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The fastest growing “religious” group in the US is the “nones”, those with no religious affiliation. Who are these “nones” and what accounts for their religious disaffiliation over the last 30 years? We’ll answer these questions and more with our guest, political scientist and pastor, Ryan Burge from his updated book called “.”

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. He is the author of numerous books and journal articles and is a pastor in the American Baptist Church.

Episode Transcript

Scott: The fastest growing religious group in the United States is a group called the N-O-N-E-S, those with no religious affiliation. Who are these Nones and what accounts for their religious disaffiliation over the last 30 years? We'll answer these questions more with our guest political science and Pastor Ryan Burge from his updated book called “The Nones.” This is part two of our discussion. We talked last week about his book, “The Great De-Churching,” and this is part two of that. We look forward to our conversation. I'm your host, Scott Rae.

Sean: And I'm your co-host, Sean McDowell.

Scitt: This is ThinkBiblicaly from Talbot School of Theology at 51����. Ryan, welcome back for part two. We're looking forward to the discussion.

Ryan: Thanks so much for having me, guys. How did you get so interested in studying the nones? You're both a pastor and a political scientist, so you've got a little skin in the game here. But there are a lot of political science subjects that you could have focused your research on. What's so interesting about this group, “the nones?”

Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I've been in the same church for 17 years now. Actually, when I was in grads, my second year in graduate school, I took over the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, and we had 50 people when I got there. And then five or seven years later, we had 30 people. And now we have 10 or 12 on a good Sunday. Every church I've been a part of is smaller now than it was when I was there. And that might be because I'm a terrible pastor in the program.

[Scott and Sean laugh]

Scott: We weren't going to go there.

Ryan: Well, I mean, maybe I'm just bad luck. But the thing is—I wanted to know if my experience was the experience. Is this a universal thing or is this a unique-to-me thing? And I knew that I had these tools that most other pastors don't have at their disposal of getting all this graduate training in methodology and data analysis. And I thought, you know what? I want to try. I'm going to scratch my own curiosity itch. And then other people can come along for the journey and see these graphs I make and maybe learn something alongside me. And that's really where the seed of the nones idea came from was a tweet that I sent out before COVID—in the “before times,” as we call it now. And I was a no name account; I only had a couple hundred followers. I was just tweeting grass about religion over and over. And this one just went viral. Everyone wanted to talk to me about it—New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London. I made the front page of Reddit, got 70,000 upvotes.

Sean: Wow!

Ryan: Yeah, it was like my life turned upside down in a very short period of time. And all of a sudden I became like the guy to call about American religion, especially American religious disaffiliation. So, when I was approached about writing a book, I thought, well, why not write about what people care about? And it's been exceedingly clear to me that they care about the rise of disaffiliation and what that means and why it's happening. And so, that's exactly why I wrote “The Nones” because I knew this is what there's already a groundswell of desire for more information about this, and I thought I could provide some in a digestible, easy to understand way.

Scott: Well, you are definitely our go to guy. That's for sure. I'm a little disappointed you didn't mention to ThinkBiblically podcast with The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Ryan: Well, obviously—Oh, I was on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper too. That's probably below you guys, right?

[Sean and Scott laugh]

Sean: For sure. No, no debate about it. Well, tell us what you mean by the term the nones and how it's different than the de-churched?

Ryan: Yeah. So, nones are people—It's a religious belonging question, right? So, what is your present religion, if any? That's the question. And then when you're given a list of 11 different options and they range from Protestant to Catholic to Mormon to Orthodox and there's Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim. And the last three are atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular. And those are the nones. People who say they are atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular. They are the fastest growing religious group in America today. In 1972, 5% of Americans were nones. In today, 30% of Americans are nones. And amongst Generation Z, it's over 40% of Generation Z are nones. So, it is changing everything about American religion. The fact that the nones are rising so rapidly and it's having ripples and impacts on literally every aspect of American society.

Scott: Now, Ryan, it sounds like that has something to do with belonging, but it sounds like that also has a lot to do with belief.

