On the morning of July 21, 2024, about three dozen people gathered in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois, a town of 14,000 an hour east of St. Louis. The building had been raised for a congregation of hundreds. In the 1960s the church counted more than 600 members. By the late 1990s it had about 170. When the pastor now standing at the pulpit arrived in 2006, a graduate student in his early twenties, it had about 50. On this Sunday, the last Sunday, membership stood below 20, and the extra faces in the pews belonged to former members, family, and a reporter from Religion News Service.<\/p>\n
The pastor read from Ecclesiastes. “There is a time for everything.” A time for birth and a time for death. A time to build up and a time to tear down. He told the congregation that after 156 years as a fixture of Mount Vernon, First Baptist would soon cease to exist, and that its ending would change their lives in ways large and small. A few minutes after the benediction, the members held a brief congregational meeting and voted to close as of August 1. Then they ate cake in the fellowship hall. The building passed to a classical Christian school.<\/p>\n
The man who delivered that benediction was Ryan P. Burge (b. 1982), and by the time his church died he had become the most visible interpreter of American religious data alive. He had written for the New York Times<\/a> and the Wall Street Journal<\/a>. 60 Minutes<\/a> had called him one of the country's leading data analysts on religion and politics. His charts on the decline of American Christianity circulated among pastors, journalists, atheist bloggers, and denominational executives. For nearly two decades he had led a double life: by week a political scientist documenting the collapse of institutional religion in national survey data, by Sunday a part-time pastor watching the same collapse from inside a building he could no longer afford to heat for the people who no longer came. The lines on his graphs ran through his own sanctuary.<\/p>\n Burge grew up in a Southern Baptist congregation in Salem, a small town in southern Illinois, during the 1980s and 1990s. Church structured his week. He was there several evenings out of seven, and he has described the evangelical world of his childhood as a cocoon, a closed and protective society that supplied answers about salvation, conduct, entertainment, dress, and friendship before a child thought to ask the questions.<\/p>\n When he was about fourteen, the cocoon gave him his first lesson in politics. The pastor of First Baptist Church of Salem had drifted toward Calvinism, and the shift caught the congregation off guard. Members who had never read Calvin found themselves conscripted into a war over predestination. The dispute came to a head at a congregational meeting where the members voted on whether to freeze the pastor's salary. The measure passed 49 to 48. A man's livelihood and a church's direction turned on one ballot. Burge later recalled his reaction: “It was like, holy cow \u2014 democracy in action.” A political scientist could ask for no better origin story, and Burge tells it as his.<\/p>\n He was a believer with a skeptic's temperament. He belonged to the church with his time and his friendships, yet he waited until fifteen to be baptized, and the confident declarations around him about Christianity's exclusive truth left him wondering how anyone could be so certain. That combination, attachment plus doubt, forecast the adult. He no longer calls himself an evangelical. He prefers “evangelical sympathetic,” a label that keeps his affection for the seriousness and community of the world that raised him while declining membership in its political project. He is neither an exvangelical settling scores with his childhood nor a defender of the tribe. He stands at the door, holding it open, taking notes.<\/p>\n Burge attended Greenville College, a small Christian school in the Free Methodist tradition, and graduated in 2004 with a degree in history and political science. Greenville widened the map. Southern Baptist Salem had presented Christianity as a settled matter; Greenville presented it as a family of traditions that disagreed about almost everything, and Burge found the disagreement congenial. He went on to Southern Illinois University Carbondale for graduate work in political science, finishing a master's thesis on religiosity and anxiety in 2007 and a doctoral dissertation on religion and political behavior in 2011 under J. Tobin Grant.<\/p>\n His ministerial career began as a summer job. After his sophomore year at Greenville he took what was supposed to be a three-month youth ministry internship at First Baptist Church in Centralia, Illinois, a congregation of the American Baptist Churches USA, the moderate northern cousin of the Southern Baptist Convention. The three months became three years. In 2006, still a graduate student, he accepted the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon. He was twenty-three or twenty-four. He explained the trajectory the way a man explains a mortgage he did not plan to take on: people kept asking, and he was bad at saying no. He stayed for seventeen and a half years and served in American Baptist ministry for more than twenty.<\/p>\n The arrangement made him a bivocational pastor, a category that covers a growing share of American clergy and appears in almost no journalism about religion. He preached on Sunday and graded papers on Monday. The church could pay only a part-time salary. Burge learned the material culture of small-church survival: the boiler, the roof, the budget meeting, the shrinking pool of people willing to serve as trustee, the funeral lunches prepared by women in their eighties for the funerals of women in their nineties.