Is America losing its religion? Statistics indicate yes, with a rapid decrease in church affiliation and a marked increase in people who don't identify with organized religion. This episode of Church Potluck features Curt Hersey (Communication), Michael Bailey (political science), and Michael Papazian (philosophy), who each help us explore the fall of religiosity, the rise of non-affiliation, and the evolution of religious identities.
Some topics we address in this episode:
Join us for some food for thought and something to chew on!
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
Is America losing its religion? Statistics indicate yes, with a rapid decrease in church affiliation and a marked increase in people who don't identify with organized religion. This episode of Church Potluck features Curt Hersey (Communication), Michael Bailey (political science), and Michael Papazian (philosophy), who each help us explore the fall of religiosity, the rise of non-affiliation, and the evolution of religious identities.
Some topics we address in this episode:
Join us for some food for thought and something to chew on!
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
Alright, before we get started on this week's episode, we've got some unfinished business from last week's episode, and so two of you were on the episode on horror. Yes, I cannot believe that I totally forgot to put this in my show notes. And then, even when Michael Bailey brought up the whole game show is it horror or is it not? I did bring it up. I did a search preparing for last week's show on horror in Christianity and I typed those two words into Google. It came up with a whole filmography. The third episode was the Passion of the Christ. Oh, that's wild, Isn't that isn't that.
Speaker 1:That makes sense, though. Passion of the Christ, horror or norer.
Speaker 3:The vent itself was horrible. Yeah, right, you know.
Speaker 4:It has elements of body horror in it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, I've heard people refer to it as a snuff film, basically in terms of just how Bruce Simit was.
Speaker 3:Violence is great, yeah, and very gruesome. I've never seen it, so I just said that I don't know really.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, even if you'll just look at the picture on the cover, you know just how much his face is mutilated. So, yeah, All right. Well, with that cheery note, welcome everyone to Church Potluck, where we are serving up a smorgasbord of Christian curiosity. I'm your host, Dale McConkey, sociology professor and United Methodist pastor, and you know there are two keys to a good Church Potluck Plenty of variety and engaging conversation. And this is exactly what we are trying to do on Church Potluck sitting down with friends and sharing our ideas on a variety of topics from a variety of academic disciplines and a variety of Christian traditions. And so welcome back to season two of Church Potluck and our third episode of the new season. Well, let me get right to it and welcome our guests Before we even talk about the topic today. First of all, I want to welcome Dr Kurt Hersey. Hey, hey, oh, yading yourself. That's good.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you got to hype yourself. Very well done. So, Kurt, remind us who you are. I am a professor of communication specializing in film and television. I've been at Berry forever. I actually do my undergrad at Berry.
Speaker 3:You're a Berry guy, I am You're.
Speaker 4:Mr Berry. In a way, I'm not going to go that far. Okay, all right.
Speaker 3:So for those who are not at Berry, mr Berry is a kind of Is a contest for a dude, is very wholesome and is ironic, tongue-in-cheek and adorable. Yes, that's correct.
Speaker 1:I accidentally made that unwholesome. One time I was asked to be the host and they, very last minute, asked people to answer some questions and so I was supposed to say stuff about them based on this, and one guy's handwriting was chicken scratch. And when they said, what are your hobbies? He had written Stargazing on Frost Chapel lawn Uh-huh, and I wasn't trying to be funny, but as I read it I said staggering across Frost Chapel lawn, and so a very unbury kind of a comment but we claim it's an unbury comment.
Speaker 3:Okay, that is true.
Speaker 1:I've heard tales, but not when you were here, of course. No, certainly not, certainly not. All right, thank you very much for being here, kurt, and next I say it every week basically, you know him, you love him. Dr Michael Bailey, hello. Good morning and I'm sure people know who you are by now.
Speaker 3:But go ahead and remind us, I'm a professor of political science here, each mostly American politics, but I teach also, of course, in modern political philosophy and I'm really very interested in this topic in particular. Thank you very much. Have you announced the topic yet? I have not. Don't say it yet.
Speaker 1:That's right, Someone who has been on almost as much as you have, Dr Bailey, and just out of the woodwork Last second, one of the benefits of having an office down here. I just walked over to Papasian. He said come join us and he did. Dr Michael Papasian, he is. Oh.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it's a good thing I came in early, because otherwise that's right, you would only have. You'd be fine with just two guests, I guess.
Speaker 1:But we would have managed without you, but it is nice to have you here.
Speaker 5:I would say even like Trinitarian there you go, there you go, you need more people for a good potluck?
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's true. That's exactly right.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. That's one of the first ratio. I was actually going to make a big deal out of the empty chair and be representative of our topic today. Oh right, yeah, because our topic today. What is it going to be Losing my religion, losing my religion.
Speaker 1:All right, losing my religion, declining church attendance in the United States, the growth of the young church, the rise of the nuns and we sociologists always think we're so clever when we say the rise of the nuns and then say that's N-O-N-E-S. Why are the folks fleeing the church? Is this a generational hiccup or is it a long-term trend? Is Christianity in crisis? Let's find out from our experts. But first I want to do a couple of announcements, as we are prone to do. We actually have another country to welcome us.
Speaker 3:Y'all looking very puzzled, very quizzical here. They can't afford anything more than half-nose, fairly False Welcome.
Speaker 1:Japan, oh, excellent, japan, yes, so we are now 29 countries strong across the globe. So we welcome Japan to church potluck. And I also wanted to just do another quick story that I want to say that actually has connection to church potluck. All of us are connected to Berry College in one way or another, and Berry College lost a giant icon yesterday in the passing of Tom Carver, who is dean of students here for I think a quarter of a century. Was he dean of students when you were here? Oh, absolutely, did you have any run-ins with?
Speaker 4:Dean Carver. No, the time I had to go, I went to see his assistant. Okay, yeah, although my brother I know my brother every time that Dean Carver they would put things in the campus mailboxes. He would correct any mistakes on it and then send them back to Dean Carver. Okay, that's the kind of guy.
Speaker 1:He was yes, and he was a larger than I figure. In many ways, absolutely yeah. And I just want to tell a quick story. When I had this calling to be the chaplain of Berry College and when it came to pass and it was announced, dean Carver was one of the first people that reached out to me, just with this boyish enthusiasm I mean oh, this is fantastic, I want to take you out to lunch. But I also suspected that there might be an ulterior motive to him taking me out to lunch, because he was very opinionated guy, very strong and devout, and I thought you had strong convictions, very strong convictions, and I thought that he might want to do a little strategizing and a little setting the agenda for my chaplaincy.
