Most people can’t tell you why they left church—they just drifted away, one Sunday at a time.
(RNS) — Burge lives this trend professionally and personally. He’s a sociologist who maps religious decline in real time, tracking how the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans climbed from 5% in 1991 to 30% in 2020, then plateaued. He’s also a pastor who spent 18 years shepherding a mainline church he knew would close. In 2017, he did the math: three years of money left. But the church lasted until 2024. Organizations scratch and claw when resources run low, surviving long past their projected expiration dates in ways no model can predict.
But here’s what keeps him up at night: The data can’t explain why people actually leave. Most don’t have some big blow-up over politics or theology. They drift. Three times a month becomes twice, then once every few months, then never. Burge calls it “trying to put smoke in a box” — attempting to categorize something structureless, something people themselves can’t articulate. The era of New Atheism appears spent. Baby boomers are aging out of power. Both political parties appear to be facing an existential crisis because of shifting religious landscapes.
What do you do with numbers that reveal broad trends but can’t capture individual meaning? How do you find your place in the sweep of history when the mental scaffolding keeps shifting?
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.
Amanda Henderson 0:00
Amanda from RNS and the Institute for Religion, Politics and Culture. This is Complexified, a podcast for the religiously curious and politically frustrated. I’m Amanda Henderson. Well, the sky is falling, right? That’s what they’ve said for more than 20 years. We’ve been hearing that the mainline church is collapsing. The data unambiguous—fewer folks in the pews. Faith is fracturing, and what used to hold communities together is coming apart. This has happened just as political divides have become political chasms. Are these two stories connected? What are the stories beneath the stories of decline and division? Here to talk about this today is Ryan Burge, a sociologist who maps religious decline in real time, and a pastor who oversaw the closure of his own congregation. He lives the tension between what the numbers say and what they can’t measure: loneliness, belonging, the quiet search for meaning when institutions fail. Ryan, welcome to Complexified.
Ryan Burge 1:10
Well, I am religiously frustrated and politically…
Amanda Henderson 1:13
Hey, you’re our person!
Ryan Burge 1:17
Politically confused, religiously frustrated. Yes, I’m all the above.
Amanda Henderson 1:27
Okay, so you argue that the political polarization of American religion is causing congregations to disappear, which is then harming democracy and social cohesion, right? This is what you’ve been saying. Now, I know you’re a sociologist, and I know you like the data, but I want to ask you another question. What are the questions that you’re asking that data can’t answer?
Ryan Burge 1:56
Oh man, you’d be amazed at how many people will ask me a question, and I’ll sit there and think to myself for a second, how in the world have we never asked about that on a survey? Like, how we missed that for 50 years? One of the things that actually makes me sad, in like a very nerdy, weird way, is I think back to the past and realize all the stuff we don’t know because we didn’t have surveys 50, 60, 70 years ago. So like, that part of our history, we just don’t… like, when people say, well, evangelicals loved Calvin Coolidge, and I’m like, you don’t know that. We’ll never know that. It’s impossible to know those things, you know. Like, so the things that we don’t know, like, it’s so much larger than the things we do know. But the thing that really keeps me up at night, and I’ve written books—I wrote a book called The Great Dechurching, right? Why are people leaving church? And we did a tremendous survey about that, and we have another survey we just did, and we’re going to write a book about spiritual migration patterns in America.
Amanda Henderson 2:51
But no data, Ryan, no data!
