Hey, everybody, this is Razib Khan here with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And I'm here today with someone that I think a lot of you will know from social media, Think Tank world Lyman Stone. He gets involved in a lot of things. He's on vacation right now for those of you with us on YouTube. So that is not a very realistic background. That is reality for him right now, just to keep it real. But in any case, I want to talk to Lyman today about religion. Before obviously, we get into that just like quick introduction, Lyman is director of research for demographic intelligence, demographic intelligence, okay. And he's a PhD student at McGill, doing stuff like demographics, sociology, that sort of stuff. And you have a very, very interesting Twitter account . So I want to ask you really quickly, are you You are a Lutheran, are you Missouri, cyanide? Lutheran?
I am Missouri, Synod Lutheran. All right, can you?
Can you tell people why that's totally different than the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America? I mean, this is like a not a trivial, not a trivial thing. I mean, you know, straight out of Saxony. Right.
Right. So, yeah, so there's like, you know, somebody says, like, Hi, I'm Lyman, I'm Lutheran, like this could mean anything in the world like, so. If you're like ELCA, that's Evangelical Lutheran churches, church in America, Church of America and America? I don't know. They're a very liberal denomination. And what I mean by liberal, there's two elements to that. One is you can think like socially, progressively politically liberal, right tends to, you know, be very much on the political left across the spectrum of issues, economic and social, but actually, in our kind of denominational squabbles. That's actually not what liberal means. For us what liberal means, is, basically three things. One is that they do not believe that the Lutheran confessions are completely true and reliable, but they believe that they're only true and they are only true insofar as they agree with, you know, external validation, whereas conservatives tend to say, no, they are true, we think they are correct. Secondly, they don't take the Bible to be the infallible word of God, whereas we do. And And then third, there are a lot, let's say more loosey goosey on like membership, who can commune things like that, that then we tend to be so there's political liberalism, and then also theological liberalism. So we're the original Protestants. Right. As Lutherans, we nailed the Lutheran nail the things to the door in Wittenberg and set off the Reformation. We're very into what we're against. I'm part of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which is the largest conservative Lutheran denomination in America, and has deep roots. It was founded by immigrants from Germany from Saxony as also also some Wendish immigrants in Texas. And what they all had in common for the most part was they were fleeing some kind of persecution or, or religious unrest. And they made a church together united by that specifically, what they were fleeing was what's called Prussian unionism. This was an effort by the Prussian monarchs to force the Reformed church that's basically Calvinists in the Lutheran church, that's my background, to use to become a union to become one church, one state church, and the Lutheran is like, no, the Calvinists are crazy and wrong and totally awful in every respect, we'd never want to share a church with them. And so again, there's that very Lutheran thing we're very into what we're against. And so all those people fled, they came to America, they started a church that has been pretty strongly defined by Lutheran distinctiveness, we like to say, right, that we are, we really have a strong church culture of the idea that we are a distinctive denomination. We're not just another American Protestant denomination. We pretty strongly resist classification as like an evangelical denomination, even though sociologists will classify us as evangelical Protestant denomination. You know, we we tend to think we're pretty special, if you will. So that's kind of the his Historical background. I don't know how much like the theology nuts and bolts you want on like what we believe. But I'm not sure what's what's going to be interesting on that.
Most of my most of my listeners are not Christian actually. I have done surveys. But but, you know, I think it is interesting to know where people are coming from and also but your name, Lyman stone. It sounds more like an early Mormon name than it does a German name. So you're a convert, right?
I am a convert but not from Mormonism. Oh
OK but from what?
Oh, yeah. So actually, my family founded Hartford, Connecticut in the 1600s. So the Lyman family. There's a Lyman church. I just visited the lineman house in Litchfield, Connecticut. Lyman Beecher, is one of my original namesakes. So like Beatriz Bibles, Harriet Beecher Stowe. So yeah, I mean, almost virtually all my ancestors arrived before 1776. And all of them arrived before 1860. So I'm old Wasp stock. I converted to Lutheranism. I was the first Lutheran that I really fell in love with was Soren Kierkegaard and the second was my wife. And then between the two of them, they convinced me that it made sense to make the trek to Wittenberg. But yeah, I mean, now it's, it's I'm a convert, but, you know, they say the zeal of the convert, right? You tend to people tend to really get into the things that they converted to. So
yeah, I mean, you know, just in terms of like, a lot of American politics and culture, you see, like, converts to Catholicism from other backgrounds
yeah, that's sort of the thing. You're the the people who were raised Catholic or like, yeah, the Pope and, you know, whatever was converts, or like, he should actually run the legislature.
Yeah. Which, like, you know, I don't think I'm, you know, you're not, you're not that extreme, I guess, about your Lutheranism. But I just interesting, because you are, I think, you know, an interesting aspect I will point out is your denomination were very conscious, whereas, you know, the radical evangelical strain of American Christianity is no, I mean, there's non quote, non denominational churches, a lot of them come from, like, I think Baptist backgrounds, but, you know, the really reality is people just go around saying, I'm Christian, you know. So,
I grew up in a non denominational mega church that was actually not coming out of the Baptist tradition, who's coming out of the restorationist tradition. So in some sense, actually, if you were to take like, scale people in like the radicalness of their Protestantism, the restorationist traditions like even more radical. So I grew up in that very kind of nonconformist. loetscher, low church, nondenominational environment. But I was also raised by a theologian and a seminary professor who kind of taught me to at least raise an eyebrow at some of that, and think a little more about deep roots.
Well, so speaking of deep roots, I think this is like, a good, good segue. I want to talk about your report from a couple years ago, promise and peril, the history of religiosity, its recent decline, just in terms of, you know, it kind of came to my attention, there was a new report or book out I think, Ryan Burgess, about religion in America and the nuns, the rise of secularity, and just for the non American listeners, you know, I'm personally an atheist, you know, I don't identify as an atheist, I'm an atheist, just just put it out there. But um, you know, so but I'm, I'm of a certain age, I'm a little older than lineman, you know, I remember the 80s and 90s. And, you know, I remember the end of communism. And so religion in America, it's changed its position in America has changed a lot in my lifetime. I feel also like even within the Republican Party on the political, right. What was once normative is, frankly, no longer normative. A lot of younger people, it's just not that big of a deal that they're not religious. When I was younger, it was pretty big deal. When I was in high school people didn't know what the word atheist was, you know, all of these things. Satanic Panic, like the Evan Jellicle culture was much, much stronger and widespread. I mean, we don't remember Tipper Gore. Al Gore's wife was, you know, they were both Baptist. And, you know, he was originally pro life, and she was worried about satanic stuff. So this was a much bigger deal in American life, and we've seen secularization happening and maybe it's not we're not Sweden, or France, but or the UK, but there are parts of-
by some measures Sweden is more religious religious, yes.
