Why do industrialized countries lose religion? Dr Ryan Cragun has a very interesting theory. We’ll also talk about other projects he is working on. Check out our conversation by subscribing to our free newsletter at gospeltangents.com/newletter
Don’t miss our other conversations with Ryan: https://gospeltangents.com/people/ryan-cragun
Copyright © 2023
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission
Why Utah is Not Majority Mormon
GT 00:29 Okay. It was interesting, and it’s because I have a statistics background., I was really surprised on your article that came out this week, that you were using 99.9% Confidence Intervals, because everybody uses 95. Why did you pick that?
Ryan 00:49 Sure, happy to. For our listeners, this is really basic statistics stuff, but I’m just going to clarify. What we were doing is called a point estimate. We were trying to estimate some parameter, some number in the population. And you do that based on a sample. So, we had a sample of 1900, (roughly) people. So, when you make that estimate, we know statistically that it’s not actually the number. It’s just an estimate. So when you put that in, you want to put what’s called a confidence interval around there and say, “That’s our best guess, based on the data that we got, but the true number is somewhere between this lower value and this higher value. It’s going to be somewhere in there.” And you’ve certainly seen this, all the listeners will have seen this with presidential polling data. Trump’s polling at 42% plus or minus 3%. That’s the confidence interval. Like you said, most people will put it in at 95%. We knew going into this that people were going to be like, Oh, come on. 42%? That’s a huge difference from what the Church is reporting. The Church is saying 60%, and you’re saying 42%? We’re like, yeah. It’s not that it’s the perfect survey. It’s kind of the standard now. It’s what most people use. So, it’s kind of an online panel that is a quota sample. That’s technically what it’s called. It’s not a true random probability sample. So, there are those problems.
GT 02:08 But it’s probably better than a random sample.
Ryan 02:09 It might be. Don’t put me under the gun on that one. I don’t want to opine on that one. It’s not perfect. It’s as good as we can get these days for less than several million dollars. We paid $10,000 for that survey. So, just so everybody knows, it wasn’t cheap. But it’s not perfect. What we also wanted to do is say [that] look, when you go, when you increase your confidence, your interval gets bigger. So, you could say, oh, I’m 50% confident, but I have a really small margin. Or you could say, you know what? I’m 99.9% confident, but your margin gets bigger.
GT 02:55 Right, and I always tell people, “Hey, I’m 52% confident that Trump’s going to win, but the margin of error is anywhere between zero and 100%. Prove me wrong.”
Ryan 03:08 Yeah. You just gave the whole margin, right?
GT 03:10 Exactly.
Ryan 03:11 You can’t be wrong.
GT 03:11 So, that’s why the more confidence you have the bigger your interval is going to be.
Ryan 03:15 Exactly. Right. So that’s why we did it. And part of that was when it came out at 42%, I was, like, okay. Obviously, the very first question that people are going to ask is…
GT 03:26 What’s your margin of error?
Ryan 03:27 What’s your margin of error? And if your margin of error is big enough that it covers the 50, we can’t say that Mormons are a minority in the state anymore. They’re still the majority. So, we put as big of a confidence interval as we could, and it still only reached–I want to say 46%. Right? It’s like 38 to…
GT 03:45 I think it was 45.
Ryan 03:46 Yeah, something like that. So, we still didn’t come close to the 50%. And that’s why we can say, Mormons are no longer the majority in Utah.
GT 03:53 Yeah, if I remember, right, it was like 38 to 45.
Ryan 03:57 Something like that.
GT 03:58 So that would be, what, a 5% margin of error. But you’re 99.9% confident. That’s really, really confident.
Ryan 04:05 That’s the true population parameter. Isn’t that crazy?
GT 04:06 Yeah.
Ryan 04:06 That got played out. Journalists don’t understand statistics well enough to understand what we were actually saying. So, this very technical conversation we just had about, if you increase your confidence, you increase the margin of error. They were all just like, the researchers are 99.9% sure that that’s the true number. And I’m like, “Nope. That’s not what we said.”
GT 04:28 That sounds like a test question I use.
Ryan 04:31 That’s not how I framed it. Read the paper. Understand statistics,
GT 04:34 And students still miss it.
Ryan 04:36 Yes. Absolutely. They’re still going to miss it.
