America's Religious Revival Is a Mirage

Today, the state of religion in America and the state of America.

Perhaps you've heard the news.

America is experiencing a religious revival and it's concentrated among young people

who are flocking back to church.

From the economist, quote, the West has stopped losing its religion.

From the Washington Post, quote, why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.

From Reuters, quote, Catholicism spreads amongst young Britons longing for something deeper

and from the Wall Street Journal, quote, a church's campaign to teach lost boys how to

be men.

Big if true, as they say.

Since the early 1990s, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation

has been skyrocketing.

This group is somewhat confusingly called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, which is a homonym for nuns,

N-U-N-S, which describes, of course, extremely religious people.

I don't know who came up with this word.

I think it's a bad one, but it is a term of art.

And so we're all stuck with it.

In any case, the story of religion in America has been the rise of the N-O-N-E-S nuns

for decades, which makes it a big deal if that trend line, the long secularization of America,

and it's hit the pause button.

But as today's guest Ryan Burge tells us, the secular pause in America is much stranger

than it initially looks.

And the forces behind today's weird religious revival, including the rise of new churches,

the conflation of Christianity and the Republican Party, and the divergent ideologies of old

and young Americans, are some of the most important trends in culture and politics.

To understand the state of religion in America today is to understand the state of America.

Ryan is the author of a sensational sub-stack called Graphs About Religion, which does exactly

what it says in the tin, deep dives into the state of belief and identity in America

to produce beautiful graphs about religion.

So today's episode will be a little special for folks on YouTube and Spotify.

You'll be able to see the beautiful graphs that Ryan makes, graphs that really hammer

home his deepest conclusions.

And if you'd prefer to simply listen along, that's fine, of course, and you can check out

the full transcript of this conversation along with Ryan's pretty charts if you head

to my sub-stack at DerekThompson.org, where this conversation will run very soon after

it goes live here.

Thanks for listening and for watching, as always.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain H.

Ryan Burge, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, Derek.

Appreciate being here.

We're going to do something fun on this show.

We're going to talk about the history of the state of the future of religion in America.

And we're going to do it by showing audiences watching on Spotify or YouTube some of the

really fantastic charts that you've published on your sub-stack.

So if folks are listening rather than watching, have no fear, you're going to get 100% of

the content here.

But if you can watch, you're going to get 110% of the content because some of these

charts are really, really fascinating.

And you're going to want to maybe take a screen grab and talk about it on your groupchats.

Let's start with the biggest possible picture here.

Throughout the 20th century, America was by all accounts, the most religious rich country

in the world by far, 400 years after the sign to the revolution.

100 years after Nietzsche declared God is dead.

In America, God was not dead.

We were still a very religious country.

What's the deal with America and religion?

We are, you are right, Derek.

We are an insanely religious country and it becomes even more prominent when you do like

a scatter plot of GDP on one axis, the religiosity of other axis because all the other wealthy

countries on earth, especially our, you know, Eastern, Western European neighbors, Scandinavian

neighbors, they're significantly less religious than we are.

Our closest like comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP.

And only 17% of the Swiss, they religion is very important in America.

It's about 50%.

So we are three times more religious than we should be compared to our European neighbors.

We're more religious than basically any industrialized country on earth at this point.

And it's so far.

I tell people I never get asked to travel outside the United States and talk about religion

because I do so much American religion stuff and it applies nowhere else on earth.

People around the world look at us and go, oh, goodness, why are you guys so weird?

We really are a case of one when it comes to our economic prosperity, but also our religiosity.

We are as religious as some of these, you know, sub-Saharan African countries on some

metric.

So in every possible way are the religiosity America, there is no comparison case in the

world right now.

You just answered the question statistically that we are three times more religious than

the most religious other rich country.

I still want to know why you think that's the case.

And this might be, you know, a short answer that requires a book.

But if you can make the book maybe like two and a half minutes long.

Yeah.

And why is America specifically so much more religious and why did our religiosity continue

to hold on deep into the 20th century?

Yeah.

So I think the Christian nationals are going to hate this answer, but the fact that we

did not have a state church at the Vowen.

You could think, really you can think Thomas Jefferson for this, by the way, who was not

a Christian in any meaningful sense, you know, the idea that we should not have a government

sponsored religion.

I was told people, if you want them to hate something, make it part of the government.

So, you know, by the fact that, you know, people hate Amtrak, people hate the post office,

because they're run by the government.

We don't have a state church.

And people don't even realize this in highly secular Germany, there still is a state church.

And you pay taxes to that church unless you opt out of it.

And many of them, you know, Germans don't opt out because they don't even know, you

know, they don't understand what the money is going.

So what that allowed, there's a theory in this field called religious economy theory put

together by Roger Flinkian and Stark in a book called The Church of America where they

argue that the competition between religious groups in America by not having a monopolized

state church that religion really had to compete to be the best, to be the most interesting,

most charismatic, the most attractive.

And we had the most robust religious market of any country in the western part of the

world.

And because of that, we had one movement after another movement, after another movement,

capture more of the American consciousness, right?

Even had the latter days sayings in the conversation, but the United Methodist and the Baptist,

you know, dominated American religion in the 1800s with their, with their circuit

writers.

They gave a young man a Bible and a horse and said, go west and don't come back, start

at church.

And a lot of them had a lot of success.

And even the modern iterations with these non-denominational churches, I mean, you can

see constant evolution in the religious marketplace when, to be fair, in most of the rest of the

developed world, religion is very stagnant.

They're sort of worshiping the same way today they did 200 years ago.

Now add to that the fact that America was founded by deeply religious people by enlarge.

I mean, a lot of were scallywags and weirdos and, you know, people got, you know, debt,

debt problems in Europe and came here.

But a lot of people really came here because they saw it, it was the new, right?

It was the new world for them to express their faith.

And I, you know, we can't measure this, but it almost feels like a deep sense of religious

belief and religiosity sort of like woven into the DNA of Americans and into our culture.

So I think that created the sort of fertile soil.

And then the fact that we had this marketplace just allowed that soil to be even more productive.

And I don't think you'll ever see anything like this ever again, really.

The answer you just gave makes the next part of this story so much more surprising that

if you look at the share of Americans who said, I do not believe in any particular religion.

I have no particular religious affiliation.

It's a very flat line from like the 1940s when modern polling basically started to the

1980s to the early 1990s.

And when you look at this graph of people saying I have no religious affiliation, sometimes

called the nuns, not NUN, but N-O-N-E-S.

And we'll return to this concept in a second.

When you look at this graph, it's like a flat savanna until 1990.

And then suddenly it's Mount Kilimanjaro.

It just starts going up linearly.

What happened 1990?

I caught what called the venture capitalist graph, right?