Speaker 1:Because I entered the chaplaincy during a very divisive time on campus. There was a strong tension between the chaplain's office and our religion philosophy department and students were feeling like they had to take sides and I thought Tom was probably going to want to help me shape the agenda for my chaplaincy. And so we're sitting having lunch. It's a fantastic conversation. He was just so supportive of me serving as chaplain, which I really appreciated, and then at the very end of lunch, things got a little more serious and he says Dale, there's a lot of tension on campus right now. And I said, okay, here it comes. Here comes the little nudge in terms of direction. And he just looked at me and says people can disagree on these issues. I just hope you bring a sense of joy back to the chaplain's office. Isn't that?
Speaker 1:nice For a man with strong convictions that he said I just want you to have and he told me a little bit more about how he had learned over the years from Larry Green's chaplaincy just how chaplain does have to serve everybody and you really can't take strong stands on things. And he just that liberated me in many ways. Just to focus on that and I think it's influenced a lot of my ministry and one of the things we try to do here in church potluck. Bringing it back to what we're doing here, yeah, social media.
Speaker 4:I saw just an outpouring from other alumni and the stories that they had. I just I was not very connected with the administration when I was a student but lots of people worked in KCAB that had different campus jobs that had really been touched by Tom Carver Yep.
Speaker 1:Thank you all very much for letting me tell that story. Let's go ahead now and get into the topic. Let's talk about the religious nuns and just the fact that we are losing our religion in the United States and this is a trend that is relatively recent, do you?
Speaker 3:mind. If I ask you, though, we're familiar with the term religious nuns. I know you said it's not going to be NUN, but what is the NONE referring to?
Speaker 1:Great time to ask that question, because there has been a decisive decline of religious attendance, religious membership and Christian attendance and membership in particular, over the past two decades. The United States has had fairly robust religious participation for decades upon decades In fact. Let's do a little game show, since you brought it up All right now, in honor of Bob Barker's passing, we're going to say guess the number without going over. All right. So 1948, so post-World War II, how many people in the United States identified themselves as either Protestant or Catholic? 82%, 82%, I was going to say 80%, 80% 83%.
Speaker 3:I know that one.
Speaker 1:Oh, he knows how to do the game.
Speaker 3:My actual guess is right around 80,.
Speaker 1:Right around 90% 88% 88% of people in the United States, so nine out of 10, basically people, because that doesn't include those Orthodox folks over there too, michael Bayes.
Speaker 5:But that would be like.1%. Yeah, it was very tiny.
Speaker 1:And so two out of three people identified themselves as Protestant. In the United States 66%. What percentage of the population today identifies themselves as Protestant?
Speaker 3:At first At least, according to the most recent polls 34% 34% oh really yeah, wow, I would say 60% 60, very high still.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I will say 40%.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're going to give that to Kurt, but Bailey can make his argument on the data that I have from a Pew. Research from this would have been just a few years ago. Less than half now identify as Protestant 47% and Catholicism, interestingly, hasn't changed too much and that is in part because Catholicism has declined in the Northeast but it has increased in the Southwest, as immigrants very often bring their Catholic faith.
Speaker 3:This was a. My information was from either a Gallup 2022, as I had three kinds of polls One was from the Pew Research Center and others the Public Religion Research Institute in Gallup, so I think that was the Pew Research Center 2022. It said 34%. There was a dramatic drop in the last two years. Wow, Wow. That's astonishing, isn't it.
Speaker 1:That very much is astonishing and just in big picture, though, to think about that in terms of people who practice Christianity, has declined by at least 20%. Maybe the better way to say all this and I apologize for providing all these numbers on an audio format, but let's ask it this way In 1948, how many people said they have no religious affiliation? That doesn't mean atheists or agnostics. They have no particular religious identity or affiliation.
Speaker 5:5%, or less, I'll say 7%.
Speaker 4:I'll say 18%, 8%.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're all a little bit over so I don't have a wrong buzzer, but Bailey was the closest. 4%, only 4%, and now we are heading very close to 30% of the US population just doesn't have any particular religious identity. Now down here where we are in the Southeast, that number isn't that high, but it's much higher. There are places out west where it's over 50% of the population just doesn't identify religiously. So what does that mean for us? What does that mean for us, or why is this happening?
Speaker 5:Yeah, one question I had is if we compare the numbers with Western Europe, is it like Western Europe has been pretty secular for a long?
Speaker 1:time. Yeah, you're getting far ahead of me. Oh, okay, I'm sorry.
Speaker 5:I was going to say we're just locking behind. The trend was going to happen anyway.
Speaker 1:Just hit a little bit later in America than in Europe, yes, and so I was going to have these tales of woe that we talked about, and how bad things are.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I want to hear the tales of woe.
Speaker 1:And then at the end it was going to be. But things aren't quite so bad, because look at Western Europe. Okay, I don't have to apologize, but we're going to talk more about Western Europe and we're going to talk about why perhaps the United States looks different religiously than Europe Going back to what Michael Bailey talked about, the kind of defining terms which I think is always really essential in these kinds of conversations.
Speaker 4:What is it that we mean by religiously non-affiliated? What is it that we mean by nuns? I think that's useful for going ahead and defining for the sake of the audience.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you go ahead and define them for us. What are we talking about? And I guess maybe one of the things that you're trying to get at here is being unaffiliated with a church does not mean you don't believe in God or that you aren't spiritual or you don't think about religious things. It just means that you are not connected to a particular religious tradition.
Speaker 3:It's a self-designated term by the pollster. It's a term that really came out of pollsters who were asking people and they've been asking questions since at least 1972 about people's religious identity how they would self-designate. And so there's usually, depending upon the polling agency, the last people are you the inner private yourself of the Christian, protestant, catholic, jewish, other or none of the above? And that sort of I don't identify with any religion goes up. That's different than church membership. You can be a member of a church and still not really consider yourself affiliated with that, but of course that's not very likely to be the case. So they are distinct. It doesn't mean atheism but it's.
Speaker 3:One thing I will get to you a little bit is that portion of the unaffiliated has, relatively speaking, skyrocketed. So there's been several phases of this kind of shift. There's pretty steady over these numbers up until really through the 80s of who would count themselves as unaffiliated or a non. They don't really identify with any particular religion and that picked up gradually in the 90s and then it's continued that spread in the 2000. Whether it's going to level off it's not clear. But what's interesting is that you can dig deeper and look at those who do call themselves a non or unaffiliated Early in the 90s.
Speaker 3:A very heavy portion of them still believe in God and many of them believed in an afterlife, and they believed in to a lesser degree, but they believe in angels. They just didn't really associate with any particular specific religion. I have some numbers here, but it's something that in fact of even in 2000, something like 2% of folks called themselves an atheist and 9% just said they don't know one another, which might be the closest thing to agnosticism that's not a term and in 2022, that number was 12% of the population calls itself. They claim flat out they do not believe in a God, and I think it was another 7% claim that they just don't know. So it went up from basically 1 in 10 would say that to 20%, including 12% who just more or less by another label, would say that they're an atheist. So who is part of that unaffiliated has, in fact, changed pretty dramatically, and it's been in the last just few years.
