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1 week ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
You know what’s absolutely crazy? In the 200+ posts I have put together for this newsletter, I have never once written about megachurches. I just can’t believe that it’s never crossed my mind until now, but that’s about to change. I am going to lean heavily on the work of the great team at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research - they are the real clearing house for this kind of data and collecting and organizing it is yeoman’s work.
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1 week ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
One of the most important questions that one has to ask in doing data work is pretty simple, “Compared to what?” If I make a graph that visualizes the partisanship of white evangelicals and it indicates that 60% of them are Republicans, the data means very little by itself.
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2 weeks ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below. One of the most interesting lines of survey research in the last couple of years has been led by Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard. It’s focused on a fairly simple but incredibly consequential aspect of life - human flourishing.
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2 weeks ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
I get asked to talk to the media here and there. It used to be something that made me a bit nervous but I learned this little trick that made things a lot easier - I would just memorize these little bite sized data nuggets that I could toss out when asked a question that would provide enough of a structure to my response that I could build around that.
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3 weeks ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
Here’s a religion and politics story from the 2024 election that I hadn’t really thought about until recently - J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, converted to Catholicism in 2019. His religious timeline began as a nominal evangelical during his childhood, dabbling with atheism in his college years and then joined the Catholic Church in his mid-thirties.
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3 weeks ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
What in the world happened in the 2024 presidential election? It’s a question I’ve been asked by dozens of media outlets over the last six months. But I had a big problem: no reliable data that would aid me in answering such a question. The exit polls, no matter what anyone tells you, should not be considered gospel. There are a number of fundamentalflaws in their design that make it impossible to rely on them to construct an accurate portrayal of what actually happened on election day.
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4 weeks ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below. Long time readers of this newsletter know I write about the three B’s of religion fairly often.
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1 month ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
I’ve got two sons - one is thirteen and the other is ten. I remember when my wife and I were thinking about having children, we talked all the time about the best type of birthing plan (I distinctly remember becoming intimately aware of something called the ). Then it was breastfeeding versus bottle feeding and cloth diapers versus disposable diapers. It felt like it was consuming most of our conversations for a period of time.
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1 month ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
There’s this huge disconnect between what religious people want and what social science can provide. It’s one of the biggest frustrations of the type of work I do. I get asked hundreds of questions a year that I totally understand the motivation behind - but I know that there’s just no way in the world to accurately answer such a query using anything resembling rigorous social science methods. I think there are two primary reasons for this.
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1 month ago | 
graphsaboutreligion.com | Ryan Burge
There’s this very much overused saying in my line of work - data is the new oil. When you hear someone giving a ‘hype’ speech at a data science conference that line usually comes up one way or another. The assumption here is that with the right kind of data, the right kind of analysis, and the right kind of interpretation it’s possible to make decisions that can save lives, lower carbon emissions, avert wars, and make the world a better place.