Like every venture capital, you see a company like no users, no users and like boom,

inflection point and then like hockey sticks up and like all the money comes in and all

the recognition.

The nuns were sort of hanging around for a very long time.

So there was a paper written in 1968 by a sociologist and called the nuns the neglected

category of analysis.

No one was even thinking about it writing about it.

It's like, because it was 5% of America, right?

It's like, you know, interesting aside, but it's there's not enough data to study the

nuns really in America until the 1990s.

And you know, I wrote about this in my new book, like what happened in the 1990s that allowed

religion to sort of fade so quickly in the nuns to rise so rapidly.

I do think it's a multifaceted thing.

The one that a lot of people who do this kind of work point to is the fall of the Berlin

wall.

You know, for the younger said who's listening to this right now, if you grew up in America

in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, you could not say you were an atheist because you said you

were an atheist, you were a communist.

Those things were like linked together in the American consciousness.

And so a lot of people were sort of claws of atheists.

And when the Berlin wall fell, you know, now that whole, we're not in the cold war anymore.

So atheism is not so, you don't want to be blackballed.

And you were blackballed if you said you were an atheist in the 50s.

In the 1990s, that sort of started fading and you know, you could really say what you

were in a way.

And what accelerated that was the rise of the internet, you know, which allowed people

to actually say what they really were online and then find other people that agreed with

them.

And that sort of gave people the courage when they were asked on polls to say what they

really were, you know, the example I give is imagine you were a kid raised in Mississippi

in the 1950s and you did not believe in God.

You're probably never going to tell another human being what you don't believe in.

You might lose your job.

You might get kicked out of your family.

You might lose your, your spouse over something like that.

But now you can go online and find, you know, the atheists of Mississippi, Facebook group

or subreddit or some online community.

And that emboldened you to say what you really are, you know, when it comes to your religious

affiliation.

And then the last thing I'll say is it has to do something with politics.

I mean, yes, you can't, you can't look at the data.

And say that something didn't happen.

And I, I really do think Newt Gingrich is one of the worst politicians we've had, you

know, in terms of the trajectory of America, arguing on my book that, you know, he, he decided

that he'd rather win than be a good person.

And so to drag the Democrats through the mud was the way for him to win.

And by the way, proofs in the pudding, Republicans won the majority in the house in 1994 for

the first time in years.

And then by going in the mud, the Democrats did the same thing back and forth.

And then the Republican party started calling the Democrats evil, right?

Because they're not the party of evangelicals.

And then the Republican party started courting evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

And I think that sort of set off what we call the God gap or the Pew gap, which is, you

know, the idea that Republican party is the party of people of faith, the Democratic

party is largely becoming the party of not faithful people.

And I think that's going to continue going forward.

And I think it's actually might be the most important political religious phenomenon

in America is this huge divide, religiously between the two parties right now.

And I'm hearing is that there's at least two really important things that happened in

the 1980s or the 1990s.

One is that the reputation of atheism went from being a strong, Soviet communist connotation

to no connotation, maybe even a positive connotation.

And so maybe lots of people who were de facto nuns or atheists or agnostics in the 1970s,

1990s, 1990s could now say, no, I do not believe in God.

I am not a Christian.

But the other thing you said, I think, might be more powerful, which is that between the

late 1970s, the rise of Ronald Reagan through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the rise

of the new conservative movement was braided into the rise of a new Christian movement, which

meant that Christianity and the GOP became like the double helix.

They became braided.

They became one singular entity, which meant that young liberals, especially young millennial

liberals in the 1990s and 2000s, declined to call themselves Christians because they

associated Christianity with conservatism just as they no longer associated atheism with

communism.

And so it was this dual connotation shift that happened right around the same time that

led to this phenomenon where the share of liberal young people who say they have no religious

affiliation began to steadily rise while the share of conservative young people who said

they had no religious affiliation rose much, much less if at all.

Is all of that true as a kind of, this is a big subject that we're trying to wrestle

out of the ground, but is that all true as a kind of capsule explanation for why this

hockey stick moment in American history happened?

Yeah, I mean, there's a great piece in 2002 from Fisher and Howe where they started understanding

that politics was probably the great divider, you know, and that was that was driving the

rise of the nuns.

So I'll give you one stat today.

If you're a very liberal person, 62% chance that you're non-religious.

If you're a very conservative person, 11% chance that you're non-religious.

If the gap is that large and among young people, 70% of very liberal young people are

non-religious now.

It's like they don't even understand that you can be a person of faith and be politically

liberal because they have no examples of that in their recent history.

When they think of religion, that is coded as conservative.

And by the way, that's not just evangelicalism, that's Catholicism now, that's Latter-day Saints,

that's Muslims in some directions, that's Judaism.

So to be religious for them is to be conservative.

They have no concept of the social gospel movement or the religious fervor around abolitionism

or the civil rights movement.

They just understand American politics and religion as the religious right.

And that frames how they make decisions about their faith.

I feel for many of them, they don't go to church because they vote for Democrats and Democrats

don't go to church and sort of widening this polarization gap we have in America across

multiple lines now.

To deepen this point, you have a really compelling chart in one of your essays on the

religion gap, depending on who watches Fox News versus MSNBC.

And one way to describe this graph for people who cannot see it is to say that according

to your analysis, atheists are more liberal, more likely to watch MSNBC, than white Catholics

or Mormons are conservative.

I mean, so when you think about how conservative, a Mormon or white Catholic is, you're like,

well, that's got to be really large.

That's plus 25 plus 30%.

Atheists are even more likely to be liberal, more likely to watch MSNBC.

So there's the starkness of the divide where the atheists have swarmed toward the Democratic

Party while the Republican Party has held on to the most religious.

I want to continue to tell this story because we've now explained why America is so religious.

We've explained why this inflection point happened in the early 1990s.

But hockey stick moment that you've described seems to be over at some point between 2019

and 2022, the share of Americans, especially young Americans, who said they have no religious

affiliation, which had been rising for like 30 years, just stopped.

Like Mount Kilimanjaro just found its peak.

So last question was what happened in 1990?

Next question, what the hell happened in 2020 besides the obvious?

There's a massive religious revival happening in America.

Derek, if you've watched Fox News, you wouldn't know all about it because they want to

write a story about it every day.

It seems like, but no, that's, it's not a religious, I think this is such an important

point.

It's not a revival.

It's just a pause.

And what we're seeing is older Americans are more likely to say they're religious today

than boomers were even five years ago.

And that you're also seeing that with Jin X.

So a slight return to religion among sort of middle age and older Americans is driving

the aggregate number either to stay flat or maybe even go down a little bit.

But I've got, and by the way, we don't know why that is.

Like I've tried everything I can to try to figure out what is, what is making those older

Americans.

I do think at some level it is politics.

