The Art of Manliness - The Rise of the Religious ＂Nones＂ (And What It Means for Society)

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.120 In 1972, the number of Americans described themselves as religiously unaffiliated was

00:00:15.200 just 5%. 2018 was almost 24%. Why is the number of people answering none of the above to the

00:00:21.260 question of the religious affiliation jumped so dramatically in recent years? And what effect

00:00:25.120 will the growth of these so-called nuns have on society in general? My guest explores these

00:00:29.140 questions in his book, The Nuns, where they came from, who they are, and where they are going.

00:00:33.280 His name is Ryan Burge, and he's both a pastor and a professor of political science. In our

00:00:36.800 conversation today, Ryan shares the data on which religions have risen and fallen and explains why

00:00:40.480 mainline Protestantism has taken a huge dive and why the number of people who have disaffiliated

00:00:44.620 altogether from religion has grown to rival the number of evangelicals and Catholics in this

00:00:48.960 country. We talk about the role that politics has played in this shift and the fact that while

00:00:52.500 people once chose their politics based on their religion, they now choose their religion based

00:00:56.620 on their politics. Ryan unpacks the demographic profile of the average nun, breaking it down

00:01:00.700 into the category's three subgroups, atheists, agnostics, and those who label themselves as

00:01:05.100 nothing in particular. We enter a conversation with what the future growth in the nuns may look

00:01:09.040 like, the possible societal effects of an overall decline in religiosity, and whether younger

00:01:12.940 generations may swing back to being more religious. After the show's over, check out our show notes

00:01:16.680 at aom.is slash nuns. All right, Ryan Burge, welcome to the show.

00:01:33.820 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:34.840 So you got a book called The Nuns. That's N-O-N-E-S, not nuns, like flying nun, where they came 1.00

00:01:40.980 from, who they are, and where they're going. This is about people who identify as not having 0.61

00:01:45.340 a religion. And you are both a professor of political science and a pastor of a small

00:01:51.740 Baptist church. So this book sort of is an intersection of those two parts of your life.

00:01:56.300 This combination of political science professor and pastor is not something you see very often.

00:02:00.400 How do you find your way into these pasts? And which came first? Was it the political scientist

00:02:03.740 or the pastor?

00:02:05.380 The pastoring thing actually came first. I was 20 years old and I got, somehow I fell into this job

00:02:10.040 as a youth pastor at this little Baptist church about 30 minutes from where I grew up.

00:02:13.320 And I really took the job because I couldn't find another job for the summer. And that was

00:02:17.140 supposed to be a three-month summer internship. It turned into a three-year youth pastoring gig,

00:02:21.740 which sort of turned into the next thing, which turned into the next thing.

00:02:24.280 So I've been at my current church for over 15 years now, and I've always done ministry as sort

00:02:28.500 of a side thing. I mean, it's never been my primary career. I've always had two or three things going

00:02:32.140 on at once, going to grad school, being a professor. So I've always been sort of a pastor on the side,

00:02:37.320 but in my mind, I see myself as a political scientist first, a college professor first,

00:02:42.060 and a pastor second. And that actually, I think works well in terms of balance in my life,

00:02:46.720 because now I don't put too much emphasis on one or the other, but both are sort of central parts

00:02:51.820 of my identity. And I think they actually both complement each other and help me in both fields

00:02:56.160 understand the other side of things.

00:02:58.180 And I think the book actually reflects that balance. It's primarily written from your perspective

00:03:02.600 as a political scientist. I mean, it's very empirical and data-driven. You did all the data

00:03:07.160 analysis yourself. There are several dozen graphs in there. You did all yourself. And then just at

00:03:11.780 the very end, you put on your pastor hat and offer some comments from that perspective too.

00:03:16.820 But let's talk about the data you analyze, because that's the main thrust of your book.

00:03:21.980 And the big statistic to talk about is that the number of Americans who say they have no religion,

00:03:27.820 that number was 5% in 1972. It jumped to 24% in 2018. But there's a lot of nuance to that number.

00:03:36.540 A lot going on with that statistic. And to unpack that nuance, I think it would be

00:03:41.340 useful to talk about how social scientists measure religiosity in the first place.

00:03:46.420 So start there. How do we know about the state of religion in America? I mean,

00:03:50.220 are there certain surveys that we use that are sort of like the gold standard in measuring religiosity?

00:03:56.180 Yeah. There is one gold standard survey that exists. It's called the General Social Survey,

00:04:01.240 called the GSS. You'll often see it shortened too. It's been going on since 1972,

00:04:04.760 and it's been put together by the National Opinion Research Council, which is based out of the

00:04:08.880 University of Chicago. And they get NSF grant from the United States government every year to run

00:04:13.640 their survey. And what's great about the GSS is it's been done the same way, using the same format

00:04:19.480 since 1972. So it's really the only way that we have that exists today that we can track religion

00:04:25.040 in a consistent way going back to the 1970s. And it uses a question about religious belonging.

00:04:31.220 You know, what tradition do you find yourself in? Actually, the question asked, what is your

00:04:35.300 present religion, if any? And it gives you several different options, Protestant, Catholic,

00:04:39.720 other religion, or none is the first question you get asked. And so what's nice is if you ask the

00:04:44.680 same question the same way, at least you have comparability year to year and decade to decade.

00:04:49.820 A lot of times surveys change the way they ask questions over time, and they can have huge

00:04:53.140 implications for how people answer them. So when I say 5% to 23%, that's a pretty objective measure of

00:05:00.640 how much the nuns have grown. And by the way, they only went from 5% to 7% by 1990. And they went

00:05:07.700 from 7% to 23% from 1990 to 2018. So almost all the growth in the nuns has happened in the last 30

00:05:15.660 years or so. And so let's talk about this idea of religious. So the survey only asks, which do you

00:05:21.240 identify with? And so they'll give you different options, different religions, Catholic, evangelical,

00:05:26.140 other religion, or nun. But as you highlight in the book, you go deep into this, there's a lot more

00:05:32.640 to religiosity than that. I mean, someone could say they belong to their Methodist, but they might

00:05:40.040 not really. I mean, they don't go. So from a sociological perspective, how do we determine

00:05:44.880 religiosity beyond just what someone identifies as?

00:05:48.200 Yeah. So we use three separate questions. The one I was just talking about is the belonging

00:05:52.780 question. There's also a behavior question, which is how often do you attend church? And

00:05:56.740 the answers go from never to more than once a week. So we use that sometimes as sort of a measure

00:06:03.000 of devotion. We know that people who go more often are more of whatever they go to. And the third one

00:06:08.520 is religious belief. And that's oftentimes things like, what is your view of the Bible? Or what is

00:06:13.820 your view of God? Do you believe God exists? Do you believe that Satan exists? Do you believe in

00:06:17.800 heaven and hell? Things like that. Really, if you think about religiosity, it's the three

00:06:22.020 Bs, behavior, belief, and belonging. But the reality is when we talk about the nuns, the

00:06:27.340 one that I always use is belonging, because that's the one that people seem to respond to

00:06:30.840 the most. But the share of Americans who do not believe, do not behave, and do not belong

00:06:36.980 is only about 6% of the country. Over 90% of Americans still say they have some belief in

00:06:43.000 God even today, despite the fact the nuns are at least 25% of Americans. 0.96

00:06:47.440 So what we see typically happens is church attendance is the first thing that drops off.

