Episode 62: Rumors of Religion’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Given the booming numbers of people who report that they don’t belong to any religion (30% in the USA, 70% of young people in Europe), you’d think that religion is not long for this world.  But might those numbers mask the persistence of spirituality even as organized religion steadily declines?  Joe and Mark separate the wheat from the chaff and the faithful from the “nones” in scrutinizing what we gain and lose from religion’s demise, and what might fill the space in peoples’ lives that religion once occupied. (Recorded January 20, 2023.)

Transcript

MARK (00:15)

Welcome to Mansplaining, a podcast about the interesting things you can discover if you just take the time to learn. I'm Mark. I'm going to be your host this week. And as always, I'm joined by Joe, an old friend from college. Together, we'll explore what's on our minds and maybe figure out a thing or two about a thing or two. Joe, coming up in a couple weeks is a landmark event for me. I'll be on an airplane for the first time in nearly four years. And it just seems like such a transition for me personally because when I was younger, my first flight on an airplane was going to college where I met you. Airplane travel seemed like such an exciting adventure. Like I loved it. And now it's something that I kind of dread and I'm concerned about catching diseases and it's sort of an ordeal. What's your trajectory for air travel?

JOE (01:04)

Yeah, I almost could have said verbatim what you just said, including, I might add, the part about my first plane trip being when I went to college. That's true of me as well. And I'm going to have to fly in April and that'll be my first time since the before time. And I'm very much not looking forward to it. So I'm in complete agreement with you on this.

MARK (01:31)

Have you noticed how much of our lives break down into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic? It's like BC and AD only, just much more recent. 

JOE (01:42)

Yes, true.

MARK (01:42)

Well, speaking of BC and AD. Let's turn to this week's topic. And this week's topic germinated in my mind over a Christmas break is that my wife and I were spending Christmas in this quiet little community in the state of Washington. And I went into a bookstore and just browsed the shelves and came away with a book by Timothy Egan called A Pilgrimage to eternity in which he writes about taking a pilgrimage, walking from England to Rome along a medieval path of pilgrimage and really along the way confronting his faith as a Catholic and the history of his church and the other Catholics who he encountered along the way. And it really sent me thinking because one of the things that Egan talks about is how Christianity is in pretty sharp decline in Europe. It's also in decline within the US, though we're not on exactly the same schedule. But I think Eakins cites one statistic that 70% of young people say that they do not belong to any religion at all. And so we're really confronting a near future of a post-Christian Europe. And maybe 20, 30 years after that, possibly a post-Christian America. And it raises the question in my mind, mind, what comes next? Did religion fill a purpose in people's lives that something else is going to have to fill? What is society and our culture and our family is going to look like when religion is not there as just a constant element? And is there something that we should look forward to or something that we should dread or a mixture of the two? So I'm fascinated to learn what you discovered. 

JOE (03:20)

Yeah, well, unlike a lot of other answers, I really feel like I discovered something in this one that I wasn't so sure about beforehand and I'll point out when I get there. But I just want to start by saying this is such a meaty question, Mark. If this question were a person, he'd be a contestant on The Biggest Loser. Way too much flesh, you know what I mean?

MARK (03:48)

Yeah, lots of meat on the bone, that's for sure.

JOE (03:51)

Yeah. All right, let me give you and our listeners a quick map of how I want to approach this behemoth. I'm going to start by talking a little bit about the author whose book inspired your question. Then I want you and me to fess up about our own relationship to religion. Then I'm going to talk about a particular metric for measuring the decline of religion in the USA and hopefully contextualize that. And then I'll get to your three questions and we'll see where we are in 45 minutes. Okay? 

MARK (04:25)

Okay. 

JOE (04:27)

All right. I read The New York Times every day and Timothy Egan worked as a reporter and columnist for The Times for 18 years. So I've read a lot of his work. I didn't read his book like you did, but I did read some criticism about it so I could better understand where he's coming from. We'll post links to Egan's book and everything else on our Facebook page for whoever is interested. Egan describes himself as a religious skeptic, but he's equally skeptical about secularism's ability to become broadly popular in the world. I'm quoting Egan now. Until atheism can tell a story, it will always have trouble packing a house. Egan and his wife exposed their children to basic religious tenets and then hoped to "let the free market of ideas settle the debate for them as they thought it through." 

MARK (05:30)

And for context on that, Joe, Timothy Egan is a Catholic and his wife is Jewish, so they presented a fairly multicultural aspect of religious education.

