EP #71 The New Spiritual Hunger – with Christian Smith

I think traditional religions have long been framed as sort of you can believe this and still be a rational person. A rational people can really believe this, well that's one audience, but I don't think I mean huge numbers of Americans believe all kinds of stuff that in past decades would have been thought crazy. Like people don't have a problem believing in weird stuff, the weird are almost the more attractive, so I don't think that the approach should be. Listen, you can believe what we believe and still be a reasonable person, I think it should be. Here's what we think reality is. Here's the way reality is, the best we can understand it is this. Hello and welcome to the Living Egypt Podcast. My name is Jenny Sinclair. And I'm Al Roxbro. We're deep into a series of conversations about what it means to be God's people in this time of unraveling. In each episode we meet with a new guest, we read the signs of the times and hear stories of how people are responding. It's great to have you with us, so let's get to today's episode. Our guest today is Christian Smith. Christian is an American sociologist and he's calling us from Southwest Michigan. He is the William R. Keenan Jr. Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. His research has focused on religion and its place in the modern world. Welcome, Chris. It's great to have you with us. What we'd love you to do just to start off with is could you give us maybe two or three minutes of who you are and where you've come from, the early part of your life, perhaps your faith journey and what's led you to where you are today? Sure. Yeah. Well, I'm an American. I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I went to school in Boston, I've taught in North Carolina and now I'm in the Midwest. I'm a sociologist. I study religion among other things. I try to make my sociology accessible to the public, not just to academics. So I write lately mostly books that are kind of crossover. They still hopefully make serious contributions to scholarship. But also well-educated thoughtful ordinary people can read and benefit from. So my view of sociology is we're not social engineers or we should be telling the world what's going on that ordinary people, including myself, when I'm just a person on the ground, ordinary people can't get the big picture necessarily. And so I my view is I try to help paint a big picture what's going on out there. So it people can be self reflexive and think, well, what do I think of that? If that's true, what does that mean, et cetera, et cetera. So it's helping to orient people in the world. So they can figure out different communities and individuals can figure out what they want to do. I study religion because it's sociologically, it's just fascinating. I find it much more interesting and puzzling than say why people go to work or get or have a family. I have a comparative advantage because I was raised in a religious family. I've been on my own long journey, hopefully heading somewhere from Protestantism, eventually into Catholicism. But as a sociologist, of course, my commitment is to describe and analyze reality is clearly and informatively as I can, whatever that means for any faith community. Thank you. That's so interesting. And for our audience who are largely Christian of many different denominations, they'll be doing exactly what you're trying to help with, which is to figure out what's going on in particular. The profound changes to what would recognize as settled Christianity at the moment. So can you give us a quick overview before we sort of dig deep into some of the questions we want to ask? What do you think is happening to Christianity in the West? And the word obsolete that is at the core of your book. Yeah. So I mean, clearly modern life changes the status has changed the status of religion in society. I mean, we're familiar with that general story in the West, especially in Western Europe. Secularization has been the way that sociologists and many ordinary people typically think of it. I have always been somewhat skeptical of secularization as a general trend as sort of an, it relies a lot on 19th century evolutionary, a positivist laws of social life thinking. It's clear that a lot of what we normally think of as secularization has happened in the world. But my view has always been things are much more complicated while the West may be going in one direction, the global South may be going in a different direction. So we need to have a much more nuanced complex vision of things. My last I've studied teenagers and young adults for some decades now. My last book is focus more on a macro cultural analysis of the United States and the place of traditional religion in the United States. My last book is titled why religion went obsolete. And so instead of using the word decline, my argument is that culturally in the United States and the 1990s and 2000s, especially a big shifts happened that caused religion to go culturally obsolete. I find that much preferable to the idea of secularization. I also find it preferable to decline because decline is sort of a one-way line. It's going downward. It usually refers to organizational metrics like how many members does a denomination have or social survey statistics like, oh, this year was this percentage and now it's this lower percentage obsolescence for me captures a much richer and more complex notion of the status of traditional religion. In a culture. And just to keep going on here to pack this a little more, my argument is mostly about post boomers, that is Gen Xers, Millennials, and now Gen Zers. And an obsolete doesn't mean extinct. It doesn't mean useless. It doesn't mean that the new thing, the thing that's replaced, the obsolete thing is even better. It just means for most people, whatever it is that's gone obsolete has been surpassed or displaced or set aside by something that feels or seems more functional or relevant. Again, that's not a judge. That's not my judgment on religion that it is obsolete in some metaphysical sense. It's a cultural sociological interpretation. And again, it's not a it's not saying that I mean it recognizes that many people are still religious in the US. So many people still use obsolete things in the world. I still have a closet full of CDs, even though they're obsolete, for example. And it also doesn't say that, again, as I said, it doesn't mean that the obsolete thing is worse when it comes to music, vinyl records have a better musical fidelity than streaming music does, but it doesn't matter vinyl records except for the retro cool people have been made obsolete by technological changes in industry, sort of forcing us into new way. So, but that's that's the argument. Religion has gone obsolete. Traditional religion has gone obsolete in the US. Starting in 1991, I actually argue. Happened in 91. Well, a whole series of things happen in 91. As an indicator, it was the first year that the number of non-religious went up in the United States. For decades, we've been surveying Americans. And always forever, about six or seven percent said they were not religious in 1991. That started to uptick. And every year since then, it's gone up. And now we're up in the, you know, high 20s into the 30s in younger populations, it's even higher. So sociologically, that is a that is a sea change that is massive. Very few things change that much. So, many other things happen in 1991 around the internet, the World Wide Web, the end of the Cold War, all sorts of transformations. My book is basically historical cultural sociology. So I try to spell out what were the big picture, economic, cultural, economic, technological, political changes that happen in the world. That sort of pushed a traditional religion into obsolescence. Just so that our audience understands where you're coming from, are you yourself practicing Christian at the moment? I am a convert to Catholicism. And are you practicing? This is a real belief for you now? Well, yeah, I mean, like many Catholics, it's complicated. But yeah, yes, I'm not or put it this way. I am not out to subvert religion. I'm not like one of these critics. Most of my career, if you look at what I've published, has been sort of defending or nuancing or I have books against atheism and so on. Yeah. So this argument is not out to attack traditional religion by any stretch. It's actually trying to help many in traditional