work to put those things together on the other side of a religious life. And so they've had the time to do it and they're no longer in crisis. I'm wondering if anything else in your data could support or fight against that interpretation that I gave.

Ryan P. Burge (31:14)

No, I think, I think that we actually were gonna call the Duns laissez faire atheists at one point.

Dr. Dan Koch (31:21)

Whatever.

Ryan P. Burge (31:22)

Yeah, yeah, it's just like a kind of like living let live. Yeah, it's like, you know what, like I don't believe in any of that crap and I actually kind of think religion's bad. But if you want, if you like are cool being a Christian and like makes you feel good about yourself, as long as you don't try to impose it on me, then I don't really care what you're, what you're up to.

Dr. Dan Koch (31:38)

If you had asked me, I would have said you should call them live and let die atheists. Come on, come on, it's right there, it's right there because, because they just think death is the end. Live and let out.

Ryan P. Burge (31:48)

77% of them believe that when I die my existence ends of the Duns, which is really high if you sit back and think about it like the worm dirt, you know, like theory like you hear people like talk about. But they really don't believe that stuff.

Dr. Dan Koch (32:00)

Most people don't actually believe that. Yeah, so this is the one.

Ryan P. Burge (32:03)

You're going to reunite with loved ones or your soul lives on or something. We actually ask it in a whole bunch of ways about afterlife questions like does your soul live on? Do you going to reunite with loved ones, you're going to be with Jesus, like try to make it as like specific but also general as we possibly could. And the one, the hardcore question was no, when I die, my existence ends. 77 of the done said. But what's, here's what's fascinating. So those zealous atheists Like, I think they're the younger version of the Duns, like, as they age, like that fire in their belly of like, nah, man, you gotta, like, leave Jesus behind and all that stuff. You had those fights in your 20s and 30s and even maybe in your 40s a little bit when you get your 50s and 60s, you're like, dude, I don't care. You know, just leave me alone. Like, believe. I want to call the zealous atheist. Actually, I do call them this, the Reddit atheists. Because you're on Reddit. Yeah, the Reddit atheist. Dude, if you ever been on Reddit, like at all, and talk about religion, these people come out of the woodwork to tell you you believe in sky Daddy.

Dr. Dan Koch (32:57)

Flying spaghetti monster is a big one. That tells me something.

Ryan P. Burge (33:01)

Yep. Those are the kind of people who want to be disrespectful. Right? Like, they want to belittle you for having a religious belief. They really do feel like they're morally superior to you. I. And that's why they're arguing from the position they are. But again, the data says they're the group that's actually. It's funny. It's like misery loves company. It's like, my life sucks and I want your life to suck too. Like, you know, getting rid of religion and then fighting battles with people. I just think it's like, it's the. It's the, like the very online people are concentrated in that sort of, you know, the zealous atheist group, which I think it tells you a lot, is like, this is what you consistently see in the data. The people on this end are fine. The people on that end are fine. The people in the middle are the ones that are struggling the most because they're like, they don't know. They're not comfortable with 2ft in one identity, whether it be 2ft nuns or 2ft Christian. They're not happy because they're cross pressure, to use a term that you used earlier. They're kind of pulled this way and then pulled that way, and it ends up pulling them apart, I feel like, psychologically.

Dr. Dan Koch (34:02)

Well, so let me try another angle there on that tack. So one of the things that religious belonging provides for people, another sort of category that there's a lot of evidence to suggest this, is that it provides moral affirmation and like, identity validation. So, like, my life is morally meaningful. My actions, especially the ones that are related to what my religious group does, these are morally good. I am one of the goodies, not one of the baddies. And that identity, you know, like my, my identity in Christ is more important than other identities I have, like my status or my class or, or whatever. So it, it sort of gives this scaffolding and says, hey, you're good, you're one of the good guys, you're doing good work. And that is profoundly orienting. I mean, I would argue that some version of that is actually necessary for a flourishing life to have a sense of that. And how I might sort of narrate this again, middle of the bell curve, broad strokes for these two groups is like when you're still in crisis, when you're still in that sort of shorter term, medium term period, well, you are gonna maybe be grasping for that feeling of having a meaningful life. Even if you technically accept the worm dirt argument of your body and you know, there's no soul and all that stuff, human beings still need to feel meaningful. So you like, you know, you pursue that meaning through these conversations or arguments. You try and make the world a better place by ridding it of corrosive religious superstition. Right. And like later on, if you do, if you kind of have 20 years under your belt and you might just find like, you know what? I found meaning in my kids. I do meaningful work. I am embedded in a community of people that I care for and that care for me. And that's what I've got until I die. And I've come to accept that and be okay with that. So I could see how time would be a significant factor for that kind of moral affirmation and identity validation.

Ryan P. Burge (36:24)

Yeah, that's. I think that's we call, let's term in social. Called limit the liminal state. Yeah, that in between you're sort of like between identities.

Dr. Dan Koch (36:32)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (36:32)

You know, you're saying you sort of like pop in and out of the, of the, of you know, like Christian. Like you might say you're Christian if I ask you today, but then in six months you might say you're atheist. Then you might say you're Christian the next time. You know, like, it's like the people that are going through something are the ones that are struggling the most. But I like, I think at some point, like you've got to psychologically can't, you can't fight those battles every single day for 50, 60 years now. Some people do and God bless them, because that's an awful existence. It feels like, Yeah, I think for most of us we start going, okay, what really matters to me today to my self worth. And they sort of like build up These mechanisms around their brains on how to, like, not live liminally anymore. Like.

Dr. Dan Koch (37:13)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (37:13)

To use a phrase. I think a lot of young evangelicals went through the John the Baptist stage.

Dr. Dan Koch (37:19)

Okay.

Ryan P. Burge (37:20)

You know what I'm talking about, where it's like, yeah, man. Like, the coming wrath is here and you're all a brood of vipers and you're not living up to the high calling of what it means to be a Christian. Like, the whole, like, set yourself on fire and people will come to watch you burn. And I think it's like, almost like the Holden Caulfield phase of religion, where it's like, I'm the real one and you're all phonies.

Dr. Dan Koch (37:37)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (37:37)

And, like, I hate phonies. We all go through that.