00:06:51.980 About 40% of Americans say they never attend church. 25% of Americans, 23-25% of Americans

00:06:57.360 say they have no religious belonging. But only 10% of Americans say they have no religious

00:07:01.280 belief. And some people have sort of a mix and match of those two or three of those three.

00:07:06.400 And so it's very rare for someone to not do any of those three at the same time. So the

00:07:11.180 nuns is only about 6% of Americans today.

00:07:14.460 So I guess that's pretty hard for a political scientist to really kind of pin down what does

00:07:19.940 it mean if someone has no religion or if they have a religion. Because I mean, for example,

00:07:25.160 I think 25% of those who say they are evangelical Christians, they don't attend church. So from

00:07:31.040 your perspective, would you say they're religious or not?

00:07:35.000 So that's a great, great, great question. Measuring stuff is super hard. Whenever I teach

00:07:40.940 my grad students, I spend two hours in my grad method class just saying over and over again,

00:07:44.540 measuring stuff is really, really hard. So for me, there's this question on a survey that says,

00:07:49.460 are you, do you identify as born again or evangelical or not? It just says yes or no

00:07:53.520 question. And my whole, my whole approach to that question has changed over time. It used to be,

00:07:59.020 I would say that you cannot be an evangelical unless you say you're evangelical, but also say you're

00:08:03.240 Protestant or Christian. Like it's impossible to be an evangelical Muslim, let's say. 0.99

00:08:07.460 Right. But the most recent data analysis I've looked at, and I've done a lot of analysis in

00:08:12.140 the last couple of weeks, what you're seeing more and more is that people are saying yes to

00:08:16.200 the evangelical question, despite the fact they never go to church or despite the fact they're

00:08:20.720 not even Christians. There are evangelical Jews, there are evangelical Mormons, there are evangelical

00:08:25.180 Muslims, there are evangelical Catholics now. So I've taken a new approach to the whole thing.

00:08:29.880 Here's what I say. When people tell you who they are, you believe them. So if you tell me you're

00:08:34.540 an evangelical Mormon, I say, great. That is fantastic. Let's figure out why you chose

00:08:39.060 both to identify as an LDS, but also as an evangelical. And what you find if you dig into

00:08:44.840 the data enough is people are not as crazy as you think they are. They're actually picking that

00:08:48.680 evangelical identity for a very good reason. And that reason now is they see themselves as

00:08:53.060 conservative politically, but they also see themselves as aligning more and more with the

00:08:58.880 Republican party. For instance, Muslims who go to mosque more than once a week and identify as

00:09:05.840 Republicans, half of them also identify as evangelical. So what you kind of see is you

00:09:10.660 see a logic starting to form in the heads of Americans and they're seeing like the word

00:09:14.840 evangelical as meaning a political identifier and a cultural identifier, just as much as they're

00:09:20.580 seeing it as a theological identifier. And I know a lot of my past friends go, no, no, no, no,

00:09:25.180 you got to do an evangelical. You got to be a Christian. You got to be a Protestant. You got

00:09:27.940 to go to church a lot. And I would say, yeah, but these people don't believe in evangelicalism

00:09:32.060 the same way you do. And they're not wrong for doing that. So that's the problem with measurement

00:09:35.680 is what I think something means is not what the average person thinks something means.

00:09:39.680 I'm much more sliding toward the perspective of when those people say they're evangelicals,

00:09:43.680 I have to trust they know what that means. And they're picking it for a very good reason.

00:09:47.280 And I think the data backs that up now.

00:09:49.400 And yeah, maybe we can get to this intersection of politics and religion that's happened in America in the past 30

00:09:54.380 years. That's sort of changed things the way we think of religiosity. But let's talk about, you know,

00:09:58.540 sort of the state of religion in America today in general. With the best surveys, what have the

00:10:02.700 numbers looked like for the big religions in the United States? I mean, are there ones that have

00:10:06.060 held steady? Which ones have seen the biggest decrease, et cetera?

00:10:09.260 Yeah. You know, religion is, religion's demography is glacial. That's how I describe it in the book.

00:10:14.140 You don't typically see big shifts like in a year or two years or even five years. So you're looking at

00:10:20.020 10-year trends, sometimes 20-year trends. If you look at things like evangelical

00:10:24.240 evangelicalism, like people who identify with an evangelical tradition, so Southern Baptists,

00:10:28.460 Assemblies of God, Pentecostals, people like that, they were 17% of America in 1972.

00:10:34.000 They jumped to 30% of America in 1993. And now they're down to about 23% of America.

00:10:40.400 It's interesting when I tell people that, a lot of people applaud the fact they're declining from

00:10:45.280 1993, but they forget the fact they're actually up from 1972. There are more evangelicals in America

00:10:50.800 today than there were 40 years ago. Catholics are very, very steady over the last 40 years,

00:10:56.900 incredibly steady, never really going above 25% and never going below 20%, just sort of

00:11:02.080 seesawing up and down around 22%, 23%, 24%. Now, the real decline you're seeing in American religion

00:11:08.940 is a group that I call mainline Protestants. And those are people who are like United Methodists,

00:11:14.240 or Episcopalians, or United Church of Christ. These are the kind of churches where they have female

00:11:18.880 pastors, where they are open and affirming to LGBT people, where they're focused on things like

00:11:23.280 social justice. They don't pound the pulpit and tell you you're going to hell. They're a little

00:11:26.480 bit more moderate on social issues. In 1975, 30% of Americans were mainline Protestants. It was the 0.88

00:11:33.880 largest religious tradition in America. Today, that share has dropped from 30% to 10% and is very likely

00:11:41.480 going to go to 5% over the next decade because mainline Protestants are dying off very quickly because 1.00

00:11:46.460 they're older. So, that's really the big shift in American Christianity is Black Protestants have 1.00

00:11:50.740 held steady. Evangelicals have held steady. Catholics have done just fine. Mainline Protestants 0.78

00:11:55.580 have gone from 30% to 10%, while the nuns, like we just talked about, have gone from 5% to 24%.

00:12:02.280 So, you know, that's really what's happened is a lot of moderate Christians are no longer

00:12:06.740 Christians anymore. They say they're nuns on surveys, and that's led to the decline of mainline and the 0.99

00:12:12.040 huge rise of the nuns. Yeah, I think it's interesting that idea of mainline

00:12:15.860 Protestantism going on. Because I remember when I was a kid in the 90s, you go to school and some

00:12:20.920 kid was like, oh, I'm Methodist, I'm Lutheran, I'm Baptist, I'm Episcopalian. I don't hear that

00:12:26.640 anymore. It's like, well, I just go to this mega church and that's it. Yeah, it's, I don't think

00:12:33.240 we fully understand what that means for the future of America. Those institutions used to dominate

00:12:37.660 America. I mean, in all facets of American life, the Methodists were very strong, the Episcopalians

00:12:42.180 are very strong, and now all you've got is a lot of non-denominational Protestant Christians.