religion understand what in the world is going on around them. So is the observation when you talk about the word religion, are you talking about organized institutional forms of religion? Is that what you're particularly- Yeah. And this book I make a major distinction between what I call traditional religion and alternative religion. In the US traditional religions, most people refer to it as organized institutionalized religion. I basically mean Catholic, white evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, Jewish, and then there's minority versions of this Mormon Islam. The alternative to that, which I actually argue is growing. As a growth industry is the alternative religions, cultural reenchantment. So areas of neo-paganism, esotericism, alternative healing. And I have a book coming out in December actually on this called a culture, the new face of spirituality in America. So which is to say, my overall argument from this whole project is that traditional religion has been going obsolete or has gone obsolete. But that does not mean that all these Americans are like jumping into secularism. Secularism is a very limited appeal in the United States. It's a small minority that are hardcore secularists. Most people instead are gravitating into a very different style of things transcendent sacred spiritual mystical that I call a culture or re-enchanted culture. And this context of obsolete, the dismorning as I was preparing for this, I was doing my usual kind of BBC news and then other news, and on BBC news, the spawning before coming onto this. There's a commentator called Katie K. And she was interviewing someone who you may very well know, Ryan Burge, because she was quoting these statistics of the spike in attendance at churches and particularly Catholic churches. And the ways in which, and Jenny, you and I are familiar with this, there is this writing about revival and quiet revival and return, and now Ryan Burge just began quoting statistics I couldn't keep up with to say, well, that's not the case. But that is, I mean the argument, part of the argument you're making is that the notions of revival, quiet revival and return are actually missing what's going on at a very fundamental inside of traditional religion. That's one part of it, which I'd like your response to. But the second part of it is this new book that you're mentioning. Is that it's not that people, your language are becoming secularized. It's that my language, they are turning away from traditional religion as irrelevant and are seeking all kinds of other kinds of religions. Yes, exactly. So on the first point, yeah, this has been a big hubbub in the news in the last year or year and a half or two, the so-called quiet revival. I hate to be a bearer of bad news for religious people, but the reality is it's a non-quiet, non-revival. It's much more hyped than reality. And so what Ryan, what you say, Ryan Birch was saying is correct. It's based on various things. It's based on some surveys that were conducted that had very, very poor samples. One of them, in fact, in England and Wales, that has since been shown to be really bad and even the survey firm has acknowledged that. It's based on other bad surveys. It's based on some anecdotal information. There are local groups that are indeed enjoying a renewed interest among young people. I've heard enough anecdotes to believe that that's going on in various places. And then it's based on journalists quoting each other. Like once somebody hears a story, then it gets re-quoted and it gets re-quoted. In some places, it may even be coming a self-fulfilling prophecy, but nothing of the quote-unquote quiet revival has shown up yet in any national, reliable study survey or otherwise. So I think the reality is, yeah, to your second point, it's not that everyone's given up spiritual seeking. It's not that everyone has become just secular. There's a lot in the U.S. there's an even greater, I would say, interest in things spiritual and things transcendent and things that make meaning of life. It's just that people are not looking for that as much anymore or not expecting to find any answers in traditional religion. They're looking for what I call a culture or re-enchanted culture that fits modern ways of life a lot better. It fits individualism, it fits different organizational forms, it fits fluidity, it fits individualism. It's a lot more suited than a traditional church or synagogue to the way people are living now. So, yeah, so I really, the quiet revival thesis is I think that mostly reflects a lot of desperate religious leadership who are dying to hear something different than what they've been going on for much of their careers. And a lot of journalists who feel the need to have something new to say or if they hear a rumor of something, they think they can turn it into a story. But there's really no solid evidence or data behind it and as a sociologist, I will always say whatever your personal interests are, wishful thinking doesn't help anything and I think it's a lot of wishful thinking. That said, I'm not in the business of predicting the future. This could be, there could be early rumblings of something that develops in coming years into something significant. So I'm not saying nothing could ever change and even my obsolescence book is about a particular zeitgeist in a particular generation. So yeah, I'm not saying about the future, I'm just saying for now it's way overblown and people should not pin their hopes that there's a big revival happening. So let me, let me then take you to another, another phrase that you use a fair bit, reenchantment, which I suspect it will be more the subject of your forthcoming book. But it seems to me that if you are saying that traditional religion is going obsolete, in my mind it must have something to do with, and there is this growing reenchantment going on in the culture. And you put those two things side by side, then is it fair to say the traditional churches have done a pretty bad job at engagement with the enchanted, with the transcendent, if people are searching for this, they're not finding it in traditional churches. Yeah, or at least they think they wouldn't find it. I always think it's a little more nuanced. So on the one hand, I don't want to just put all the blame on churches. I've met a lot of pastors who don't have the big picture of you and they think somehow I have failed. What have I done wrong? Part of the value of the sociology is to put things, set things in a larger context where you realize I do think American churches have done a poor job in very many ways, but it's not just that the world around churches has changed. So it's not so much that the churches are failures, it's said that they failed to read the signs at the time, they failed to see what in the world is going on, and maybe that's inevitable. Maybe it's hard for people in a certain generation to have that, while it's happening none of us know really what's going on, it's much easier in retrospect. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is the world around traditional religion changed. That's a much bigger part of explaining what's happened than just churches failed. I think most religious leaders have done their best, they're very best to try to be effective in ministry. That said, in American Christianity, a lot of traditional religion is shot itself in the foot, like I have a whole section on blunders that leaders and churches made, including religious scandals being foremost among them, from the Catholic Church to Evangelical Televangelis. It's just been scandal after scandal after scandal, and that's only one of many factors, but Americans already start off being suspicious of institutions, anything institutional is suspect. And so you add scandals to that, you add American individualism, and you add about 50 other factors that I discuss in the book. And yeah, they don't think most people don't think they're going to find what they're after. in churches. And another part of that is, church is actually, like most traditions actually have the resources to deal with things like mystery and darkness, but there's a dark side to a culture which has to do with demons and vampires and ghost things. And especially the Catholic church, has all kind of resources. But for the most part, modern traditional religion has been focused on fighting a battle against secular atheism, non-believers, you know, Bechtisch Leiermacher