Jeff Weiss: Air Power and Hope in a Turbulent World

Welcome back to what's going on with Earl Ingram.

As always, I'm excited about having a very special guest to bring before you, the listening audience.

And today is no different.

Got a very, you know, a little bit different than what we normally do.

We spend a lot of time on politics and politrixes.

But I don't know if that's the case today.

I'm excited to bring before you Mr. Samuel Bess Vetter.

He's a senior data scientist on the data labs team at Pew Research Center, where he has studied a range of topics, including social media usage by political figures, as well as general public link and website detection.

and the geography of elections, vehicle charging infrastructure, best water, holds a PhD in political science and social data analytics from the Pennsylvania State University.

And he has been interviewed by a variety of outlets, including Axios and Vox.

Sam's research has also appeared in several academic journals, including the political analysts in a journal of

peace research.

With that backdrop, it is a privilege and an honor, sir, to have an opportunity to speak with you this morning.

Well,

thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

You know, I will tell you this conversation piqued my curiosity.

And because I'm a 71 year old guy who who realizes that something is different.

in the religious journey that many of us are taking today.

I've noticed that during my time as a young man, that clearly was a lot of, you know, talk, radio shows on television, evangelists, that you could always,

find religious conversations, Jerry Falwell, Rex Humboldt, Billy Graham, or Robert Jim Baker, Pat Robinson, Robert Shuler, on and on and on.

And so you would see them daily on regular national television.

But that's not the case anymore.

They've kind of drifted away from the television outlets and now

Apparently, these conversations are taking place more on the radio.

Is it safe to say that?

Well,

in this research, so back up a little bit, we have a new report out.

It's called.

religious radio across America.

And yeah, we're taking a close look at the landscape of religious radio stations.

We don't have a comparison point in there with television.

But I can tell you that religious radio is going strong in the United States.

And I think that's something that anybody who travels around the country and

makes a habit of flipping through the radio dial in different places is probably noticed, right?

You can tune into a religious station pretty much anywhere in the country you are.

So the reason I brought that up with television is because I listened to a lot of radio, not to mention that I've been doing radio for quite a while.

And depending on where you are, I live in a...

not a rural area, but in an urban area.

And conservative talk or radio, religious talk radio is not as prominent in the urban areas.

I think that they may be in the rural areas.

Is there any connection?

So we see stations pretty much across the...

the whole country, religious stations.

So we did look at a database of all of the AM and FM stations that are licensed to operate in the US, and we dug into which one of those are religious stations.

And yeah, I mean, the striking finding was really just how big a share of the American media landscape it makes up.

So to give you a sense of that scope,

Out of all the AM and FM stations that are operating in the US, one quarter of them are religious stations.

And these are mostly Christian stations, by the way.

I should say that.

Yeah, as far as the geographic coverage, 98% of the American population has at least one religious station within local broadcasting range of their home address.

So pretty much wherever you live, whether it's an urban area, a rural area, if you want to tune into a religious station, there's probably one that you could tune into.

Go ahead.

Oh, and then the third thing that I was going to say is we

We also we ran a survey of the public for this for this report as well.

And we found that nearly half of the population reports listening to religious programming of some kind, including a large majority of those listeners who say that they tune in on the radio, even if that's not the only way that they listen.

So, you know, you can also get this this programming on podcasts or streaming platforms.

There's sort of other ways.

You know, you also.

dug deeper into it and you did some breakdowns about you know the groups and evangelicals appeared to be the strongest of all any any particular reason why you you found that the evangelicals are stronger have a stronger base when it comes to religious radio than than other denominations the Christianity

Yeah, so we surveyed the public.

Like I said, we found that it's about 45% of all US adults who say that they listen to religious programming and then breaking down the individual religious groups in the country.

It's especially common for Protestant Christians.

It's about two thirds of Protestants who report listening.

like you mentioned, even higher among evangelicals.

I believe it was right around 80% of white evangelical Protestants.

We also did see a lot of black Protestants who say that they listened to religious programming as well.