Ryan Burge 2:55
I know. I think that what we’re trying to do at the end of the day is put smoke in a box. And what I mean by that is, I don’t think many people actually have a cohesive reason for why they stop going to church. So like, we’re trying to put structure into a structureless process. And the one thing we do know is a lot of people don’t leave church because of like some big blowup, right? Like a political problem, or my kid came out as gay and they shunned him, or something like that. You know what I mean? Like, it’s almost never like this big epiphany moment, like Hollywood would want you to believe. Or like the mainstream media talks about all the time. The average person just sort of drifts away from religion, like quiet quitting. They’re just like, man, you know what? When they were kids, they would go like three times a month, and then they’re teenagers, they went twice a month. And when they got in their 20s, they started going once every three months. And now they’re adults with kids, and they’re just like, yeah, I mean, church is cool, but like, I’m not going. No matter how well we survey, I think we’re trying to put people into categories that don’t fully make sense to them. And if it doesn’t make sense to them, like, that’s always my biggest question—if they can’t internalize and verbalize why they left, then how in the world is someone like me going to make some big, grand claim about here’s why people leave church and here’s why they can come back? Because the people themselves don’t even know why they left. And if you ask them, what would bring you back? A lot of them are like, I don’t know, man. Like, I’m just happy not being there. So I think, to me, that’s the big thing I struggle with.
Amanda Henderson 4:33
It’s kind of like—so I’ve got kids who are, well, young adults now, but teenagers—and you ask them, why didn’t you go to school today? I don’t know. And they legitimately don’t know. Sometimes there’s this similar… we have this longing to know something that might not really be knowable. That’s super interesting. I’ve not thought about that, that we are trying to capture smoke in a box and trying to figure out something that is… and put people in these categories that we know ourselves. I can’t easily be put in a category, and you don’t want to be, but yet we try to with these surveys.
Ryan Burge 5:12
That’s the hard part. But what I do is I have to make these broad claims about America, and the inevitable comments that I get, like the reply guys that I get, are typically, well, that doesn’t fit me. Like, I’m not one of those people. When I say, like, I’ll make a comment like, man, the Catholic Church is bad at conversion—because they really are, numerically, really bad at conversion. And then someone comments, inevitably, like, well, I converted to Catholic Church when I was 22. And I’m like, congratulations, dude, you’re a statistical oddity. I’m just telling you, like, for everything I say, I have to speak in generalities. You know, for every generality I say, there’s tons of examples of people who go against that generality. But it doesn’t mean the generality is not true. It just means it’s not universal, because there’s really nothing in this world of religion, politics, culture, society that is universal. There’s just these broad trends. So I have to speak about America with this broad, sweeping language that makes some people mad, because I’m not talking about them. Guess what? I can’t talk about 340 million Americans. It would take the rest of my life. So yeah, I think that’s something I struggle with too. Is, everyone matters, but they don’t, you know?
Amanda Henderson 6:14
We’ll put that on a pillow.
Ryan Burge 6:18
It’s true, though. Like, you’d be amazed at the people who get in my comments, like, what about the Unitarian Universalists? Yeah. I mean, I was at a Unitarian church two weeks ago. I gave a talk there—fantastic, wonderful people. Yes, it was the First Unitarian Church of Nashville. F-U-U-N, FUN. That’s what they’re called, FUN.
Amanda Henderson 6:33
I’m like, that’s amazing. That is branding. That’s a good logo.
Ryan Burge 6:37
But if you look at them on surveys, I have a survey of 700,000 people. There are 85 Unitarians in there, out of 700,000 people.
Amanda Henderson 6:46
So it’s a small percentage in the full scheme.
Ryan Burge 6:50
Exactly. But you matter, but you don’t. You know, in the grand scheme of America, your tradition doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t change any outcome. Doesn’t change society. And I’m sorry to say that, but numerically, what I’m saying is true. So yeah…
Amanda Henderson 7:01
Or a grain of sand. Okay, so where is a moment that your own personal experience as a pastor or person didn’t line up neatly with those statistics that you’re looking at?
Ryan Burge 7:17
Oh, mercy. When doesn’t it line up? You know, what we know in data is like likes like, right? So white people go to white churches. Old people go to old churches. Young people go to young churches. You know, like, that is what we know about what people do, because at the end of the day, church is a voluntary organization. And when you become an adult, you choose to go. Your parents don’t make you go anymore. You get to choose if you go, when you go, how much you go. I was a 23-year-old pastor of a church where I was the youngest person by 50 years. That is weird, statistically.