and all this. So, and so that's where the eye has been on that ball. Whereas again, that ball is not the main game anymore. The main game is reenchantment. And so to the extent that religion has been sort of fighting old battles and not, and not sensing, and there's reasons why this is the case, but not sensing where most people are headed. That's not a good thing for the, for for religion to be able to figure out, okay, how do we respond to this? Not even a clear idea of what that this is to respond to yet. So this phrase reenchantment, which is used quite a lot, I don't think is necessarily familiar to all the people listening to this. So what you're saying is reenchantment is like the idea of people somehow needing a connection with the sacred or needing a connection with something spiritual, something kind of they can't quite describe. That's beyond the material world. Is that a fair description? That's yeah, it's it's actually complicated and that's why I wrote a whole another book about this. It's coming out, but I mean, the the secularization model says the modern, we used to be enchanted. We still live in enchanted worlds, but, but modernity disenchanted us. So reenchantment is an argument that knows something about the pre-modern world is coming back. It's actually always been there, but it's been suppressed. And by the way for your UK listeners, and in Europe, I mean, this is far advanced. They are compared to the US. Scholars there like Linda Woodhead and others have been for a long time studying this, but by reenchantment means to sing into or to be put under a magic spell by, I mean, enchant comes from it's similar to the word to chant or to be a cantor. So it has to do with magic. It has to do with unseen powers and energies in the universe and in life. And so it's a it's a very, very different approach to things religious or quasi religious than Abrahamic religions, right? Thank Christianity Judaism or Islam. It's much more believing in that the universe has some kind of unseen or hidden power or energy that we can if we are enlightened. There's a new age dimension to this. If we learn the secret or hiddennosis or knowledge, we can tap into this and use it for this worldly benefit. So it's not focused on the transcendent. It's focused on this world. But unlike secularism, which is focused on this world, it still believes in things magical and mystical and spiritual and divine possibly. So it's just different from the two main players secularism and traditional religion. And as I was indicating before, I mean, I think it fits much better the kind of societies we have. It's it's mass consumer. You can order this stuff all on Amazon. It doesn't require to get dressed up once a week and go meet with a specific group of people and so on. Interesting. When you say it's it's purpose, people want it because they feel it's going to give them some purchase on what's happening in real life, which indicates there's a great just what we know is a great dissatisfaction with late modernity that the people are feeling it's up or seeing. It's unraveling. There's like a crisis of meaning, meaninglessness. And so if people are sensing, well, what the situation, the systems that we have now are not delivering. Everyone can see that, particularly in the UK, we're seeing very serious unraveling going on. So Pete, you're saying people are reaching for something that's pre-modern, that's beyond what we currently know because that somehow gives them confidence that they will be able to affect reality. So what reenchantment does is it gives you it situates you in a universe that still means something that has some larger larger order or underlying purpose or reality or direction. So there are some atheists who are happy to live with. We're here by accident. It's just matter in energy and when we die, we die. There are some people that are happy with that, but most people are not okay with that. They want something bigger, something more meaningful, something that gives their life more significance and direction. And reenchantment does that. And as you're saying, I think our recent versions of society start to unravel. People are not necessarily consciously aware. I need a strategy to figure out how to live in this new world, but there's still, it energizes a kind of a searching or a need or sometimes a desperation to find something that's going to work for them. For individuals that could come down to something as simple as my mental health is in huge trouble. I need something to help me. So meditation, manifesting, crystals, whatever, it really helps a lot of people and that that's the doorway into reenchantment. When you said earlier, the things, the spiritual things that people are looking for, you said they fit individualism. I thought that was really interesting because they, the substrate that we've ended up with, particularly in the West the last 40 years of sort of neoliberal system, that's affected our economy, but also our relationships, our moral, spiritual life. It's to had such a huge impact. So that's our, that's our default position, if you like, in our culture. And you're saying, this is coming on top of that. So it's natural then that people would reach for things that fit a kind of, what fits in my pocket like a personal development plan. You know, it's something that I can contain in that way. It's exactly. There's so much resonance with individualism here. It fits in your pocket, it can fit in your pocket like your cell phone. There's no dogma, there's no a fartative church, there's no catechism that's telling you what the truth is that you have to follow. People can customize what they want. There's actually, but there's actually a philosophical backing to this. It's not just crazy, you brick a lodge or whatever, like there's a, there's a philosophy called the perennialism which has, it goes back a very long time. The perennialism says that behind all the surface manifestations of things sacred and religious, there's a core unified truth. But it has many manifestations. So if for you, you need to pursue this manifestation and that looks very different for someone else's, that's okay because they all point back to the core, metaphysical and moral truths of the universe. And so it allows everyone to be free to customize whatever they want to do while still somehow anchoring it to something universal. There's a great irony here though, that they're reaching with something that's actually the source of the problem in the first place. Yeah, I agree with that. But on the, another dimension of this individualism is this. In the United States, we all talk about our individual freedom and everybody can do whatever they want. Whereas in fact, all the systems of modern life are completely anti-individualistic. They're way beyond anybody's control. There are these mega-institutions, we have billionaires who are deciding the future of the planet. The government feels out of everything feels out of control, healthcare. And so in a way, I think reenchantment is an attempt, or this my interpretation, is an attempt for people to latch on to some piece of experience that they will have some control over, which is exactly what magic is. Magic is through higher knowledge or learning of secret knowledge, figuring out ways to make changes in this world. It's not the salvation of your soul and eternity. It's to improve your health, as to figure out a romantic problem. That's the nature of romance. And so I think reenchantment helps individuals recapture some sense of control in their life. It's sort of a rescue of individualism in a world that essentially is obliterating the reality of individual control. Could I test something with you around this notion of reenchantment? So as Jenny pointed, I grew up in a very, very, very working class culture in a city Liverpool. And as you're talking, I can remember my mother going to the tea leaf reader. And they'd call these people the spiritualists. And she had this memory of the Methodist church a long, long time ago. But whenever, and it wasn't just here, it was just in the air, in this blue collar working class pour. You just simply want to talk to the spiritualist and there was things going on. In other words, she, I wouldn't have given to this language then, but she lived like many in those neighborhoods in an enchanted world, and there was no problem with it. So I want to lay that alongside of, and you'll have more insights