GT 04:40 Well, and so I want to contrast that with this other poll you did on women and priesthood. Because that was not, I think you call it a snowball sample. Just like, tell your friends and your friends’ friends. And so, you were able to get huge numbers, but it’s not random. And so, therefore, you can’t really put a margin of error on those.
Ryan 05:02 Sure, I don’t think we did on any of that.
GT 05:04 No, you didn’t.
Ryan 05:04 We wouldn’t put a margin of error. Because when it’s a snowball sample, you can’t generalize to a specific population. So we can say, in our sample of 60,000 members of the Church, which is a big sample, this is what we found. But I can’t then turn around and say, and this generalizes to the population. Whereas with this other sample on the percentage of LDS in the state, because it’s a representative sample, we can then turn around and say, hey, for Mormons in Utah, this is what we found. We can do that because of the nature of the sample. With a non-random snowball sample. I don’t know the target population. I’m not going to say it.
GT 05:09 You’re just saying I got these really interesting results, and it’s not random. And so, I don’t know if it’s representative.
Ryan 05:41 I don’t know if this generalizes to anything beyond the sample. So that’s what good “statisticians,” people who know what they’re doing statistically will always be very careful in framing what they’re doing.
GT 06:01 I’m going to have you on a lot more times, I can tell. You speak my language.
Ryan 06:08 I’m a stats guy. I like my stats.
Old & New Projects
GT 06:12 I wanted to let you talk about your previous book, and then tell us about your upcoming books. What are those about?
Ryan 06:21 I’m a terrible—I see a poster up here for The Greatest Showman. I’m a terrible pitch person for my own work. I had a book come out in May, called Beyond Doubt: the Secularization of Society, with two colleagues, Phil Zuckerman from Claremont College and Isabella Castle-Strand from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. What we were looking at– there’s publicly available data. So, World Value Survey, European Value Survey, a variety of different international social survey programs, that’s been collected over about a 50-year window starting in the early 80s, all the way up through, basically, today. In all of those, they’ve been collecting religious affiliation. They have what percentage of [people] have religious affiliation, percentage of belief in God and religious attendance.
Ryan 07:09 So what we did in there is we were trying to understand what’s happened over those 50 years. And all of that was in the framework of secularization. So, what we said is, if secularization is right, what we should see is if countries meet two criteria, they’re developing or developed, and they have freedom of religion. Then those countries are the ones that should be declining in terms of religiosity. And sure enough, that’s what we find. That second criteria, I was talking to somebody, was it today or yesterday about this? A lot of people don’t realize that there are close to a dozen countries around the world where if you leave the dominant religion–most of them are Muslim, but if you leave, the penalty is death. We gave a specific example. It took me a while to track down a constitution that was in English that I could actually understand. But in Mauritania, the way that it’s worded, so I wrote the section in the book, is if you leave Islam, you have three days to repent and come back. If you don’t, all of your property is given to the state and you will be put to death.
GT 08:14 Wow.
Ryan 08:15 That’s in the constitution of the country. So, you basically have to be clear that people in Mauritania are not going to be leaving Islam. They may not believe, but they’re not going to tell anybody, because they could die. So that’s a complication. So, we have to factor that in. And then, of course, we don’t really expect countries that aren’t modernizing particularly rapidly, which most countries are modernizing to some degree. But if they’re not modernizing, we wouldn’t expect them to be secularizing, either. So as long as you have those two criteria, modernizing and freedom of religion, we would expect religiosity be declining. And we see that in almost every country. I will just tell your listeners, your listeners are probably fairly educated, they could read the book. They would probably enjoy it. We get into some pretty detailed arguments. It’s really an academic book. So, it’s not written for a lay audience. It’s readable. It’s very readable. I think most people can get that. But there are going to be parts where we go off into really niche arguments that are specifically tied to the sociology of religion. So, we tackle the religious economies model, which we talked about earlier about the cyclical cycle and demand for religion being constant. We tackle some of that. We tackle some other ideas. So, there are some parts where we get pretty into the weeds when it comes to the sociology of religion. But the general idea is, hey, what’s happening with religion around the world? If the countries meet those two criteria, religion is declining.
Ryan 09:35 So that one came out, that was with New York University Press. It came out in May. Fun! We’ve had a good response. Lots of people like it. People don’t think it’s perfect, which is fine. No book is ever perfect, but generally, people have been pretty supportive of the book. So, that’s good. You want me to talk about the next one?
