If you ask Ryan Burge how he built a career that has taken him from Salem Community High School to speaking before members of Congress, advising national religious organizations, and joining the faculty of one of America's premier universities, he won't offer a complicated formula.

"Step one and step fifty don't make any sense together," he said. "But if I describe each step — one to two, two to three — those make a lot more sense."

That's the whole philosophy, really. Just keep doing what you love. See where it goes.

A 2000 graduate of Salem Community High School — and now a member of both its Athletic and Academic Halls of Fame — Burge earned his bachelor's degree in history and religion at Greenville University, his master's and PhD in political science at SIU Carbondale, and spent thirteen years teaching at Eastern Illinois University while simultaneously pastoring a church for nearly eighteen years. In August of 2025, he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis as a Professor of Practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.

His job there is public-facing: getting the Center's work and name into the world. He has a newsletter, Graphs about Religion, that drew around three million readers last year. He speaks roughly thirty times annually — Yale Divinity School, the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and rooms full of members of Congress. Last weekend, he was offered a police escort between his hotel and a speaking venue in Knoxville, a sign of the times he navigates with characteristic calm. "I'm not fearful for my life," he said, "but it's something I think about more now than I did two or three years ago." His work is empirical, not polemical — "my job is just to describe the world" — but the world has become a more volatile audience.

Six books have come out of that work, with a seventh due next year.

Yet despite the national profile, Burge remains, by deliberate choice, simply Ryan in Mount Vernon. He's been there since 2008, commuting one or two days a week to St. Louis, coaching youth sports, sitting on the school board of the K-8 district, and getting up at 7 am on Saturday mornings to clean the pool filters at the local rec center. He doesn't love the meetings. He does them anyway. "No one wants to go home and do the dishes," he said. "But if you want the world to be a better place, you've got to do the dishes." His wife Jacque — a Salem graduate, class of 2002 — is his partner in all of it. Their two sons, 14 and 12, are being raised with the same small-town ethic that shaped Ryan.

His connection to Salem runs deep. He's already in the Athletic Hall of Fame — a member of a 33-0 tennis team in his junior year. He takes the honor with characteristically level eyes. Small towns can undervalue academics, he said; the fact that Salem elevates both sends the right signal.

He's also a vigorous defender of what a small-town upbringing actually does for a person. "It's exactly what you want small-town America to be," he said of Salem — a place where teachers knew you, neighbors watched out for you, and the school was large enough to offer real opportunities without swallowing you whole. "You don't get lost in a place like Salem." And counterintuitively, he argues, growing up rural gave him an unfair advantage in academia: he was willing to take positions in smaller markets that coastal PhDs, accustomed to major metros, simply wouldn't consider. "That is a huge advantage in this world," he said. "And you can relate to the students better, too."

The guiding insight for all of it came from a college guest speaker running a Gallup Strengths Finder session. The man told him, "The world tells you to be kind of good at a lot of things. I'm going to tell you to be really good at one thing." Find the one thing you do better than anyone else. Exploit it. Your life — and the world — will be better for it.

He wishes he could hand that advice to his freshman self. Along with this, you'll figure it out. Just put your head down and work.