So there's a strong base across Protestantism, not just in evangelicalism.

So what about Catholic?

You know, I don't know.

Again, I've listened to some religious radio in my time and I don't recall too much of the Catholic religion having many of those shows.

Yeah,

absolutely.

So we're talking about audience.

So let's keep talking about audience within within.

Our survey findings about 40% of Americans who are Catholic reported listening to religious programming.

So not as common as for Protestants, but still a pretty sizable share of the population.

And then in terms of the stations themselves,

As part of this research, we looked into religious radio stations' websites to see how they describe their religious tradition.

Like I mentioned, the vast majority of these are Christian stations.

Most of them only describe themselves as Christian radio rather than aligning with a specific denomination.

But we did find that around one in 10 stations are Catholic stations.

So there's a fair share of Catholic radio stations.

You're based in Wisconsin, right?

Yes.

The share of stations in Wisconsin that are Catholic is actually a little higher than the rest of the country.

So the Midwest especially has a little bit higher concentration of Catholic stations, which was one thing we found interesting.

Do you think there's any correlation between the sheer numbers of people are listening to religious radio?

Because, you know, surely a really the number of

people who are attending services on any given Sunday has gone down.

And do you think that they're people aren't attending the services physically, but they're still getting what they need through these radio outlets?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's that's a pattern that we've seen in some other research as well that I didn't work on personally.

But

it's increasingly popular for folks to watch their Sunday service online or on a TV broadcast.

One thing that was pretty interesting is that the groups who were most likely to report listening to religious radio in this study, they're more or less the same groups who also are likely to report going to Sunday services in person regularly.

we're sort of seeing those behaviors going together.

You know, you and I are certainly from different demographics as it relates to age.

And so there's been conversations about your generation not physically showing up in church as much as my generation did when we were young, like you.

And so maybe that is the answer.

Maybe that's what happened.

Maybe people, it's easier certainly to turn on a broadcast if you're in the car heading somewhere with your family.

You can certainly, instead of the way it was when I was a young person, you had to go to church first and then whatever happened after that happened after that, but church was a prerequisite.

you know you you may not you have to do that anymore because if you got a young family you're it's a weekend and you you're going to a place on that Sunday morning where you and your family can do some different things you can also you can kind of get two for one you can certainly not miss the message that you'll receive in church physically you can get that over the airways maybe that's got something to do with it

Yeah, I think that

might be right.

And yeah, again, it's not research that I worked on personally, so I don't have all the exact statistics at hand.

But my colleagues at Pew Research Center have done quite a bit of work on church attendance over time.

And there are definitely patterns there.

Generally, a decline in attendance over

over the past few decades that as far as we can tell has started to level out.

So it's sort of, I don't know that I'd call it a religious revival necessarily, but it's a slowing down of the decline at least.

So three in 10 religious stations are independently on?

So if you're looking at three and 10 stations independently owned, the other 70% large conglomerate, is that backed by any religious owners or are these independent, I mean, an organization that may not even be engaged in religion?

Yeah,

this was fascinating to dig into a little bit.

Of course, AM and FM radio stations need an FCC license to operate in the US.

And who owns those, or who holds those licenses is a matter of public record.

So as part of this research, we dug into those records a little bit.

Like you said, we found that it's right around 30% of stations that are independently owned.

The rest are all licensed to an owner that also holds the license to at least one other station.

So in some cases, that's, you know,

a group that owns maybe a handful of licenses.

In other cases, it's station networks that are quite large, up to hundreds of individual stations in the same network.

And they're owned by...

a number of different types of entities.

So some are directly operated by churches.

Others are big media companies that specialize in Christian radio.

Others seem to be a portfolio of Christian stations and secular stations.

And it's just kind of a mix of what that company owns.

I have to tell you 63%.

Christians, not specified, Protestant tradition, 10%, 8% Catholic.

So the majority of the stations that we're talking about are Christian.

This nation is made up of all different religious backgrounds.

Is there any reason why that you can answer that?