Which we'll get into that because there's some details so I mean, so a lot of this has to do with Americans founding it goes back we're very very unique country in a lot of ways I have so I've actually just uh, you know, I have read most Rodney Starks works. I'm really big fan, going back to 1990 going well, he was great. Going back to The 1990s Yeah,
he's a Lutheran. He's a member, he was a member of the LCMS.
I didn't know that. Yeah, because he was an agnostic. For those of you out there, he wasn't like, he was a fellow traveler forever. And then by the end of his life, you know, he was he was a Christian. But so, um, you know, I've read a lot of his works. I've seen some evolution there. But I mean, we're gonna get into that, but really hit me like with think like those that like the church youth Church of America, that book where it actually
might be thinkI, who's might be thinking, who's Lutheran? It's either funky, or I forget which one of them is one of them is Lutheran, I forget which one it is.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. But, um, but I mean, although Stark was Christian by the end of his life, and that's the only reason he could, you could be appointed at Baylor. But so, you know, he reported data that's counterintuitive to a lot of people. You know, and it depends on who you're talking to that America was not a churched nation at the founding. And then it became progressively more churched, over time, probably peaking in the 1960s. And stylized factors, there's like, there's kind of like a crash. And then it stabilized. That was actually the perception in the 80s and 90s. If you read, who are we Sam Huntington, his last book, which was written probably around the year 2000, was published in 2004. He just assumes that America is going to be as secular as it was, at that point, and definitely listen to the bush, too. It was evangelical in the White House, and all this stuff. And I think Bush's ever gel class, which was, frankly, a little overdone, but you know, for him from his own perspective, and then also from the media. But in any case, that was actually a time of like, the beginning of like a start of a massive secularization wave that arguably is still going on, and people argue about it. But I've just seen a massive difference within the last 20 years. I mean, you see it in the data, and we can get into that. So there's this data that we're talking about, you know, you examine the data. And I want to ask you really quickly, your take on this your belief. So when America was founded, obviously, you say this in your report, and this is well known. Churches were established throughout all the different colonies, almost all the different colonies, you know, and that was just like part of the culture. And our Federal Republic was founded. And, you know, there's some books back during when, when Church State separation was a big deal, like the godless constitution. And then there's some Evan Jellicle books that were founded a Christian nation and all that stuff. And, you know, I think a lot of modern people don't understand how radical it was at the founding that our polity, our federal polity, was not explicitly wedded to a particular we'll use the word denomination, you know, but that was a really weird thing. And Europeans thought it was weird. And a lot of Americans like Patrick Henry thought it was strange. There are some practical reasons why that couldn't happen because of religious Pearl pluralism that was already happening in the new world. What do you what do you think about it? Because I think that that is a very, that is something that modern Americans do not understand how radical because the founding was not totally radical. And always we're not the French Revolution. But when it comes to religion and disestablishment, Arianism it was pretty weird.
Yeah, so I'm talking about America's founding is always weird, because people want to look at 1776. But of course, that's not when America was founded. Right? 1600s, right, who comes over? You got Jamestown, you got Massachusetts, all these things. People think of Massachusetts is religion as religious and Jamestown is like mercantile or whatever. This is not true. Evidence on church and attendance in the southern colonies, just there was just as high as in the north, at least among whites. Which is an important caveat, of course. You know, what I've done. So when, when Fickian Stark did their their churches of America book they had access to this was kind of at the eve of the internet, basically. Right? So they had access to all this archival data that they put together, but at a lot of gaps, right? Because there was just stuff that wasn't available in the ensuing you know, 20 years, a lot more data has become available. And so in this report I wrote a few years back, I basically supplement their work with everything we now know, taking records back farther identifying denominations, they missed extending it to more recent years, comparing it to other kinds of indicators that we can take back. And what I show is that, you know, you can look at things like baby names, you can look at things like you know, what share of births in America in the 1700s I had a church baptism, right. This is a good indicator of like a kind of secularization America was extraordinarily devout in the late 1600s. Early 1700s. secularization occurs during the 18th century, and then when the revolution happens 1776 1789 That period is like the low ebb of religion in America. Right? This is like the lowest period of church attendance in US history. There's debate about why that is. But the upshot is, you know, what we know is also at that time, it was a time of radical ideas, right? You get the free thinkers like Thomas Paine, right? A very public atheist, which is not something you would have had in like 1687 You know, Puritan Massachusetts. So there's there is a clear ideological shift ideational shift, so that when the revolution comes along, you've got, you know, a minority but allowed one that wants something like secularism, but then you also have this political problem where the Southern colonies are, by and large, Anglican, you know, if you were a Baptist in Virginia, you could not legally marry because only Anglican priests could solemn, nice a marriage and you have to be a member of the English like, you know, so like, they were not just like nominally Anglican, like you didn't have civil rights if you weren't Anglican, in Virginia. And in most southern states, in South Carolina, you couldn't even be citizen. You couldn't even be a citizen if you couldn't affirm like nine different religious statements. In the northern colonies, of course, you have like Congregationalism and several of them. The upshot is that we can't agree on a national creed between Congregationalism, Anglicanism and in the minority faiths people like Quakers, Lutherans, Benjamin Franklin has a famous piece in like the 1750s, where he's complaining about these unassimilable Lutheran immigrants from Germany. And they'll never make good Americans in look, I'm married to one I agree, they're still not really assimilated. But so we get this weird moment where there's a real push for, like ideological secularism alongside no political consensus for a federal state religion. And so it converges into this constitution says, Look, you can't have a test act, right. You can't require religious confession for public office, which they did not mean to protect secularists, they meant it to ensure that Anglican would the Anglicans couldn't force congregational has to be Anglican, and that Congregationalists could like they intended it for that. And in fact, test X originally didn't even protect Quakers. All right, it wasn't till later that they're like, I guess we also won't make Quakers swear on a Bible, because they won't take oaths. And so they get expanded, right. But in the 1700s, you get this unique moment where I've done this, I've gone through every colonial and state constitution, US history, and I've looked at all of their provisions related to religion. This is in the report, right show that there's a dramatic institutional secularization in this period, a lot of colonies, disestablished their state churches, particularly the Anglican colonies do this, because obviously, that's the Church of the crown. You get, you know, church taxes are abolished in a lot of states, you get some states prohibiting clergy from holding public office, which is like a pretty strong, like, that's a limitation on civil and political rights of religious. Like, that's now that would not be okay. Like, you couldn't do that. But like tons of states did that. You know, that's kind of like your classic anti clericalism is like, limiting the civil liberties of clergy. Yeah, so like, you get these things in that period, but they don't last. by enlarge. Some features last, some don't. But we actually see in the 1860s, as Catholics migrate over, there's a push to say, you know, to password called Blaine amendments, which are basically laws saying that no public money can be spent for sectarian education. They pass in some states, not another's. But the interesting thing is, there's an effort to pass a federal Blaine Amendment, and it is soundly rejected. They say we are not going to require public education funding to be secular, that is rejected as a constitutional norm in the 1860s pretty emphatically. And then it is made into a constitutional norm without any in contravention of the clearly expressed will of the electorate. It's made into a constitutional form and a series of court cases in the 40s 50s and 60s, despite the fact that it is very clearly not in the Constitution.