<\/p>\n The congregation repaid him in kind. When Eastern Illinois University laid him off during budget cuts in 2016, the church paid his family's health insurance. The university later rehired him. He told this story in his last sermon as evidence for a claim that reversed the usual pastoral flattery: his friend had said First Baptist was lucky to have him, and his friend was wrong, because he and his family had received more than they gave.<\/p>\n The church was politically mixed and politically quiet. Burge has said he often did not know how his members voted. They disagreed about God and government and still served on committees together, visited the same hospital rooms, and buried one another. That fact sat in his memory for years before he understood it as data.<\/p>\n Burge joined Eastern Illinois University in 2012 and spent thirteen years there, rising to associate professor of political science and graduate coordinator. Eastern Illinois is a regional public university in Charleston, Illinois, with a heavy teaching load and no national profile. Burge built his career from that position, outside the elite research circuit, publishing more than thirty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the measurement of evangelical identity, political tolerance, survey response categories, and voting. His signature methodological concern was already visible in that work: small decisions about how a survey asks its questions can move the answers, and the categories that researchers treat as natural, Protestant, evangelical, none, are instruments with histories and defects.<\/p>\n The public career began with charts. Burge discovered that a graph posted to social media could do in an afternoon what a journal article could not do in two years: reach the pastors, journalists, and lay readers who wanted to know what was happening to American religion. His newsletter, Graphs About Religion, grew into the center of his output. By mid-2026 it had more than 33,000 free subscribers and drew millions of views a year. He publishes twice a week. The format rarely varies. He takes a popular claim, a revival among Gen Z, the death of the Black church, the flight of women from the pews, finds the relevant dataset, explains what the categories can and cannot show, and lets the lines on the graph do the arguing.<\/p>\n He credits the pulpit for the style. Seventeen years of sermon writing taught him to structure a large body of material for people who had not spent the week studying it, to introduce evidence in an order a tired listener could follow, and to land somewhere. He has called the public work mental scaffolding: a frame that lets people understand why their churches, children, and towns are changing.<\/p>\n Two datasets anchor the work. The General Social Survey supplies the long view, a consistent record of American belief and belonging back to the early 1970s, with a typical sample around 2,500. The Cooperative Election Study supplies the wide view: more than 60,000 respondents in election years, above 15,000 in off years. The size solves a problem that defeats ordinary polling. A national survey of 1,500 people catches a handful of Muslims, Orthodox Christians, or Jehovah's Witnesses, too few for analysis. A sample of 60,000 lets Burge cut small religious populations by age, race, education, and party and still have statistical footing. It cannot solve every problem. The CES runs through an online panel, leans on weighting, and depends on what people say about themselves. Its gift is power, and power is what the study of American religious minorities had lacked.<\/p>\n Burge's national reputation rests on his analysis of the religiously unaffiliated, the “nones,” the survey respondents who answer atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. His first book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (2021), organized the argument that runs through everything he has written since: the nones are not one thing.<\/p>\n The division he draws is simple and has consequences. Atheists and agnostics carry explicit secular identities. They are more educated, more liberal, and more politically engaged than the general population. In Burge's reading of the 2022 CES, 51 percent of atheists held a bachelor's degree. The “nothing in particular” population, which outnumbers atheists and agnostics combined by roughly three to two, looks nothing like them. About 23 percent held a degree. Large majorities reported no conventional political participation, no volunteering, no meetings, no yard signs. If five nones sit in a room, one is an atheist, one is an agnostic, and three are nothing in particular, and the three are the story.<\/p>\n This finding embarrasses two narratives at once. Conservative Christians describe the nones as an army of militant atheists manufactured by hostile universities. Secular activists count them as a progressive bloc waiting for mobilization. Burge's data show a population split between a small, organized, ideological wing and a much larger mass whose defining trait is detachment, from church and from nearly every other institution. He calls many of them dropouts. They did not trade Christianity for humanism. They stopped showing up, to everything.<\/p>\n His account of how people become nones follows the same anti-dramatic logic. Few disaffiliations begin with an argument about God. A person moves for work, misses a month of Sundays, loses touch with church friends, and one year gives a different answer to a survey taker. Belief, behavior, and belonging move at different speeds, which explains a fact that puzzles both sides: many nones pray, and many believe in God. They have not left the faith. They have left the building.<\/p>\n The second Burge argument, and the one with the sharpest political edge, holds that the causal arrow between religion and politics runs both ways. Religion shapes votes. Votes also shape religion. In a widely discussed analysis, he showed that survey respondents who newly adopted the evangelical label between 2016 and 2020 held warmer views of Donald Trump (b. 1946) than those who did not, and that some self-identified evangelicals rarely attended church. “Evangelical” was drifting from a theological description toward a partisan one, a word that increasingly meant Republican with a religious inflection.<\/p>\n The sorting runs in the opposite direction too. Liberals shed the evangelical label because of its politics, and some eventually shed the Christian label with it. The result is a landscape that polarizes even when nobody changes what he believes, because the labels migrate while the beliefs sit still.<\/p>\n Burge extended this argument to the young in work that ran the week of this writing. In July 2026, he reported findings from a Billy Graham Center Research Institute survey of 2,365 Gen Z adults, led by Rick Richardson at Wheaton College: 48 percent agreed that Christian support for Trump had made them less likely to attend church, with the effect concentrated among Democrats. The number describes perception, and perception is the point. For a large share of young Americans, the church has acquired a party registration, and they respond to it as they respond to the party.<\/p>\n He has spent equal energy deflating the counter-narrative. Beginning in 2024 and 2025, viral conversions, crowded campus worship nights, and rising interest among young men fed claims of a Gen Z revival. Burge went to the data and found a generation still exceptional in its distance from organized religion. Then the data moved, and he moved with it. The 2025 CES put the nones at 31.8 percent, down from 36.2 percent in 2022, a statistically significant drop confirmed in direction by the General Social Survey. Burge called the finding what it was, a reversal he had not predicted, and drew the line he has held since: stabilization is real, and stabilization is not revival. Fewer people call themselves nonreligious. That is a fact about labels. Whether they sit in pews, accept doctrines, or rebuild institutions remains unproven. He has flagged one development as potentially large: among some younger cohorts, men now report attending church at rates equal to or above women, a reversal of a pattern that held for as long as anyone has measured.<\/p>\n Burge writes books the way he writes the newsletter, as organized attacks on comfortable stories. 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America (2022) takes twenty intuitive claims, evangelicals are devout, Catholics vote as a bloc, nones are atheists, and tests each against national data. The Great Dechurching (2023), written with Jim Davis and Michael Graham on original surveys Burge designed with the political scientist Paul Djupe, examined the roughly 40 million Americans who once attended church and stopped, and found that most left through drift rather than injury, which meant the churches trying to win them back with apologetics were answering a question the dechurched had not asked. The American Religious Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2025) is his atlas, twelve religious traditions cut by race, age, region, education, and politics, with the recurring lesson that the broad categories conceal about as much as they reveal.<\/p>\n The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us (Brazos Press, January 13, 2026) is the personal book, and the one where the referee steps onto the field. Its subject is what Burge calls the great sorting. Conservative evangelicalism holds one flank of American religion. A growing, generally liberal secular population holds the other. The moderate middle, the mainline and centrist congregations that once contained Republicans and Democrats in the same pews, is disappearing, and Burge argues that the country loses something civic when it goes. Churches like First Baptist of Mount Vernon forced politically incompatible people into sustained cooperation. Members sat through budget meetings, organized funeral lunches, and maintained buildings alongside neighbors whose votes canceled theirs. They practiced the unglamorous disciplines of association: tolerating irritation, negotiating disagreement, staying connected to people they disliked. Those disciplines trained citizens, and the training grounds are closing.<\/p>\n The argument invites an objection Burge partly anticipates. Mainline decline began decades before the current polarization, driven by low birth rates, aging membership, and failure to keep the children, and moderation did nothing to stop it. Attributing civic virtue to institutions that could not reproduce risks nostalgia. His stronger claim survives the objection: whatever killed the moderate church, its replacements, the partisan congregation and the private screen, perform the bridging function worse. A dying bridge is still a bridge.<\/p>\n The closure of First Baptist gave Burge a strange new authority and a season of grief. National outlets covered the story of the church-decline scholar whose church declined to death; the Associated Press version ran in hundreds of papers, and because he worked for a state university, his email address was public, and the messages did not stop. Strangers diagnosed the corpse. The theology killed it, the moderation killed it, the pastor killed it. Burge, who had conducted more funerals than baptisms for years and knew the arithmetic better than anyone writing to him, stopped attending worship for about a month.<\/p>\n He wrote about the year that followed with the flatness of a man reporting from inside his own case study. “I was the guy standing at the pulpit delivering the last benediction,” he wrote near the first anniversary. He turned down most invitations to preach; after standing in a pulpit nearly every week from his early twenties to forty-two, he wanted to learn whether he missed preaching or only missed who he had been. The pastorate outlived the church. In the year after closure he buried two former members and administered last rites to one, and he concluded that he would remain pastor to the survivors until the last of them was gone.<\/p>\n He now attends a Methodist church near his home, where a few former First Baptist members sometimes sit together. He sits near the back and leaves quickly. He also goes to Mass with his wife, Jacqueline, and their two sons, who are Catholic. The Baptist minister's children are being raised in the Church of Rome, and Burge treats the arrangement without anxiety. His concern is that his sons stay connected to Christianity in some durable form. The denominational borders his childhood policed have stopped mattering to him, which may be the most representative fact about him: the scholar of American religious decategorization has decategorized.<\/p>\n On August 1, 2025, one year and ten days after the last service, Burge left Eastern Illinois for Washington University in St. Louis, joining the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics as professor of practice. The Danforth Center, founded through the former senator John C. Danforth (b. 1936), an ordained Episcopal priest, exists for public engagement with religion and politics, which made the hire a recognition that Burge's charts had become part of the national infrastructure. The move carried its own status arithmetic. For thirteen years he had addressed a national audience from a regional teaching university, fitting the public work around a full load; now an elite private research university pays him to do the public work as the job. He took the position after a year of subtractions, the church, a retiring department chair who was a close friend, the family dog, and marked it as loss and providence at once: “A lot of things that were in my life 18 months ago are gone.”<\/p>\n Burge's strength is descriptive discipline. He compares datasets rather than crowning one, and when the CES surprises him he checks the GSS and Pew before he checks his priors. He treats question wording as substance: his published work includes research on whether offering “Christian” alongside “Protestant” as a survey option changes the measured size of American Protestantism, the kind of finding that never trends and quietly governs everything that does. He approaches religion as a political scientist, asking what identities predict and how they change, and leaves the judgment of theological coherence to others.<\/p>\n The limits are the limits of the instrument. Everything rests on self-report, and Americans overstate church attendance; studies that compare surveys against counted heads find the gap persistent. A Burge chart of weekly attendance looks harder than the measure underneath it, and the safe readings are comparative, this group above that group, this year against that year, rather than absolute. The work is also almost purely quantitative. A survey records that a woman stopped checking the Methodist box. It cannot recover the divorce, the hospital, the sermon that went one sentence too far, or the Sunday the car would not start and no one called. Burge counts the movements between categories better than anyone; the meaning of the movements lies outside his data, and he mostly has the discipline to say so. Causality resists him as it resists everyone: religion, politics, education, geography, and family shape one another in loops, and a chart shows the loop's shadow, one correlation at a time. And the medium exerts its pull. Substack and X reward the arresting difference, survey research produces the ambiguous one, and his shortest posts sometimes carry more certainty than the full methodological discussion would license.<\/p>\n His temperament is the referee's. He is neither a secular writer enjoying the funeral nor a church-growth consultant selling the resurrection. He tells atheist audiences that the nones are less educated and less engaged than they imagine, and Christian audiences that the revival is not in the data. He has said he takes it as a compliment when readers cannot tell whether he is a Republican or a Democrat. The neutrality has boundaries, and The Vanishing Church marks where they run. After twenty years of describing the sorting of American religion, he now argues against it, for institutions that can hold political difference, for participation over detachment, for the moderate middle he watched die from the pulpit. The commitments were always there. The book signs them.<\/p>\n The tension that organizes Burge's career runs between the graph and the funeral. His charts show long lines descending in slow arcs, and the arcs are accurate. His other life taught him what a data point weighs: a congregation founded three years after the Civil War, a woman who prepared funeral lunches for fifty years, a health insurance bill paid for a laid-off professor, a vote of 49 to 48, three dozen people and a cake. He measures the transformation of American religion from inside it, as participant, casualty, and recorder at once, and this position, more than any single finding, is his contribution. American religious statistics had partisans and it had technicians. In Burge it acquired a witness who could count.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the morning of July 21, 2024, about three dozen people gathered in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois, a town of 14,000 an hour east of St. Louis. The building had been raised for a … Continue reading