September 25, 2025 • 47 mins
In this episode, Ryan Burge unpacks the data shaping Christianity in America today. He explores surprising trends among young believers, the influence of education on religious commitment, and how political polarization is reshaping faith communities. The conversation touches on the decline of mainline Protestant denominations, the rise of Pentecostalism, the role of gender in religious identity, and the importance of social trust in church participation. It's a Numbers Game is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to a numbers game with Ryan Gradowski. It
is Thursday, September twenty fifth. We are forty days from
the twenty twenty five elections. There were a few special
elections that happened this past week. Republicans held onto the
mayorship in Mobile, Alabama, which doesn't seem like a big deal,
but Republicans hold so few mayorships that anything is a
big deal when it comes to winning a mayor's office
(00:22):
With the GOP. Republicans won a special election in the
Georgia State Senate where Jason Dickerson b Deborah Shingley by
twenty three points. It was though a Trump plus thirty
four districts, so it's nothing to ride home about. Over
in Arizona, a Delta Grivlla won the seat once held
by her father, Raoul, who died in the seat back
(00:43):
in January. She won by a very large forty two.
This was a better result than either her father received
in the last few elections since the twenty twenty election
and Kamala Harris. These are not great results for the
Republican Party, though none of them were so prizing. It
wasn't like a big shock. The Mobile Alabama mayorship is
(01:03):
actually probably the biggest deal of the three. Many people
at Hope that in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination,
Republicans would start voting in these special elections in larger
numbers like presidential numbers, and that would have definitely reversed
the trends in these seats. You know, had Republicans turned
out at presidential levels in the congressional election in Arizona,
(01:25):
Republicans would have absolutely won that. That didn't happen, though,
and it doesn't seem like it's happening. Next Monday's episode
is going to specifically focus on the Virginia elections coming up,
because there's the Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and obviously
in New York City, but Virginia and a deep dive
into Virginia is going to be taken place next Monday,
(01:45):
and I'm going to be a rundown what's happening in
New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But I want to keep you
guys attuned to these elections, which are indicators of how
people feel going forward. So many of you run down
of those elections. About a deep dive into the Virginia election,
some people have asked, what are the elections in Pennsylvania.
I keep talking about Pennsylvania. Has the state Supreme Court
(02:06):
up for a statewide vote? Now? A lot of people
like Ryan, I don't care. I don't live in Pennsylvania.
What do I care about the state Supreme Court? The
State Supreme Court is very important because they decide on
congressional lines in Pennsylvania. Republicans lost a lot of congressional
seats from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which is majority Democrat.
Sat there and said that the Lions had to be
(02:27):
give Democrats more seats. So the reason the House is
much closer than it is because Republicans pibly lost three
congressional seats in Pennsylvania, and going into twenty thirty twenty
thirty two, when redistioning will happen again, Pennsylvania is likely
to lose one more congressional seat as the population has
not grown fast enough relative to the rest of the country.
(02:48):
So those Supreme Court races there's multiple will matter a lot.
I know that local politics is not the sexiest type
of politics, but they matter a lot more to your
daily life than in the Senate, the presidency, all these
other things. So they just matter, like they will really
really matter. And I love local polities where I got
my start. I will say one thing briefly about what's
(03:10):
happening before I go into my main topic. When some
sears really seems like she's losing momentum in this race,
and I'm gonna give the reason why I think that
she's losing momentum next on Monday's episode. But there seems
to be momentum building for Jack Chitarelli over New Jersey.
Now he's still definitely not the favorite to win, but
(03:34):
he earned a very important endorsement. He earned the endorsement
of the Fraternal Order of Police, which did not endorse
at all in twenty twenty one, and endorse Democrat film
Murphy in twenty seventeen. He had that great poll, he
had a very strong debate performance. These are the kinds
of things you want to see happen break in your
favor in the last few weeks of an election for
(03:55):
a surprising victory. I'm not saying he's gonna be victorious.
I'm not giving a addiction at all about it. I'm
just saying these are the things if you're looking for
something to break, this is when breaking matters the most
because people are paying attention going back to the Charlie
Kirk of it all, which because everyone was hoping that
his assassination should alter the state of politics and maybe
(04:17):
will long term. I mean, I'm not judge, I'm not
canceling it out. I'm just saying these special elections is
not really motivating people to go and vote. But there's
also a significant number of people who are hoping that
Charlie's legacy not only alters the state of politics, but
he also alters the state of religion. They hope that
there is a religious revival because as a result of
(04:39):
his death, if this leads to a movement that people
seek out a church and a faith. I spoke to
several evangelical Christians, including some who work for me, and
they've all said they were excited to see people go
back to church after Charlie's assassination. I know somebody who
had not been in church in twenty years who went
after Charlie was assassinated, and she cried when she went.
(05:00):
She said it was such a moving experience and religious
engagement is a great thing. Data shows that regular religious
attendance promotes higher levels of chattable giving. They it produces
more intact families, lower rates of depression, and greater community cohesion.
Even if you are not particularly religious, you enjoy immense
benefits from a society with a higher church attendance. There's also,
(05:23):
obviously the religious element of it all. Christians hope that
you will pursue faith in order to save your soul,
which is a great thing if you believe in that.
If you are a religious person, you see people go
to church, you are happy that the army of God
is becoming larger. Some liberal commentators note that they felt
very alienated by the whole experience of watching Kirk's memorial.
(05:45):
Mass Don Lemon, formerly from CNN, said that it was
really an event for Christian nationalism. Writer Thomas Cheterton Williams
said that he felt a strange watching the whole memorial
and said he'd feel more comfortable in Greece than he
would at that place in Arizona. Philosophy professor Dan Williams
from the University of Sussex over in England, he said
that he felt extremely culturally distant in this world, he said,
(06:09):
and I think this is an important quote, he said
quote watching the Charlie Kirk memorial. I am struck by
how extremely culturally distant I feel from that world. Everything
about it feels alien. The aesthetic symbol is a music, rituals, mythology, gurus, ideas,
and norms. It feels like being exposed to a culture
and symbolic universe of a distant tribe. If I reflect
(06:29):
on this, it occurs to me that this feeling must
be symmetrical, that they must view the kind of cultural
universe I inhabit as similarly alien and in a strange way,
Despite opposing almost everything about this political project, this reflection
makes me feel more empathy for what the project must
feel like from withinside. So looking at these three comments,
(06:51):
and I know Dan is from England, so it's much
different than America. I respect Thomas Chatterton Williams the most
because I feel like it was not just Respectulho was
acknowledging a divorce from a big part of America. Though
I don't know why you're commenting on American politics if
you feel that alienated from you know, a giant portion
of the population. Don Lemon is a paranoid attention seeker,
(07:11):
so I don't think of anything that he ever says
as being serious, all he does is promote fear porn
on the left. But the British professor I use that
quote because I can't emphasize enough about how much he
misses the mark. The feeling of alienation that secular people
feel towards christian is not symmetrical to how Christians feel
(07:32):
about secular people, because unless you are a hermit who
lives in a cave, Christians and religious people are bombarded
with secular messaging all day, every day their entire life.
There are bakers and nuns who have been mired in
lawsuits for years for not baking a cake for a
gay wedding, or you know, giving out condoms to their employees,
(07:55):
or paying for employees to have birth control, which they
don't believe in the case of the nuns. Religious people
are not just bombarded by the media and tech companies
with secular messaging, but they are not allowed to live
alone or live lives within communities that are divorced from
the secular world. And I know many liberals feel that
(08:19):
religious people want to control their lives. One of my
very good friends, who's a woman, former college professor, a
lesbian who I respect deeply, and I really love our friendship.
But she said, you know, Christians, she said on Twitter,
Christians are trying to run my life. I am not
saying that one side is one hundred percent right and
the other one is one hundred percent wrong. But part
(08:40):
of this conflict, especially when it comes to religion and
political power, is because government is so large, individual liberties
have become very limited. So we're inevitably going to be
trampling on each other's right to exist in our own
(09:00):
world or in the world and the communities that we
see fit to belong to. I will say that since
Charlie's murder, I have been thinking a lot about my
own faith a lot more. I'm a practicing Catholic. I
have always shielded away from speaking about that in public.
I gave one interview to a Christian newspaper after being
(09:22):
canceled from CNN. But I was always taught you never
discussed religion and politics, and let's face it, I failed
very badly at one of those things and keeping that
out of the public. But I'll say this in my
own personal life. If you go to dinner with me,
I don't bring up politics unless I know you're like
in the business like political consulting, business like I am,
or you asked me about it first, I don't bring
up politics. I was raised differently on that, and I
(09:45):
have questioned since his murder whether that serves me well
keeping those conversations within me. I know, keeping the peace
in exchange for not having an open dialogue about faith
doesn't mean you have to browbeat the people over the
head with it. But I think that maybe maybe we
(10:08):
people should be talking about it more. I'm exploring this
in my head. I'm exploring how to navigate that in
a different capacity than maybe I did in the past.
I know I'm not the only one who's thought about this.
I've had conversations with friends of mine who think about
this in a different way and exploring the idea of
faith and how what it means in their lives. A
(10:30):
Pew Research report from back in February, months before Charlie
was assassinated, explored the idea of religion and found that
the number of people identifying as Christians, which had declined
for decades, having a reversal around twenty twenty two. According
to the Pew Research study, sixty three percent of Americans
identify as Christians, which is around the same number as
twenty nineteen, so there was no more massive decline. And
(10:52):
ninety two percent of Americans believe in either God, a soul,
an afterlife, or some kind of spiritual presence beyond the
natural world. Very few are just true like atheists. They
believe in something bigger than this. That Pew study also
noticed that people born between the years nineteen ninety and
two thousand and six had a pretty significant shift in
(11:13):
those identifying as Christian. For those born in the nineties,
the number grew from fifty two to fifty six percent,
and from those born between two thousand and two thousand
and six, that number increased from forty five to fifty
one percent between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four.
So if there is a Christian revivalism, it's something that
may predate Charlie. It may be turbocharged because with Charlie.
(11:36):
Other really important things in that study is that young
men are more likely to identify as Christian than young
women people born in the two thousands. That's the first
time ever that men are overly stating this over women.
And I want to partially them just say identifying as
Christian and practicing the faith are two very separate things. Right,
Young people are increasingly likely to say that they are Christian,
(11:59):
but they are not going to church in the same
percentages as some older generations, and they are not praying daily.
I think that all this conversation about religion and the
idea of a religious revival and the idea of what
that means in society, that is going to determine a
lot of our politics, especially within the Republican Party, going
(12:21):
forward in a country that has been moving towards secularization.
