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- [00:05]
Edward Jones Narrator
A rich life isn't a straight line to a destination on the horizon. Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn, with detours, new possibilities, and even another passenger or three. And with 100 years of navigating ups and downs, you can count on Edward Jones to help guide you through it all. Because life is a winding path made rich by the people you walk it with. Let's find your rich together.
- [00:33]
Derek Thompson
Edward Jones Member, SIPC this episode is brought to you by Spotify Advertising. Right now, you're listening to my voice. It's the way I communicate, how I connect, share stories and for most of human history, this is how culture moved at the speed of voice. We told stories out loud. We built trust through tone. Then the screens took over. Attention was reduced to clicks and scrolls. Tech made us faster, but also more fragmented. Now, thanks to AI and connected devices, voice is re emerging as a primary interface, and it's helped audio and sound become more integrated and interactive than ever. Spotify calls this shift the Sound on Era. It's the focus of a new report exploring how sound has become the bridge connecting modern media and why brands need a sound on strategy to be heard. If you're curious about the trends reshaping consumer behavior, go to ads.Spotify.com, download the sound on Era report and learn how to turn up the volume on your business 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, the West has stopped losing its religion. From the Washington Post, why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men. From Reuters 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 nones 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 nones for decades, which makes it a big deal. If that trend line the long secularization of America has 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 substack 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 substack@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 English. Ryan Burge, welcome to the show.
- [04:37]
Ryan Burge
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Derek. Appreciate being here.
- [04:40]
Derek Thompson
We're gonna do something fun on this show. We're gonna 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 spot YouTube Some of the really fantastic charts that you've published on your substack. 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 group chats. 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 scientific 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?
- [05:37]
Ryan Burge
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 and religiosity the other axis because all the other wealthy countries on earth, especially our eastern Western European neighbors, Scandinavian neighbors, they're significantly less religious than we are. Our closest comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP. And only 17% of the Swiss say religion's 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 fatal, 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 gawk at us and go, why are you guys so weird? We really are a case of one when it comes to our economic prosperity, but also our religiosity. I mean, we are as religious as some of these, you know, sub Saharan African countries on some metrics. So in every possible way are the religiosity of America. There is no comparison case in the world.
- [06:40]
Derek Thompson
Right now you just answered the question statistically that we are three times more religious than the most religious other rich country. I still wanna 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.
- [06:58]
Ryan Burge
Yeah.
- [06:59]
Derek Thompson
Again, why is America specifically so much more religious? And why did our religiosity continue to hold on deep into the 20th century?
- [07:10]
Ryan Burge
Yeah, so I think the Christian nationalists are going to hate this answer. But the fact that we did not have a state church at the founding, you can 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 always tell people, if you want them to hate something, make it part of the government. And 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, you know, Germans don't opt out because they don't even know, you know, they don't understand while the money's going, so what that allowed? There's a theory in this field called religious economy theory put together by Roger Finke 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 add the Latter Day Saints in the conversation. But the United Methodists and the Baptists, you know, dominated American religion in the 1800s with their, with their circuit riders. They gave young men a Bible and a horse and said, go west and don't come back. Start a 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 and large. 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 was the new Eden, 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.
- [09:28]
Derek Thompson
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 n u n 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 savannah until 1990. And then suddenly it's Mount Kilimanjaro. It just starts going up linearly. What happened in 1990?
- [10:12]
Ryan Burge
I call it. Well, I call it the venture capitalist graph. Right? Like every venture capitalist wants to 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. Like, no one was even thinking about it, writing about it, 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 and 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. You know, for the younger set 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 if 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 closet atheists. And when the Berlin Wall fell, you know, now that whole we're not in the Cold War anymore, and 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 to, 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, 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 emboldens you to say what you really are, you know, when it comes to your religious affiliation. And. And then the last thing I'll say is it has to do something with Politics. I mean, you can't look at the data and say that something didn't happen. And I really do think Newt Gingrich is one of the worst politicians we've had, you know, in terms of the trajectory of America. I argue in 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 Republicans, 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. The Republican Party is the party of people of faith, and the Democratic Party is largely becoming the party of not faithful people. And I think that's going to continue going forward. I think it's actually might be the most important political religious phenomenon in America, is this huge dividend religiously between the two parties right now.