Dr. Dan Koch (37:39)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (37:41)

And then you get in your, like, 30s and 40s and go, yeah, dude, if you want. If you think women should be pastors, like, I don't give a crap anymore. You know what I mean? If you think, like, two men should get married, I don't really care. Doesn't affect me at all. And I think that's that process. We don't understand that process very well, by the way. I think we should, you know, like, have a better grip of, like, how that works in a Christian. Like, how religious context works. I think it's. What you see in the data very clearly of the nuns is, like, these two categories of, like, young, pissed off, zealous atheists and older. Shrug your shoulders. I don't like religion. But whatever. You know, the. The. The Duns. And I guess here's the. Here's a glimmer of hope for those young zealous atheists. You won't be like that forever, you know.

Dr. Dan Koch (38:18)

They're not listening to us, Ryan.

Ryan P. Burge (38:20)

No, they really should. If you are, though, like, here's your little piece of, like, pie of, like, your life's probably gonna get better because you're probably gonna get me less pissed off. And that's. That's probably a good thing.

Dr. Dan Koch (38:29)

I mean, this is not an ad for my therapy or coaching services, but, like, this is so down the middle of kind of a lot of what I do is that, you know, the time. The time where therapy or coaching, depending on the situation, would be sort of useful and indicated is when there is still angst going on about all of this and when the footing is still being found. Right. Like that people go to therapy when they are in some sort of crisis, as a general rule. That's like, when you decide to pull the trigger, spend the money, make it work in your schedule is when you're like, okay, I need some help. Like that's when I always resume therapy after a break is like, shit. I am really struggling with these couple things, like let's get that guy back in here. You know, and so it's like that makes sense. And just like with therapy, like most clients make progress and they do move past this stuff, you know, so it's not a. That sort of crisis is not generally a steady state for people. And I'd like to distinguish between that type of crisis, which can happen at any age, I think and usually seems to be sort of the result of life circumstances, things that happen to us. And things can happen to us anytime, right?

Ryan P. Burge (39:59)

Yep.

Dr. Dan Koch (40:00)

Versus what you're talking about, which I would actually think of through a developmental lens. Like when I was 18, I came back from college as a freshman and I told my mom to sell all her jewelry. Right. Why did I do that? Was it only because I was like getting into more left leaning politics? No, it's also because I was fucking 18. Right. Like that is a part of it. Yes. In fact that's probably the main part of it. Like I may have had a. I may have thought like if today I thought people with as much jewelry as my mom had when I was 18 should probably sell some of it. Like they have too much jewelry. I would not go to someone and say it to them. The reason that I said it to her was because I was 18. Right. And so there is a developmental. There are just normal stages where we just interpret the world differently based on how long we've been in it and what we've seen and what's firing off in our brain and what our hormone levels are and how connected our prefrontal cortex is and you know, that kind of a thing. So I would distinguish between that developmental questions and sort of like any. A crisis can happen at any time and then there's a crisis and there's resolving the crisis. And that is not maybe how you'd resolve it would be developmentally there. A developmental lens would be really interesting on like how do 50 year olds go through faith crises or 70 year olds versus 20 year olds. That's a really interesting question. But that's. The crisis itself can happen anytime.

Ryan P. Burge (41:26)

I think that's. I was talking to my son. He's 14, right. He has a lot of emotions at 14. And I was remembering back to when I was 14. I had a lot of emotions at 14.

Dr. Dan Koch (41:36)

Yeah, dude, it's like you're. I was putting Most of them into really bad pop punk songs. That's what I was doing with my 14 year old. Emotion.

Ryan P. Burge (41:43)

Writing poetry and like feeling things, man. Like, but I think, I think this is such an important point. It's like when you're like in that age, right. Like 12 to 22, 25, your life's an emotional roller coaster. You have the highest highs and the lowest lows and as you get older, the peaks and the valleys get closer towards the middle. You know, I mean, you still might have peaks and valleys, but you'll never feel as good or as bad as you did whenever you were 16 years old.

Dr. Dan Koch (42:12)

Yeah. And I think, by the way, I think that is implicated in the reason that our favorite music and the reason that our friendships, especially from college.

Ryan P. Burge (42:24)

Yes.

Dr. Dan Koch (42:25)

Are so sticky, is that we have traversed that terrain with these songs and these people. Right. And then. So I love Geese. I won't on Instagram. I won't stop. I won't shut up with my friends. I won't shut up talking about this New York City band, Geese, who have my favorite album of last year. But it's still like, that's my favorite album of the last five or 10 years. And it doesn't hold a candle to the way I felt when I first heard the get up Kids or MxPx. It just can't. It can't.

Ryan P. Burge (42:57)

Yes.

Dr. Dan Koch (42:58)

Further seems Forever or Dashboard Confessional. Like, I just am physically, my brain is incapable of a record meaning that much to me now. Unless, like, you know, you go through a really traumatic life experience. Maybe later in life you could have a record that gets you through that or something. But it would, it would take a lot. Whereas routinely ask people what's the most emotional you get with music. It's like it's something that they got into in high school or college. You know, something like that. Right?

Ryan P. Burge (43:27)

Yes, yes. And that's good. But I think that's. You can't live like that forever.

Dr. Dan Koch (43:31)

No, you wouldn't want to. You would.

Ryan P. Burge (43:33)

It's miserable. It's amazing.

Dr. Dan Koch (43:35)

Look to the example of the truly dones. They have found peace there.

Ryan P. Burge (43:40)

But like, that's the thing is like their ups and downs aren't big ups and downs anymore. They're sort of like inside that, like, normal distribution of like. And I will say this, like, I felt more emotion for my friends or my girlfriend at 16 years old than I. Than I felt. But the thing is, I also felt worse, you know, honestly, in the same week sometimes.

Dr. Dan Koch (44:01)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (44:01)

At that age. Oh yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (44:02)

The cycling is so much More rapid.

Ryan P. Burge (44:04)

It's in. The thing is like that. I think that's like leaving faith, like being in that liminal state is like those, those like those bounces are humong fungus. And then the further you get away from it, it's like grief. You know that great Reddit thread about what grief is like? It's like waves. And the first, you know, the first six months, it's like they're 100ft tall and you're just doing everything you can to keep your head above water.