Amanda Henderson 7:52
And a male too, you know? I mean, that’s another statistical—23-year-old male. And at that time… now we’re seeing an uptick, but…
Ryan Burge 7:58
Absolutely, yeah, you know. And my wife’s Catholic, and both my kids are baptized Catholic. So even like that is… people go, how does that work? And I go, how does it not work? You know? So my entire life… like the people I was just talking about, like how you matter but you don’t—like, I’m one of those people. Like, I matter, but I don’t, because I was always pastoring churches where I was the youngest person by 30, 40, 50 years. And for whatever reason, in our situation that actually worked. I mean, the church closed, but it worked, like interpersonally. We never had that many conflicts about it. So, you know, I think my own life is like swimming against the stream. Like, I really should have probably become a nondenominational church planter, looking back on what people like. And by the way, a lot of people I went to college with—that’s exactly what they did. They planted churches in their denomination or nondenominational churches. I didn’t go that route. So, I mean, that’s where like, I don’t fit in with the data.
Amanda Henderson 8:51
Yeah, I was reading a little bit of your story and saw that you did… you became pastor of this mainline congregation at 23?
Ryan Burge 8:58
My first church lasted a year, which is probably a year too long, honestly. And the second church, I was 24. 2006, yeah.
Amanda Henderson 9:05
And that is interesting, because that would be typical, especially in the early 2000s, that you would be growing out a goatee and getting some great glasses and making some spiky hair and doing the church plant. But you wound up being in this role that so many of us see as kind of hospice to a mainline church over 20-plus years.
Ryan Burge 9:30
That’s the word I use often. I was a hospice pastor. Like I mean, I not only saw the death of the church, which I’ve written about extensively, I’ve buried a lot of people in my life. I mean, my baptism-to-burial ratio is really bad. It’s probably one of the worst in the world. Like it’s got to be 10 to one, maybe 20 to one at this point.
Amanda Henderson 9:48
Hopefully you don’t get scored on that at some point.
Ryan Burge 9:52
And I was just thinking the other day that I’m going to be burying people for at least the next 20 years. You know, as long as members of that congregation are still alive, I’ll still be their pastor. When they’re going to die, they’re going to ask me to do their funeral. And so it’s like the church closed, but even 20 years later, I still have an obligation—you know, not a legal obligation, a moral obligation, a spiritual obligation—to those folks, because I chose to shepherd them for 18 years. And that’s a burden that I don’t think I fully understood when I took the job at 24 years old. And, you know, in some ways, it’s an honor that they would still choose me to be there, you know, to preach their homily, 20 years after I stopped being their pastor. So, you know…
Amanda Henderson 10:32
All right, so there’s this disconnect sometimes between what the statistics say and what our experiences are, and there’s always these questions behind the statistics that we just can’t capture. But what do you see as the value of this data and watching the trends? What does that do for you to help make sense of senseless realities?
Ryan Burge 11:00
Yeah, yeah. I think that a lot of us… I don’t know how other people make sense out of what happens, like, during a day or a week or a month, like, but I’m a guy who wants mental scaffolding, like cubby holes in my brain. And so when something happens, I can slide it into that cubby and go, okay, that makes sense, because this is what we’re doing right now, and this is the macro-level trends. And so like, when I give a talk, and I often just give a talk, like, the last 50 years of American religion in 45 minutes, which is like—you know, what are we going to do in 45 minutes? But you would be amazed at the number of people you can see in their face that they’re having this realization about like, why they are what they are, why they fit in or don’t fit in, you know. Like, why they left this church, why they joined that church, why they can’t find a church, you know. Like all that starts to make sense when they see the broad sweep of what’s happening in America. And it sort of gives them that mental scaffolding to sort of put their life story inside that in a way that feels better than amorphousness, you know, than structurelessness. And so I think that’s really, to me, why I keep doing what I’m doing. Explaining might be the most important skill you can have in the 21st century, because we have all this information, but you need people to help you sort of arrange it in such a way that is true to what the data says, but also makes sense to people at the same time. And I think that, to me, has always been my sort of goal, and what I’ve always been really good at, is making sense of all this disparate information.
