Aug. 1, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

Ryan Burge is a political scientist and statistician at Eastern Illinois University. He’s also an American Baptist pastor whose church, First Baptist of Mount Vernon, Illinois, is winding down its ministry and headed for closing its doors soon, like an increasing number of churches in the U.S.

It’s a trend you and I are well-acquainted with. Virtually every colleague I have in the UCC and elsewhere has included this trend in communications with our congregations via sermons, newsletter columns, and social media posts—partly to manage our own and others’ expectations of organized religion in the moment we’re in, and partly to comfort ourselves that, “Gosh, the Church is facing serious headwinds in society,” and that the decline of participation in our own, local churches has many causes and is not simply our fault.

But in the May 20, 2024 issue of his Substack newsletter, Graphs About Religion, Burge says that the rise of the Nones (those who are affiliated with no particular religion) may have plateaued.

Yes, he writes, “The rise of the nones may be largely over now. At least it won’t be increasing in the same way that it did in the prior thirty years.” Since 2020, the percentage of Nones has held relatively steady at between 34 and 36 percent, after decades of rapid growth in the surveyed population. It’s just not rising anymore in any statistically significant way.

Why? He first turns to the large number of those surveyed who were “marginally attached” to their identified religious group, and simply switched to “no religion” on surveys in the past 10 to 20 years. This left only the most committed religious people, who are unlikely to ever become Nones.

But he also says that, as the so-called Silent and Boomer generations (those born in 1925 to 1945 and 1946 to 1964, respectively) die off, they are replaced by Generation Z (those born in 1996 and after), who tend to be less religious than their grandparents—even though the generational gap between the groups is likely smaller now than was first thought.

Burge says this is likely the end of the “rise of the Nones” narrative in demographic studies of American religion.

It also means the landscape of possibility may not be as bleak as we’ve painted it to be for a merged church that truly reimagines its ministry and embraces a compelling mission to reach the unaffiliated people who are actually out there, in ways that are truly relevant to them.

What are YOU seeing in your neighborhood, or among your circles of friends?