to this than I do, that what happens in, certainly from the end of the Second World War, is that we took working class kids like myself, and we turned them into white collar middle class kids. And in the turning of them into the white middle class kids, particularly at the universities, we disenchanted them, or to use the Alan Siligman's language, we discovered that life could be lived well without God, and is it the case that like the children and the grandchildren of the boomers are discovering that a life can't be lived well without God, or some form of that. And B, and this is where you please press back on me, the traditional churches in America do not give me a place to discover the enchanted God. And so this search is going, I mean, I, yeah, something like that. So here's my story. Reenchanted as false, if we think of that as we were totally disenchanted and now we're returning to, there's, there has always been undercurrents. These traditions go back to before Christianity even existed many of them. And if they've come and go in waves, and if there's a lot of recent religious history of the United States that shows, there's been all kinds of belief in what traditional religion would call crazy things, and like this, this has been around a long time. And in fact, the 19th century had all kinds of interest in spiritism, mesmerism, sayances, and so on. My story is that what happened was in about 1930, between 1930 and the late '60s, elite culture managed to pretty successfully suppress enchanted culture. This was the era of science. This was the era of economic boom. This was the era of belief in positivism as a philosophy of science, materialism, advances in technology. So it's not a matter of ordinary people like your mother in Liverpool is, it's, it's that what the macro culture managed to construct a reality that we're now secular, we're now disenchanted in the United States has partly had to do with, in a post-war dominance. But that's, that's the alternative enchanted culture was suppressed. In fact, the biggest boom in the United States of, of traditional religion, at the most recently, was post-war, returned to normalcy, Eisenhower, like lots of people were returning to church, Billy Graham and so on. So to pick up this thread though, what happened is, well, lots of things happened. But in the late 1960s with the counter-culture, much of this was revived, and then the '70s, it went mainstream, new age, and has just since gone from, from there. So it's sort of a returning with a vengeance after being suppressed. And the interesting thing is that the suppression was, was done by a coalition of secular elites, scientists, university professors, whatever, and also traditional religion, who, they, traditional religion wanted to own the sacred, the spiritual, the mysterious, and not have witches and pagans running around. So they had, they shared the commonages. So but back to what you were saying, I think it's not just this century of that century. I'm human beings have a profound and inextinguishable longing for meaning, for purpose, for something that transcends the horizons of empirical history. I mean, that's where religions come from. And so, yeah, after a while, the conditions of society, again, this is me as a sociologist, are such that people are not okay with just being secular. And like the new atheists, for example, after in the 2000s, they started to be militant in ways that a lot of Americans said, wait a minute, this is exactly the kind of spirit or attitude I don't like about religion, you know, you know, everything and you're going to force me to be an atheist. So they were essentially rejecting that too. Yeah. Wanting something that was more rich, more mysterious, more meaningful, that they could figure out that worked in their lives. And that's reenchantment. We hope you're enjoying this episode. If leaving Egypt is resonating with you, we'd love you to become a paid subscriber. Leaving Egypt is an independent podcast, sustained by listeners who believe these kinds of conversations truly matter. If you'd like to help us continue this work, head to leavingegypt.com to become a paid subscriber. Your support helps us continue to bring in thoughtful guests of meaningful conversations and discern a faithful path in these uncertain times. Thanks for being on this journey with us. It really means more than you know. Going back to the churches and church leaders and the point you were making earlier about, you know, not necessarily their fault because the world has changed around them. I mean, it is also true to say that quite a lot of churches during that period have tried to make make themselves more palatable by becoming more like the culture. And then we get Tom Holland and his book Dominion saying actually, you know, you need to do more of the weird stuff. The real deal of Christianity is actually more attractive to people than you think. You'll be going in the wrong direction. Right. So exactly. And I think so. And so as I said before, like thinking that you're fighting against skeptical atheists, that's one face of a struggle for traditional churches. But it's not the main one anymore. And I think that there was way too much fixation on that, you know, apologetics and so on. And precisely in order to make, especially liberal religion, in order to make traditional religion palatable to the quote unquote modern man, liberals strategy was, let's throw overboard as much objectionable as we can. We'll get rid of miracles. We get rid of exorcisms. We'll turn this into morality and to rationality, et cetera. And that may have worked for some, but now that it reenchantment is coming back, these religious traditions have put all of their, all of the resources they have that could interface with this, a culture, they packed it up in boxes and stuck it away in the basement. And they're actually kind of embarrassed about it. So I am, I am not advocating like, all the churches should start having a demonic exorcisms now. And like, let's, I'm not, I wouldn't, your version of Tom Holland, I wouldn't say, get weird and that's the solution. But I would say in a way that secularism has zero resources, religious traditions have tons of resources to begin to engage with the interests and concerns that are animating and energizing reenchantment. So if, if you were, one other piece of that, but there is this tendency in American religion at least to say, well, there's where the culture is going. So let's imitate it. Like with the secret churches and mega churches, let's turn our churches into shopping malls that satisfy spiritual consumer interests. In the long run, the churches can never compete with mainstream Hollywood, Madison Avenue advertising, et cetera. So I don't think I wouldn't say, well, here's the new trend. Go chase it. That's not it either. I think it's, I think anything successful is going to require a lot of careful, patient, reflection, self-criticism, reinvention in a constructive, positive way that sticks with identities and traditions rather than throws them overboard. If that makes sense, it makes total sense. The, just a couple of observations and a comment to invite you. So when I was, when I was teaching in seminary, I, it became very clear that the, the majority of those coming in to train for ordination, the primary courses that they were taking were courses in counseling and therapy. And the notion that the way to stem this tide of obsolescence was for the minister to become a good therapist, a good counselor. So therapy became part of, in Protestantism, the answer to that. And then what emerges is, well, 20, 30 years ago, a whole new degree for clergy called a doctor of ministry. Yeah. It's a waste for seminaries to make more money. Oh, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's credentializing. Yeah. And, and so there was this notion that if, if, if I could just become a doctor. like others. I could handle this and change this and make it work. But, and again, I'm testing with you. You're talking about what anthropologists call primal religion, right? Or primal religious imagination that the deep, the eradicable in culture. And this is where people like CS Lewis and Owen Barwick and many others in the stories that, at least like Tolkien, are the stories that they're telling of a whole other world that we in the modern West have either eradicated or forgotten. And what I hear, I don't want to put words on you about, but I