JOE (05:35)

Interesting. And I did not know that, so thanks for adding that. Now, though Egan's kids are now adults with a reasonable skepticism about the supernatural claims of religion, Egan hopes they won't be closed off to what he calls "the idea that a great faith, though flawed, can contain great truths." In the pilgrimage from Canterbury to Rome chronicled in his book, he attempts to model the goodness that should be at the heart of Church doctrine, but is all too often forsaken throughout history. Shortly before his book was published, Egan wrote a piece for The Times called "Why People Hate Religion," whose subtitle provided a terse answer, "The charlatans and phonies preen and punish while those of real faith do Christ's work among refugees." In the piece, he bemoans the "selective moral policing that infuriates good people of faith," and he complains about the sexist, misogynist, bigoted, racist prudes who always seem to rise to the top of church hierarchy in most religions. He cites as his American exemplar of this dubious distinction white evangelical Christians, a quarter of whom believe the USA has a responsibility to take in refugees. This, despite Christ's explicit teaching in the New Testament that people will be judged by how they treat the least among us. Egan concludes that these self-proclaimed Christians "profess to be guided by biblical imperatives. They're not. Their religion is play-doh, used as moral cover for despicable behavior."

MARK (07:25)

In the book he cites a number of examples from Catholic history as well, so it's not just evangelicals who he's pointing out that he highlights the times in Catholic history when popes and cardinals and priests failed the faithful in a number of ways. And in fact, he cites a fairly heartbreaking incident from his own life in which his brother's closest friend was molested by a priest at their local parish and later took his life. 

JOE (07:52)

Wow. Okay, that's good context. Before I tell our listeners my own views about religion, I'm curious about yours. Would you describe yourself as a religious person? 

MARK (08:07)

I would not. I was raised Presbyterian. My father, in fact, was an ordained minister, though for a living he worked as a psychologist. But I grew up interested in religion as almost a historical artifact. I have a PhD in the history of religions. I went to school for a very long time to study religion, but it was not an exercise of faith. It was looking at religion as a prism through which to view the historical experience. And so I've had this lifelong fascination with religion. But at the same time, faith is just something that never really worked for me. And I can't say that there was any day in my life when I really felt the presence of Jesus or an angel or a religious experience. I've sat through a lot of sermons and in grad school, I read an enormous amount of religious literature. And so it's always been intellectually fascinating to me, but it's never something that I felt personally. 

JOE (09:05)

Right. And hence this question that you've put to me. So I was born Catholic, I'm definitely no longer a Catholic. I would describe myself as a dismissive agnostic. So an agnostic thinks that the existence of God is unknowable, kind of like the last digit of pie, which came first, the chicken or the egg. I add the adjective dismissive to my own description of myself because I think there are so many more important questions we should be thinking about than whether God exists. And I'm angry that so much time and mental bandwidth is spent pondering something so unknowable. If all the time spent thinking about God were instead spent on useful things like trying to stop war or cure cancer or end poverty, humanity would be in a much better place.

MARK (10:02)

Yeah. Well, you're preaching to the choir to a good extent because I also would describe myself as an agnostic. I will say, just as an aside, that Egan is a little dismissive of agnostics. If there's one thing that religious people and atheists can agree on, it's that agnostics kind of suck because they both describe agnostics as atheists without courage, but I would dispute that. I'd say an agnostic is an intellectually honest person because we accept that there are some things that we don't know and so we choose not to make claims about ultimate truth and that's one thing that atheists and religious people also have in common, which is that they make definitive statements about ultimate truth. They say that they know the unknowable. And so I am comfortable with my agnosticism.

JOE (10:52)

Yeah, hear, hear. And all I would have for myself is that piece I said about my dismissive attitude toward people who want to dwell on unknowable things. Let's talk about things we can do something about.

MARK (11:06)

Yes.

JOE (11:07)

So, okay, to Egan's point about the waning influence of religion, there's no question that it has declined in the USA in recent decades. There are numerous academic studies quantifying this, but I want to highlight the most recent Gallup poll taken in July 2022. It surveyed confidence in US institutions and showed that the percentage of people who have either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church or organized religion is down to 31% an all-time low. In fact, the percentage of Americans who have very little or no confidence in the church is also at 31%, which is an all-time high. The data goes back several decades, so you can see that in 1975, confidence in the church was at 68%, and it was over 50% as recently as the mid to late 2000s, but it's been sinking like a stone ever since. But here's some important context for those numbers. Gallup surveyed almost 20 American institutions, and I want to name all of them so you can see how wide-ranging the survey was. And pay attention, Mark, because there's a quiz at the end. Besides the church, they also looked at the military, the Supreme Court, public schools, newspapers, TV news, news on the internet, Congress, organized labor, the presidency, the police, the medical system, HMOs, the criminal justice system, small business, big business, large tech companies, banks, and science. Now, can you guess which institutions scored the highest and lowest on the confidence scale?

MARK (13:05)

Lowest would be the federal government, would be my guess.

JOE (13:10)

Good guess, but Congress got the lowest score. 7%.

MARK (13:18)

And as for the most confidence, I'm going to guess small business because I think we tend to romanticize things like the struggling entrepreneur.