00:12:46.700 Back in 1972, only 5% of all Christians were non-denominational, and now it's 25% and rising

00:12:52.300 rapidly. It's the only tradition in American Christianity that's grown over the last 10

00:12:56.940 years. Baptists are down, Methodists are down, Episcopalians are down, Presbyterians are down. 0.76

00:13:01.400 The only group that's grown are non-denominational churches, and they are eating denominational

00:13:06.280 Christianity, and they represent this entirely different way to do faith because they have no 1.00

00:13:10.460 accountability. They have no organizational structure. A lot of them started with a guy

00:13:14.060 in his basement and a couple of families and grew to a mega church of 1,000 or 2,000 people

00:13:18.340 who don't have a ton of accountability, a ton of history, a ton of connection. It's a radical

00:13:22.800 rethinking of American Christianity, and again, we don't really fully understand what that means

00:13:27.500 for American society at the same time.

00:13:29.820 Why do you think people have left mainline Protestantism and maybe joined a large mega

00:13:35.560 church or non-denominational mega church? What do you think is going on there? Any insights?

00:13:38.900 Man, that's the question that keeps me up at night because I'm a mainline Protestant. I'm a pastor

00:13:44.500 in the American Baptist Church, and we were an offshoot of the Southern Baptist Church, and we

00:13:48.000 split over the issue of slavery in 1860s, right before the Civil War. So my tradition is declining

00:13:53.660 very rapidly. The church that I'm a part of had 300 members in the 1960s, had 50 when I took over in

00:13:59.100 2006, and now we had 10 last Sunday. So we are part of this mainline decline. I think it was a lot of

00:14:05.840 things. I think a big part of it was evangelicals got really popular in the 1990s, and a lot of my

00:14:11.940 parents' generation, let's say, became evangelicals because it was the thing to do, and it leads to

00:14:16.520 this perpetual cycle of the fewer people go, the fewer people go, right? So it goes down and spirals

00:14:21.540 downward and downward. And now if you look at the mainline, they are in serious trouble. For instance,

00:14:25.980 the Episcopal Church, which used to be one of those powerful churches in America, only have about half a

00:14:30.280 million people who come to church every Sunday, half a million people, and a nation of 330 million

00:14:35.140 Americans. I mean, they're going to go away in the next 20 years. So I think that what happened was 1.00

00:14:41.600 those churches got older, they got grayer, and because of that, young families don't want to join

00:14:45.560 a church with a bunch of 60 and 70-year-old people. When they have kids, they want their kids to play

00:14:49.060 with other kids. There were no kids there. So I think it's sort of fed on itself and perpetuated on

00:14:53.720 itself. And once you get to a certain point, it's almost impossible to turn a church around because you

00:14:58.420 just don't have a whole lot to offer when the church down the road has three youth pastors and

00:15:02.800 a gymnasium and a beautiful sanctuary with lights and sounds and smells. And your kids want to go to

00:15:07.120 that because all their friends go to that. So I think all those things together led to the death

00:15:11.240 of the mainline. And I really do think American Christianity and American society, by the way,

00:15:14.960 is worse when you only have one flavor of Protestant Christianity left in this country.

00:15:19.620 Yeah. I think we do underestimate the power of sociability when it comes to people's

00:15:24.420 religious affiliations. I remember if you can go further back, I know there weren't surveys done

00:15:28.020 about religiosity in the 40s and 50s. But from what I understand, after World War II,

00:15:33.320 that's when the mainline Protestant denomination saw this huge uptick. And it was what you were

00:15:38.420 supposed to do. You had to join a church. And so people became mainline Protestant because that's

00:15:43.660 what everyone else was doing. Absolutely. People came back from the war and said,

00:15:46.800 well, I need to put down roots in my community. And you know what? The Methodists are nice. They're

00:15:50.840 fine. They don't yell at me. They want to do soup kitchens and clothes closets and food pantries and help 0.77

00:15:55.100 the community. And I can deal with the theology piece of it because I believe in Jesus, but I don't

00:15:59.240 know about Jonah and the whale and Noah and the flood and all those kinds of things. And those

00:16:03.020 churches preach that corner of the sun a softer gospel. And a lot of people found that very,

00:16:07.600 very appealing. The other thing about the mainline is they're very hierarchical.

00:16:11.700 Like the United Methodist Church, they pick who your pastor is at your church. You don't do that at

00:16:16.240 the individual level. So it's very, very top down, not bottom up. But think of the kind of

00:16:21.260 Christianity that's surviving right now. Non-denominationals are a radical democratization 0.99

00:16:26.580 of religious hierarchy. It's all bottom up. There's no top down anymore. The top down churches

00:16:32.200 are dying and the bottom up churches are succeeding wildly now because they don't have that structure.

00:16:38.240 There are no gatekeepers anymore. So anybody can get a pulpit, get a microphone, get a field somewhere

00:16:43.220 and start preaching. And all of a sudden they have a church in two or three years. You can't do,

00:16:46.760 as a United Methodist, you have to go to college to be a preacher. You have to have a degree and a

00:16:50.220 certification, all those things. It seems like that whole entire structure has sort of fallen

00:16:54.600 by the wayside. And now it's, well, anyone can get a microphone. Anyone can lead a church. And it

00:16:59.060 just changes how we think about Christianity and religion in general.

00:17:02.840 So we've talked about Christianity, Christian denominations. What's the state of like Judaism 1.00

00:17:07.120 and Islam? What's their growth line?

00:17:10.380 Yeah. Those traditions are really, really hard to find on surveys. About 1% of Americans are Muslims,

00:17:16.780 which is 3.5 million people. We have 3.5 million Muslims in this country, but you have to do a 1.00

00:17:22.000 really large survey to have enough Muslims to really see them in a way that you can do statistical

00:17:27.380 analysis on, right? So Mormons are 1%. Muslims are 1%. Buddhists are 1%. Hindus are about one half of 0.95

00:17:34.680 1%. Jews are, depending on the survey, it's really hard to survey Jews because a lot of them kind of, 0.98

00:17:40.820 they can't figure out whether they're religiously Jewish or culturally or genetically Jewish. So you

00:17:46.760 kind of get all that together at the same time. But if you add all those traditions up together,

00:17:51.060 you get about 6% or 7% of Americans kind of fall in those other religious traditions.

00:17:55.760 We know that Muslims are the youngest religious tradition in America. The average Muslim adult in

00:18:00.420 America is 33 years old, when the average American adult is about 50 years old overall.

00:18:05.740 So Muslims are young. They're having lots of children. And so they're growing pretty significantly

00:18:10.040 in the United States. But what's interesting about Muslims especially is they're very geographically

00:18:14.540 concentrated in certain pockets around the country. For instance, in Dearborn, Michigan,

00:18:18.900 there's a huge Muslim population, but there are many counties in the United States. There's not a

00:18:23.380 single Muslim that appears in any census data. So these communities are growing, but they're growing

00:18:28.920 sort of in these little pockets, especially on the coasts, not throughout the heartland. They're

00:18:33.300 getting larger, but that's also, they're becoming a larger part of American society because of

00:18:39.480 immigration as well. Most people who immigrate to this country are not Protestants. There's a huge

00:18:44.740 growing number of Hispanic Catholics, obviously, but there's also people coming from the West and

00:18:49.500 the East and they bring their different religions here. So America is becoming less Christian over 1.00

00:18:54.040 time. It's just happening very, very slowly over your lifetime, not over the next five years,

00:18:59.260 let's say.

00:19:00.480 All right. So let's go back to the nuns specifically, because that's the topic of your book.