Amanda Henderson 12:30
And helping find yourself in it, whether you fit it in or not. That’s what’s interesting. You know, as you were talking, I was thinking—over the summer, we went into the Grand Canyon and rafted, which is just a phenomenal experience. And at night, the stars were breathtaking. Because you can see the Milky Way, and you can see everything. But it made me come into myself in a way that I don’t really know what else has, because you see… you feel your place in the universe when you’re looking up at the stars in this way that is just so visceral. And so—I mean, that seems like such a far-fetched metaphor for data as the stars. But when you were talking, I was thinking, there is this thing that is helpful when you look at the sweep of history, or the sweep of humanity or America today, and find your little niche within it. It helps find the sense of connection in it all.
Ryan Burge 13:31
Can I be Pastor Ryan just for a second?
Amanda Henderson 13:35
Please be Pastor Ryan.
Ryan Burge 13:36
When you told me that story, I was thinking immediately of the story of Abraham, when God takes him out at night, and he has him look up and go, your descendants are going to be more numerous than the stars in the sky, and I’m going to build you a great nation out of you. And the stars that he was looking at are the same stars that we look at. Like, just think about that. Like, crazy. It’s crazy to think about. Like I always said when we took communion—we use the word communion. We don’t use the word Lord’s Supper, because I don’t like that term. Communion means to be together, right? To intermingle with each other. And we’re doing that, not just in our congregation, but in all these congregations across the world on this Sunday, as people in Australia took communion, and then in Middle East, and then Europe, and then us, and, you know, they’re all taking it. But then, even better than that, we’re communing backwards into history with all the people that took the same communion that we did, just like Abraham looks at the same stars that we looked at. Like it connects us to—to go back to that story—the grand sweep of human history. Like I think that’s why the Scriptures, to me, actually makes sense in some ways, because it’s like, whatever Isaac and Jacob and Moses and Noah… what we’re struggling with, I’m still struggling with today, and the things that they saw and the problems they’re facing are the same problems I’m facing, just with a whole lot more spreadsheets than they had. But we’re all trying to do the same thing, which is make meaning out of this thing, and find structure and purpose. And that’s, I think, whether you’re preaching or just, you know, giving a talk with a bunch of graphs, it’s really kind of the same goal, which is just help people feel a little more sturdy, you know. I mean, a little more settled in their lives. And afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. You know, that should be the goal, whether you give a research talk or a sermon. It should be both those things. And that’s what I will say—I think one of the reasons I’m somewhat good at what I do in just presenting the information is because I stood in front of a group of people every Sunday for 20 years and spoke as a human being. You know, the only way you get better at public speaking is public speaking. There’s no shortcut or secret. And so yeah, that’s what I think about a lot. Is like, man, I’m so glad I’m a pastor.
Amanda Henderson 15:38
Yeah, this is so good. Let’s take a quick break. It seems like the sky is a theme here. I started by talking about the sky is falling, and now we’re talking about the sky as this thing that has connected us across time and reminds us where we’re at. As you think about what’s happening in religion right now, what do you feel that you can’t footnote?