JOE (13:27)

That is absolutely correct, Mark. I'm impressed. Small business scored 68%. The military was the only other institution besides small business to crack 50% incidentally. Confidence in the police fell below 50% after George Floyd. Confidence in Even the Supreme Court was in decline even before the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and confidence in the presidency usually mirrors the president's approval rating which has been dismal. Overall the erosion of confidence cuts across race, sex, and partisan identification. Average confidence across all institutions is at an all-time low of 27%. So at 31%, the Church is doing relatively well. The point of this digression mark is that confidence in everything has been sinking in recent decades. It's not just religion. Average public confidence in institutions rarely gets above 40% these days, and it happens only briefly like during the dot-com boom in the late 1990s when most Americans were doing well financially, or when the public rallied around the government after 9/11. Apart from those blips, the default mode for public confidence is low. And who can blame us for that? In just the last two decades, we've lived through an Iraq war that was started under false pretenses, a great recession in which many lives were shattered and not a single banker went to jail, a seemingly perpetual partisan gridlock in Washington, a COVID-19 pandemic that's killed 1.1 million Americans and counting, and now inflation at its highest rate in 40 years. It's enough to make a person lose faith, isn't it?

MARK (15:31)

And you didn't even mention what we all went through during the Trump presidency when evangelical leaders were saying that he had been sent by God to restructure the country.

JOE (15:42)

Organized religion certainly deserves plenty of blame for its decline. What with pedophile priests and evangelical grifters preying on their U.S. congregations as they move farther and farther away from what Timothy Egan and many others believe should be their primary role of serving the poor and dispossessed. Outside our borders, reactionary theocracies are ascendant in large swaths of the Middle East and even in Israel. There are good reasons for the decline in religion, but let's be careful to describe accurately what's in decline, because declining confidence in religion and diminishing church attendance may be more reflective of a decline an institutionalized religion than in the loss of faith or spirituality. In my research, I came across many stories of people who were raised in a specific faith tradition that proved not to be welcoming to the politically liberal or LGBTQ or non-binary people they became, but who nonetheless retained aspects of that faith even after they ditched the church they grew up in. One such person told the Christian Science Monitor, "This radical love of Christ is something that is still a model for my activism. If people are hungry, feed them. If people need healing, give them health care." This is a religious person who lost confidence in their denomination, deciding to retain the best parts of their religion, the wheat, if you will, while disposing of the comparatively worthless chaff of affiliation with a particular church run by irreligious hypocrites. I distill the wheat chaff metaphor to religious faith versus organized religion. The latter is clearly in demise, but I'm not so sure about the former. This is a subtle point, so I want to spend some time on it. There are two mitigating factors regarding the decline in religion, not just in the USA but all over the world. One is the primordial human need to make meaning and purpose out of suffering. When tragedy hits, we crave explanation and often look to our faith to be the salve. This is one reason I think religion is likely never to go away completely. gives comfort to too many people living lives of quiet desperation, who need to know that there's something more than their squalid existence and some unseen being or benevolent force that loves them. 

MARK (18:31)

Yeah, and if there's one thing that physics is not, it's comforting. Physics does not give you a warm hug.

JOE (18:37)

Yeah. According to social scientist, Aran Noranzayan of the University of British Columbia, "People want to escape suffering, but if they can't get out of it, they want to find meaning. Religion seems to give meaning to suffering, much more so than any secular ideal or belief that we know of."

MARK (19:00)

I think that's true and I would also extend it to religion provides meaning for all of experience, including the part that doesn't necessarily involve suffering. Religion traditionally gives an architecture to your life where the things that you do plug into some meaningful framework so you can feel like you are contributing to something that's much, much bigger than yourself. So I would 100% agree that religion makes life meaningful, and it can be particularly helpful if, for instance, you're mourning the loss of a child and you need to find some way to make sense of that. But I think it provides meaning incrementally as well as at those moments of great stress and suffering. 

JOE (19:45)