Ryan: Oh. So, what's really interesting is belief and belonging don't run on the same tracks all the time. You know, I think, you know, one of my former colleagues at EIU was talking about religion—because obviously we talk about religion because it's what I do. And he goes, you know, I've been going to church for like 30 years and I don't believe in any of that stuff. You know, I just go because I like the socialization, I like the good work the church is doing in the community. So, he's a belonger but not a believer. And there are people who are believers, but not belongers, right? They believe in God without a doubt and they believe in Jesus Christ and the Bible is literally true, but they don't go to church at all. You know, the behavior, belief, belonging circles for some people overlap in very odd ways. You know, they might belong but not believe or behave, or vice versa. So this, the none specifically, was looking at the belonging measure first, which I think tells you a lot.

For instance, if I'm a Protestant or I grew up Protestant, let's say, and I haven't been to church in five years, when I'm asked the question, what's your present religion, if any, if I say Protestant, that's a whole lot different than me saying nothing-in-particular. Because it still says I identify socially with what Protestants are. And they're my people, even though I don't go to church anymore. If I instead say I'm an atheist or agnostic or nothing-in-particular, I'm saying I've rejected everything that has to do with religion. And to me, and you can look at the data, that's a big leap from being a never attending Protestant to being a nothing-in-particular.

Scott: So Ryan, how large a group is the nones in terms of absolute numbers?

Ryan: Yeah. So, 30 million Americans are nones and there's about 330 million Americans total in this country so about 100 million people now identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing-in-particular. But if we compare that, let's say, to Western—I can only give you attendance measures with Europe, that's the data I have. 51���� 25% of Americans attend church every week, it's about 14% of Europeans. What's really interesting though is if Poland was in the United States, it would be the most religious state in America. 44% of Poles go to church every Sunday. But then on the other end, only 3% of people in Denmark go to church every Sunday. They'd easily be the least religious state. So, America is sort of, the average American is more religious than the average European, but not by much and the gap seems to be closing over time. I don't think we're ever going to get to the space where we're as irreligious as Western Europe, especially as Scandinavia, but I think we're trending in a much more secular direction now than we were 30 or 40 years ago.

Scott: Can you break down the nones a little bit? Because it almost seems strange bedfellows to have the three groups that you described. Who exactly are they? What do they have in common? How do they differ, even though they fall under this larger umbrella of the nones?

Ryan: Yeah, so there's atheists and agnostics. I almost grouped them together in my mind because we call them “secular people.” And I think that's a really important distinction that I want to highlight. Secular people have thrown off religion and replaced it with a secular worldview, right? Humanists, rationalists, science, all those things. They have a framework to think about the world. You can agree with it or not, but they have one. Nothing-in-particulars are a completely different animal because they've thrown off religion, but they haven't replaced it with anything else. We call them non-religious people because they're not secular and they're not religious. So they're almost defined by what they aren't instead of what they are. Atheists and agnostics are defined by what they are. They've embraced this secular worldview. But here's the most important part. Most nones are nothing-in-particular. 51���� 60% of nones are nothing-in-particular and about 20% are atheists and about 20% are agnostic. So, when we talk about the nones, especially when I talk to evangelical crowds, they want to think that, well, that's about, that you're talking about atheists here. I'm actually not talking about atheists here. I'm primarily talking about nothing in particulars, and the differences between, let's say, an atheist and a nothing in particular demographically cannot be any bigger. Okay. 51% of atheists have a four-year college degree. 51%, they're the second or third highest educated group. The lowest educated group, religion educated group, is nothing-in-particular. 25% of them have a four-year college degree. So, 50% versus 25%. When you look at economics, like you add the economics and education together, one third of nothing-in-particulars have a high school diploma or less and make $50,000 a year or less as a household, one in three of them. Amongst atheists, it's only 12%. So, from a pure demographic perspective, one group is doing very, very well. Atheists are doing very, very well. And nothing-in-particulars are doing very, very poorly and falling behind every year on all these factors that we know matter, education and income specifically. So, there's a lot of concern there from a social science perspective about nothing-in-particulars and how they fit into American religion and American society.

Scott: So Ryan, help our listeners understand a little bit more without getting lost too much in the weeds on this. How do you measure religious affiliation and disaffiliation?