Ryan Burge 16:10
Yeah, I do feel that we’ve moved through sort of an era—that the chapter’s closed on the prior era. And you sort of see it in the data a little bit, but like it’s somewhat data, somewhat vibes. And the data says the share of Americans who were nonreligious, you know, climbed exponentially from 1991 to 2020. It went from 5% to 30%. And then, but the last five years, it sort of hung out at this 30% level, and the Christian share stayed around 63% during the same time. So we’re like in a stasis period, and it feels like we’ve reached the end of sort of the New Atheism moment in American history. For those who don’t know, that was like Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris. God is dead. God Is Not Great, The God Delusion. Those guys all sort of found their footing by putting their debates on YouTube when YouTube was really young. That was one of the most popular threads on YouTube, because if you think about it, a lot of evangelical kids would never hear a smart atheist ever debate about anything, you know. And so now you could. And now it’s like, oh man, I didn’t think about that. But it feels like whatever that was in the zeitgeist, it sort of ran out of steam. And New Atheism has turned into this whole weird xenophobic, racist movement, which is a whole different story. But now we’re sort of in a new era. Like that chapter’s closed, and now we’re sort of in an era where, okay, secularism exploded across America, and then a lot of people left religion, and now we’re in this sort of waiting room period where it’s like, okay, what’s next? Yeah. In 20 years, where are we going to be compared to 20 years ago?
Amanda Henderson 17:42
Yeah, it’s so hard to imagine, because not only the changes in religion, but the changes, as you named, in technology, in politics, and it feels like everything is kind of, you know, in the air—pick-up sticks. It’s hard to predict where religion is going right now.
Ryan Burge 17:59
That’s the hard part. People ask me to predict these things, you know. Where are things going to go? And you can only base those off of what you see in the data before that, right? And so the hard thing is, when I started doing this, I would have said the nones would have kept rising, you know, just straight up into the right. Because if you look at the graph, that’s what it was—straight up into the right. And then you hit this moment where you hit this pause. It’s kind of plateaued. And then you think to yourself, why didn’t I see that, you know? Like, why did I not anticipate that happening? It’s like, why did I not bet on that team to win the World Series? Or why did I not buy Google stock in 2001 or Bitcoin 15 years ago? Kierkegaard said you have to live life forward, but it only makes sense in reverse. And I think that’s what we’re always chasing in this world of social science, right? We have to live every day, and then we look back on those days and go, okay, now I understand why that was, and what was happening here, and what the structure of this whole thing was. But at the time, it’s happening so fast that your brain sort of can’t make sense of it. It can’t build the scaffolding fast enough in real time. You have to look back on it. So I think that’s the thing I struggle with a lot—how do I do real-time stuff and do it properly when it seems like cognitively, it’s impossible for us to do?
Amanda Henderson 19:12
Yeah. Now, how do you see the political polarization of this moment in relationship to these trends—not only the trends in the data, but the feel and the vibe that we experience behind the numbers around religion? Where did these intersect?
Ryan Burge 19:31
I was thinking a lot about Donald Trump today. You know, Donald Trump has been on the political scene now for…
Amanda Henderson 19:39
A long time. Eleven years.
Ryan Burge 19:43
Yeah, yeah. Longer, yeah. Fifteen. I mean, yeah, he was sort of like an ancillary character before that, but he’s been like the prime mover in American politics now for over a decade. We’ve never had that since FDR, by the way. We’ve never had that in our lifetimes. And so imagine you turned 18 in 2016. Donald Trump’s been on the ballot for the Republicans in every election you’ve ever voted in. You’re almost 30 years old now. So think about that. We just talked about how this era of religion has sort of turned the page. We’re on to a new chapter. It feels that way politically too. So like it’s been forever since the Republican Party has not been the party of Trump, at least it feels that way. And so now it’s like, when he exits stage right, what is the next flavor of conservatism going to look like in America? How do the Democrats respond? Because I think in some ways the Democrats—this is a vibe thing, not a data thing—I think in some ways the Democrats have realized they totally oversteered away from Christianity in their messaging the last 10 years by not talking about it very much, by not leaning into Christian values very much. And I think they’ve realized there’s been a backlash against that, and they’ve lost a lot of voters who would be amenable to their causes if they would just say things like, hey, I believe there should be exceptions to abortion laws where you have a conscientious objection, you don’t have to engage. They don’t say stuff like that, you know. So I think that the Democrats, if they have any wits about them, will sort of steer back and understand that you still have to have a whole bunch of Christians vote for you on Election Day to win. You can’t just appeal to the nonreligious and Muslims and Jews. Like there’s not enough of them to win elections. And unfortunately, that’s what it feels like the Democratic Party’s done. So to me, I think it’s an interesting era where I think both parties are facing this existential crisis because of the shifting religious landscape of America, and they’ve got to reorient themselves to how to campaign effectively in that new environment.