I agree with that, but I want to stick with the idea of meaning and suffering because there's some place I want to go with this, so bear with me here. It's a well-known phenomenon that even in highly secular societies, natural disasters or even grim medical diagnoses can lead to temporary spikes in religiosity among the people experiencing the event. Psychologists have fancy terms for this intuitive instinctual behavior, like dual process theory and hypersensitive agency detection. But it seems we are hardwired for religious belief to some extent, So it's unlikely to go away even in a rapidly secularizing world. In fact, if humanity were unlucky enough to experience a global nuclear war, or if we learned that a comet or asteroid was on a collision course with the Earth, I suspect religion would re-emerge in a big way. This also explains why belief in paranormal superstitions like ghosts or astrology persist in the modern era. that's another podcast episode. The second mitigating factor of the decline of religion has to do with the way religion and spirituality intertwine. The religious scholar Netanau-Miles Yepes, writing in the Huffington Post, proposes an interesting definition of religion as "a sociological construct meant to take us back to the primary experience from which it arose." He cites the Buddha's likening of religion to a raft that you can make and use to cross a river. Once you're across the river, you don't need the raft anymore. Meaning, religion is the means to an end, not the end itself. Yapez thinks religion is something we do or use to further our spiritual exploration. It shouldn't be seen as an institution headed by an all-knowing God that we're forced to believe in. Yepes reminds us that the Latin root of the word religion is "ri ligare," which means "to link back or reconnect." Religion is meant to reconnect us to "the source or essence of our being." It's a tool we use to gain access to the sacred, but it is not in and of itself sacred. By contrast, spirituality is sacred. The Latin word spiritus suggests the divine breath or spark in a person or in the universe. After learning this, I'm suspicious about whether religion is truly in decline. If we adopt the broader definition of religion that includes non-denominational faith and spirituality, then to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors about religion's death have been greatly exaggerated.

MARK (22:58)

That's really interesting. It makes me think of two things. The first, along the lines of that religion is what creates access to the spirit, but it's not spiritual in itself, That makes me think of sort of the structure of a ritual, which is at the heart of a lot of religious practice, of course. And it's sort of this patterned, routinized behavior that the essence of a ritual is that you do things in a certain way at a certain time, and it's always the same every time. And you're kind of creating a structure that is pure enough for the spiritual to come into it is the way I like to think of it. So you're building a space through the rituals that you're performing. And that ritual could be anything from putting up a Christmas tree to going to church on Sunday, but by doing it the same way every time, you create a space. But the things you're doing are sacred. You're creating the space that the sacred can occupy, which I think is a fun and interesting way of thinking about that. 

JOE (23:56)

Yes, yes, agreed. And I think that's in harmony with the point I was just making. And I'm arguing here that the spirituality is the wheat. and the organized parts of it are the chaff. So that's a little controversial, but that's ultimately my argument here. 

MARK (24:15,540 24:21,660

I think the only place where I would raise my hand and voice a possible objection is that religion does many, many things in our societies. It isn't just the one thing. I'm flashing back to when I was at grad school and I'd read entire books about the purpose of religion. And it would always be one thing and I'd be like, "Well, what about the other things. And one of the things that religion provides for people is a sense of community. And I'm thinking here specifically of my mother. And for her, religion was a lifelong dedication, but she was never a particularly spiritual woman. For her, religion was a community. It was a group of people, like-minded people who shared a sense of values. And she really appreciated the opportunity to connect with them once a week and to feel that sense of belonging. I think that's one of the things that people get from church, from a congregation coming together on Sundays, is being surrounded by people who believe in the same thing and do the same thing and give you that sense that you're not alone in the world. While I would agree that what that scholar was talking about is an important thing, I think we miss something if we don't understand that religion also gives people a sense of community and within a world where people might never speak to their neighbors and you might not even meet up with your coworkers anymore. Community is kind of a scarce commodity and I think people might miss that if they abruptly leave the church and stop visiting services. I think one of the things they're going to miss is that sense of community and belonging.

JOE (25:57)

Yeah, this is a really good point, Mark. And I must confess, I did not think about community specifically when I was framing my answer. There were a lot of other things to think of, but you make a really good point here. I do want to say though that when we get near the end of my presentation, when I talk about things that might fill the spaces that religion is giving up, there's at least one thing that replicates the sense of community. So I'll be interested in your reaction when we get there. I want to talk a little more about Yapez the religious scholar. Yapez uses the Catholic term magisterium to describe "the body of spiritual teachings, lore, rituals, and techniques" of each individual religion. If we lose religion, do we lose this magisteria? Maybe not. In a world where people of all races, creeds, ethnicities, and nationalities mix more readily and easily than ever in human history, forming veritable hyphenates as they mix, it's inevitable that religious ideas will be subject to the same mixing. Yapez believes that mixing will create "a greater magisterium of all religions, where the myths and practices of each will become the rightful inheritance of all people." In this sense, it will be a true religion of humanity. Over time, these two ingredients, the deep structures of religion and heart essence of spirituality, will be extracted from the individual religions, making a religion not of the Buddha or the Christ, not of the mind or of the heart, but of humanity and wholeness, the parts and nuances of each the inheritance of all."

MARK (27:55)

That's a very Unitarian outlook, and I kind of like Unitarian Universalism, so I'm receptive to it. I would tend to suspect that Southern Baptists would be very angry at that idea, but please go on.