Dr. Dan Koch (44:24)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (44:24)

And they're 80ft tall and they're 50ft tall and they'll always, for a long time, they'll be the first thing you think about when you wake up. Then the second thing, then there's a third thing and then you don't think about them every day. Like, I think that's how the Duns have gotten. Those waves have gotten to 20ft as opposed to 100ft. And the zealous atheists are still dealing with hundred foot waves every day. And it feels like that's her entire identity.

Dr. Dan Koch (44:44)

I'm pretty sure Daryl would say that that wave analogy would also apply pretty well to religious residue to that idea.

Ryan P. Burge (44:50)

I think that's exactly right. Like it starts fading and now it never fades all the way. I think we can all admit that, like it's always like in the background. Yeah, yeah, you lose, it's always there.

Dr. Dan Koch (44:57)

Yeah, you lose a kid or a brother or something like that isn't. You don't ever. That's.

Ryan P. Burge (45:01)

No, you'll never. It's always going to be like as a background noise in your head somehow. And sometimes it gets louder, sometimes it gets quieter, but it's always there. And I think that's why these zealous atheists are struggling because those waves are just throwing over, you know, they're getting tossed left and right. And I think our, the other part of it is they're leaning into it. Like they're like, okay, let's see what the next wave looks like. Let's like, let's. The problem with the Internet is you can hunt out your worst impulses, like, let's go start a fight about God on Reddit or Twitter or whatever. When you couldn't do that 30 years ago or you couldn't do it easily. I'll say that. So I think it actually makes those things, impulse control problems are exacerbated a thousand times with the Internet because you can find whatever nonsense you want. I think actually for the grief process, it actually makes it worse for a Lot of those people. And I am not a therapist. Dan's a therapist. But I'll tell you, from my uneducated position, I would say don't seek out the waves. They're going to come anyway. Just be will. You know, I mean, like, understand, like, you don't have to make that up. And you don't, you don't have to care as much as you do about that right now. Like, find a way to not care about that.

Dr. Dan Koch (46:07)

Yeah, sometimes. Easier said than done.

Ryan P. Burge (46:09)

Yeah, exactly. I feel like in therapy, I feel like you said a lot, Dan. It's like I'm telling you what you should be doing, but I don't know if you're going to be able to do it.

Dr. Dan Koch (46:16)

But. Yeah, well, we don't. It doesn't work as well if you tell them what you think they should be doing, actually. So you got to. You have to be a little more artful about that. Let's take a little ad break and I'll throw a grenade in that. We can see how it mixes with everything. Because you do have an interesting recent essay about the boom and bust speaking of developmental changes of transgender and non binary identification among young people. So we'll come back and chat about that. Okay, so you have this graph, which is not really about religion, I gotta say. So you've really kind of gone beyond your framing here. But you have a piece recently about. And I've seen this elsewhere, but mentioned in little news articles and stuff. But I think you, you tackled it with some more substance. There has been, you know, people remember 2022, 2023, just thinking, okay, so many. It sure seems like a lot of young people are identifying as trans or non binary or some variation of that. I think the way in the survey data you've got it is like identifying as neither male nor female. Now, there's a lot of problems here. We don't have very long data for this kind of stuff. There's different phrasings of questions and you can get into all the sort of methodological problems with, with making sure you're like reading that correctly and stuff. But all those caveats included. What's the headline? Out of the data.

Ryan P. Burge (48:02)

Yeah. So I actually have to give full credit to what being on Twitter sucks. But every once in a while you get a good idea. And other people started looking at these data sets that I had access to. I just never thought about, about the trans identification question because we started asking those questions on surveys probably five years ago. Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (48:19)

So unlike the nuns project, we don't have like rich data for the last 30 plus years for this.

Ryan P. Burge (48:24)

And that's like, you'd be amazed what we don't know. That's like a biggest, like the biggest thing is like, what, what do you wish people knew about your job? Is that I don't answer. I don't try to answer questions I don't know. I don't have the data to answer. That'd be a waste of my time.

Dr. Dan Koch (48:36)

Right?

Ryan P. Burge (48:37)

So the trans questions started getting put on surveys like in 2020, and among 18 to 22 year olds, like 8 and a half percent of them said they were. They were not male NOR Female in 2020, which is insane. Like just numerically 8. Pretty high. It's. That's like crazy high. Like, to give you a sense of like, how big that is, I always put it back to like religious groups. Atheists in America are 6% of the country. So like 8%. There'd be like more trans college students. There would be atheist college students. Like, it's, it's a ton of people.

Dr. Dan Koch (49:08)

Can I ask you this? Because I feel like that this might help me at least, and probably a listener, you hear different numbers. Obviously it changes over the decades as, you know, acceptance of non straight sexuality grows. I used to hear numbers like probably 2 to 3% of America is gay or lesbian. Then later I heard numbers like, okay, maybe it's like 5 to 6%. Is there. Does anybody have like a reasonable kind of baseline for. In a society where it is acceptable to not be straight, approximately what percentage of people sort of as a basic biological baseline, will identify as non straight? Like, can that help us, you know, figure this out? And that's not exactly the same as gender identity. Right? That's sexuality. So there are. But it does, it might help orient me.

Ryan P. Burge (50:02)

2 to 3% is probably the right number.

Dr. Dan Koch (50:04)

That.

Ryan P. Burge (50:04)

Okay, okay, but here's the issue. As people age, they're more likely to identify as heterosexual.

Dr. Dan Koch (50:12)

So they try things like they're more likely to be more experimental in younger years and then sort of figure out, especially women.

Ryan P. Burge (50:19)

Especially women. Okay, like for instance, like there's data that like among 18 to 25 year old women, something like 35 of them do not identify as heterosexual.

Dr. Dan Koch (50:28)

That's huge.

Ryan P. Burge (50:29)

That's huge. But what we do know is but

Dr. Dan Koch (50:32)

once they reach 60, most of them will, like, a lot of them will just be in heterosexual partnerships.

Ryan P. Burge (50:37)

Yeah, well, once they reach 35, you know, because they'll be married to a dude, right? Like living a very sort of quote unquote traditional you know, life. So it's like, I think part of it is like part of this allyship, to use a term. Like women are more willing to say they're not straight because it's like I want to stand with my, you know, my gay friends or my trans friends or my non binary friends and it's an easy way to signal like support and maybe they actually never had a sexual encounter with another woman.