hear from you in terms of the reenchantment is that this is another one of those times when that other world is resurgent. Yes. And that we as traditional churches with all our therapy, with all our whiff of this sex, or that sex with all of these things are missing the point of something deep and fundamental, which should be at the core of who we are as churches. Yes. All that's correct. Yes. So the the demon degree is a matter of credentializing as if if I have the credentials, I'll be more respectable than I have to say. I'm not dismissing the people that had had those degrees, but Melanie couldn't give a damn about credentials. They want a certain kind of authenticity and experience that's going to resonate with them. They don't care about who has what credentials. So yeah, it's a primal, it's again, it's going back to something we said earlier. It's a combination of both the cosmos is meaningful and I can solve problems in my personal life. I can cope with what's going on. It's not just one or the other. It's both. And that's a great way to say it. Yeah. The other thing is to another dimension of this is the generational nature. Different countries are different places in all this. In the United States, millennials, especially are what what I call in the book polluted. Religion is polluted for millennials. It's like a toxic dump waste. You don't want to go there. Polluted sites can be cleaned up, but it takes some time or it has to be washed down the river so that new water can come along. Whereas here's this is just an anecdote, but I found it really interesting. A sociologist in England told me that they've talked with some very young people in the UK who are so post post religious, they literally don't even know what their parents rejected. And so their attitude is like, it's not polluted for them. In other words, it's kind of almost like a paganism. So this is the way this sociologist put it, they said, the young people were like, wait a minute, this group of people believes that somebody came back from the dead. Wow, that's totally cool. Cool. You know what I mean? Whereas, but that's it, but that has required a sort of a passing of all the pollution associated with post chrysanthemum. So that somebody's almost like innocently pagan. In the US, things are not there. There's still a huge amount of pollution from negative affect toward traditional religion. A traditional and institutional almost anything, politics, corporations. I mean, it's not just religion, it's universal. It's very interesting what you're saying all that because the church I go to attend, I'm a part of, I would say the average age would be early 30s. So in that way, it's quite different than most churches. But what strikes me as a boomer is that part of the narrative that those people is, let me tell you you have the church hurt me. Yeah. Let me tell you why this is bad. And I find myself sitting there going, oh, get over it. Get over it. But what you're saying is that this is part of the flushing down the river that has to take place. Yeah. And it's not just an individual story. It's become part of the zeitgeist. Religion is bad. Religion will hurt you. Religion excludes people. Especially LGBTQ issues are a big thing. Gender issues. Yeah. For the first time, here's another switch for the first time. It appears that women are leaving religion in the US more than men, which is a total switch. And that has to do with a sensibility of like, religion is bad for women. It's patriarchal. It's oppressive. It's exclusive. So yeah, if you take, yeah, there's so much we could talk about here. But yeah, there are young people who are willing to stick with their churches because they love them or it still means something to them, even if they've been hurt or they know people that have been hurt. But a lot just walk out the door and they want to do something else. Also, there's always been, there's always been a small pipeline of people who either were or weren't raised in churches who return and become very seriously involved. Usually they become Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or High Anglican. These often tend to be more higher educated, thoughtful, intelligent people that eventually hits them. Tinder culture is empty and stupid. Like, I don't want to live that way. I need something more meaningful. There's that happening now. And I think part of the quiet revival is paying attention to that. But that's always been happening. There are books about this two decades old that talk about this happening. So that will always be there. And it helps churches to have those people returning who are really committed. But it's not a national revival. So as we're talking, I'm thinking of a number of local priests and pastors that I know who might be listening to this. And I'm thinking, what would we say to them when a young person turns up inquiring for the first time? They might be one of those young people you just described who don't have experience of Christianity in any part of their family. But they've come to this potentially through a political route to disaffection with, you know, hyper-liberalism and they've gone to the Bishop Baron podcast or Matt Fraud or, you know, they found some rabbit hole to go down and they've discovered. I mean, I've come across people from working class backgrounds as well, not just middle class well-educated who've learned about Augustine and Aquinas and, you know, got really excited about something deep and meaningful that has a tradition and goes back hundreds of years, which for them is what they're looking for. So when you said earlier, for them, you said, the cosmos is meaningful and I need something to cope with life. I found that really helpful, for us to get inside the mindset of the the Gen Z type of person. So they're looking for something to solve their immediate problems, to meet that need, but which also answers the questions about mystery and something that's much bigger. So when they turn up on the doorstep for a priest, potentially a priest who is in the Boomer generation, who really perhaps doesn't know how to respond to this. You know, what would you say? Because you referred earlier to the great resources, you know, of the traditions. What should they draw on? How should they first interact with that young person? Well, first I would say this needs to be not left up to individual clergy to sort it out. Like these need to be big conversations with among a lot of people. Open-ended, creative, brainstorming. But to answer your question, I mean, I think the first thing to do is not try to capture them, not say, oh, here's a potential convert. What can I do to get them in? People don't want to be captured. I think to have conversations, basically, to listen. Religious leaders are trained to talk. They're trained to instruct. They're trained to have the right answers. And I'm not criticizing the individuals. I'm saying this is the occupational role is to instruct. I think there needs to be a huge amount of listening and learning and not just like to gather data so that one can respond, but to really learn from and absorb, this is not a matter of doctrine. It's not a matter of argumentation. It's a matter of cultural, psychological, sensibility. So I think the short answer is listen a lot, ask questions, and really take seriously without feeling the need to give an answer right away. Just a brief comment is that given your question, the theological answer to that is incarnation is dwell, be with, or hospitality too is just a basic virtue. So I didn't mean to stop you. Yeah. So the other thing is, I mean, this is a structural problem in the role of clergy. From a sociological point of view, I think what really needs to happen is every parish and congregation needs to give their clergy member like 10% of their schedule to do nothing, but go out into the world, sit in coffee houses, sit in wherever people hang out and talk to them or listen to them. Have conversations, not evangelism. Just learn, just open. The problem is, you know, clergy are running around crazy just to get through the next week and prepare their sermon, especially Catholic priests, you know, when there's a shortage of them, they have to run around and all these do all these jukerous and so on. I totally understand that, but when you have a situation where clergy, by the nature of their occupational schedule, have no time to interact with almost anyone except for the people