Speaker 4:This has happened, which is, I think, unsettling in a way that kind of rapid change, but I do think it's useful to differentiate between those who are flat out atheist and then people who may be grouped into the nuns, who do believe that they don't affiliate with a particular religion or faith tradition.
Speaker 1:This is one of the really big movements, I would say, in sociology, religion and other circles. To just one of the ways to try to capture what's going on in the United States is this phrase spiritual but not religious, that there's many people who still do think, thinking about God and maybe even being involved in prayer and some personal religious activities just don't affiliate with large religious institutions, and so they will use this phrase I'm spiritual but not religious, and that seems to be a growing category in the United States, for sure.
Speaker 3:It was 14%, not that it matters. You said avoid the numbers.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:But the point is that 26% of folks are agnostic or atheist now, which is just extraordinary given the numbers you already cited in the past. Interestingly, of the people who would call themselves atheists, there is a fair portion of them who also might believe in life after death as well and would also call themselves spiritual. They wouldn't necessarily believe in a God, but they might think there's something divine infused in the universe. It may not be a personal agent, but it's something you could tap into and grow from and mature and thrive as a human being because of it.
Speaker 1:We're talking abstract, we're talking numbers here. But Kurt, you were one, and Mike Bailey as well, suggested this topic. But you're actually coming at this from a relatively personal angle, correct?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I wouldn't call myself a nun, but I would call myself unaffiliated with a church. I was brought up a charismatic church of God in the suburbs of Atlanta in the 1970s 1980s, went to what now I don't know if we would consider Mount Perron a megachurch, but it was certainly one of the largest churches in the metro area that time. And so grew up, went to church as I came to Berry as an undergrad, stopped attending consistently, went to some southern Baptist churches around Rome when I lived in Rome and after getting married and moving back to Marietta, started going to Episcopalian church and which was a radical change from the church charismatic church of God, you don't know what you're getting on any given Sunday to….
Speaker 1:You know exactly what you're getting every single Sunday.
Speaker 4:Here's the literature. I bought the book of common prayer. I was all in. I like this kind of like consistency kind of thing and we went for several years and then in the early 2000s, my wife and I we started looking around at different churches and a lot of the churches that we visited at that time were unaffiliated churches.
Speaker 4:I'm not great with all of the specific religious… the domination names …for a bit and they're the big churches that we're not affiliated with any certain denomination, we just do our own thing, but we meet in giant buildings and bring in lots and lots of money. And I was listening. I'm going to tie this in because the last month I've been listening to the rise and fall of Mars Hill on Dale's recommendation, which is a fan…. I'm a huge fan of podcasts and it was really well put together podcast, but it also really resonated with the experiences that I had visiting churches in the 2000s that felt a lot like what they were talking about with Mars Hill.
Speaker 4:I remember going to one and the preacher was a former football player and had all of these sports analogies that he was using. And I just turned to my wife and I just said I could not do this, I am losing my will to live as I sit here, right, and we would struck out He… Well played, and you all decided to punt yes, yes, but he was in the podcast they taught. Yes, I recognize that was a sports as well.
Speaker 3:What no one really knows, except for the three of us here, is that our host is bright red in the face.
Speaker 1:It seems so pathetic that I tried to jump in there after my very good punt that it didn't need any extra.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, so they were really emphasizing this kind of traditional masculine roles. This former football player, the whole it's known as complementarian by some people. That's not necessarily what I would call it, but the idea that the men are the boss and women need to be over there in the corner and I know I'm doing a disservice to it. That's because I want…. So yeah, there was that. And then we would go to other churches and they would have massive power points and lots of music and I would sit there and I'd be like, at what point are we going to be taught something? Because everybody's singing and everybody's like doing stuff. But I hadn't heard any actual discussion of who's going to talk about translation of ancient Greek and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Right, I can do that you can. You went to the wrong guy. He's right here.
Speaker 4:I'll just hang out in Papazia's office for now.
Speaker 1:I don't do football at a fours, or analogies either, but just think about how you could expand your audience if you did, though. Oh, I did yeah, if you could turn ancient Greek texts into football analogies, you know.
Speaker 3:I have to think about this now. All right, but Dr Papazian does know his rock music, which I mad respect for that I gotta have respect for that.
Speaker 4:Are we doing a…. I'd like to go on record as that being my favorite music video ever.
Speaker 3:It's great, isn't it? It is, it's really a classic, and you know that there was like a 10-second clip that was taken out of that because it was considered to be too gruesome. There was a point at which one of the paintings they represent is Dowding Thomas the.
Speaker 4:Carriaggia painting. Yeah, that's right. And he puts his finger in the hole.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the hole. We're Dowding Thomas, right, and so, anyways, I went to the dark web and found it, so it's still there, yeah.
Speaker 4:So I was, yeah, no, we lost track there. And then I was going to say I went to another church, oh, and I found that we were asking questions afterwards potential membership kind of thing and I was like you have all these numbers for how you're going to build new parking lots and new buildings, how much of your money goes to food for people who needed or helping families that need to buy clothing. And they said, oh, we leave that to small groups. That's not what the donations to the actual church go to. And I just stopped going. I felt like I don't. Oh, and then other ones, they were bringing in political candidates to talk in front and I just said, yeah, I got no interest in this whatsoever. I don't feel any connection to these people. I feel the opposite of connection. Oftentimes I didn't feel any enrichment and so I just I'm going to pray on my own and I'm going to believe and I'm not going to go.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you this what was the impetus for leaving the Episcopalian Church? Because it seemed like there was something that you were getting of substance there.
Speaker 4:There was, and I kind of regret doing that and I keep thinking of going back and but I think as a family we were trying to make some decisions. I don't want to. My wife encouraged us to go and look. Obviously I could have stayed if I wanted to, but if you, listened to the Mars Hill teaching boy, you would have.
Speaker 1:You would still be in the Episcopalian Church. All right, I'm sorry, that's probably ironic.
Speaker 4:I do think about going back. I think once, once we had a child, everything seemed so busy, which is, I know. We're going to talk about the book that came out recently what does it call the Great De-Churching, and one of the. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I've read a couple of reviews of it and they talk about how the pace of life in America has a lot to do with why people have stopped going to church, that we connect in different ways, that we no longer necessarily need church for those kinds of social connections. And that was also what I experienced as well, just the pace of life, that I was interacting with people in different ways.