I think a lot of older Americans are Republicans, especially white older Americans.

And they're realizing like we're seeing this by the way in all kinds of data.

For instance, the share of people who self identifies evangelical, but go to church

less than once a year went from 16% in 2008 to 27% today.

So now over a quarter of self identified evangelicals don't go to church.

And if you try to figure out what, what's up with those people?

It's because they're Republicans and conservatives and vote for Donald Trump.

So I think part of the return of religion is I'm a Republican.

I'm a conservative.

And that's why we say that we're religious.

It's not that they're actually going to church.

They just go, they just say they're religious because that's what their tribe does.

They're people of faith.

But and this is such an important point.

The share of Americans who are non-religious will go up in the future unless something dramatic

changes that we've never seen before in the history of modern polling.

And that would, you know, the reason for that is because millennials about 40% of them

claim no religious affiliation.

And among Gen Z, it's around 45%.

And guess what?

Boomers are going to die by the tens of millions in the years to come.

And as they exit the surveys, they're going to be replaced by Gen Z.

So boomers are around 22% non-religious.

Gen Z are 45% non-religious.

So for every boomer that dies and replaced by a Gen Z, the aggregate number of nuns is

going to rise because of generational replacement.

So this is just a pause.

I do not expect the line to go down in the future.

Or if it does that, it won't go down by much because we're basically waiting for the

boomers to exit the stage and they will be doing that in the next 10 or 15 years.

I want to be clear that I understand this because there is absolutely a meme, a narrative

that says that young Americans in particular young men are swarming back into Christian

churches.

And you're saying it's much clearer.

It's much clearer that it's older Americans, older self-identified Republicans that are

now more likely to say, I am evangelical, I am Catholic.

Is that what explains the secularization pause that we're trying to figure out here?

Yeah, I think that's the most plausible explanation with the data that we have right now.

To parse out young people, by the way, is really hard there.

Like from a polling standpoint, because there are hard group to pull first off because

they're hard to contact.

They don't want to do anything online except watch memes and bet on Bitcoin and do only

fans they don't want to answer surveys unfortunately.

And people don't realize like even like the gender gap thing among Gen Z, like mathematically

is really hard to parse because you're cutting a sample from everyone to just Gen Z and

you're cutting it in half again between men and women.

So you're talking about a subgroup of a subgroup and then to see it change there that's

statistically significant would take a sample size that was so large, we can't collect

samples that large.

So all these anecdotes are interesting, but this idea that young people are coming back

to church in mass is just not supported by any data that I've ever looked at.

But the data that says that boomers are saying their Christians, that number has absolutely,

the share of boomers who are Christians has risen significantly in the last couple

years.

So there is evidence that boomers are sort of leading this pause right now.

But again, they're not young, 60 to 80 years old right now.

And as they are the thing that we're all waiting on in American religious demography right

now.

And when they start dying in large numbers, things are going to move really quickly.

And this whole narrative about revival is going to go away very quickly in the next 10

or 15 years.

What religions are growing?

What religions and denominations are growing the fastest right now?

Yeah, so there's a thing in American evangelicalism called non-denominationalism.

And for those of you who don't live in this evangelical world, these are the churches

you drive by that look like factories or office buildings.

They're called like the journey or the ramp or the bridge or life church.

One of my favorites is called I Heart Church.

That's literally their legal name is I Heart Church.

There's one called enjoy church in St. Louis, I drive by all the time.

Those non-denominational were a rounding error in American Christianity 50 years ago.

Like 3% of Americans were non-denominational 50 years ago.

And now 14% of all Americans are non-denominational.

By the way, that equates to 35 to 40 million Americans.

For comparison, the largest denomination is the Southern Babs Convention, 12 and a half

million.

So non-denoms are probably three times the size of the Southern Babs Convention.

There one third of all Protestants now are non-denominational.

It is the reason that evangelicalism is still 20% of America today, which is the same size

that was 50 years ago, is because of the rise of non-denominationalism.

And there's a couple other small denominations.

The Assemblies of God is like a Pentecostal denomination.

It's grown consistently for the last 50 years.

The Anglican Church North America, the Presbyterian Church USA.

But even like we talked about the Latter-day Saints, right?

Latter-day Saints, most Latter-day Saints today do not live in the United States.

Only 40% of LDS are Americans now.

They're actually seeing a lot more growth in places like Brazil and the Philippines.

So I can probably count on one hand, the number of religious traditions that are growing

significantly in America right now.

But it would take me an hour to describe you all the religious denomination traditions

that are declining.

Talk to me like I'm a reformed Jew who knows nothing about non-denominational evangelicalism.

In part because that's exactly who I am, I want to understand what's special about these

non-denominational churches that explains their unique growth at a moment when so many

other faiths.

In particular, so many other, I'll call them legacy traditional faiths are still declining.

Why are they growing?

I think they're the most grassroots form of religion you could possibly have.

A lot of these churches were literally started by a guy in his basement having a Bible

study with maybe two or three other couples.

The guy might have been a real estate agent, interns broker, construction company guy.

He just started a Bible study and then it grows from eight people to 18 people to 800 people.

It just sort of becomes this organic growth.

A lot of these guys don't have a whole lot of theological training.

A lot of these guys sort of, it just happened to them.

I think it's like in many ways is the evidence of the great reversal I call it an American

society where we usually very top down, very hierarchical, very structured.

If you wanted to be a pastor, you had to go through an ordination process, you had to

get approval of a certain denomination.

They would place you in a congregation even if you didn't want to be there.

They'd put you where they wanted you to be.

This is the absolute opposite of that.

They don't ask permission for anyone to start a church.

They don't get ordinate.

A lot of these guys aren't ordained.

A lot of them have very little or no theological training.

In some ways, I think it's the epitome of the social media internet too.

It's like you can build a following up right online and then it sort of becomes this whole

thing.

These churches are popping up by the thousands all across America.

They actually are methodologically incredibly problematic for people like me because how do

you track these groups when they're, they don't report to anyone.

They don't have national meetings because there is no national denomination.

It's literally an animation of one, one church.

Some of them are multi-site.

They might have 10 or 12 different campuses around a metro area, but the vast majority,

and that's it.

That's their entire locus of control.

Those are the kind of churches that are really taking over because I think people like

the idea of their anti-institutional.

Some of those pastors are proud of the fact that they didn't have to seek permission

to start the church.

They're proud of the fact they had very little theological.

God did this.

I think people like the accountability factor too because when you put a hundred bucks

in the plate, that hundred bucks is decided where it goes by people sitting in that room

right there.

The elders, the deacons, the pastor are all right in front of you and you can talk to

them on any Sunday where if you gave money to the Catholic church, some of that goes to

some diocese in the Vatican and it goes away and we don't know where it goes or even, you

know, Baptist or Methodist, the money goes somewhere else.

