Ryan Burge Research

“The headline suggests that President Donald Trump is a devastating force of anti-evangelism for American churches. But a closer look at the data raises questions and, if not red flags, at least yellow ones.” - CPost

“the distance between official Church teaching and the lived experience of the average Catholic in the pew can be considerable…. it raises a genuinely interesting empirical question: just how Catholic, in the doctrinal sense of the word, is the average American Catholic?” - Ryan Burge

“Burge, a political science professor who is probably the leading analyst of religion data in the United States today, points out that not all branches of American Christianity are declining. The percentage of Americans who identify as evangelical is just as high as it was fifty years ago, during the 1970s.” - Mere Orthodoxy

“The Presbyterian Church in America gets a gold star. They’ve got individual church-level data for most of their 1,700+ congregations. So, let me show you all the cool stuff I can do with data like this.” - Ryan Burge

“…religious people self-identify as happier than non-religious people. There’s just no mistaking that conclusion. There are ways to try and explain it away, certainly.” - Ryan Burge

“…only about 16 percent of ‘nones’ ever considered themselves ‘born again.’ That means that nearly 84 percent of ‘nones’ are not ‘exvangelicals’or ‘deconstructed’ Christians. They were unbelievers all along.” - MinistryWatch

“But before I start digging deeply into the relationship between religion and fear, I wanted to help orient us to how fear is distributed in the public on a number of demographic variables like age, race, and education.” - Ryan Burge

“Is there a rising number of non-religious Republicans that are going to take the party in a less socially conservative direction? Let’s see what the data has to say about that.” - Ryan Burge

“Even among people who have graduate degrees, they are still three times more likely to say that they have no doubt of God’s existence than to express an atheist or agnostic view of God. Certain religious belief is still incredibly robust in the United States, even if it has declined somewhat over the last 35 years.” - Ryan Burge

“women in America seem to be abandoning Christian observance more quickly than men. Political scientist Ryan Burge… recently shared survey data showing that college-educated men are now more likely to attend church weekly than college-educated women.” - Breakpoint