00:19:03.380 When you first ran your analysis showing the significant increase in nuns, I mean,

00:19:08.180 were you surprised by that? Or did you already have a hunch as a political scientist and a minister

00:19:12.840 that the number of people who don't consider themselves religious had been increasing in the

00:19:16.840 past several decades?

00:19:18.360 Yeah. It's always showed up in the survey data, but you never know where a tweet's going to go,

00:19:23.320 right? So I started the book with a story about that tweet that really kind of made me into what I

00:19:28.340 am today. I just showed this graph. The GSS had just come out with 2018 data,

00:19:32.360 and the nuns for the first time were now larger than evangelicals or Catholics. And I just tweeted

00:19:37.340 this graph out and I said, big news, the nuns are 23% now, which is at least the same size as

00:19:42.660 evangelicals and Catholics. And it seems like everyone wanted to hear that at the time.

00:19:47.480 I mean, it just took off. I mean, I looked down at my phone, I'll say it's 75 retweets in the first

00:19:51.500 10 minutes. And within the next week or two, I've been called by basically every news media outlet in

00:19:55.740 America and the world. We're interested in American religion and what was changing in American

00:19:59.580 religion. And part of me was thinking, this has been going on for 30 years now. Why are you all 0.97

00:20:05.060 keying on this right now? But I think we've sort of hit this inflection point where it used to be

00:20:10.580 to have no religion in America was not the thing you would say. We were a generically Christian

00:20:15.980 country. We have something called American civic religion, which is the idea that God we trust is

00:20:20.660 on the money and that's totally cool. And we opened Congress with a prayer from a pastor and that's

00:20:25.040 totally fine. But as the number of nuns get larger and larger, it becomes more and more socially

00:20:30.260 acceptable to say you have no religious affiliation. And I think that's fed on itself. And so I think

00:20:34.880 we got to this point where we all looked at each other and went, oh, wow, this is a real thing.

00:20:39.680 They're not 10% of Americans. They're 25% of Americans now and growing rapidly. And that's

00:20:44.720 changing America in ways that we can never fully understand. And a lot of these reporters wanted to

00:20:49.560 talk with me about the implications of what that means, not just now, but for the future of America

00:20:54.740 when we're 30% nuns or 40% nuns or 50% nuns and how that changes. Every situation in American life

00:21:02.020 is going to change because America's religious composition will look in 30 years like nothing 0.99

00:21:07.000 we've ever seen before. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:21:10.820 And now back to the show. Okay. So the number of nuns has, is increased with about the same as

00:21:19.180 Catholics or evangelical Christians. So the question I'm sure people ask you is like, why,

00:21:22.740 what's going on? What, what is causing people to disaffiliate with a religion? So when they're

00:21:28.420 asked, are you, what religion do you belong to? They're going to say none. Like what, what are,

00:21:33.220 what's the cause? Have you figured it out?

00:21:35.460 I wish I could give you like a bumper sticker reason. And I, you know, in the book I try to,

00:21:39.340 I lay out a whole chapter where I give sort of eight different reasons, potential reasons,

00:21:42.760 and I could probably add eight more reasons on top of that, that I thought about in the last

00:21:46.060 couple of years about why there's so many nuns. But I'll, I think the first one, I think this is

00:21:49.980 really the overriding one that a lot of people have not really thought about because they haven't

00:21:53.020 read, you know, 1800s social science, which is this idea called secularization. Max Faber,

00:21:58.200 who's this really famous German sociologist basically argued that as society becomes more

00:22:02.540 educationally advanced and has higher levels of income, they're going to naturally become less

00:22:06.960 religious. And he actually had a term for this. He called it demagication. He said that the world,

00:22:12.080 you know, three or 400 years ago was all magic. It didn't make any sense at all. Like why did it

00:22:15.740 rain? Why was there an earthquake? Why was there a flood? Why did my crops not grow? Everything seemed

00:22:20.080 magical. We didn't really understand cause and effect or geography or geology or climatology or

00:22:25.500 anything else. So everything just sort of seemed like it was spiritual. And then science comes in and

00:22:29.800 sort of says, well, here's why it's raining or not raining. And here's why your crops die or don't die.

00:22:33.800 Here's why you died of that disease. It's called viruses and bacteria, not because of God's trying

00:22:38.140 to smite you or something like that. So what Weber said was, the more we learn about the world,

00:22:42.540 the less we need God. So he, you know, this is called secularization theory. And, you know,

00:22:48.060 he was really, he was proved right by what happened in Western Europe. If you look at Western European

00:22:52.260 countries, places like Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, those countries are almost entirely

00:22:57.040 irreligious now. We're talking about 10, 15% of those folks go to church at least once a week. I mean,

00:23:02.060 very, very few religious people in those countries anymore. And it was sort of inevitable in my mind

00:23:07.120 that what happened in Europe was going to come across the ocean and wash across American shores.

00:23:11.760 We just didn't know how long it was going to take. And in our case, it took probably about 40 years

00:23:15.540 for the waves really starting to crest across America in the early 1990s. And so we were bound

00:23:21.280 to be secularized. It just took longer and went slower than a lot of people anticipated. And I don't

00:23:26.680 think we're done yet. Secularizing, I don't think we're ever going to get to the level of Europe 0.95

00:23:30.380 where, you know, 80, 90% of those people are not religious, but we're definitely going to look a

00:23:34.320 lot more like Europe in the next 30 years than we did in the last 30 years.

00:23:37.780 And what role do you think politics has played in the decline in religion?

00:23:40.880 It's hard to mistake the fact that 40% of people who identify as very liberal also identify as

00:23:47.140 religiously unaffiliated. It's only 10% of people who are very conservative. So 40% of very liberals are

00:23:53.720 nuns, only 10% of very conservatives are nuns. I think what's happened is that we have forced 0.92

00:23:59.080 people to sort themselves into all kinds of camps. And we say, you can't, you have to have a

00:24:03.580 congruent identity. So for instance, it's really hard today to be an evangelical and a Democrat when

00:24:09.540 80% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. It's very, very hard on the other hand, to be a

00:24:15.380 conservative, politically conservative atheist, because 85% of atheists voted for Joe Biden in

00:24:20.940 2020. So what's happened is people have felt like they need to align all facets of their

00:24:26.180 personality, their religiosity, their political views, their cultural views, even where they live.

00:24:31.260 They want everything to line up in such a way that it's all congruent with each other.

00:24:36.880 And so, and there's actually been some political science work on this is we're seeing more and more

00:24:40.340 people are picking their religion based on their politics, much more than they're picking their

00:24:45.620 politics based on religion, which is really mind-blowing because for the last 50 years in social

00:24:50.780 science, we always assumed that religion was the first cause. It was the first lens that we looked

00:24:56.040 at the world through and politics was sort of downstream of that. But there's been a lot of

00:25:00.620 evidence in the last five years that says it's the opposite, that everything, that politics is the way

00:25:05.040 we look at everything in the world, including what kind of church we go to. Evangelicals have 0.66

00:25:09.660 benefited from this. They brought in a lot of conservatives, but mainline Protestants have been

00:25:13.480 hurt by this because they're not so politically cohesive. There's a lot of Republicans and Democrats in those

00:25:18.200 churches. So people are sorting themselves out and the mainline were sort of the casualty of all that.

