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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
David Kinnaman
David, hi everybody. My name is David Kinnaman. I’m CEO of Barna, and I’ve had the privilege of doing that now for 30 years. I started in 1995. I’m also a dad of three amazing kids, Emily, Annika and Zach. And I’m also a widower. My wife passed away a number of years ago from cancer. So that’s part of our story. And you know, the Lord has been good in the midst of all that. The privilege of serving the Lord through Barna and being an author and a speaker and researcher is a lot of fun, and it has its ups and downs sometimes, but it’s a great privilege to be able to share with Christian leaders what God is doing in the world.
David Capes
David Kinnaman, David, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast.
David Kinnaman
Hey, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
David Capes
It’s great to see you. And you are a fellow Texans, so you’re already way high on the score. You know, you meet people sometimes through their books. I was writing a book years ago called Slow to Judge: Sometimes it’s Okay to Listen. It was about 2013 and you and Gabe Lyones just published a book called unChristian. That was really an important book for me. I devoured that book and tried to understand what all was happening in the world at that particular time. I’ve gotten to know you through that.
You’ve been with Barna now for a time, and you’ve been doing some great work, but I want our folks to know about you, and I want them to know also more about Barna and its mission. And you and Ed and some other friends are going to be coming to the Lanier Theological Library on June the 21st to do a big meeting with pastors and church leaders and talk about the “State of the Church.” I’m really excited about that. I want to welcome you to the podcast, and we’ll share a little bit about it so we can encourage people to be a part of it. Okay, Barna. People have heard of it. Maybe they read about it in the New York Times. Maybe they saw it on Fox or some other news outlet. Maybe their pastor has quoted some research from Barna. Tell us what Barna is.
David Kinnaman
Well, we’re a social research company. We were started by man named George Barna. Great, great Research Leader, writer, boss, mentor and friend of mine. Barna is a research company really dedicated to trying to understand what’s happening in the world, the intersection of faith and culture. We work with Christian leaders, church leaders, para church leaders, education leaders, parents, anybody who’s in at a decision point in their life. We try to use evidence based, data driven research to help you make a better decision. To be better informed, to know what to do.
David Capes
Who are the people who look at your research, who use your research? You talked a little bit about how they did it, but who are some of those people.
David Kinnaman
Well, we’ve worked with a wide range of different clients and organizations, such as churches, nonprofits, financial services organizations. We’ve done some work with entertainment organizations, film studios, music companies. Often we will be hired to try to help people understand their audience. One of the core ideas behind research is being able to listen to someone else and to be able to hear someone else’s story that’s taken the shape of a lot of different things. Market research, which is one of the kinds of expressions of research, is understanding your market or social research is understanding the sociology of the people around us. We work with a wide variety of organizations and leaders, most
of them are faith affiliated or Christian.
But sometimes we work with mainstream companies as well, because one of the things you learn in this work is that actually a lot of mainstream businesses don’t know how to grapple with faith and the psychographics of faith. They think it’s controversial. Everyone in a for-profit fortune 500 company, all have their own unique faith stories, or they’re not faith forward at all. Or they’re sometimes even antithetical to faith, or antagonistic to faith.
And so faith has often been taboo to talk about. And I think the consequence of that has been that a lot of businesses and ministries, politicians and leaders who don’t lean in on faith can often miss some of the key clues It’s like trying to play guitar without understanding that dimension. So we try to help give, in addition to the demographics or economics or work lives and other aspects of people’s lives, we’re trying to understand a little bit more about their faith lives and how that applies in various industries and spaces of our society.
David Capes
Now, when you say faith, do you mean specifically the Christian faith, or do you broaden out to talk about other faith groups, faith communities as well?
David Kinnaman
Well, Christian in particular, but when you study Christianity in America and around the world you realize it’s at least similar to other faith traditions. Personally, I am an evangelical Christian and believe in the exclusive claims of Jesus. The company was founded to advance and explore that, but we always interview people of all faiths. When you do a sample of US adults, you’re going to find a wide variety of people. Some people who might not describe themselves as Christian might be more open to Jesus than you would realize. And sometimes people say, hey, I’m a Christian. I’m a lifelong Jesus follower. But they’re sometimes further from God than the labels they put on themselves might
otherwise suggest.
So it’s an interesting business, because you start to realize, there’s something about trying to understand someone’s profile and heart and priorities and how they want to describe themselves. So we do look at everything from a Christian perspective, but we do interview people of a variety of different faith orientations in our research.
David Capes
Are most of those interviews conducted face-to-face? Are they over social media? How do they take place? You guys have done millions of interviews, I’m sure.
David Kinnaman
Yea. It’s almost all online these days. When I first started back in the 80s, telephone research was really the gold standard, because everyone had a working landline in their home. That’s not so much the case anymore. We use a lot of online interviews and sometimes qualitative in-person interviews.
David Capes
I think most people these days, when they get a number on their cell phones that they don’t recognize, they just ring off. So I wondered how that really happened. One of the things that we’ve seen David over the last 30 years or so is an increasing number of people who identify as “nones”, N, O, N, E, S. It’s been going up and up and up, I don’t know for how long now. You probably have that number in mind, but it’s been several decades, and now it seems like we’re seeing something different happening. Is that possible to say?
David Kinnaman
Yes, Barna data and a lot of other research now is corroborating the idea that over the last 30 years there has been an increase in the percentage of people who say they’re religiously unaffiliated or nothing. In particular, the shorthand of that is to call them the “nones”. The Pew Research named them that based on their survey questions, “are you Christian, Jewish and other religious faiths. And people say “none”. So that has been steadily increasing the last 30 years.
I don’t recall the exact percentage off hand, but it’s a quarter to a third of all Americans who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated. But that has been plateauing, and it appears that there are signs of a renewed spiritual interest among Gen Z and Millennials, especially younger men. So there are some really interesting trend lines to that. It seems to be slowing down that overall trend.
David Capes
Now, you said, in particular, young men. What about young women? You go into a lot of churches, and it looks like you get two or three women for every one guy. But this seems to be a different trend.