Ryan: Ya know, it's honestly not that complicated. You just ask people the question, what is your present religion, if any? And they get to check whatever box that the spirit moves them to check. And that can be complicated sometimes because you're like, wait a minute, how can you—for instance, evangelicals, you say you're Protestant, you say you're evangelical, two separate questions. And then you say you never attend church. A lot of people go, wait a minute, you can't do those things, evangelicals have to attend church. And my approach to surveys is very simple. It's a paraphrase of Maya Angelou, which is when people show you who they are, believe them. For me, it's when people tell you who they are, believe them. So, if you want to tell me that you're a never attending evangelical, it's not my job to say you're not an evangelical. It's my job to figure out why you said that, why you made those selections, what was going on in your mind that got you to that place. And so when we talk about, you know, why does someone pick nothing-in-particular, instead of picking Protestant or Catholic, I think they're making a very important declaration about how they see themselves in the world and who their people are. You know, they don't, I don't hang out with Catholics anymore. I don't think like Catholics anymore. Even though I grew up Catholic and I got baptized Catholic and I went through communion as a Catholic, I am not a Catholic anymore. That tells me something very, very important about how they see themselves and position themselves in the social and political landscape of America. So, I'm a big believer in just asking people straight up, what are you and just letting them go from there.

Sean: Well, what factors account for the growth of the nones? Because I could imagine you could have people being born into a second, third generation, non-religious home and that growing. I can imagine people being de-churched. Where is this group of the nones coming from, and why is it growing so significantly?

Ryan: Yeah, so the most important thing I want people to know is that most nones are made, not grown. Most people in America are still growing up in religious households. Obviously that's declined over time, but even amongst the youngest adults today, 80% of them say they grew up in a religious household of one type or another. So, most people who are nones were not nones from the cradle. They were not second or third generation atheists. They became non-religious. What we know is that typically we ask people, actually in “The Great Dechurching” book, at what age did you consider yourself the most religious? The average answer was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old. So, young teenage years, youth group years, and then something happens along the way. To me the boat gets the leakiest between 15 and 25 years old. That's where most people drift away from the religion in which they were raised for all kinds of reasons, by the way. It could be politics, we cannot discount the role of politics in religion. The pew gap or the god gap, what are you going to call it, has never been larger than it is right now. Amongst people who identify as politically conservative, only 12% of them are non-religious today. Amongst people who identify as politically liberal, 50% are non-religious today. So, for people who are left or center politically, especially if you're white, you have a really hard time being a Protestant or Catholic because you think the church is continuing to turn to the right and you don't want to be associated with those things. So, I think politics is playing a huge role in this. We also can't discount social media and the internet is a really interesting one. People bring it up to me all the time like, "I know the answer. It's the internet." I go, "I think you're probably right, but I can't prove it." Because almost everyone in America got the internet in a five year window of time. It happened so quickly. There was no reference group. They were like, "Okay, you people can't get the internet for 20 years. We're going to figure out what the internet did." I mean it sounds so good. I can't prove it empirically, but I do think there's a value in saying it's easier to learn about other religions today than it ever has been before. You can go on YouTube and say, "What do Muslims believe?" You have a wonderfully produced video by a scholar of Islam who gives great information that's very detailed and very accurate. It used to be able to go to the library and dig out the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal system. So, exposing people to other religions might be part of it as well or learning about their own religion in a different way might be part of it as well. It's a myriad of factors that's leading to the rise of the internet. It's not just one simple trick that's making people lead religion.

Scott: Ryan, we've had several conversations on our podcast here in the past about the phenomena of people who are deconstructing their faith. Is there any data that helps us understand what percentage of the nones have actually completely left the faith that they grew up with? I mean, obviously the atheists and agnostics have, but that other group of the nones— how does that connect with this phenomena of faith deconstruction?

Sean: By the way, you're using deconstruction in terms of deconversion.

Scott: Deconversion, that's right.

Sean: In that terms.

