Homebrewed Christianity The Four Faces of "None": What the Largest Study of Religiously Unaffiliated Americans Reveals
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Jan 6, 2026 
Ryan Burge, a political scientist who led a landmark study on religiously unaffiliated Americans, joins theologian Tony Jones and Sarah Lane Ritchie, director of the Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative. They reveal insights from the largest survey ever conducted on this demographic. Discover four distinct categories: NINOs, Spiritual But Not Religious, Disengaged, and Zealous Secularists. They dive into surprising findings about happiness levels among atheists and the implications for American religious identity.
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Big Surveys Form The Empirical Backbone
- Invest in large, well-designed surveys if you want to understand national-scale religious trends.
- Smaller, qualitative studies need a strong quantitative backbone to contextualize findings.
Machine Learning Reveals Four 'Nones'
- Machine learning clustering revealed four distinct subgroups among American 'Nones' rather than one monolithic group.
- This method surfaced patterns researchers admit they would likely have missed by hand-coding categories.
Let Data Drive Categories
- Use unsupervised methods (like K-means) to let patterns emerge rather than imposing categories.
- Then interpret clusters qualitatively to name and understand each group responsibly.