GT 09:53 Yeah. It sounds like I’m going to have to read this one and then have you back.
Ryan 09:56 You should definitely read that one.
GT 09:57 Maybe in April? (Are you coming back to Utah?)
Ryan 09:58 Sure.
GT 09:58 Are you going to come for the Juanita Brooks Conference?
Ryan 10:00 I just found out that I’ve got funding, so I’m going to try and be there.
GT 10:05 That would be awesome.
Ryan 10:06 There’s a time complication thing. So, I might go a day early, but I have to leave the night of the conference to get back for something.
GT 10:12 We’ll arrange something.
Ryan 10:14 We can do it. So if you read the book, let me know. I’m happy to talk about it. The next one is also with New York University Press, a different co-author. His name is Jesse Smith. He’s at Western Michigan University. A secret, he doesn’t tell anybody, but he’s also a former Mormon. He grew up south of Provo. So not far from here.
GT 10:30 I think there’s a lot of people like this because I’m like, why are all these people from these weird universities studying Mormons?
Ryan 10:38 He really doesn’t. He basically cut his teeth on atheism stuff. So, he’s been studying people who leave religion since the beginning of his doctoral degree. And this book is not about Mormonism at all. There’s nothing really, I mean, we’ve probably mentioned it a few times, as examples, but it’s about people leaving religion in the US. The title is Goodbye Religion. I like double entendres. There are a couple of double entendres here. So, we’re looking at what I mentioned, those push and pull factors. There’s some theory in there, but we have a lot of data. And that one is very mixed methods. So, all the quantitative stuff we use top level surveys. So the General Social Survey is the gold standard, we use some Pew surveys where we’d need additional questions. But then we have 120 interviews that Jesse and I did over the years. We draw pretty heavily from those for some of the arguments that we’re making, where we just don’t have good quantitative data to make the argument. But we’re basically building an argument for why are people leaving religion in the US, and try and explain it. We show the numbers, and we back all of that up. That will be out in October. So it’s not quite a year from now. That’s the launch date.
GT 11:46 Very good. Well, I feel like I’ve found a kindred spirit.
Ryan 11:52 Anybody who likes stats, we can hang out. I’m down with it.
GT 11:57 I’m going to start coming to these conferences. I just wish I’d have known about them sooner and I would have had you guys on for years, instead of just finding out now.
Why Rich Countries Lose Their Religion
Interview
GT 12:09 So, last question here. From your opinion, in studying the data, [in] a country that continues to industrialize, religiosity is going to decline. There’s nothing the LDS Church can do to reverse that?
Ryan 12:31 The short answer is no. There’s really nothing that they can do. Here’s the here’s a bonus bit. I don’t know if you caught this at the conference. But the day before the SSSR, actually two days before the SSSR Conference started, I actually went to talk to the researchers of the Church Research Information Division.
GT 12:48 Oh, really?
Ryan 12:49 Yeah. They invited me to come give a talk about why people are leaving religion, which I was fine doing. I don’t know if they knew that I was a former member of the Church when they invited me in, but so be it. So in that, I straight up told them, I was like, “Look, you’re not going to stop this.” You can do lots of things. And they’re trying. I don’t know if your listeners know this. I don’t know how many people actually know this. But the Church actually employs somewhere between 30 and 50 social scientists, people with masters and PhDs in sociology, or psychology or anthropology, in social science disciplines who work full time for the Church. They read all the same journals I read. They read all the same books I read. They have the same training that I have. They’re studying these very same questions to try and answer what’s going on and try and figure out what it is they need to do. Now, I don’t know that most of them are being tasked with the same things that I get to study. They are studying very different things. But when I told them that, I said, “Look, you might be able to slow things down a little bit. But based on the current trends and everything we understand about how people work, you’re not going to reverse this. Secularization is happening.”
GT 14:07 So pour your resources in Africa?
Ryan 14:11 They’re not going to–the 30% of people in the US who now no longer identify as having a religious affiliation, that’s actually a misrepresentative number, I think at some level. It’s roughly 30% say they have no religious affiliation. But we leave out what I think is actually the most important part of that. Only 20% of people in the US regularly attend religious services.