JOE (28:10)

Yeah, probably true. But Yapez is predicting a melting pot of the key tenets of most religious faiths. "Thou shalt not kill; do unto others as you would have them do unto you; goodness is measured by how we treat the least among us," etc. People will be nourished by the wheat of age-old universal religious belief and will discard the chaff of organized religious affiliation. It might seem a fanciful notion, but it's slowly happening. Further evidence for this unraveling can be gleaned from an unlikely source, statistics about the unreligious among us. According to the Pew Research Survey, the fastest-growing cohort of Americans is the religiously unaffiliated who describe themselves variously as atheist, agnostic, or nothing, and who've become known popularly as the nuns. That's N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S. In the past few decades, many Americans have left Christianity to join the “nones,” who now constitute 30% of the population, up from 19% in 2011. If the “nones” were a religion, they'd be the largest denomination in the country. Now, as a dismissive agnostic, I'm one of the “nones.” It sounds like you're also one of the “nones” from your description of yourself earlier, Mark.

MARK (29:44)

Yes.

JOE (29:45)

We used to be concentrated in urban areas along the coasts, but we now live all over the USA and come from all different ethnicities, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although more than half of us describe ourselves as neither religious nor spiritual, 30% of us meditate, including outspoken atheists like the neuroscientist Sam Harris. And a solid majority believe in some kind of higher power or spiritual force. In other words, lots of us “nones” observe the tenets of one or more faith traditions, but we're not interested in being enrolled in churches or formally identifying as members of religions. Pew modeled a number of scenarios for how all the dropping and shifting of religious identity could play out in the next several decades. In 2020, self-described Christians were 64% of the American population, the “nones” were 30%, and all other religions – Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. – were 6%. So that's the baseline – 64% Christian, 30% “nones,” 6% everything else. By 2070, people of non-Christian religions will double to 12-13% of the population, while Christians will shrink from 64% to between 35% and 54% of the population. The high end of that range, 54%, assumes no further shifting, which is highly unlikely. Meanwhile, the “nones” will rise to between 34% and 52% of the population, with the low end of 34% assuming the counterfactual of no further shifting. We won't live to see the “nones” become a majority, Mark, but I must say it warms my heart. The future belongs to the “nones.”

MARK (31:56)

Yes. 

JOE ( (31:58)

And now to your questions, some of which I've already partially answered. What do we gain from the demise of organized religion? The quick and dirty list, pun intended, includes fewer acts of depravity by pedophiles hiding behind religious garments, fewer honor killings by misogynists fueled by antiquated morality codes fewer instances of genital mutilation, which happens most egregiously to women and girls, but also includes the barbaric circumcision I received as a baby no more people crashing airplanes into towers in order to get their eternal reward of 72 virgins. If we're lucky, we'll see the further flowering of pan-religious faith and spirituality devoid of competing, morally bankrupt religious organizations. That may lead to fewer wars between religious factions inspired by religious differences, more "out-nones" in positions of power already happening in Europe but will take longer here at home. And to that last point, another part of religion's appeal is that it offers its adherents security in a world full of uncertainty. That's why religious belief is often strong in poor, underdeveloped, or politically unstable nations that don't offer robust protections to its people. For instance, the rate of atheism in Sub-Saharan Africa is tiny, it's around 1%. Whereas wealthier nations like Japan, Canada, and most of Europe, where there's relatively low inequality and relatively high access to education, capitalism, and technology, report the highest rates of atheism. Their citizens arguably have less need to believe in higher power. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that in developed countries, scientific inquiry and the control of nature replaces religion as a way of controlling uncertainty in people's lives. I think it's correct to intuit that another thing we might gain from religion's demise is a continued trend toward stronger protections of physical, economic, and political security in the nations where religions influence wanes and social welfare programs mitigate people's fears about the future. Yes, I'm talking about more big government, folks. And we can only hope that these trends continue in the USA too.

MARK (34:46)

It will at least become untenable for a conservative government to just outsource all social care to religious organizations, saying that the churches will take care of you because the churches will increasingly not be there in the first place.

JOE (35:02)

Yeah, good point. All right, and here's another thing we might gain from the decline of religion. a smaller human population. Reminds me of that joke in the Monty Python movie about the Catholics. You know what I'm talking about? 

MARK (35:19)

I do. I do.

SEGMENT FROM “MONTY PYTHON AND THE MEANING OF LIFE (35:20)

Look at them bloody Catholics filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed. 

JOE (35:25)

Organized religions through their promotion of fertility and marriage, not to mention their continued denigration of women as domestic vassals to men, encourage childbirth, while the better educated and more ambitious women in the developed world are having fewer and fewer children. Okay, next question. You already heard the distinction I made about how genuine faith/spirituality is likely to persist while organized religion declines as a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. So, my short answer to the question of what we will lose from the decline of religion is not much. But here's a different answer from, of all people, the world's most outspoken atheist, biologist Richard Dawkins, whose theories we touched on in our altruism episode. That's episode number 38 if you want to listen. Dawkins thinks the demise of religion might give people, licensed to do really bad things. He compared a higher power central to religious belief to the presence of surveillance cameras meant to deter people from shoplifting, speculating that the crime rate might rise without the "divine spy camera in the sky" reading their every thought. whether irrational or not, it does unfortunately seem plausible that, if somebody sincerely believes God is watching his every move, he might be more likely to be good."

