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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody. We're thrilled to announce that Restore tickets are on sale now. And we're so excited to tell you about the new format for this year. We're calling it Restore Connect. It's designed to make your experience more interactive, more embodied and more communal than ever before. This year it's September 24th through 26th at the Nordisk center at UVU. We'll have an opening social on Thursday evening with two days of smaller, more intimate sessions so that you can choose the topics that are most important to you and have lots of time to connect with other attendees. And the presenters space is limited, so you're going to want to get your tickets fast. You can go to faithmatters.org restore today. We can't wait to see you in September. Hey everybody. This is Aubrey Chavez from Faith Matters. Today we're joined by Ryan Burge, one of the country's leading data analysts on religion and politics. And he's talking about his new book, the Vanishing how the Hollowing out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us. For decades, we've measured the decline of American religion by empty pews and shrinking membership roles. But Ryan explains that as moderate congregations disappear, we're also losing one of the last places where people with real differences in politics, class, age, education and conviction learn how to love each other as neighbors. At a time when it's easier than ever to sort ourselves into smaller and more like minded communities, church has remained one of the few places where belonging asks something of us. It asks us to listen to worship beside people we didn't choose. And Ryan argues that this kind of community forms the habits of empathy, compromise and civic trust that democracy itself depends on. Ryan brings both data and his own lived experience to this conversation. Conversation. Having spent years as a pastor watching his own congregation slowly disappear. It's a challenging discussion about what church is really for, what we're losing, and why. He believes that showing up to worship with people you may disagree with politically might be one of the most countercultural and necessary things that we can do for our country right now. And with that, here's Ryan Burge.
- [01:56]
B
Well, Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this with us. We are fans of your work and we've been really excited to dig in. So thanks for being here.
- [02:05]
C
Well, you're welcome. Or I'm sorry, or whatever makes most sense for you.
- [02:09]
A
Right.
- [02:09]
C
I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [02:12]
B
So I was thinking, I think that what is fascinating to me about your work is that you're approaching a conversation that we're really familiar with from a totally different angle, like you're bringing the data to a really heart centered conversation that we've been having for seven years on the podcast, which is, you know, what do you do when you're longing to belong and you're longing to be authentic? Feel completely at odds and you make a really powerful case that that tension is healthy for our communities and for our souls and you have some numbers to back that up. And so I think that's why it lit me up and it feels like really good medicine for the moment. So. But I'd love, before we get into the numbers and the interesting data that you have, I'd love for you to just tell us a little bit about your own story and your own experience with a congregation that was once vibrant and healthy and really just withered.
- [03:06]
C
Yeah, that's. I never really felt like, had the Isaiah 6 called the ministry, you know, like, here I am, Lord send me. I kind of kept falling into ministry because people kept calling me and I'm really bad at saying no to things which I'm working on, but I'm still not very good at. And so I started pastoring. I was 20, I was a youth pastor. Supposed to be a three month, like summer internship. You know, just like take the kids to camp and like go play laser tag and do a lock in and you know, go back to college. That turned into three years and then I quit that to go be a pastor, a senior pastor of a little church in Mary and only for about 30 people. When I was 23 years old, I had one suit and they wanted me to preach in a suit because they were old Baptists and that's what you do. And then about four weeks in, this guy comes up to me and goes, ryan, how many suits do you own? I go, one. And he goes, here's a hundred bucks, go buy another suit.
- [03:57]
D
So I had two suits.
- [03:59]
C
And then when I left that church, I was just going to do pulpit supply and then work at SIU Carbondale where I was in the graduate school program. And church calls me up, says, will you preach on Sunday? I say, sure, you know, next Sunday preach? I said, sure. Then they call me up a couple weeks later and goes, hey, you want to be our interim pastor? And I was like, I mean, not really, but I guess. And that turned into 17 and a half years. So I actually ended up being the longest serving pastor in the history of First Baptist Church at Mount Vernon, Illinois. When I got there, we had 50 on a good Sunday. Now this church Used to be huge, right. Like, when the building was built in 1960s, had 300 people, and the sanctuary was full sanctuary, huge sanctuary. And then when I got there, it was 50. So I already felt, you know, bad ish at 50. And then just over time, it went from 50 to 30. And then in the last couple years, we would have 10 or 15 on a good Sunday. And so my church decided to close down. So we closed down in July of 2024, which was close to our anniversary. We were established in 1868. So a church that had been around for, like, 155 years closed. I preached the last sermon of that church. So that's. That's sort of the most formative, sort of spiritual, you know, experience of my life. And I think it shapes a lot of how. And by the way, when I was doing this, I was going to grad school, get a PhD, getting a job writing for academic audiences, writing for the public, writing books. So a lot of, like, what I write comes out of my own experience and my own background of experiencing the pulpit on Sunday with a pew that was getting lighter and lighter, you know, emptier and emptier sanctuary. So that. That deeply impacted how I think about my work and my role and my job and my calling and all those things. And I think that. That, you know, I have this weird, you know, these two things in my life. I have this data background, this academic background, but also this very pastoral background, too. And I think that's what gives me sort of my. My unique voice that I feel like I have to share. That's like my calling, like, not to get too spiritual, but, like, that's my calling is to use these two platforms that I stand on and then help people understand the intersection of those two things.
- [05:51]
D
Yeah. Well, maybe you could share with us to what extent, you know, your experience in your. In your church is an archetype for what's happening in the broader religious landscape in America. Is that. I mean, in the end, you're the guy to talk to about this. You've got the. You've got the numbers.
- [06:05]
C
Is that.
- [06:05]
D
Is that. Is that a representative story?