Amanda Henderson 21:29
Where do you see unexpected resilience or creativity that doesn’t show up in the numbers around people leaving religion or coming to religion?
Ryan Burge 21:42
So… I’m going to go way down the rabbit hole.
Amanda Henderson 21:45
Okay, okay. I’m ready.
Ryan Burge 21:47
There’s this book I read in grad school called Time, Chance and Organizations—can’t think of his name now, but it’s called Time, Chance and Organizations. And the point that he makes is it’s almost impossible for organizations to die. Like they’re amazingly resilient, especially when they get resource-poor, to find ways to scratch and claw and find resources and merge with other organizations and just survive the moment. And I saw that in my own life with my church, because about 2017 I did my data thing and looked at our budget, looked at our reserves, looked at our trajectory, and said, hey, we’re going to be out of money by 2020. You know, we have three years left. And we didn’t close till 2024. So we actually scratched and clawed for almost five more years. And part of that was because we got COVID money. We got PPP money. We could have—you know, why not, right? We also had some people die who left a little bit of money to the church. And we had certain things happen that made our expenses go down. But that, to me, is really… because when I do projections of denominations, like, when are denominations going to close? You can’t just project the line going down in a linear fashion, because to me, what happens is, once you get down, there’s like a floor effect. There’s grasping that happens. Like, the desperation kicks in at some point, and these organizations are going to scratch and claw and bargain and beg and do whatever it takes to keep going long past what their projected expiration date was. You can’t model that. That’s why people ask, how many churches are going to close in the next 15 years? I’m like, you might as well have me throw darts at a dartboard at this point. Because again, some of those churches that probably shouldn’t close are going to close because they just don’t have any organizational will to stay open. But then other churches that should have closed 10 years ago are still sort of hanging around, hanging around because there’s enough core of people and the financial situation’s in such a way that they don’t have to close down. That’s what makes all this very hard, because you can’t just use numbers to predict church closure, because every church is a unique snowflake that you can’t make broad, sweeping generalizations about.
Amanda Henderson 23:52
Okay, what does that say about our humanity? How does that parallel to like, how a person… like this moment? I think so many people feel like we are just on this train to nowhere in the United States. It’s been a rough time for many people. How does that grasping play out for us, politically and as people?
Ryan Burge 24:18
I think it makes us… there’s this common phrase you hear in public policy circles: the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Which is just this idea, like, inertia is a heck of a thing to try to overcome. You know, you could have something that’s not good, but people will be like, no, but we should keep doing the thing that we’ve always been doing, because at least we know what we’re going to get here. When there might be something better on the other side, but you’ve got to get to the other side to figure out if it’s better or not, right? The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. You know, that whole mentality. And I think that’s where we are politically right now, it feels like. We’re sort of grasping onto these old—let’s be honest, the politicians that we have in Washington are almost all old now, and we’re sort of grasping onto that. There’s going to be a wave. People don’t realize this. There’s a band of boomers, and they’re in their 70s now, and in 15 years, they’re going to be off the stage, either, you know, gone or in the nursing home. It’s going to be a big shift. And so when that happens, it’s like all the doors of power open up really quickly. You know, who is going to step into that void, politically and religiously, by the way, and sort of steer us into what America is going to look like in 2050 or 2060? I think we’re actually in a really interesting moment, because look at the baby boomers. They’re the most unique generation in American history, because fertility absolutely exploded in America for a very short window of time and then returned back to baseline. So we’re never going to have a baby boom generation ever again, and they’re aging through right now. And it’s going to open up possibilities and some downsides too, in ways that we can’t even begin to understand until it actually happens to us. So to me, that’s a really hopeful and terrifying thing. Like, the devil you know—it’s like the boomers are running things and whatever, but they’re not going to be running things for a while, and who’s going to be willing to step into the void and take control? I don’t know.