And those churches, the accountability structure, the decision making structure are all right

there.

But bureaucracy, we hate bureaucracy especially when it's nameless and faceless.

Guess what?

Nondenoms have almost no bureaucracy.

And so I think that's the attractive factor for them is the accountability is close.

It feels very like renegade-ish, right?

It's like screw what everyone wants us to do.

We're going to start a church because God wants us to.

And to be honest with you, that has been incredibly successful and really changed the trajectory

of American religion.

I think in American society in many ways too.

It's interesting because I would have thought that the resurgence of Christianity would be

a counter-movement to this larger theme of the decline of tradition and the decline of

institutions.

I'd say, well, institutions are declining over here in media, but they're strong over here

in religion because look at the religious revival.

And it sounds like what you're saying is no.

In fact, the same thing that's happening in media where you used to have to start off

with the local newspaper and then become a beat reporter and then become an editor

at the local newspaper and then get pulled into the New York Times and then slowly work

your way up.

But that has been demolished.

And now it's, go online, start a Twitch, start a YouTube, build an audience that is anti-institutional

that can grow to be even larger than people who work at the major newspapers.

That's the familiar story that people tell in media.

And it's interesting that you're telling that story within religion, which I would typically

think of as being the domain of traditional ideas.

And there raises one question, which is, some of these media startups are somewhat, I

don't want to call, they're not exactly personality cults, but they're certainly personality

businesses, right?

People read the New York Times to read the New York Times.

They watch Hassan Piker or whatever Tucker Carlson to watch one individual.

Are these fast growing non-denominational religions?

Are they well understood as personality cults or cults?

Or they better understood as tweaks of Protestantism that catch on because they are seen as grass

root rather than tapping into a 500 year old tradition?

I think many of them are personality driven without a doubt.

And there's this interesting thing that's going to happen in a couple of years because

a lot of these churches were started like the 1990s and 2000s and those pastors are getting

to the age where they don't want to be pastor anymore.

And they're 60s.

How do you hand a church over to someone else when you're the guy who started that church?

Like literally built it from nothing.

And not everyone's there because of you, but a lot of people started coming because

they want to see you and hear you as the pastor.

How do you hand that off to someone else who is half as charismatic as you?

Or 80% of good as speakers you are.

And there's actually really sort of famous examples of this going, there's a church in

Chicago called Willow Creek and they were one of the first non-denominational mega churches

in America just outside Chicago.

And they had a pastor named Bill Hybles.

And Bill Hybles had this five year plan that he's going to retire and he's going to

hand it off to a new generation of pastors.

And actually it all went to plan.

He had two elders.

It was a male and a female.

They handed off, they overgroomed the new pastors of the church.

By the way, a female pastor of a non-denominational church is a big deal because that's not what

evangelicals do.

But he had this whole plan and then it came out that he got involved in some sexual harassment

stuff.

And the first thing fell apart, both new pastors resigned, mostly elderboard resigned

because they were accused of covering up Bill Hybles, you know, sexual improprieties.

And the church is declined 30 or 40% in attendance.

Like that is the weakness of this whole model, by the way.

Denominations will continue to endure because they have structure in place to sort of carry

you over the chasms of uncertainty and problems.

Non-denominationals have no structure.

It's all based on who the pastor is.

And I think a lot of them, you know, I hate to say it, Derek, but you and I are both,

you know, pretty popular on substack.

It's almost a substackification of American religion, right?

You can start your own thing.

You go outside the media ecosystem.

You don't need all the structures and all the things people pay for you.

They don't pay for all the reporters to report.

They were paid for you to report and analyze and have opinions.

That's almost exactly what these non-denominational churches are doing.

You know, you're not here for the methodism or Lutheranism.

You're here for my flavor of American Christianity and the way I preach it and the way we minister

to these people.

And people are drawn to that by the tens of thousands.

I mean, that is really the only major segment of American religion, not just American Christianity.

American religion is growing just like in the media.

You know, substack is one of the only bright spots in the entire, you know, media landscape.

It's the bottom up thing.

It's like build a thousand fans thing.

It's not just happening to media personnel.

It's also happening past or two.

I mean, proofs in the pudding, right?

35, 40 million people.

That's the Catholic Church is only 62 million and there's a good chance there'll be more

non-denominational than America than Catholics in 20 or 30 years.

It's unbelievably successful.

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You've really changed my mind and introduced a new concept to me in the last 5, 10 minutes

because let me try to get this right.

I came into this conversation with a pretty clear frame that the rise of secularism in

America was all about the decline of institutions and the rise of individualism.

But the story that you're telling is that many of the biggest success stories within Christianity

right now in America are about anti-institutional individuals building a broadcast that is

1 to 1 million audience.

It was kind of interesting that the same underlying sociological engine or phenomenon that one

could use to describe the rise of nuns and ONES non-religious believers is the same thing

that is describing or powering the renaissance of Christianity in some parts of America.

It just makes you realize how unbelievably powerful some of these zeitgeists are that

they can explain and power movements that seem in terms of their outcomes to be entirely

opposite.

On the one hand, people becoming less religious.

On the other hand, people becoming more religious.

But it's the same anti-institutional zeitgeist that's powering both.

I think that's really, really interesting.

Well, I was thinking about him while you were talking.

I didn't want to make it all that politics.

But of course, no, what's the Republican party?

It's not a party.

It's a person.

It's a person.

And he ran outside the party.

They don't want me to be the candidate.

They're actively working against my candidacy.

He used that as a badge of honor just like those pastors say, yeah, I don't need to get

ordained.

I don't need permission to start the church.

God wants me to start this church.

You want me to be president.

He was a bottom up, a grassroots president.

And I think that's sort of the great reversal, right?

Like all the power in society now comes from building a following on social media.

And if you build a big enough following, you can literally change the world, whether

it be religion or politics or culture, I think all of us are evidence of that in some way,

shape or form.

And I don't think we fully grasp what that means in terms of like how we operate in society

and who we think power comes from.

I mean, listen, we destroyed all the gatekeepers.

And is that necessarily a good thing?

I would argue that a little bit of gatekeeping here and there is actually what kept us safe.

Like Ivermectin is not the solution to all your problems, guys.

But when you destroy all gatekeepers, it does seem like that.

So I think that's the where we live in right now is almost like not to go too far and

to philosophical stuff, but it's like we are living in a relativist world where no one

has the truth.

It all becomes if you can follow this person or that person.

And I think that reversal, that destroying of the hierarchy and destroying of leadership

and all the structures that we had are leading us into a new era that's going to change everything

about how we think about what authority feels like and looks like and who we listen to

and what the truth is.

And I think American religion, whether it realizes that or not, led that charge by the rise

of these non-denominational.