- [06:08]
C
Oh, I think it's. If it's not right now, it's going to be certainly in the next 10 or 15 years. Like, I think we're sort of the leading edge story of what's been going on in our church. Closed earlier than others, but there's going to be tens of thousands that are going to be in the exact same boat that we're in over the next 20, 25 years. You know, American religions declined dramatically by any objective metric, that's true. Whether it be affiliation, 5% of Americans were non religious in 1991. Today it's 30%. Among Gen Z, it's closer to 45%. Share of Americans who never attend church is now north of 40%. It used to be less than 10% share. Americans who believe in God, without doubt, still relatively high, but it's dropped about 15 points over time. So by any metric, America is less religious. Add that to the fact that I was in a community in a county in rural southern Illinois that's the same size today as it was in 1950. So we're not in a growing sort of like population increasing community. We're part of a mainline tradition. And the main line has, you know, the mainlines, Episcopalians, United Methodist, American Baptist, what we were. And you know, that that tradition has been declining for 75 years now. So if you sort of like look at all these headwinds, like, okay, first off, population's not increasing, tough. Secondly, Christianity is declining, tough. Thirdly, mainline Protestant Christianity particularly is doing poorly. So it's like I give this whole talk, you know, like where I talk about to pastors, what are your headwinds and what are your tailwinds? What's the macro level stuff impacting your situation that you probably don't see or don't think about, but it's making your job harder or easier depending on where you are geographically. And if you look at my situation, it was about as bad as it gets in terms of the things that we were facing. And guess what? There are thousands and thousands of churches that are in that exact same spot right now. And they're sort of like holding back the current, you know, as it's lapping up against the walls of the building. And guess what? It's going to come over the walls. And when it starts happening, you. The thing that made it easier for us was we ran out of money. You know, that makes the decision external, not internal. We didn't have to like voluntarily choose to like throw our hands up and walk away. It was like no, man. We got six months of funds left even after giving our building away, by the way. So we weren't even paying like utilities and maintenance and upkeep. So for us, that actually was a blessing in disguise. What I worry about is those churches have huge endowments. You know, 1 million, $2 million were given to them by people in the 1930s. And now it's not money that makes the decision to Close down. It's like, no, we have to choose to close down. But guess what, that's going to happen on a massive scale in the next 20 or 30 years. And a lot of these little churches across, dotted all across the Midwest are going to close down and they're going to sit empty and it's actually going to be a huge logistical problem. Not just a spiritual problem, but a logistical problem for all these communities. How do you deal with this? We don't have an answer. And no one's really thinking about this either.
- [08:48]
B
Yeah, what when you look back over the last 50 or 60 years, are there? What are some of the bigger inflection points in the US you think that it's sort of like got the ball rolling.
- [09:00]
C
The 1990s are like it, man. Like if we're going to look back. Yeah, like so to put myself in this story, I was born 1982 and I grew up a Southern Baptist in rural Illinois in the 1990s. Evangelicalism hit its numerical peak in 1993 in the United States. So like I grew up in the center of the evangelical, like the peak of the peak of evangelicalism. And it was like everywhere, like if you grew up in my world, like you could, you could, you could boundary yourself with evangelicalism. On every side there are evangelical T shirts. Even the CCM industry, contemporary Christian music industry was humongous in the 1990s. There were music festivals all over the country. 20, 30,000 evangelical kids would show up. We had evangelical evangelical bookstores. You know, it was just a whole thing. But at the same time that was happening, the nuns started rising. They went from 5% of America to, to, by the end of the 1990s, they were from 5% of America to about 12% of America in just one decade. And that was the thing that rolled the snowball down the hill. That really is lead in among young people. The share of young people 18 to 35 who identify as Christians dropped 12 points between 1991 and 1998. So just in a seven year window, a lot of young people left Christianity and those people had kids and raised them without faith either. And so that's sort of what we're living in, the perpetuation of what happened in the 1990s. The main line was collapsing by that point. It dropped from 30% of America in 1975 to 20% of America by 1988. So there's all these like, factors that sort of like converged in the, in the 1990s. And we're sort of just living in the, that's the big bang. And like all those pieces are just like going out from the trend lines that were established in the 1990s. And that's really, if I could point to any moment, that's what I would say is like that, that 10 year window of time is, is the most informative, indicative and transformative, you know, period we've seen in literally the last 75 years of American religious history.
- [10:53]
D
So at that point in the 90s, if mainline is sort of like falling, is evangelicalism rising at the same time or are they, are they sort of like falling together already?
- [11:02]
C
See, it's hard to. That's the hard part is like, how does it. Because like so I mean demography is a zero sum game, right? So like it all adds up to 100%. If one group goes down five, someone else has to pick up the five. It does. The data does point to the fact that the evangelicals were rising as the main line was falling. But you can't, by the way data works is you can't ask people, hey, what were you before you were this? So it's like we can see one line go up and one line go down, but you can't causally say like that thing led to that thing because other groups were rising during that time. You know, Muslims and Hindus and Jews and you know, all these Catholics. There's all your other groups, right? So like, it does seem like that's the most convenient answer. And I'm always like one to reject the most convenient answer because it's like too simple. But it does seem like that the mainline collapsing led to the evangelical increase. But then the second question we have to ask is then why did evangelicals and go from 30% of America, 1993, back to 22% 10 years later? Because the main line didn't go up and the nuns didn't go up enough either. So there's like all these sort of like this is what frustrates people who talk to me. We can't peek behind the curtain of like you're. We know what you are now. We don't know how you got there though. And we're working on this. But that's a problem that we face and there's no easy answer to honestly.
- [12:18]
B
Okay, so I want to. If I think about the 90s, like those years you're talking about, what changed in my life is that all of a sudden we have the Internet like that. I mean, the world changed overnight in what, like 95 to 9. What year?
- [12:35]
C
Yeah, like the mid-1990s. I actually have a graph of one of my books. It's like straight up line, Internet adoption. It's unbelievable how fast that happened.
- [12:42]
D
Yeah.
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B
So like, is this a correction? Was it just like all of a sudden people have access to this whole world of information and like they're, they're experiencing some more doubt and does that ripple into less activity on a Sunday? Like, like, that's. I think, I think I'm like, afraid that's the answer.
