When Ryan Burge speaks, a growing number of evangelical thought leaders listen.
If you don’t know Ryan Burge, he is the newly named “professor of practice” at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
But I know him as a numbers guy. He is one of a very few people (Christian Smith of Notre Dame would be another) who really dives into statistics about religion, and when he emerges from these deep dives, he often brings with him surprising and helpful insights.
One recent dive into the data looked at the “exvangelical.” Exvangelicals are people who were raised as evangelicals, but later rejected evangelicalism. Exvangelical memoirs have become something of a cottage industry. The most famous was Sarah McCammon’s New York Times best selling book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. This book and others capitalize on a belief that evangelicalism is hemorrhaging adherents, and that children raised in the faith are rejecting the faith when they reach adulthood.
But are these assumptions true? Ryan Burge dug into the data to see if he could come up with some answers. He arrived at several conclusions that I found to be fascinating.
The first questions Burge wanted to answer was this: How many exvangelicals are there? As it turns out, the number of exvangelicals in the U.S. is relatively small. If an exvangelical is someone who was raised in an evangelical church and later rejected it, Burge figured he could find some answers by asking those who have no religious affiliation (the so-called “nones”) about their background. Were they, in fact, raised in a religious family, or were they non-religious all along?
He found that 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. In fact, some sociologists suggest that the so-called “rise of the nones” may not be much of a rise at all. They say that the “nones” of today are no greater than the “nones” of the past, but that people today are just more honest, less inhibited by social norms, from saying so.
So, just to do a little math here: Nones represent about 30 percent of American adults, according to a recent Pew study. That percentage represents about 75 million adults. But if Burge is right, only about 11 million of these people were ever born-again Christians. That’s a big number, but it represents only three percent of the U.S. population. Burge concludes: “There’s just not any strong evidence in the data that the ranks of the nones are swelling because of a rejection of evangelicalism.”
Burge looked at the question from another angle, and his findings there are equally interesting. He asked the nones in his survey, “did your mother or father describe themselves as evangelical or born-again?” This question is helpful because it helps us understand if young people are truly rejecting the faith of their parents, or if in fact they are religiously unaffiliated because their parents were and that is the way they were raised.
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According to Burge, “The data here tells an incredibly simple, yet mythbusting story. The share of nones who grew up in a house where both parents were evangelical was less than 10%. Yeah, it’s really that low. All those narratives that we hear about atheists who grew up with strict evangelical parents don’t represent the median none. In fact, those stories are statistical outliers.”
Burge goes on to say, “Instead, what that data tells us is that over four in five current non-religious Americans grew up in a household that was not in any way evangelical in its orientation.”
To be specific, Burge explains, “83% [of nones] said that neither their mother nor their father would have self-ID’ed as evangelical.”
Burge and his collaborator Tony Jones have a lot more statistics about what he calls the “Christian to None” pipeline, but his bottom line is this: “I don’t know how else to say this but I think the whole Christian to none pipeline is just way, way overblown.”
Does that mean we should ignore the “rise of the nones” or that subset of nones who call themselves exvangelicals?
Absolutely not. The U.S. is a big country, and even if only 16 percent of former evangelicals become “nones,” that is still – as I said above – 11 million adults. And, of course, more than 200 million people in the United States who might describe themselves as “Christian” of one variety or another, but who are in fact only loosely affiliated with the church or lack any meaningful level of faith formation. These people, and our posture toward them, are what the Great Commission is all about.
But we should not panic or fear. We should not let our churches and ministries be guided by church growth fads that downplay theological distinctives and water down essential doctrines for the sake of growth.
Indeed, to me, one of the most interesting aspects of American religious life is that the churches that are growing are those who take their biblical distinctives most seriously. For the past 75 years, the churches that are growing are those that are theologically conservative and doctrinally clear. As Burge put it, “Growing up devoutly Christian is not a significant push factor when it comes to the non-religious. It only explains about 10% of the growth of the nones among Gen Z and Millennials. Having devoutly Christian parents does not drive many young folks to start identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. In fact, it seems like it makes it much more likely that they will stay attached to Christianity for the rest of their lives.”
Burge concludes with this: “My best advice? Still listen to those voices of the exvangelicals. Hear what they have to say about the current state of evangelical Christianity. But also keep in mind that those authors, speakers, and thinkers represent a very small sliver of the American population.”