Amanda Henderson 26:10
Yeah. Okay, so you talk about how the decline of the mainline church and this polarization that’s happening has led to a deeper sense of loneliness and disconnection. And I’m wondering how you personally, having experienced the vanishing church, as you say, and seeing these arcs of decline, how do you find meaning, belonging, connection in the midst of these narratives?
Ryan Burge 26:47
Oh man. Now I turn into a pastor, Amanda. Let me tell you about this guy who gave us all a little bit of purpose. His name is Jesus Christ. You know, for me, I constantly have two voices rolling in my head. And one tells me that I have far exceeded everything that I could have ever imagined for myself when I was 16 years old. You know, like I would say 16-year-old Ryan would think 43-year-old Ryan is killing it. He’d be like, holy cow, you get to do that? So that’s one voice. And the other voice in my head is, but you’re not doing enough. And I think that’s how I find meaning—trying to balance those two voices out, you know? And I find my happy place whenever I can… like, I get done with a day of work, right? Because I work from home a lot. I teach one day a week. I’m doing a lot of writing and speaking and stuff like this. When I get to like five o’clock, right? And I look back at what I did and go, man, I knocked some stuff out today. Boy, I really pushed the ball up the hill on this thing, and now for the next four hours, I don’t have to do anything. Like, that’s how I make meaning. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s how my brain works. You have to earn every day. That’s how I make meaning—earning every day that God gave me as a gift, you know. Like when I get to heaven, hopefully someday I die, go to heaven, and, you know, I can go to God and say, I gave you everything, you know. I mean, like you gave me all this—more than I could have ever, ever asked for. Blessed beyond measure, you know, in every possible way. And then I gave it all back to you and your kingdom. Like I laid it all out there for you, and I’ve got nothing left in the tank. That’s how I make meaning. Like on a day-to-day basis, I constantly have to ask myself, have I done enough? You’re doing great, but have you done enough? Right? That tension is what drives me every single day.
Amanda Henderson 28:36
It’s great. It’s finding your place in the universe and the data—finding where your pocket is. That’s mine.
Ryan Burge 28:43
That’s how I live. I don’t know… I always love when people talk about their philosophy of life, because it’s like, wait a minute, that’s how you think about things? Not the way I think about things. You know, yes, yes.
Amanda Henderson 28:56
Well, thank you so much for being with us. This has been a really fun conversation, and really grateful, and would love to have you back sometime.
Ryan Burge 29:04
Please buy the new book, The Vanishing Church. Just came out last week where fine books are sold. It’s a fantastic read. It’s fun. It’s got graphs—not too many graphs. It’s got stories about my life, and it will definitely make you think, I can tell you that for sure. And it’ll definitely start conversation. So please buy The Vanishing Church and go to my Substack, graphsaboutreligion.com. New posts on Mondays and Thursdays.
Amanda Henderson 29:26
Thank you, Ryan. Complexified comes to you from the Institute for Religion, Politics and Culture at Iliff School of Theology, in partnership with Religion News Service. Senior Producer is Jonathan Woodward. Our editor is Julia Windham. Associate Producer is Josh Perez. Consulting Producer is Paul O’Donnell. I’m Amanda Henderson. The world needs us now—more thinking, more questions, more curiosity, more complexified. Share this episode with your favorite person to talk about life and meaning with, and then email me right now at [email protected]. That’s complexified at I-L-I-F-F dot E-D-U.
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