MARK (37:06)

Yeah, I've always been a little suspicious of that point. My mother-in-law once infamously said that if there wasn't a God, she would just start killing people, which might have been a joke or might have been entirely serious. I've heard that argument straight up seriously from religious radicals that in the absence of God, then there is nothing that would stop people from committing atrocities. And I think my answer to that always has been that I have navigated my life with an absence of a sense that God is my copilot and I so far have not committed atrocities. So either I'm the exception to the rule or that people find good reasons not to do terrible things.

JOE (37:50)

Yeah, I hear you. And I'm admittedly giving short shrift to your second question about what we lose from the decline of religion. But that's because I think faith and spirituality are going to long outlive, organize religion. And if that thesis is correct, we're really not going to lose much from the decline of religion, organized religion.

MARK (38:16)

Well, what I suspect, and we've already talked about community, if you lose that sense of community within your church, you're going to have to find it somewhere else. And I think it also goes for a sense of purpose that if you belong to a church, then that church provides you with purpose. Like it's delivered to you every Sunday. And so in the absence of that, it's not that you live life without purpose, but you need to seek purpose in your life. And that there might be some people who struggle with that. And if they struggle with that, maybe they turn to things that make them feel better. Would that be alcohol or I don't know, television, whatever it is. It's not easy to find purpose if you don't have a burning bush telling you what your purpose is. And speaking as someone who has spent my life trying to understand what my purpose is and if there is such a thing purpose. I can say it's a long-term task. It's not something you handle over a weekend. It's something you grapple with over the course of your life. And there might be some people who just are not up to the task or just choose not to do it. And if so, I wonder how that would influence them. 

JOE (39:23)

Yeah, I'm glad you said this. And I'm glad you said it right now because I'm about to pivot to your third question. So let's put a pin in the two concepts you raised, community and purpose. And let's think about community and purpose with regard to what I'm about to present on your third question, because I think they're both relevant here. So just as a reminder, your third question was, "What is going to fill the space in people's lives that religion once occupied?" Now, the most popular answer I came across in my research was science. The rigor of the scientific method provides a sharp counterpoint to religion's requirement of slavish conformity to fantastical stories and beliefs with no basis in fact. But despite their profound differences, religion and science both provide authority and belief structures for people who yearn for answers. has commandments and rules. There are laws of science. As the one wanes, perhaps the other ascends? I'm not so sure about this one. Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York magazine a few years ago, cited the philosopher John Gray's definition of religion as "an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe." To argue that that's precisely why science will never replace religion for many people. And here's Sullivan. "Science does not tell you how to live or what life is about. It can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning." Sullivan thinks religion exists because humans are aware of their own mortality and seek meaning and purpose as a way of reconciling themselves to that awareness. That makes sense to me. We can thank God for science without believing it's the replacement for God. 

MARK (41:34)

In grad school, I did read books that said the purpose of religion to explain things like the stars and the sun. And I always found that to be very unconvincing. And I always wondered about the people who would argue that because how many times per inner person's life are you really thinking, "Where does the sun come from?" What really confronts you on a day-to-day basis is, "Why are these things happening? What should I do? Who am I and where am I headed?" Those are the things we grapple with. I think religion is one of the ways that we grapple with them. 

JOE (42:08)

Yeah. So I think I'm hearing skepticism on your part. I think we're both skeptical about the science being the answer to this third question. So let me move on to the second candidate. I know this sounds irreverent, but how about sports as the replacement for religion? 

MARK (42:27)

Joe, before you even make this point, Joe, let me tell you that at one point in my life, not so long ago, I had the idea of writing a book about how the rise of organized sports in the 19th century paralleled the decline of organized religion in this country because one was replacing the other. So we're already on the same page, so please go forward.

JOE (42:48)

Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Okay. So the evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber cites the work of other psychologists in arguing that sports has many of the same effects on spectators as religion does, even down to the shared vocabulary. For example, faith in and devotion to teams. Fans worship of star athletes in ways that give focus and meaning to their lives, or the dedication, sacrifice, commitment, and suffering required to succeed in sports. Religious ceremonies served as mass entertainment prior to the era of mass communication. Sports stadia and arenas resemble cathedrals where fans gather for an experience that transcends their daily lives as they pray for their teams to win. Fans wear team colors, carry flags and pennants, and sing songs in unison. As attendance at religious events drops off, sports spectatorship is booming. To paraphrase Marx, is sports the new opiate of the masses? Maybe for some people.