00:25:23.060 That is interesting that there's these findings that people are choosing the religion based on

00:25:26.740 their politics. That seems like the tail wagging the dog. I mean, you think, you know, it's the

00:25:30.620 spiritual would help you decide you're earthly, but it seems like the earthly is helping people decide

00:25:34.980 they're spiritual. And you know what? I had a pastor tell me one time he goes, listen, I get them for

00:25:38.800 30 minutes every Sunday, if I'm lucky, you know, if they pay attention to me, they go home and watch

00:25:42.820 Fox News or CNN for six hours a day, seven days a week. I can't compete with that. You know, so where are they

00:25:47.460 getting the gospel more from? Where are they getting, you know, religious ideas more from? Probably the TV

00:25:51.380 than me. And so, you know what a lot of pastors have done, interestingly enough, because of this

00:25:54.960 polarization is they stop talking about politics in the pulpit entirely because they don't want to turn

00:25:58.940 off anybody in the congregation. So when you leave that void in people's lives, they're going to fill

00:26:03.520 it in some other way. Like, how should I think about abortion or immigration or gay marriage or,

00:26:07.720 you know, DACA or whatever it is, they're going to listen to somebody. And pastors sort of gave that

00:26:13.300 away over the last 30 years. And now the people who talk to them are people like Anderson Cooper

00:26:17.200 and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and people like that. So they're getting it from somewhere

00:26:21.180 else. It's not from the pulpit. It's from the TV each and every night.

00:26:24.900 All right. So secularization is one theory of the decrease in religious affiliation. Politics

00:26:29.820 in America has played a role. You also talk about this idea of social desirability bias.

00:26:36.300 What is social desirability bias and what influence do you think it has had on religion surveys?

00:26:41.380 Yeah. So social desirability bias is really a fancy way of saying that people lie on surveys. We know

00:26:47.220 this. We've known this forever that people are really, really prone to lying about certain things

00:26:51.500 in their life. Questions about things like sexuality. Do you masturbate? Have you ever cheated on your

00:26:55.200 partner? How many sexual partners have you had? Do you do drugs? What kind of drugs do you do? Have

00:26:59.720 you ever stolen, lied, cheated, sealed? All those kinds of questions. Are you racist? Are you sexist?

00:27:04.680 Those kinds of questions, you never get the right answers. You always get the answer that people want you

00:27:09.160 to hear, not the real answer. And we know that when it comes to religion, that social desirability

00:27:14.200 bias is a huge problem because people want to seem more religious than they actually are.

00:27:19.420 I talk about in the book about this county in Ohio, Ashtabula County, Ohio. It's this little rural

00:27:24.680 county in the middle of the state. And this survey team sent a survey out to about a thousand people

00:27:30.100 living in that county, asked them how often they went to church. About 37% of respondents said they went

00:27:34.940 to church every Sunday. So they checked. They went around to every church in the county every weekend

00:27:40.560 and they counted cars in the parking lot or they asked the pastor. They called them up and said,

00:27:45.400 how many people do you have in church last Sunday? They tabulated all that and they figured out the

00:27:49.280 share of people in that county who went to church every Sunday was about 20%, not 37%. So half the people

00:27:55.060 who say they go to church every Sunday lie about it on surveys. And so what that means for us,

00:27:59.960 though, is as it's become less and less taboo to be a nun in the 21st century, we actually might be

00:28:06.840 seeing the real answer to the religion question, not the socially desirable answer. And so there's

00:28:12.520 a real possibility, and we'll never be able to figure this out with any certainty, but there's a

00:28:15.900 real possibility that we've never really been that religious. It's just people lied on surveys a lot in

00:28:22.000 the 1970s and 80s to over-inflate their own religiosity when really they never went to church.

00:28:26.600 But today they're giving us the real answer or an answer that's closer to real and honest.

00:28:32.300 So we're actually seeing the real numbers today, not the over-inflated numbers we saw 30 or 40 years

00:28:36.960 ago. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point that maybe Americans have been less religious

00:28:41.000 for a long time. And now we're just knowing because people are just being honest with the surveys.

00:28:45.500 And I think I've read history books about the history of Christianity in America, where they talk

00:28:50.360 about where they actually look at church roles. And you look at the number of people on a church role

00:28:55.700 compared to the number of the population. And the number of people on a church role is like

00:29:00.420 20 to 30% of the actual population of a colony or an early state. So I mean, it's probably been

00:29:07.960 smaller than we... Actual religiosity has been probably in the same range for a really long time.

00:29:13.520 I think generally, we were never as religious as certain people think we were. But I think we're

00:29:20.100 less religious today than we were 30 or 40 years ago. But I don't think that number is as big as we

00:29:24.660 think it is. But again, we'll never be able to figure out this question with any certainty,

00:29:29.640 which is really obviously troublesome for me. But it's also problematic for social science,

00:29:33.160 because we can't say, are we more religious today than we were 50 years ago with any sort

00:29:36.620 of empirical data? It's maddening. Yeah. So let's talk about the demographics

00:29:40.940 of nuns. What do they look like? Are they more or less educated than average, more or less income,

00:29:45.900 male-female breakdown? Can I just give us a thumbnail sketch of a nun? 0.74

00:29:49.480 Man, they're all over. They're everywhere. And they're everyone. I think that if anything comes

00:29:54.040 out of the book, I hope people realize that it's not... The trope that we have in our heads,

00:29:57.860 it's always like a white male philosophy professor who makes a bunch of money and has a PhD.

00:30:02.440 That is not the nuns anymore. Now, the other thing in the book that I think is really,

00:30:07.000 really important is I break the nuns down into three distinct categories, right? Atheists,

00:30:11.760 agnostics, nothing in particular. Atheists are 6% of the population. They have very high levels 0.84

00:30:16.660 of education. Almost half of them have a four-year college degree, which is insane because only about

00:30:20.660 30% of Americans have a four-year college degree. So very, very highly educated. They have incomes

00:30:25.020 that are much higher than the national average. About 47% of atheists are white men, which is

00:30:30.760 obviously a disproportionate amount. 60% of all atheists are males. And I talk about in the book,

00:30:35.440 if you go on Amazon and look at the bestseller list for the atheist category, almost all of it is white 0.99

00:30:40.060 men. So it's a very white male-dominated space. Politically, they're incredibly liberal.

00:30:45.620 They think they're to the left of the Democratic Party now, and they see themselves trending even

00:30:49.640 further to the left of the Democratic Party. They're incredibly politically active. They show

00:30:54.300 up to meetings. They go to rallies. They hold protests. I mean, they put bumper stickers on

00:30:58.080 their cars. They put up yard signs. They do all that stuff. They're actually the most politically

00:31:01.740 active group in America today are atheists. Agnostics are a little, I call them like atheist light. 0.71

00:31:07.040 They're also 6% of America. They do have higher levels of education, but not as high as atheists.

00:31:10.980 They have higher incomes, but not as high as atheists. They're politically active,

00:31:13.660 not as much as atheists. And they're liberal, but not as liberal as atheists.

