My latest: a review of Ryan Burge, in The Lamp
In the latest issue of The Lamp, which just went online today, I have a review of Ryan P. Burge’s new book The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future. The review is called “The Stickiness of Religion." Here are the opening paragraphs:
Social science fiction—this was Albert Murray’s term of art for the kind of “pseudo-scientific” analysis he saw applied to black life in the 1960s. Too many, he observed, were tempted “to mistake the jargon of social science for insight into the nature and condition of man.” The result was “social science fiction fiction,” namely, novels posing as gritty, revelatory art that merely rendered in narrative form the pathologies and policies proposed by “current survey methodology.” By contrast, Murray’s approach was “distinctly proliterary,” that is to say, humanist in its presumption “that interpretations of human behavior in the raw require at least as much respect for the complexity of human motives as the interpretation of a poem or play or a story.”
Although Murray, a distinguished critic and novelist himself, was primarily concerned with the subject of race in America, his point stands as well for the academic study of religion. Murray may not have known what a “wonk” was, but had he seen one coming down the street, he would have turned and run on the spot.
Ryan P. Burge is the premier wonk of American religion today. A professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and the author of the Graphs about Religion Substack, Burge has contributed to just about every major newspaper and religious or political magazine. When journalists want to know what’s going on with American religion—usually evangelicalism or Catholicism—they turn to Burge and his trove of ready-made charts. He was at the forefront of popularizing and explaining “the rise of the Nones” and co-operated in the study, published two years ago in The Great Dechurching, that found forty million American adults who used to attend church but no longer do so.
Click here to read the rest. When I wrote the piece I had no idea it would be in the issue commemorating the passing of Pope Francis—nor that I would be just one review separated from Christopher Caldwell. I’m grateful to be included.