For you know, it feels like time in memorium, but
probably for the last half century, or maybe a little
longer than that. I decided to have an expert to
discuss religion with me. He's coming on next Stay tuned
with me on today's episode is Ryan Birch. He is
(12:41):
a professor of practice at the Dawnforth Center of Religion
and Politics at Washington University at Saint Louis and the
research director at the Faith Counts. Ryan, thank you for
being on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
So, Professor. When when Charlie Kirk's murder happened, there was
a lot of talk about the hopes of a religious revival,
especially from a lot of evangelicals and even some young
people that I know. Back in February, there was report
by p Research showing that many young people were increasingly
identifying as being Christian. How real according to the data
(13:16):
you've seen, is that trend?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, So what we know is that the share of
Americans who are Christians decline from ninety percent to sixty
three percent between nineteen seventy two and about twenty twenty
or so, and really the number cent has kind of
hung there last couple of years. As far as young people,
what we know is that the rise of the nuns
among them has stopped increasing so rapidly. So, for instance,
(13:40):
people born in two thousand are probably just as likely
to be non religious as someone born in nineteen ninety,
which is sort of a big deal if you think
about it, because every you know, generation is significantly less
religious than the prior generation. So the fact that slowing
down is a big deal. But I've been asking a
lot about you know, what's what's the impact Charlie Kirk's
going to have. I'll just say a couple of things
about that.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
One.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
It's way too early to know, you know, we don't.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
We don't do polling on religion, big, big surveys on
religion once a year.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
I mean, that's what you get. There's really no.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Point in doing it once a month or once a week.
That the cost to do that would be astronomical. The
value of it would not be that high.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
So and even then we would I would need to
see several surveys that all came to the same conclusion.
There's an upswing in religiosity among young people. And here's
the other thing, and people don't realize this. There has
not been a single event in the last fifty years
that's had a demonstrable and durable increase on religiosity in America.
I mean nine to eleven happened, right, We're like, oh,
(14:38):
America became a lot more religious, it became slightly more religious,
and then by two thousand and two, early two thousand
and two, all that had faded away back to baseline. So,
you know, the preponderance evidence says that whatever happened with
Charlie Kirk is definitely not going to lead to a
long term sort of quote unquote revival in religion in America.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, I read your tweet about that where you said
there and said there's been no singular incident, that reverse
trends only had brief incidences and then reverse the norm.
And that's why I think a lot of people are
hoping that it's not and it then is so much
a movement. You said in one of your reports that
eighteen or thirty five year old Christians are more likely
to be a weekly church goer than than they were
(15:21):
than that age demographic was in two thousand and eight.
But older people kind of have given up on going
to mass. Can you explain that trend?
Speaker 2 (15:28):
M this is?
Speaker 3 (15:30):
So this is one of those like the math. You
got to think about the math for a second. Okay,
So overall religiosity has declined, but among young people who
still identify as Protestant or Catholic, they're more likely to
go to church on a regular basis today than young
people who are Protestaner or Catholic in two thousand and eight.
And the reason for that is because the share of
young people who identify as Christian has gone down the
(15:52):
last fifteen years. So the people who are left over
are the true believers like you.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
It's I tell.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
People like, imagine you're an eighteen year old and you're
sitting in high school and you call yourself an evangelical.
You're not going to call yourself evangelical because you kind
of believe in evangelicalism, like because you might have someone
who's trained sitting next to you and a gay guy
sitting behind you, you know what I mean, Like if
you say that, you really believe that to be true
and you're all the way in. So among young people
who are still Christian, which is a smaller number overall,
(16:19):
the ones who are there are actually more devout because
it's sort of the marginal people who have sort of
left among older people, that hasn't happened because Christianity still
has a lot of cultural cachet among older folks. There's
less stigma against being a Christian among you know, sixty
seventy year olds. So I think that's the reason is
you're seeing that young people who are still there, who
still say they're Christian, are actually more Christian than Christians
(16:40):
were fifteen twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah. And also, people get stuck. And this is not
just a problem of political commentators, but this is a
problem with people in general. Is people get stuck in
a certain age in which they came of age. So
when I think of someone who is eighty, I'm thinking
of someone who was born in nineteen twenty, because my
brain froze in the year two thousand as instinctively as
(17:04):
that's the year that, like nineteen ninety was only ten
years ago, until I think about it and like, oh no,
that's actually a long time ago now. So when I
think of somebody who is seventy, now, I'm talking about
a baby boomer. You know, and I said this in
my audience all the time. You know, Archie Bunker is
dead and Meathead is a senior citizen. So who is
(17:25):
a senior citizen and who is voting as a senior
citizen is considerably left wing from when George W. Bush
was running for president. And I think that makes sense.
Do you find that young people, I mean, you mentioned
higher church attendance, and there's a Pew study about identifying
as Christian. Do you think that there is a certain,
especially in conservative circles, a young amount of young people
(17:48):
increasingly identifying as Christian, not necessarily practicing, but identifying as
kind of like, well, I'm conservative and I'm Christian. But
they may not pray daily, they may not go to church.
Is that. I mean, that's how I interpreted the Pew study.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Maybe I'm wrong, No, I think that for some people,
you know, it's like, if I'm conservative, I have to
be a Christian, especially if you're white.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Like it's like, to go back to Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
If you look at early stuff, he was sort of
more like an old school like non religious libertarian, tea
party kind of Republican. But as he aged, he sort
of aged into a more you know, Christian conservative style Republican.
And I think I think a lot of Republicans end
up doing this, like Elon Musk ended up doing this, right.
He was an atheist for a long time, and I
was like, hey, Christianity is great, and he's like praying
the Lord's prayer. If you hang around a lot of
(18:35):
people in your tribe who are religious, you know, the
likelihood is that you at least open yourself up to
the idea of religion. And people want to live unified lives, right,
They want everything in their life to line up behind
and in that unifying force. Unfortunately, in an American life today
is politics. So if I'm a Republican, you know, I
want to be a Christian I want to say I'm rural.
I want to say I'm a conservative because that's what
(18:57):
those people are.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Right, right, you want to It's like when that song
came out about Richmond and north of Richmond and yeah,
and a lot of wealthy people who live north of Richmond,
Virginia were all playing that song, and I'm like, it's
a good I mean, it's an interesting song, but you
are definitely those kinds of peace. I don't know what
you're identifying with. What I think is a misinterpretation of religion,
(19:21):
especially to people who are not particularly religious. Is they
view church attendants, especially church attendants, but also religious affiliation
as being something for poor people. That is not the
case usually, and typically people who are college educated and
higher than median earned income are likely to participate in
(19:44):
religion and go to church, specifically go to church. That
was the truth that you know, when like Bowling Alone
was written in stuff, Is that still the truth? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:52):
No, I think this is if I want to like
feel if I'm feeling bad one day and I want
to get a lot of retweets, I just post a
graph that shows educated people are more religious than not
educated people in America.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Because it's true like a cause.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
When it comes to a church attendance, the people who
are most likely to attend church this Sunday are people
with graduate degrees. The least likely are those who didn't
finish high school. The most likely people identify as non
religious are those who have the lowest level of education.
People with master's degrees are the least likely to be
non religious in America today. Now in Europe it's the reverse.
Educated people are less religious in Europe, But in America
(20:26):
it's the and I think and people like see this
in their I think they're rid too much, Carl Marx
is the problem, like religion is the opiate of the masses, right,
it keeps it keeps stupid people down and happy in
they're in their in their their bondage, you know, is
what Marx would say. Right, Well, guess what the data
actually says that, you know, religiosity and education are related
(20:47):
to this idea called pro sociality or pro trust. And
the more you trust people, the more you likely you
are to go to college, because guess what going to
college is really an exercise and trust your roommate, your professor,
your classmates, the administration.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
You got trust all those people to get through college.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
But you know what church is, it's an exercise and trust, right,
It's it's sharing your life with other people. It's like
giving money to an organization where you're not one hundred
percent share where it's going to go. So I think
it's it's this. It's this sort of web of causality
between education, religiosity, pro sociality, pro trust that. And I
think what we're seeing more and more in America is
that low education people are less trusting people, and therefore
(21:25):
they're dropping out of American society, not just education, but
also politics, also religion, also all the social structures that
sort of bind us together. And those are the kind
of people that really worry me, to be honest, you know,
because they're not they don't have governors and they don't
have guardrails in their lives that tell them like these
are acceptable things to believe and say and do. And
(21:46):
I mean, I don't want to extrapolate too much, but
if you look a lot of these these these shooters
you're shooting incidents, I feel like a lot of those
people fall in that.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Well, what do I do all day?
Speaker 3 (21:54):
I spend a lot of time on YouTube or a
lot of time on social media, and I'm not part
of any social I don't touch grass, right, I live
all virtually. That cannot be good for our souls. I
just I can't believe that.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, And you know it's funny. You know, I worked
for Senator I worked for now Vice President J. Dvancement,
he was a Senate candidate, and I remember reading He'llbilly
elogy the first time in him mentioning that his grandmother,
who was a lower income person without a college degree,
I don't even she had a high school degree but
never really went to church, but read the Bible all
(22:27):
the time. And it was a very kind of personalized
relationship with religion versus JD. Now, who's a church going Catholic.
And I think that that is the truth for the
most high most people of a certain things social trust religion.
I don't do you think religion creates social trust or
is it a chicken the egg thing where you have
to have high levels of trust to participate in religion.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
I think it's both, actually right.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I think it takes a certain level threshold to get
you in the church the first time. But then I
think I think what people don't realize is the more
you're there, it almost naturally builds trust in other people
because you get to know them on a personal level.
Now it's not just like the faithless, nameless religious people.
It's oh, there's there's stand and there's Bob, and there's
hell in at church and they're great people because I've
(23:12):
known them for three of And that's actually what my
new book's about, by the way, is like religion used
to be a great mixing place in Americans. It's called
the vanishing middle. How the kind of moderate congregation search
democracy face. I'm going to bring them up at the
end of the answer. Yeah, like the book for right now.
But yeah, yeah, Like I think it's like so important
to be in spaces with people who are different than you, vote,
different believe different, different age groups. Right, Like, we need
(23:35):
all that stuff. And the thing is, where else do
you get that in American life Now? No Elks, no Moose,
no bowling League, no boy Scouts, none of that stuff.