- [13:12]
Derek Thompson
What I'm hearing is that there's at least two really important things that happened in the 1980s, early 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, 1980s, 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 early 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 down to the ground. But is that all true as a kind of capsule explanation for why this hockey stick moment in American history happened?
- [15:04]
Ryan Burge
Yeah. I mean, there's a great piece in 2002 from Fisher and how. Where they. 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. Like, 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.
- [16:16]
Derek Thompson
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. So when you think about how conservative a Mormon or white Catholic is, you're like, well, that's gotta 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 onto the most religious. I want to continue to tell this story because we've now explained why America's so religious. We've explained why this inflection point happened in the early 1990s. That 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?
- [17:42]
Ryan Burge
Besides the obvious, there's a massive religious revival happening in America. Derek, if you've watched Fox News, you would know all about it. Because they want to write a story about 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 Gen 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 identify as 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'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, not that they're actually going to church. 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 surve, they're going to be replaced by Gen Z. So boomers 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 goes down, 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.
- [20:13]
Derek Thompson
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?
- [20:42]
Ryan Burge
Yeah, that's, 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, Derek, like from a polling standpoint because they're a hard group to poll 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, then you're cutting it in half again between men and women. So you're talking about a subgroup of a subgroup. And to see a 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, you know, boomers are saying they're Christians, that number has absolutely, you know, the share of boomers who are Christians has risen significantly in the last couple of years. So, 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 to see 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.
- [22:05]
Derek Thompson
What religions are growing? What religions and denominations are growing the fastest right now?
- [22:12]
Ryan Burge
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 like office buildings. They're called like the Journey or the Ramp or the Bridge or Life Church. There's one of my favorites 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 denominationals were a grounding 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 Baptist Convention, twelve and a half million. So non denoms are probably three times the size of the Southern Baptist Convention. 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 it was 50 years ago, is because of the rise of non denominationalism. And there's a couple other small denominations. Like 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 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, you know, I can probably count on one, one hand the number of religious traditions that are growing significantly in America right now. But I could. It would take me an hour to describe to you all the religious denomination traditions that are declining.
- [23:53]
Derek Thompson
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, like what. What's special about these non denominational churches that explains their unique growth at a moment when so many other faiths and in particular so many other, I'll call them, I don't know, legacy. Traditional faiths are still declining. Why are they growing?
- [24:23]
Ryan Burge
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. And the guy might have been a real estate agent, insurance broker, you know, construction company guy. And he just starts a Bible study and then it grows from 8 people to 18 people to 800 people. And you know, 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 in American society where we used to be 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, then 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 or 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 that sort of becomes this whole thing. And these churches are popping up by the thousands all across America and they actually are methodologically incredibly problematic for people like me because like 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 a denomination of one, one church. Now some of them are multi site. You know, they might have 10 or 12 different, you know, campuses around a metro area, but the vast majority, and that's it, like that's their entire locus of control. And those are the kind of churches that are really taking over because I think people like the idea of their anti institutional. I mean 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 have very little theolog God did this. And I think people like the accountability factor too because when you put 100 bucks in the plat, that 100 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 in those churches. The accountability structure, the decision making structure are all right there. You know, bureaucracy, we hate bureaucracy, especially when it's nameless and faceless. Guess what? Non denominator have almost no bureaucracy. And so I think that's the, that's the attractive factor for them is the, is the accountability is close. It feels very like renegade ish, right? It's like screw what everyone else 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.