Mainly Christian stations.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I guess the first thing that I would say is I don't personally know what all it takes for a radio station to be economically viable.

You might be more

of the expert on

that.

But I imagine that a big part of it is the potential audience that's within the broadcast area, right?

And when we're talking about religious groups in America, yes, this country is made up of people of all sorts of different faiths.

But the largest share of the population is Christians.

And the second place spot, depending on how you slice it, actually goes to former Christians.

So any other specific faith group is going to be just kind of a smaller segment of the population and a smaller segment of the potential market for any radio station that it's going to try to cater to a faith-based audience.

That's not to say that there isn't religious programming that's intended for other faiths or from other faith traditions.

So during our research, we did find a number of individual shows.

from various religious traditions that are either distributed online or get carried periodically on various public interest radio stations.

For this analysis specifically, though, we were focused in on stations that spend all or most of their time broadcasting religious content.

So again, with that focus, we were only able to identify a handful of stations from faith traditions other than Christianity.

So you even broke it down to...

what's being heard on these outlets.

Music, what percentage of it is, you know, music?

What percentage of it is talk?

What percentage of it is sermons?

I mean, let's talk a little bit about that because I think it is critically important.

Music in church, especially in Christian churches, is part of...

what it is, right?

And I remember as a young boy constantly, you know, and brought up in the Christian church, it was always the singing, the choir and all of that served a really big portion of, you know, the religious experience.

So you even broke it down to how much of it is people are listening to music.

How much do you listen to talk the sermons and all those things?

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

So yeah, part of this research was to do a large scale content analysis.

We actually recorded programming from all of the religious radio stations in the country that offer an online broadcast.

So that was how we were able to record from them.

We in total captured over 400,000 hours of broadcasts that were broadcast during the month of July 2025.

So we're talking a couple of months ago.

It takes some time to do these studies.

But yeah, across all of the material that we collected, there was about an even split between talk and music.

So it's pretty well 50-50 across everything.

you know, if you tune into an individual station, stations really tend to focus mostly on one format or the other.

So we found that 37% of stations are spending most of their time on music, 35% on talk, and the other 28% are spending, you know, kind of a little more even mix of the two.

So some stations in the middle there.

So, yeah, the balance between talk, programming, and music that listeners get is really going to depend on where they're tuning

in.

So I have to ask you because, again, as a young boy, I don't remember Jerry Farwell's, Billy Graham's, or Roberts and Jim Baker's.

They didn't spend a lot of time on politics.

That was not part of what they did.

But today,

even in religious radio, the political situation is coming into play more now.

Did you notice, have you noticed that more or at all, or is that at all an issue?

Yeah, so

we, because we only have the snapshot from July 2025, we don't necessarily have a comparison point where I could tell you,

There's more politics now than there used to be.

But it is definitely something that we looked into.

Politics is really a great example of a topic where the programming that listeners choose to listen to is going to have a pretty big impact on what they hear.

So when we surveyed folks, most listeners said that they don't

typically hear that much about politics while they're listening.

It was, I think, 35% of listeners who say they rarely hear about politics, 21% say they never do.

So it's a good chunk of the listener base who basically aren't encountering this material much at all.

But we can focus in on, there's about 18% of Americans who specifically say that they like to listen to religious talk programming.

And within that audience, that shares looking a lot higher.

So 60% of those listeners say that they hear about news and politics.

It's about the same share who say that keeping up with current events is one of their reasons for tuning in.

You know, I've got a lot of friends and in many of them, I found out, you know, I used to basically when I thought about Christianity, it was Protestant Lutherans Catholics.

Presbyterians and it didn't often hear about evangelicals.

And so as I talk with many friends who are evangelical and it just seems like that there are more conversations political around, especially with President Trump and in those kinds of things that didn't happen in the past.

but they're clearly even in the evangelical circles.

I think politics are discussed more in that circle than they are in the other aspects of Christianity.

Yeah, I think that that might be true.

