Faith in Flux: Tracking America’s Religious Shift

Charles is a Hayek scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His newest book, which is taking religion seriously, is uh is doing well at uh Amazon. He's uh also uh a renowned author and political scientist, having written The Bell Curve and uh Losing Ground American Social Policy from 1950 to 1980. Terry Mattingley, lovingly referred to as T-Matt, is a longtime journalist uh who has written his column on religion for the past 36 years. Um, very broadly distributed.

His new substack is called Rational Sheep. And he focuses on the role of religion in life and how people lead their lives in the digital world uh and still can stay and make religion relevant to them. So, gentlemen, welcome.

uh class that I belong to and we're in the public policy world and academia and so forth. And there there's been a remarked change. It's symbolized by the fact that the very same day I submitted the manuscript for copy editing for taking religion seriously, was the pub date for Ross Dowtett's belief that came out uh last spring. And in addition to that, I worked for an organization that has had uh devout Catholics as the president of it for the last several years.

I have colleagues there who are uh devoutly religious. That was not true in the 1990s. There you're now getting a lot of people who are big surprises who are talking about religion. Ayan Hercy Ali, famously an atheist, has uh declared herself a Christian. Her husband, Neil Ferguson. If I ever met somebody who sort of epitomizes the charming and wonderful, because I like the guy, but the charming, wonderful intellectual atheist, it was uh it was Neil.

And Neil has uh seen uh a change in his own attitudes. I could go on, but essentially the zeitgeist has changed in the world that I inhabit uh profoundly over the last 20 years.

to the polls that are sifted and rounded up by a former colleague of mine, Ryan Berg of St. Louis. And I'm convinced at this point that parts of American religion are in growth periods and parts of it are in collapse. And it and if that ends up looking like a straight line, it's an incredibly complex straight line.

And I think we could see this in Judaism, for example, where Orthodox Judaism continues to grow, while in the world of intermarriage, mainline and reform Judaism, we're still seeing statistical collapse in many cases.

Ryan showed a chart the other day, Ryan Berg showed a chart the other day that mainland Protestantism, which was about 33% of the American horizon or marketplace, I should say, in say about 1970 or the late 60s, is now on a pretty pinned to a decline that would put it at about 4.5% of the American population here in just a couple of years.

Um meanwhile, in my own church, I'm a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, we have churches that are just dying completely and vanishing, and we have others that are growing at a rate of 50% a year. Wow. And I mean, I attend a church here in Northeast Tennessee uh that probably had 40 members five or six years ago, and we now have about 200 in attendance. We have 60 potential converts lined up to get in the door, and most interestingly, I think we at last count we have 65 children under the age of 12.

Yes, we've got lots of young men in our church, but we have lots and lots and lots of young families. To me, and the last thing I'll mention here before we move into it, you know, on with the conversation, the other statistic that I think is most interesting is the rapid decline in religiosity among women under the age of 40 and the rising potential for religious commitment among young men under 40s.

And if you know anything about the statistics of American religion and sociology, that's bizarre. But that's that's now occurring among Southern Baptists, it's occurring among Lutherans, we're seeing it among Roman Catholics, and it certainly is a trend within Orthodoxy.

let alone uh other uh kinds of religious doctrine. And in Judaism, as far as I can tell, the surge in orthodoxy is accompanied, as Terry indicated, by a collapse in reform and even conservative Judaism. In other words, the real thing is thriving, and sort of the airsatz, watered down diluted versions are collapsing.

In other words, and I don't know if this is happening across across uh the other religions, but those people who've decided to stay uh in the congregation are much more engaged. Now, we happen to have the advantage of having a a really quite wonderful um uh new rabbi who is a convert from Catholicism. Um and he's really we're we're we're growing for the first time in decades.

And so I think that there's even among people now, Judaism is not like uh Christianity in the way it's set up, and uh you know individual synagogues are can be very different from one to the other. But are you seeing, and and uh uh Terry, I'd be interested in your take, that those who are committed who have used to maybe went to church, went to the synagogue, you know, sort of like as a social uh thing are now becoming more committed to it um in the in the current circumstance.