GT 14:32 Twenty?
Ryan 14:33 Twenty, 80% don’t regularly attend religious services. We are not a really religious country. I don’t think people realize that.
GT 14:43 Do we know? I think John Dehlin gave the number 1/3 of LDS people attend.
Ryan 14:50 That’s probably right.
GT 14:51 And so that would be higher…
Ryan 14:53 than the general population.
GT 14:54 Than the national general population.
Ryan 14:55 Yes, so it’s only 20%. Then if we look at something like belief in God, I mean Heaven and Hell, those have held pretty steady. But belief in God has been declining over the last 50 years to where today it’s about 50% of the population [who] say they know God exists. On the other side are people who are like, maybe. I’m not sure. I believe in a higher power. I don’t believe at all. It used to be that you got those numbers–when I first started doing this, in the early 2000s, oh, 90 plus percent of Americans believe in God. Well, they were aggregating all of the people who are like, well, I believe sometimes. Is that belief in God? That sounds an awful lot like some form of soft agnosticism to me. So, all of those other categories: I believe sometimes; I believe, but doubt; I believe in a higher power; I don’t think there’s a way to find out; and I know there’s no God; or I don’t believe in a God, all of those now make up 50% of the population. It’s only 50% who say, “I am confident in a Judeo-Christian God existing?”
GT 15:54 Aren’t the numbers higher than that as far as belief in God? I thought it was more like 70% of Americans. It’s 50%? You’re telling me it’s 50%?
Ryan 16:02 It depends on how you aggregate those groups. And so if you’re trying to make the argument: oh, Americans really believe in God, then throw in the, I believe, but doubt, or I believe sometimes. That’s usually what people do if they’re trying to accentuate how religious Americans are. But if you only use the one category, I am confident God exists, or I know God exists, that’s 50% of Americans. That’s it. Twenty percent are attending, 80% are not regularly attending services. People don’t seem to catch that.
GT 16:34 See, that seems low to me. But that’s interesting.
Ryan 16:37 So here’s the fun part. The reason why we know that is all the way up through–I mean, the 90s is when we actually found this out. But through today, when you ask people in a survey, oh, how often do you attend religious services? Oh, roughly once a week. That number comes in today at like 35-38% [who] say they attend once a week. But in the 1990s, somebody working for one of the big progressive churches in the US said that number cannot be true. If it was true, we would need twice as many churches as we have. His name was C. Haddaway. I’m forgetting his first name. Anyway, Haddaway was his last name. And then Mark Chaves and somebody else actually came on, Peggy Long Marlar. There were three of them. They had this enterprising idea. In the 1990s, they said, “You know what, let’s actually go count.” They went to two counties, one in Ohio, and one in Georgia. They were rural counties. They fielded a survey. They asked people months in advance, “How often do you attend religious services?” It came in at, like, 40% [who] said, roughly every week. Then, on a specific week, they went to all of the clergy in those counties. And they said, “Give us your attendance numbers.” And if the clergy wouldn’t participate, if they said, “No,” they sat in the parking lots and counted. Isn’t that wonderful? This is social science. I love this kind of social science. They’re like, we don’t believe you. You’re saying 40%, and when they can’t counted, guess what number came back? 21%.
GT 18:07 Oh, wow. Well, we talked about that in my statistics class, the social desirability index. It’s better to say you go to church, even if you don’t.
Ryan 18:16 Right. And we can literally see that in the numbers. So, it’s a classic thing. So, when I say it’s 20%, it might be lower than that. We don’t know the exact number, but it’s somewhere in that range. It’s only 20%. So, when we’re talking about how religious Americans are. Are they that religious? I’m not convinced. I’m just not sold on Americans being super religious anymore. Twenty percent attend religious services, roughly once a week. Maybe 50% are pretty confident that God exists. Belief in Hell is lower than belief in Heaven. That’s always a fun one. So, people are far more likely to believe in heaven than they are in hell. What’s going on there? All these fun little statistics kind of bears out; I completely lost track of the question. What was the question that were supposed to be answering? You got me down the path of statistics.
GT 19:09 I don’t know but it was a great tangent.
Ryan 19:12 Gospel Tangents. That’s what we do.
GT 19:12 There’s a reason why we call it that. I think, originally, we were talking about your next book. Wasn’t that the question?