Anti-authority philosophy.

Powering the revitalization of Christianity as much as it's powering the rise of secularism

is such a strange idea that I never would have made, even considered that sentence plausible

to say out loud before this conversation.

But I really like that idea.

I think it's really counterintuitive and chewy.

I want to talk a little bit about the nuns as you call them because the same way that

to non-Christians, Christianity looks like one big borg, but to Christians they recognize

the riotous diversity inside of Christianity.

Among people looking at non-believers, they think, oh, it's just one big borg of people

who hate Christianity.

But you've done a really good job explaining how there are really four subcategories of non-believers.

And I'd love you to run down those four categories before we talk about the fastest

growing part of the non-believer movement.

Yeah, so we, I got a Templeton grant.

We did a survey of 12,000 non-religious Americans because for those you don't follow this work

closely, you know, for a long time the nuns were just one group.

It was like a monolith.

You were non-religious and we were like, yeah, the nuns, that's it.

And when you're 5% of America, you can be a monolith, like empirically speaking, no one

really cares because there's a lot of people to have diversity there.

But you can't go from 5% to 30% and we still call you the nuns.

Like there's got to be sort of internal categories there.

So we did this Templeton grant 12,000 person survey of non-religious Americans.

And we created this four part typology myself and Tony Jones, my co-author.

One is called S.B.N.Rs.

So spiritual but not religious.

We all know that category.

It's sort of been bouncing around a lot in the literature.

And these are people who, I call them like the Wu-Woo's, you know, I mean, like they,

don't believe in Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha, but they want to know your astrological

sign.

Like that somehow that like has some predictive power.

By the way, those people are so interesting to me because they think like believing in

Jesus is absolutely nonsense.

Like what star sign you were born over changes your entire life trajectory.

Like that makes more sense to them.

So that's S.B.N.Rs.

To make fun of myself just before you continue to keep going.

Oh my gosh.

I think you should have the groups.

Yeah.

I remember in my 20s, I certainly wasn't very religious.

And when I was dating, I believed that there was a lucky pair of socks that I had and

that if I wore those socks, it would be a really good day.

And I realized after months, maybe years of bleeding quite fervently in the concept of

lucky socks, I was like, my theology is that there is no God except a God of socks.

Like the Almighty has no control over anything in the world and there's no point to praying

to him or her except after creating the heavens and the earth and the animals and the humans,

his only domain of care is the degree to which these striped socks lead to an enjoyable

date.

And I was like, it's just so interesting how individual theologies can sometimes make

absolutely no sense when you look at them from 30,000 feet up.

But this is the nature of human belief.

Like a lot of it comes from a place of just an instinct that isn't exactly well planned

before it's articulated.

So anyway, I interrupted your wonderful four part breakdown.

We've talked about the spiritual, but not religious, S, B, and R's.

Keep it going.

What are the other three subcategories?

Yeah.

So there's one that's sort of more methodological than Nino's, Nones, and name only.

And I think this is actually a problem because a lot of these people say they have no religious

affiliation, but then you ask them questions about like religious stuff and they do a bunch

of religious stuff.

And you're like, wait a minute.

Why are you saying you're not religious when you really are?

So actually that's like 25% of the Nones are Ninos.

So we actually think we're doing a bad job of measuring non-religious people.

Like we need to do a better at like making them say their Christians when they actually

are Christians.

Because right now we say Protestant, Catholic, LDS, Orthodox Christian.

A lot of people don't know their Protestant by the way there.

FYI, like a lot of people who think they're Baptist, those non-denum church that we were

just talking about, they don't use the word Protestant.

They don't even use the word religion.

They say we're not a religion where a relationship where a new movement of faith, they don't

use typical Christian language.

So it makes it hard for those people to know what they are on surveys.

So we actually think the Nones are probably smaller than what we think they are.

Just people can't identify properly.

So the first two groups, SBNRs and Ninos, 60% of the Nones are in those two groups.

We think those groups are generally more open to religion because we ask a bunch of questions

about their openness to religion.

The bottom two groups are not at all open to religion.

One we call the DUNs because that's exactly what they are.

I mean, they're as far from religion as you possibly can be like 1% of them believe

in God, less than 1% pray at all, 2% go to church once a year or more.

And then what's wild about this group is we ask people what happens when you die in 77%

of the DUNs say when I die my existence ends.

So they don't believe in anything beyond this.

We ask about ghosts and spirits and devils and angels and every spiritual thing we can

think of and they're like in the 5% to 2% range and believing in that stuff certainly.

There's nothing there.

And by the way, they're the oldest of the four groups.

These are like old atheists.

People born in the boomer atheist in my mind are the DUNs.

So the DUNs are about a third of all DUNs are DUNs and then the last category which is

only 10% but I think it might be the most fascinating category.

We call them zealous atheists.

And the bad described to people for younger people listen this.

If you go on reddit sub, you know, atheist subreddit right now, that's who you're going

to see in the atheist subreddit over and over again.

Are people who are atheist and are angry about it and want you to become an atheist too?

So we ask, you know, we ask all the DUNs, have you tried to convince someone to leave

religion in the last 12 months average, you know, like 5% of DUNs have tried to de-convert

someone among the zealous atheists.

It's a majority of try to convert someone away from religion.

These are the people who are zealous.

I also wanted to call them evangelical atheists at one point because they want to try to convince

you they're wrong.

And by the way of the four groups, the ones that are doing the most well on well-being

scores are the DUNs and the ones who are doing the worst on it are the zealous atheists.

Like they're younger, they're angrier.

It's so interesting because like they're miserable and they want to drag you into their

misery as well by not believing in any of these things.

So there's really two sides of the coin having really nothing to do with religion.

The DUN size the most positive, you know, manifestation, which is I believe in nothing

and it bothers me not at all.

I was going to call them Lose Fair DUNs at one point.

It's like, live and let live, man.

Live your life, do your thing.

Zealous atheists are the opposite of that.

You know, they are not living that live.

It's like no religions, a poison, it's a cancer, it's child abuse.

You should de-convert from religion.

And I am miserable, but I want you to be miserable about this too.

And then the DUNs have just gotten over the whole thing.

And those two groups combined for about 40% of non-religious American.

So it's much more of a nuanced thing than like, oh, all nuns hate religion, all nuns

are atheists, all nuns want nothing to do with faith.

Actually, a significant number of nuns do believe in God or a higher power at some level.

A lot of them say they're spiritual.

A lot of them have some sort of religious practices where they realize they're not.

Very few people are completely, you know, a spiritual and a religious.

It's more of a gradient than an often-on switch.

I think that's what we realize in doing all that work.

That's a wonderful rundown.

I want to circle back to the spiritual but not religious.