Ryan: So, in “The Great Dechurching,” one of the interesting findings we had was one thing, two things actually, that young people can do to make it less likely for them to leave church is to regularly attend a church when they're in college and also be part of a college ministry. Those two things were almost like an immunization. It was like a vaccine against de-churching because it kept them on the right track. It is very easy to fall away from religion in 2023, because you have so many more options and ways to entertain yourselves. I don't think we fully understand how much society's changed and how easy it is to entertain yourself and how hard it was 30 or 40 years ago. Robert Putnam wrote a book called “Bowling Alone.” It was published in the early 1990s where he basically makes the argument, "We're not joining stuff anymore." Whether it be the Elks or the Moose or bowling leagues—that's actually where the title of the book comes from is we bowl alone now, not with other people. He blamed it on cable television because it was like 1991. For them, it was like, "We can watch 30 channels now. This is really exciting." The updated version to me is like tweeting alone, Facebooking alone, Instagramming alone, Netflixing alone, TikTokking alone. We can entertain ourselves more than ever before. And I think when we talk about this deconstruction idea, I think for a lot of people, the reason they're deconstructing or de-converting whatever we want to call it, leaving their faith behind is because they don't have people in their lives who come beside them and say, "I went through the same things at the same time." They're almost doing this in isolation. There are times in our lives when we need to understand that we need to have people around us that we can talk to and be honest and open about what we're feeling and what we're thinking and what we're believing or not believing anymore and hearing from wise counsel about, "Hey, I was in the exact same spot you were in and here's what got me through." Here's a thought for you to consider in the moment that you're in to try to move you from this stage of your life to the next stage of your life. If we don't have those guardrails and we're not having those guardrails because we're not joining anything, we're not creating social connection anymore. I think it's very easy for us to get wrapped up in our own mind and spiral into this deconstruction mindset. Guardrails are good. Having friends is good. I think part of deconstruction has been driven by the fact that it's almost always done in isolation.

Sean: Ryan, you talk about this secularization thesis and clarify it, correct me if I'm wrong, it's this idea that society has become more economically and educationally advanced; there's less and less room and need for God. First off, clarify what's meant by that. Is the US an exception to this or is it experiencing a delayed secularization a few decades behind, say, maybe Canada and/or Europe?

Ryan: Yeah. So, there is a burgeoning amount of work in anthropology and psychology specifically trying to figure out where this idea of God comes from. The understanding is that we are meaning-making machines. We want to try to understand why—we don't like randomness, it doesn't sit well with our brains. We try to find reasons why things happen. So, if it doesn't rain for three years and all our crops die and we all die of starvation, why is that? Well, because God's mad at us, not because of meteorology or climatology or science, it's because God's mad at us. Why did my child cough twice and die? Because I've sinned against God and that's my punishment for those sins, not because he had tuberculosis or some other genetic disease. The secularization theory basically says that what happened over time is that we've replaced—we’ve answered our questions with science and we don't need God anymore. The more education we got, the more answers we got, and the more answers we got, the less God that we needed. In America, if you asked me 50 years ago, "Are we an exception to the secularization rule?" The answer is, "Oh my gosh, yes." 1970s America is way more religious than Western Europe. I mean, Western Europe secularized incredibly rapidly in the post-war period. I mean, churches were closing by the thousands in Western Europe. Even today, by the way, we are way more religious than we should be based on secularization theory. For instance, we have an economy that's very similar to Sweden in terms of GDP. Only about 12% of Swedes say religion is very important to them. It's 52% of Americans say religion is very important to them. We should be either a lot poorer or a lot less religious to get back on the trend line. So, really, what we're seeing in America, I think, is kind of a reversion to the mean. We were always going to secularize. It just took a while. Now, we're kind of coming close—I don't think we're ever going to get to the level of Europe in terms of secularization, but we're moving closer to that level every year.

Ryan: Right. I remember here reading the sociologist Will Herberg say that America is at the same time the most religious and one of the most secular countries in the world. And part of the reason for that, I think, was that religious faith had become largely privatized for individuals and was not culturally engaged. It was simply a private matter between them and their God. Would that help account for the difference between where secularization has gone in the US and where it's gone in Europe and Canada and other places?

Ryan: Yeah, I think we cannot discount the role of rugged individualism when it comes to American religion. If you even think about the language of evangelicalism as having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, right? I think that the individualization of American religion in some ways has made it very durable. It's hard to overcome that, but at the same time, I think there are some real downsides to that from a sociological perspective. Emile Durkheim, who was this French, probably wrote the very first empirical paper book, and It was about suicide. He went to morgues around Paris and collected death records from people—and they actually kept really good ones back in those days. It was not just age and gender, it was also religion. He collected all these records trying to figure out what religious group was more likely to commit suicide than the others. What he found was that Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics were. He theorized, one of the reasons was because Protestantism was such an individualized religion, while Catholicism was much more communal in its orientation.