00:31:17.500 But they're sort of in that direction of atheism. But the third group is this group called nothing

00:31:23.080 in particular. And I think this is the group that sort of goes understudied, underconsidered,

00:31:27.320 and underthought about. About 22% of Americans today identify as nothing in particular, which is

00:31:32.160 about the same size as evangelicals. These people have the lowest education of any religious group in 0.90

00:31:38.120 America. Only 20% of them have a four-year college degree. 60% of them make $50,000

00:31:43.320 a year or less as a household, which means that most of them live in poverty. They are left out,

00:31:48.520 left behind, lost. They don't vote. They don't go to meetings. They don't participate in the

00:31:52.780 political process at all. I think they're really the tragic figures of the 21st century in America

00:31:58.400 because they are not economically prosperous. They're not culturally advancing. They feel like

00:32:02.960 they're isolated and unmoored from the rest of society. And the funny thing is, most of the nuns 0.81

00:32:08.380 are nothing in particular. Three in five nuns are nothing in particular. And yet, it seems like

00:32:12.800 all the attention in the media on the nuns falls on the atheists and agnostics when really the nothing

00:32:17.380 in particulars are so different than they are and larger than they are at the same time. So,

00:32:21.380 I think we need to spend a lot more time thinking about that third group than nothing in particular

00:32:25.300 group. Yeah. I thought that was an interesting point in the book. So, going back to the theories of

00:32:29.840 what's causing disaffiliation, we talked about the secularization theory. As you become more educated,

00:32:34.180 the less likely you're going to be religious. And that would make sense for someone who's atheist 0.99

00:32:39.400 or agnostic. But as you noted, nothing in particular is they're not as it. They're not

00:32:43.980 very educated. So, what's going on there? Is secularization playing a role? What's causing

00:32:49.500 them to disaffiliate? My best inclination with them is they are dissociating themselves with every

00:32:56.040 part of American society. I think if you look at the data, a lot of them tried to go to college,

00:33:00.460 but just didn't make it for whatever reason. I bet it's probably because of things like

00:33:03.760 finances or logistics or things like that. These are people who are just, I think,

00:33:09.320 these are the kind of, in my mind, here's who I think they are. These are the kind of people who

00:33:12.300 wanted to live the same lives their parents did. And they tried to do the same things their parents

00:33:16.180 did, which would go to high school, get a degree, and then go work at the local factory. Except the

00:33:20.320 local factory their parents worked at doesn't exist anymore. It closed down and got offshore to

00:33:24.260 somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, the life they wanted to live, they can't live anymore. And the money 1.00

00:33:28.800 they wanted to make, they can't make anymore. And they just don't feel like there's any way for them to move

00:33:33.080 forward. They feel like every part of society has left them behind, whether it be education,

00:33:38.080 whether it be politics, and whether it be the church. They are antisocial. They have no reason

00:33:43.700 to be social because nobody can do anything for them. They are really sort of in despair in American

00:33:48.920 society, and they're rapidly growing. And I think their numbers are going to continue to grow

00:33:53.080 because I think for a lot of people, they don't want to reject religion and take on all the negative

00:33:57.640 stereotypes that atheists have in American society. But they also can't be religious either because 0.94

00:34:02.100 they're antisocial largely. So, they're sort of caught between the real hardcore nuns on one 0.96

00:34:08.000 side and the real hardcore evangelicals on the other side and go, I can't do either of those things.

00:34:12.460 So, I'll just be stuck here in the mushy middle.

00:34:15.100 So, these are the people that Robert Putnam was talking about in Bowling Alone. These are the

00:34:18.800 people who are bowling alone.

00:34:20.220 Absolutely. They're bowling. But I think Putnam, if Putnam wrote his book today, he should call it

00:34:24.460 tweeting alone or Facebooking alone or Instagramming alone, right? The internet has accelerated our

00:34:29.320 ability to stay at home and still be entertained in ways that we don't even fully grasp.

00:34:34.140 So, people are doing fewer social things. Even back in Putnam's day, he blamed it on cable TV.

00:34:39.640 I mean, think about what Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and all these things have done for us and TikTok

00:34:43.920 and Instagram. Now, we never have to leave our house. And I think for certain people, that's really

00:34:48.740 sort of cut them off from any potential economic prosperity, relational prosperity. And people used to

00:34:55.520 go out and see other people and hang out and enjoy company and things like that. Now, they just stay

00:34:59.480 home and watch Netflix on a Friday night. And I think there's a lot of reasons to believe that

00:35:03.100 has been a net negative for American society.

00:35:06.480 And also, another point you make about the nothing in particulars is, unlike atheists who say, yeah,

00:35:10.800 there's no divine being out there. Agnostics are like, well, I don't care. Maybe, maybe not. 1.00

00:35:16.100 The nothing in particulars, when you ask them, they might not associate with a religion. But if you ask

00:35:21.280 them, are you, do you believe in a higher power? They might say yes. And some of these folks even

00:35:26.440 attend church every now and then. That's right. About 30% of nothing in particular say they go to

00:35:31.460 church at least once a year. So, they're not anti-anti-religion like your atheist or agnostics

00:35:36.460 are. Less than 3% of atheists or agnostics go to church at all. So, there's a huge divide. And 40%

00:35:43.260 of nothing in particular say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives.

00:35:47.420 We've talked about education and income of nuns. What about age? Is there a general age or an

00:35:54.820 average age of a nun? Yeah. So, nuns are, the conception that they're a bunch of young folks 0.81

00:36:00.600 is actually not that empirically true. They are younger than the average American, but only by a

00:36:05.680 few years. And nothing in particular is actually, their median age is very, very similar to the median

00:36:10.380 age of the average American. Now, we have 18-year-old nuns. We've got 85-year-old nuns. So,

00:36:15.600 it really spans the gambit. It does lean towards the younger generation just because generational

00:36:20.740 replacement change and things like that. But what we're seeing is, if you look at the data

00:36:24.420 on Generation Z, which are people who are born in 1995 or later, the oldest members are now moving

00:36:30.320 into adulthood so we can survey them. We're seeing that the rate of nuns amongst Generation Z now is

00:36:36.060 way over 40%. I've seen 42% or 44% nuns amongst Generation Z. So, think about this. Every day in America, 0.94

00:36:43.820 baby boomers are dying off. 18% of them are nuns. But every day in America, someone now from Gen Z is 0.99

00:36:49.440 moving into adulthood and 44% of them are nuns. So, we're seeing this rapid shift in that old people 1.00

00:36:55.380 are dying off who are more religious while young people are entering American life who are much 0.99

00:36:59.340 less religious. And that by itself is going to change the composition of American religion without 0.78

00:37:03.920 anyone converting or deconverting at all. Just generational replacement is going to do more work than any sort

00:37:09.480 of conversion or deconversion ever could. Well, let's talk about predictions for the future.

00:37:14.240 So, have political scientists made predictions about the number of nuns what'll be like 10,

00:37:19.040 20, 40 years from now? So, I get asked that question a lot. And, you know, prediction is

00:37:23.080 obviously a very, very treacherous place to go into because American society can shift. And if you're

00:37:28.040 a Christian, you believe in revival and awakening and those kind of things. And when America's seen two 0.95

00:37:33.080 of those, we saw two great awakenings in our history where massive amounts of people, millions and

00:37:37.000 millions of people became Christians overnight, basically, because of, you know, this cadre of 0.95

00:37:40.380 preachers who are very dynamic. I have to say, assuming that won't happen, and, you know, there's

00:37:45.160 no way to assume it will or won't happen. I think what we're going to see in America in 50 years is

00:37:49.560 probably 45 or 50% of Americans are going to be non-religious. So, half secular, half not.