And but he found that if you the harder you pushed, the more you found out that about 15 to 18 percent of Americans were actively practicing a traditional religion in a way that affected their life day after day after day. Then you had a lot of people who were like occasional goers or once a week but don't stay around for coffee. I mean, marginally involved, but still identified with the tradition. That was the mainline world to some degree. That's what's fading.

So you're the churches that are surviving are on this. Uh the late Martin Marty stressed, they they're churches with a sense of authority. They have some ability to to to make a demands of your time and your efforts and your your thoughts and your beliefs. Then the growing sector on the other side is the what the Pew Research Center found in, I believe it's 2012, was when the survey came out. The nuns, the nun of the above, the non-religiously affiliated.

Well, that group now seems to have plateaued in the most recent surveys, but it's still huge. And it's like 85% of the core of the voters of the Democratic Party among white voters. It's an amazing statistic. Um I think the figure that Ryan Berg said would I I don't want to get too far, but the overwhelming majority of white Democratic voters may not have been to a church or synagogue within a year.

is actually done better by the by the orthodox groups as opposed to the the um uh the the less orthodox groups. What what's your sense of that? Is there are they kind of better community organizers?

One is you say, well, the mainline Protestant denominations, their stock and trade is social activism, so surely they're the people who have more soup kitchens and more community activities and so forth. That might be, but uh, and maybe Terry can chime in on this. I think a lot of those congregations are increasingly just passive and disengaged.

And it may very well be that it's the uh spiritually grounded groups that are actually getting out and trying to do hands-on work with people who need help. But I'm speculating rather than reporting data.

85. I've seen statistics that the average Episcopal church in America now tends to have about 25 to 35 in Sunday attendance. And there are there are dioceses in the Northeast, in the frozen chosen zone, you know, of New England or something like that, where the entire diocese will have fewer people in the pews on a Sunday morning than one local evangelical megachurch in a suburb.

So back back to that idea that the solid 20% of active participants and the new 25 to 30 percent of non religiously unaffiliated uh do-it-your own way, none of the above, folks, that middle is what we're watching shrink the most. The the old religion is kind of normal to me, but it's not a big deal. Crowd.

I would argue that Robert Bella, with his Sheilaism concept, the growth of self-defined religion, that that's what we're seeing with the none of the above, who are people who say they're spiritual, but it's the the famous quote from Robert Bela, he quoted one of uh Bella, he quoted one of his people he was he was interviewing. She said, her name was Sheila, and he says, I have my own faith. It's my own little faith, it's my own little voice. You can call it Sheilaism.

Well, that used to be about 8% of the population, it's now about 30, 25 to 30 percent of the population.

That that kind of egocentricity seems to be feeding that particular breakaway from organized structure, or at least it seems like that to me. Is that a mistaken view on my part?

is just as rampant as Terry suggested it's. I think of it as the uh I see God in the sunset kind of uh related religiosity. And I have no doubt that people can experience the transcendent watching a beautiful sunset. Uh what religion involves is in my experience, the last 25 years of my haphazard, my haphazard exploration, is that it takes a lot of effort.

That it takes uh a lot of effort if you're like my wife and you have a lot of spiritual perception, but but getting deep into contemplative prayer and a lot of the other things she's deep into, it's like getting a PhD in some respects. And my approach is more empirical, but there's a lot of work there too. You know, the reason I call it taking religion take religion seriously is you gotta take it seriously in order to get a lot out of it.

And uh, and that's what the current generation, I think, doesn't realize that this is deep stuff, you know. They they want to be inspired without a whole lot of effort.

I didn't come to seminary to talk about movies and television, and and on the spot, kind of with my mass communication background, I improvised a secular definition of discipleship because he had said, I came to seminary to learn how to make disciples for Jesus Christ. I said, Good, define disciple, and we ended up, I came up with these three questions. In mass communication theory, you often state a theory in questions. You answer them, you have your theory. And I came up with three questions.