Speaker 3:Not that I was taking notes here and having with a spreadsheet or anything, but you did mention three reasons that really seem to be in the air for scholars or looking at for the cause of this, and one of it has to do a kind of reaction to certain kind of sexual cultural stances. You said complementarianism and the churches come out and taken some strong stands about abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage and the like, and that has been a seemingly a turnoff for a fair number of people. Then you also mentioned the politicization of the church. That too seems to be a possible cause. People are turned off by that. And then you suggested you could probably get as much some spiritual edification on your own right, with your own prayer, your own networks. And that kind of decline of social capital or a new expression of the social capital is also one of those explanations for why people so you're like over-determined, why.
Speaker 1:That's right. Your story is not union.
Speaker 3:Do you?
Speaker 4:get an all to say or shout out. For that, pardon me.
Speaker 3:Over-determined. Oh, I shouldn't have said that. Right, we can explain. You is what I should have said.
Speaker 1:That's right, but I appreciate you sharing that story and Michael, what Paisen I know, and Mike Bailey and I have lots of things we can say going forward. So you want to get a word in edgewise?
Speaker 5:Actually, no, I actually had one thing when you were talking about that church with the football player, pastor Kurt, I was thinking in terms of you had a hyper-masculine worship leader. I was wondering if especially numbers people how does the gender breakdown work with? Nuns Are like more male, it's more male, yeah slightly more male than female. Could it be that having the football player guy is a way to try to bring new guys back in?
Speaker 1:This was one of the strategies of Mars Hill, for sure was to make it masculine, to give a masculine version of Christianity, to make sure that the men were engaged.
Speaker 5:Right that the church has become too feminized, and that's one of the reasons why men are.
Speaker 4:I've heard of the strategy of going to football to try to bring men in. Yeah, that seems to be a.
Speaker 5:That's a little weird. Very college, yeah, very college.
Speaker 3:Yes, we were all just Take it from their playboy thinking the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. This is one of the ironies that I mentioned to my students just recently in sociology of religion is that women are still far more likely to attend religious services and to be involved in the church and yet men are far more likely to be the ones in charge and in fact, that there are traditions where men have to be the ones in charge, and I find that to be very interesting that women still get something out of religion despite the patriarchy that runs the church. That takes us a little bit off in a different direction from where we're going. Michael Bailey, what are some of the other factors? You've mentioned three that Kurt mentioned in his personal account, but what are some of the other reasons why people don't?
Speaker 3:go to church. There is a this is a puzzle why this is happening. So one way of looking at it is it's no puzzle at all. Dr Papasian suggested that at the beginning is that it would suggest, with the modern era probably is not an era very conducive for religion, for reasons that we could talk about. Europe was already with the program of the modern era and they shed their religion some time ago, and so the real question one might ask wasn't why are we losing it, but why did we keep it for so long? And a number of scholars have looked at that question of why is it that we were so religious?
Speaker 1:Let me go and jump in here because we haven't said numbers for at least four minutes. Let me go ahead. And we talked about how in the United States we still have about a third to maybe 33 to 40% of folks who go to church on a fairly regular basis on any given week. But over in Europe we've got the United Kingdom at 8%, norway at 7% and many countries in the teens, tens and teens in terms of church attendance. And so the United States, by comparison to our Western European counterparts, just robust, very robust, but compared to the United States of two, three decades ago.
Speaker 3:Not so much. So that was one of the fun things to study or to read about is why the United States was this kind of outlier right, and there's all sorts of explanations for that. Lots of people notice that there seems to be a kind of trade off between how wealthy a country is and how religious it is. So the wealthier it is, the less religious it becomes, and that played out perfectly in almost all of Europe, with the exception being maybe Ireland and Poland, both very devoutly Catholic countries. But the United States somehow managed to be industrial, very wealthy and also very devout. How do you, how do you account for that? The reason I think there's a lot at stake in here is arguably how one responds to. That reveals the extent to which we think of religion as a natural phenomenon. What is the more natural state for human beings in the condition we live in now? Is it disbelief or is it? What do you have to really explain? Or is it belief?
Speaker 3:I know in the 19th century and 20th century almost all the great thinkers. I am terrified to name any of them because I don't know if that would count as a citation or not. But don't be afraid of the citation. So people like it's an affirmation. Karl Marx and Max Weber and John. That's giving me a headache.
Speaker 3:Oops, sorry, sorry. Citation and Freud and John. Stuart Millenot Citation. Virtually, yeah, virtually. Every, I think, prominent 19th century, early 20th century thinker just assumed that the future, as we become more knowledgeable, as technology takes place, as we become more modern in all those kinds of recognizable ways, is that we'll realize that religion was just a legacy of our infancy. Another thinker go ahead, push it right. French thinker Alexis Sotokville thought that the natural condition.
Speaker 3:He was a big fan of Pascal and he thought the natural condition of human beings is to need consolation for the fact that we live in a crappy world and we die and we want more of that. He suggested that the secularization that you see in the decline of religion as early as the 1830s in Europe was really because of corruption in the church and because the United States was able to sever its church institutions from state. It allowed us to hate each other, the political level, but still go to church and not consider the corruption and spit. His point was it religion will never go away if you allow it to grow, because it consoles us and it addresses really directly, in a way that nothing else can, the human predicament. So that's the reason actually interested in this topic. If we are Shifting ourselves very dramatically towards the unaffiliated, with, in the last decade or so especially a spike in total disbelief, does that suggest that the modern era really is deeply, profoundly inconsistent with religious belief? I have the answer no idea.
Speaker 4:You brought up a bra and I was also thinking quite a bit about the protest and ethnic in the spirit of capitalism citation and to me it's a compelling thought for, or thesis for, why religion is perhaps still so central in America, but then also maybe why we're falling away a little bit from religion.
Speaker 4:So they were said that the particular formation of religion and capitalism in America, where we have this idea that we're religious and we have a religious calling, and that religious calling is partially work, if we're successful at work, then it proves that we are chosen, because this was also when predestination was very much part of the culture and so the only way to know if you've been saved is if you are successful, because then it shows everyone that you've been saved. But now we've work perhaps has become our religion right. We're so focused on work to the exclusion of everything else and this is again part of what they're talking about in the great to churching that work starts to fill the needs of the church. Work shows that we are chosen. It validates the way that perhaps religion used to.
Speaker 3:Meritocracy, in so far we become more of a meritocracy than our sense of chosenness. Our place are also just, just the companionship that we get. All that might be replaced, and so man without the heaven, basically.
Speaker 1:Let me share one of the sociological insights that that I have found to be interesting, and this is from Roger Finkie, rodney.