- [13:01]
C
I think, okay, so this could be like a 45 minute dissertation. Because I think about this a lot. First thing I'll say is Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone, the Class Revival, American Community, which everyone sort of heard of. It's like the seminal work in political science. And basically this argument in a nutshell is that we stop joining stuff like the bowling leagues, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Elks moves, VFW Legion, like everything social we stopped doing. And he blames it on cable television, by the way, because his book was written using Data from the 1990s. Because he's like, well, then we could go home and watch 35 channels. I was like, well, that's cute because now we can watch 35 million channels. But the point I want to make with that though is we were already socially atomizing before the Internet came around. You know what I mean? So, like, to me, this is something I, I wish more people would think about and write about is why is the natural inclination for human beings living in, in the United States to not socialize? And, and technology made that easier, of course, but we were already heading that direction. We had black and white TV in the 1960s, so like, make that make sense to me. So like, that's why, like, the Internet to me is like just an accelerant for sort of like an innate trend that was already going on in American society. I mean, I, I'm not a huge fan of social media. I use it all the time, but I hate it because you have to, like, in the world we live in. But I don't think we can blame all this on Zuckerberg. Like, I think we can blame it on, you know, like NBC and cbs. Right? Like, I think it's part of their fault too. But can we even blame on all those people? Because why are we naturally inclined to not go be social? You know, why is that not the natural state of man? And now it's just become easier and easier over time. So the Internet, let's talk about that just a minute. The Internet did a couple things, I think are really important when it comes to how we measure religion. One is it allowed people to go figure out why their religion was wrong in a way that was so much easier, you know, than it was even 20 years. You had to go to the, the library and go to the D decimal and the card catalog and you know, like I tell, I tell my students about this and they look at me like, are you like a dinosaur, my dude? Like, what is a card catalog? And I'm like, it's this big wooden box with cards in it. And you flip through and you had to go to the library to check out a book. You had to read the whole stupid book, 250 pages to find out. You know, now you can Google and you can find a really well done, really well researched YouTube video and like five things wrong with evangelicalism or six things that are great about Judaism or whatever. So that's part of it. The other part of it though is it allowed people to find community in a more anonymous way. So now I, I'm sure there's a lot of atheists living like in the south in, you know, like in the 1960s who would never tell a soul they didn't believe in God. They went to church every Sunday because that's what you did. But then you can go online and Google Atheists of Alabama and find a Facebook group and a subreddit in a community of people. So now when the survey taker comes to your house and ask you what your present religion is, you go, I'm actually an atheist because I know people like me at the same time. So I think it had like this multi layered effect on like how religion changes. I think some of it actually just revealed what was already existing in American society and we were just afraid to say it. And so now it became more, more surfaced as opposed to actually changing minds. It just revealed what we already were.
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D
Yeah, okay.
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B
Yeah.
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D
I think the, the conversation so far, at least as I've taken it, is it's resting on this assumption, you know, that, and it could be a data backed assumption obviously that there is falling attendance and falling religiosity and falling, you know, levels of faith, you know, society wide, at least, you know, at least in the US And I think I, I like adopted this, this viewpoint like qualitatively on a trip we went on in 2022 where we kind of like we're in the east coast for a while and went to these churches and then we went to the UK and went to these churches and it was not uncommon. I remember One specifically, I think it was a, it was Presbyterian in Massachusetts. There were like seven or eight people there. I was like, oh, whoa. Like this is, this is really not well attended. And. And then we went to another one in the uk, an Anglican church and same thing. And it's beautiful old church. You know, I was like, I felt so honored to be there. And it was dozen, it was a dozen people. And so I like that, you know, what's that?
- [17:06]
B
All with white, White hair.
- [17:08]
D
Yes, yes. And the attendees. Yes, you're right. Were for the most part very elderly. And. And yet I would say in the last like year or two, there's this sort of like counter narrative that I've, I've seen like the New York Times, I think, ran an article in November about Eastern Orthodoxy and how it, like they're seeing a surge in convert. They ran another article in March about Catholicism. And I think there is a general idea that's somewhat mixed in with these other societal trends, you know, potentially around masculinity, et cetera, that are, that are sort of pointing to, oh, there is a religious revivalism happening. Are you seeing that in the data or do the nuns continue to rise?
- [17:45]
C
Yeah, that's, I mean, to me, that's the question I get asked all the time, every day. You know, I hear there's a revival. The vibes are changing. And like, I can't measure vibes first off. I don't know. You measure vibes. Like, what is that? Like the fe. I got the feels, you know, the feels tell me that, like, religions come. And I think the reason you have that, that vibe is because religion has been collapsing for 30 years now, and it's collapsing less quickly. So it feels like revival, you know, I mean, it's like compared to what? You know, we had unbelievably rapid secularization in this country. Let's be clear about that. Mathematically speaking, we went from 5% nuns in 1991 to 30 nuns by 2020. It's like in a 30 year window time, a quarter of Americans left religion. Like, that's insane. Like, you don't see change that fast, demographically speaking. And now that the fact that the change has slowed down or maybe even stopped feels like revival when it's not. I mean, the data says, in multiple data sources point to this. The, the nuns have plateaued probably right around 30% of America. The share of Christians has plateaued around 63%, sort of flatline. So we were like, we're in a stasis period. That's really what is like the last five years is sort of like, I don't know what's happening, but here's what I know is going to happen, mathematically speaking, which is that younger generations are less religious than older generations. That's just empirically the case. You know, boomers are about 18% non religious. Gen Z is like 42% millennials around 40% non religious. So guess what's going to happen? Silent generation folks are old, 80, and above now. They're almost all going to be gone in 10 years. Boomers are going to start dying en masse in the next 10, 15 years, because they're 1946, 1964, so they're 60 to 80 years old. And guess who's going to replace them in surveys? Gen Z. And whatever comes after Gen Z. And how do you replace 18% with 40%, 42%? The aggregate number has to rise from here. We're sort of in a lull because the boomers are hanging on. Like, demographically speaking, that's what's happening. And when those boomers die, then they're going to. Unless Alpha is just insanely religious or Gen Z finds faith in a massive way. Like, they would have to go from like 40 nuns to 20 nuns, which would be the biggest religious rival we've ever seen in modern America. And that would, by the way, just to keep the number flat. So, like, you know, mathematically speaking, that number, it's gonna. It went up and up and up and then leveled off. I don't know how long it's gonna level off. I would say probably the next five years. Maybe it won't go up that much. But then as soon as those boomers start dying, that number starts shooting right back up and goes to 40%, probably in 25 or 30 years, because the boomers are out of the. Out of the sample.