- [27:04]
Derek Thompson
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 a 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. 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 so interesting that you're telling that story within religion, which I would typically think of as being the domain of traditional ideas. And it raises one question, which is some of these media startups are somewhat, I don't want to call it, 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 Hasan 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 are they better understood as tweaks of Protestantism that catch on because they are seen as grassroot rather than tapping into a 500-year-old tradition.
- [28:44]
Ryan Burge
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 years because a lot of these churches started like the 1990s and 2000s, and those pastors are getting to the age where they don't want to be pastor anymore, in their 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 everyone, 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, you know, 80% as good a speaker as you are? And there's actually really sort of famous examples of this going around. There's a church in Chicago called Willow Creek, and they were one of the first non denominational megachurches in America, just outside Chicago. And they had a pastor named Bill Hybels. And Bill Hybels had this five year plan that he's going to retire and he was 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 overcome 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 whole thing fell apart. Both new pastors resigned. Most of the elder board resigned because they were accused of covering up Bill Hyville's, you know, sexual improprieties. And the churches 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 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 will pay 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, 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 pastors too. And 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 denominationals in America than Catholics in 20 or 30 years. It's unbelievably successful.
- [31:27]
Derek Thompson
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- [32:07]
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- [32:45]
Edward Jones Narrator
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- [34:16]
Derek Thompson
you've really changed my mind and introduced a new concept to me in the last five, 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. And so it's kind of interesting that the same underlying sociological engine or phenomenon that one could use to describe the rise of nones n o n e s 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 empower 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.
- [35:42]
Ryan Burge
Well, think about Donald Trump too, Derek.
- [35:45]
Derek Thompson
I was thinking about him while you were talking. I didn't want to make it all about politics, but of course what's the Republican Party. It's not a party.
- [35:51]
Ryan Burge
No, 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 this 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 the 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, that. So I think that's the world we live in right now is almost like not to go too far into philosophical stuff, but it's like we are living in a relativist world where no one has the truth. It all comes if you can follow this person or that person. And I think, you know, that reversal that the 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 realized it or not, led that charge by the rise of these non denominationals anti authority philosophy.
- [37:23]
Derek Thompson
Powering the revitalization of Christianity as much as it powering the rise of secularism is such a strange idea that I never would have 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 nones, 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 nonbeliever movement.
- [38:18]
Ryan Burge
Yeah, so I got a Templeton grant. We did a survey of 12,000 non religious Americans because for those of you who 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 it was like, we're kind of 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 not enough 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 Espionage. So spiritual but not religious. We all know that category. It's sort of been bouncing around a lot in the literature. These are people who, I call them like the Woo Woos, 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's 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. But, like, what star sign you were born over changes your entire life trajectory? Like, that makes more sense to them.
- [39:23]
Derek Thompson
So that's espionage to make fun of myself. Just before you continue to go, oh my God, the grips.
- [39:28]
Ryan Burge
Yeah.
- [39:29]
Derek Thompson
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 date. And I realized after months, maybe years of believing 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, that's just like, it's just so interesting how individual theologies can sometimes make absolutely no sense when you look at them from 30,000ft up. But this is the nature of human belief. Like a lot of it comes from a place of just of 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 SVNRs keep us going. What are the other three subcategories?