Yeah, so, you know, in America, we've had like, these ways these changes, you know, it's interesting, a lot of people from other countries, other parts of the world, you know, there are exceptions, like South Korea, for example, as an exception, you know, parts of Africa but, you know, like half almost half of Americans change religion if you count denomination in their life, right? And like a lot of the world that's just really strange. Like, I've talked to people who just don't believe me when I tell them that from other, for example, a friend from India just did not believe that for obvious reasons. Because it's just like, Wait, why are you serious? And I was like, no, look it up and like, I had to like show them. You know, I think
a huge share of that is either switching among Protestant denominations, or some bleat simple. disaffiliation right? And so yeah, part of what's also going on is in a lot of countries, you have people who are totally disaffiliated In terms of lifestyle, practice and belief, but they still culturally identify as Hindu, or Muslim or whatever. Or Lutheran. Yeah, actually, that's a huge one, right? Um, but in the US, we don't have the norm of, you know, like, non theological church identity. So if you were to apply, like a US sociological definition, definition of religion in India, you would find a very large share of the population that has in fact changed religion. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's concept creep. Yeah. And
so I think, you know, in just for the non Americans, like, we are talking to very, like an American context here, which, you know, is portable, to some extent, in some countries, but a lot of the world, they find this understanding alien. So, you know, we're talking about Rodney Stark, for example. So he had, you know, he had the rational choice theory, the supply side model of religious competition. And, you know, I did read a theory of religion back in the day. So, I do understand, like, explicitly, like, what he's talking about, I think that its best case is probably in the United States. What do you think about that, I don't think that it works as well in other parts of the world.
So there is forgetting the exact citation, there's a nice paper that tries to it tries to use like reconstructed religiosity data for like, you know, two centuries or something across a lot of countries. And they also look at like state religious law, like country level religious policies, and they do seem to find that if you have a combination of kind of like, illiberal, or non inclusive political norms in general, and also, um, you know, strong kind of religious, you know, imposition in your laws, that it does seem to cause more secularization in the modern period. So their argument is basically, it's not so much having a state religion that causes secularization, it is secularization, plus kind of an early, high capacity state before the advent of liberalism, right. So places where you, you kind of, you didn't really have really high centralized state capacity, actually, India's like, a great example of this, right? You actually did have extremely, like, you know, the states were very religious in India, right. And they were very not okay with conversion. And they were perfectly happy to use violence about that. But your actual level of state capacity is, you know, central state capacity, at least, is somewhat limited, right, you have a lot of local autonomy, and so you know, like these, so, so it doesn't drive a lot of secularization, whereas, you know, somewhere like Sweden, you have a lot of state capacity really early. And, you know, Gustavus Adolphus, the Lutherans of Sweden did not really go in for like, allowing dissent wasn't a thing. And so he's very secular today is the is the argument now? I don't know. So this is kind of the supply side argument, right? That if you crack down on religious competition, you get a lack of religious innovation, and the result is your religions can't really metamorph well, to stay competitive as society changes. This is a very debated thesis. And, you know, your the empirical findings for it depends on like, if you use like a state level analysis, a country level analysis, a county level analysis, you know, whether you use like lifetime exposure of an individual or like contemporary, it's very empirically contested. Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to the broad idea that the supply side of things matters. But I there's, well, if you know anything about theory or theory of religion, there's three kind of big families here. So one is supply side arguments and, you know, kind of religious competition is one of the big arguments of that. Another is basically what we could call demand side arguments, basically, that secularization, the advent of modern rational ideas, enlightenment thinking, science, all these great wonderful ideas convinced people that like the the factual propositions of religion were probably not true. And so there just wasn't demand for religion. And then the third set of explanations is that it's basically all idiosyncratic nonsense. That religiosity just kind of rises or falls based on kind of arbitrary quirks of socialization behaviors at a young age. That's actually my preferred theory that like there's supply side matter some sometimes there's demand sighs like sometimes it's, particularly sometimes a specific idea is really discredited, or really challenged, but religions, religions are fought, they can work around a specific idea being Describe it. They've done so many times in the past, it's not hard. My view is actually idiosyncratic socialization factors are pretty much the whole story. That is what happens to children guides all of society. And it's not, you know, people, there is a ton of religious switching in America, almost 100% of it happens before age 20 It's like 80% of kids before age 20
You should tell you, you should tell rod dreher No, just joking. Just joking. No, no,
no, but this is important to understand is like, you know, if you serve a teenagers, like they've already lost their faith, right? Like, the rise of atheism is not about like adults sitting down with like, a bunch of evidence and being like, in some, like neutral, rational fashion being like, which one of these propositions appears most true on the basis of some large body of evidence. So it's basically like a decision you make when you're elected, empirically speaking, you know, it's, it's about childhood role models, it's about parental influence, it's about, you know, media factors. The truth content is not very important, in my view, in terms of what people actually believe, you know, competition does supply side does matter, for kind of, you know, enabling people to flex with times when socialization might give rise to the emergence of like, an unusual new idea that's hard to cope with. But, but at the end of the day, like childhood socialization factors that are very idiosyncratic, are really, really, really important. And we have good empirical evidence for this, right. Like, there's good evidence showing that when societies become more educated, there's no change in their religiosity, unless the education is legally secular. Right. So like, if people acquire more years of education, and like their PISA scores rise, and like they, you know, all these things, but their school is like, not officially secular, the government, you know, and it's like, you know, we're talking about like, the best case, this is a really nice, randomized, controlled, or not rctb, like a natural experiment from Indonesia, where they look at a huge educational expansion, but a lot of it was like Islamic private schools, now, they had to pass standardized tests. But they were pretty, devoutly Islamic. And they find that those kids, you know, they got better jobs, better educated, better scores. But also as adults, they were just really well educated fanatical Muslims. Like, it didn't decrease religiosity. So like, the evidence suggests that like, the idiosyncratic content of your childhood environment is hugely important. So all these these like big, like, oh, it's about rational ideas, or oh, it's about like religious competition. Yeah, it's like, it's basically like, just like, the quirk of culture when you're a kid.