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B
Do we have data? I mean, how far back does this data go? Like, has anything like this happened before? Could this be a pendulum?
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C
I. So this is one of those things, like, what do we not know? The answer is a lot. We don't have any good polling data about religion prior to 1972. Okay, so we can look back a little bit and ask people, like, what religion were you raised in? And that can allow us to kind of peek back into the early 1900s, but that also is, like, requiring them to remember how they were asking people in 1972 what their religion was in 1885. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, you're like, I don't know if you're right or not. Okay, but we, you know, the awakenings, the first Great Awakening, second Great Awakening happened, you know, pre revolution and post revolution. We don't actually don't know statistically speaking, like how big those revivals were in like butts and seats numbers. So the answer is no. If that happened, there'd be no precedent, empirically speaking. Like, I've never looked at a data set from America or any other country where religiosity goes up like in a noticeable demonstrable way. So I was, People tell people, I would love to see that just from a pure like scientific standpoint to try to understand it. But we have no frame of reference. There's no comparison case for what that would look like.
- [21:24]
D
That makes sense. I, I want to, I mean, I think we want to spend a lot of time, a lot of time in this conversation on sort of like the implications of this and like what it means for, you know, people of faith or, you know, for society generally. But before we get there, do you have any data that you could share as it pertains to Latter Day Saints in particular, where we sort of like fall in this spectrum or any other just like interesting anecdotes about when you, when you look at our particular group versus everybody else.
- [21:49]
C
So I actually spoke to the area committee about a month ago in Salt Lake City, which half of the quorum of the 12 were there. Yeah. So Apostle Dieter Uchtdorf wrote me a letter thanking me for my presentation, talking about what's going on at the church. So yeah, I, I got a tour of the new visitor center, which they did, was just opened. It's like soft launch. I got to be one of the first non LDs to walk through it. And I went to the tabernacle and got to hear like a p. Organ recital, like, so I was, I was. Yeah, it was great. So LDS are interesting for a whole bunch of reasons. I love studying them. They're actually really hard to study though, just like from a practical standpoint because there's not that many of them. About 1% of Americans identify as Latter Day Saint. Their own data says they're like 7ish million latter day Saints in America. But here's what's fascinating about them. There's actually more LDs outside the United States. Inside the United States right Now it's about 60, 40 split. And it's getting bigger. Like the growth for the church is really internationally now. It's not, it's not a domestic growth. I think they all understand that. And actually Salt Lake City is not majority LDs now because of all the immigration people moving in from other places. LDs are interesting because they are, they look sociologically like evangelicals in many ways. Right. They sort of like, have those sort of traditional family values in terms of, like, getting married young, having lots of kids. They actually have the highest fertility rate of any religious group we have. Yeah, they actually have more kids and they have kids younger and more children than anyone else. Fascinating. The problem with that, those retention, you know, you got to keep those kids in the church or it sort of, that's, that's. I always tell churches that's the most important number you could ever track is retention. Like the number of kids who are born into your faith who stay in that faith at 25 years old or 30 years old is like the most important metric. So I think retention for them is great. Here's where they differ, though, and here's why I think actually might be the most sociologically interesting thing about Latter Day Saints compared to white evangelicals. Politically, like, 66% of LDS voted for Donald Trump. You know, it was 80% of white even jokes. So they're pretty Republican, but not like deep red. They're red, but not deep red. The big difference, though, is on diversity. So there's this great Pew poll that asked, do you think, like, an increasing amount of religious diversity, it makes America stronger, weaker, has no difference. And they asked the same thing about religious diversity and racial diversity. So two different dimensions, diversity. White evangelicals are not cool with diversity. Like, they think it's bad for America on racial lines and religious lines. And LDs are much more open to diversity. They see themselves as a, as a minoritized population, as a stigmatized group, and therefore they want more diversity because they see themselves as. That welcomes people like them. White evangelicals see themselves as sort of the dominant culture. Like they're, they're, they're over everyone else. Why. And LDS do not see themselves. So I think that's like, to me is like the important. And the data also says that LDs are way cooler with immigrants, especially if they went on an international mission when they were 18 to 20, 18 to 20 years old. So that to me is like, if you want to, they're like white evangelicals in a lot of ways. But that's the clear unique difference of LDs compared to white evangelicals.
- [24:48]
B
I was really curious to ask you about that, about the, you know, where you see us fitting in this landscape, because to me, another huge difference is that we, we can't really shop around for congregations like Just where you live is your, that's who you worship with. And so, which is why I think we, we're so interested in, in your work generally, because this is the tension of a Sunday experience is that, like, you will sit next to someone who you really disagree with. And so that can create so much tension. And, and it seems like you're making a case that that's what's disappearing and we need it. And so I would just love to hear thoughts about that. Like, that is the hard thing about going to church. And I understand what you're saying that, like, that could be better, that kind of friction could be healthy for us. But it, like, it's the hard thing. It's really hard sometimes.