- [40:46]
Ryan Burge
Yeah, so there's one that's sort of more methodological than ninos. Nones in 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 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 nuns are ninos. So we actually think we're doing a bad job of measuring non religious people. Like we need to do better at like making them say they're Christians when they actually are Christians. Because right now we say Protestant, Catholic, lds, Orthodox Christian. A lot of people don't know they're Protestant by the way Derek, FYI, like a lot of people who think they're Baptist. Those non denom churches we were just talking about, about, they don't use the word protestant. They don't even use the word religion. They say we're not a religion, we're a relationship. We're a new, you know, 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 nuns are probably smaller than what we think they are. Just people can't identify properly. So the first two groups, Espionage and Ninos. 60% of the nuns are in those two groups. We think those groups are generally more open to religion because we ask them a bunch of questions about their openness to religion. 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, you know, once a year or more. And then what's wild about this group is we ask people, you know, what happens when you die? In 77% of the done say, say when I die, my existence ends. So like they're, they don't believe in anything beyond this. Like we asked about ghosts and spirits and devils and angels and you know, every spiritual thing we could think of and they're like in the 5% to 2% range and believing in that stuff certainly like there's nothing there. And by the way, they're the oldest of the four groups. These are like old atheists, you know, like people born in the boomer. Atheists in my mind are the Duns. But then, so the Duns are about a third of all nuns are dones. 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 you know, the way I describe to people for younger people, listen to this. If you go on Reddit's 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 nuns, have you tried to convince someone to leave religion? In the last 12 months average, you know, like 5% of nuns have tried to deconvert 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 almost 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. They're younger, they're angrier, it's so interesting because they're miserable and they want to drag you into their misery as well. Well, by not believing any of these things. So there's really two sides of the coin to having really nothing to do with religion. The done 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 laissez faire 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 live and let live. It's like, no, religion's a poison, it's a cancer, it's child abuse. You should deconvert 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 Americans. 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, aspiritual and a religious. It's more of a gradient than an off and on switch. I think that's what we realize in doing all that work.
- [44:49]
Derek Thompson
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 none 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 or believe in. If you don't believe in God because you essentially don't believe there is 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? And what do we misunderstand about them?
- [46:31]
Ryan Burge
I think that people think that religion and spirituality run on different lines, right? So like a lot we, 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. So, you know, 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. Espionage are a one manifestation of non religion. I think, Derek, what you were talking about is this concept that Christian Smith pioneered about 20 years ago, moralistic therapeutic deism, which is just like God wants me to like feel good about things. You know, like I'm going to take this little, like your, your lucky socks or like astrology or like I'll, you know, I'll go to, I'll go to, you know, go to mass once a year on, you know, Christmas. Like if you pick and choose what kind of theology makes sense for you and you sort of like push away whatever else doesn't make you feel very good about that faith. I think it's what espionage have done. They sort of like plucked out certain practices from major religious groups and go, I'm going to take the parts that I like 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 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 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 home Paul, 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 cohesive. 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 on their plate. And that. That has no legs to it. That doesn't endure. And so these ESPNRs 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, you can't put a blanket on all these espionage, because some are super astrology, some are super meditation, some are super both. Some just say they're very spiritual but 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. 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
- [49:57]
Derek Thompson
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 Thi 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 are 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. 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 do the work of church, that bring together a community, often have excuses, so to speak, for bringing people together that are 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 Gonna bowl. We love reading nonfiction books and discussing them. If you like the last book we read on Marxism, you're gonna love it. If you don't like Marxism, you might wanna 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 I think some people say if you knock God off the pedestal, it 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, in 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.
- [52:45]
Ryan Burge
Yeah, I think this, this might be the most worrisome trend I see in all the data from a macro level sense. Like, and, and religion for me is the keyhole to understanding, like attachment and being part of things, but what we see over and over. So the keel 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 and you get, you know, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, you know, Buddhist, all those. The last three are atheist, agnostic and nothing in particular. Particular. And so 20% of Americans now say their religion is nothing in particular. And if you compare nothing in particulars to atheists on things like education, atheists are twice as likely to have a four year college degree as nothing in particulars. 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. 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 this 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, 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 the least likely are those with a high school diploma or less. I have never seen a single data source where 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 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 wives, their lives, demonstrably worse in ways that they don't see and feel 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 in their lives to sort of support them through their darkest, most difficult times. When they lose a job, when they lose a spouse, when they're going through depression or anxiety, those kind of social organizations are what carry them through. I think it's creating this sort of like bifurcation in American society between the haves and the have nots. And the haves are getting a lot better socially, economically, politically, culturally, and the have nots are, are doing worse. And what's even scarier, Derek, is among young people 18 to 22 years old, the most popular response option of what your present religion is is nothing in particular. One third of 18 to 22 year olds 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 in life. 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. Connection.