Scott: Interesting.

Ryan: And so, individualization is great. And I think it's one of the reasons America is one of the greatest countries on earth because we try to do something for ourselves, but there are some real downsides to not having a more communal understanding of faith in society.

Scott: So, you talk a lot about the intersection of faith and politics. This quote jumped out to me. "Political concerns are driving religious behavior. More than theological beliefs are guiding political convictions." So, would people leave their church before they would leave their politics? Would they also leave their faith before their politics?

Ryan: So, this is probably the biggest change in how we understand religion and politics since I've been doing it, I started in 2005. The understanding was always that religion is the first cause and politics is downstream of that. We have a religious lens in our head and we look at everything in the world through the mind of Christ, to use an evangelical term. But what's changed is that now the data has gotten better and we're theorizing better, it's almost undeniable now that people are picking their religion based on their politics more than the reverse. If I'm a conservative, I'm not going to go to an Episcopal church because it tends to be more left of center. I'm going to go to an evangelical church, a Southern Baptist church, because they align more with how I view the world. If I'm a liberal and I'm in rural America especially, there's really no liberal churches left in rural America, so I'm leaving religion entirely. People are picking their religion based on their politics. Politics has almost become religion for some people. It's become the master lens through which we look at the world. And I think that’s, honestly, it's not been that way before. We look at the late 1980s, if you went to an evangelical church, you were just as likely to sit next to a Republican as you were a Democrat. It's the thing in the mainline. It's the thing in the Catholic church too. They were almost evenly divided in the late 1980s on the issue of politics. Now these churches have become so ideologically sorted out that I think it's driving this—it's making it even worse. It's not just political polarization when you talk about America, it's also religious polarization we need to talk about. In the future, the only kind of religion that's really going to exist is conservative religion. The mainline, which were moderate Protestants, were 50% of America in the 1950s. Their 10% of America today is going to be 5% of America very soon. Meanwhile evangelicals are about 21% of America today. There's actually more evangelicals in America today than there were in the 1970s. Evangelicals are not going away. It's the middle, the moderate part of the process, and it's declining very rapidly.

Scott: So, I see certain conservative churches responding to this trend differently. Some move into politics and start publicly making the case for life, for a certain candidate, and it's kind of like they're leaning into the fact that people see religion through the lens of politics. Other churches move more apolitical and try not to preach and talk about politics from the pulpit. Does the data show that either one is more effective? I'm not asking a biblical or theological worldview question. Is there any data on which one is more effective in terms of numbers and reaching the nones?

Ryan: So, we actually ask a bunch of weekly churchgoers: In the last 12 months, have you heard any of the following issues mentioned from the pulpit? Okay, and we gave them a whole list of immigration, health care, abortion, same-sex marriage, even something so innocuous as just voting. So, not even political in one way or the other. The number one response of weekly churchgoers, what issue they've heard in the last—and it was check all that applies, they can check 10 if they wanted to—the number one response, 33% of people said none of the above. Not a single issue was mentioned from the pulpit in the last 12 months. Over half of the sample picked one issue or no issue at all were spoken from the pulpit. So, the vast majority of churches are not preaching politics from the pulpit on any regular basis. Now, I think pastors have to decide which way they're going to go on this. And I'm always reminded of Michael Jordan's wisdom on questions like this, the great prophet of our time.

[Scott and Sean laugh]

Ryan: He was asked why he was not more political when he was playing basketball, and he said, "Because Republicans buy sneakers too." And I think that is a pretty good encapsulation of how I would tell pastors to approach this. Listen, even amongst Republicans, a lot of them don't want politics from the pulpit. I think there's a small sliver of the American population who wants politics, preaching pulpit, wants their pastor to talk about Trump and abortion and gay marriage and things like that. And they will find those churches that do that. But for the vast majority of Americans, they want a strong wall between what their pastor talks about politically and theologically on a Sunday morning. So, I think most pastors are better served—if they want to speak about politics, andI talk about this in “The Nones,” they should talk about politics holistically and give both sides a lot of grief. Because I don't think either party speaks completely for the gospel. There's this concept called imago dei—I'm talking to theologians about theology, I apologize. But every human being is born in the image and likeness of God, which means that God cares about the unborn, but he also cares about the immigrant. So, both parties are not doing the right thing on both those issues in some ways. So, if we talk about politics holistically, I think that's a better way to discuss—don't ignore them. Don't be partisan. Be bipartisan in who you criticize. I think that's always been the role of the church in America is to point out when politicians are wrong on certain issues on both sides. And that's hard to do, but I think it's a necessary thing.