Yeah, let me just let me talk about Indonesia really quickly, because idiosyncratic and because Indonesia is not that a typical, I think, in a lot of ways, a lot of people that I encounter think, well, you get more educated, you get more modern, you get more developed, you get more secular, and you get more tolerant, and you get more liberal. But that's not necessarily what you see, say, during the Reformation in the Catholic Reformation, or what's happening with the spread of orthodox Islam. So in Indonesia, if you're a very urban educated person, a lot of these people are what they call santuary. So their their religion is unmoored from their locality, it's less syncretistic is less like, you know, localized the traditional Indonesian Islam that's called tolerant, all of a sudden is replaced by a more herbicide. I don't want to say herbicide. But you know what I'm thinking international normative Islam. Yeah.
Well, and it's important, it's international. So part of what's when you get more educated, you do enter into more globalized discourses, right? You start using different social media, all these things. And there's this assumption that people had the entering into a more globalized discourse will mean a more liberal discourse. Right, that you will liberalize, but that's not true. The best?
Like yeah, they should they should read about the night the 17th century in France,
also, like the best educated people in the world are like Saudi Qatari and Bahraini nationals. Okay, like, if you look at years of educational attainment, especially especially for women like the best the women with the most years of educational attainment in the world are like Qataris okay, like they're not like liberal progressives. Okay, like it's not happening yeah, maybe there's some drift you know, maybe they're a little more liberal and progressive than like, they're less educated. I don't know Sudanese, you know, co religionists or something, but like,
Alright, we're gonna we're going to the bottom of the barrel, you know, go to Sudanese
like this. Is this, like, Qatari women are not like an emblem of like liberal progressivism. Okay. I'm not saying there's like a critique. I'm just like, you know, it depends on which globalized discourse you land in, if you land in the globalized discourse of all the Madras says that, that Saudi Arabia setting up it's a very different discourse. It's a very different set of norms. You know, another good example of this in like late 19th century France, restricted the presence of, of, you know, Catholic orders in public education. Right, they like limited how many like monks and nuns and all that and priests could like be in Catholics, it could be in public schools. And like they made it so they couldn't be teachers anymore. And they'd been like a huge share of the teacher population. And this caused that generation of young people to grow up with way fewer like religious role models and inputs and stuff like that. And the upshot is they became a lot less religious. Dutch pillar isation is another like fun example of this where like, because Dutch society allowed certain groups to kind of opt out of like, Public Religion role modeling through basically the the strong sectarian divisions in the Netherlands. The result was that a lot of people grew up without any kind of religious role modeling. And so the Netherlands has the earliest 20th century decline in religiosity. But again, religiosity is idiosyncratic there's this great study from France by going blank that shows that like France starts to secularize in the early 18th century, and that gives rise to their fertility decline in the mid 18th century. The thing is, by the mid 19th century, France is very religious, again, it doesn't stick in this thing is like religion, religion changes, it changes over time, it's there's not a historical long arc of religion. You know, we can see this you can find medieval Catholic priests complaining that no one goes to mass. Or that that paper I wrote, I have a section where I show some data from the UK in the long run. And it's derived from these reports, the Anglican Church would like go around and like, they would have people like interview pastors and collect data on like, what their concerns were about their flocks. And they would also like do headcounts in churches. And like, none of them are like, Oh, these people are atheist, and they hate God. But you do routinely find like, everyone is gambling on Sunday, the church is empty, the pastor has not even written a sermon, because no one is there. But you find that all the time, there's like, 1000s of these reports, because like, it was just an extremely non religious society. And that was even a time when religious attendance was legally mandatory. It was not to go to church, and people were just out gambling.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's so in your report, like you tried to, like, you know, use these various data and connect the dots and interpolate. And this is what you have to do. And a lot of times, because it's not always clear, so for example, I just take you give an example to the listeners and viewers, you know, my family's from Bangladesh. And there was a wave of murders of atheists in Bangladesh actually about like, you know, in the teens, let's put it like, you know, the last decade, and there was nothing like this in Pakistan, and people were like, Oh, does that mean, Bangladesh is more fundamentalist in Pakistan? I'm like, No, it's the opposite. In Pakistan, everyone just keeps their mouth shut. There's, there's plenty of atheists there, especially among the elite, but there's no public norm of religiosity there. And so they're not threatened in Bangladesh, and it's still happening, probably due to the empowerment of women and integration to globalization, more, you know, and like less institutional power of the army and other things. There is like an outbreak of basically like, you know, little like baby Dawkins, you know, type people, and they, they're big mouths, they open their mouths, and like, periodically, they get killed. And so what you're seeing here is not a society that's going through a religious revival. It's almost like a bang Larian reaction to probably the last gasp of the old order.