00:37:57.500 Christianity will probably be 35 or 40% of America, and there'll probably be 10 or 15% of America who are

00:38:02.840 everybody else, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, all making up that other 10 or 15%.

00:38:08.980 I don't think we're ever going to get to the place where Europe is today, where it's, you know, 80% 0.97

00:38:13.140 secular, 90% secular. I think we're stubbornly religious in this country, and we always will sort of

00:38:18.100 have this very strong core of religious belief, and probably 40% of Americans will be Christians or

00:38:22.940 whether it be very conservative Catholics or Christians or Jews or Muslims, whatever it is, they will 0.72

00:38:27.680 still exist even in 50 or 60 years. Well, going back to this idea that, you know, Gen Z, 40% of 0.51

00:38:33.680 them are saying they're nuns. You know, they don't identify with religion. Going back to this idea,

00:38:38.260 also, you said earlier that religious demography changes very slowly, and one reason it's changed

00:38:45.080 slowly, I think social scientists have noticed that, okay, young people will, you know, become less

00:38:49.320 religious in their early years after leaving home, but then they become more religious again when they

00:38:54.640 settle down and have their own families. The projections you just gave, it sounds like that's

00:38:59.340 not going to happen. Yeah. There used to be this model called the life cycle model, and it said that

00:39:04.280 when you were a kid, you know, under the age of 18, you were fairly religious because your parents took

00:39:08.320 you to church. You did youth group and church camp and all that kind of good stuff, but when you went

00:39:12.980 into, you know, your 20s, you went to college, you partied a little bit, you know, sowed your wild oats,

00:39:16.920 and you became less religious, but then when you moved into your late 20s, early 30s, you would find a

00:39:21.180 partner, you would get married, you would have kids, and then you would want to raise them in

00:39:25.020 the same sort of religious upbringing that you grew up with, so you'd go back to church and take

00:39:28.580 your kids back to church. Well, that held for the baby boomers. They actually did do that. They came 0.99

00:39:33.540 back to church when they were in their, you know, late 20s, early 30s through their 40s. That is not

00:39:37.940 happening at all amongst younger generations. You know, in the book, I show these graphs where it's

00:39:42.540 just up and up and up. There is no dip when people are supposed to have kids and come back to church.

00:39:47.380 They don't come back to church ever. And so, we're actually seeing this, interestingly enough,

00:39:52.020 in every birth cohort. So, people born in the 50s are doing the same thing. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s,

00:39:57.180 are all doing the same thing. As they age, they're becoming less religious over time. So, there's

00:40:01.940 really, you know, pastors have sort of held out hope, oh, and the kids, you know, come back from

00:40:05.440 college and they get married, they're going to come back. I see zero evidence of that in the data.

00:40:09.720 They're just getting less and less religious as every year passes.

00:40:13.780 So, as a minister, you've seen the interest in religion firsthand in your small

00:40:17.360 congregation. As you said, it started out at 350 when you took it on. Now, you had 10 people

00:40:22.440 at church last Sunday. Besides shrinking church congregations, what are the larger social and

00:40:28.620 political implications of the increasing number of nuns for our society in which only, you know,

00:40:33.540 60% of people, some of the projections you gave, say they're religious?

00:40:38.500 Yeah. So, I think we have to think about the social safety net in this country. And, you know,

00:40:42.500 I think we forget about all the invisible things that churches do to make life less awful.

00:40:47.200 Even little things like, you know, the Southern Baptists have this disaster relief core. It's a

00:40:50.880 bunch of guys with chainsaws that come out of places that have tornadoes and hurricanes and

00:40:53.840 cut down trees for you and haul them off. Little things like that. Things, you know,

00:40:57.580 like my church, for instance, I packed 210 brown bags this morning to deliver to kids over the

00:41:01.420 weekend in our school district because our poverty rate's 85%. So, they have food to eat over the

00:41:05.680 weekends because a lot of those kids just frankly starve in our community. So, little churches do

00:41:09.960 little things like this all the time to make life less awful. So, where are we going to fill those

00:41:15.140 gaps in from? I would love if the atheists would come together and create social service organizations

00:41:20.740 that would help on a large scale. I think that would be the most amazing thing ever, but I don't

00:41:24.320 see a whole lot of evidence of that working right now. So, I don't know who's going to fill in the

00:41:28.880 social service gap, but also just from a political science perspective, church used to be this place

00:41:33.720 where you would sit with people who have a different political view than you do, but you still love

00:41:38.620 them and trust them and care for them as part of your family because they're part of your church

00:41:41.960 family. So, you know, in the 1970s and 80s, even in evangelical churches, the number of Republicans,

00:41:47.620 the number of Democrats was almost exactly equal, even in the 1980s. So, you would sit next to people

00:41:51.600 who had completely different views than you did and voted for completely different candidates,

00:41:54.320 but you still saw them as human beings. You didn't demonize them like we're seeing today.

00:41:58.740 And now, when you never come in contact with someone who votes differently than you do or thinks

00:42:02.740 differently than you do about political issues, you automatically think the worst of the other side.

00:42:06.860 You sort of other them. You create this sort of mirror image in your head of everything that's

00:42:11.560 good about you is bad about them and vice versa. So, what that does is creates these larger divides

00:42:16.680 in American society between Republicans and Democrats. Churches used to be what we call

00:42:21.040 bridge-building institutions. They built bridges from your world to their world. People from the

00:42:25.820 other side of the political aisle, there are not many bridge-building institutions in America anymore,

00:42:30.860 and I think we're all going to be worse for it, and polarization is only going to get worse for it,

00:42:34.620 and we really are going to feel more and more like we're living in two separate planets when

00:42:38.400 Democrats talk about something versus Republicans because we don't even talk to each other anymore.

00:42:43.320 Besides the sort of the dwindling social service component that churches offer and maybe the sort

00:42:48.640 of the buffer of polarization that churches once offered, I mean, another role that the church has

00:42:52.420 played in at least in American life, it was a socially organizing role. You'd go there and you'd make

00:42:57.500 friends. You'd find mates. You could improve yourself. There was, you know, this history throughout

00:43:02.440 American Christianity and even Judaism where you'd have these mutual improvement associations within

00:43:07.180 churches that was for free, was all volunteer, and it was sort of that Alexis de Tocqueville idea of

00:43:12.800 we're doing it on our own. We're going to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We don't need the

00:43:16.100 state or a large corporation to do this for us. If that's gone, how are people organizing themselves

00:43:21.820 in the same way that churches once organized people?