I don't have data directly on that, but one of the ways that that's showing up in the data that we collected is that

in sort of the same way that most listeners are, in the survey at least, they didn't tell us that they're out looking specifically for political coverage and the religious programming that they choose.

Most religious stations also aren't dedicating a whole lot of time to politics either.

But then there are some exceptions, right?

So we found that there's about,

30% of the religious stations that we studied where politics ends up being a pretty major focus, accounting for several hours of programming every day.

In some stations, it was up to like 10 or 12 hours a day of political commentary.

And the stations that are spending a lot of time discussing politics are doing it in host-led talk radio formats, kind of like this show, right?

They're bringing on guests to do interviews.

They're doing call-in segments with the audience.

And this is actually in contrast with stations that have less of a political focus.

Not only do those stations spend less time talking about politics in general, but a larger share of the time that they do spend talking about politics is coming in the form of a short news update.

sort of passing mentions rather than this sort of longer form intentional commentary.

So let me ask you, when we look at the encroachment of social media on the norms of life.

And so do you think that part of the reason

So many people are still tuning in to Christian radio.

It's because of the impact that social media is having on their families.

And so children who may be attending church with their family, the family is not as back during my time.

It's not as collective as it was during my time because

probably we would add access to social media.

It would have probably been the same thing with us, but we didn't have access to those things.

And so people are tuning in because something is happening to the family, the fabric of the family, the fabric of the nation.

And so people need to try to find some answers and maybe get back to a time when...

when they were young, because I don't think that the majority, not the majority, but a large percentage of those listening to Christian radio from your demographic, I think that most of them would be from my demographic.

Is it safe to say that?

Well, actually,

Pretty interesting to me, a little surprising.

We found that Americans across all age groups are about equally likely to report listening to religious programming in general.

Now, we did see some interesting differences in what content they choose and how they access it.

So older Americans are more likely to say that they're tuning in to listen to services rather than music.

And younger folks are more likely to say that they're listening to music and also much more likely to say that they're listening on streaming platforms rather than tuning in on the radio.

So there does seem to be a bit of a demographic shift in the programming that people are choosing to listen to and then also where they're getting it.

You know, I have to tell you, I always say, what's the point in doing this if you're not going to be trooper with the listening audience?

So I'm one of those people who used to go to church every Sunday, right?

It was from the time I was a child, it was inculcated into who I was until the time I got to a certain point in my life that I...

basically just stopped attending the services.

But I too have listened to sermons and things on radio as opposed to going and attending the services as I used to do so readily.

And so there are times that I myself have turned on the radio on a Sunday morning.

when I'm doing other things and felt like I needed to have that foundation.

I revisit that foundation and it's certainly a lot easier than getting up early in the morning and, you know, and knowing you're going to spend an hour or two getting ready and preparing and doing all those things.

But part of the problem with that is part of what the whole experience of

this religious journey is to interact with other like, you know, people.

And you can't you can't do that over the airways.

No.

And yeah, that's that's a great point.

I do I do think it's interesting.

I think a lot of people have an experience

kind of similar to yours though.

I mean, we asked folks why they listened to religious programming and most people said that it's because they find it to be spiritually fulfilling or calming or to provide a good source for life advice or guidance.

And then we also asked them to tell us how important

the programming that they listen to is for their spiritual lives.

And 37% of listeners said that it's extremely or very important.

Another 35% said it was at least somewhat important.

So it's clear that many people who are listening to this programming are really finding it to be profoundly meaningful.

You know, Sam, the personalities matter or they did matter.

Once upon a time if if you've got a you know again a person like Billy Graham or Roberts and Jim Baker the personalities were bigger we're larger than life and So when you would look at these people and listen to those people part of it was that personality And so as do you find a whoever's delivering the message?

Does that bear have some

And I know you probably didn't do any research on that, but you personally, you think that the person who's delivering the message is part of the reason people listen?

I think probably,

yeah.

And one thing that I would have really loved to be able to do would be to get

more granular on understanding exactly what programming folks were tuning into.