- [25:39]
C
No, I, I, I actually had a conversation with some folks when I was in Salt Lake City about this very idea of, like, geographic, you know, wards and then how the stakes are organized. And it's like, yeah, and Protestantism is like, you don't like that Baptist church? Just go two miles down the road to the other Baptist church and it's all cool. Like, no one really cares. Catholics are kind of stuck a little bit because, you know, like, most towns have, like, one parish, unless it's a big town, then you get multiple parishes. But, like, in most small towns across America, you got one option for Catholicism. I think the, this is, to me, the LDs have a retention problem that's growing over time. And I think it might be related what we're talking about, which is you don't get much choice. We know that as a, as a group gets larger, it's harder to maintain cohesion in that group. It just makes sense, right? Like, it's when you're, when there's 30 of you, you all are going to get along and figure it out. But if there's 3,3 million of you, then you get factions and people wanting to splinter out and spin off. But I will say this man, the LDS missionary program is the most sociologically brilliant idea ever in the history of religion I've ever seen. Because it doesn't convert that many people, by the way. It's not about conversion. It's really about retention because it keeps those young men and women in the faith at the most sort of treacherous, precarious moments of their faith journey, which we know, empirically speaking, is between, like, teenage years and early twenties. Guess what? That actually is easily the most successful part of that program. But still, sociological factors are going to pull that group apart as it gets bigger. And we're already seeing a lot of that I feel like.
- [27:12]
D
So that's really interesting. It feels like there's a little bit of a. Of a catch 22 here, potentially, because the, the, the model that the LDS Church, for example, is, is using, is it, like, has created all this heterogeneity, as you say, where, you know, there are different, you know, a lot of different viewpoints potentially expressed in a single. In a single congregation. Other churches that are more locally based do probably separate ideologically. But what the question is, though, what's really actually good for society? Is it going to church on Sunday with a bunch of people that think exactly like you, or is it going to church with a bunch of people who think differently and you have to learn how to get along? And I feel like you've sort of made the argument that for, for society's sake, we should be sitting next to people who are very different than us. But then. But then you, like, faced. Are faced potentially with a retention problem, because that's uncomfortable and it's. And it's difficult. So how do you. How do you think about this?
- [28:01]
C
Yeah, I went on Ross out podcast and he asked me that very same question, you know, and he said. And I gave the answer that I think, like, like, this is the, like, the core problem. My book is what I'm asking people to do is bad for the church and good for democracy. You know, like, and I don't know how to square that circle. I'm asking you to do the hard thing. I'm actually asking pastors to make their life even harder, you know, by inviting people in who don't agree with you on theology or politics or culture or family values or things like that, because it's so important for us to learn how to interact with people who we disagree with.
- [28:36]
B
With.
- [28:36]
C
I feel like we've atrophied that muscle to a point that we don't even know what it's like to be disagreed with anymore. And we almost act like it's like a mortal wound when someone says, I don't agree with you. You know, we've surrounded ourselves with podcasts and algorithms and family and region that all agree with us on all this stuff. The church is, at its best, the church universal. Not just one denomination or one tradition. The church at its best is a place where people from. From every stage of life meet and, and find community with one another, whether it be rich or poor, young or old, PhDs in high school, dropouts, you know, like liberals and conservatives. And what you figure out is, man, it's. It's really Easy to hate someone when they're on two dimensions on a computer screen. But it's really hard to hate them when you take communion with them every Sunday, because they're real people and living in three dimensions. And that makes the church harder because you're going to get people who disagree without the direction of the church and what issues we should advocate for and what programs we should do and what theology we should teach. But that is like, we're little incubators of democratic processes. Like, you really think about what the church is like. There's this great paper my buddy Paul dup wrote about 20 years ago called the Resourceful Believer, about how the civic skills are generated in religious contexts. Like, how do you learn how to run a meeting church? How do you learn how to fundraise church? How do you learn how to organize an event? Like, you know, like, if anything, a church, you know, like, when I started my job at Eastern Illinois, we had a faculty meeting, and they were firsting and seconding, and I knew how to do all that stuff. And they go, how do you know how to do this? I grew up in a Baptist church where we had business meetings once a month, and we first did in second and use Robert's Rules of order. It taught me how to be, you know, how to go out into the world. And the data says, by the way, the people who gain the most out of that are those people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. So, like, there's all this cool stuff that houses of worship do, but it only works well when they're diverse. You know, ideologically diverse, theologically diverse, you know, demographically diverse. And so that's the problem that we're facing here, right? It's like as the church purifies and becomes more homogenous, it actually is making democracy, it's making pastors jobs easier, but it's making all of our lives harder because we can't compromise, because we don't know how to do that. And that's the struggle that I face, is I'm asking people to do hard things, which, listen, I get it. I don't want to do hard things. But, you know, it's not about you, right? It's not about your comfort. It's about what's good for the country. And we've got to start not to be like John F. Kennedy, but, you know, like, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And what you can do for your country really simply is be around diversity. You know of every style and stripe. That's, that's the call that I'm making is asking people to do hard things because it'll benefit you personally, I think it will. But it also benefit your community and it'll benefit your country, which is as people who are called by faith, that's what we should be doing. Because if the country prospers, then we prosper and vice versa. You know, prosperity runs on the same line. So that's, that's my big argument. I mean, I don't know if that's an inspirational or, you know, aspirational or antagonistic to how we think about the world, but that's just how I think about my job, my role as a citizen in American democracies. Do hard things. If we want the world to be better, we've got to make it better like we want. We've got to do the thing that we know is good. Like for instance, I want the. I'm on my kids school board these part. Both my kids go to public school. I got asked to be on the school board because the guy dropped out. I hate it. I hate going to meetings, I hate all the nonsense and the bureaucracy. But I also want to see my kids school to be good school, you know what I mean? So I'm doing hard things because I want them to have a good outcome. I'm on the board of a rec club which is a pool, a public pool we have here in town. And I have to go up once a week and clean these filters in this dirty stinky pit. That's awful. But why do I do it? Because I want my, I want my community to have a place to gather and build social relationships and community, you know, so like you got to put your money where your mouth is. If you want to change the world, go home and love your family. You know, like just do the basic stuff in your community to change the world. And by like going to church is that thing. It will make your life better, it'll make your world better. It'll make your, it really will. It'll make your whole world better by just showing up on an average, you know, average weekend. I really do believe that that's so powerful.
