In Vanishing Church, Burge contends that religion’s role in American public life was “recast” in the 1990s, when the religious right was at the height of its cultural prominence. Drawing on survey data such as the Cooperative Election Study and General Social Survey, he makes a case that until roughly the latter 20th century, religion was an incubator of social capital because it involved people from a broad cross-section of society working together to improve it. When the culture wars co-opted Christianity, it was to the detriment of not only Christianity but also American civil society, as young people began disaffiliating from Christianity (and religion as a whole).
“An increasing number of Americans began to see religion as primarily political,” Burge writes, instead of considering it as a body of theological beliefs, a means to approach existential questions, or a personal moral foundation. Opposing abortion, for example, became “a political stance with a religious justification, not a theological posture that expresses itself in how one votes on election day,” he writes.
One could argue that today’s online “trad” Catholicism is the current form of this recasting. This specific trend is mostly absent in Vanishing Church, but Burge has been vocal about it in interviews. As he recently framed it, this iteration has become “very desirable among highly intellectualized Republicans” as an entry point to “move up the ranks.” It is, in Burge’s words, “instrumental”—that is to say, another form of political sectarian identity. Burge also pours cold water on the notion that we’re living in the moment of a Catholic revival or ascendancy: It may appear so from “a vibes perspective,” but “not from a numbers perspective.” As college campuses and Manhattan parishes boast standing-room-only crowds and record numbers of converts, Burge observes that this is primarily an elite phenomenon that working-class parishes have not replicated. “It’s a bougie revival,” he recently told the National Catholic Register. “It’s very much an elite discourse revival.”
“There seems to be a rapidly spreading phenomenon of people who say they are religious … while they have essentially no connection to a local church.”
— Tablet Magazine (@tabletmag) May 27, 2026
Is America’s “religious revival” more aesthetic than communal?@maggiemphillips's latest:https://t.co/adzIauhgsz