Dr. Dan Koch (51:06)

Now when you say signal support, I mean you don't mean, you don't mean simply answering an anonymous survey as to say that they're not straight. You mean they would actually have a kind of, they would think of themselves as more fluid. Whether or not that ended up as like taking action.

Ryan P. Burge (51:24)

I think that's, that's something we don't fully understand. I think it's a very reasonable hypothesis. It's a way to say like me like a woman, a 22 year old girl. Saying like I'm, I'm not straight is like the stigma against that is like almost not. And the positive benefits are now you feel like you're an ally to your

Dr. Dan Koch (51:40)

gay friends, let's say, provided you are in the left half of the country. Right?

Ryan P. Burge (51:45)

Yeah. And let's say you're on a college campus.

Dr. Dan Koch (51:46)

Yeah, college campus, coasts, urban area. So really at 18 to 25, unless you are going into agriculture, you know. Right. Like you're likely, unless you're in a very red coated area that is unlikely to cost you anything, especially as a young person. And it is likely to sort of, it's like young men saying that they're feminists.

Ryan P. Burge (52:12)

Yes.

Dr. Dan Koch (52:12)

It's very unlikely to cost you romantic partners if you're straight to highlight your feminism.

Ryan P. Burge (52:19)

Yes.

Dr. Dan Koch (52:20)

You know, something like that.

Ryan P. Burge (52:21)

That's the exact corollary I would use. Right. And also what it does is it also like from a public policy standpoint goes, man, there's a lot more gay people than we thought, you know, so maybe we should give them more rights and more protections and you know, in

Dr. Dan Koch (52:33)

which for those women you're talking about, that would be aligned with their values.

Ryan P. Burge (52:38)

Absolutely.

Dr. Dan Koch (52:38)

It's like win, win, win in that sense. Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (52:40)

Yes. And I think a lot of like this would be like our qualitative work would actually be very helpful to like follow up with these women and just like ask, have you ever, you know, had a romantic relationship with a woman?

Dr. Dan Koch (52:49)

Yeah. An orgasm with a woman.

Ryan P. Burge (52:51)

Have you? Exactly.

Dr. Dan Koch (52:52)

Kind of benchmark questions. Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (52:53)

Like, you know, ask them a question like your next partner. What's the likelihood that It's a male versus a female. Like, you know, things like 80% male.

Dr. Dan Koch (53:00)

Do some longitudinal stuff and then follow up.

Ryan P. Burge (53:03)

Oh, that'd be fantastic.

Dr. Dan Koch (53:04)

Like five years later. What was after that? We, we interviewed you at this year or two years later. What was the gender of your next one?

Ryan P. Burge (53:12)

And even like when you, when you see yourself getting married, if you see yourself getting married, like, who do you see that person being?

Dr. Dan Koch (53:18)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (53:18)

You know, don't even make it about gender. Just like, describe that person with whatever words you want to use. Because if, like, I think a lot of those 18 to 22 year old women who say they're not straight, the vast majority say, yeah, it's a man, you know, he's got a job and da da, da, and all that kind of stuff. So that's why it's hard now, the trans stuff.

Dr. Dan Koch (53:35)

Yeah, yeah. So just really quickly, again, there's a, there's a developmental lens to all of this stuff. We're talking about 18 to 25 year olds. So we're talking about the period of most intense identity formation. And by the way, in teen and early twenties, that identity formation often happens regularly. Happens in some way in contradiction to one's given identity that you were raised in. And so for religious kid, you know, for teenagers and young adults coming out of religious groups, it's pushing back against that. If your parents are conservative, you're getting liberal, some of them. If your parents are liberal, you're getting conservative. Like we see some of that going on with this group. You know, there's a lot of stories about that in young men, but just developmentally it's just a normal thing to push back on whatever you had been given.

Ryan P. Burge (54:24)

Rebellion's like a key, you know, aspect of being a young person.

Dr. Dan Koch (54:28)

We call it differentiation. You know, when I was 18, I called it rebellion. Now I call it differentiation at 40.

Ryan P. Burge (54:34)

So here's a fun story. When I was 18, we had to take all these surveys at college for like, you know, all the educational clearinghouses for, you know, their data and all that stuff.

Dr. Dan Koch (54:41)

Okay.

Ryan P. Burge (54:41)

And they would always ask race and I would mark other and write child of God in the box because I was just trying to be a jerk.

Dr. Dan Koch (54:48)

Yeah, being a little.

Ryan P. Burge (54:49)

But I feel like in some ways that's what this is. Like, it's a form of rebellion. Right. Of like saying, like, I'm not gonna, you're not gonna put me in a box, man. Like, I'm gonna, I defy categories. When really at the end of the day, those, almost all those women who say they're not straight, are gonna marry a guy or have a long term relationship with a guy. Like that's, they're, they're, they're dispositionally heterosexual. They'll just say they're homosexual because it, because again what we just talked about.

Dr. Dan Koch (55:12)

Or you're, they'd more say they're bisexual or kind of open. Right. That's more what they would write. Lesbian. They'd be less likely to write to check lesbian or something. Right.

Ryan P. Burge (55:23)

That'd be fun to actually ask them, like use words to describe your sexual orientation and see which ones they would use. Like I probably very few would actually say the lesbian unless they really are, you know, like they really have a female partner and have had one and will have one. So.

Dr. Dan Koch (55:36)

Okay, so, so that was interest. That was an interesting cul de sac there. So maybe it's 2 to 4% of like more adults. But now the trans question is controlling for age. So the developmental thing is only interesting insofar as we're comparing it to different ages. But the graph that you posted is of the same age group over a five year, eight year span. Most of the data doesn't start till 2020. A little bit of it starts before. So what's the kind of, what's the big takeaway of how things have changed in the last, let's say seven years?

Ryan P. Burge (56:09)

So 2020 to 2024 is how far I can like look at the span.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:13)

Because that's where you have more than one data, more than one survey data point.

Ryan P. Burge (56:17)

Yes. 8.3% in 2020 and then down to 3.5% in 2024. Again looking at 18 to 22 year olds, like just the youngest adults.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:26)

We can survey the same group.