So if we lose that, we don't have a great
mixing place in American society.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
So yeah, and I find when people make a church,
like I always attended mass growing up, but we were
not when we're Catholic, When we were not. We went
to church and we went home and then we did
things with our family. People who make the church kind
of not the center. I don't I don't want to
(24:08):
over emphasize like the center of their world. But they're
part of like church organizations, and they spend time in
like the auditorium after church because they're doing social mixers
or whatnot, and beforehand and Sunday school and all the
babysitting organizations. And I've been all over the country because
of political campaigns, and it is a the church is
(24:29):
a center for that holds community together in a lot
of different ways. What are societal benefits of a high
church community?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
I think first was tolerance, Like the very first paper
I re published was about what aspects of religiosity drive
up political tolerance, by the way, is just putting up
with ideas you disagree with, just saying that people have
the right to say things that you don't agree with,
have books in the library you don't agree with. And
among the aspects of religion, the the jd Vance Mom story,
(25:01):
like she doesn't go to church read the Bible a lot.
Biblical literalists were the least tolerant people, but people who
went to church on a regular basis were the most
tolerant people. So like religion has these countervailing forces, right,
part of it makes you less tolerant, but other parts
of it makes you more tolerant. Unfortunately, guess which ones
dropped the most in America in the last fifty years.
It's the attendance piece, the piece that we need the
(25:22):
most to generate these feelings of democracy. So I think
from that perspective by itself, but also, you know, there's
a great paper by Roschetti that came out a couple
of years ago that found that economic mobility is really
important in America, right, moving yourself up the economic ladder.
The number one predictor of that is being an economically
diverse space. And guess what, religion is one of the
(25:42):
last economically diverse spaces we have in American society. So
how do you move up the ladder. You talk to
someone at church who's a manager at a company says, hey,
we'd love to have you come work for us. You
move your way up that way. So I tell people,
like the thing about religion, you think it's all vertical,
it's all spiritual, it's all about God and salvation and stuff. Really,
at the end of the day, a lot of it's
very horizontal, it's very social, right, it actually might help
(26:04):
you like in this world too, not just the world
after this world.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
That I never thought of it like that. I always
tell the Republicans when they talked about when the conversation
on defunding the police was happening, I would say to
Republican politician, like, there is a safety net thing component
to it, very obviously. But also if you are a Latino,
lower income who can only get an associate's degree, one
of your only chances to be part of the middle class,
(26:29):
your only economic latters is joining the police or the fire.
It is a public union, and you need to talk
about things from an economic standpoint. I never thought of
religion in the same capacity, but it makes a lot
of sense. And I'll say this as someone who goes
to mass almost you know, almost every single Sunday. There
are times I sleep in, but most of the time
i'm there, I find that the only ones going still
(26:52):
are Republicans. I mean, I can, you can almost and
I live in I mean, like I just between Louisiana
and New York, and I mean Louisiana. Obviously, if ever
read state, even in New York City when I go,
you could nine times out of ten if we were
to campaign outside of a church, they're almost all Republicans,
(27:13):
and the ones that are Democrats left are like Joe
Biden's age is. And maybe this is just my unique experience,
but is church becoming considerably the Republican Party at prayer?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Absolutely like that.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
We call it the God Gap, and it's getting bigger
and bigger every year, like the idea that Republicans are
the party of religious people and the Democrats are the
party of non religious people. Forty five percent of Harris
voters in twenty twenty four where atheist, agnostic, or claimed
no religion in particular, it was twelve percent of Trump's voters.
So you know what's happening is the parties are sort
of sorting into. The Republican Party is the party of Christianity,
(27:51):
particularly white Christianity by the way, so white Evangelical is
white Catholics. But the Democratic Party has like become the
party of non white Christians. So black Protestants suspend Catholics, Muslims, Jews,
but also the party of the non religious. I think
that's actually a huge problem the Democrats are facing now,
like on a lot of these issues of like morality
and culture and society is like, how do you please
(28:12):
an atheist and a black Protestant on issues about pronoun
usage in public schools or right? Like those those two
groups are not going to agree on anything in the
social space. And yet I think I was thinking the
Republican coalitions a lot easier to campaign to to message
with because it's like Christianity is good, family values are good,
(28:33):
Traditionalism is good. You know, like you can basically hit
these notes that eighty five ninety percent of Republicans will
agree with you.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Meanwhile, the Democrats don't. They don't. They're the party of
everyone else when it comes to religion.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, and you put up some interesting data that I
had now read before that a majority of churchgoers do
not actually want to hear their minister or priest talk
about religion.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
They don't pop politics from the politics a politics right here? Yeah, people,
they wanted to save space.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
I think people forget that, Like, and I just talked
to a progressive pastor yesterday, like what should we do
in response to this this god gap you talk about?
And I don't think the solution to them becoming more
right wing is for you to become more left wing.
I actually think there's a huge lane in America for hey,
we're not political here, and you can be vaguely liberal
talk about you know, everyone's welcome here, things like that,
(29:21):
But like, if you're wearing a rainbows there's actually I
saw a female Methodist pass thro who had a planned
Parenthood logo on her soul when she was preaching, and
I'm like, if you don't like when you see pastors
wearing maga hats, but you're okay with that, then that's
the problem. Like, the solution to the maga hat issue
(29:42):
is not you wearing a rainbow stole. It's for you
to preach the gospel in an apolitical, non political way
to get people a respite from all the nonsense that's
going on in the discourse and just say, my job
is to preach Jesus in the Kingdom, and come on,
if that's what you want to hear, that's what you're
going to hear from us, and listen. I go to
a Methodist church now, first, not a Methodist here in town.
(30:03):
My church closed down as an American Batist for a
long time. And I've been there for over a year now,
and there's not a single time I would go wow,
that's really political. Not once, and I love it, you
know what I mean. I just sit there and I
get to hear the message. I get to be told
to do better and God loves you and serve your
neighbor and love your family.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Like how can you be mad about that?
Speaker 3 (30:19):
That's what I think to myself a lot, is like
how can people be mad at the message you're hearing
right now?
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Right? You know, I grew up and I've lived my
whole life as a Catholic, So I think it's a
little different smoth. I've never had a priest talk about
abortion from a POLP. I mean maybe one literally close
to never and any other really big political issue. Maybe
maybe like it's just like assisted suicide. I think was
brought up one time. But of the tens of thousands
(30:46):
of times I have been to a church, I could
count on one hand how many times it's been explicitly political.
Maybe it's something that's different in like an evangelical setting
where I've known, you know, political commentators get to speak
at the pole, So it's a very different I think
unique experience. I have to ask this because it's part
of my church and because you read this data. So
(31:07):
what is the data on young converts to Catholicism. I
know in my own life, I know like about a
dozen young people most only eleven of the twelve have
been men. It's mostly young men who have said I'm
going to convert to catholsm What is there? Is that
just anecdotal or is it there a real thing? Because
(31:28):
I think that like a lot of young men are
looking specifically for structure, and there's nothing more structured and
less democratic in the world in the Catholic Church.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
So so the data macro level stuff doesn't show any
anything worth writing home about in terms of, you know,
like a huge upstick in men now. So what we
do know is the gender gap used to be a
women more religious and men. We've known that forever, Like
that's just one of those we don't know things in
social science.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
But this is as close as we get.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
And what's happened with gen z as the gap has
closed between men and women on religiosity measures. It's not reverse.
I think people overestimate this. Oh, men are more religious
than women now, young men and that's not true. They're
probably as religious as each other. And it does seem
it's like it's being driven by politics. We don't know
that for sure, but definitely there's some suggestive threads that's happening,
(32:22):
you know. For instance, I have a piece coming out
I think next yeah, next week, where I look at
how young men and young women think about issues like transgender, LGBTQ, abortion,
and the gender divide on those questions among kids born
in the two thousands is actually larger than any other
decade of birth between men and women. So young men
are actually significantly more conservative than young women on these
(32:46):
social issues. And I do think that has to be
tied to religion in some way, right, because it's like
what teaches you about LGBTQ and how we think about
those things, Well, it's the church. And I also think
that young women are they're reacting to you know, me
too in the church. Let's be honest, the Catholic Church
and Evangelical churches are very patriarchal, right, women don't have
access to leadership, and I think a lot of would
(33:07):
look around and go, why am I part of an
organization that doesn't give me access to leadership. You know,
I want to lead in fortune five hundred companies and
social organizations, But why would I be part of a
church that doesn't think I'm valued, I'm not equal to men,
and so they're leaving. So the increasing liberalization of young women,
I think is something that is talked about but not
enough in American society.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
And there's only so many women who want to become
a trad wife influencers on Instagram. So I mean, there's
a market for that, but it's there's definitely a ceiling.
Last question before I get to your book, what is
the fastest growing segments of the real of the Christian
faith in America?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Oh? Man, what is the uh.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
So A hard question. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
The problem is it's like these really small groups will
come to me and be like, oh, we're growing. Look
at our numbers and they're like one hundred and twenty
five thousand last year, they're one hundred and.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Thirty thousand this year.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Right, Okay, thats you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
That's like, so I will say this, Pentecostal groups are growing,
like the Assemblies of God for instance. So like if
you look at almost every major large denomination in America,
Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans. Their membership is down significantly.
You know, over the last thirty years, talking twenty five
(34:20):
thirty percent. The Assemblies of God has grown almost without
fail in the last fifty years. There are three point
three million people now. They're actually the most racially diverse
large denomination in America. So I think to me, like
charismatic worship, you know, people raising their hands and clapping
and sometimes you know, speaking in tongues, those kind of things.
That kind of religion actually, not just the United States,
(34:41):
but in the world is really the resurgent kind of
religion happening all over. People are drawn to that. It's
it's it's almost like a spectacle in some ways. And
if by the way, it's very good on YouTube, you know,
to watch people like it's fun to watch people like
have a really like seem like they're having a religious
And by the way, the Kirk funeral, I think you
saw a lot of that at Charlie Kirk's funeral, Like
(35:01):
Chris Tomlins, the CCM rock star.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I mentioned that my monologue against that they were like that.
One writer said he is like that I feel more
at home and Greece than I do at an event
like this, i'mas Williams. Yeah, it was very evangelical, absolutely,
and there is even certain portions of Catholics to pick
up on evangelical performance a little bit. I don't want
(35:27):
to say like they don't obviously do the same things,
but there is definitely some of the aesthetics that seem
very similar.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
And I think I was thinking of what what Shady
Van's doing during all this stuff, you know, being Catholic
but also not wanting to alienate the evangelical base. But
the worship was incredibly evangelical in its orientation, and that's
Catholics don't raise their hands except during the Lord's Prayer,
like you know, I mean like that that's just not
a thing that happens in Catholic worship. So there's like
there's in some ways they're aligned on certain like social issues,
(35:57):
theological issues, but in terms of style that is the movement.
