The Purple Church Is Gone: Ryan Burge on Polarization and American Faith

What happens to a country when the church stops being the one room where people who vote differently still sit together? On this episode of Complex Creatures, Rev. Dr. Jarrod Longbons talks with Ryan Burge, a political scientist, former pastor, and researcher at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, whose new book is The Vanishing Church. Together they trace how the moderate congregation hollowed out, why that is bad for democracy and not just for church people, and what the rural mega church is really doing to the small churches around it. They dig into the 1990s sorting that nobody noticed until 2000, why people actually leave church, the dairy farmer who taught Ryan how to be a father, and the humility of a preacher who ends a sermon with "but I might be wrong." Go to church to learn how to be a human being.#ComplexCreatures #RyanBurge #TheVanishingChurch #GraphsAboutReligion #ChurchDecline #ReligionAndPolitics #AmericanChristianity #Polarization #ReligiousPluralism #ThirdSpaces #ChristianPodcast #FaithAndCommunity #SpiritualPodcast