Ryan P. Burge opens his new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us, with a story that may feel all too familiar: The small Baptist congregation where he was serving as pastor was aging rapidly, and he began to ask himself when they were going to have to close. More hauntingly, he began to ask where he would go when they did—or if he would even return to church.
Burge grew up an evangelical Protestant but found his way into mainline Protestant churches after he decided the evangelical church did not have as much room for his doubts and questions. The problem for him, however, is that churches like his are rapidly dying out. He didn’t know if he would be able to find another church like his.
In The Vanishing Church, Burge presents a data-driven picture of how the American religious and political landscapes have transformed together over the past 50 years. While Christian congregations in the United States used to have Democrats and Republicans together in the same pew, Burge’s data illustrates how this is becoming more rare, as Christians have overall become more politically conservative and political liberals have overall become more hostile to religion.
While his book is backed by data taken from surveys like the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, Burge roots these numbers in his own personal journey as someone whose faith and community are at stake. Refreshingly blunt, Burge calls it like it is, and says that given the rate at which more moderate Christian congregations are declining—and not being replaced with young people—it is unlikely that there will be a resurgence any time soon.
While Christianity has moved to the political right, the “nones”—people who claim no religious affiliation—have become more homogeneously politically liberal and practice the same sort of gatekeeping as their conservative counterparts. Perhaps most troubling in this polarization is the data that suggests that in the majority of American lives, as Burge describes it, “politics impacts religion much more than religion impacts politics.” Liberals feel that they will not find a house of worship suitable for their political views, so “many find the most sensible option when it comes to religion is to leave it behind.” On the flip side, evangelicalism has become for many no more than a label that indicates their conservative political beliefs.
Burge offers some explanations for what happened to bring the United States to the polarization he has outlined. Perhaps most troubling for Catholics who are committed to a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable, Burge explains how churches are becoming less socioeconomically diverse and instead look like gatherings of people who have done things “right”—college educated, middle class and married with children.
As Burge argues, this means that less advantaged and less educated people are being left out of the community support and social capital that religious congregations often provide. It also reinforces political polarization, because people who are critical of social safety nets rarely come into contact with those who most benefit from them.
Burge places the sources of much of the change in the 1990s, including factors like the emergence of the internet, televangelists, the 24-hour news cycle and the rise of the religious right, as well as the decoupling of atheism from communism in the public imagination and the decline of the social stigma that used to come with not believing in God. He also describes how “dirty politics” became more prominent in the 1990s, with politicians being more willing to ruin each other’s reputations in order to win.
I am skeptical of claims that politics in our country have never been this bad before—politicians have been ruining each other’s reputations since the inception of the United States—but the data that Burge presents is compelling, and his thesis is thought-provoking.
Burge’s argument about why this polarization is a problem for democracy is essentially this: Religious congregations ought to be places where people of diverse backgrounds come together to work toward a common cause and, in doing so, understand each other’s humanity. When this diversity declines, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for discussion across differences. This makes it increasingly difficult for Americans and the politicians who represent them to come to any compromises or agreements, which are essential for a functioning democracy.
In his chapter on Catholicism, Burge notes that the Catholic Church is unique in the landscape of American Christianity for its unity and multiculturalism. Catholic churches in rural Pennsylvania and Seattle follow the same order of Mass, and the Catholic Church includes both aging white members and younger, more recently arrived members from around the globe. Still, the data demonstrates that the Catholic Church has not been immune to the polarization that has seeped into the culture of the United States in the past 50 years.
Like white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics have become more politically conservative. Around the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the percentage of white Catholics identifying as Republicans surpassed the percentage identifying as Democrats for the first time in the modern era. The majority of non-white Catholics still vote Democratic, but there has been a slight uptick in Republican non-white Catholics in recent years. Other data show that the priesthood has shifted even further to the political right than the remainder of Catholics have, and priests have also become more traditional theologically than Catholics overall.
As more progressive Catholics die out and new, more politically conservative priests become more prominent, “The once-great meeting place of the Catholic Mass will look similarly to what is found in American evangelicalism—a place where like-minded people talk about like-minded topics with no input from thoughtful people on the other end of the political spectrum,” Burge writes.
In the final portion of the book, titled “A Way Forward,” Burge complicates the picture of polarization and offers a few suggestions for what to do next, including avoiding dehumanizing language and learning to spot fringe beliefs; he also notes that the failure to find the perfect congregation does not need to get in the way of finding a good one. When looking at the data about individual Americans, he posits that the majority of them do not line up entirely with the beliefs of their religion or political party but actually tend to be “fairly moderate, nuanced, and pragmatic in how they view some of the most talked about and divisive issues in modern society.” They just don’t speak up about their doubts.
According to Burge, Americans still overwhelmingly believe in God. In 2022, there were seven Americans who believed in God for every one who did not. At the same time, many Americans are not necessarily claiming a religious affiliation or a local church to belong to. These are the “tens of millions of theological and political moderates,” Burge writes, many of whom are left “with no place to find community and spiritual edification, or to work collectively to solve societal problems” when their congregations shut down.
This final part of the book left me with many questions, including a curiosity about how Burge’s thesis relates to this current moment in American politics. Have politicians like James Talarico and Zohran Mamdani, who often talk about their religious beliefs in relation to their progressive politics, created a landing space for more progressive but still religious people in the United States? And if so, will a similar safe space return in local congregations? How do people actually go about creating that, given the force of the trends in the opposite direction? Or will a new social space emerge outside of the traditional congregation to fill that purpose?
Burge’s book also provokes a set of more inward-facing inquiries—an examen of sorts, which any readers of the book could partake in. How have my own political and religious beliefs evolved over the past decade? Did my religious beliefs or my politics come first? How willing am I to engage with people who disagree with me? What will I do if my aging parish declines too much for it to continue?
For anyone who has ever felt politically or religiously homeless—too religious for a progressive friend group or filled with too much doubt for a zealous parish—Burge’s book offers a compelling explanation for why the American political and religious landscape has come to this, and even some reassurance that they are not alone. Still, there is much room to expand upon the way forward for people who find themselves in this chasm.
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