Like there are groups like there are churches that literally
go they have their worship band, like go on tour
and go to stadiums and sell out five ten thousand
person stadiums where people just do an hour and a
half of praise and worship like it's a movement.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Right now, I.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Will say something that I might offend people, but I
don't care because it's very funny. I dated someone briefly
who was an evangelical and brought me to an evangelical
church and they had a rock band and I was like, Oh,
this is weird. And then the pastor was just saying, like,
clap if you like just wanted more participation than I
(36:37):
am used to as a Catholic, and it was you know,
clap you if you want Jesus and snap your fingers whatever.
And I looked over and go, this is not like
a tinker Bell situation where if you just clap hard
enough they come back to life. Like this, I don't
understand what we're doing right now. So your book, The
Vanishing Church. I haven't read a book specifically about sociology
(36:58):
and religion since A Nation of hero which was a
great book. What's this book about? What can we expect?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:04):
So I really I take all the data I've got
from the last fifty years and make this claim that
we talk a lot about political polarization in America, we
do not talk about religious polarization in America, and how
religious polarization is probably actually driving the political wedge between
us even stronger. And so if you look at evangelicals,
obviously they become a lot more conservative over the last
fifty years. Actually, in nineteen seventy two, a majority of
(37:26):
white evangelicals were Democrats.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Not surprising Jimmy Carter, Yeah, Jimmy.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
Carter, right, And even like the old Southern the Southern Democrats, right,
you know about race and all those things. But today
they're more polarized than ever, They're more they're more monoculture
than ever. Politically, almost eighty percent of them identify as Republicans,
eighty two percent voter for Trump. But what people don't
realize is even like mainline protests and Christianity, and people
don't know that's Episcopalian Methodists, sort of the middle stream
(37:52):
of pros and Christianity that is actually becoming. They were
sort of moderate politically, like divided politically, but guess what,
they're almost gone in America today. The main Line was
over half of America in nineteen seventy two, and now
they're down to about ten percent of America quickly going
to go to five percent because.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
They're all old, they're all going to die soon.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
So the point I make in the book is, like
Margaret Thatcher said it best, you stand in the middle
of the road. You get hit by cars coming and going.
And the main line was always too liberal for evangelicals
but too conservative for atheists, and so they kind of
rode that middle line. They're going to write it right
to irrelevancy in extinction. But the Catholic Church, you know,
(38:32):
you go you're Catholic, you go to if you look
at data on priests and ask them about their politics
and their theology. Among priests who have been ordained in
the last ten years, almost all of them are conservative now,
and the white Catholic voter is moving incredibly to the right.
Over sixty percent of the white Catholics vote for Trump
is twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
That's pretty wild. I mean, I think that a majority
voted for Obama in two thousand and eight. I cord
that's the data. So it's about win by twenty points
in the largest single church in America. Is pretty wild.
What what was I going to ask you about? The
perfect perfect thing about the priests. I have a young
priest at my church who's younger than I am. First
(39:13):
time I've ever had a priest is younger than I am.
And he said to me, I speak seven languages. Oh,
that's like amazing, which like which ones? He's like, well,
English and then six other dead languages. And I was like, okay,
that is that is.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Literally count I don't know if we counted that way.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
I know, but it's it's it speaks to the level
I never in my life a priest I grew up
with with smoke cigarettes while like giving you confession, so
like it was a definite version of like orthodoxy that
younger priests I know are younger priests are very very orthodox,
and I think that the the Pope Francis form of
(39:56):
Catholicism has a very short window within the papacy, within
the entire practicing faith. They just don't. Even though there's
less priests now, the ones who still commit that life
of the priesthood are very very not just conservative, but
very uh very beholden to the belief of like the
(40:18):
Catechism and the belief of the of the founders of
the Church or the like. You know. I would strongly
suggest that there's probably a decent percentage. I think Vatican
too was a mistake.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Oh well, Cardinal Dolan called them Charlie Kirk a saint like.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Mar he called he compared him to Saint Paul. Yeah,
Cardoninel Dolan is not a I mean Cardinal Dolan, Like
where's like you know, it's like talk about football. I
mean like, Cardinal Dolan is not a radical right wing
pastor in the respects. I can't remember his name, but
(40:55):
oh Simon and Garfuncle, the radical priest sing blank in
the name uh And okay, someone's gonna comment and I
mean email, like how would you forget? It was from
this song whatever? But Julio, me and Julio down at
the cool yard of the school yard, there was there
was there was a radical precinc mentions and I forget,
but it was the role that Cardinal Dolan currently has
(41:16):
cardinal and is not of that elk. And to compare
Charlie Kurchus Saint Paul is a very very substantial claim
from uh, from especially from him of all people. And
I just think that that is a sign of the
change within this church is going to be immensely different
than what it is now. So well, where can people
(41:38):
go to get your work?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
You hit me on that substack graphs about religion. That's
that's what people like. I tried to come with a
cool name for it. I was like, nah, dude, it's
just grasps about religion. I post Mondays and Thursdays. It's
just a bunch of grass Fifteen hundred words and five
six graphs, just trying to explain something happening in the
world of religion, mostly religion, but sometimes religion and politics.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
You can sign up.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
There's a free tier and there's a paid tier. Free
gets you most of everything. Page gets you a little
bit more. On top of that, I've got a new
book coming out. We just talked about it. You can
get on Amazon pre order now, comes out in January.
Wrote a book called The Nuns in Onees, Where They
Came From, Who they Are, Where They're Going, which came
out second edition came out two years ago. And I
had a book with Oxford University Press called The American
Religious Landscape that came out like six months ago. If
(42:22):
you want, like, if you want to understand the American
Religious Landscape, like with just a bunch of charts and graphs,
like in a textbook style and an engaging textbook style,
that's the book you should pick up.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
It's called the American Religious Landscape, so it's.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Like a religious version of Generations by Jeanette. I've got
her last twenty yeah, I think Frenny. Yeah, but that
was literally like a reading textbook for school. But I
enjoyed it. But I'm a nerd, so I get it.
I love your graphs. I look at your Twitter constantly.
I'm so happy to be able to do this podcast.
Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 4 (42:50):
Thanks very, I appreciate it you're listening to It's a
Numbers Game with Ryan Grodowsky. We'll be right back after
this message. Now it's time for the ask Me Anything
segment of the podcast. If you want a part of
the ask Me Anything segment, and I love getting your emails.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
I read them all. Email me Ryan at Numbers Gamepodcast
dot com. That's Ryan at Numbers Plural Numbers Gamepodcast dot com.
I will read your email. I will get to it
eventually on the show. This comes from my actually no name, Jake.
He asked, have you always been a conservative? The answer
is no, because I was not always political. When I
was young. I was the only political opinion I had
(43:29):
as a kid. I had two, which was that I
was against the Iraq War, which I snuck out of.
I went to one of the protests. I went to
Manhattan without telling my parents that I was going there
to protest the Iraq War when I was in high school,
and I was against amnesty for legal immigrants because growing
up in New York City, I saw neighborhoods vastly demographically
(43:52):
change and the level of social trust within those neighborhoods
and the norms and the customs of these neighborhoods go
with it, and I was like, this is not, you know,
healthy for society. These neighborhoods are not are definitely less
participatory in civic engagement in civic society, and I think
that there's a big problem with how many people are
(44:12):
coming to our country in very fast numbers. So I changed.
I had of those opinions, but other than that, I
didn't have like, you know, some people are like, I'm
Republican so I have believe in everything in the platform,
or I'm a Democrats are biding the entire liberal series
of liberal platitudes, and I was very I just didn't
have a lot of other opinions aside from immigration in
(44:34):
the Iraq War, which I thought made me a Democrat.
So the first person I voted for was Anthony Wiener.
He was also running on opposed, so I have a
little carve out from that, but I voted for him.
And then when I was like nineteen, I needed a job.
I was doing like a lot of like you know
when you're like young and you just need to make money,
so you do like Kurt crazy things. I was was
(44:57):
shadowing a real estate agent for a little while, was
doing a bunch of things to try to find something
I was interested in, and I thought of politics, and
I went to go work for move on dot org.
They used to have. It used to be this big
anti Bush organization. If you don't know what it is. Uh,
they were very against the war. So it's like, oh, perfect,
I'm against the war. There against the war. And they
used to people that they hired to basically stand out
(45:20):
in corners of Manhattan and ask people for money to
do like anti war activism. And I was like, all right, whatever.
I was probably eighteen, I probably wasn't even nineteen yet,
and I was like, all right, that sounds good to me.
And beforehand we had to have like all the people there,
they got to go to the move on dot org
office and walk in and sit on beambag chairs and
have coffee and discuss, you know, why they're there, what
(45:43):
motivates them to be political, you know, some events of
the day. And I get there and everything smells like
pod and like feet, and it was like disgusting. And
you sit down and I'm you know, in a semi
circle or circle with these other people who want to
be like left wing activists, and they were like, I
believe the Nation stage should but be abolish. Like it
was like the craziest shit I've ever heard before in
(46:05):
my life. And I was like uh, And of course
I started arguing with people because I can't help myself,
and I was like, I do not belong here, Like
these people are nuts. I can only imagine when those
people say now at this point, because this was you know,
twenty years ago. But and then I went I was like, okay,
this is not for me. In like two thousand and eight,
(46:26):
I was like, I'm going to vote for who's ever
against the war in Iraq and against amnesty for legal immigrants.
And that was Ron Paul. So I went to a
rom Paul meetup group and a round Paul I joined
a Ron Paul forum online, and I actually still have
friends from the rom Paul Forum from two thousand and
eight who I still speak to occasionally. And then I
read started reading. We talked about constitutional limited government, things
(46:47):
I never thought of before, and Austrian economics and the
gold standard, and it was just fascinating to definitely pique
my curiosity. And then on a very boring family vacation,
I decided to buy some audiobooks and I bought and
Culture's book and Pat Buchanan's book, and there was just
really no going back ever after that. So that was
(47:09):
my little And there was also like a lot of
religious movement in my life at that time as well,
so there was a lot going on. But no, I
definitely was I was not always conservative, but I was
not always deeply political. And the one consistency in my
life is I was going to say war in Iraq,
I was against ambassy for legal immigrants. And I still
don't have opinions on a lot of things that I
don't jump into it. I don't need to get into
(47:30):
the fray about a million things. I know there's a
lot I don't know about it, and I don't really
care about them, so I only talk about things I'm
interested in. Anyway, thank you for listening to this episode.