Ryan P. Burge (56:28)

Okay, yeah. 18 to 22 year olds. That's a tremendous drop.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:31)

So that's like older brother, younger brother, older sister, younger sister. Like my boys are four years apart. So they are literally like. That's exactly. If, if my oldest had been 19 in 2020 and was asked the question, then my youngest would be asked the same question at 19 in 2024. And for the average person in terms of non binary, is that the, what's the best term here? Non binary. Neither male nor female.

Ryan P. Burge (56:58)

What's your present gender? Male, female, something like other something else. Like if you don't check male or

Dr. Dan Koch (57:04)

female other than male or female. So any other language would be in this. Okay. And so in a four year span, that went from eight and a half percent to three and a half percent.

Ryan P. Burge (57:13)

Yep.

Dr. Dan Koch (57:14)

Wow. So what's funny about that Is now. Okay, this is, this is surely controversial among many. Like, probably. Probably. What would it be? The further left you are, the more controversial that statement is. Is that the way of saying it?

Ryan P. Burge (57:27)

Okay, so here's what's fascinating. Like, you don't know how data is going to be received. That's one of the fun parts of my job is like, I can just show you. And if you just read what I do, like, I really just kind of show you what the data says and don't, like, get over my skis too much and try to like, hot. Take my way into, into trouble, especially on that post. Like, if you read that post, I literally have like two sentences where I talk about plausibility structures and the last sentence was, as Forrest Gump said, that's all I'm going to say about that. Like, I literally just dive and duck and like, I'm not going to get involved.

Dr. Dan Koch (57:55)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (57:55)

So I put that, that finding out in the world and it goes like, all over. Like on Reddit. I read the comments, which is a mistake. But here's what's fascinating. The reasons for that drop have fallen into two camps. Okay. One is, of course trans identity would drop. We have an administration that's actively trying to kill trans people.

Dr. Dan Koch (58:17)

So these people that, these were the Biden years.

Ryan P. Burge (58:21)

That's, that's the, the, the, the fly in the ointment of that argument.

Dr. Dan Koch (58:25)

But the argument is 2020 to 2024. Exactly 21 to 25. Biden's in office. He wins in.

Ryan P. Burge (58:30)

It was when Trump got, when Biden got elected is when that. And Biden was in office during the second polling.

Dr. Dan Koch (58:37)

Yeah, so that would, that would be a problem with that perspective.

Ryan P. Burge (58:41)

Yeah, but that perspective is what you hear. The liberal people, the liberal responses, to

Dr. Dan Koch (58:45)

be clear, by the way, I have seen firsthand with clients and others and friends that, like, that is a real psych. You're not saying that's not a real psychological reality out in the world while Trump is president. What you're saying is it doesn't work very well as an explanation for the drop in identification because of the chronology.

Ryan P. Burge (59:05)

I think the chronology definitely puts a big shadow over that explanation.

Dr. Dan Koch (59:10)

It's probably part of it, though. Even like if Trump had one. And then like, but then you'd almost think, like, it might even be a counter argument, which is like, oh, Trump's president. Fuck you guys. I'm identifying as trans.

Ryan P. Burge (59:23)

Loud and proud. Right.

Dr. Dan Koch (59:24)

So that actually, but that would be a different explanation. But unfortunately we don't have data from 2016 to 2020 help clear that up if. Yeah, because it could be, I would believe, like, I'll just put it this way. Like all the punk bands that I grew up on were like formed their, the. Sorry the historic punk bands that, that were putting out music before I was of age to listen to punk defined themselves in opposition to Ronald Reagan and fucking Margaret Thatcher. So Margaret Thatcher in the uk, Ronald Reagan in the States. We are anti this kind of a thing, right? And so we're going to embrace this kind of anti capitalist like, you know, aesthetic and all this stuff. We like the 80s greed is good sort of sheen on everything that we're doing the opposite of that. So I could see that like that would make sense to me as an analog to my own subcultural experience during the Trump years. Be like, fuck you, I'm, I'm trans, I'm non binary. Like that you stand for everything I hate. I'm going to disrupt that with the way I see myself. And you know something like, I don't, I'm not arguing that non binary that one's identification is like one's dress or clothes. It's like aesthetics. That's not true. It's real. It represents a real psychological facet of a person's life, but it's not necessarily tied to a behavior you could identify that way. And you know, doesn't really matter what you do, you'll still get credit for it on the survey. Just like you can dye your hair and wear, you know, a crass, you know, stitch a crass logo on the back of your dickies jacket and it doesn't matter if you are actually working class. Like you can do that whether or not you go take a factory job and you know, like you can sort of, or live as a crust punk on the street or whatever the sort of connected lifestyle is supposed to be. Identification is looser than that. Self identification is more flexible than that, which is great in a lot of ways.

Ryan P. Burge (61:30)

I think the other thing, like this is where I get, I, I don't know, people are saying like they're worried that they're going to take the survey and then somehow someone's going to get a hold of it and then track these trans people down and cause them harm. That's what I actually see a lot of people like in my mentions will say was, I would never tell a pollster I was trans because I worry about my safety. I don't know how I feel about that.

Dr. Dan Koch (61:53)

That's interesting. I mean, I wonder, you know, it's certainly it must be true that a reduced trust in institutions would probably correlate with someone saying, this is completely anonymous. And you go, fuck. It is. You know, like. Like you could imagine being like, I've heard that before. Or, you know, like, not trusting that and so not offering that and a increased sense of felt danger would. Would. Okay, I could see that playing in what are. But, like, what are the other arguments? Like, so what are the arguments that go, well, here's why it makes sense maybe from a less apologetic kind of a perspective.

Ryan P. Burge (62:34)

Social contagion, like, that's really, really what.

Dr. Dan Koch (62:37)

So social contagion. Yeah. This is really unfortunate because it's a. It's a term that was coined in academic literature to just mean. But it's one of those. It's like, gosh, you guys really could have come up with a better term.

Ryan P. Burge (62:50)

I know, it's off, like, you know, hates it. Like all the epidemiologists hate when we use that term.

Dr. Dan Koch (62:55)

Yeah. Who actually talk about contagions.

Ryan P. Burge (62:58)

Yeah. Like Covid as a contagion.

