Sociologist Ryan Burge does some myth-busting about American religion, tackling the narratives that evangelical Christians are in decline, that only lapsed Christians voted for Trump and that people who leave religion also no longer believe in God.
This Zoom interview has been edited for length and clarity.
And if you look at the share of people who say that they’ve had a born-again experience, it’s higher today than it was 30 years ago. It’s true that mainline Protestantism and liberal Catholicism are in an absolute free-fall right now, but devout, conservative religions are doing well by comparison and actually might be growing over time. So conservative religion is upLet’s talk about abortion. Americans’ views about abortion are pretty middle-of-the-road and have not budged much in 40 years. But politicians who don’t adopt one extreme or the other tend to get attacked.
It was wishful thinking by evangelical leaders because they did not want to realize what really was going on. There was a nice field for Republican evangelicals to vote for in 2016. I mean, Ted Cruz had some bona fides in the evangelical world. Marco Rubio did, too. The narrative that many evangelicals used was that “evangelicals are not anti-immigrant, they’re anti-illegal immigrant.” But if you look at the data, that’s not true. A majority of white evangelicals were anti-immigrant, period. You even see it in data today: For example, 60% of Southern Baptists want to reduce legal immigration to America by 50%. That’s legal immigration, not illegal immigration. The reality is that many evangelicals don’t want immigration at all.
On the other side, I think we’re going to see more secularization. Honest-to-goodness atheists and agnostics are still a very small portion of the population. By belief, it’s only about 10% of Americans. Here’s an interesting statistic: Among people who never attend church, if you ask what they believe about God, a bigger share says they believe in God without a doubt than don’t believe in God at all.
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