How do you spend your time? How do you spend your money and how do you make your decisions? And there are a lot of Americans who would prefer a form of faith that doesn't affect how they spend their time, how they spend their money or how they make their decisions, or as someone else bluntly put it, their calendar, their checkbook, and their sex life.

Um the what Dr. Murray was saying of it's pretty intense stuff if you're going to try to practice a traditional form of faith, but at very least, there's more to it than how do you spend your time, how do you spend your money, how do you make your decisions. That's not a bad place to start. Right.

Um is the return to religion partially a way of addressing this sort of breakdown in social relations?

on uh modernity. I mean, it used to be by used to be, talk about 1890, 1880, that you could not avoid going through life without being brought face to face, uh face with uh the big questions. People lost their spouse, people lost children, uh, they they suffered debilitating diseases, they knew that they, if they wake up with a sore throat, they could be dead three days later. And you constantly had to think about mortality, about what your place in the universe is.

And the key characteristic of the 21st century, I think, is that we have technology that allows us to entertain ourselves 24-7. We don't have to think about any of this stuff unless we're brought face to face with it by some disastrous event. And the human tendency is if you don't have to think about it, you don't think about it. If you can entertain yourself, you do entertain yourself.

But then in the backdrop of all this, if we assume, as I think all of us do, that the urge to find meaning in your life is a deep universal human impulse. Uh, if that's the case, at some point I think you have more and more people who are seeing the vapidity and the ultimate underlying boredom of a lot of this entertaining that we're doing of ourselves. And you've got these warring things. Will the will the entertainment win out or will the more basic things win out?

I i I can't help but think that we're in a temporary in something like marriage and children. Do not tell me that women have lost their urge for children. Do not tell me that men have lost their urge to be a caregiver and a caretaker for a wife and children. I think those underlying human impulses have not changed. And if they are there and if they are strong, sooner or later I would like to think they're going to re-emerge.

And then when you look, I I just was in another interview just an hour ago when I urged people who want to try to figure out this why are some churches growing and why are some Catholic churches declining, in what it was the context we were talking about. I urged them to look for the marriage statistics. How many parishes, what is the break that they have people getting married?

Look for the signs of infant baptisms, look for the signs of converts to their faith, look for the signs of the number of men willing to consider to make the ultimate sacrifice of becoming a priest in a Catholic context. I was told a story by an Anglican bishop of something he heard happen in a global, I think it might have was one of the Lambeth conferences at Canterbury.

And the Americans and the Europeans in churches that are just cratering statistically, but they were so happy with how things were going, and we're seeing all kinds of progress, and we're, you know, we're our environmental position is strong, and this, that, and the other. And at one point, an African bishop raised his hand, and he's from a church that's exploding with members and rapid growth. And this African bishop waved his hand at the American

bishop and said, Where are your priests? Where are your converts? And where are your children? That's a very blunt way of assessing the situation. But if you're looking for survival in a religious congress tradition, not a bad set of questions to ask. Yeah. Where is the life? And where will that hopefully if you're hanging on to your children and your converts, that means you have a future.

And that the idea that there would be uh a deity that would uh no more uh would have some uh agency over you, that this was really kind of the way religion started. And as we came into the humanism era of the 1600s, that broke down. And what happened was we started to look inward uh to ourselves uh for that still small voice, right, to explain things. And that's just how the notion of uh the little voice inside you, right?

The the the uh the uh gnawing, nibbling voice of conscience um uh uh came about. And people as a result of that started to look to themselves uh for the answers as opposed to uh um God for the answers. And uh what's happened as a result of that is now that we have media that amplifies that and basically says to people, yeah, you have agency over yourself. That was one of the things that that put a damper on religious practice.

His further argument, by the way, is that uh as we move into a world of biotechnology where uh algorithms measure all of your biochemical reactions of what's going on inside of you, they're gonna know more about you than the little than the little voice does. And that's his question is that's why he calls his book Homodeus, Man is God, because people are gonna want, are going to want that. They're gonna want to be able to live forever, know everything, and live a life without pain.