You have a really fabulous picture of how they are different from the rest of the non-category.

They are more likely to do yoga.

They're more likely to meditate.

They're more likely to believe in astrology or horoscopes.

They're more likely to use crystals.

They're more likely to use tarot cards.

They're more likely to burn sage at home in their business or use mind-altering substances.

It's interesting to me that there's this category of Americans, and I want to learn more

from you about the demographics of this group, that has almost gone into religion as if

it's a foreign country and harvested certain souvenirs from that country and then brought

it back to the world of secularism.

These are people who practice yoga but have no interest really in understanding the religious

origins of the practice or they meditate, but they are not remotely interested in any

kind of Buddhist version of Nirvana.

Astrology, as you said, is such an interesting phenomenon to practice if you don't believe

in God because you essentially believe there's a God worth praying to, but you believe

that he or she left stars that orbit each other and orbit or move around our sky in

such a way as to divine our futures, which is obviously a funny juxtaposition.

Tell me a little bit about this group.

Who are they?

Are they growing?

What do we misunderstand about them?

I think that people think that religion and spirituality run on different lines.

I think a lot of people perceive that a lot of people who say they're very spiritual,

don't say they're very religious and vice versa, but here's the big misconception.

Among all nuns, 25% said spirituality was very important to them and 25% said it was not

at all important to them.

Among the religious, 61% said spirituality was very important to them and less than 15% said

it was not at all important to them.

This idea that lots and lots of non-religious people are replacing religion with spirituality

is actually not true.

Most people who are non-religious are also non-spiritual at the same time.

SB&Rs are a one manifestation of non-religious and I think Derek, what you were talking about

is this concept that Christian Smith pioneered about 20 years ago, moralistic therapeutic

daism, which is just like God wants me to feel good about things.

I'm going to take this little, like you're lucky socks or astrology or I'll go to mass

once a year on Christmas.

If you pick and choose what kind of theology makes sense for you and you push away whatever

else doesn't make you feel very good about that faith, I think it's what SB&Rs have

done.

They plucked out certain practices from major religious groups and go, I'm going to take

the parts that I like and leave those other parts behind because they don't work for

me.

Not realizing that one of the reasons that religion has been so successful for all of human history

is because it has to do all, I'll give you a story.

There's this thing that about 15, 10, 15 years ago, there's a huge media blitz around

this idea called Sunday Assembly.

And it had this great headline, Church Without God, because it was a bunch of atheists who

got together on Sunday morning and had coffee and donuts and then had a service where

they sang pop songs and heard like a Ted style talk.

And they had community that way.

And it was like the biggest story, oh, we're remaking American religion without God.

Most of those Sunday assemblies folded because they only wanted to take the parts of religion

they liked and left the other parts behind.

For instance, they were afraid to ask for money because they felt, they thought it felt

kind of scummy and scammy.

And so a lot of them didn't have the money to pay the musicians to pay the rental

hall to set the whole thing up.

It's like, you can't just like pick and choose what parts of religion make sense to you

and then leave the others behind.

It's a cohes, it's like a three-legged stool, right?

You've got to have all three legs for it to continue to endure.

And if you pull one leg out, it's going to fall apart.

I think that's what a lot of people are doing with religion right now.

It's like walking down the buffet line of American religion, like picking one piece here

and putting it on their plate and one piece here putting it on their plate.

And that, that has no legs to it.

That doesn't endure.

And so these espionage are interesting, I think, but they're also conceptually really

difficult, by the way, because they're not spiritual in the same ways, nor are they

not religious in the same ways.

So you can't put a blanket on all these espionage because some are super astrology, some are

super meditations, some are super both, some just say they're very spiritual, but they

do nothing about it.

So this is what makes this job really hard, measuring religion is really hard, measuring

spirituality is even more difficult than that.

And I think that's what we're going to struggle with going forward is how to make this amorphous

group into a more tangible group.

And we don't have the tools to do that.

I don't think at least at a massive scale.

That answer really sprung a lot of thoughts.

Let me try to organize these as well as I can.

One thing I hear you describing in the distinction between traditional religion and the church

without God movements that failed is a difference that some psychologists describe as thick versus

thin culture.

That some cultures have a thickness.

There's something keeping it together that isn't just proximity or routine.

There was a philosopher who came on the show, C. T. Nguyen, who said that games have both

a goal and a purpose.

If you play settlers of Catan, the goal is to win.

The purpose is to have fun.

And church with God has, I believe, both a goal and a purpose, a strong goal and purpose.

You're there to be with other people, but you're also there to worship a higher power

who cares for you and controls the universe.

Whereas if you just join a book club, it's a bit of a thinner culture because there

is no God equivalent.

There's just, I either like the book or I don't.

And other organizations that sometimes, quote unquote, do the work of church that bring

together a community often have excuses, so to speak, for bringing people together.

And our thinner than we are part of a tribe or a community that has a loving God that

we're trying to build a relationship with.

It's a little more ad hoc.

It's just like we bowl.

We like bowling.

If you're free on Thursday, we're going to bowl.

We love reading non-fiction books and discussing them.

If you liked the last book we read on Marxism, you're going to love it.

If you don't like Marxism, you might want to skip this round.

And so there's a distinction, I think, between some of the communities that are, quote,

unquote, doing the work of church and church itself.

And that leads to a second thought, which is that I'm very interested in this idea that,

you know, I think some people say, if you're not God off the pedestal that creates a vacuum

for spirituality and that vacuum has to be filled with something.

And you're saying no.

In fact, what we see in the data is that in many cases, that vacuum is filled with more

vacuum.

The people who sometimes are least likely to go to church are the most likely to feel

somewhat empty in their lives.

This is one way that you summarized it.

I believe in one of your essays.

You said dropping out begets dropping out, dropping out of religion leads to, and here

I'm paraphrasing a little bit, dropping out of the rest of life.

And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about this phenomenon where a lot of the

people, least likely to be attached to church or attached to a belief system, aren't necessarily

replacing church with yoga.

They're replacing church with nothing.

And that's the real problem here.

Yeah, I think this, this might be the most worrisome trend.

I see in all the data from a macro level sense.

And religion for me is the keyhole to understanding like attachment and being part of things.

But what we see over and out.

So the keyhole for me was there's a group called nothing in particular that Pew uses

in their surveys.

So you know, you get like, you get 12 options for what your present religion is.

You get, you know, a Protestant Catholic Muslim Jewish, you know, Buddhist, all those.

The last three are atheist, agnostic and nothing in particular.

And so 20% of Americans now say their religion is nothing in particular.

And if you compare nothing in particular to atheists on things like education, atheists

are twice as likely to have a four year college degree as nothing in particular.

One third of nothing in particular, people make $50,000 a year or less and have a high

school diploma or less.

