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In his new book, Ryan Byrd says American religion has undergone this massive sorting process over the last 40 years.

As evangelical churches became more politically conservative, a lot of moderate and liberal Christians lost their taste for it and just stopped going.

Burge is a political scientist. He's a data analyst of American religion, but he's also a former minister, and he's seen this phenomenon firsthand.

A few years ago, he was the pastor at First Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois,

and he noticed the congregation had started to slowly shrink.

He says he would find himself counting heads during

the service, which he admitted is never a good look. You know, I was sitting in the front in this

chair next to the pulpit and looking out at the congregation, and there were a lot more empty seats

than there were full seats. You know, I started bouncing my eyes around the congregation

thinking, okay, there's this person here and this person here, but that person, they moved away

or that person's in the nursing home or I did her funeral two weeks ago, so she's not going to be

back and, you know, started getting to the actual numbers of the whole thing, and I realized, man,

this might be the first Sunday in the history of First Routers Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois, where we had

single digits in attendance on that Sunday. I knew that, like, sort of once we crossed that threshold,

there was no going back. And, you know, I thought that if I just preached really well, I could be sort of like a John the Baptist character from the Bible where people would come from far and wide out to the desert to watch this crazy person proclaim the coming of the day of the Lord and all these things. And I thought, well, if I did the same thing, then I can grow this church. But what I realized really quickly was, I don't care how good you preach. I don't care

how orthodox you are, how fervent you are, how prepared you are. If you walk into your church

in their 20s or 30s and see a whole bunch of people in their 70s and 80s, it doesn't matter

how good the sermon is or how charismatic you are, how friendly you are, people want to be around people like

them in terms of age, demographics, and everything else. And when I took over the church, we only

had 50 people. I mean, and they were all 60s, 70s, and 80s years old, and I was 23. Like,

what was, I don't care how good I was going to preach. So this is sort of the, the end of the road for what First Baptist was and what was going to be.

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