- [56:17]
Derek Thompson
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 had 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 just happy, 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 than 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, 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 that the happiness benefit of religion seems to have doubled between looking at boomers and looking at millennials in gender Z. Why do you think that is?
- [57:37]
Ryan Burge
Well, I mean, at first I do think methodologically, a lot of people say, oh, that's problematic, Ryan, because happier people tend to be more religious. Religious people aren't. Ha. You know, like the causal arrow goes the other way.
- [57:46]
Derek Thompson
And we're going to talk about the causation correlation thing in a bit. I'm interested in this generational shift. Yeah, right. Like, why does it seem like, like, let's pull the Jonathan Haidt argument into this. In a world where, 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?
- [58:26]
Ryan Burge
I think 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. You can cut the data however you want. You can control for whatever you want. You can do whatever fancy math you want. Conservatives are happier than liberal people are. And I think part of it is this idea that I hear all the time online, especially in the political world, is we live in the worst timeline possible and everything's catastrophized. The polar ice caps are melting and Social 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 America 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, like, truly inspirational to us? The answer is not very many, to be honest with you. You know where I hear the most inspirational story stuff is at 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 always get asked 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, that Jesus, death and resurrection saved me from my sins or, you know, like the, the hope that religion provides. If you don't have that, where does your hope come from? Come from the, the Donald Trump presidency is not going to destroy America. Like, I just, I, I wonder where the optimism comes from in a world without. I'm, 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. Discussion. It is not redemptive. It is not salvific. It is going to disappoint you more than it's ever going to inspire you. 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, married people are happier than unmarried people. People with children are happier than people who don't have children. Like, that is not conservative talking points. That's just what the data says says. And at some point, we've got to say the. 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, you know, 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. Right. You know, 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 like have social trust trust, you're more likely to be religious. You're more likely to go to college. Like, all these things are sort of 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 happiness.
- [61:36]
Derek Thompson
I agree with everything you just said. And 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 here. 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 is, I believe the sociologist Catherine Eden had some research on this, the 1990s, 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 the way I think about it is, rather than this really clean domino effect that starts with a domino overload religion, it's more like you said, there's a stool metaphor that we can employ here. It's 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 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 hymnal, antisocial 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 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 ultimate ingredient here, sure, maybe it's God, but also I think it's just other people.
- [64:59]
Ryan Burge
Yeah. So there was this tweet a couple 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, like, 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 would absolutely love to have you show up. Show up and be part. And all the comments were 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, I speak to psycho groups all the time. And the, the question they asked me, which is sort of awkward, it goes, do you think that our, our way of living is defective? Or like, infer. 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, and by the way, not just Christianity, but, but, but Judaism or Islam 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 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. 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, and a lot of Christians read that and think, oh, it's because God was protecting Christians from the Black Plague. No, the answer is that Christians did not leave other Christians behind when they got with the Black Plague. They try 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 miraculous, 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 otherworldly. 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 to 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, Derek, that the average person, 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.
- [68:24]
Derek Thompson
It'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.
- [68:34]
Ryan Burge
Mm.
- [68:35]
Derek Thompson
It's strong beliefs and 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. 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 just 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 thrive, praise, enhance. Well, again, it's the strength of the vertical that will explain the strength of the horizontal. And as I'm working on these ideas and trying to build out my theories of the antisocial century, I think this is something that I really want to remember and hold on onto, which is I talk to people who are trying to plan communities and revitalize community. And 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. A truly strong horizontal community. I love that thought. Ryan Burge. This was really educational for me. Thank you so much.
- [70:26]
Ryan Burge
It's been an absolute pleasure, Derek. Thanks for having me on.