- [32:41]
B
I mean, I think if I, if I tried to clarify when I feel the most conflicted, it's about how, how I'm defining the role of church. And if I think it's this place that is supposed to nourish me or it's a container of truth, then I'm going to feel conflicted anytime Something comes up that, that interferes with those intentions. I really like this case that you're making, which is like, maybe we're completely missing the point. And that has very little to do with our. With the, with the reason we commit to a community.
- [33:10]
C
It's like, what can church do for me? It's like, no, no. What can you do for them? Like, it's not about you, man. Like, stop. Like, the, the individualization of social media. It's like, what my platform is, how many followers I have. And like, you know, it's like, stop that. Like, you are part of something. And like, what you do together, the, the value you get and the satisfaction that you get from building something together is so much larger than what you can do individually. And I think we've forgotten that mentality. It's not how far I can get, it's how far we can get. Can we make the world a better place for all of us, not just for me and my family? And that takes hard work. That takes commitment. That takes people getting out of their comfort zone. It's taking people doing things they don't want to do. But I. I want to call people to something higher than that. You know, I don't want to do all the stuff that I do. Like, I don't want to go to church every Sunday. A lot of times I want to just, you know, stay and make graphs because I like to do. But I also understand, like, me being there. My life is being changed, and I'm changing the lives of the people around me. So you got to take what you believe and lay it on what you do. Like, that. That connection to me is the most important thing is behavior has to fall from belief. Like, if I believe this is good, then I have to do it, even if I don't want to do it, even. It's hard. And that's a hard message. That's not what people want to hear. I'm asking you to get out of your comfort zone. But that's, that's what we have to do.
- [34:26]
D
Totally. I, I. From a logical perspective, I completely agree with you. And I would say there was actually a phase of my life where I, like, completely embraced this principle, and I was like, church, it's. It's going to the gym, you know, and, like, I hate going to the gym. I hate lifting heavy weights. It's really uncomfortable. But, like, I'm, like, I feel like I'm probably growing, and I'm trying to, like, be a part of a community. That is because I'm Like, a fairly weird. I'll speak for myself here, but, like, fairly weird Latter Day Saint in some cases. Ideas that I bring to church are like a little bit. A little bit unorthodox and a little bit. A little bit weird. And when you feel like you've got, I don't know, judgy eyes on you a little bit, it's just. It's hard to be there. But, like, to feel at least somewhat nourished or at least somewhat, you know, included is. I don't know, it's somewhat refreshing. So, again, like, from a logical perspective, I totally agree with you. From, like, an emotional counterpoint perspective, it's like, okay, it's kind of nice sometimes to fit in a little bit.
- [35:18]
C
Oh, I. I agree with that 100 that I always tell people, find a church you don't hate, then go there. You know, I mean, like, where you don't feel miserable. You're not gonna find a church you love. The bar is low. Because the thing is, like, every organization sucks. It's got jerks, it's got authoritarians, it's got, you know, all these problems with it. But the thing is, how do we think if we're sinful people, we're going to create sinless organizations? Like, that's nonsensical, right? So instead, what I say is, like, the perfect's the enemy of the good. Don't find a perfect church. Find a good enough church and just put roots down there and contribute where you can contribute and then shut up when you got to shut up. And if over a long period of time. I don't think that every Sunday is great. Like, I go on Sunday and, man, sometimes I sit there, my mind is racing a thousand miles an hour. I'm not thinking about anything. I'm not thinking about the gospel or I'm thinking about, you know, my role in the world. I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about, like, my. My itinerary for the week and the things I got to do when I get home and my kids and. But then sometimes I go and it all makes sense. You know what I mean? Like, in my church, we have what's called the Apostles Creed, which is like the oldest creed the church has. It goes back to, like, the. The one hundreds. And I would say it every Sunday, 52 Sundays a year for 17 years, 95 time. It would mean nothing to me. It would just be words coming out of my mouth. And then 5% of the time, it would change everything for me. You know, it's like, God Honors the showing up. I believe going to church creates space and says to God and yourself, I'm going to give you this next hour to maybe allow something to change in me and how I think about the world. And if nothing happens, I'm coming back. The routines, the structure, the scaffolding is what allows the things to happen to us. It allows us to think and be and believe and, and change who we are. So I just think there's a lot of power in just showing up and saying, like, here I am, Lord, I'm giving you an hour. If you don't want to show up next week, I'm going to give you another hour, then I'll give you another hour. There's a concept in the Catholic Church called the dark night of the soul. St. John of the Cross wrote about it where it's like, God's just gone. Like, I don't. I pray to God and nothing happens. I feel nothing on my side because we all go through dark nights of the soul. They might last a week, they might last a month, they might last five years. But God honors the dedication of you showing up and allowing that space for something. And then something's going to change. You know, something's going to break in you, something's going to move in you. And all those times you went and didn't do anything, it's going to be worth it. In that one moment, because you allowed something to happen in that one moment.
- [37:40]
B
Are there things that come to mind that you think are nourishing? Let's say you find, you find the church you don't hate and you're committed and you're going to show up, you're going to give the hour. Are there, are there things that you think are effective at helping you connect across the dividend?