Ryan 19:21 Could be, yes. So, the next one is Goodbye Religion. And yes, we’re wrestling with a lot of these questions about why people are leaving. It should be good. So again, mixed methods, a lot of fun. And I’ll give a pitch for the last chapter. The last chapter, I think is…
GT 19:38 So, it’s written.
Ryan 19:39 It’s done.
GT 19:40 It’s to the publisher and they’re doing reviews.
Ryan 19:44 Well, the reviews are done, too. Everything is done.
GT 19:45 Okay, it’s done.
Ryan 19:46 We got the copy edits, like the week before Christmas. So, copy edits is not the proofs, but it’s the copy edits. So, they went through very carefully, asked some questions, fixing our spelling and grammar and stuff like that. And we got all that back to them. So, everything’s done. So the next stage will, literally, be the proofs. So we’ll get typeset proofs. And at that point, we’re literally just looking for typos, we can’t change anything else.
GT 20:10 Who’s publishing it?
Ryan 20:11 New York University Press. So, that’s my second one with New York University Press, which I love that press. I shouldn’t do this. But like they are way better than Oxford University Press.
GT 20:22 I don’t like Oxford, either.
Ryan 20:24 Oxford will publish anything these days. They just have a really low bar. I’m just not as impressed with their work. A couple of the books that I just recently reviewed for Oxford University Press, were filled with typos, grammatical mistakes and errors.
GT 20:39 That’s not why I don’t like them.
Ryan 20:40 They have other issues, but one of them, they took full length URLs, and put them in the body of the text. And I was like, why would you do that? No one can click on that. It’s print. It’s a book. Why would you put the full-length URL in there?
GT 20:56 Maybe it was for the Kindle.
Ryan 20:58 So Oxford University Press is struggling. Sorry. I mean, maybe I’ll publish with them at some point. If I’m slumming it, I’ll go with Oxford University Press. But no, I like NYU Press. They do a really good job.
GT 21:09 Okay. Well, you’ll have to tell them to send me a review copy.
Ryan 21:12 I can get that. I can make that happen.
GT 21:15 That would be awesome.
Ryan 21:18 Anything else you wanted to cover?
GT 21:21 I haven’t read enough of your books and your publications. I will say, give your website, because it’s one of the best ones. Because I went on there and I read both of those articles. And you’ve got a list of all your publications there. What is it?
Ryan 21:38 Oh, the website: ryantcragun.com. It’s pretty easy. If you Google me, there is another Ryan Cragun out. There are actually three other Ryan Craguns, which is weird. There’s one who competes with me for the top spot in Google. He plays football for UCLA.
GT 21:52 That’s not you.
Ryan 21:52 That’s not me. So, if he’s a football player, and he’s big and stocky, you’ve got the wrong website. No, it’s ryantcragun. Usually, I’m the number one result. Sorry, other Ryan Cragun, if you’re listening, but I do usually have the top spot. So, I’m pretty easy to find. And then, yes, the website has all of my publications. Don’t tell the publishers, but I give all of my papers away for free. So don’t tell them. Nobody let them know. But I did write it. I shouldn’t have to pay to get my own publications. And no one else should, either. Science and data should be free. All of that should be free. It bugs me that it’s not. But it’s all up there. And then there are links to all my books up there, too.
Ryan 21:54 All right, and then give a plug for the MSSR. How do people sign up for that? Is it A or R?
Ryan 22:18 [It’s an] A: Mormon Social Science Association. We’re at Mormonsocialscience.org, I think is the website. You can find us. We are the number one hit for Mormon Social Science Association. We do have our own journal now. So, the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association, it’s in its second year of publication. I think we’re going to be switching the format a little bit, but that’s out there now. If you’re into the social science of Mormonism, that is the place for it. We do have a mailing list. You can join that, and you’ll be caught up to date on all of our conferences, all the publications, cool stuff that’s happening in that association. It’s been around for a long time, lots of cool resources there. So, definitely check that out.
GT 23:17 I love MHA, and I love MSSA.
Ryan 23:20 I’m glad you found us.
GT 23:24 So, Dr. Ryan Cragun, from the University of Tampa, thank you so much for being here on Gospel Tangents. I really appreciate it.
Ryan 23:31 My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Copyright © 2023
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22 — 1.3MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Email | | More