MARK (44:09)

Well, there's definitely a sense of community there. I know on a previous episode of this podcast I talked about Emile Durkheim, the classical sociologist, and his theory of collective effervescence. Do you remember that? That was his theory of what religion provides, is this sense of just like this exuberant, joyful understanding that you are collectively within the church bound into something much bigger than yourself. And I feel like I've experienced that and I've experienced it at sporting events. I can remember times when something miraculously happened on a field or on a track. The entire crowd was roaring. We were all just shrieking with joy. And I remember at one track meet when I was in high school that I went to with my mother, she and I just turned to each other and we just hugged each other fiercely. And that was a moment of just pure joy and rapture and is something unlike anything I've ever experienced in church. Sports gives that to you. It gives you that sense of being suddenly bounds to thousands of people. I remember the day the Seahawks won the Super Bowl and I wrote home through a city that was celebrating and it just felt transcendence. And I could see where, yes, people would go to sports for that if there's nothing else in their life that gives you that feeling because there really is nothing like it. 

JOE (45:27)

Yes. And we discussed some of this in our podcast episode about sports, which people can also check out if they're interested. But I agree with you, This is a promising, intriguing candidate for some of the replacement space taken over by the decline of religion. I want to float one more though, and this one is also intriguing, I think. Politics, which is looking increasingly like a quasi-religion here in the USA. Our country has long been a a repository for what some sociologists call "civil religion" – a shared faith in things like the flag and our country's founding documents as evoked in the Pledge of Allegiance that we used to recite in school every morning – one nation under God indivisible. Today, as church attendance is replaced in part by online echo chambers, some aspects of religious division are migrating to politics. Ryan Berge, a Baptist pastor who teaches religion and politics at Eastern Illinois University, explained the division this way. "Liberals and nuns went to the left, conservatives and evangelicals went to the right.

MARK (46:49)

There's no middle anymore.

JOE (46:51)

Our politics has become religion. It has a religious fervor to it now that it didn't have even twenty or thirty years ago." In a May 2021 editorial, Linda Feldman of the Christian Science Monitor echoed Berge's words, acknowledging that "For many Americans on the left and right, politics has become imbued with a kind of religious fervor, while at the same time participation in actual organized religion has plummeted." Consider also that atheists have emerged as the most politically active group in America. I think we're witnessing the rise of a more intense politics that offers partisans things that they used to find in church, like a sense of belonging, devotion, and moral certitude. Nate Cohn of the New York Times, in a piece about the growing threat of political sectarianism, described the warring sides as "two hostile identity groups who not only clash over policy and ideology, but see the other side as alien and immoral." The two sides, sorted by geography, education, and social networks, speak in moral absolutes and vilify their opponents as evil. has been replaced by periodic donations to candidates and parties. If your preferred candidate wins, the feeling is akin to ecstasy. Especially in the Trump era, stump speeches resemble old-fashioned revival meetings. Timothy Egan wrote of Trump voters, "Older white Christians rouse to Trump's toxicity because he's taking their side. It's tribal, primal, and vindictive." Andrew Sullivan, who rejected science as religion's replacement, thinks illiberal politics in which religious impulses are expressed through political cults, is the answer that comes closer to the truth. He bemoans the cultish impulses that elevate a conman like Trump to demigod status set against what he calls "the cult of social justice" whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again evangelical." Despite the efforts of moderates like President Biden to find common ground, the two sides drift ever farther apart using apocalyptic imagery to describe the existential stakes. What do you think of that possibility?

MARK (49:41)

Well, the mind does go back to our QAnon episode, doesn't it? With the, frankly, apocalyptic evangelical thinking specifically directed at political figures like Donald Trump, and predicting the resurrection of former quasi-political figures like JFK Jr. So yes, It does seem to be on point and I'm also reminded of sections of Eakins' book where he talks about Christian on Christian violence over various periods of European history when people are motivated to kill each other just simply on the basis of how that other person read the Bible. And that's not the sort of thing that is happening frequently in our country today. We don't really have Catholic on Protestant violence or vice versa, but what we are seeing is conservative on liberal violence and to a lesser extent the opposite of that. So maybe it is, maybe it's true, maybe we've just traded out one really dumb reason to kill each other for a new really dumb reason to kill each other. 

JOE (50:40)

Yeah, I wanted to add stuff about QAnon to this presentation but I ran out of time and space but yeah, your point is well taken. I was also thinking about QAnon when I was putting together this last part. So that's basically what I have to say about your questions, Mark, but I thought I'd close with a few quotes about this topic from people I admire. Here's a deliciously snarky definition of Puritanism from one of my favorite American writers, H. L. Mencken, "The haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."

MARK (51:24)

Yeah, that's a classic. 