Dr. Dan Koch (63:00)

It's a literal contagion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so, but when you said plausibility structures, that's what you're gesturing at, right?

Ryan P. Burge (63:07)

Yeah, that's what plausibility structures are like, possibility for those who don't know plausibility structures. The idea of, like, what is possible? What can you potentially be like in a certain world? You have very few plausibility. You know, like, they're very tight boundaries are very tight on what you can be. And then during COVID it was like, you don't have to go to class. You don't have to turn anything in on time. Our sense of plausibility structures got very elastic during COVID Or to use a

Dr. Dan Koch (63:29)

religious example, if you grow up fundamentalist, it seems extremely plausible that the universe is 6,000 years old. And it seems extremely implausible that it could be four and a half billion years old. But that's only true for people who remain in that pretty small fundamentalist world, because as soon as you get outside of it now, I experience it to be entirely implausible because my plausibility structures have changed sort of around me.

Ryan P. Burge (63:57)

The way I would describe to people is, what do you allow your brain to think about is what plausibility structures are? Like, maybe I could be gay, or maybe I could be trans, or maybe I don't have to go to church this week. Or, you know, like most people don't.

Dr. Dan Koch (64:10)

Okay. But here's what. Let me. So here's a problem with that. That argument. Yeah, I, in some sense, the. I would, I would say that the plausibility of a young person being like is a trans or non binary or fill it in identity available to me. If, if anything, I would plot that as a. Just an upward graph that like, that would become more and more like from. From 9, from 2016 to 2026. I, I would see that as becoming increasingly plausible. I wouldn't think that it would be. It. It's not. Become less plausible. Right. Since Trump's second term or, or, you

Ryan P. Burge (64:53)

know what I mean?

Dr. Dan Koch (64:53)

Or since Biden was elected. Like, that seems weird, I think.

Ryan P. Burge (64:57)

But I think here's the issue with the trans thing specifically. Okay.

Dr. Dan Koch (65:01)

Okay.

Ryan P. Burge (65:02)

For a lot of people, they got introduced to the idea of transgender in a real way in a very short window of time. Time. Right.

Dr. Dan Koch (65:08)

Like Caitlyn Jenner and a couple other big news events. That kind of a thing.

Ryan P. Burge (65:13)

Yep.

Dr. Dan Koch (65:13)

Like around 2019. 2020. Right.

Ryan P. Burge (65:16)

It went from like the transvestite to use a term, you know, like that's the only way it was referred. Or cross dressers is what you would have heard 10 years ago. Right. To this is a real thing and lots of people are transgender and we need to accept them. Like the, the, the, the, the bathroom bills and all that kind of nonsense. Right. Like, I think the thing about. Okay, think about this. So there's LGBTQ plus, right. The LGB thing. Most people were aware of that for 30 years before it became law that two men or two women could get married. Right. I mean, we were talking about gay people in the 70s.

Dr. Dan Koch (65:51)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (65:52)

Like, widespread. The trans thing felt like it came on us like, way faster than that. And I think in some ways that leads to a more like it's, to use a term, it became a fad or a trend, you know, like in, in 2020, that it was like, hey, that's how to be different. And so a lot of people said they were trans. And then the backlash came. And a lot of people, like, if you look at the data, like if you break it down by politics, there were actually a significant number of Republic Young Republican people who said they were trans in 2020. And by 2024, there are hardly any less than 1%, because I think the, the politics hardened around trans in a way that it was not hardened in 2019.

Dr. Dan Koch (66:34)

Yeah. So I just looked it up like the Caitlyn Jenner Person of the Year cover, magazine cover. That was 2015.

Ryan P. Burge (66:41)

Holy cow.

Dr. Dan Koch (66:42)

Yeah. So I wish we had data going 10 years back because that'd be really Interesting to be able to compare to that. But here. Okay, so not that I'm an expert on this, but the stuff that seems most plausible to me that you've described is. Here's how I would put it all the way back to the polarization angle of your new book. It's like if you maybe in 2020, Covid, George Floyd, that is sort of the height of, as I understand it, that's the height of a certain kind of social justice orientation to the world being sort of like universally acceptable. There's a brief window where even people on the right are kind of like, like they're not yet arguing that George Floyd was actually deserving of it hasn't taken that turn yet. It's kind of like conservative people, older people in my life joined us for protests. There was this moment and what I would believe is that from then to now, in the last five, six years, five and a half years as we're recording this, what's happened is those pathways have remained equally, if not more viable in sort of the 25 to 30% most left leaning of the country, sort of your MSNBC viewers and leftward, but certainly on the right, that's become a sort of a cultural. No, no. And maybe even in the middle too, there's kind of an exhaustion with the language and concepts of the more progressive wings of the country. And so a way I would buy now, I don't know how this would apply to 18 to 25 year olds, that's maybe a little bit harder, but that there is a sense in which, okay, 2020 represents a peak moment where anybody who experiences themselves in any way divergent from a kind of cisgender or, you know, normative, you know, self that they have like peak, there's a peak of their ability to feel comfortable claiming that. And that as you go on from 2020, if you are broadly on the right or broadly in the middle, you're just kind of. That's going to get less and less unless you kind of stay in the hashtag resistance world. How does that hit you?

Ryan P. Burge (69:12)

No, I think that's. That, that is probably how I would describe it. I think there's a lot, a lot about the trans thing. I don't. Well, the problem is like, so scientifically it's hard to study a group that's that small. Like before 2020. Like, how would you even do that? Like, there's just not enough folks in that group. I just think a lot of people are. Okay, so when something new comes along, you know what most people's initial reaction to that thing is, it sucks. It sucks. I hate it. Like, we're seeing this in solar panels around my part of the world.

Dr. Dan Koch (69:47)

Music.

Ryan P. Burge (69:47)

Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, I hate this new stuff. But, like, say, like, solar panels around where I live are, like, a big fight right now because everyone wants to put solar panels out in their farm fields because they're getting a ton of money from the government to do so. And all these people just hate it. Like, they hate the idea of electric cars because they're just different. They hate ideas of solar panels. It's just new. I don't like it. So I. I think, like, that's almost like a personality disposition thing to everything. Not just politics, by the way, just life. Like, and someone's like, oh, these dudes are wearing dresses now. And I'm all grumpy about it, you know, in the same way that I'm grumpy about anything that's different from back in my day. So I do wonder if, like, the. Really, the resistance there is just because it, like, hit him so fast. Like, and when it becomes. I don't want to use the word normalized, but, like, normalized, like mainstream.