Unfortunately, in our survey, we had to be pretty general.

Are you turning into services?

Are you listening to religious music?

But in our content analysis, we talked a moment ago about syndication at the station level where stations shared ownership.

We did also find quite a bit of syndication at the show level.

So there were some shows that we found that appear on the broadcast schedules of, you know, up to half of religious stations across the country.

And, you know, I think those are very likely to be about specific personalities, right?

Like that show is carried on that many stations because people want to hear that person speak specifically.

And then another interesting thing about that is that when it comes to these highly popular syndicated shows, listeners don't even necessarily have to tune into a live broadcast to hear them.

So most are available online or through a podcast platform, much like this show, right?

Well, radio clearly was a lifeblood for my generation.

long before there were all these other outlets.

Radio was precious.

And there was a time when it looked like radio was going away.

And certainly the fact that it's still hanging on and it's still an important part of many people's life.

Thank God for that.

That there's still people who listen to the radio.

But I would ask you,

I think so many different things have changed in the way a lot of us practice religion.

Back in my day, the songs that we're saying were pretty much traditional kind of music and songs.

And today, Christian music is kind of intertwined with

not the traditional kind of music, it is more upbeat.

Do you think that that's part of the reason why you got a lot of younger listeners listening to the music side of Christianity and these in the radio?

Yeah, I think that could definitely be a contributing factor.

Yeah, like I mentioned,

A minute ago, music accounts for about half of all the airtime on religious radio stations.

It was also the most popular form of religious programming that we asked about.

So 37% of the population say that they listen to religious music.

And of course, that can be anything.

That can be the old hymns.

That can be the modern contemporary Christian music.

I can say that most of the music that airs on religious radio these days is mostly Christian contemporary music and worship music.

And interestingly, it tilts pretty significantly towards a relatively small handful of the most popular artists and bands.

So we found that during our study period, which again was July 2025,

the top 10% of artists accounted for 87% of all of the tracks that

played.

I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

You know, Sam, the more I think about this, the more it begs the question, radio itself,

It's a struggle today.

It clearly is.

I don't care what it is you're doing, what markets you're in.

To make a living in radio, to make a profit in radio is extremely difficult.

And so when we're talking about religious radio, I think the margin for profit must be a little lower than it is in maybe

I'm asking.

I don't know.

Because I think when we're talking about other types of radio, it's a lot more difficult, I think.

And maybe the profit margin is different than it is in religious radio.

Any ideas?

Yeah,

it's such an interesting question.

Unfortunately, we don't really have data on that directly.

I'm sure that exists somewhere.

It'd be really interesting to see.

One thing that I could comment on though is, again, the audience side of things.

So one of the things that we asked about was sort of how people have changed their behaviors based on the religious programming that they listen to.

And we found that many listeners say that they have made some kind of change in their lives or taken some kind of specific action in response to what they hear in the religious programming that they listen to.

And this can range from things like roughly half of listeners said that they watched a movie or read a book that they heard promoted.

15% said that they started attending a new religious congregation.

The reason I bring it up though is because one of the things that we asked about was donations.

And around one in five listeners said that they have donated money directly to a religious station show or podcast that they listened to.

So there's clearly at least an audience that is interested in supporting these stations financially.

Well, it clearly is.

I mean, as I think about it now, there's a...

a radio or religious radio station in the city.

Where I lived has been around a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time.

They're still there.

They're still doing the same thing that they've been doing for the past 30, 40 years.

And they wouldn't still be there if they weren't, you know, prosperous and clearly.

That is from donations that people are making to keep them afloat.

So people who listen obviously know it costs money in order to make that happen and they're willing to do that instead of and they understand because if they're making donations when they're physically at a church that same reality exists.

If you're not there, in order to be able to get the word that you want to hear, nothing's free in this world.

That's right.

Let me ask you, were you surprised, anything that surprised you guys in this extensive research that, you know, what were you looking to find out?

Did you get what you were looking for?

Yeah, I mean, we were motivated to do this.

We've wanted to do this study for a number of years now.

Religious radio seemed like an important part of the media landscape that felt understudied.

I don't know of any other projects that have done this sort of in-depth look at them.

And yeah, in some senses, it took a little while for the technology to catch up to where we could do it at the scale that we wanted to.

But we went into this really expecting this to be a big, significant part of the media landscape, the radio landscape specifically.

And even with that expectation, I think everybody on the research team was surprised by that, just by the scale of it.

you know, a quarter of all the stations in the country are religious stations.

That's bigger than I was expecting.

So yeah, if anything surprised me, I think it was that.

You know, you guys really, it's Pew.

So that explains why you went so much in depth.

How long did it take you to do this research?

We started working on this in January 2025.

And the report came out maybe a month ago.

So yeah, it's been about a 15 month process.

Yeah, that's a pretty deep dive.

And I'll be honest with you, when I first saw this, you know, religious radio is really something I want to have a conversation about.

And then when I thought about it tomorrow, I said, yeah.

Yeah, I mean I mean really The world is the world is changing, but there's a segment in the part of the world that is not changing And and that's people's beliefs and there's their beliefs and something greater than themselves and no matter what we see physically Those of us who who understand as a power greater than ourselves know that we have to find a way to stay connected and

The radio is always an outlet that gives you that opportunity.

You don't need to physically be somewhere to be able to get what it is you are looking for and what you need.

And so if it's religion, certainly I can see where there are people who have grown accustomed to it and it's a way of life for them.

And it doesn't look like that's ever going to end.

It doesn't seem like it's ending anytime soon.

Well, that's good news, Sam.

And my last thing with you to you is this conversation has really had my mind kind of spinning because

I got so many friends who aren't Christian and who are spiritual and who don't practice any religion.

But they listen to Christian radio.

What do you think that is?

We saw that in the survey results too.

So, you know, Americans who don't identify with any religion were the group that was least likely to say that they listened to religious programming.

That part doesn't seem that surprising.

But still, about one in five say they do sometimes.

So, yeah, there are

plenty of folks out there who don't consider themselves religious, but they're listening to this content.

Now it's worth noting that for our analysis, we usually group together the folks who specifically say that they're atheist or agnostic with those folks who say that they just kind of don't really identify with anything.

And if we look at those separately here, then we do find that most of the listeners in this category

are people who say that they don't identify with anything in particular, rather than those who specifically say that they're atheists or agnostics.

Well, I want to tell you, man, it's been a pleasure.

You know, you certainly opened my eyes to a lot of things.

I clearly was thinking that, you know, just based on my own life and the people in my life,

that there weren't a whole lot of them listening to Christian radio or listen to radio to get their spiritual, you know, fix, if you will.

But, you know, you don't need to have anybody but your radio.

And,

go ahead.

Oh, that's why we love doing a project like this is, you know, I think,

I think many, if not most of us here in the US have some kind of a personal experience with religious radio, whether that's actively listening to it or just sort of brushing past a few stations while hitting scan on the dial in your car, right?

We know it exists.

The thing that was so cool about being able to do this study is that it let us get

a look in the 40,000 foot look into what it looks like across the whole country and what those patterns look like in terms of who's listening and why.

And the reason that's so important is because, man, it's so easy when you watch television and your social media.

It's so easy to say mankind is lost and that there's no hope.

and you think that the spiritual aspect of life has gone away.

But again, if I can find it over the airways, man, that makes my life, and it makes things a little brighter, you know, because you don't see it on television.

You don't get it much on the internet.

At least I know if I'm...

thirsty for water.

I know where I can get the water.

Same thing with this.

So thank you very much, man.

I really appreciate it.

Great talking to you.

Keep up the good work.

Thank you so much.

It's great to be here.

All right.

Always great to talk with anybody who's talking about the right things.

Thank you, Mr. Bess Vetter.

And he's a senior data scientist at the Pew Research Center.

Thank you very much.

That's a wrap for what's going on with Earl Ingram.

See you later.