I hope you enjoyed it. If you like this podcast,
please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
wherever you get your podcasts. Give me a five star
review if you really liked this episode, and I will
see you guys on Monday,
Welcome back to a numbers game with Ryan Gradowski. It
is Thursday, September twenty fifth. We are forty days from
the twenty twenty five elections. There were a few special
elections that happened this past week. Republicans held onto the
mayorship in Mobile, Alabama, which doesn't seem like a big deal,
but Republicans hold so few mayorships that anything is a
big deal when it comes to winning a mayor's office
(00:22):
With the GOP. Republicans won a special election in the
Georgia State Senate where Jason Dickerson b Deborah Shingley by
twenty three points. It was though a Trump plus thirty
four districts, so it's nothing to ride home about. Over
in Arizona, a Delta Grivlla won the seat once held
by her father, Raoul, who died in the seat back
(00:43):
in January. She won by a very large forty two.
This was a better result than either her father received
in the last few elections since the twenty twenty election
and Kamala Harris. These are not great results for the
Republican Party, though none of them were so prizing. It
wasn't like a big shock. The Mobile Alabama mayorship is
(01:03):
actually probably the biggest deal of the three. Many people
at Hope that in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination,
Republicans would start voting in these special elections in larger
numbers like presidential numbers, and that would have definitely reversed
the trends in these seats. You know, had Republicans turned
out at presidential levels in the congressional election in Arizona,
(01:25):
Republicans would have absolutely won that. That didn't happen, though,
and it doesn't seem like it's happening. Next Monday's episode
is going to specifically focus on the Virginia elections coming up,
because there's the Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and obviously
in New York City, but Virginia and a deep dive
into Virginia is going to be taken place next Monday,
(01:45):
and I'm going to be a rundown what's happening in
New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But I want to keep you
guys attuned to these elections, which are indicators of how
people feel going forward. So many of you run down
of those elections. About a deep dive into the Virginia election,
some people have asked, what are the elections in Pennsylvania.
I keep talking about Pennsylvania. Has the state Supreme Court
(02:06):
up for a statewide vote? Now? A lot of people
like Ryan, I don't care. I don't live in Pennsylvania.
What do I care about the state Supreme Court? The
State Supreme Court is very important because they decide on
congressional lines in Pennsylvania. Republicans lost a lot of congressional
seats from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which is majority Democrat.
Sat there and said that the Lions had to be
(02:27):
give Democrats more seats. So the reason the House is
much closer than it is because Republicans pibly lost three
congressional seats in Pennsylvania, and going into twenty thirty twenty
thirty two, when redistioning will happen again, Pennsylvania is likely
to lose one more congressional seat as the population has
not grown fast enough relative to the rest of the country.
(02:48):
So those Supreme Court races there's multiple will matter a lot.
I know that local politics is not the sexiest type
of politics, but they matter a lot more to your
daily life than in the Senate, the presidency, all these
other things. So they just matter, like they will really
really matter. And I love local polities where I got
my start. I will say one thing briefly about what's
(03:10):
happening before I go into my main topic. When some
sears really seems like she's losing momentum in this race,
and I'm gonna give the reason why I think that
she's losing momentum next on Monday's episode. But there seems
to be momentum building for Jack Chitarelli over New Jersey.
Now he's still definitely not the favorite to win, but
(03:34):
he earned a very important endorsement. He earned the endorsement
of the Fraternal Order of Police, which did not endorse
at all in twenty twenty one, and endorse Democrat film
Murphy in twenty seventeen. He had that great poll, he
had a very strong debate performance. These are the kinds
of things you want to see happen break in your
favor in the last few weeks of an election for
(03:55):
a surprising victory. I'm not saying he's gonna be victorious.
I'm not giving a addiction at all about it. I'm
just saying these are the things if you're looking for
something to break, this is when breaking matters the most
because people are paying attention going back to the Charlie
Kirk of it all, which because everyone was hoping that
his assassination should alter the state of politics and maybe
(04:17):
will long term. I mean, I'm not judge, I'm not
canceling it out. I'm just saying these special elections is
not really motivating people to go and vote. But there's
also a significant number of people who are hoping that
Charlie's legacy not only alters the state of politics, but
he also alters the state of religion. They hope that
there is a religious revival because as a result of
(04:39):
his death, if this leads to a movement that people
seek out a church and a faith. I spoke to
several evangelical Christians, including some who work for me, and
they've all said they were excited to see people go
back to church after Charlie's assassination. I know somebody who
had not been in church in twenty years who went
after Charlie was assassinated, and she cried when she went.
(05:00):
She said it was such a moving experience and religious
engagement is a great thing. Data shows that regular religious
attendance promotes higher levels of chattable giving. They it produces
more intact families, lower rates of depression, and greater community cohesion.
Even if you are not particularly religious, you enjoy immense
benefits from a society with a higher church attendance. There's also,
(05:23):
obviously the religious element of it all. Christians hope that
you will pursue faith in order to save your soul,
which is a great thing if you believe in that.
If you are a religious person, you see people go
to church, you are happy that the army of God
is becoming larger. Some liberal commentators note that they felt
very alienated by the whole experience of watching Kirk's memorial.
(05:45):
Mass Don Lemon, formerly from CNN, said that it was
really an event for Christian nationalism. Writer Thomas Cheterton Williams
said that he felt a strange watching the whole memorial
and said he'd feel more comfortable in Greece than he
would at that place in Arizona. Philosophy professor Dan Williams
from the University of Sussex over in England, he said
that he felt extremely culturally distant in this world, he said,
(06:09):
and I think this is an important quote, he said
quote watching the Charlie Kirk memorial. I am struck by
how extremely culturally distant I feel from that world. Everything
about it feels alien. The aesthetic symbol is a music, rituals, mythology, gurus, ideas,
and norms. It feels like being exposed to a culture
and symbolic universe of a distant tribe. If I reflect
(06:29):
on this, it occurs to me that this feeling must
be symmetrical, that they must view the kind of cultural
universe I inhabit as similarly alien and in a strange way,
Despite opposing almost everything about this political project, this reflection
makes me feel more empathy for what the project must
feel like from withinside. So looking at these three comments,
(06:51):
and I know Dan is from England, so it's much
different than America. I respect Thomas Chatterton Williams the most
because I feel like it was not just Respectulho was
acknowledging a divorce from a big part of America. Though
I don't know why you're commenting on American politics if
you feel that alienated from you know, a giant portion
of the population. Don Lemon is a paranoid attention seeker,
(07:11):
so I don't think of anything that he ever says
as being serious, all he does is promote fear porn
on the left. But the British professor I use that
quote because I can't emphasize enough about how much he
misses the mark. The feeling of alienation that secular people
feel towards christian is not symmetrical to how Christians feel
(07:32):
about secular people, because unless you are a hermit who
lives in a cave, Christians and religious people are bombarded
with secular messaging all day, every day their entire life.
There are bakers and nuns who have been mired in
lawsuits for years for not baking a cake for a
gay wedding, or you know, giving out condoms to their employees,
(07:55):
or paying for employees to have birth control, which they
don't believe in the case of the nuns. Religious people
are not just bombarded by the media and tech companies
with secular messaging, but they are not allowed to live
alone or live lives within communities that are divorced from
the secular world. And I know many liberals feel that
(08:19):
religious people want to control their lives. One of my
very good friends, who's a woman, former college professor, a
lesbian who I respect deeply, and I really love our friendship.
But she said, you know, Christians, she said on Twitter,
Christians are trying to run my life. I am not
saying that one side is one hundred percent right and
the other one is one hundred percent wrong. But part
(08:40):
of this conflict, especially when it comes to religion and
political power, is because government is so large, individual liberties
have become very limited. So we're inevitably going to be
trampling on each other's right to exist in our own
(09:00):
world or in the world and the communities that we
see fit to belong to. I will say that since
Charlie's murder, I have been thinking a lot about my
own faith a lot more. I'm a practicing Catholic. I
have always shielded away from speaking about that in public.
I gave one interview to a Christian newspaper after being
(09:22):
canceled from CNN. But I was always taught you never
discussed religion and politics, and let's face it, I failed
very badly at one of those things and keeping that
out of the public. But I'll say this in my
own personal life. If you go to dinner with me,
I don't bring up politics unless I know you're like
in the business like political consulting, business like I am,
or you asked me about it first, I don't bring
up politics. I was raised differently on that, and I
(09:45):
have questioned since his murder whether that serves me well
keeping those conversations within me. I know, keeping the peace
in exchange for not having an open dialogue about faith
doesn't mean you have to browbeat the people over the
head with it. But I think that maybe maybe we
(10:08):
people should be talking about it more. I'm exploring this
in my head. I'm exploring how to navigate that in
a different capacity than maybe I did in the past.
I know I'm not the only one who's thought about this.
I've had conversations with friends of mine who think about
this in a different way and exploring the idea of
faith and how what it means in their lives. A
(10:30):
Pew Research report from back in February, months before Charlie
was assassinated, explored the idea of religion and found that
the number of people identifying as Christians, which had declined
for decades, having a reversal around twenty twenty two. According
to the Pew Research study, sixty three percent of Americans
identify as Christians, which is around the same number as
twenty nineteen, so there was no more massive decline. And
(10:52):
ninety two percent of Americans believe in either God, a soul,
an afterlife, or some kind of spiritual presence beyond the
natural world. Very few are just true like atheists. They
believe in something bigger than this. That Pew study also
noticed that people born between the years nineteen ninety and
two thousand and six had a pretty significant shift in
(11:13):
those identifying as Christian. For those born in the nineties,
the number grew from fifty two to fifty six percent,
and from those born between two thousand and two thousand
and six, that number increased from forty five to fifty
one percent between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four.
So if there is a Christian revivalism, it's something that
may predate Charlie. It may be turbocharged because with Charlie.
(11:36):
Other really important things in that study is that young
men are more likely to identify as Christian than young
women people born in the two thousands. That's the first
time ever that men are overly stating this over women.
And I want to partially them just say identifying as
Christian and practicing the faith are two very separate things. Right,
Young people are increasingly likely to say that they are Christian,
(11:59):
but they are not going to church in the same
percentages as some older generations, and they are not praying daily.
I think that all this conversation about religion and the
idea of a religious revival and the idea of what
that means in society, that is going to determine a
lot of our politics, especially within the Republican Party, going
(12:21):
forward in a country that has been moving towards secularization.