Speaker 1:Start citation Don't know if you're familiar with these names at all, but they gave economic model of religiosity to explain the differences that were happening in Europe, in the United States, and their argument was if you look at the way religion gets expressed in Europe, almost every country has some type of monopoly. So you have the church of England in England, you've got Catholic countries where socialism is main, got some Lutheran countries, but one major religion, and whenever you have a monopoly, there's not innovation. Whenever you have a monopoly, there's not any strong Effort to adapt your religion to meet human need at the at the moment. So, but here in the United States we are firmly disestablished. Right that that we won't.
Speaker 1:The constitution says we will not have a state religion and that you are free to worship it however you want. So we have a free market of religion. So you can take whatever beliefs you have and attach it to football. You can take whatever beliefs you have and attach it to strong gender roles or dueling with gender roles, right, and so you can adapt. Religion is very malleable, and so you have this great pluralism of religious expression in the United States, and so people find their religious niche that they can be part of, and so this helps to explain why religion has been robust in the United States compared to Europe, and I think that there's something very interesting.
Speaker 5:And Plus, you can be a religious entrepreneur and that's your own religion, and then you don't need other people.
Speaker 1:That's what I tell my students, that I can hang out a shingle and says Dale's church, the church of Dale. I could even say you don't even need any members, that's right got your own church going for you and but seriously, I would have just about the same kind of rights in the United States as the Catholic church or the southern Baptist or any of these large denominations.
Speaker 3:That there really is this great flattening of preference a thousand years ago, when I was at the University of Texas and graduate school, one of the older students who has gone on amazing things and discipline that was her area was to use sort of economic models of choice to look at Churches from an entrepreneurial perspective, in the sense that they are selling their wares and effect and they're trying to tailor them to specific audiences and they're going to have more of an incentive, without being supported by the state, to try to anticipate, create and meet needs. And she said that freedom prompted more church membership, so similar type of argument.
Speaker 5:It could also not. They could also turn people off like it's. Like you're profaning the faith, you're turning it into a business model.
Speaker 1:You read my mind and look at, look what comes out of that. Right, and this is why the prosperity gospel is so popular. Right, you're going to have it all in heaven and here. That God's going to bless you here and there's so much about what I consider to be the core of historic Christian faith that gets tangled up in a whole mess of other things and you can almost like test case. Right, oh, we talk about political issues in the pulpit. Hey, that's popular.
Speaker 4:We'll start bringing in political leaders, like I was saying, and so we really start, okay, tailoring the message to meet that, that human selfishness, rather than those great human needs and human desires from a traditional standpoint and I mentioned to the and I know this is well moving away from the European discussion, but what you were saying made me think about the use of Of spectacle, and I was thinking of Gita board and society, the spectacle and how the spectacle stands in for the real thing, and how worship services have just become this overwhelming visual presentation of Hugeness and video screens and production quality, and it's like you're at Disney World watching us.
Speaker 1:Come to my church and you shall get none of that. We have trouble with our one microphone not buzzing on us during this service.
Speaker 3:No spectacle one argument of something that might be accelerating this increase in disaffiliation is the internet and the fact that we find so much pleasure in our phones as well, as we think that we have community in this kind of virtual world that we don't need it. So it would seem to me that If that's the world that appeals to us, what these churches are doing in a kind of huge, amplified way phones essentially on steroids might be explainable in that particular matter, the one. So yeah, it seems to me that there's several of these causes, that Possible causes why we have changed our time we've addressed and a couple that we haven't. Probably the most awkward one to talk about, arguably, is there's a couple arguments related to parenting, and what we know is that Overwhelmingly, especially in the past, a very good predictor for what an adults religious affiliation will be, what their parents were right. So there's this kind of transmission of culture, transmission of believe, transmission of practice, and One one study would suggest that starting really in the fifties is that in the United States or became a greater emphasis on the value in parenting of autonomy, teaching your kid to think for themselves rather than to respect for authority.
Speaker 3:So as that increased, he anticipated we shouldn't be surprised that there would be a lag. But in later generations, especially as they teach their own kids, the grandkids of those originals, is that they would leave the church. And what we found is that is it? Once upon a time was faith was pretty sticky and it's becoming less sticky over time. So if you're a young Christian, most likely when you're older you'll be a Christian. Now the unaffiliated is far more sticky in a sense.
Speaker 3:So another set of authors looked at just more generally how do children end up with the same beliefs, basic worldview and so on of their parents and came up with a set of really specific conditions for that. And it said essentially that transmission, especially religious beliefs, works most powerfully in raising kids if that person lives at home with two parents and both those parents practice the same religion. Suggested there was a correlation with the self-reported happiness of the parents. So if your parents are miserable and they're going to a particular denomination, you may want to back out.
Speaker 3:And then I think more controversially for our discussion about implications, he said the more traditional family structure also is associated with the transmission. So if you came from a family where dad worked and mom stayed at home two parents you're going to have a very high rate of replication of that religion later on in life. Now we have a lot of people who are unmarried, cohabitating, raising kids, and you have a lot of single mothers and single fathers, lots of divorce. Interesting if you chart, basically if you look at the rise of divorce starting around 1968, 69, 70, and if you track that trajectory, one generation exactly after 18 years is when you see the rise of the unaffiliated. That it is coincidental, but given the causal logic, I think that that could be a place to explore.
Speaker 1:So do you think that type of family structure as an explanation is more powerful than the internet explanation? Use the internet explanation in terms of the pomp and circumstance and the production. Yeah, but I'm also thinking just in terms of one of the things that Peter Berger said citation is a threat to religious belief is just pluralism, because you see so many different ideas.
Speaker 1:If you are a church right next to a mosque and you have people over in this mosque being happy and loving their kids and it's hard to think of your faith as unique and distinctive and the best right. And so now with the internet you get this explosion of introduction to all kinds of religious ideas and beliefs and it's hard to think of yours as distinctly and uniquely true.
Speaker 3:I think that would be the case, assuming that you have a kind of openness of mind and if you value autonomy. But let's say you drill your children into an authoritative position and that's been presented to them. It turns out it just would seem, based on the numbers, that children who come out of that product really do adopt the religion and the politics of their parents. So you might have to have a prior condition of parents who are already inclined to encourage your children to think for themselves. But that works in any event more powerfully when you have two at home parents doing that.
Speaker 5:So, to preserve the church, we need to establish authoritarian, narrow-minded, iron parenting strategies, something to that's what's contributing to the church becoming more conservative right, and that, of course, is going to polarize people, because the more church people who are coming out of traditional families, the more people more on the left are going to find it more unattractive to be religious right.
Speaker 3:Our selection of this conversation is until it directly addresses this right and Mark Driscoll. He maybe doesn't have the studies, but he has this kind of intuition that if you want to, if you want to continue to proselytize by procreation which is what he wants to do in part you have to have a lot of kids and you have to have a family structure that is really devoted to that propagation of the religion and that's going to work best if you have a stay-at-home mom who's nurturing their children in that particular faith, the dad earning, so on and so forth. I'm not endorsing any of this, just for the record. It wouldn't necessarily explain the decline of religion in Europe, although it would also be. I think that if you look at the Scandinavian countries in particular, they have a lot of they actually have a lot of two-parent families that tend not to be married, but it might help explain why this is happening. In the United States, dramatic increase of single parents.
Speaker 3:I mentioned this once at a conference paper and I was excoriated. It wasn't my research, I was just passing on. But someone excoriated me said okay, so now we blame women for the death of God or something like that. No, I don't think that's what I'm saying. So you're giving another shot here on the podcast. We'll see what the reactions are. I just want this is a good opportunity for point out number one I'm not against half notes. All right, so going back to the Japanese national anthem.
Speaker 1:That is a back reference.
Speaker 3:And the second thing here is we're trying to account for this puzzle right, and one just might be that as we secularize in general, we're going to see this, and it might be there's political reasons. But another reason for this might be just looking at the broader question of how does anyone ever develop their faith belief? In the past, at least, it used to be through your parents.
Speaker 1:Let me go ahead and just broaden this out a little bit, and we've already talked about these in a variety of ways. But I mentioned the free market economic model earlier. But different approach would be Peter Berger, who just basically says the trends of modern society lead toward a lack of religious conviction. I've already mentioned the pluralism that it's difficult to think of your religious belief as important and distinctive when you are seeing other religions with lots of different ideas but also just the strong emphasis toward individualism that we I'd mentioned this to my class yesterday.
Speaker 1:It's not that we don't want to belong to religious institutions, we just don't want to belong to institutions at all. Right, we don't trust the press, we don't trust our government, we don't trust religion. Now we don't. There's our big social institutions. We are very we take a very cynical, skeptical attitude, in part because it's much easier to see the corruption in this age of transparency that we have because of the internet and other factors, that we just see the bad behavior of our leaders, and so it's more difficult to attach ourselves fully and identify fully with any organization, not just religious organizations.
Speaker 3:The modern world does all these things that you're talking about. Right, the modern world is associated with movement of ideas, movement of capital, movement of people, which means that local ties are broken all the time, customs are broken all the time, self-protected, hermetically sealed communities are infiltrated. Those people leave, and so you're going to have this kind of exchange of ideas. The modern world is much more associated with an emphasis on cause and effect and with science and explaining things, not because the world is enchanted and this is the world of God, but no, this is how atoms work, this is how gravity works, this is what we know about biology. So I think that is one of the reasons those 19th century folks thought it's just a matter of time for us to grow up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's very true, and the last point related to that that Berger mentions is how we don't look to the past French wisdom anymore. Dr Papasian, does you very much do.
Speaker 5:The hard sell, because yeah, people say what a common refrain in students writing is yeah, Plato was smart for his day. For his day, yes, his day 2000,. More than 2000 years ago. He was pretty bright, but we just know better.
Speaker 4:We know better and influence her.
Speaker 1:Right yeah. But we look to the future for solutions. We will find a solution with new technological developments. We'll find a solution with new ideas. We don't trust the past. We think that the Jesus time was just so different than our post-industrial society that we live in now that it can't have the answers for us today. And so we just don't revere the past like we did. We don't go to our grandparents for information on what cell phones to buy.
Speaker 3:That dude I quoted earlier with the citation Alexis Tocqueville said even back in the 1830s his perception was that Americans were haunted by the future, almost always wanted to accelerate to get to that point where we would think our problems would be solved.
Speaker 4:I do think there's something about the celebration of the individual and the focus on the individual over the communal too, because none of us. Increasingly, I think we want to be involved less in organizations. You were talking about the distrust in organizations, but then I think that's also combined with the desire to be exceptional and to not have to depend on other organizations or community groups or connections to make your mark.
Speaker 1:And you made a little joke about influencers before, right, but the whole idea of entrepreneurship and I get to be my own personal influencer and I don't really even need producers, right, I can set up my own oh, I can do my own podcast, right, and you don't need these institutions to rely on anymore. I think that's. There's a lot of truth to that. I know that our, which is, would also explain the popularity of community churches, non-denominational community churches, rather than being tied to a longstanding church tradition. No, it's cashing it on our own. We're new and cool. We're new and cool. We're not. We might look to Jesus in the Bible, which is ancient, but the way we're doing everything is innovative. I don't know where you are in that podcast.
Speaker 3:I'm finished, okay, yeah, so you definitely saw that point where they started hiring really top notch marketers, not because right of their religious convictions that are piety or whatever but because they knew how to get numbers.
Speaker 1:I was actually in a meeting for that at a relatively small church and was here in town and we had this little retreat and the pastor, who I had great respect for, brought in a professional marketer and we thought we were going to brainstorm about the future of the church and the mission and it was how much do we want to grow by next year? And we looked around each other and we're saying isn't that something for the Holy Spirit to decide? Is that? But no, we're going to set the goal and then we're going to say here's how we get to the goal. It was just so corporate mindset and some kind of antithetical to my understanding of what a church community should focus on. And it was. It just felt for me. Personally I don't want to criticize everybody's approach, but it just felt creepy to me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but that's part and parcel of that entrepreneur market choice we were talking about. This is the rational choice of lots of decisions. You have to figure out where you are in that kind of market niche.
Speaker 1:Yeah great.
Speaker 5:There's been some kind of a I don't know how big a trend it is, but kind of a pushback against that and a return to tradition. I know there was in the. A year or two ago. There was an article in the New York Times magazine about what they called weird Christianity and about these young people who want to go to the Latin mass. They don't like the modern Catholic mass and they want the incense and all that, all those trappings, and I wonder I don't know how big a trend that is but if that might be kind of a counterreaction that might grow in the next decades.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great point, and you've got personal stories here. I know, michael, of students here who came from either a megachurch background or a very conservative, traditional background and just by their experiences here turn to a much more tradition-based faith.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think there is that longing and a lot of people to connect to. Even though we live in an anti-institutional age that's very cynical, there's still this desire to belong to this long tradition and this history. And once you expose them to that because a lot of our students are coming from non-denominational backgrounds have no idea of church history they don't know even Protestants, don't really know who Martin Luther was that's like ancient history. But once you expose them to that and this long, rich tradition, a lot of students find that very attractive.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we have an irony here. How can the traditional church market itself better so it can get all those traditions so we can push back against this increase of the nuns.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that actually raises the question again. Going back to the podcast, it's a really delicate question of are we as fallen creatures who are vain and interested and are just selves and are own prestige? Are we using the marketing because we see numbers themselves as a validation, or is it we really believe that people will thrive and flourish if they're introduced to these? And we want the good for people, we want people to be happy, we want them to live rich, rewarding lives, and so the only way to encourage that is by introducing them as many as we can. Right to this, I think it's difficult, as a difficult razor to walk.