See, I don't think it's either one. And again, I think it's important to resist the idea of an old order and a new order, right? Today's new order will be tomorrow's old order, it will change again, there are many forces that cause religiosity to change. And we've seen many times through history, religions rise and fall religiosity rises and falls, recognizable religion, sometimes, you know, we think, Oh, maybe, maybe what happened wasn't what wasn't that religiosity per se declined, but it was substituted by a kind of religiosity that's harder to track. A lot of people argue that's what's happening with like, woke ideology in the US. Yeah. You know, like Ross Douthat, right will argue that, yeah, it's a new religion. You know, it depends on what you mean by religion. Western secularists tend to have a pretty strong notion that religion involves propositional statements about God, God or gods. You know, that definition doesn't work great for like a Confucian or a Buddhist. So like, then you get it like you've just cancelled, like, a lot of world religions that don't don't have the same kind of idea. You know, so so, you know, it depends on what you mean by religion. But, you know, the other thing to keep in mind is just social mimetics are weird, right? Like, you kill someone publicly enough. There will be a copycat. Why did things happen in Bangladesh, not in Pakistan? Well, because Bangladesh people are more aware of things happening in Bangladesh, right? Like, you don't need a big explanation like a macro explanation for 30 murders. Like, you can just get that from a very small number of killers targeting a very small number of public people. Big cuz, like,
it's a meme for the positive feedback loop.
Yeah. So and I think it's important understand that like, all of our ideas are basically like this, right? Like very few people arrive at any of their ideas, because of some like, like hyper rational, deep consideration of truth statements, right? We mostly do it through kind of mimetic imitation guesswork, and kind of just throwing things in the wall and seeing what gets us like, you know, a little bit of a dopamine hit or something, right. Like, that's basically how our minds work. I'm very anti rationalist. And in thinking about how humans make decisions, as you can tell, sure, but And so like, I think it's important to keep that in mind when we explain social phenomenon that like, Look, if you had like, 5000 people out there murdering atheists, I'd be like, Okay, maybe we need a macro explanation. But like, a couple of dozen is like, you know, like, all your killers can like meet up and have dinner together. Like, you don't need a macro explanation. You just need like one social media forum. But you need like one group chat to explain it like yeah, the socializing force of one small group very
don't give my listeners ideas. I need more than one group chat. Yeah.
I'm not saying it's obviously horrible, very opposed to murdering people for any reason. Especially religious recent still do that. Very opposed to that. Because look, I'm a missionary for my faith. I don't want people to die. If people die, they can't convert. It's a horrible outcome for me to go to hell, they go to hell. Right. Right. Right. Look, if you kill a Christian to go to heaven, like it's terrible, you shouldn't do it, but like, Okay, I don't know any theist. First thing you could do, sorry, I'm gonna get I'm gonna get phone calls about that from people, my denomination. Obviously don't kill Lutherans either. But, you know, like, you're I'm not saying like, Oh, it's fine. We don't need to worry about it. It's a horrible thing. But like, it's important not to jump to like gigantic, like, it's macro explanations for what might ultimately just be a weird psychosis of a small group of people spread medically. Right? You see a similar thing with like, school shootings in the US, right, like, actual numbers of gun deaths in schools are not rising. Like they aren't. They're not, this is like not a growing problem. But like school shooting, mass school shootings, maybe our again, even the data on that doesn't necessarily suggest that it's necessarily a huge problem. They've probably risen since late 1990s. Largely because of copycatting, right. Like, you don't need to come up with like, an elaborate explanation for why suddenly, you know, a small set of angry and depressed high school boys acted out their, their, you know, problems by murdering their classmates, right. Like, we know why it happened. One or two groups of high school boys did this in the media, ate it up and loved it. And so it communicated to every angry high school boy in the world that like this is a way to get attention. Yeah, yeah.
That makes sense. That makes sense. So you know, there are these, you know, like a femoral bleeds patterns that come and go. But let's talk about like a bigger pattern. Would you agree that there has been a wave of secularization over the last generation in the United States?
Yeah, I mean, in my report, I show yeah. Church attendance, religious behavior is oscillated dramatically over time. Nominal religious identity is more stable across time. Until very recently, that is, in the past, in the US, you had large shares of people who might have, in some very nominal sense identified with something like Christian Christendom. But of course, they never attended church, they did not behave like Christians in any, there was no evidence of like moral conduct or something like that. They, they weren't like supporting religious policies, they were often supporting very disestablishment, terian policies, etc, etc. But in recent years, we have a different situation, right, where religiosity, religious behavior is declining, but also nominal religious affiliation is declining. Yeah, that is quite new. In the debate is about what that means. It could be that we've just made a society where it's easier for non practitioners to say what they believe. Right? So maybe in the 1770s, actually, belief was really low, but they just couldn't say it. Right. And maybe today, it's not a unique situation. It's just unique that we have good measurement and people say it. Other people say no, it is unique. It reflects a real loss in some kind of, you know, belief system or way of thinking about the world. So the way to get at that is just ask people and sell their identity, ask them their beliefs. And this is where it gets really complicated. So We asked people like, Do you believe in God? Um, there has been some decline, particularly with people born after 1990. All of the decline happens, you know, before they were 20, there's no evidence of a big change in adults losing their religion. But when people enter the age at which we start surveys of them, so about age 18, to 20, we do see at the entrance into the survey, we see a big decline in religion. In the last 20 years, we don't see an increase in switching away from religion in the last 20 years that hasn't increased. But people who say look when I was I was raised Christian, when I was 11, but I'm an atheist that has increased among people are like 18 to 20. And then it sticks for their life and not saying they've been rejected. Well, it doesn't fully stick people do become more religious as they age, in terms of belief, behavior, everything but it's not a huge effect. It's not it's not massive, but they do become a bit more religious, partly because less religious people tend to die younger. But um, but beyond that, the other thing that's it's it's train of thought you were asking about
the secular ization hypothesis of mass secularization? Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes.
Okay. So that's my belief in God. But then you could ask a different question, like, you know, do you believe that there's an afterlife for your soul? The share of the population that agrees with that has been stable at 90%. For the last 50 years, there's been no change. So you've got a lot of people who don't believe in God, they're not they don't they identify as non religious, like something like 50% of atheists in America have self identified Atheists say they believe in an afterlife of the soul. So like, What the heck is that? Like? What does that even mean? Okay, let
me let me jump in here. I think, you know, I might have a little bit of insight on this. Well, I mean, so I mean, you probably know the cognitive science of religion literature, which is somewhat different than what we're talking about. So I mean, you know, I personally do believe that, you know, I'll give you an example. So I have, you know, like, I live in Austin, Texas, pretty liberal town. Not too many religious people, but some, but you know, one of my co workers one time very, super liberal guy. And I'm, by the way, I mean, I think most listeners know this. I'm not very liberal today, I guess. But, but he's super liberal guy, like, typical Austin liberal guy. And we were just talking about ghosts or something. I was like, Do you believe in ghosts? And he was like, yeah. And
yes, superstitious belief has not declined.