in there who are already in their congregations and their maybe their families. That is a recipe for short, medium, and long-term being completely disconnected and cut off from what's happening in the world. So I just think there needs to be a lot of giving clergy time to go out and hang out in various kinds of places where real people, not people that are like them. Well, people that are like them are real too, but where people who are different from them are hanging out and talking and doing their thing and just strike up conversations and listen to it, which is to say becoming, I mean, of course, everyone should read my two books because I've summarized it all, but beyond that, there needs to be a lot of in local settings, learning where people are. Yeah. Amen. And that's listening. Listening. Yes. Sure. Taking seriously. But at the same time, you're not saying they know nothing. You're saying there should be in a listening posture, but I'm sure you'd also say that their formation is not nothing. I mean, they have, they have all this knowledge about who the human person is, who God is, the history. And so these young people may be coming with questions. So they, you're not saying they shouldn't answer those questions. I say, you got to listen to the questions. Yeah. I'm saying, of course, they, of course, they know a ton. Of course, they have a lot to contribute. But a, especially in the United States, clergy are automatically going to be like a wall put up against them like, oh, here comes another person shoving religion down my throat. So there needs to be a demonstration to people. I'm actually interested in you as a person. I'm really open to hearing even though you're not in my church. B, there needs to be an awareness of what the conversation, who you're even conversing with. You can't have a conversation if you don't even know anything about the conversation partner. Sure. I get that. But what I'm thinking is often these young people are looking for something. And they're like, okay, impress me. Or, you know, tell me something interesting. Yeah. I'm listening. I'm listening for something different here. You know, they're very alert to the kind of conversations that they're in. You know, what they're getting out of it. Yeah. So, so let me back up and say I'm a sociologist. I'm not a pastoral consultant or anything like that. These are just my extensions of ideas from, but I would say, um, yeah, not, not, not give, not, not give any answers, but I would say it's, I would say probably the most effective thing would be after a lot of listening. Let them ask the questions first. And then respond in a kind of a confessional mode. Well, here's, here's what I believe. Here's where my tradition is coming from. Here's, here's what my church is trying to live out. Here's the, here's the best of what we hope to try to live out. And so not a sort of, here's the answer. Here's your solution. But here's, here's who we are. And hopefully they find that attractive and choose that rather than, oh, I've just been told the answers. Am I going to agree with that? And also people often are attracted by what they see lived out. Yeah, that's the other thing. This is so much, most of this happens through personal relationships, exposure, building effective bonds with people that later their brains come, I mean, this is basic sociology conversion. People are not changed, people don't change their religious positions because they have a new idea. Yeah, no, they have new networks, they have new relationships, things resonate or vibe with them, and then they get on board the ideas. I want to go back to the point, the first point you're making about this listening and being with and attending. I live in a household which multi-generational in which there are three late, well, early 20s, right? And I just, I just want to underline what you're saying is that for me as a lay boomer, with lots of knowledge and lots of information who they adore, I, I realize I do not understand the questions that they're asking. I do not, I inhabit a fundamentally different world than how they see it and read it. And I've had to learn the hard way to be truthful, how to listen in the way you're talking. I think it's an utterly critical posture that, to your question, clergy have to take. Yeah, I think that's true, but I think Jenny's point is equally true too, which is, it's not the clergy should pretend they don't know anything, they're just like seekers along with everyone else. They stand for and represent and offer traditions and belief systems and ways of life. So I think that goes together. Another way to struck me to put this is back to the, which battle are you fighting? In a way, I think traditional religions have long been framed as sort of, you can believe this and still be a rational person. A rational people can really believe this and I'm going to be, well, that's one audience, but I don't think, I mean, huge numbers of Americans believe all kinds of stuff that most, that in, in past decades would have been thought crazy, like people don't have a problem believing in weird stuff. The weird are almost the more attracted. So I don't think the answer, I don't think that the approach should be, listen, you can believe what we believe and still be a reasonable person. I think it should be, here's what we think reality is. Here's the way reality is. The best we can understand it is this. And to be able to say that confidently, not arrogantly. That really resonates that people are very much looking for a moral clarity. Yeah. I also think it could be that in the UK, Jenny, young people are more ready to hear stuff from. Why is that? What's the difference then between the US and UK? Because the UK has been more evacuated of Christendom earlier in history and so you have more generations of people that are past it. Whereas a lot of Gen Xers and millennials, I mean, they were all raised in Sunday school and whatever. Like they're the first generation of people who feel hurt and violated and turned off to Christianity. That's just, that's my sense. That's my sense. I mean, it's often said, isn't it? But the irony being that we are ostensibly a Christian nation with a church of England and so on and yet in some ways we're less religious. Don't you? In some ways less religious, but yeah, my time living in England, it is in other like official ways. Like going to what was it? The red mass for all lawyers and judges. It's sort of semi-involuntary. Christianity is built into institutions in a UK in a way. It's not here. So every setting will be locally different. Sure. And our institutions have suffered a great deal from this, this era of hyper-liberalism. There's been a huge amount of mission drift. So I think that that desire for moral clarity that many people are hungry for, you know, that is one of the things they're looking for in potentially looking for something almost too traditional to counter the unraveling. This is my own personal approach, but I would hope that this all doesn't feed into a kind of sectarian fundamentalism because that's one way that much of this can go. Yeah. So another thing that hasn't come up here is people will often ask in relation to my obsolete argument, what about Christian nationalism in the US? And my argument as a Christian nationalism in the US is not a sign of religious strength. It's a sign of religious obsolation, a desperation. Like we know we're really losing it. So now the Christian right used to say we need godly men and women in power to defend, you know, God. Now they're saying we'll take the most ungodly, horrible human being and elect him president so he'll protect us. That's a sign of desperation, not confidence. But equally, it manifests in young people being attracted to Islam as well. I met a young man recently who told me that he'd recently converted to Islam. He was 22 at a background of grandparents from Ethiopia and Nigeria. One set was Christian, the other set was Muslim. And I said why what happened and he said social media? And I said what do you mean? And he said he just looked very dark and he said it was really, really bad. And I could tell he was talking about porn, right? His life had been basically completely corrupted and ruined by a hyper liberal in online life. And he said what was so great about finding Islam was its absolute certainty. And it was it was during Ramadan and he was saying it's so impressive. They're just, you know, if that's all makes a mistake in the recitation of the Qur'an, there's a punishment. And I said, oh my God, this is scary that people want this kind of certainty. But you can see why as a antidote to the chaos. The more social and moral order disintegrates or unravels, as you say, the more people people, that's just really uncomfortable, it's not if not intolerable, so people will seek solutions to that. What's the church in its response, then, needs to strike this quite a tricky balance between this listening, dwelling, and moral clarity, and tradition? Yeah, as a matter of strategy, as a matter of approach, but I would say, in the end, what churches need to do is figure out who are we, and what does it look like now to be that? Because in the end, it's not just a matter of selling products in market share, right? It's a matter of, if you believe something. If I didn't, yeah. The authentic life. So Chris, you're sociologist, and you do sociology, however, I don't know where I heard this, whether it's in a conversation, but you, how do I say this? So very often, the sociology I get is about data, all the data saying this, all the data is saying this, but I've heard you say in other places that, yes, that's critical, and it's important, and you do that, but for you, it's the question of, how do I stand back from that data, and how do I be attentive to the larger frame in which it's being set? I think that's fair of the scripture, and this gets to the earlier question of, what a clergy do? They are trained. They do have information, but I think when I read this book, why religion went obsolete? It causes me to get energized and keep reading it, and I want to recommend that to people, is not the graphs. It's the way in which you are bringing to those graphs a picture, a frame of what's going on here, and it's, I'd love you to just talk a little bit about that, about how you function. As a way of saying to clergy, to pastors, here's a way you need to be engaging. Am I making sense in what I'm asking you? Hopefully. I'll say what I can say in response to that. My way of autobiography, I was inducted into sociology in a kind of a, what has been called a humanistic sociology, like it's very interesting theory, it's very interested in people's experience, it's very interested in what's happening at a macro picture, especially with modernity, how is modernity changed the human experience? And then since then, of course, postmodern, post human, all that stuff. And not just a kind of a scientist, show me the data, this, that, which is to say, data themselves don't mean anything, they don't say anything, they don't have any significance apart from some framework of concern, of interest, about what they tell us about the world. So in my view, social science is not just this science for its own's sake, but it's a way to give us a bigger picture, understanding and analysis of what's happening in the world so that we can figure out what we're going to do with that, what our life is like, what's going on around us. Yeah, so I see sociology as sort of an under laborer for the world, for society, for humans and communities to better understand what's going on and what they want to, what they should do about that, and to foster these kind of conversations, you know, to foster deliberation. So it's very much kind of a participatory, so it's not an elite of sociology or it's not a statistic, it's a serving people. So in so far as I do sociology religion, and that's not the only thing I do, but in so far as I do, what I have to say about what's going on in the world should and does, I hope, report these kind of conversations so that everyone isn't running around. I'm not saying people are ignorant, I'm saying, all of us, including me, live our individual lives. You know, we have very little exposure, it's most of what we know is mediated through the media, sociology I think provides a way to get a bigger picture frame of what's going on, and so it's not just our own individual perspectives. So clergy, again, so the implication for clergy is, and I know they already do this, but I hope that my work contributes. Here's what's going on around you, you're part of it, but it's not all your fault necessarily. You haven't failed just because things are going in a certain direction. And also if this is what's going on around, what would it mean or look like to respond well or faithfully to that? So this gives us a bigger frame within which that quiet revival, faulty research took place and maybe you're saying part of the problem is that obviously there's an excitement in parts of the church seeing these statistics indicating an uptick, but what you're saying is that you're only looking at a very small part of the picture, there's a huge change across people's attitudes to religion, belief, the mysterious, the reality of the world. And we're not doing this bit of research on what's happening in the churches, but right over there, there's all sorts of other stuff going on. So if you just concentrate on this, you're actually missing the bigger picture. What you're saying is there's lots of people searching for meaning in lots of different ways. And yes, you've got this tiny little bit of data that makes you excited, but step back a bit and look at the much bigger frame. Yeah, it's much bigger and more complex than that. And also, even though I've said it's not just data's meaningless, I mean, I think the world would be much better if people learned some basic methodology and statistics to be skeptical of, like, wait a minute, it can't be that in five years, the number of youth and whales have tripled how religious they are. Like, that's just not possible. Yeah. Yeah. And in some ways, what you're saying, it's very resonant of the arguments of Mary Harrington. I don't feel familiar with Mary's work, but she will say she'll talk about, you know, the revival, not the one I ordered, you know, there's something happening, but it's not what we thought it was. Yeah, yeah. And what I would like to, I mean, this is basic difference between sociology and a lot of what goes on in seminaries. What I would like to think, how I would like things to be is not necessarily what's really going on. Like, just because I want wishful thinking again is not helpful. But at the same time, there'll be some priests listening to this, you'll say, but hold on a minute. I am seeing large numbers of young people coming to my church. We did have record number of baptisms this year, I'm sure that's true. And that may be the beginning of something big, but that's local and it's anecdotal so far. It's not to dismiss it. It could be great. I mean, and there's much, I think there's potentially a lot to be learned. Okay. What's going on there? What's driving that? Even if it's just local and anecdotal, because it could speak to something bigger. But the idea of revival means at a big picture, national level, there's the needless moving. That's not happening. This is where the listening is so helpful, isn't it? Because if you really do get deep into the detail of why somebody is turning up, what is it that's actually motivating to you? It's just reminding me of another guest we had who was telling us about a young woman who came to their church who had done that sort of mat-fried Bishop Barron journey and she'd done this big sort of online studying period of time in her life. And she came to the church and wanted to become a Catholic. And then she was absolutely shocked when she realized it involved becoming part of a community. She thought it was a solitary journey. And she actually found that really hard because through COVID, she was a very young person. She'd become very, very isolated. And so that requires like a whole different approach, you know, how does the established church community receive somebody like that? Well, maybe she could have been pointed to the Egyptian and Syrian desert mists, you know, monks and isolated mystics or maybe or maybe I mean, I think this is the community is a part of this, especially with social media and COVID. We know for a fact there's this sort of a desperation among many, many, especially young people. They literally don't many don't even know how to make community anymore, like boomers at least would know how to try to make it happen. A lot of young people, they're literally like, I wouldn't even know, like they're only friends or at work. So on the one hand, there's both a suspicion of community because community feels like it could be coercive, there could be group think. On the other hand, there's a desperate longing to be part of something like that. And so I think that needs to really be thought, like, how does that work? That organizational forms does that take that on the one hand, doesn't force people into something that's not going to work. It's not necessary. And on the other hand, I don't think the on the other hand, the approach of like, we'll make this easy for you. This won't require anything of you, like that's, that's not a deal either, you know. In one sense, what you're saying is that we're in a space where let's take the language of community, that in a church, comprise the bloomers or that, you bring kind of an assumption or a habit around that. And yet, what you're saying is that. There is this longing for community, whatever it might mean, but we've got to listen, we've got to step outside what we've built, and we've got to listen in a way that we ask, what does it mean amongst these people to construct community? Yeah. Or what? And in this kind of social order, yeah, so just for a concrete example, in American religion, it's always been congregational and the general model that's received and still dominant in traditional religion is kind of hub and spoke. We have a centralized congregation to be religious means you come to us, and here are the scheduled times, and you should dress like this. And here's what we're going to do. Is that necessary? You know, I'm not saying sell all the church buildings, but in youth ministry, in the US, there have been some who've been saying, instead of making youth come to us at these times, so that we can have fun and study the Bible and entertain them. We should be out there in their lives. We should be going to their football games. We should be going, like visiting them at lunch at school or whatever, like maybe this is mission, I don't know, I don't know the doctrinal stuff behind this, but I think organizationally in a society that's organized by networks now and not brick and mortar top down or at least for young people, especially, what might that mean? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know the answer, but it looks like a perhaps a, do we talk about the congregation or do we talk about what it means to be a Christian, you know, being out there in the world among people, the activity that matters, it's not just that within the church walls, it's in everyday life. So I think when you were speaking earlier about listening and we were talking about the authentic life, living the authentic life, I mean, we're really talking about what we mean by evangelization, aren't we, you know, that evangelization is not just proselytizing, it's not just proclaiming, it's how we live and living among our neighbours rather than having that rather kind of almost transactional, consumerist thing, like you come to us and we'll give you something. Yeah, exactly. This is more like a, how we lived, how we live and then I think it was put by Benedict that said, you know, the church grows by attraction, not by being in transmit mode. Right. Yes. Yeah, that'd be one way to put it. And I'm not saying, I'm sure there are times for large gatherings. Again, I'm way on thin ice here. This is not my area of anything, but I don't want to be misunderstood. Yeah, I'm not saying liquidate collective worship or something like that, but people live their lives now in in their homes and apartments and public places at work, at bars, pubs, whatever like. So I think that needs to be thought through. It does. It does. Yeah. And, you know, this sociologist, this gets us into all kinds of questions about the ways in which, for example, the notion of congregation emerged in modern Western cultures. And why, your point is, why are we stuck with that when it comes to thinking about the world into which we've entered? And that raises all kinds of other things is that when you have a whole system in Protestantism in which it's clergy, its priests are trained to be able to function when people come to a certain place to get certain things, and you're suggesting that that's a pretty obsolete way of understanding where the culture is. That's scary stuff. Yeah. It's very scary stuff. It goes back to generational, boomers can very much feel obsolete themselves. Yeah. It's behind need or a huge amount of work to retool. I'm not saying there are any easy answers or that there are any answers, they're not asking for that. But I like here's just another, I think about community. It may be that what many young people want now would be a community meeting, 12 people at a dinner table that get together for dinner every so often and converse. No expectations, no selling the gospel, rather than look at our parish, we have worship together and then we have fellowship after. Maybe they want both, but I think something about sitting down eating meal with people. Huge. Yeah. I don't know England. Did somebody invent something called Alpha or something that's like that? Oh, I don't think that's. I don't know about these things. No, no. Right, one of the most attractive things about Alpha are people sitting down having a meal together. No question about it. Yeah. Or we need to take out at the park. Yeah. All kinds of things. I mean, we're certainly hearing a lot of stories like this, Chris, you know, as people come to us and grassroots stories of basically about relationship, about people feeling cold to certain kinds of relational or associational forms on the ground. We're hearing, you know, sometimes people who were ordained pastors, even critical generally, who are feeling like their mission is outside the church. Maybe it's hanging out at McDonald's and chatting to people, you know, or in the GP surgery or, you know, there are different places where people gather as you've said. One pastor that we know became a barber. Yes. Right. Oh, that'd be a great occupation. But the other implication of this, I'm just off the top of my head, the other implication is the model of the clergy as the one who does the ministry and the parishioners of the one who gets served has got to change too. It's the whole community. It's just living a way of life. Yes. So this takes us into the territory where some people are talking about the new monasteries or some form of, you know, a shared community life with a rule at the heart about it that's not in a removed position away from the city, but within the neighborhood. We're hearing a couple of stories around this that people are trying this, but I can believe it. I mean, that would be a way for, you know, if there was, if there was an easy way for people just to encounter the authentic life on an everyday basis. It wasn't too strange, but at the same time when they come into it, they do discover that this moral clarity and the mystery and the depth and the tradition, the practices that which is embodied, I hope, in a local embodied form. Yeah. And hopefully doing some gardening and crafting as long with that too. Some work. Yeah. And within the new era of AI, physical work, hands in this oil. Yeah. And new forms of work, potentially, that we haven't, you know, yet thought of as the landscape changes as AI takes on its influence. We need to draw this to a close. Yeah. We could talk for eight years. This has been great, Chris. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's fun talking. Thanks for having me on. And I just want to say, and I mean this genuinely, that some of the best helps not the right word, but your books, Chris, are fabulous. Thank you. And in terms of this question, that many passes and clergy would ask of how do I read what's going on? How do I get at it? You could go to nothing better than some of the books that Chris has written, because that's what he's doing. So thank you very much. I'm glad you did that. Thank you. Yeah. It's been great to meet you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Leaving Egypt. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with another wonderful guest. Meantime, we'd love you to help us reach more people by leaving a review on Apple Podcast. And we really look forward to you joining us again on our next episode. To find out more about us and what we do, check out the show notes. And do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Find us at leavingegypt.com. It will really help us to continue this work. God bless. And see you soon.