Scott: I'm impressed that you used the Latin term for the image of God. Very impressive. And I think probably it's important for others to know, too, that no political platform was written with biblical fidelity as its goal. So they're all going to be mixed bags. And therefore, I think worthy of the criticism and that our theological convictions stand above our political convictions and offer the critique, affirm where they are consistent with how we understand the Scripture, but also critique where they are at variance with those. One final question, Ryan. When it comes to the religious landscape in the US, give me one or two things that you're encouraged about.

Ryan: Okay. So, the nones have seemed to stop rising. That is something that I think is. . . It almost felt like it was never going to stop. The line was going to keep going up into the right every single survey and just never, ever in until it got to 100% and we were all nones and that was it. The data actually, if you look at the trend lines amongst the youngest adult Americans, so people who are like between the ages of 18 and 25 or so, a 25 year old is just as likely to be a none as an 18 year old is now. So, the line is sort of flattened out and maybe even curved down a little bit. And this is a consistent finding I've seen in multiple surveys over the last several years. And now the number is high. It's probably between 42 and 45% of the youngest adult Americans are nones, but it stopped increasing. So, I don't think we're going to see a future of America, at least in my lifetime, where 60, 70% of Americans are non-religious. I think it might get to 45 or maybe even 50% might become non-religious, but it's never going to be a strong majority or in that camp. So, I think in some ways that's very encouraging.

The other thing I want people to know is that the relationship between education and religion is probably not what you think it is. Educated people are actually more likely to be religious than non-educated people. The people who are the most likely to be nones are those with a high school diploma or less. The people who are the least likely to be nones are those with a graduate degree. So, don't be afraid to send your kids out to get an education. I've seen in some ways it inoculates them. And on church attendance, weekly church attendance, the people who are the most likely to go to the church this Sunday, are people with college degrees, four-year college degrees and above, making between 60 and $100,000 a year. So, religion has become actually the bastion of people who have good educations and good incomes now. So don't be afraid of education. As America has actually become more educated, I don't even think that's the primary driver of secularization. It's part of the story, but it's definitely not pushing people from the pews on Sunday morning.

Scott: Ryan, I this is so helpful. I think one of the most insightful things I think you said is that between the ages of 15 and 25, if students are involved in a church and when they go to college involved in a campus ministry, the chances of them becoming one of the nones is pretty dramatically reduced. And that's really good advice for parents and for those of us that make our living from Christian colleges, because we say we have students who say, "I can have a great relationship with God, but I don't need the church." And getting our students plugged into meaningful churches and particularly in those first few years after college, that's a really good insight, not only for those of us who are teaching at Christian college, but also for churches as they reach out to those folks in their early to mid-20s. So, this has been super helpful, super insightful. Ryan, we're so glad for you being with us. We're going to commend to our listeners your book called “The Nones,” N-O-N-E-S, by Ryan Burge, “Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where are They Going.” It's been great to have you with us. Thanks for the conversation.

Ryan: Thanks, and don't, my sub-stack is grassaboutreligion.com, two posts a week, nothing but graphs about religion. If you like data, then you're going to like what I put out there. So, grassaboutreligion.com. Thanks, guys.

Scott: I appreciate that. This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. Think Biblically podcast brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at 51����, offering programs in Southern California and online, including our masters in Christian Apologetics, now offered fully online. Visit biola.edu/talbot in order to learn more. If you'd like to submit a comment, ask a question, or make suggestions on issues you'd like us to cover or guess you'd like us to consider, you can email us at thinkbiblically@biola.com. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. If you enjoyed today's conversation with our friend Ryan Burge, give us a rating on your podcast app, and please do share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening, and remember, think biblically about everything. [music]