But that that was that was kind of his historical tracing. And I wondered what you thought about that.

And this this diversion of ourselves from thinking ourselves of ourselves as as moral creatures with

uh responsibilities and duties and so forth. We started to think of ourselves in terms of our neuroses and our subconscious and the rest of it. And and it it gave it encouraged this. I'm in in partly just echoing what you said, uh Joel, that uh it uh it it gave us an illusion of being able to manipulate ourselves that was always an illusion and led to dead ends. And I guess I can't put it any better than that.

But he was dean of the school in Urbana when I was there. And in this seminar on communications technology, he walked in the first day, very dramatically, sat on the front of the desk, looked at the class, and spoke the following words. Would the Protestant Reformation have ever happened without the printing press, without movable types? And then he walked out of the room, which had exactly the impact he wanted. It forced us into a kind of like, what in the world was that about?

Why did he ask that question? Well, it's a very good question. I mean, and when you see people now calling the internet the greatest revolution in communication since movable type, that is some comparison. Movable type to me is the engine for modernity ahead of Freud, you know, and everybody else. I mean, to some degree, the information systems bloom out for better and for worse, bloom out of the printing press. I'm not gonna stand here and take a stand against the printing press.

But now my questions, how do you spend your time, how do you spend your money, how do you make decisions? That was a big set of questions when I was teaching in the cable television age. You start talking about the statistics for the amount of time people spend online or on their smartphones, and you look at Jonathan hates quoting statistics that something like 80% of students who are in mental health issues say they're on their phones constantly.

And uh Charles, you were saying that among your cohort, there's now a greater sense that religion, you know, people who are biologists, you talk about um I mean one of our good friends, uh uh Tony Lemus, who will be speaking, who is an astrophysicist.

Um that that there may be there there is some light at the end of the tunnel that it not that we're gonna go back to the 13th century, but that that there is now going to be an intellectual respectability for religion, which seemed to have almost completely disagreed uh disappeared.

Well, then you got to the 20th century and you had this kind of nightmare for uh the physicists, whereby they they they proved that the origin of the universe basically is a gloss on Genesis. You let there be light, the Big Bang. And furthermore, the anthropic principle that came out of the uh physics of the of the Big Bang, it's not religious. The physics of the Big Bang says the odds against a

universe that permits life are a trillion to one. And that's how why do we have multiverse theory? Because if you don't have multiverse theory which positive, oh, we have an infinite number of universes, a proposition I find implausible on its face. Uh, if if you reject that, you're left with two choices. I believe in a one in a trillion chance, or I believe that there is intentionality in the universe. All at once you have a religious answer to a question that science discovered.

And the same thing is happening with consciousness. I had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal talking about evidence that uh consciousness can exist independently of the brain. And the reaction of Steve Pinker was heresy. His attempt to refute it was not Steve Pinker that I know, who is a very careful methodical uh scientist, but rather it was a person who had voiced a heretical thought that is forbidden by scientism.

Because science has in fact taken on some of the characteristics, worst characteristics of religion, in that certain things are off-limits. They are not subject to uh respectability in the sciences. And the idea that consciousness can exist independently of the brain is one of them. But I got news for you. The hard evidence that it can is pretty doggone powerful.

Then we have a a large group of people that have rejected that, you know, and are in the

none, none of the above atheist agnostic crowd. The question in America right now is what happens in the middle, and that affects everything from education to politics. Um, I think in the last election, it was interesting to see the number of people who said a key factor in casting their vote was whether or not the candidate believed that males could compete in DNA-defined males could compete in female sports.

And a lot of these people that were very upset about this issue were not churchgoers and stuff, not the usual religious right. They were people that suddenly had to stare at an issue that they couldn't deny. Do I want my daughter competing for a scholarship against a a human who by DNA is male? And a lot of people they hit they finally hit an issue they couldn't get around. It was too practical.

So I think watching what happens in the muddy middle of American life is where the action is going to be in the next decade, at least on the religion beat. Don't know about sociology.

us and your perspectives and for being a guest on the Feudal Future podcast.