For you know, it feels like time in memorium, but
probably for the last half century, or maybe a little
longer than that. I decided to have an expert to
discuss religion with me. He's coming on next Stay tuned
with me on today's episode is Ryan Birch. He is
(12:41):
a professor of practice at the Dawnforth Center of Religion
and Politics at Washington University at Saint Louis and the
research director at the Faith Counts. Ryan, thank you for
being on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
So, Professor. When when Charlie Kirk's murder happened, there was
a lot of talk about the hopes of a religious revival,
especially from a lot of evangelicals and even some young
people that I know. Back in February, there was report
by p Research showing that many young people were increasingly
identifying as being Christian. How real according to the data
(13:16):
you've seen, is that trend?
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, So what we know is that the share of
Americans who are Christians decline from ninety percent to sixty
three percent between nineteen seventy two and about twenty twenty
or so, and really the number cent has kind of
hung there last couple of years. As far as young people,
what we know is that the rise of the nuns
among them has stopped increasing so rapidly. So, for instance,
(13:40):
people born in two thousand are probably just as likely
to be non religious as someone born in nineteen ninety,
which is sort of a big deal if you think
about it, because every you know, generation is significantly less
religious than the prior generation. So the fact that slowing
down is a big deal. But I've been asking a
lot about you know, what's what's the impact Charlie Kirk's
going to have. I'll just say a couple of things
about that.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
One.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
It's way too early to know, you know, we don't.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
We don't do polling on religion, big, big surveys on
religion once a year.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
I mean, that's what you get. There's really no.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Point in doing it once a month or once a week.
That the cost to do that would be astronomical. The
value of it would not be that high.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
So and even then we would I would need to
see several surveys that all came to the same conclusion.
There's an upswing in religiosity among young people. And here's
the other thing, and people don't realize this. There has
not been a single event in the last fifty years
that's had a demonstrable and durable increase on religiosity in America.
I mean nine to eleven happened, right, We're like, oh,
(14:38):
America became a lot more religious, it became slightly more religious,
and then by two thousand and two, early two thousand
and two, all that had faded away back to baseline. So,
you know, the preponderance evidence says that whatever happened with
Charlie Kirk is definitely not going to lead to a
long term sort of quote unquote revival in religion in America.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, I read your tweet about that where you said
there and said there's been no singular incident, that reverse
trends only had brief incidences and then reverse the norm.
And that's why I think a lot of people are
hoping that it's not and it then is so much
a movement. You said in one of your reports that
eighteen or thirty five year old Christians are more likely
to be a weekly church goer than than they were
(15:21):
than that age demographic was in two thousand and eight.
But older people kind of have given up on going
to mass. Can you explain that trend?
Speaker 2 (15:28):
M this is?
Speaker 3 (15:30):
So this is one of those like the math. You
got to think about the math for a second. Okay,
So overall religiosity has declined, but among young people who
still identify as Protestant or Catholic, they're more likely to
go to church on a regular basis today than young
people who are Protestaner or Catholic in two thousand and eight.
And the reason for that is because the share of
young people who identify as Christian has gone down the
(15:52):
last fifteen years. So the people who are left over
are the true believers like you.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
It's I tell.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
People like, imagine you're an eighteen year old and you're
sitting in high school and you call yourself an evangelical.
You're not going to call yourself evangelical because you kind
of believe in evangelicalism, like because you might have someone
who's trained sitting next to you and a gay guy
sitting behind you, you know what I mean, Like if
you say that, you really believe that to be true
and you're all the way in. So among young people
who are still Christian, which is a smaller number overall,
(16:19):
the ones who are there are actually more devout because
it's sort of the marginal people who have sort of
left among older people, that hasn't happened because Christianity still
has a lot of cultural cachet among older folks. There's
less stigma against being a Christian among you know, sixty
seventy year olds. So I think that's the reason is
you're seeing that young people who are still there, who
still say they're Christian, are actually more Christian than Christians
(16:40):
were fifteen twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah. And also, people get stuck. And this is not
just a problem of political commentators, but this is a
problem with people in general. Is people get stuck in
a certain age in which they came of age. So
when I think of someone who is eighty, I'm thinking
of someone who was born in nineteen twenty, because my
brain froze in the year two thousand as instinctively as
(17:04):
that's the year that, like nineteen ninety was only ten
years ago, until I think about it and like, oh no,
that's actually a long time ago now. So when I
think of somebody who is seventy, now, I'm talking about
a baby boomer. You know, and I said this in
my audience all the time. You know, Archie Bunker is
dead and Meathead is a senior citizen. So who is
(17:25):
a senior citizen and who is voting as a senior
citizen is considerably left wing from when George W. Bush
was running for president. And I think that makes sense.
Do you find that young people, I mean, you mentioned
higher church attendance, and there's a Pew study about identifying
as Christian. Do you think that there is a certain,
especially in conservative circles, a young amount of young people
(17:48):
increasingly identifying as Christian, not necessarily practicing, but identifying as
kind of like, well, I'm conservative and I'm Christian. But
they may not pray daily, they may not go to church.
Is that. I mean, that's how I interpreted the Pew study.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Maybe I'm wrong, No, I think that for some people,
you know, it's like, if I'm conservative, I have to
be a Christian, especially if you're white.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Like it's like, to go back to Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
If you look at early stuff, he was sort of
more like an old school like non religious libertarian, tea
party kind of Republican. But as he aged, he sort
of aged into a more you know, Christian conservative style Republican.
And I think I think a lot of Republicans end
up doing this, like Elon Musk ended up doing this, right.
He was an atheist for a long time, and I
was like, hey, Christianity is great, and he's like praying
the Lord's prayer. If you hang around a lot of
(18:35):
people in your tribe who are religious, you know, the
likelihood is that you at least open yourself up to
the idea of religion. And people want to live unified lives, right,
They want everything in their life to line up behind
and in that unifying force. Unfortunately, in an American life today
is politics. So if I'm a Republican, you know, I
want to be a Christian I want to say I'm rural.
I want to say I'm a conservative because that's what
(18:57):
those people are.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Right, right, you want to It's like when that song
came out about Richmond and north of Richmond and yeah,
and a lot of wealthy people who live north of Richmond,
Virginia were all playing that song, and I'm like, it's
a good I mean, it's an interesting song, but you
are definitely those kinds of peace. I don't know what
you're identifying with. What I think is a misinterpretation of religion,
(19:21):
especially to people who are not particularly religious. Is they
view church attendants, especially church attendants, but also religious affiliation
as being something for poor people. That is not the
case usually, and typically people who are college educated and
higher than median earned income are likely to participate in
(19:44):
religion and go to church, specifically go to church. That
was the truth that you know, when like Bowling Alone
was written in stuff, Is that still the truth? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:52):
No, I think this is if I want to like
feel if I'm feeling bad one day and I want
to get a lot of retweets, I just post a
graph that shows educated people are more religious than not
educated people in America.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Because it's true like a cause.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
When it comes to a church attendance, the people who
are most likely to attend church this Sunday are people
with graduate degrees. The least likely are those who didn't
finish high school. The most likely people identify as non
religious are those who have the lowest level of education.
People with master's degrees are the least likely to be
non religious in America today. Now in Europe it's the reverse.
Educated people are less religious in Europe, But in America
(20:26):
it's the and I think and people like see this
in their I think they're rid too much, Carl Marx
is the problem, like religion is the opiate of the masses, right,
it keeps it keeps stupid people down and happy in
they're in their in their their bondage, you know, is
what Marx would say. Right, Well, guess what the data
actually says that, you know, religiosity and education are related
(20:47):
to this idea called pro sociality or pro trust. And
the more you trust people, the more you likely you
are to go to college, because guess what going to
college is really an exercise and trust your roommate, your professor,
your classmates, the administration.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
You got trust all those people to get through college.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
But you know what church is, it's an exercise and trust, right,
It's it's sharing your life with other people. It's like
giving money to an organization where you're not one hundred
percent share where it's going to go. So I think
it's it's this. It's this sort of web of causality
between education, religiosity, pro sociality, pro trust that. And I
think what we're seeing more and more in America is
that low education people are less trusting people, and therefore
(21:25):
they're dropping out of American society, not just education, but
also politics, also religion, also all the social structures that
sort of bind us together. And those are the kind
of people that really worry me, to be honest, you know,
because they're not they don't have governors and they don't
have guardrails in their lives that tell them like these
are acceptable things to believe and say and do. And
(21:46):
I mean, I don't want to extrapolate too much, but
if you look a lot of these these these shooters
you're shooting incidents, I feel like a lot of those
people fall in that.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Well, what do I do all day?
Speaker 3 (21:54):
I spend a lot of time on YouTube or a
lot of time on social media, and I'm not part
of any social I don't touch grass, right, I live
all virtually. That cannot be good for our souls. I
just I can't believe that.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah, And you know it's funny. You know, I worked
for Senator I worked for now Vice President J. Dvancement,
he was a Senate candidate, and I remember reading He'llbilly
elogy the first time in him mentioning that his grandmother,
who was a lower income person without a college degree,
I don't even she had a high school degree but
never really went to church, but read the Bible all
(22:27):
the time. And it was a very kind of personalized
relationship with religion versus JD. Now, who's a church going Catholic.
And I think that that is the truth for the
most high most people of a certain things social trust religion.
I don't do you think religion creates social trust or
is it a chicken the egg thing where you have
to have high levels of trust to participate in religion.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
I think it's both, actually right.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
I think it takes a certain level threshold to get
you in the church the first time. But then I
think I think what people don't realize is the more
you're there, it almost naturally builds trust in other people
because you get to know them on a personal level.
Now it's not just like the faithless, nameless religious people.
It's oh, there's there's stand and there's Bob, and there's
hell in at church and they're great people because I've
(23:12):
known them for three of And that's actually what my
new book's about, by the way, is like religion used
to be a great mixing place in Americans. It's called
the vanishing middle. How the kind of moderate congregation search
democracy face. I'm going to bring them up at the
end of the answer. Yeah, like the book for right now.
But yeah, yeah, Like I think it's like so important
to be in spaces with people who are different than you, vote,
different believe different, different age groups. Right, Like, we need
(23:35):
all that stuff. And the thing is, where else do
you get that in American life Now? No Elks, no Moose,
no bowling League, no boy Scouts, none of that stuff.
So if we lose that, we don't have a great
mixing place in American society.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
So yeah, and I find when people make a church,
like I always attended mass growing up, but we were
not when we're Catholic, When we were not. We went
to church and we went home and then we did
things with our family. People who make the church kind
of not the center. I don't I don't want to
(24:08):
over emphasize like the center of their world. But they're
part of like church organizations, and they spend time in
like the auditorium after church because they're doing social mixers
or whatnot, and beforehand and Sunday school and all the
babysitting organizations. And I've been all over the country because
of political campaigns, and it is a the church is
(24:29):
a center for that holds community together in a lot
of different ways. What are societal benefits of a high
church community?