Dr. Dan Koch (70:29)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (70:29)

Like, I think to go back to where we started with the Duns, like, the fights won't be fighting anymore. They'll just be like, okay, man, like, you hung around and still said you're trans, even though all that nonsense happened. You must really be trans, dude. Like, let's respect that and move on with that whole thing.

Dr. Dan Koch (70:43)

Yeah, yeah, I could see that. And, you know, so I guess I was offering sort of a flip side of the fad coin that would be more about genuine experience. But I. But to sort of play the other side of it, it might be something like, for someone who's on the fence, not sure. Which, by the way, 18 to 25, great time to be on the fence and not sure and figuring shit out about yourself. So more power to you if someone's not sure. Maybe 20. 20 represents the height of. Well, this has actual kind of cachet to it that this is not that. Like, oh, and you could imagine someone being like. And I might even be, like, kind of celebrated for it, you know, like, as opposed to bullied for it or something. So. And. And then in that sense, you could call that fad. Ish. Whereas someone might be drawn to it. For whom? That's not really gonna last for them kind of a thing. But, you know, you could also talk about the flip side of that, which is like, well, it is a bummer that it is no longer so celebrated or welcomed, you know, and I would, you know, in my own personal thinking, I would say I would pin some of the blame on the sort of more activisty perspectives being given so much platform, because I do think there are sort of natural consequences to fringe ideas being presented as mainstream to people and then going, what? And I think really probably if you had to boil it down to one thing, it would be the sports issue that, like, it's just not gonna ever be palatable to maybe. Do you know the percentage you give me a percentage of you being much closer to the numbers? A 16 year old or 19 year old who was born male playing a sport with kids who were born female,

Ryan P. Burge (72:38)

just full stop, just that infinitesimally small.

Dr. Dan Koch (72:41)

What is the percentage of Americans who go, yes, I think that's a good idea.

Ryan P. Burge (72:44)

Do we know It's a loser political loser, even for Democrats to say that.

Dr. Dan Koch (72:48)

Yeah, okay, but is it 40%? Is it 10%?

Ryan P. Burge (72:50)

No, it's like, I think I've seen a little polling. It's like in the 30s.

Dr. Dan Koch (72:53)

Okay, all right.

Ryan P. Burge (72:55)

Like, it's, it's a very minority view. Like, I'll give you, I can give you, like, I'll give you a concrete example right now. A question of do you, did you, would you support a ban on gender affirming care for under people under the age of 18? So that's not surgery, that's just like hormones or anything. The only two groups in America who are opposed to a ban are atheists and agnostics. Like every Christian group is 65 minimum, 65% in favor of a ban. It goes up to like 85% among evangelicals and Latter Day Saints. Like, trans stuff among kids is incredibly unpopular. Like, it's a huge political loser, like from that, from like, if you're trying to win votes, what do you win and what do you lose? You know, but can I just make one point about this?

Dr. Dan Koch (73:35)

Yeah.

Ryan P. Burge (73:35)

I think this is something I think about a lot in this debate is how the trans community, when they started feeling resistance policy wise, they took on this, this line of, would you rather have a trans kid or a dead kid?

Dr. Dan Koch (73:47)

Yeah, that's a huge.

Ryan P. Burge (73:48)

Yeah, that's a line that you heard all the time. And I actually think that line backfired in ways that that community did not fully understand. They thought, like, we're gonna put you, we're gonna put you in this terrible binary position and you're obviously gonna choose a live trans kid. But a lot of people said the fact that you're being so strident about this almost is like comical, if that makes any sense. Like you're pushing too hard right now and you're trying to take us to where we don't want to go. Yeah, you're basically negotiating at gunpoint with us.

Dr. Dan Koch (74:19)

I think there are parents of children who are in crisis and in their psychiatrist's office, their therapist's office, their doctor's office, for whom that line is potentially real.

Ryan P. Burge (74:35)

Yes.

Dr. Dan Koch (74:36)

Right. And so practitioners, I would think, found that line to be effective for a self selected population of families in that office. In their office. Right. Where it's like, hey, like for you, this actually might kind of be the choice. Right. But then that the wrong sort of political strategy lesson was taken from that or, you know, for whatever reasons that I'm not as qualified to talk about that people thought that would be good to sort of mainstream that sort of line of thinking. And there's just not gonna be, there's just not gonna be that many kids for whom that's really the choice. There are some, there clearly are some. But I think that the findings by the sort of European medical bodies who are not infected by American right wing politics in nearly the same way in Sweden and the UK and stuff like that. It's not true that J.K. rowling has a stranglehold on UK politics and medicine, like, you know, just because she's British, like, you know, and certainly not in Sweden and Denmark. So I think that, I also think that the, the, my, my genuine sense is that the rhetoric outpaced the evidence there in a way that, that smacks of activism to me. And now the chickens are coming home to roost a bit because the facts on the ground are more complicated than that. I think it's less complicated for adults and it's much more complicated for minors for both legal and developmental reasons.

Ryan P. Burge (76:18)

I think that's really. Listen, if you're a politician, here's what you, if you're a Democrat politician, you stand up and say, here's where I'm at right now. If you're an adult, if you're an adult who wants to change their gender through surgery, good luck, God be with you. Whatever you want to do, you know, like, whatever. If you're a kid, let's pump the brakes, you know, let's, let's say, hey, let's. That's a decision you're going to make when you're 18 years old. There's a lot of things that go into being 13, not that I don't Trust the parents. But I also think this is bigger than that and we need to have some guardrails. And by the way, that's where the average American like on abortion, you know where most American, most Americans are on abortion. Safe, legal and rare. Safe, legal and rare. Yeah, safe, legal and rare. That's where they are. They don't think it's a good thing.

Dr. Dan Koch (76:53)

First trimester, ideally.