The, issue here, the issue is like, I was like, why? And he was like, because I'm human. And I was like, yeah, that is actually true. Most people have a really strong intuition, no matter what they're taught about stuff like that. I never have like, I walked through, like cemeteries, and I've never been scared. So there's something like, something dead inside, maybe? I'm honest about it.
Yeah. No, but this, isn't it. So like, you know, there's all these studies on like, you know, people they do like G wasps or kinship studies or like religiosity. Right. And there is a genetic component to religiosity, not to religion, and there's an important identity, yeah, to religiosity. And so what no one has done and what I desperately want someone to do, but you got to get the data for it is to is to do a GWAS and distinguish between religiosity and superstitious belief.
Right that, yeah, there's, there's people working on it. Yeah, like,
I really want to see, I want to know how much of the loss of religiosity is superstitious belief versus like pro social inclinations, or like, other things that might be or fertility, right. So, yeah, so like superstitious belief has not declined by nearly as much as nominal religion. So, like, what do you make of that like? And so it gets very complicated where you're like, Okay, you're in a world where religious practices, recognizably religious practices, declining, nominal religious affiliation is declining. Some religious beliefs are declining, other religious beliefs or not? And I believe, although there's not yet empirical evidence for this, because survey, people who write surveys are not interesting enough people to think of this, we should be asking things like, Do you believe some rocks have magical powers to heal you? Because like that belief is clearly growing? Yeah. Do you like do you believe your astrological sign is actually going to impact your life, believing that is clearly rising? So I would love to get more surveys of that? Because that's an emergent religious belief that might be supplanting a different or like, Do you believe that, like, you're asking about essential oils would be interesting, right? These are things that like, yeah, these are clearly religion like superstitious and religious beliefs, that that we're not serving as religion we're not asking about in this in any systematic way. And I suspect what that means is we're actually dramatically overstating the extent to which religion is declining, versus the it's changed that superstitious belief is finding a new outlet in a new kind of what's clearly like a metaphysic a set of metaphysical claims, right? It's not secular right? If you think a crystal is going to heal you or change your energy for the day like that is very much like in the realm of very conventional religion. Yeah, so
let me, let me like, just like, I think that there's four categories here. So there's people who have strong supernatural intuitions, who are affiliated with a traditional, organized, systematic religion as we understand it. There's people who have strong supranational intuitions, but they're not affiliated with an organized religion. These people often call themselves spiritual, you know? And then then there's people like religious. Yeah, but there's people like me, I'm not religious. I'm also have like, very, very, I'm just very low on intuitions about supernatural things. Okay. Now, there is a fourth category, and I've known people like this. People who are there, they're like, converts to like, traditional Catholicism, and I privately talked to them, and they're like, Yeah, I don't really get it. But I believe in, you know, the proofs in you know, summa Summa Theologica. I know people like this. I think they're kind of frankly, over represented in the public discourse.
Yeah. I mean, look, I'm kind of in that category. Like, I don't have real strong supernatural intuitions, like, like you said, when I walk around the graveyard, I don't get the heebie jeebies, like, you know, you know, just, you know, I go into various life experiences, but like, you know, I don't have that, like, oh, that person cast a spell on me. I'm worried now. Like, no, I'm not. That's bullshit. Like, it's just fake. Yeah. So like, you know, I don't have really strong supernatural intuitions. I also like max out the scales on like, any survey question of like, religious behavior, Brack, yeah. And I believe, but what does it mean to believe something like, what does it mean that I believe the moon exists? Like, does that mean that I have, like, some emotional relation with propositions about the moon? No, are you?
Are you gonna believe linear algebra? Linear Algebra works, but that doesn't that's like, what does that mean? Yes, Z linear algebra.
I am on a magic box device right now talking to you. If you told me that, like little fairies made this computer work, I could not disprove you. Like, I do not have that ability to prove that wrong. I just kind of take it on faith. They're like, whatever. You know, you know, I'm relatively religiously literate. I understand a lot of the claims. I think there's a strong rational argument to be made for it. I also don't believe that the strong rational arguments are ultimately what motivate people. I think that basically socializing experiences are overwhelmingly what shapes people's religious identity, belief and practice. And whether you get the heebie jeebies, whether you get the feels about your religion, or not, like also, like full disclosure, like I'm Lutheran, and we're like, the like, we were like, lowest on the scales of like emotional, emotional expressionism and faith like to begin with. So like, I'm a real good fit for being like, like, I'm religious, but like, when I say I'm spiritual, I'm like, Yes, I am. In my own sense of that, but like, not in the sense of like,
oh, yeah, I mean, there is that argument, there. Um, there have been books written about this, that you know, not Lutheranism is in this direction. But there's like, certain species of rationalist Calvinism. You know, there are people who have an ism in terms of like, they think like, you know, the extreme forms of Calvinism are actually the last step before atheism by disenchanting the world like there is that argument, you know, because you're saying like, Oh, you don't get the heebie jeebies, like you don't believe in casting spells. Like, you know, I have religious friends that Jesus is protecting me. Well, I mean, I have religious friends that believe there are demons in the world. I know there are
demons in the world. I just don't have any particular like emotional like, I just like as a proposition, I believe yes, there are demons in the world.
Yeah, well, you just said proposition you had you had as a proposition. It's like that's not a thing to say, bro. Like belief is not a proposition. It's something you I don't personally honestly feel this but the people have told me this my whole life you know, they're like, it's a feeling and then like, you know, they'll talk to me about their feelings. I can talk to someone like you because we share the common currency you know, there's another there's another type of psychology I don't share a common currency whether they're Christian or not, they they're communicating in like a deep intuitive way in a currency that I just like I'm I'm I'm broke I don't have any of that stuff. It just it doesn't appeal to me you know, so I can I can I can argue about like the ontological proof or something like that. Right? I can't I can't I can't argue about like you know, God filling my heart because like Sorry, I don't have a heart
receive you know, you have you ever want to talk about becoming Lutheran we'd be a great fit for you. We're a whole religion if people were like,
okay, you don't hurt this is a funny story. This stuff like, I'm not gonna I don't want to talk about this too much because like, I don't want my people like, know too much about my personal life, but I have a lot of Catholic friends. And so you know, the joke is So I you know, the 1517 project? Yeah, I like him, but like, I have some issues with the Reformation, and stuff like that. So I like I went, like I argued with Gibson about it. And he was like, why are you Catholic? I'm like, oh, no, no, no, I'm an atheist. So I was like, I just always joke. So I have a Calvinist friend, and we were talking about Christianity. And he was like, you know, you should like, look into this. And I was like, well, the Catholic Church has a right of first refusal. I'm like, that did not come down.