Speaker 3 (24:41):
I think first was tolerance, Like the very first paper
I re published was about what aspects of religiosity drive
up political tolerance, by the way, is just putting up
with ideas you disagree with, just saying that people have
the right to say things that you don't agree with,
have books in the library you don't agree with. And
among the aspects of religion, the the jd Vance Mom story,
(25:01):
like she doesn't go to church read the Bible a lot.
Biblical literalists were the least tolerant people, but people who
went to church on a regular basis were the most
tolerant people. So like religion has these countervailing forces, right,
part of it makes you less tolerant, but other parts
of it makes you more tolerant. Unfortunately, guess which ones
dropped the most in America in the last fifty years.
It's the attendance piece, the piece that we need the
(25:22):
most to generate these feelings of democracy. So I think
from that perspective by itself, but also, you know, there's
a great paper by Roschetti that came out a couple
of years ago that found that economic mobility is really
important in America, right, moving yourself up the economic ladder.
The number one predictor of that is being an economically
diverse space. And guess what, religion is one of the
(25:42):
last economically diverse spaces we have in American society. So
how do you move up the ladder. You talk to
someone at church who's a manager at a company says, hey,
we'd love to have you come work for us. You
move your way up that way. So I tell people,
like the thing about religion, you think it's all vertical,
it's all spiritual, it's all about God and salvation and stuff. Really,
at the end of the day, a lot of it's
very horizontal, it's very social, right, it actually might help
(26:04):
you like in this world too, not just the world
after this world.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
That I never thought of it like that. I always
tell the Republicans when they talked about when the conversation
on defunding the police was happening, I would say to
Republican politician, like, there is a safety net thing component
to it, very obviously. But also if you are a Latino,
lower income who can only get an associate's degree, one
of your only chances to be part of the middle class,
(26:29):
your only economic latters is joining the police or the fire.
It is a public union, and you need to talk
about things from an economic standpoint. I never thought of
religion in the same capacity, but it makes a lot
of sense. And I'll say this as someone who goes
to mass almost you know, almost every single Sunday. There
are times I sleep in, but most of the time
i'm there, I find that the only ones going still
(26:52):
are Republicans. I mean, I can, you can almost and
I live in I mean, like I just between Louisiana
and New York, and I mean Louisiana. Obviously, if ever
read state, even in New York City when I go,
you could nine times out of ten if we were
to campaign outside of a church, they're almost all Republicans,
(27:13):
and the ones that are Democrats left are like Joe
Biden's age is. And maybe this is just my unique experience,
but is church becoming considerably the Republican Party at prayer?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Absolutely like that.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
We call it the God Gap, and it's getting bigger
and bigger every year, like the idea that Republicans are
the party of religious people and the Democrats are the
party of non religious people. Forty five percent of Harris
voters in twenty twenty four where atheist, agnostic, or claimed
no religion in particular, it was twelve percent of Trump's voters.
So you know what's happening is the parties are sort
of sorting into. The Republican Party is the party of Christianity,
(27:51):
particularly white Christianity by the way, so white Evangelical is
white Catholics. But the Democratic Party has like become the
party of non white Christians. So black Protestants suspend Catholics, Muslims, Jews,
but also the party of the non religious. I think
that's actually a huge problem the Democrats are facing now,
like on a lot of these issues of like morality
and culture and society is like, how do you please
(28:12):
an atheist and a black Protestant on issues about pronoun
usage in public schools or right? Like those those two
groups are not going to agree on anything in the
social space. And yet I think I was thinking the
Republican coalitions a lot easier to campaign to to message
with because it's like Christianity is good, family values are good,
(28:33):
Traditionalism is good. You know, like you can basically hit
these notes that eighty five ninety percent of Republicans will
agree with you.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Meanwhile, the Democrats don't. They don't. They're the party of
everyone else when it comes to religion.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, and you put up some interesting data that I
had now read before that a majority of churchgoers do
not actually want to hear their minister or priest talk
about religion.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
They don't pop politics from the politics a politics right here? Yeah, people,
they wanted to save space.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
I think people forget that, Like, and I just talked
to a progressive pastor yesterday, like what should we do
in response to this this god gap you talk about?
And I don't think the solution to them becoming more
right wing is for you to become more left wing.
I actually think there's a huge lane in America for hey,
we're not political here, and you can be vaguely liberal
talk about you know, everyone's welcome here, things like that,
(29:21):
But like, if you're wearing a rainbows there's actually I
saw a female Methodist pass thro who had a planned
Parenthood logo on her soul when she was preaching, and
I'm like, if you don't like when you see pastors
wearing maga hats, but you're okay with that, then that's
the problem. Like, the solution to the maga hat issue
(29:42):
is not you wearing a rainbow stole. It's for you
to preach the gospel in an apolitical, non political way
to get people a respite from all the nonsense that's
going on in the discourse and just say, my job
is to preach Jesus in the Kingdom, and come on,
if that's what you want to hear, that's what you're
going to hear from us, and listen. I go to
a Methodist church now, first, not a Methodist here in town.
(30:03):
My church closed down as an American Batist for a
long time. And I've been there for over a year now,
and there's not a single time I would go wow,
that's really political. Not once, and I love it, you
know what I mean. I just sit there and I
get to hear the message. I get to be told
to do better and God loves you and serve your
neighbor and love your family.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Like how can you be mad about that?
Speaker 3 (30:19):
That's what I think to myself a lot, is like
how can people be mad at the message you're hearing
right now?
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Right? You know, I grew up and I've lived my
whole life as a Catholic, So I think it's a
little different smoth. I've never had a priest talk about
abortion from a POLP. I mean maybe one literally close
to never and any other really big political issue. Maybe
maybe like it's just like assisted suicide. I think was
brought up one time. But of the tens of thousands
(30:46):
of times I have been to a church, I could
count on one hand how many times it's been explicitly political.
Maybe it's something that's different in like an evangelical setting
where I've known, you know, political commentators get to speak
at the pole, So it's a very different I think
unique experience. I have to ask this because it's part
of my church and because you read this data. So
(31:07):
what is the data on young converts to Catholicism. I
know in my own life, I know like about a
dozen young people most only eleven of the twelve have
been men. It's mostly young men who have said I'm
going to convert to catholsm What is there? Is that
just anecdotal or is it there a real thing? Because
(31:28):
I think that like a lot of young men are
looking specifically for structure, and there's nothing more structured and
less democratic in the world in the Catholic Church.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
So so the data macro level stuff doesn't show any
anything worth writing home about in terms of, you know,
like a huge upstick in men now. So what we
do know is the gender gap used to be a
women more religious and men. We've known that forever, Like
that's just one of those we don't know things in
social science.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
But this is as close as we get.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
And what's happened with gen z as the gap has
closed between men and women on religiosity measures. It's not reverse.
I think people overestimate this. Oh, men are more religious
than women now, young men and that's not true. They're
probably as religious as each other. And it does seem
it's like it's being driven by politics. We don't know
that for sure, but definitely there's some suggestive threads that's happening,
(32:22):
you know. For instance, I have a piece coming out
I think next yeah, next week, where I look at
how young men and young women think about issues like transgender, LGBTQ, abortion,
and the gender divide on those questions among kids born
in the two thousands is actually larger than any other
decade of birth between men and women. So young men
are actually significantly more conservative than young women on these
(32:46):
social issues. And I do think that has to be
tied to religion in some way, right, because it's like
what teaches you about LGBTQ and how we think about
those things, Well, it's the church. And I also think
that young women are they're reacting to you know, me
too in the church. Let's be honest, the Catholic Church
and Evangelical churches are very patriarchal, right, women don't have
access to leadership, and I think a lot of would
(33:07):
look around and go, why am I part of an
organization that doesn't give me access to leadership. You know,
I want to lead in fortune five hundred companies and
social organizations, But why would I be part of a
church that doesn't think I'm valued, I'm not equal to men,
and so they're leaving. So the increasing liberalization of young women,
I think is something that is talked about but not
enough in American society.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
And there's only so many women who want to become
a trad wife influencers on Instagram. So I mean, there's
a market for that, but it's there's definitely a ceiling.
Last question before I get to your book, what is
the fastest growing segments of the real of the Christian
faith in America?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Oh? Man, what is the uh.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
So A hard question. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
The problem is it's like these really small groups will
come to me and be like, oh, we're growing. Look
at our numbers and they're like one hundred and twenty
five thousand last year, they're one hundred and.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Thirty thousand this year.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Right, Okay, thats you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
That's like, so I will say this, Pentecostal groups are growing,
like the Assemblies of God for instance. So like if
you look at almost every major large denomination in America,
Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans. Their membership is down significantly.
You know, over the last thirty years, talking twenty five
(34:20):
thirty percent. The Assemblies of God has grown almost without
fail in the last fifty years. There are three point
three million people now. They're actually the most racially diverse
large denomination in America. So I think to me, like
charismatic worship, you know, people raising their hands and clapping
and sometimes you know, speaking in tongues, those kind of things.
That kind of religion actually, not just the United States,
(34:41):
but in the world is really the resurgent kind of
religion happening all over. People are drawn to that. It's
it's it's almost like a spectacle in some ways. And
if by the way, it's very good on YouTube, you know,
to watch people like it's fun to watch people like
have a really like seem like they're having a religious
And by the way, the Kirk funeral, I think you
saw a lot of that at Charlie Kirk's funeral, Like
(35:01):
Chris Tomlins, the CCM rock star.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I mentioned that my monologue against that they were like that.
One writer said he is like that I feel more
at home and Greece than I do at an event
like this, i'mas Williams. Yeah, it was very evangelical, absolutely,
and there is even certain portions of Catholics to pick
up on evangelical performance a little bit. I don't want
(35:27):
to say like they don't obviously do the same things,
but there is definitely some of the aesthetics that seem
very similar.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
And I think I was thinking of what what Shady
Van's doing during all this stuff, you know, being Catholic
but also not wanting to alienate the evangelical base. But
the worship was incredibly evangelical in its orientation, and that's
Catholics don't raise their hands except during the Lord's Prayer,
like you know, I mean like that that's just not
a thing that happens in Catholic worship. So there's like
there's in some ways they're aligned on certain like social issues,
(35:57):
theological issues, but in terms of style that is the movement.
Like there are groups like there are churches that literally
go they have their worship band, like go on tour
and go to stadiums and sell out five ten thousand
person stadiums where people just do an hour and a
half of praise and worship like it's a movement.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Right now, I.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Will say something that I might offend people, but I
don't care because it's very funny. I dated someone briefly
who was an evangelical and brought me to an evangelical
church and they had a rock band and I was like, Oh,
this is weird. And then the pastor was just saying, like,
clap if you like just wanted more participation than I
(36:37):
am used to as a Catholic, and it was you know,
clap you if you want Jesus and snap your fingers whatever.
And I looked over and go, this is not like
a tinker Bell situation where if you just clap hard
enough they come back to life. Like this, I don't
understand what we're doing right now. So your book, The
Vanishing Church. I haven't read a book specifically about sociology
(36:58):
and religion since A Nation of hero which was a
great book. What's this book about? What can we expect?
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:04):
So I really I take all the data I've got
from the last fifty years and make this claim that
we talk a lot about political polarization in America, we
do not talk about religious polarization in America, and how
religious polarization is probably actually driving the political wedge between
us even stronger. And so if you look at evangelicals,
obviously they become a lot more conservative over the last
fifty years. Actually, in nineteen seventy two, a majority of
(37:26):
white evangelicals were Democrats.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Not surprising Jimmy Carter, Yeah, Jimmy.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
Carter, right, And even like the old Southern the Southern Democrats, right,
you know about race and all those things. But today
they're more polarized than ever, They're more they're more monoculture
than ever. Politically, almost eighty percent of them identify as Republicans,
eighty two percent voter for Trump. But what people don't
realize is even like mainline protests and Christianity, and people
don't know that's Episcopalian Methodists, sort of the middle stream
(37:52):
of pros and Christianity that is actually becoming. They were
sort of moderate politically, like divided politically, but guess what,
they're almost gone in America today. The main Line was
over half of America in nineteen seventy two, and now
they're down to about ten percent of America quickly going
to go to five percent because.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
They're all old, they're all going to die soon.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
So the point I make in the book is, like
Margaret Thatcher said it best, you stand in the middle
of the road. You get hit by cars coming and going.
And the main line was always too liberal for evangelicals
but too conservative for atheists, and so they kind of
rode that middle line. They're going to write it right
to irrelevancy in extinction. But the Catholic Church, you know,
(38:32):
you go you're Catholic, you go to if you look
at data on priests and ask them about their politics
and their theology. Among priests who have been ordained in
the last ten years, almost all of them are conservative now,
and the white Catholic voter is moving incredibly to the right.
Over sixty percent of the white Catholics vote for Trump
is twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
That's pretty wild. I mean, I think that a majority
voted for Obama in two thousand and eight. I cord
that's the data. So it's about win by twenty points
in the largest single church in America. Is pretty wild.
What what was I going to ask you about? The
perfect perfect thing about the priests. I have a young
priest at my church who's younger than I am. First
(39:13):
time I've ever had a priest is younger than I am.
And he said to me, I speak seven languages. Oh,
that's like amazing, which like which ones? He's like, well,
English and then six other dead languages. And I was like, okay,
that is that is.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Literally count I don't know if we counted that way.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
I know, but it's it's it speaks to the level
I never in my life a priest I grew up
with with smoke cigarettes while like giving you confession, so
like it was a definite version of like orthodoxy that
younger priests I know are younger priests are very very orthodox,
and I think that the the Pope Francis form of
(39:56):
Catholicism has a very short window within the papacy, within
the entire practicing faith. They just don't. Even though there's
less priests now, the ones who still commit that life
of the priesthood are very very not just conservative, but
very uh very beholden to the belief of like the
(40:18):
Catechism and the belief of the of the founders of
the Church or the like. You know. I would strongly
suggest that there's probably a decent percentage. I think Vatican
too was a mistake.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
Oh well, Cardinal Dolan called them Charlie Kirk a saint like.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Mar he called he compared him to Saint Paul. Yeah,
Cardoninel Dolan is not a I mean Cardinal Dolan, Like
where's like you know, it's like talk about football. I
mean like, Cardinal Dolan is not a radical right wing
pastor in the respects. I can't remember his name, but
(40:55):
oh Simon and Garfuncle, the radical priest sing blank in
the name uh And okay, someone's gonna comment and I
mean email, like how would you forget? It was from
this song whatever? But Julio, me and Julio down at
the cool yard of the school yard, there was there
was there was a radical precinc mentions and I forget,
but it was the role that Cardinal Dolan currently has
(41:16):
cardinal and is not of that elk. And to compare
Charlie Kurchus Saint Paul is a very very substantial claim
from uh, from especially from him of all people. And
I just think that that is a sign of the
change within this church is going to be immensely different
than what it is now. So well, where can people
(41:38):
go to get your work?
Speaker 3 (41:39):
You hit me on that substack graphs about religion. That's
that's what people like. I tried to come with a
cool name for it. I was like, nah, dude, it's
just grasps about religion. I post Mondays and Thursdays. It's
just a bunch of grass Fifteen hundred words and five
six graphs, just trying to explain something happening in the
world of religion, mostly religion, but sometimes religion and politics.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
You can sign up.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
There's a free tier and there's a paid tier. Free
gets you most of everything. Page gets you a little
bit more. On top of that, I've got a new
book coming out. We just talked about it. You can
get on Amazon pre order now, comes out in January.
Wrote a book called The Nuns in Onees, Where They
Came From, Who they Are, Where They're Going, which came
out second edition came out two years ago. And I
had a book with Oxford University Press called The American
Religious Landscape that came out like six months ago. If
(42:22):
you want, like, if you want to understand the American
Religious Landscape, like with just a bunch of charts and graphs,
like in a textbook style and an engaging textbook style,
that's the book you should pick up.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
It's called the American Religious Landscape, so it's.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Like a religious version of Generations by Jeanette. I've got
her last twenty yeah, I think Frenny. Yeah, but that
was literally like a reading textbook for school. But I
enjoyed it. But I'm a nerd, so I get it.
I love your graphs. I look at your Twitter constantly.
I'm so happy to be able to do this podcast.
Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 4 (42:50):
Thanks very, I appreciate it you're listening to It's a
Numbers Game with Ryan Grodowsky. We'll be right back after
this message. Now it's time for the ask Me Anything
segment of the podcast. If you want a part of
the ask Me Anything segment, and I love getting your emails.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
I read them all. Email me Ryan at Numbers Gamepodcast
dot com. That's Ryan at Numbers Plural Numbers Gamepodcast dot com.
I will read your email. I will get to it
eventually on the show. This comes from my actually no name, Jake.
He asked, have you always been a conservative? The answer
is no, because I was not always political. When I
was young. I was the only political opinion I had
(43:29):
as a kid. I had two, which was that I
was against the Iraq War, which I snuck out of.
I went to one of the protests. I went to
Manhattan without telling my parents that I was going there
to protest the Iraq War when I was in high school,
and I was against amnesty for legal immigrants because growing
up in New York City, I saw neighborhoods vastly demographically
(43:52):
change and the level of social trust within those neighborhoods
and the norms and the customs of these neighborhoods go
with it, and I was like, this is not, you know,
healthy for society. These neighborhoods are not are definitely less
participatory in civic engagement in civic society, and I think
that there's a big problem with how many people are
(44:12):
coming to our country in very fast numbers. So I changed.
I had of those opinions, but other than that, I
didn't have like, you know, some people are like, I'm
Republican so I have believe in everything in the platform,
or I'm a Democrats are biding the entire liberal series
of liberal platitudes, and I was very I just didn't
have a lot of other opinions aside from immigration in
(44:34):
the Iraq War, which I thought made me a Democrat.
So the first person I voted for was Anthony Wiener.
He was also running on opposed, so I have a
little carve out from that, but I voted for him.
And then when I was like nineteen, I needed a job.
I was doing like a lot of like you know
when you're like young and you just need to make money,
so you do like Kurt crazy things. I was was
(44:57):
shadowing a real estate agent for a little while, was
doing a bunch of things to try to find something
I was interested in, and I thought of politics, and
I went to go work for move on dot org.
They used to have. It used to be this big
anti Bush organization. If you don't know what it is. Uh,
they were very against the war. So it's like, oh, perfect,
I'm against the war. There against the war. And they
used to people that they hired to basically stand out
(45:20):
in corners of Manhattan and ask people for money to
do like anti war activism. And I was like, all right, whatever.
I was probably eighteen, I probably wasn't even nineteen yet,
and I was like, all right, that sounds good to me.
And beforehand we had to have like all the people there,
they got to go to the move on dot org
office and walk in and sit on beambag chairs and
have coffee and discuss, you know, why they're there, what
(45:43):
motivates them to be political, you know, some events of
the day. And I get there and everything smells like
pod and like feet, and it was like disgusting. And
you sit down and I'm you know, in a semi
circle or circle with these other people who want to
be like left wing activists, and they were like, I
believe the Nation stage should but be abolish. Like it
was like the craziest shit I've ever heard before in
(46:05):
my life. And I was like uh, And of course
I started arguing with people because I can't help myself,
and I was like, I do not belong here, Like
these people are nuts. I can only imagine when those
people say now at this point, because this was you know,
twenty years ago. But and then I went I was like, okay,
this is not for me. In like two thousand and eight,
(46:26):
I was like, I'm going to vote for who's ever
against the war in Iraq and against amnesty for legal immigrants.
And that was Ron Paul. So I went to a
rom Paul meetup group and a round Paul I joined
a Ron Paul forum online, and I actually still have
friends from the rom Paul Forum from two thousand and
eight who I still speak to occasionally. And then I
read started reading. We talked about constitutional limited government, things
(46:47):
I never thought of before, and Austrian economics and the
gold standard, and it was just fascinating to definitely pique
my curiosity. And then on a very boring family vacation,
I decided to buy some audiobooks and I bought and
Culture's book and Pat Buchanan's book, and there was just
really no going back ever after that. So that was
(47:09):
my little And there was also like a lot of
religious movement in my life at that time as well,
so there was a lot going on. But no, I
definitely was I was not always conservative, but I was
not always deeply political. And the one consistency in my
life is I was going to say war in Iraq,
I was against ambassy for legal immigrants. And I still
don't have opinions on a lot of things that I
don't jump into it. I don't need to get into
(47:30):
the fray about a million things. I know there's a
lot I don't know about it, and I don't really
care about them, so I only talk about things I'm
interested in. Anyway, thank you for listening to this episode.
I hope you enjoyed it. If you like this podcast,
please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
wherever you get your podcasts. Give me a five star
review if you really liked this episode, and I will
see you guys on Monday,
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