It's only 11% of atheists.

Like this group is struggling economically.

Socioeconomic status is the lowest of any religious group.

They're also the least likely group to participate in politics, whether that be putting up a yard

sign going to a political meeting.

They are struggling in every possible way because I think in many ways they've dropped out

of the social fabric that sort of holds American society up.

And they don't have any rungs to climb up to move up that social ladder.

And here's what people don't understand about how a religion works in America.

The people that are the most likely to go to a house of worship this weekend are people

with graduate degrees.

The people that leads likely are those with a high school diploma or less.

I have never seen a single data source or the line between those two things is downward.

Sometimes it's flat, but many times it's positive.

More education leads to more participation in everything in American life.

I want to make that point clear.

It's not just religion.

It's also politics.

It's also culture.

It's also society.

And if you think about the things that religion does that are sort of invisible to the average

person, it gives you the opportunity to move up in life because you can build a network

of people who run businesses, who are managers, who can get your foot in the door at a new

company or new corporation, where if you're a nothing in particular who dropped out of

everything, you're putting your resume in a stack with a thousand other resumes and

no one knows who you are.

So I think in many ways, this dropping out phenomenon actually makes their lives demonstrably

worse in ways that they don't see and feel and know.

And religious people are sort of doing well because they've built this social network

that they don't, that is not fully visible to them, but is there for them and their

lives to sort of support them through their darkest, most difficult times.

They lose a job when they lose a spouse when they're going through depression or anxiety,

those kind of social organizations or what carry them through.

I think it's creating this sort of like bifurcation in American society between the

halves and the half-nots and the halves are getting a lot better, socially, economically,

politically, culturally, and the half-nots are doing worse.

And what's even scarier, Derek, is among young people, 18 to 20 years old, the most popular

response option of what your present religion is is nothing in particular.

One third of 18 to 20 years old say they're nothing in particular.

And it's like you're setting yourself up for failure as you move into adulthood because

you don't have the social networks that your parents and grandparents had to help them

get through these difficult spots and like, what are you going to rely on?

The answer for many of them is they're going to watch Twitch and YouTube and they're not

going to get tick-tock and they're not going to get out in the world and try to make it

better because they have no way to do that because they have no social connection.

You said in that answer that religion leads to, and then the thing you were alluding to

was happiness and social connection.

And I want to interrogate that in just a bit.

But first, I want to strengthen your argument that there is something, or seems to be something

special about religion, especially for young people.

You have this amazing graph that I can easily describe for those who are not watching,

that looks at the difference in the share of Americans who say they're very happy, not

to tapy, very happy between Christians and non-religious people.

In the 1940s, that gap is 1%.

Christians are just 1% more likely to say they're very happy.

The non-religious people.

For people born in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, it's more like about a 5 percentage point gap between

Christians over non-Christians.

Since the 1980s, the decade I was born and up to the 2000s, the decade that Gen Z was

born, the gap looks more like overall 10 percentage points.

So one way you could summarize this very, I think, both accurately and pithily, is to say

say that the happiness benefit of religion seems to have doubled between looking at boomers

and looking at millennials and Gen Z. Why do you think that is?

Well, I mean, at first I do think methodologically a lot of people say, no, that's problematic

right?

Because happier people tend to be more religious.

Religious people aren't happy.

You know, like the causal arrow goes the other way.

And we're going to talk about the causation correlation thing in a bit.

I'm interested in this generational shift.

Yeah.

Why does it seem like, like, let's pull the Jonathan Hyde argument into this.

In a world where young people are more miserable than they used to be, more sad, more anxious,

more depressed, it seems like the benefit of religion has grown, or at least to be very

careful.

The association with religion has grown in terms of conferring this happiness benefit.

Why do we think we'd see this change over time?

I think it's part, it's also tied up with liberalism versus conservatism.

And no one wants to have this conversation, by the way, but liberals are not as happy

as conservatives.

Like, you can cut the data however you want.

You can control for whatever you want.

You can do whatever fancy math you want.

Those are happier than liberal people are.

And I think part of it is, like, this idea that I hear all the time online, especially

in the political world is we live in the worst timeline possible and everything is catastrophized.

Like, the polar ice caps are melting and so security is going to go bankrupt and we're

being led by a fascist who's going to destroy American democracy.

Like, how many times, especially now, like, you and I both kind of came of age during the

Obama ascendance and Obama was a hopeful politician.

He was very good about instilling this idea in us that like democracy could be good and

society can be good and American could be a beacon of light and hope for the rest of

the world.

Think about the politicians who have run for election.

How many of them are truly inspirational to us?

The answer is not very many to be honest with you.

You know where I hear the most inspirational stuff?

Is it church?

You know, like, that's where I get inspired to feel positive about things.

It helps reorient myself toward the positive things in life.

And whenever I give a talk, the last question I was going to ask,

is Brian, where's your hope?

And for me, it always does come back to faith at some level.

So if you don't have that, right?

If you don't have that, you know, I have hope because I know how the story ends and this

is not it.

Or I have hope that, you know, the Jesus death and resurrection saved me from my sins.

Or, you know, like the hope that religion provides, if you don't have that, where does your

hope come from?

The Donald Trump presidency is not going to destroy America.

Like, I just, I wonder where the optimism comes from in a world without, I'm a, I'm

a person of faith.

I was a pastor for almost 20 years.

I see the world through a Christian worldview.

I think about the world in those terms.

I don't think I would be as hopeful a person if I did not have that well of optimism,

kind of ingrained in me as a child.

So when it all comes back to politics, there is no hope in politics, period, end of discussion.

It is not redemptive.

It is not salvific.

It is going to disappoint you more than it's ever going to inspire you.

And I think a lot of young people who are non-religious are also very politically liberal

and think that's where their hope lies.

And it does not lie in those things.

And by the way, this also leads the fertility gap, the marriage gap, like all these other

things.

By the way, Mary people are happier than unmarried people.

People with children happier than people who don't have children.

Like that is not conservative talking points.

That's just what the data says.

And at some point, we've got to say that the true thing in the data over and over again,

which is there are certain things that tend to make people happier.

And these are those things.

Being religious, having kids, getting married, having an education, all those things make

people happier.

And by the way, all those things are correlated with each other, like in this causal matrix.

Being more religious means you're more likely to be married and more likely to have kids.

You're more likely to have social trust.

If you're more likely to have social trust, you're more likely to be religious.

You're more likely to go to college.

All these things are tangled up in this web of things that generate positivity.

And if you're not in that web of causality, it feels like you're going to struggle on

these other metrics like negative happiness.

I agree with everything you just said.

There's one more ingredient that I want to throw in there.

It is true, absolutely, that if you look at the data, married people are happier.

People who are religious or go to temple or church are happier.