Speaker 4:I thought I'd bring up a stat, because we've talked about the rise of the nuns and non-religious versus religious, but we haven't really talked about the actual numbers who have stopped attending church. And so, according to an Atlantic article that I found, 40 million Americans have stopped attending church in the last 25 years, which is around 12% of the population. So that kind of frames that melt as we would call it.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's quite generational and I think, mike, some of your numbers spoke to that. The younger generation used to drop out for a while, almost like your story. When you go to college or when you're off on your own for a while, you drop out, but historically they would come back when they had children of their own, would re-assimilate into the church life and that was a fairly common pattern. But the last couple of generations they leave and then they just don't come back.
Speaker 4:Last year a Pew study found 31% of those raised religious become unaffiliated between 15 to 29 years old. Yeah, that's 6.
Speaker 1:31% yeah, that's a lot, and so this current generation is starting at a much higher baseline in terms of unaffiliated than previous generations and the chances of them returning. Some will, obviously, but I think we've hit a tipping point is the way I've always thought about. We've hit a tipping point where it's not that unusual, it's not that there's no shame in being unaffiliated in most places, so it's going to become much more common and much more regular. I believe it's certainly possible.
Speaker 3:A lot of those folks, initially at least, who left the church were a white affair. It was mostly just sort of white society, and that's shifted. Now there are increasing number of Hispanic folks who are also recognizing themselves as unaffiliated, One of, if you look at percentage of people in the country who are either some mainline Protestant or evangelical Protestant or unaffiliated, or Catholic or other. The Catholic percentage has remained really over decade after decade, remained remarkably the same around 20, 21%, and so that sounds like there's a kind of steadiness there. But what's really changes the composition of the Catholic Church? So there's been something akin to really serious white flight from the Catholic Church as immigration shot up in the 80s and 90s. There were many Asians but it was overwhelmingly from Latin America and 60, 70, 80% of Latin American folks are Catholic. So they would come into the church, they come into the Catholic Church, and there was just a drain of white folks. So that's what sort of maintained its steadiness.
Speaker 5:We're here in Rome too. In the Catholic Church it's about maybe a little bit more than a half of the congregation is Spanish speaking right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Let me conclude with this cherry note this is old data. This data is over a decade old, but this is from a book called UnChristian. It was published by the Barna Group, which is they try to be objective, but they're Christian based research. And here are. I don't know if this is the top 10, but these are the top reasons why people who don't go to church say that they don't go to church. And I should just give you this bud and you say hit it and I'll hit the. I'll hit the button every time. Every time we got one of your reasons here. Okay, okay, you got it All right. It's anti homosexual, it's judgmental, it's hypocritical, it's old fashioned, it's not really, I just like hitting them.
Speaker 1:It's too involved with politics. It's out of touch with reality. Yeah, it's insensitive to others.
Speaker 4:It's boring. I would say it's too much of a spectacle now. I like the boring.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's not accepting of other faiths and it's confusing. Oh, he didn't press it on the last one.
Speaker 4:I'm trying to think I would need more specifics to be able to press that button.
Speaker 1:All right, I don't think, even though this is old data, I don't think that has changed much over the past, over the past decade.
Speaker 4:I don't know if this is sounding a positive, hopeful note or if it's just sounding a note that's shifting in directions. But Wendy Cage, who's a sociology pro from Brandeis, and Elaine Bamcheck.
Speaker 4:Citation Wrote an article in the Atlantic that I thought was really interesting, where they talked about the move away from churches, but how people of shared faith find themselves regrouping in different ways through, for instance, social justice groups, through online groups, and so how maybe it might not be that we're necessarily losing faith or losing our religion, but that we are reorganizing around different ways outside of physical buildings.
Speaker 1:That's interesting, because what 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school, that was a very big thrust. Look at the rise of these paratroop organizations. But it was always in concert with the church, and so perhaps some of these paratroop organizations or these faith-based groups are now supplanting religious conviction. No, I get my real meaning, my real understanding and my real conviction of my faith through this organization and not through the institutionalized or the traditional church. That's interesting. It could be Any last words.
Speaker 3:I think, for another podcast. One thing that we could look at and this would not be the time here is just, even at the gut level, is this promising for our future or is it problematic? Of course it's going to be both right, but I'd be curious what people have to say. Is it actually an occasion for a kind of reformation of Christianity again and a kind of purifying of Christianity? And I'm not saying you have something like the remnant, but folks who are willing, even in a culture that might may mock them or dismiss them out of hand, find no, this is important enough for me to be involved in, and they would not be operating from the standpoint of grabbing power because they wouldn't be able to have it. So there might be a kind of humility baked into it that might be sorely missing. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it'd be great for another podcast, because I would love to discuss what would a humility-based church look like. That would be my goal for sure. I want to thank all three of you. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I hope all of you out there have enjoyed it as well. I want to thank our audience for sitting around the table with us today. I hope that we have provided you with some Kurt you came up with these some food for thought and something to chew on. I suspect that we will have some leftovers, some conversation amongst us after the music is over here, so feel free to stay on and listen to our debriefing after the podcast is over. We appreciate your support, except for that one person out there who gave us one star. We got all five stars. What's that? First, they don't identify, but we got all five stars, and it's one little person. I didn't understand the great existence. I think that must be it.
Speaker 4:You have a disgruntled student.
Speaker 1:I don't know where this comes from, but anyway, we do appreciate your support and as part of that support, please do consider subscribing rating with five stars, not one. You out there and reviewing Church Potluck wherever you're downloading.
Speaker 3:Or at least coming back and apologizing for it. There you go.
Speaker 1:I think you can change that review out there too.
Speaker 5:You'll be forgiven.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like old papaisi, will give you absolution Right. Yes, well, until we gather around the table next time. This has been Church Potluck. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So one thing that we didn't do a whole lot of speculation which is good right about how this is going to proceed, but based on these pollsters, who they've developed some methodologies that try to predict how much we're going to continue this on in the future. And it turns out, even if there's no one really dropping out of Christianity, this trend is going to continue to rise dramatically, just because all of the religious belief is stacked with the people who are old and dying, and so the people who have faith, who are sort of showing up the numbers, they're going by the wayside, and it seems as if this commitment to, or the lack of commitment to, religion and affiliation is much stickier than they would have anticipated. It's not just like your as a wayward journey between this place and another, is it? Once you land there, a lot of people stay there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we've talked about people leaving. Well, what we didn't talk about was churches closing. There, have you know, after you know, church, the number of just churches in the United States growing, growing, growing. It has actually declined and COVID accelerated that big time.