Like, as a Lutheran, you know, if anybody ever wants to renegotiate Westphalia at the point of a sword, my team is fixed. I know what side I'm on. Like, I'm here for it. Let's go. But you know what, at the end of the day, Catholics are my brothers and sisters in Christ, sir. It's great. Love it. Yeah. You know, just, you know, stay away from government guys. Well, so
I do have to say, you have to say, growing up in the United States in the late 20th century. You know, I grew up in upstate New York and Oregon. And I have to say that in terms of religion, I have come to feel that we are, you know, so we're talking about like secularization and America founded as a non confessional state, which is pretty weird. So what I like to say is America was not found in a Christian nation, it was a nation of Christians. And by that, like, it's just obvious that they assumed that Christianity was going to be the default religion, the culture, and even even as late as the 20th century. I feel like I do feel like there is a Protestant presupposition about a lot of this country in terms of how religion is how our society is ordered. And it doesn't really ultimately doesn't matter whether you're Muslim, you know, Catholic, Jewish, whatever. You are even like, you know, a liturgical Protestant magisterial Protestant, like radical reformation. Protestantism has really shaped this country in ways that are really hard to discern. disentangle if you were raised in this country, from from just your orientation in the world.
Yeah, so I mean, obviously, like, we're, the founders, many of them are not religious, many of them are Deist. You know, these are not like, they're not founding a theocracy. Many of them turn around in their state legislatures, and then immediately like disestablished the churches that were in there. However, it is absolutely true that founders did not imagine a world where the ethical, moral and brought like very broad and metaphysical assumptions of generic Protestant Christianity, were not going to be the basis for society. They had to say they didn't imagine a sectarian society at all, but they would not have conceived of a world where something vaguely like, you know, mainstream Protestant moral beliefs were not the reigning normative value set that guided people's behavior. And also the founders were not agreed even on the question of sect. So for example, the in the Barbary states treaties, the ones that Adams negotiates, say that we are not a, they explicitly say the United States is not founded on any Christian principle, yada, yada, yada. They're like, we're like this very strongly secular language. Those ones don't last, they get abrogated. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans negotiate a second round of Barbary states treaties that are still enforced today, you can look them up on State Department's website, they're there. And they explicitly say that the United States is a Christian nation. They're still legal. And they say that they're still in force with Morocco, like the treaty never broke. Now, this doesn't mean, you know, like, we should ignore all the other voices of the founders, so to speak, like, this has always been a debate. Like we've been arguing about this since literally before we were a country. So I would argue that on some level, being American means sitting on the fence of this question, so hard to get splinters way up in there. I'm there like, if you don't feel a temptation to have it both ways on this question, then like you're not fully encapsulating the founding mentality. Um, also, it's worth mentioning, like what was meant by Protestant like, Blaine amendments are a great proof case of this because they had an enormous public debate, they left an enormous public record, and they prohibited sectarian school financing. So what did sectarian mean? Well, public schools had reading of the Bible, they had prayers, they had all this clearly Christian stuff. So what did they mean? What they meant is they wanted they prohibited any non Christian funding, and also anything that they saw as a sect. So what is a sect? Was any Christian denomination that asserted its denominational identity as superior to the label Christian, or that didn't agree that all the other Christians were also Christians. So who did that mean? Mormons? It meant Catholics, most of all, it also meant Lutherans. And if you look at American history, who are the groups that have the biggest school and how hospital systems choose Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons. Why? Because we're the ones who are targeted. Why? Because we're the ones who were like, guys are like, you might be okay. But we're very, like we set ourselves apart. And so we set a target on our backs. Because we were not generic American Protestant. And as a result, our churches got burned. We got direct constitutional assaults in Blaine amendments, Catholics were the main target because they were more numerous but Lutherans and Jews are absolutely being in Mormons are absolutely being targeted as well. You know, we we, you know, we were, and also Eastern Orthodox to some degree, you know, we're the groups that were getting hit by this because we were non compliant with non sectarian Protestantism. We're like, actually, like my church, we were founded for the purpose of sectarian division. Like, we're like, we're not going to do generic Protestantism with a reformed to like, that's our whole reason for being so like, of course, gonna be targeted by non sectarian stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, the Missouri Synod Lutheran is like, in terms of your denomination, like, explicit denominational ism, that's also like, a little weird in America today, because everyone's like, Oh, we're all Christian. We believe in that. No, you guys are like, No, we don't we don't.
Christian, but we do not believe the same thing.
So, okay, so we're, you know, as we're closing out, I want to ask you, Lyman, you know, you've talked about fertility a lot. We haven't talked that much about fertility. And congratulations on fatherhood and all that. You know, it's great, right, but going on three? Yeah.
Do you have kids? Yeah.
I got three. Hey, that's great. For now, we'll see. I gotta, it's not like it's a competition.
Three, great for now or three for now.
You know, I have aspirations to get beyond three. That's an American. Okay, but out there. But we're,
we're shooting for five so, okay, yeah,
that's, yeah, that to me, that's a good that's a good. That's, that's a good target. So. So I'm gonna ask you though, um, so it's really weird. Like, you're talking about cyclical stuff. It's like very non Christian way to talk about the world, but whatever. So do you think so, you know, I had Eric Kaufman on, you know, in his stuff about like, fertility and religion. And basically secularization, like pretty much everywhere is correlated with reduced fertility, as you imply, like there's a few places like Israel where secular, quote, secular people are kind of at replacement, but really, mostly they're below we see South Korea. Yeah, South Korea has an active Christian minority. But, you know, over half the population is not religious. Its total fertility rate is point seven.
And also Christians in South South Korea have pretty low fertility. They've got like 1.0.
I mean, maybe we shouldn't even use Korea as an example. The South Koreans are just weird. And
that's a whole different podcast. Okay. I
don't get to talk to somebody about that. But um, do you think that our current, our current secular moment, secularizing moment, are you into? I mean, I know you can't predict because we don't know these sorts of sociological things. But, you know, just looking at the total fertility rates and stuff like that, it seems like, you know, we're gonna turn around and you know, we'll have like another I don't know, like Great Awakening, maybe 21st century great awaken, what do you think about so
the example so the important thing to look at it this is to ask, Do we have any prior example of this? And the answer of course, is yes, we do. The classic example of this is in the you know, the first to fifth centuries, where the old religion was dying, Roman paganism is being replaced by the newly emergent religious superpower medicae ism. You thought I was gonna say Christianity, right? But no, mannequins, which was more numerous in many parts of the empire, especially if you include Mithraism as like kind of a related sect, right. Where are the mannequins today? They're dead. They're gone. There are none of them the last documented mana keys were in like 1890 or something. Okay,
so that's what happened in China right?
I forget where Yeah, but like
there's not there's still there's still a temple there's still a template which is simple, but it's a Buddhist temple now. Yeah, they Buddha. Oh, okay. In defense of the mannequins though, you know, the Ming Dynasty he did come out of a post mannequin sack so
yeah, so but like they died out. Okay. But at the same time as the mannequins there was another sect I can I'm not gonna I'm not about say Christianity. There's another sector that is still around today. 100,000 or so of them. The mandate Ian's mandates are coming out of the exact same general mill you actually Manny himself is coming out of a sector related demand day anism. There are sect in southern Iraq for the most well now they've mostly mostly in Sweden, they're mostly Yeah, so the mandates are interesting. The big distinction between the mannequins there's many distinctions being made mannequins are men dance, but an important thing to note is that the mannequins had an anti fur ability posture, right? They really restricted reproduction for particularly like their priestly class. Man dance did not man dance or like have babies. Babies are great. Love them have a lot of them numerous, very pro baby. They're coming out of similar theological milieu. The mannequins grew massively larger for several centuries. I mean, the mannequins spread like wildfire through conversion. They had lower fertility than societies around them. They don't exist today, the mandate has never got as big as the mannequins they still exist. Now, that is the power of differential fertility, to keep you from ceasing to exist, men dance like I said, there's about 100,000 of them. You would think after two millennia of differentially high fertility, there'd be more than 100,000 of you. There aren't. Why? Because conversion is very powerful. So Kaufman's argument is basically that difference or religious fertility inevitably leads to religious majorities? What I'd argue is that religion is weird that we don't actually know what it is that makes fertility heritable. For basic, like fishy Aryan reasons. Fertility shouldn't be heritable. Like, this is nuts, it shouldn't be hard, like if it's heritable, like, and that's his point is it will get weeded out. But we don't know what it is about religion that makes it about fertility that makes it heritable via really
not that much time, I really quickly you said fish area, and you're talking to ra Fisher, basically, if something is affecting fertility, that is like fitness, cloth fitness. And so it's just like, extremely strongly selected, there shouldn't be go on finish up.
So like, you know, his argument, basically, that tells us that irreligion will be weeded out. But I think it's also possible just that whatever it is, that makes religion pronatal will diffuse will spread, if it's something genetic, a lot of non religious people will have that gene, if it's something mimetic, at least some secular groups are probably going to learn it unless it's something truly inherent to religion. It might be it might be about transcendent identity, something like that. But even then, how people fulfill that sort of religious demand inside them is going to be highly socially sensitive. What replaces religion to justify fertility might not be something that today we recognize as religion, right? Or religions themselves might change. Most religions are not super high fertility today. So I really resist the idea that differential fertility necessarily leads to religious victory, because what that religion looks like three centuries from now is very unclear. The power of conversion is very powerful. My whole view of religion, right is that it basically is through idiosyncratic socialization. And where we actually have examples of like, similarly situated small sects, with similar general ideologies, but then like radically different fertility and conversion politics because Mandaeans don't really they're like, opposed their as their mystery religion, they don't see conference. Yeah. You know, what we see is Yeah, differential fertility does do a lot of good. It keeps you from going extinct. So I think differential fertility among religious people, very plausibly means we will never be a fully secular future. I don't think it means that we're going to see a future where like, the Amish are half the population or something that's not happening, partly because they'd all die of famine.
Yeah, they require other people to sustain their Yeah,
yeah. So like, on some level, as these groups get bigger, their rate of conversion out will rise. Eventually, um, so. So my view on this is the No, the righteous will not inherit the earth. But you know, devoutly religious people are always going to be a meaningful political player, and they remain so even somewhere like the Netherlands, where the most secular countries in the world, devoutly religious populations are still a crucial part of any political coalition. It's hard to govern without them. It's hard, you know, if you govern without them, you end up based on you know, other groups with also very idiosyncratic demands. So, you know, I just think we are likely to be a society divided by religion forever.
Okay, that's a really long time, but up so I know you gotta go. So I do have to say, honestly, like, I think I think you're on the right track. I pretty much agree with you. These like deterministic models, like always predict an end of history that just never seems to show up. So, you know, you got to go with induction at some point and just say, like, okay, like, it's more complicated. Maybe we'll someday figure out maybe we never will. So, maybe it's just one of those gods Gods mysteries. I don't know.
Like, you know, FCAT illogically, right, so Christians have their whole entire thing. A lot of Christians have very strong in times beliefs. Lutherans. Like we believe Christ is coming back. It'll be very sudden, it'll happen. It'll be done. haven't held okay. All finished. Like we don't believe that. There's gonna be like some giant build up of like monsters. Walking out of the ocean like that's not us. That's like the Pentecostals it's not us it's just he's just going to do it okay so like for US history is just like a long cyclical humans getting better and worse better and worse better and worse forever until God's like cool we're done
that's that's your making Pentecostalism seem kind of cool that's all
i know i mean monsters walking out of the ocean is actually objectively like awesome in this kaiju but you know again if you want like like the most like humdrum versions of Christianity not too much emotion and no monsters like
30 So our that will add like thank you Mr. humdrum Christianity great spokesman I guess for hyper rational humdrum religion but thank you Lyman and I will see you online then.