It's also the case that people who have more money are happier.

And income correlates with education.

And sometimes those are proxies that you can look at side by side.

But I think this is important because this is a cycle that flows two ways.

People who are educated and therefore on the higher end of the income bracket

are more likely to get married.

So not only do they have financial security, they also have relationship security.

And that is conferring of happiness or maybe it's a kind of vaccine against misery.

It is also the case as I believe the sociologist Catherine Eden had some research on this

the 1990s or early 2000s that men who were religious or went to church and then get divorced

often lose their associations with the church because it was the woman in the relationship

that was in charge of the social calendar, including, hey honey, let's go to church on Sunday,

which meant that the divorce precipitated the disengagement with religion rather than

religion being the thing that dictated the relationship in the first place.

So rather than see these things as a kind of clean domino effect, where it's like first

domino, believe in God, second domino, get married, third domino, make money, fourth

domino, be happy.

And I'm not suggesting that you're describing something as linearly simplistic as that.

But from the way I think about it is rather than this really clean domino effect that

starts with the domino of religion, it's more like you said there's a stool metaphor

that we can employ here.

Is this complex storm, cycle of factors that to me keeps touching back on social connection?

What is marriage?

It's a social connection.

What is a religious congregation?

It's social connections.

What is an enormous difference that we observe in the data between people with means with

money and people without means with money?

One thing that people with means can do is afford the kind of experiences that are

likely to protect social connections rather than stay inside and do a lot of things that

are really cheap on your phone and never go outside, lack of social connection.

So to me, and this is talking about a pastor singing from his own hymnol, anisoscial

century, to me it all comes back to the fact that people need people.

And we have a handful of institutions, marriage and religion that are very good at keeping

people attached to people and folks who disengage from religion and marriage.

It's not that they're doomed to misery.

It's just that man, there's a lot that you have to build on your own without the assistance

of social institutions that are really, really good at keeping you connected to community.

If you don't have these things, you have to build it on your own and that's just really

damn hard to do.

So that was like much more of a sermon than it was a question, but I guess I wonder,

you were a pastor for several decades.

So perhaps you can appreciate.

Why don't you just sermon back to me?

Like how do you think about this idea that ultimately, like the, the ultimate ingredient

here?

Sure, maybe it's God, but also I think it's just, it's just other people.

So there was this tweet a couple of years ago, the guy tweeted, I wish there's a place

to like hang out that like wasn't expensive to hang out.

There's a no alcohol there.

We just like make friends.

I go, oh, you're going to hate my answer to this question.

But there's probably one less than a mile from you right now that we've absolutely

loved to have you show up and be part and all the comments like, no, not like that.

You know, like that's, that's the problem is like people are waiting for like this perfect

social organization thing to go to to like fulfill all their loneliness needs and make

connections and maybe find a partner.

Like your grandparents knew how to do this inherently and like we've forgotten how to

do it.

You know, like how to just go and be social.

I speak to second groups all the time and the question they asked me, which is sort of

awkward.

You think that our way of living is defective or like inferior to yours.

I go, I don't want to speak about philosophical theological thing because I have my own theology

and you have yours.

I'm not going to convince you that I'm right and vice versa.

What I can tell you this, unless and until you create the social organizations that religion

has provided for American society for the last 250 years, I'm going to think the way

that you're living is not as good as what in my way, not just Christianity, but but Judaism

or Islam or or Latter-day Saints or whatever it is.

The community of people meeting together on a regular basis to share their lives with

each other, to create a mutual aid society for each other and also to serve people in

the community is an objectively good thing.

And I think this is something I think people think that religion is all about belief and

it certainly is for lots of people about belief to some level.

But lots and lots of people go to a house of worship on a weekly basis and believe half

of it or a third of it or none of it because they like the social connections they get for

being part of that or it works on two levels.

Right.

I think religion always has a vertical component.

You and God, your understanding of God and higher things, but it has a very strong horizontal

component too.

Like you just hanging out with other people.

It's, you know, Ronnie Stark talked about during the black plague, you know, people were

dying by the, a third of Europe died during the black plague, right?

But the rate of death among Christian communities was lower.

And in a lot of Christians read that, I think, oh, it's because God was protecting Christians

from the black plague.

Now the answer is that Christians did not leave other Christians behind when they got

sick with the black plague.

They tried to take care of them and feed them and nourish them.

And by doing that, actually lowered their death rate.

So you know, like it's not magic.

It's science, right?

Like just taking care of other people is in some ways, mirac, a miraculous thing to do.

And that is how religion operates.

You don't have to believe in any woo, woo, any spiritual, any resurrection, any miracles

to understand the miracle of what it means to hang out in community with people for a long

period of time who want to help you and you want to help them.

That in many ways is magical and spiritual and other worldly.

We've forgotten that part of the whole thing.

Like there is a value in just showing up and being part and building a community

of other people.

And if you believe in none of it, it won't matter because those other people believe

in you and you believe in them.

And you're, I really do believe there.

The average person goes to an average house of worship on a regular basis for the next

year or two.

Their lives will be demonstrably better in multiple dimensions in ways they won't even understand

after a year or two or three because of their being part of that community of people.

That's a really beautiful thought and one thing I'm going to take from that is that the

strength of the vertical leads to the strength of the horizontal.

It's strong beliefs in a higher purpose that lead to strong connections with other people.

And that's true way outside of religion.

Like why does everyone make their best friends from school or work or their children's

school?

Because they are obligated by the law to send their children to school or to attend school.

That's a very thick connection.

The strength of the vertical, which is the letter of the law, predicts the strength of

the horizontal.

It is the law of mandatory education that leads to many people making their best friends

from school.

This also I think might explain the difficulty of forming church without God.

If the vertical is going to be weak, the horizontal is going to be weak.

If you have a book club of lots of people who don't really like the same novels, you're

going to find that book club doesn't last for very long because the strength of the

vertical isn't strong enough to prove the strength of the horizontal.

Whereas with church, if you have a lot of people who at least somewhat believe in a higher

power and believe in the strictures of Catholicism or Protestantism or some non-denominational

thing that sounds like some band that thrive, praise, enhance.

Well again, it's the strength of the vertical that we'll explain the strength of the horizontal.

As I'm working on these ideas and trying to build out my theories of the anti-social

century, I think this is something that I really want to remember and hold on to, which

is I talk to people who are trying to plan communities and revitalize community.

This is an idea I'm going to remember that if you don't have that central spine of

purpose, this is not going to last.

If your only purpose is just let's get together, that's not going to last.

You need that higher purpose, you need that vertical spine in order to build a truly strong

horizontal community.

I love that thought.

Ryan Burge, this was really educational for me.

Thank you so much.

It's been an absolute pleasure, Derek.

Thanks for having me on.