Speaker 4:Sure, it used to be, when businesses closed down, a church would open, and now churches are closing down. I guess that's perfect for spirit Halloween stores. Yeah, along with what Bailey said, they, I guess projections are 2070. We will fall below 50% in terms of people who identify as Christians If nothing changes. But that's incredibly conservative, right.
Speaker 1:So and, if anything, it seems like it's ramping up. I don't remember Stanley Howarth I almost brought this up during the podcast that Stanley Howarth, when he visited, kept using the phrase the church is just going to get leaner and meaner. Right that it'll be, and we've we're kind of losing the kind of just the the fair weather Christian that if you're going to be a Christian you're going to be all in, you're going to be committed to it and so you'll be devoted, rather than just Christian in name only and kind of attending here and there.
Speaker 3:I know he's using a turn of phrase with that, but I think one of the problems is a lot of people think it's already plenty mean, right. I know it's a turn of. I know it's a literally turn of phrase. I think that's a good point.
Speaker 1:And in fact I think, probably I've never used that term in public except for a podcast. Now because of that, because of the meaner aspect.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think another way of looking at it is. There's just no denying that a lot of Christianity in the contemporary age is sort of obsessed with power. It's aligned oftentimes with the partisanship and it sees even sometimes the party as a fundamental addendum right to, or an appendage to, the church, or vice versa. And once you get it below a certain threshold, you're going to be able to see that you're. There may be people who are giving that quest up for social power, for political power, and it might be. This is how we understand. Here's how we orient ourselves to the cosmos. This is what we understand our obligations to your Lord, god to be and let the chips fall where they may. I won't have power, but at least I know I'll have. You know I can live with integrity. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean your point earlier about Tocqueville, Mike, I think. I mean, isn't the problem that you know if Europe had a corrupt Christianity and America was kind of immune from that? That's no longer true. It seems like we've politicized the church and the same problems that Tocqueville observed in Europe are now occurring here.
Speaker 1:Something that I think about a lot, but I hate that. I think about it because I don't want this to be true. But is it possible that this amazing thing that the church actually did do in my mind is that the church's role in the civil rights movement, that that somehow opened the door to politicizing? No, it was the church, because all of a sudden we had this big victory in the 60s for civil rights. All of a sudden, we say, well, we can use the church for other political goals now.
Speaker 4:And so I mean the church was. A lot of churches were involved in abolition too. So I would say that predates civil rights yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's okay for church to get involved in politics, so long as it's the righteous causes.
Speaker 3:There's a really good argument for that to be exactly true.
Speaker 3:I mean to say that it's not the case would suggest that what should shape our view of politics and religion is liberalism rather than sort of the dictates of religion.
Speaker 3:But I think you can make an argument, and one of our former colleagues, david McKenzie, wrote an article that I found very persuasive, and his argument is that using the church as a vehicle for improvement when the goal is inclusion and justice, is very different than using the church as a goal for exclusion and hierarchy, for the simple reason being that all religious claims one way or another are revealed, which is to say that they're not really open to public transparency and reason. So if you're going to be making religious claims, if you're doing it for your own advantage, it's already just almost by definition, out of line. But if you're using this as a way of inspiring people, to allow more people into the system and to help them out, then it's just, it's almost like a good marketing tool. So I think you can make the case that, yeah, you can use religion when it's for the cause of inclusion and others for the common good.
Speaker 1:So Pellan yes. I think that is about as compelling an argument as one could make, but it just requires a little philosophy, philosophy, logic. If A, then B, you know, and then that, that's just that's always that question of what counts as inclusive.
Speaker 3:So I mean, with respect to the abortion debate, is that something that is imposing hierarchy or is that protecting? I mean, you can go either way and I think really faithful, good-hearted people are going to disagree about that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kurt, did we hit the points that you were thinking we would hit?
Speaker 4:Yeah, this has been great. I've enjoyed it. I want to know a little bit more about the Church of Dale, though. What's what's involved?
Speaker 5:Yeah, yeah, I will. I'm intrigued I might join. It begins with a podcast, of course.
Speaker 1:And then just slowly grows from there. I am grooming the audience and so just stay tuned, folks. So it's really international.
Speaker 5:Right, you got 29 countries now. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1:I didn't think about that. I just do realize that I own the domain rights for TheHumblesscom, so but that is something that I think about a lot is how can the church be a vibrant church but also just really ooze with humility? And because it just doesn't feel it feels like it's a missing ingredient for a lot of the expression of Christianity today.
Speaker 5:But anyway, yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe it is because it's just the person who's talking about the Church of Dale. Yeah, you're in a position of power and it's hard to be humble when you got this big mega church and this big spectacle that you were saying.
Speaker 1:And you think you're, you think you must be doing something right if you've got thousands and tens of thousands of people attending Part of it might be just what you were, what you mean by humble, what you're humble about.
Speaker 3:So if humility means being, I think, lukewarm, wishy-washy, ambivalent about your message because you don't want to step on toes, that's probably not going to be very effective. But if humility means that you're not saying what you're saying to promote your own specific self-interest and you're including others in the fold, then I think that could be very powerful. Yeah. That's good.
Speaker 5:Well, we solved it, we did, that's it. We need a church of humility.
Speaker 3:Oh, there you go, that's a problem, there you go, I mean I mean this is traditional Christianity.
Speaker 5:I will be the best.
Speaker 1:at the church of humility, you'll be the greatest I will be. You're better than anyone else I will be the better than anyone else at the church of humility.
Speaker 5:That is what the paradox is, yeah, humility, but if you go back, to like the desert not to go back I always talk about the desert fathers, but that was their key thing you have to. You have to cultivate this kind of humility. It's not easy to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but see, I'm not willing to go out to the desert. That's the problem. Oh yeah, we need.
Speaker 5:We need more people like the church of the desert.
Speaker 3:We need to cancel without air conditioning.
Speaker 1:This is a problem for people who believe you know Moses wrote all five books of the Pentateuch, because there's a part in there where it says Moses was humble, the most humble person there ever was. But if Moses? But if Moses wrote that, that's kind of a that was inserted later. Yeah Well, I think that is one of the arguments, that that that was inserted that it was written by Moses Plus his death too.
Speaker 4:That was exactly it's kind of hard for Moses to write about the details.
Speaker 5:He was a great man, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you all so much. I enjoyed that and I hope that the folks that are out there will will do the same. Thanks for having us. Thank you, I'm not promising, but I am really hoping I turn this around quickly and we get this out tomorrow morning is the goal, but we shall see if the goal is realized. But thank you, yeah.