- [37:55]
C
Yeah. First off, I would say hang around before and after. Be there, be present, show up early. Be willing to have sort of those water cooler conversations. Like in, in those moments, don't feel like it's like I'm checking the box. It's like I'm going to have an experience here. And the experience is not just the. When you start and when you end the service, it's the whole thing. It's the parking lot afterwards when you bump into somebody, go, hey man, how are you? And you have a nice little five or ten minute conversation. That's part of the worship. Like bumping into someone, meeting a new friend, setting up a time to go eat dinner, you know, setting up a play date for your kids. That is worship. Like that is part of the experience of being a person of faith is all that stuff. Not just when you start playing the first bit of the music and they give the benediction at the end of the service, like, everything is part of that. But also be willing to just be a little bit vulnerable with people. You know what I mean? Being a little bit honest with people. If you're struggling, you can say you're struggling in church in a way that you can't say you're struggling somewhere else, you know, but find people. I. My whole approach is I want to talk to people who don't look like me, who don't think like me, like, people who are 30 years older than me, like, who have wisdom and courage and things that I don't have. Like, the best part of being a pastor of a church. While I was 50 years younger than everybody was, I learned what it meant to be a person of faith by watching these people as examples of people of faith who showed me what it means to be good fathers and good husbands and good, you know, good church members who would show up on a Tuesday and fix a door when we didn't ask them to. Or. Or we would go to this one guy and say, hey, we got to send this kid to camp. We don't have the money. Here's your money. You know, that kind of, like, faithfulness, like, taught me what it meant to be a good person. Like, and. And that's. Actually, I learned more from that than anything else. Like, just following the examples of these, like, saints who came before me. So, like, creating relationships with those saints, I think is the most important thing. And by the way, I disagree with them politically on basically everything. But I saw they were good people of character. That's all that matters to me. So that's what I would say is, like, build. Try to build relationships with people who don't look like you. I'll give you a quick story. John Rockefeller was an American Baptist. And, you know, near when he got really famous, he was one of those famous people in the world. And the media would follow him everywhere. Like, tons of photographers. They would yell questions at him. People would yell requests at him, like, I need money for my kids sick. And, you know, so, like, leaving the house was misery for him. He would only go to work, and he would go to church. That was it. That's only two times he ever left the house. And someone asked him later, why do you go through all the hassle of going to church? And he goes, because it's my only opportunity to Sit next to a blacksmith or a carpenter. And I think about that like, he got it. You know, he understood that this is. This connects me to the world, the real world of not billionaires. Like, that's what church does. It allows us to connect to differences. Where we don't get that anywhere else in the world, by the way. Not at school, not at work, not with our friend group. Like, that's the take advantage of that world, right? Because there's so much you can learn from that other.
- [40:45]
D
Other than sort of like the personal growth aspect. Like, could you. And I'm sure you've got data on some data on this, like, what's happening societally and politically that people who can sort of bridge divides can help with. Like, what are. What is the. What are we facing today that's sort of like, unique in. In American politics and society?
- [41:04]
C
I think it's. We do. We. Almost all our interactions are online now, which are terrible. They're not real. Like, I think that's the problem is, like, we don't. We don't see the person in three dimensions. We see them in two dimensions. And like, we mischaracterize them because of one belief they have or one position they hold. The approach that I've been taking more in my life is what I call, like, epistemic humility, which is, like, I've got to be humble about how I know things. Like, my perspective is, you know, like, because I talk to. I do, like, talks. All kinds of different groups, right? From LDS to Yale to, you know, evangelicals. Like, you know, I don't agree with all of them. I don't agree with most of, you know, like, on a lot of things. But what I'll say is, like, my faith teaches me that this is that. Like, I'll say my faith teaches me, you know, like, this is how. This is where I'm coming from. Like, my understanding of the Bible is that Jesus cared about these people. Because what I'm not saying is, like, what I'm saying is here's how I understand it. Not here is the understanding of faith or the Bible or Jesus. I think that approaching things with that epistemic humility says I could be wrong. I'm willing to be open to the idea that I'm wrong. I'm willing for you to challenge me to be wrong. And it's from a leadership standpoint. As a pastor, I wanted my congregation to know that, guess what, they could come up with their own ideas about things because they need to be epistemically humble. Too, Right. When I preached, I would say, well, one commentator says this passage means this, but this one says it means this. And here's how they differ, and here's why they differ. When I was younger, I grew up Southern Baptist. I held. I believed a lot of things a little bit, but then I went to college and started believing a few things a whole lot. You know, like, hold true to those things you believe a whole lot, but then be humble about all the periphery stuff and be willing to debate and discuss. That's such a more helpful posture. Right. On how to approach these things. And saying, like, it's my way or the highway. The Bible says that I believe it. That settles it. Like, now let's talk about this. Let's have an honest conversation. And then, by the way, don't just say that. Believe that. Like, really be open to hearing what they have to say and be willing to change your mind in a real. A real way. To me, there's nothing more virtuous than that is someone who literally is open to the possibility they're wrong and willing to change their mind if you give enough. A good enough evidence for them to change their mind.
- [43:12]
B
Yeah, it seems like the other. It seems like the other thing that happened in the 90s was that we had this. That the beginning maybe of extreme political polarization, too. And so I wonder, like, is this the medicine for politics right now, too? Like, is it going to look like we're shifting culture through epistemic humility because we have relationships with people that we're worshiping with? Do you think that's the best we can do right now for our country politically?
- [43:37]
C
Yeah. So what's actually really interesting about that comment is if you look at the partisanship of, like, major religious groups, we were the most politically diverse in the late 1980s, and then the nuns began.
- [43:50]
B
Yeah.