Ryan P. Burge (76:55)

Yeah, exactly Right. So guess what? On the trans issue, that's where we are right now. Which is like if you're an adult, do whatever the heck you want, dude. If you're a kid, let's slow down. Let's be very measured about what we do. Because we give you hormones, they might not be reversible. Like you might never go through puberty, you might have never a functioning sexual organs. Like these are all bad outcomes. Let's just. The science, by the way, the science on this, if anyone says the science clearly says in the trans debate, they're full of crap.

Dr. Dan Koch (77:20)

Yeah, no, it's a live, It's a live, it's a set of live questions.

Ryan P. Burge (77:24)

It absolutely is a set of live questions right now that you cannot like people say science is objective, like follow the science. Like you can just do it like impassionately and emotional and biased bull crap. You cannot. And especially in this conversation, the best read of the science is it's incredibly muddy on either side. And to say the science clearly says that we have to do this to kids, they're going to kill themselves or we should not do this to kids at all is they're lying, they're not being an honest broker of what the data says right now. So I think caution, my approach in life is if you don't have a clear, you know, you don't know what the best standard of care is. Caution is the best standard of care. That's where politicians stand right now. And will it make the activist class of the far left angry? It absolutely will. I. But guess what? You can't make everyone happy when it comes to politics. So you gotta sort of hit the median. And safe, legal and rare will piss off the 20% of people on the far right and the 20% of people on the far left. But that's where most Americans are like, it's just, it's fine to respect the median in situations like this.

Dr. Dan Koch (78:24)

Yeah. And that's in a lot of ways that's politicians job is to be representative of their constituency. Which the best way to kind of think about that, that on one mathematical model is to say who's your median constituent. Yeah, that is your, that's sort of where you should start your representation.

Ryan P. Burge (78:45)

Right.

Dr. Dan Koch (78:45)

And then you have other crazy idea,

Ryan P. Burge (78:47)

by the way, like let's try to do popular stuff is a controversial statement in America right now.

Dr. Dan Koch (78:53)

Well, there's a nice, there's a nice opening for whoever wants to do that. We'll see if, we'll see if Democrats, if we can get our, you know

Ryan P. Burge (79:01)

what you do, if you, then you don't stand for anything. You don't have any principles. And it's like, no, no, no. To go back to my book, by the way, part of my book, I say, like, cut off the extremists at both sides, like label them as extremists on either side and say, hey, I'm saying in America you have the right to say whatever in the world you want. But it's my job to tell those people that they have a weird opinion, statistically. Speaking. And if you want people to believe you, you've got a great option in America. Convince us that your position is right and we will adopt it if your arguments are good enough. That's why I say to the pro life movement, they go, yeah, but, but, but I go, you've been preaching this for 40 years now. You know what the end result is? More Americans are pro ch today than were 30 years ago. So why do your arguments suck so bad? And same with the trans movement, by the way, you've been preaching this for five or six years for more trans acceptance and all the public opinion has gone the opposite way on trans issues. So why are your arguments so non uncompelling to the average American? Get better arguments. That's all you have to do.

Dr. Dan Koch (79:59)

I mean, a lot of the successful gay marriage advocates, you know, sort of Gen X types, would say, the difference between the arguments that we made then and the arguments that are being made now, they're kind of night and day that the gay marriage argument was essentially, we're just like you, we just want the things that you want.

Ryan P. Burge (80:18)

We don't want extra rights.

Dr. Dan Koch (80:19)

We're not the same rights. We want the same rights. And I think that like, for instance, bathroom access is, in my mind, falls under that category. We want the same rights. We would like to be able to, you know, like, especially pushing for like, you know, individual stalls, like sort of genderless, you know, whatever.

Ryan P. Burge (80:36)

Which is a good move generally speaking, by the way.

Dr. Dan Koch (80:38)

It's great. It's also, it's like hygienic. It's. I know there are some problems with like, you know, drug use and stuff like that. Maybe in more public settings, urban settings. But, you know, that's like a solution that's like, hey, we just. I just want to be able to use the restroom in peace and privacy. I want what you have. Wonderful. I want my kid to be able to compete on your kid's sport team. Agnostic of the gender that they were born. That is not saying. We just want what you have. Right. Like that is saying actually we want something different and we actually want to. We want a privileged status. And you know, I think that that's a pretty good argument for what separates them. It's a very broad, broad based argument. And of course not all the arguments. That would not be a. That critique does not apply to all of the arguments. But I think it especially applies to the sports one. And the sports one is just especially public and easy for people to get their minds around. And so I think has been kind of politically disastrous. But that's not really what my podcast is for. I don't give a shit about the politics. I'm trying not to. Ryan Burge, thank you so much for joining again. I always love having you here, man. The new book.

Ryan P. Burge (81:45)

Buy the book please.

Dr. Dan Koch (81:47)

The Vanishing Church on Brazos Press and we'll. Yeah. And also there' swe should just say, just to be clear, there's a bunch of stuff for Tony Jones lovers of which there are many here. Where's the best place for people to engage with this stuff? He's pretty meek about it. He doesn't talk about it all the time. But you guys have released some stuff from all that work, Right. So where should people go for that?

Ryan P. Burge (82:12)

Thensproject.com on our website. Yep. And then on my substack I've been releasing these articles which they're linked on thensproject.com but we've got like 12 articles now and we're talking like 20,000 words, like tons of graphs trying to understand these four categories. It's like we wanted to make this data publicly available. We want to write for the public. Like that's cool. What the purpose of the grant was is to be public facing. And guess what? You get all of it right there. We're not hiding it. And oh yeah, and on Homebrewed we're doing a four part class.

Dr. Dan Koch (82:42)

That's right. There's a new class coming on Homebrew Christianity with trip. Yep.

Ryan P. Burge (82:46)

In June, in January, 4 o'. Clock. It's a pay what you want model. So you can pay nothing. You can pay 20. You can pay 100. I don't care. We're gonna do four. Four sessions over Zoom on the nuns. If you sign up and you're not available during the time you get a recording, a link of the recording so you can watch it later, ask questions. Should be really good.

Dr. Dan Koch (83:05)

Tripp and I did one of those a year and a half ago about Irvin Yalom and Paul Tillich. Sort of an existential approach from the two sides. So. So that was fun. All right, thanks, dude. Thanks, everybody.

Ryan P. Burge (83:17)

Thanks, everybody.