JOE (51:26)

Yeah. Here's my favorite atheist, Sam Harris, on the subject of spirituality divorced from religious dogma. "There is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives." Here's Harris again with one of the best arguments against organized religion. "The central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed." 

MARK (52:04)

There is an exception to that, which is the aforementioned Unitarian Universalism, which is a Christian creed whose fundamental tenet is that there's no important difference between Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism, Islam.

JOE (52:20)

Yeah.

MARK (52:21)

So generally speaking, yes, but there are exceptions to the rule.

JOE (52:25)

Yes. And my wife is a “none” for sure, atheist, but she also grew up in the UU tradition. So I know a lot about that and that's quite correct. I want to end on this last quote, which I think needs no introduction. Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today. Imagine that indeed. Okay, I promised we'd check in after 45 minutes, probably more like 50 or 55 minutes, to assess whether my answer met the enormous challenge of your question. So what do you think?

MARK (53:15)

I think that was an excellent answer, Joe. Thank you for doing the reading and coming back with such a thoughtful presentation. I really appreciate it.

JOE (53:21)

It's my pleasure. 

MARK (53:25)

And this is the sort of thing that there is no correct answer to. It's something that I cannot stop myself from grappling with. and I hope our listeners also find things in here that are intriguing and thought-provoking and we'll send them off in mental directions that maybe will be fruitful and they'll discover new things. 

JOE (53:45)

Yeah, that's a good point. Though we kind of facetiously, self-deprecatingly call this podcast “Mansplaining,” this is really about just being open and aware to knowledge in the world and going out and finding things out about the world and talking to other people about them. And we hope to encourage our listeners to do the same and to be inspired by some of the things we're talking about here. 

MARK (54:13)

Yeah. 

JOE (54:15)

And then circle back with comments on our Facebook page, which may be sent us in new directions. 

MARK (54:20) 

It would be great if this turned into a dialogue. But thank you. That was an excellent answer. 

JOE (54:25)

Okay. You ready for your question for next time? 

MARK (54:27)

I am.

JOE (54:29)

We haven't tackled a domestic political issue on this podcast in quite a while. I look back and it's been many months. As you know, Mark, that's a big interest of mine. And I have a backlog of these kinds of questions for you, so I want to raise one of them. With wildly gerrymandered congressional delegations and the 18th century relic of the electoral college locked in place for the foreseeable future. Democrats and liberals have been looking for alternate ways to undo the anti-majoritarian tilt of US politics. It's been almost 64 years since the United States admitted a new state to the Union. And I'm fairly sure that's the longest we've ever gone without increasing the number of states. So, Mark, I want you to consider the arguments for and against admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as the 51st and 52nd states. Is there a good case to be made? And what is the likelihood of it happening anytime soon?

MARK (55:39)

Okay, yeah, that's a nice concrete question. It seems like the sort of thing I can answer within a couple weeks, so thank you for asking it.

JOE (55:49)

Sure. 

MARK (55:51)

So that's it for this week. Thank you for hanging with us and confronting the big questions as we confront them alongside you. If you have any questions or concerns or comments on this episode, you can find us on our Facebook page at “Mansplaining the Podcast.” If you do go there and you haven't been there before, please give our page a like. And while you're there, leave a comment, ask a question, and if the spirit moves you, you can suggest a topic for a future episode. We ask for that every week. People tend not to take us up on it. So maybe this is the week that someone is going to say, "Hey, do an episode on this thing." 

JOE (56:24)

Yeah, we're not exactly running out of topic suggestions ourselves, but it would be really interesting to get some topic suggestions from listeners. And I'm sure that would send us in interesting directions that maybe we'd not plan beforehand.

MARK (56:43)

Indeed. So Joe and I recently got an email that said, "Mansplaining the Podcast grew 17% last year, which is a cool number. 17% is better than 15%, much better than negative 17%. So we are happy about our growth. If you would like to help us grow and find new people to join the mighty Mansplaining audience, there are a few ways you can do that. First, you can like and share our page on Facebook. And also, you can go to your podcast platform of choice. And maybe that's iTunes, maybe Spotify, maybe it's Google Play. Find our podcast within that directory and leave us a rating and review. And that really does help people to discover Mansplaining.

JOE (57:26)

You realize, Mark, now that you've put that 17% marker down, nothing less than 17% growth in will do. 

MARK (57:32)

I know. I mean, if we come at 16%, Wall Street will punish us. Our share price will crater. 

JOE (57:40)

And I'll pray to my maker that our bad luck reverses, but because I'm a “none,” I don't have a maker, so I'm totally screwed. 

MARK (57:46)

Yeah, without Mansplaining, what purpose do we have in our lives? We'll be drifting aimlessly. And that's it for this week. That was Joe. This is Mark, and thank you for spending some time with us. 

JOE (57:59)

We'll talk to you next time.