- [43:50]
C
So like, evangelical. The lines for Democrats and Republicans were evangelical. White evangelicals crossed in, like, 1988. And for the Catholic Church, they cross right around the same time. And the mainliners have always been fairly close. So, like, that was the time when actually the church was the most, like, people go, what was like the, the most wonderful time in American churches, like, 1985, like, that really was the time we were the most diverse. And then what's funny, like, I, you know, causally, I think about this, the fact the lines began to go the other direction from that point, and that's when the nun started to rise is incredibly interesting. Not saying that one's related to the other, but it's just Interesting that the heterogeneity then led to the rise of the nuns, right after that, it's like people started sorting themselves out. That's the, that's like the four. There's a couple of forces that are shaping American life. One we talked about, which is like social atomization, right. The second one is a tremendous distrust of institutions and people. And the third one, sorting, which is like, we just want to surround ourselves with people like us. And all those, by the way, are incredibly caustic to running a pluralistic, western style democracy. And, but again, that's become the default condition. That's the, that's the, it's easy to slide into that, into that ditch of, you know, distrust and homogeneity and social atomization. We've got to fight against all those things for whatever reason, like Christianity and religion generally has just been coded as being conservative in America, which is funny because it wasn't that way 100 years ago. Like, to be a religious person was like social gospel man, which is like super socially progressive, super liberal, right? Working on workers rights and children's rights and health care and all these things. But now in the modern incarnation, it's conservative. It's, it's coded as conservative. But then the parties figured that out and began to sort of message in a way that made like. So now the Republican Party used to say, like, you know, they speak sort of like vaguely family values. Now they're like, no Christian values, no evangelical Christian value. Like, they started like realizing they catered to that audience. And then the Democrats started talking a whole lot about less, but less about Christianity. So I think it's a, it's a, the public started realizing something and then the parties bought into the narrative and just sort of driving like this division between the two groups. The Republican Party's not putting up like bastions of like, Christian virtue, but they're using the right language. Meanwhile, the Democrats, like, almost have to apologize for the fact they grew up in a church. Like, don't apologize for that. Say, my faith informs me, and here's how it informs me on things like, you know, humanity and, and the least of these and all these things. But. And the problem is we have more allegiance to our party than our, than our beliefs, than our religious background. And that, that is what I really struggle with. I don't think that's the way forward.
- [46:25]
B
I know we got to let you go. I want to ask you one last thing. I. On, I mean, I guess my real question is, like, what about politics on a Sunday? You Know, how do you navigate political differences in a congregation? And is it even. Is it possible to do well in a community where you. Where. Where you certainly are sitting with people you disagree with?
- [46:45]
C
This is what I struggle with, because, like, there are people who want to say, like, oh, you have the privilege of not having to worry about these things and not talking about these things. This is the. This is. The problem I have, is that most Americans are the 20. The 10% of Americans on each side try to make us all care about these things a whole lot, because it matters to them if we have a conversation and you walk into it. So my job is to change your mind, but you're not going to change my mind. We're not having a conversation. Because to me, conversation is you bring your best version of the argument to the other person as a gift, and they do the same for you, and you open your minds and hearts to that idea, and you potentially could change your mind. If you walk in saying, there's nothing you can tell me right now that will change my mind on this issue, then we're not having a discussion. We're having a, you know, a monologue. And that's asymmetrical. I will say this. My hopefulness is, though, 80% of Americans are not on the other side. You know, they're open, they're willing to have a conversation. They're practical, they're sensible, they're middle of the road. They're looking for sort of like a middle position that makes everyone sort of, kind of mad, but kind of happy. Like, on immigration, I hear this all the time. On abortion, I hear this all the time. Like, yeah. Do I think the Biden policy was bad? Absolutely. Basically opened the border for a bunch of people. But do you think the solution is to close the border to everybody? No. Do you think it's deporting tens of millions of people? No. You know, like, there's ways to nuance this debate. Right? How do we live in that tension? If you are engaging with someone who's engaging with you with epistemic humility and good faith, guess what? Great. You know, go with God and enjoy it, because most Americans are in that. In that. That band of people.
- [48:11]
B
Thank you so much. I'm sure we all have soapbox issues where we're not really listening, but I think having something else on the table that we can both do together, when it feels like we're at an impasse, it's. It's a gift to be able to do a project that we both value where that doesn't have to be the issue between us, you know, and there's something that I think my faith has in. Has. Has healed in me by just creating these opportunities to be rubbing shoulders with people where it feels like otherwise that would be the only issue. Like, it would be the only thing I could see between us. And so I think, yeah, I think that's why your work has been just so resonant. Let's fight for these spaces, for these middle spaces, and. And at least in our own lives, choose to opt in when. Yeah, uncomfortable.
- [48:58]
C
Let's fight for the normal people. You know what I mean? Let's fight for the, like this sort of average. My job is to point us toward the middle, not the edges. You know, like, everyone wants to talk about the outliers. My job is to point us back to what normal looks like, what the median looks like. And the median person is a thoughtful, compassionate, mindful person who seeks compromise, who seeks the middle position, who cares more about American democracy enduring than their position being right. You know, that's what we cannot forget that. And don't let the ones and twos and nines and tens break our brains, because most Americans are four, fives and sixes. There's a lot more of them than there are on the edges. Yet social media distorts our reality. And I think that's the real. That's the danger of social media above all things, is it changes what we think normal is. And I think that makes it actually harder for us to govern ourselves.
- [49:42]
D
Well, thank you so much for being here, Ryan. I, I really admire. I mean, you're bringing all this very interesting data, but you're also practicing what you preach in the sense that, that you're coming on with us. And obviously we come from religious backgrounds, no doubt view different things differently, but, like, we're having a good faith conversation. And I just really appreciate that about you and your openness. So thank you again for being here. This has been an awesome conversation.
- [49:59]
B
Yeah, thank you so much.
- [50:00]
C
It's been a great conversation, guys. Really appreciate you guys and what you're up to. And listen there. When you have more conversations like this and people in the middle need to speak up and say, like, listen, I'm proudly moderate on this issue, right? Like, I'm, I'm willing. I'm willing to compromise on this issue because that, that's the kind of people that, the glue that makes democracy work. So pushing back, being loud, being proud of your moderation, I think is actually a very good thing. Not just for, like, yourself personally, but for your community and for democracy. And really, if what you're doing is making democracy worse, then stop doing it right. It's really. It's really that simple.
- [50:33]
B
All right, thank you so much.
- [50:35]
C
Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it.
- [50:37]
A
All right, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this content conversation, we hope you'll check out Ryan's new book, the Vanishing Church. You can find it wherever books are sold. And if Faith Matters has been meaningful to you, one of the best ways that you can support the podcast is by subscribing, leaving a rating or review, and sharing this episode with anyone you think might enjoy it. Thanks again for listening. And remember, you can check out more at faithmatters. Org.