00:43:25.360 They aren't. I think that's the long and the short of it. I mean, I think there's some online

00:43:28.900 organization that goes on, but I think that the evidence is overwhelmingly in one direction,

00:43:33.100 which is that online interactions are not as good as in-person interactions, whether it comes to

00:43:37.660 friendship or community building or social trust or social capital. We're not seeing those being

00:43:42.340 replaced by anything else. And by the way, churches used to be really good about training people about

00:43:47.060 how to run meetings and how to fundraise and how to organize an event, let's say. They used to learn

00:43:51.300 those skills in church, then use them in the community to fundraise for a candidate or fundraise for

00:43:55.820 something good in the community to help someone who got cancer, let's say. So these civic skill

00:43:59.680 building exercises that churches used to teach are sort of falling by the wayside now and nothing

00:44:04.560 is stepping in to take over. I'll give you a good example. So there's this atheist movement for a

00:44:09.540 while called Sunday Assembly, where it would be a bunch of atheists coming together on Sunday and

00:44:13.960 basically having their form of church where they would sing pop songs and they would hear some sort

00:44:18.120 of inspirational message from a speaker. But most Sunday Assemblies failed. And the reason they fail

00:44:23.440 was because they felt bad asking for money because a lot of atheists are very skeptical of anyone

00:44:27.620 asking them for money, even if it seems quasi or pseudo-religious. So most of them closed down

00:44:32.360 because they couldn't pay the bills. So these other organizations are trying to do what church did,

00:44:37.320 but for whatever reason can't replicate the social aspect, the political aspect, the cultural aspect

00:44:43.100 that churches do. And I just don't see anything in American society that comes close to replicating

00:44:48.200 what happens in church every Sunday across America.

00:44:52.320 Yeah. I mean, I think something I've heard you bring up in another podcast is like this hypothetical,

00:44:57.300 like what will society look like when it's nuns for three generations back? So like grandparents were 1.00

00:45:02.300 nuns, their kids were nuns, and their kids, those kids were nuns. Like the kids of those kids were nuns.

00:45:08.700 It's going to, I think there's actually going to be a swing back the other direction.

00:45:12.440 And the reason I say that is because we know that young people always don't rebel against

00:45:16.480 whatever their parents are up to. And for generations, their parents have been up to

00:45:20.420 Christianity, largely in America. So they want to rebel against that and become a nun. But 0.88

00:45:24.000 isn't the most rebellious thing to be religious when your parents aren't in some weird way?

00:45:28.500 I do think we're going to see sort of a resurgence. I don't think it's going to like bring

00:45:32.160 Christianity back to where it was 30 years ago or whatever. I think that's overshooting the mark. 0.98

00:45:36.180 But I do think there's going to be the sort of counterculture thing that happens

00:45:38.620 when you're second or third generation nun, and you're going to look around and go,

00:45:42.780 you know what? I kind of like the idea of being religious. I kind of like the feeling of being

00:45:47.460 spiritual. I want to think the world is bigger than me, and I want to be part of something bigger

00:45:51.220 than myself. And I want to think there's something beyond all these things. I do think that some

00:45:55.260 people, for whatever reason, are wired towards spiritual things, and they're going to drift their

00:45:58.900 way back into church. Even though their parents never really got them in church in the first place,

00:46:02.880 they're going to seek it out on their own because they're going to want that spiritual void being

00:46:06.540 filled somehow. So I do think there's going to be sort of a backlash against the nuns. I don't know how

00:46:11.720 large it's going to be. I don't know when it's going to happen, but I do think it's a very real

00:46:15.480 possibility in the next 20 or 30 years we're going to see first-generation Christians again.

00:46:20.180 Well, that guy's kind of related to that Strauss-Howe generational theory. In America,

00:46:25.220 there's sort of this cycle of generations that happen. There's a lot of swinging from back and

00:46:28.920 forth, like one generation is rebelling against the other generation or the previous generation.

00:46:32.600 So you're saying that could happen, maybe?

00:46:34.840 Yeah, we do see that. Religion waxes and wanes in different places. Over the last 200 or 300 years,

00:46:40.480 we don't see that in the last 50 years as much. We see only one direction. But there's plenty of

00:46:44.420 reasons to believe that Americans are not just going to become not spiritual at all in 50 years.

00:46:49.420 And for a lot of them, we're already seeing this, by the way. We're already seeing people fill up

00:46:53.120 their spiritual void by things like tarot cards and astrology and palm reading and crystals and

00:46:58.680 healing and all those kinds of things. So people are always going to be spiritual. How they express

00:47:03.780 that really depends on what these institutions do in response to the changing religious landscape in

00:47:08.880 America today. Yeah, I think that's going to be the... I think people will always be religious.

00:47:12.580 It's... Yeah, I think it's on an institutional level. Will it be like it was in the 1950s or 60s?

00:47:18.520 And that's... Yeah, that's the key though, is use the right word, institution. I think people

00:47:22.340 become anti-institutional in America. And I do wonder if that's going to come to an end though.

00:47:27.040 And we're going to start believing in institutions more and more because we realize without them,

00:47:31.340 we get the current political and religious landscape of America where it's a bunch of people who got

00:47:35.720 famous online for saying odd things and how bad that is for American democracy.

00:47:41.080 Institutions, I've changed my mind on a lot of this stuff. I think institutions are actually good.

00:47:45.060 I think gatekeepers are actually good. We got to keep the crazy down in this country because the

00:47:49.240 internet's basically giving the crazy people a megaphone. And we've seen what that's done to us

00:47:53.860 in the last 10 years. Yeah, that's one of the things, predictions that the Strauss-Howe

00:47:58.300 generational theory makes is that we're due to like a resurgence in institution building,

00:48:02.860 supposedly. We'll see if it shakes out. As I say about... You know about prophets. You've studied

00:48:07.400 like most prophets get killed. So... I do not see myself as a prophet, but I will say I think

00:48:13.140 that institutions are going to make a comeback because to go back to the Episcopal church,

00:48:16.420 they have no people. They have one point... They take in $1.5 billion a year and their endowment's

00:48:21.200 like around $10 billion. They got money. They just need the people to show up. And a resurgent

00:48:25.460 group of young people wanted to become Episcopalian. I'm sure they would roll out the red carpet 0.99

00:48:28.360 for them. So there's a possibility there. It's just how do we get there? I have no idea.

00:48:33.580 Well, Ryan, this has been an interesting conversation. Where can people go to learn

00:48:35.860 more about the book and your work? You can go to... I'm big on Twitter. I post

00:48:39.700 graphs every day at Ryan Burge, R-Y-A-N-B-U-R-G-E. RyanBurge.net is my website. My first book,

00:48:45.940 The Nuns, Where They Came From, Who They Are, Where They're Going is on Amazon.com right now. And I

00:48:49.500 have a new book coming out next March, March of 2022. It is called 20 Myths About Religion and Politics

00:48:55.880 in America. And you can pre-order on Amazon right now.

00:48:58.980 All right. Well, Ryan Burge, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:49:01.220 Thank you, man. I appreciate it.

00:49:02.680 My guest today was Ryan Burge. He's the author of the book, The Nuns, Where They Came From,

00:49:06.100 Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:49:09.560 You can check out our show notes at awm.is slash nuns, where you can find links to resources.

00:49:13.280 We delve deeper into this topic.

00:49:21.520 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check our website at

00:49:25.260 artofmanless.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written

00:49:28.700 over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free

00:49:31.640 episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,

00:49:35.740 sign up, use code MANLESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up,

00:49:38.960 download the Stitcher app on Android iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast.

00:49:43.200 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you'd take one minute to give us a review on

00:49:46.000 Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps that a lot. If you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the

00:49:50.080 show with your friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the

00:49:53.360 continuing support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you all how to listen to the AOM Podcast,

00:49:56.980 and put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - October 27, 2021

The Rise of the Religious ＂Nones＂ (And What It Means for Society)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript