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- [00:00]
A
Know, with Catholics, it's plug and chug.
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B
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Sky Pod. I'm Sky Jutani. This episode is being brought to you by Holy Post Media and Knight Industries. I am joined today by none other than than Ryan Burge, professor of practice at the John C. Danforth center of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, author of Graphs About Religion on Substack, pundit on so many different media platforms, including Holy Post. Ryan, welcome back.
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A
I'm a pundit now. I thought I just made graphs and
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B
tweets and Facebook posts. You give all kinds of analysis, and people are bringing you all over the country on a weekly basis to.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Explain the world to them.
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A
I love airplanes. Oh, I love it so much, I'd rather just spout my hot takes from behind my computer screen in my house.
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B
All right, what's your airline?
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A
Comfortable Southwest. 60% of flights out of St. Louis or Southwest. So I'm like an A list. Preferred all card number. I get first. You know, all the first boarding and all that stuff. So it's good.
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B
All right. I used to be Southwest because we have a. Midway Airport is a huge Southwest hub right here, but. But I've switched to United States.
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A
Well, listen, I don't have that option.
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B
I know, I know. We're lucky here in Chicago. We have multiple hubs, but.
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A
Yeah, but I'm a Southwest guy. I mean, it works. Listen, if you want to fly direct St. Louis anywhere, Southwest is basically your only option. So it's 90% of what I fly. Southwest. So go Southwest, please. Give me some free points or something. I'd appreciate it.
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B
Well, they're changing. They're not what they used to be.
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A
No, not even close, anyway.
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B
Okay. We're not here to talk about airlines. We're here to talk about what's going on in the world of data and religion. And you wrote a piece recently titled I Like the Idea of Religion Idea, all caps to start off with. For those who are not familiar with sociological research around religion. You talk about the three B's that you measure. Behavior, belonging, belief. Explain what you mean by those.
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A
Yeah. So people are not all religious in the same way. You know, some people can be very high on belief and never go to church. And some people can go to church and not believe any of that stuff. Or so, you know, behavior is just going to church. That's usually the way we measure it. Sometimes it's prayer frequency. Sometimes it's like, how much do you give to, you know, a congregation or something like that? But usually it's attendance. Belief is what it sounds like. It's psychological, right? Like, how strongly do you believe in God or Jesus, the Bible or devil or angels or heaven or hell? You know, like all kinds of doctrine. Like what? Yeah, doctrine stuff. Like what do you believe about supernatural things? And then belonging is very sociological, right? It's like, who do you throw in with? Are you a, you know, a Protestant or a Catholic or a Muslim or a Hindu or Buddhist or an atheist or agnostic? So all those things sort of. They don't all work on the same dimension. You know, some people can be high on one, high on two, none on the other. And that's why this piece about religious importance, you know, like the idea, like the idea of religion. There's a question that we always see on surveys saying, how important is religion to you? And there's four options ranging from not at all important to very important. And this is like one of those questions. It's like evergreen on surveys about religion. And you see it all the time. And it actually made some headlines a couple weeks ago, which I'm sure you're going to ask me about with a recent Gallup poll about young men and young women.
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B
Yeah. Okay. Hold on a second though, before we get to that news making bit of data to go back to the behavior belonging belief thing, because I think some people might be confused by this, the belonging idea who you throw in with. Is this a case where somebody on a survey might go, oh, yeah, I totally identify as Catholic, but on the rest of the survey they never attend a Catholic church or rarely ever. And then when asked about various Christian or Catholic doctrines, they don't really buy into any of that. Yeah, but they still identify as Catholic. That's the belonging piece, correct?
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A
Yeah, it's sociological, right. It's like, what group do you, like, see yourself with?
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B
Right.
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A
And it really is. It's how you put yourself in social space, you know, educational space, you know, like regional space. Like, it's. The thing is, this is the one that makes people like true believers really mad. Like, well, show me what the real evangelicals believe or the real Catholics believe in all this stuff. And like, you got to understand, as a sociologist, like my. One of my operative conditions in life is if you say you're blank, then you're blank. Right? If you say you're atheist, you're an atheist. Like, it's not my job to go, no, no, no, you're not a real atheist or you're not a real Catholic or a real Muslim, a real Jew. Like, if you say you're this, then you're that. And so my job is to figure out why you called yourself that. If you don't believe in most of the church's doctrines and you hardly ever go to Mass, like, why would you still say. By the way, the data says a never attending atheist and a never attending Catholic are nowhere close to the same political person. Like the never attending Catholic a significantly more conservative and Republican than a never attending atheist. So, yes, it does matter that that person says that they're a Catholic instead of an atheist because it says something deeply important about who they are and how they see themselves, the social, political and cultural world.
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B
Okay, now back to the headline.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That has caught so many people's attention. So the survey found that young men who said that religion is very important to them.
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A
Yeah.
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B
A couple years ago in 2022, 2023, it was only about 28% of young men who said that religion is very important to them. The newest data says that that number has shot up from 28% to 42%. So 50% increase in the number of young men saying that religion is very important to them. Yeah, that would get some attention. It got your attention. So walk us through what caught you about that and what was your process to try to dig deeper behind that number?
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A
Yeah. So let me pull back the curtain a little bit on my life sky for what happens when these kind of things happen is that these major polling organizations will send out embargoed reports to certain reporters in America and give them like a 48 hour head start. That way, when the actual report drops from Gallup or Pew or whoever, these reporters have a story already written with color and quotes and all this kind of stuff. And here's the best part. Guess who does not get a copy of that embargoed report until it goes live? For everybody else, it's me. So these people will start emailing me and saying, hey, did you see the new Gallup? Or I'm like, no, I've not. And then they Give me like 5 minutes to read it and then they're going to call me and I need a quote on it real quick so I can tell when Big Data is going to drop. Two days before it drops.
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B
I'm surprised, given your prominence, that Big Data is not sending you the embargoed report early.
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A
Well, we can talk about the reasons for that all day long.
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B
Sounds like you ticked off somebody at the wrong cocktail party.
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A
Listen, I'm, I, I'm a friend of everyone, okay? Including Centers and major data firms, they send it to me for whatever reason, but I do kind of like trying to, like, figure out on the fly, like, what's going on. So with Gallup data, you're right, 28% a couple years ago, down to up to 42% of religious importance. Religious importance. That's a key metric here, religious importance. And I want to say a couple things about that. First, when you see a metric go up 50% in a very short window of time, you immediately should be suspicious of that change. No matter. Unless there's an external reason for that. Like, for instance, we were attacked on 9 11. Things changed, right? Or we had a new president. Things changed. Like, there's nothing that happened in America in the last 18 months like that that would lead to a dramatic, you can say Charlie Kirk's assassination. I don't believe that because most Americans don't even know who Charlie Kirk is, by the way, or did not know who he was before he was assassinated. So there's nothing external that would say that one metric should go 50%. And we also have to consider the margin of error, which no one talks about because it's boring and nerdy. The margin of error is so big on that differ difference. It's actually not. Actually not statistically different from the earlier sample to the later sample, but. And the other thing, sky. If you look at the other metrics they ask about religious belonging and religious behavior. Guess what? There was not a dramatic change among young men on religious behavior or religious belonging. It was one metric out of a cornucopia of metrics that we use to measure religion. So all those together make me sort of hesitate to believe that one simple number is just predicting or indicative of something huge happening among young men when it comes to religion.
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B
So it's a big data outlier that maybe you don't give much credence to because there's no other evidence to suggest an actual change.
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A
So we always say that extraordinary results need extraordinary evidence.
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B
Yeah, this is Carl Sagan.
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A
Extraordinary findings.
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B
Carl Sagan, you say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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A
Extraordinary claim is that the share of young men who think religion's very important has risen 50% in two years. That's an extraordinary claim, just empirically speaking. So if you're going to make an extraordinary claim, one data point is not enough to convince me that that's actually happening. Now, if I see that in multiple data sources spread out over the next six to 12 months now, I go from being skeptical to believing it because the, you know, the, the The. The overall sense from the data. You see this in the medical field too, by the way.
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B
Yeah.
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A
One study that says we gave this drug to six people who had cancer and they didn't die from cancer is not enough to make that drug widely available for everyone who has cancer. You need to it 60 times. Right. So this is one finding. It's certainly interesting, and it's certainly suggestive of some potential things, but we can't change our entire understanding of young men and religion based on one data point from one poll when the other data points in that same poll don't say the same thing.
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B
Okay, I want to get into that, though, because you unpack this. It will link to the article from your substack.
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A
But
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you. You identify the fact that despite this rising number of young men saying that religion is important to them, we don't see any corresponding rise in attendance at church. Okay, so you kind of conclude either this is an outlier data that we should just dismiss entirely, or there's a possibility that among young men, there's a growing desire to like the idea of religion without actually in any way becoming more religious.
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A
Mm. Yeah, that's.
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B
Is that kind of where you're hanging. Your best hypothesis now is on young men? Like, the idea in the last two years, the perception of being religious is growing for young men, but they don't want it to actually impact their beliefs or behaviors.
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A
Yeah, that's. I've been writing about this. I don't want to be, like, the hipster data analyst right now. I've been writing about this for years. Like, I think that religious importance is a weird metric, because I do think religious importance a weird metric because it's about vibes. It's not about butts and seats. Right. It's like how you feel about something, not what something actually is. And so, you know, you might. Your actual level religiosity might not have changed at all, but you believe that religion is more important because of something that happened in the culture. And this goes back to the Charlie Kirk thesis, by the way. A lot of young men saw Charlie Kirk and thought, wow, man. Like, he was a really religious person and talked about religion a lot. And I think young men looked at that and said, well, I want to be a young man kind of like Charlie Kirk, and I want to think that religion is important, but they're not actually, like, doing the religion part. And I'll say this like, I can't say this any more clearly. Of the different facets, manifestations of religion, the best part from A purely empirical perspective is the going to a house of worship part on a regular basis. Like, you can't beat that. I'm telling you. Like if you look at the preponderance of evidence, health, mental health, physical health, age, Spanish, political engagement, tolerance, you know, like sociability, going to church on a regular basis increases all those things in an incredibly positive way. You know what doesn't? Things like belief and belonging and importance is part of that, like sort of cadre of things. It's about, it's about tribalism. It's about us versus them. It's about vibes. It's not about a live reality with a community of other believers.
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B
Okay, so that, that gets to one hypothesis here, is that what the survey is actually picking up on is a tribal marker. It's a shibboleth. It's a sense that it is important within the tribe that I want to identify with to be religious. So I'm going to say I'm religious. Is this the equivalent of like, you know, the guy who wears the Steph Curry shoes or the Michael Jordan Air Jordan, you know, merchandise, whatever, but never actually plays basketball, but you want to be identified with the athlete who does? There's an aspirational identity marker there, but it's not actually a practice.
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A
It's cosplaying religion. That's what it feels like. It's cosplaying religion.
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B
Yes, exactly. So I mean, you see this in a lot of American Christianity where people will put all kinds of Jesus merchandise on their life. You know, the branded products, the bumper stickers, the clothes. But they're not actually interested in following the way of Jesus anyway. They just want to be identified with that. So there's that tribal marker possibility, but let me float another one. I don't know. You didn't really write about this, but I'm curious to get your thoughts. Is it possible that we're actually seeing some increasing devotion to Christian faith among young men, but they're so anti institutional that they've completely divorced it from any marker that would indicate greater church attendance or involvement in an organized religious community?
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A
Yeah, but maybe. Yeah, okay. I mean, I'm willing to pull on that thread a little bit, but I also think like the first question I had then, why are women importance not going up and they're still going away from. You're still not attending church either. Like if it was an anti institutional thing, you think it'd be a macro level thing as opposed to like a targeted thing? And why would it just be 18 and 29 year old men and not all of America because we're an incredibly anti institutional sort of mil you in American society right now. So I would need to figure out why it would just be young men that would be so anti institutional to
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B
play on some stereotypes. Is it because women are more social?
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A
Yeah, I mean, the evidence is. Yeah, I know people are gonna get mad. You're saying that the evidence does say that women are more social than men. Like that's just a fact.
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B
Like the data in aggregate.
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A
Yeah, in the aggregate, yeah. If you look at, you know, the multiplicity of studies like out there, you see that women are. Or have more friends, you know, use more words per day, just have more conversations than men do. Men are happier being solitary than women are. And I do think that's part of it for sure. But I also just think like young men, gosh, the manosphere is like giving them this perception that like, they need to like re embrace old mentalities. Right. Like on fertility stuff, on traditionalism, on all these things. And I do wonder if that is what's pulling them in is when you hear guys like Theo Vaughn say, I'm reading the Bible and hear Joe Rogan saying, I'm going to church every once in a while and you hear all these like, influencers. But I also. You ready for the dark side of this whole thing? Because I think we haven't talked about this yet.
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B
Okay.
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The dark side of this is I think a lot of young men feel very uncomfortable with the changes in sexuality in American society over the last five to 10 years. Maybe the gay stuff, but maybe the trans stuff too. Because the trans movement has really like gone from almost non existent in America to being like part of the huge conversation in a very short window of time. You got to think like the LGBTQ movement took or the LGB movement took like 50 years to sort of get where it is today.
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B
I have a theory on why. Well, I talked about this on last week's show. Got me into some trouble. I mean, I think part of it was it really got accelerated with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Dobson. Because the religious right, the conservative Republican right, has used abortion as a motivating issue for five decades. Right. And it was not only was that issue, in a way resolved by the overturning of Roe, but then Donald Trump and the Republican Party decided they didn't want to have anything to do with the pro life movement anymore. They dropped it from the party plank. There's a lot of pro life activists who are very Angry about this. The number of abortions has actually gone up since Roe was overturned. It's a losing political issue for them. And they suddenly realized we don't have another what I deem crotch Christianity issue in order to motivate people into polls. And they realize that the trans issue is just waiting there to be picked up because it hits all the same issues. It's about sexuality and gender. It's something that people are worried about with their kids. You can exploit it in all kinds of ways. It's numerically not a massive threat, but psychologically can be played as one. And so I think the rhetoric around the trans issue has gotten picked up as the rhetoric around the abortion issue has become toxic for the right. So I know that doesn't explain all of it because it predates the overturning of Roe, but I think that's why so many people are talking about it now, because it just fits the bill of a needed political motivator for the right.
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A
I have a post coming out about this, by the way, and I actually make the argument you just made, which is like, if you ask someone 20 years ago, what's the two culture war issues, they say gay marriage and abortion. Everyone would say that.
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B
And they're over. No one's arguing about them anymore.
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A
At least no one's talking about marriage anymore. Yeah, yeah. And abortion sort of like faded, right? Because it's like, okay, the Overton window moved as far as we're going to let it move, like, in still be in the mainstream of the discourse. And now what are we left with and the problem? I will say that from a polling perspective, the problem with the trans issue is it's really hard to poll on because it's so multifaceted. Right. So it's not just like gender transition for minors is one piece. People competing in sports is another piece. Pronoun usage is another piece. Bathroom bills are another piece. So, like, with gay marriage, it was one question, right? Do you think that poo people of the same gender should be able to get married? This is, like, harder to pull on because it's got so many, like, you know, like, nuances to it, but I agree.
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B
But that's also what makes it so useful for a politician.
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A
Oh, absolutely.
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B
Because in any community at any given time, you can pull whichever part of that issue you want. And on top of it, when you look at the data, the percentage of Americans who would identify as trans is infinitesimally small.
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A
So it's gone down.
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B
Yeah, it's gone down. And so the Threat of alienating a critical constituency politically is not very big. Whereas when you're dealing with abortion, you risk alienating a huge amount of the population on that issue. This one, it feels like high reward, low risk. From a political point of view, we can demonize a group of people that's very small, motivate our people into the booth, pick whatever particular part of the issue is most energizing, sports, bathrooms, schools, whatever, transition for children and play it up. So it's like tailor made for a segment of the conservative evangelical community that's hyper motivated by sexuality, gender and reproductive issues, but not a high cost politically. So I just think that that's why it's getting so much attention.
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A
I'll take a step forward on this, on the Democratic Party. This is their Achilles heel in many ways, because the Democratic Party wants to make everyone feel who's marginalized, feel not marginalized, feel seen. And you see this like one time I wrote a post about, I scraped the tweets of all the candidates for president for Democrats in 2020. So Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Kristen Gillibrand, Biden, Bernie, all those people. And they tweeted about Islam seven times more than they tweeted about Christianity in like the year before, which like Muslims are 1% of America, Christians are 63% of America. Right. It's like, why are they keep talking? Because they want the tent to feel very inclusive of everyone. Because that's, that's a principle of the Democratic Party is being inclusive, which is, could be fine, but man is politically a huge liability. Because when you're willing to like stick your neck out for a group that's marginal in the size of the population because your ideals tell you to embrace all these marginalized groups, it opens a huge vector for the other party then to attack you for marginal, you know, for not wanting to marginalize these groups. So I think it's a flaw in the design. I agree on the Democratic part.
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B
Gavin Newsom has figured that out. He's, he's tried to disagree himself from some of that from previous election cycles and there's others. And I'm not trying to argue that there aren't legitimate ethical, moral, even theological issues to debate about the trans issue. I think there are, I think the exploitation of this issue for political purposes can be explained through the stuff you're talking about, the sociological and fear based utilization of that issue. And I think one of the reasons it's gotten so much more attention is because they no longer have abortion as a motivating political issue, at least on a national level, it might be a more of a local or state issue for some folks.
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A
And by the way, it's just not working. Can I just drop a seed of an idea in people's minds about the abortion issue right now? We spent 50 years debating abortion. The pro life movement spent billions of dollars, ran hundreds of thousands of ads, all these candidates and the average American is much more supportive of abortion access today than they were 20, 30 or 50 years ago. So if you. The problem I have, by the way, is a lot of people who are very pro life have very sort of like clear black and white thinking on this, like IVF is murder, you know, like all these things are terrible. Like if your argument is so self evident and they act like it is so self evident, by the way, like you would be an idiot to not agree with me that sperm plus egg equal human, then why has that argument been so uncompelling for tens of millions of Americans over the last 30, 40 and 50 years? Like that's the part I don't understand is if you're going to spend all this money and all this time trying to persuade people, then why have you been so unsuccessful at persuading people at the, at the Democrat, the little deep Democratic level to change their views on abortion? I just, I'm, I struggle with that every day.
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B
Well, I mean that, that's a whole nother episode maybe for us to talk about sometime. I think what's more interesting, not more interesting, but equally interesting, is that they've spent tens of millions of dollars with the messaging. I'd argue a lot of their messaging was not about the argument for sperm plus egg equals human. But an enormous amount of their messaging has been overturn Roe. That that single Supreme Court position is the end all, be all of this issue. Well, they managed to do that in 2022. They won. And what's crazy, after 50 years of hammering home, we have to overturn Roe. In the post Roe world, the data we have so far, the number of abortions in America have gone up. Yeah, that's crazy. So it shows a flaw in the argumentation. I'm not saying all pro life advocates were making that case, but that was by far the largest message that people.
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A
That was the brass ring.
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B
That was the brass ring.
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A
Exactly.
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B
And now they've kind of been shown that that brass ring wasn't really the brass ring. And I think it's made, it's like disillusionment, I think, with a lot of folks who are going, hey, you told Us, this was what we were supposed to do. And now what. And I have, we're really getting off into crazy territory here. I think there's a difference between somebody who is pro life because they genuinely want to see a reduction in the number of abortions, and then there's the person who's pro life. In other words, they want a solution to the preservation of pre born people. And then there are people who are pro life for the symbolic reason is they don't want to belong to a country whose law, laws allow for abortion. And for those folks, they're very happy with the overturning of Roe regardless of how many abortions there are afterwards. But then there's the pragmatists who are saying we want to actually reduce the number of abortions. And I think they are upset at where we are because they did what they were told to do and get the presidents to nominate the justices to get the senators to okay that nomination. We finally overturned Roe and abortions have gone up like that wasn't what they were in for. But the people who are looking for the symbolic victory of a more righteous quote unquote nation because of our laws, they're fine with the change.
- [24:08]
A
And let's close the loop on this too, by the way, sky, like to go back to where we started, like the religious importance idea, I think for a lot of young men, they feel uncomfortable with women getting abortions for reasons they can't articulate. Like they're not in favor of like ending abortion access, but they don't, they don't think it's a morally good thing and they're looking for a reason why they don't feel good about it. And that sort of leads into that. Like, I like the idea of religion that sperm plus egg equal human, even though that's, by the way, the average American. The thing I just articulated is exactly where the average American is on this, by the way.
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B
Right.
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A
They don't, they can't get to sperm plus egg equal human, but they can get in the neighborhood of that argument.
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B
Yep.
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A
And makes them feel uncomfortable about abortion, but not so uncomfortable they want to make it illegal. Right, that's, that's the tension.
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B
Not illegal from conception.
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A
Exactly. Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's why they'd be willing to do it. Like people go, well if you think it's murder, it's okay to murder at eight weeks but not 20 weeks. And you're like, yeah, but that's, you know, I mean, like that's being in the neighborhood of that thought. So I think that's the problem is a lot of men are trying to figure out why they feel uncomfortable about the trans issue or the gay issue or the abortion issue. They go, well, because religion is like the thread of, you know, traditional morality. So I'm gonna like a seed to the idea of religion, but not actually go to church, because I don't want to actually go be social and, like, actually believe in this stuff.
- [25:32]
B
Well, okay, Whether you're talking about abortion or gender roles or the trans issue, whatever it might be, I. I think to get a step behind what you're saying, there's been such rapid cultural and moral change in this country over the last 10, 15, 20 years.
- [25:47]
A
Absolutely.
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B
And it's thrown a lot of people out of balance. And the basic message in materialist, secular Western societies is every individual has to figure out for themselves what they think about everything all the time. And you're bombarded by all these different messages and influencers online with all these different ideas, and. And I think that leads to a degree of exhaustion. And what religion then offers is a sense of, here's a tried and true historical package of beliefs and views that your ancestors have followed for thousands of years. And you can turn off some of the thinking on your own and just adopt what they've been saying. And, oh, by the way, to the young men you're describing, whether it's the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church or some other stream of Christianity, they tend to hold the traditional views that you kind of have a bias toward anyway, so why not just shut off all the other noise and go, yeah, I'm Orthodox now or I'm Catholic or whatever, and it's easier to. But I don't want to go to church, and I don't want to engage in all the practices and disciplines. And, oh, by the way, I don't want to feel guilty about the parts of my life that don't conform to those traditions or teachings. So I'm going to identify with this religious thing, especially on a survey, and if somebody asks me, I'll say yes. But I don't want to be held too closely to it.
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A
You know what this feels like? Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, version 2.0.
- [27:08]
B
It's Christian Smith.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's Christian Smith all over again, just in a little bit of a different package, you know, I mean, like, just slightly turn to, why don't I feel good about women getting abortions? Why don't I feel comfortable about the changes in sexuality and gender? Man, I bet it's because of religion. You know, it's like, so you're using it sort of like a cudgel or a crutch or a shield to like, I always thought, I always thought that, like, a lot of people used abortion that way. By the way, like, why do you vote for the Republican? Like, if you're at a dinner party with, like, a mixed company of people, why do you vote for the Republican? Because I don't want babies to be murdered in America. When really you voted for the Republican because of things like immigration or things that are less savory to say in mixed company, that abortion becomes a conversation stopper because someone goes, okay, yeah, murdering babies. All right, now how about the weather? How about the baseball? Right? Because it changes the conversation quickly. And I wonder if that's part of what this is too. Like, why are you not comfortable trans people? Well, because the Bible says. Or why are you not comfortable with abortion? Well, because the Bible says it becomes a convenient way to not have the deeper conversation, the theological, spiritual, theological conversation and just move on to something more superficial.
- [28:13]
B
That may be. And I think to that example you gave of abortion, I think the facade of it all was exposed in 2016 because there were what, 16 or 17 Republican candidates. Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber. So head over to holeypost.com skypod and sign up. For just $5 a month, not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never have to hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll also get access to everything else at Holy Post plus, including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin Shess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe.