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Episode 25 - An Interview with Daniel Dacombe and Ryan T Cragun
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Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe sits down with sociologist and author Ryan T Cragun.
Ryan T. Cragun is a professor of empirical sociology at The University of Tampa. His research focuses on the nonreligious, Mormonism, and has been published in various scholarly journals. He is also the author of several books.
Today, they discuss previous writings, academic author battles, and various secular metaphors.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
it's I hope I can swear on here. But like, I was like, oh, wow, it's done. It's done. Right. you could You can swear on here. We had Cory Doctorow on. You can swear. okay. Okay.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to The Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens.
00:00:38
Speaker
Welcome to the conversation.
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello everyone.
Dr. Ryan Cragen's Background and Upbringing
00:00:44
Speaker
My name is Daniel Daycomb and I'm one of the hosts of the Voice of Canadian Humanism podcast. On this podcast, we like to feature the voices that are involved in, leading or important to humanism and secularism in Canada and beyond.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm very pleased to be joined by today's guest, award-winning sociologist, author and professor, dr Ryan Cragen. ah Ryan T. Cragen is professor of empirical sociology at the University of Tampa.
00:01:10
Speaker
His research focuses on the non-religious and Mormonism has been published in various scholarly journals. He's also the author of several books. Ryan, welcome to our humble podcast. Delighted to be here. I'm excited for the conversation.
00:01:22
Speaker
I am as well. I've been ah reading some of your work and your books over the years. And one of the benefits of being involved in this podcast is that we get to have conversations like this. And I've been looking forward to it for a while.
00:01:36
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, so it should be fun. One of the things that we like to do when we start these interviews, especially when it's with a researcher who's working in the area of religion and secularism, is to ask our guests a bit about themselves, ah namely the cultural and religious environment they grew up in and what their journey was like to get to doing the research they are now.
00:01:58
Speaker
I'd like to ask you if you're willing to to share that. Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is yes, but I need to make an appointment with my therapist afterwards. So I'll let you decide if you're comfortable. Yeah. ah no No therapist required. I'm happy to to talk about it.
Dr. Cragen's Religious Journey and Academic Path
00:02:12
Speaker
So listeners probably caught, ah you know, I studied the non-religious and I also study Mormonism. So not surprisingly, my background is in Mormonism. I'm from a Utah originally, small town, Utah, very, very small town. i i remember...
00:02:27
Speaker
in my application to graduate school, I actually used that. So i had to write, you know, a personal statement and I said, the weekend activities, this is absolutely true. The weekend activities when I was growing up were rodeos and crash up derbies. Do you know what crash up derbies are?
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah. We have some of them in rural Canada as well. Yeah. So just smashing cars until only one is still running, right? Yeah. but That legitimately was my hometown. There still is not a ah stoplight in my hometown where I grew up in Morgan, Utah.
00:02:56
Speaker
um And the other thing I like to point out, this is very much dating myself, right? It's like I was born in the 70s, but in my hometown when I was growing up, there were more mink because they were using them for fur coats than there were people.
00:03:10
Speaker
Okay. So, yeah. So you probably heard like there are more sheep in New Zealand than there are people. It was mink where I grew up, right? So ah very small town. um At the time when I was growing up, it was between 89 and 91% LDS in that community.
00:03:23
Speaker
mormon or lds in that community And we actually knew like everybody who was not a member of the church. um Luckily, I can say like, I wasn't the one who was badgering the non-members like join. I actually, he was friends with some who were not members. There was one who was a Presbyterian, right? um And he was a good friend.
00:03:43
Speaker
um So I did grow up in ah in a very kind of small community where almost everybody was Mormon. um My family is all Mormon, right? I have pioneer ancestry, if we know the history. So goes all the way back on my dad's side. So my dad's side... ah Yeah. My my great great grandfather was named Mormon Cragen. Okay. they were actually sent to settle part of Utah, which is actually where my parents live now. They've moved back there.
00:04:11
Speaker
So long, long history with that. um Basically kind of what did me in, if you will, I had questions. I was a very good devout Mormon. I kept a journal.
00:04:22
Speaker
And so I do have documentary evidence. I'm not recreating this, right? But I have documentary evidence of me occasionally going like, That doesn't make any sense, right? So it's in my journal that I like i know, but I was pretty in and a pretty devout believer.
00:04:35
Speaker
And then I served a mission. So I went to Costa Rica um for two years, from 96 to 98. And it was really on that. So prior to my mission, I was gonna be pre-med. I was gonna go to medical school was the was the the plan.
00:04:49
Speaker
On my mission, i basically was like, all right, look, and I wrote this again, like this is, it's not a direct quote, but it's pretty close. I basically wrote down either Mormonism is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the planet or is the world's biggest fraud. And now I have to figure it out.
00:05:06
Speaker
Okay. so So I kind of, but like I was getting very serious about this. I came home from my mission, went to the University of Utah. My parents actually met at BYU at Prigham Young University. That's where they met and got married.
00:05:17
Speaker
They wanted me to go there. I didn't want to go there because I didn't want people to telling me what I had to study. Right. It was a little bit of a free spirit. So I'm back at the University of Utah. I actually schwitt switched from biology pre-med to psychology, just trying to understand religion.
00:05:33
Speaker
So my undergrad degree is actually in psychology. I took one sociology course, didn't even cover religion in that course, um read a number of things that really were pushing me down a path of like deconstruction, which I hate using that term because I mean it in a very specific way versus how a lot of ah other people.
00:05:50
Speaker
um When I say deconstruction, I'm talking about like the social construction of reality by Berger and Luckman, which i don't know if you've ever read that book. um I have not, but yeah I'm aware of its existence. okay I'm not making that up. I am aware.
00:06:01
Speaker
So um great book, right? From the, I want to say fifties or sixties. I actually teach it occasionally, but um I read it in a communication class of all places. And it like, they mentioned religion. It's not really the focus. They're just like deconstructing reality, ah social reality.
00:06:18
Speaker
And that was pretty mind blowing. And then at right at the end of undergrad, I kind of already knew I was going to go to graduate school. I happened to pick up a introduction to sociology textbook and the way that that chapter on religion described religion as a social construct. I was like, these are my people that this is what I need to do.
00:06:36
Speaker
So, I was still devout. Uh, I got married right around the end of grad undergrad, but I decided I'm going to go to graduate school to try
Transition to Humanism and Secularism
00:06:45
Speaker
and figure this out. So I was still just trying to figure i was doing me search, right? This is not uncommon. I'm trying to figure me out.
00:06:50
Speaker
yeah Um, yeah. So ended up going to graduate school, ah some of the details don't matter, but conveniently the a person had just kind of started at the university where I ended up going, who studied religion.
00:07:05
Speaker
And for that whole first year, i really wasn't reading a whole lot about religion. i was still devout, but definitely questioning a lot at this point. um Made a good friend who was an evangelical Christian at the time, who was in the same stage in his life of trying to figure all of these things out. And basically over that course of that one year,
00:07:23
Speaker
we were really pushing each other in a lot of ways. And at the end of that first year of graduate school, I couldn't teach, right? So it was that only after your second year that you could actually start teaching over the summer. So I had an entire summer and yeah, i should have probably been working on like research or something, but I was like,
00:07:38
Speaker
Nope, i'm I'm digging in, right? This is my year to just like yeah figure this out. And I just started reading all the stuff that I wasn't supposed to read before that. And it took about six weeks and I was like, holy shit.
00:07:51
Speaker
it's I hope I can swear on here. But like, i was like, oh, wow, it's done. It's done. Right. you could You can swear on here. We had Cory Doctorow on. You can swear. okay. I didn't know he had a potty mouth. That's good. um Because I do too. He dropped a few.
00:08:06
Speaker
yeah All right. That's good. We had we had a good chat. Excellent. So it was around that time in your second year digging in it. took about six weeks from the moment of, I am going to look at the forbidden knowledge to, oh dear, the forbidden knowledge has shown me why it's forbidden.
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I can go into details if people are really interested, but but at the end of the day, you know it was a a lot of things. Six weeks, and I was like, I'm definitely not Mormon. Another month, and I was like, I'm definitely not Christian, right? Right, right. And then, you know, it was it it took time after that, and I think this is one of the...
00:08:41
Speaker
and I'm not trying to point fingers, I'm not blaming anybody, but you know, this is 2002, right? right What would have been amazing is if I could have just been like, hey, I don't think I believe in God anymore on Google, right?
00:08:55
Speaker
And it popped up and it's like, maybe you're a humanist, right? I came to humanism pretty quickly after that, but it took a few years to find it, right? And and that was, I think, at some level kind of frustrating,
00:09:08
Speaker
that I was like, why was I not able to just immediately find my intellectual home of like, this is where I actually belong. um It just took a little while to find it because there isn't a great online presence for humanists. I hate to say that, but I think that's still kind of true.
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, we're a little thin on the ground, I think, because just being an either atheist, agnostic, non-believer, whatever your secular turn of phrase of preference is, doesn't automatically kind of connect you with all the other people around you who might not believe in something supernatural, but also want to make the world a better place. yeahp Exactly.
00:09:44
Speaker
It's a little tough to find that community. It's interesting. You mentioned in 2002, that was kind journey. 2002, I was in college. ah you know. your journey in two thousand and two i was in bible college so ah i know and But in our Bible college, we had a a sociology professor who was teaching a sociology of religion class.
00:10:07
Speaker
And that was it tough one for everybody who went through it because he actually was a really good <unk>s exactly was like a really good academic. He's got actually a fair number of publications now, and he's edited a sociology textbook or two, and he's you know, was was really pushing people saying, hey, let's ask these questions. And then people were kind of having these little breakdowns back in dorm, like, oh my gosh, religion is a social construct. What do we do?
00:10:31
Speaker
ah i you know it didn't It didn't push me all the way out, but definitely ah launched me on a more progressive trajectory that i I don't know if I would have eventually deconstructed or whatever word we're going to use for that all the way without some of those earlier experiences in sociology. It was kind of impressive to see some people walk that line still being able to you know say, I still ascribe to the the beliefs, but I'm also kind of acknowledging that, and gosh, this sure looks like a social construct at times.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, the the fun part is like I can genuinely say today, like I teach a class called Witches, Satanists, and Atheists, which is kind of my sociology of religion class. um The goal in there is not to get anybody to like give up their religion.
00:11:17
Speaker
i'm I'm not interested in that at the end of the day. Do I want them to think very critically? 100%. And so i'm I'm very interested in pushing them to think and understand how sociologists think about religion, which clearly it's a social construct. And like, we we we do a lot of that.
00:11:34
Speaker
But at the end of the day, i don't I don't care if people walk away from that class like, you know, i I have changed the way I think about religion, but I'm still religious. I'm like, well, good, that's great. that's not my My purpose is not to challenge that, right? It's to get you to just think.
Exploration of Sociology and Secularization Theory
00:11:48
Speaker
So I'm glad that there was another sociologist out there who was teaching religion, who did the same thing that like, he wasn't trying to get you to leave religion, right? Like that's not at the end of the day, my goal. It's just to get you to think about it from a sociological perspective.
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah. And isn't it an interesting how ah once you stop ascribing to a worldview that requires you or the people around you to to ah to believe the correct truth claims in order to achieve some kind of salvation, once you stop believing that,
00:12:18
Speaker
you can actually relax yeah a lot more in your personal relationships and you can actually be genuine with people instead of the, I actually don't know if, if in Mormonism, you guys called it this too, but the, the friendship evangelism.
00:12:31
Speaker
Oh, well, yeah. ah Building relationships of trust is the language that they would have used. Okay. That makes sense. Sounds a little creepier, I think that way, but yeah, that's the way they would frame it. Yeah.
00:12:43
Speaker
Well, ah whatever you call it, it is a bit of a disingenuous kind of relationship structure, isn't it? Where you're just trying to get you know just trying to get close enough to someone that you can then give them the you know the the sales pitch.
00:12:56
Speaker
um Reminds me of that film with Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito, The Big Kahuna, if you've ever seen it. which Sounds familiar. Oh, see, I always bring up media that our guests haven't seen. And this is a really terrible way to do a podcast. ill that that a couple of say a bunch of salespeople going on ah on a trip and Kevin Spacey is the big salesperson. But there's a younger but ah Baptist with them who winds up ah like trying to convert the person they're making this big deal too to to...
00:13:24
Speaker
to evangelical Christianity instead of selling him you know the product. And so there's this whole like, it's a great sociology movie, actually. And I think that the person I watched it with was that sociology professor back in Bible college.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yeah, he had a movie night at his house. So a bunch of us came over and watched that and it gave us even more questions because that's... that's what a good sociologist does yeah i I do make my students watch um a variety of movies but the only fictional movie that I've ever assigned in my classes is the Exorcist everything else is um is is documentary right so uh this weekend this past weekend they just watched a movie uh called Twist of Faith about a guy who's sexually assaulted by a Catholic priest and like that stuff but
00:14:10
Speaker
Next, they're watching a documentary about Jonestown, right so which is great. And then i don't know if you've seen the movie Kumarae. Have you heard of Kumarae? I haven't. Oh, this is a great movie. So it's a guy who's got, yeah, you like everybody should watch this. It's it's wonderful.
00:14:26
Speaker
um He's obviously of Indian descent, right? But he's American. So he's lived in the US. He's from New Jersey, right? Right. um But he gets this idea of like, what if I just created a religion? Like, could I do it?
00:14:38
Speaker
It's all awesome. him So he actually goes to India for a little bit and just like practices um yoga, right? So he's like practicing yoga and like goes to study with some gurus to pick up their lingo and then comes back and like rebrands himself and gets an assistant.
00:14:53
Speaker
And he he creates a religion where the primary message, it's a amazing. The primary message is I'm not real. Right? So he's literally telling people, I'm not real.
00:15:06
Speaker
And he gets a huge, like not huge, but like 30 people come to believe that he's a genuine guru. They're confessing everything to him. And he keeps just telling them like, you know, that in in an in in Indian accent, right? So he does a really good job with this.
00:15:20
Speaker
So he makes him out to be like a guru. He grows his hair long. He's got a long beard or whatever. He practices yoga, but they're all confessing all of these things. And it's like a year long process. And then at the very end, He cuts off all of his hair, shaves everything, drops his accent. And he's like, my name's actually whatever his name is. Right. But he's like, yeah none of it was real.
00:15:39
Speaker
And it's just, it's brilliant to watch the whole thing. Some people run up and hug him and they're like, oh, this was amazing. Others feel completely betrayed, but it's, it's just like this brilliant movie where he shows how easy it is to start a religion.
00:15:53
Speaker
It's amazing. It's wonderful. Everybody should watch it. Well, that's on my weekend watch list now. I'm, and and now you And you have to go watch The Big Kahuna. We'll exchange some notes. will. Okay, sounds perfect.
00:16:04
Speaker
yeah And then the listeners can tell us which they liked best, i guess. You know, I actually... ah One of the things i I think we might want to do before we go much further is on the podcast, we've interviewed several different kinds of academics who work in the different areas of the study of religion. Most of them have been psychologists of one type or another.
00:16:24
Speaker
um You're actually the second sociologist that we've had on. ah Dr. Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme was on. um But I thought this might be a good ah good time to ask on behalf of our listeners who may only have a vague idea.
00:16:37
Speaker
um of what sociology is where it actually is. Because most of them probably know like your psychology, people lie on a couch. Anthropology, people go in jungles or something. But what's sociology?
00:16:48
Speaker
Sure. No, that's a fair question. So I will occasionally try and draw this distinction for my students. And the weird thing is I dabble a little bit from probably social psychology all the way up to macro sociology. But um The way I often think about it, it's not a perfect distinction, is that psychologists are really interested in like the individual, what's going on inside their head, and then at the most social level, how society influences the individual. But it's really kind of very individualistic, right? It's about the individual. Sociology is all about society.
00:17:22
Speaker
So we can go from that same level of like how society influences the individual. So that'd be sociological social psychology. This is yeah really weird, wonky details all the way up to really macro stuff of like trying to understand how flows of people go around the world and migration patterns, right? um Most sociologists of religion are going to be looking at that kind of macro trends and in in religion. So like, why are religions growing? Why are they dying?
00:17:49
Speaker
um Why is there kind of gender patterns or race patterns or um even social
Non-Religious Identity and Community Building
00:17:54
Speaker
class patterns in religion, ah different things like that. So there there are lots of different aspects of that, but it's all the social, right? So it's like what's happening is in groups of people.
00:18:04
Speaker
um Again, you can get down to the individual level, but generally we don't, it's all about groups. And so sociology is about groups. um it's it's interesting because a lot of people don't know what sociology is right psych is very clearly like demarcated their brand and everybody knows what that is and sociology we really don't even though um it's it's going to sound awkward but like we're the parent discipline of criminology we're the parent discipline of public health we're the parent didnt discipline of um uh political science right all of them actually come out of sociology it's just they've taken that subset of what we do and
00:18:38
Speaker
I hate to say cannibalized, but in a sense cannibalized it. And now they've specialized and it's pretty easy. Right. So if if your parents are like, Hey, what are you studying? You're like Oh, I'm in criminology. They're like, oh there's a clear career path for you. Right. Yeah.
00:18:50
Speaker
But then if they ask in sociology, it's like, well, what are you going to do? And this is where we struggle. Right. Cause like social work. Right. Like, I mean, there are paths. Yeah. yeah And any NGO, right? Demographers, people who run censuses, all of those things come out of sociology. It's just we're like the really broad discipline.
00:19:10
Speaker
And then people have begun to specialize and cannibalize the discipline in interesting ways. Sorry, that was a very big, broad answer. No, it's a great answer because, and and in even like public understandings of like those slice disciplines, as I sometimes call them, ah can be very like criminology, like you assume law enforcement, but not necessarily. Like it could also be working in housing, yeah right?
00:19:32
Speaker
ah Or in other like poverty reducing public health programs. Like these are... ah These are disciplines or these are areas of some social action where a lot of people do a lot of really good work.
00:19:45
Speaker
That's just behind the scenes and not as maybe direct or individualistic as getting something talk about their feelings. Yeah, for sure. Which is a very, again, like a a narrow slice of psychology itself. When people ask me what what I'm studying and I say social psychology, they're like, so you're not actually going to help anybody. im like, well, no, not like...
00:20:05
Speaker
individuals right maybe like a few people at once but yeah so thank you for that explanation I think it's gonna it's gonna scratch an itch for some people who are curious um speaking of studies I actually came to know your research through my own studies over the years which um I mentioned Bible college. There was a lot of stops along the way to to today.
00:20:31
Speaker
ah But i I noticed your name and names associated with yours kind of coming up over and over again in different pockets of research as the you know as the waters of psychology and sociology were overlapping in the in the area of religion.
00:20:44
Speaker
And one of the first books of yours that I picked up is a book called Beyond Doubt, the Secularization of Society, yeah which you wrote with Phil Zuckerman Isabella Castlescrant.
00:20:57
Speaker
yeah Okay, Swedish. yeahp And in that book, i ah i found your explanation well your collective explanation of secularization theory ah to be really compelling. And I have more questions about the other books, but I wanted to ask what brought the three of you together to to describe secularization theory and what is secularization theory? Sure.
00:21:23
Speaker
Yeah. ah So a two-parter. Yeah, two-parter. Together. um So here's the fun story. and then what is secularization? Got it. um I had an idea. And, you know, maybe this will be entertaining to your listeners because I wish I could just say that I'm like truly objective scholar and I don't have any kind of petty vendettas against people. Yeah.
00:21:51
Speaker
the The reality of academia, right, is like occasionally we do have these things. Yeah. um So there there's he is now passed away. Right. But there's this guy out there. His name is Rodney Stark. I don't know if you've ever read anything by Rodney Stark or heard the name.
00:22:04
Speaker
I have. You have. Yeah. So he's a big enough name that like people have heard of him. Um, I hadn't heard of him until I went to graduate school. and then of course in graduate school, I picked up his probably most famous book, acts of faith, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, uh, published in 2000. And I read it and I kind of found it compelling at the time. Luckily my advisor in graduate school, Reese Williams, who is now retired and is amazing, right? Absolutely wonderful advisor.
00:22:29
Speaker
We sat down and had like a really good conversation and like he totally dissected that book and really helped me see through it. And um there were a number of things that happened, you know, as a result, but I began to realize like Rodney Stark was actually kind of a terrible sociologist.
00:22:45
Speaker
um in in In some ways, and I'm not trying to like speak ill of the dead or whatever, right? But um this came to a head in a couple of interesting ways. So one in 2011, and just giving some numbers, we'll come back to this when we talk about secularization. Yeah.
00:23:01
Speaker
1990 in the US, we can do Canada if we need to, right? I won't know the numbers as well. 1990 in the US, 7% of adults said they had no religious affiliation. By 2001, it had
Trends in Secularization and Data Analysis
00:23:11
Speaker
doubled.
00:23:11
Speaker
So it was at 14%. And it was going up, okay? Around about 2011, Rodney Stark comes out and he's like, it's not true. secularization is not happening.
00:23:22
Speaker
This is um just like natural variation that we would see in surveys. And we're like, dude, it's more than doubled. And we see it in every survey. So he actually gets the money together because he's such a big name. He gets the money together to fund his own survey called the Baylor religion survey.
00:23:38
Speaker
um And his data come back at like 11%, but they had asked the questions in weird ways. And so it was like, no, 11% is within the margin of error of, you know, 7%. And I'm like, well, you've got a shitty sample then, right? But like he's got all sorts of issues, but he's literally just denying reality.
00:23:55
Speaker
um So like that happens, and he's kind of establishing himself as the anti-secularization person, which had already done, right? He'd been fighting this battle between him and um Steve Bruce for about 20 years already.
00:24:08
Speaker
I was too young to know like this was actually happening, but I i i learned all the history later. um And then there was a bit of a... a kerfuffle. um I probably shouldn't give too many details, but basically I reviewed one of Phil Zuckerman's books, right? For ah the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. So Phil's a co-author of mine now.
00:24:29
Speaker
At the time, I didn't really know Phil, right? So I'd been asked because I was doing stuff on non-religion. He wrote a book and in his book, he actually said, secularization is happening and this raises all sorts of challenges for Rodney Stark and Christian Smith and a bunch of other scholars who have said like, no, it's not really happening.
00:24:48
Speaker
Well, Phil's book, which is all about like the decline of religion in Denmark, and he has really good data on this. It pretty clearly shows that like demand for religion has declined. And so in my review, I was like, I think he's basically made the point, like it's done, right? Like demand can vary.
00:25:05
Speaker
Long story short, Christian Smith ah doesn't like my review. He's an endowed scholar at Notre Dame and he writes me CC's Rodney Stark and like a whole bunch of big names in the field, including the editor of the journal and the book review editor. And he's like, I think you should pull that review because I don't think it's fair.
00:25:25
Speaker
And I'm i'm a newly minted PhD. Like I've been out of graduate school for two years and I'm like, what the hell is going on? Like these are the yeah biggest names in the field and they're bullying me to try and change what I've written, even though I think it's factually accurate.
00:25:40
Speaker
So luckily I reach out to my my mentor, Rhys Williams, and I'm like, dude, what do I do? And he said, well, you've got a choice. Yeah. He said, you can try and keep them happy, but you know you'll be capitulating.
00:25:51
Speaker
Or you can just stand up and say, like look, what Phil said was accurate. Here's what you've said. Here's how it shows that you're wrong, and you can actually fight this battle. Right? now That kind of sounds like who I am, right? Like, I'm just kind of the fighter, right? Like, I hate bullies. I hate, hate bullies.
00:26:09
Speaker
So I did, you know, just a little bit of extra work to make sure that I had like direct quotes from Christian Smith and Rodney Stark and all these big names where they had said these things. And then I wrote back, I wrote back and, you know, CC'd everybody, but then I included a bunch of other people on the other side.
00:26:27
Speaker
So I CC'd like my side, right? And I was like, look, this is the reality of like, this is what you said. Phil's got it right. You guys are all wrong. And we got into this pissing match, right? Where i went back and forth for like three or four emails. And then Rodney Stark of all people, right? he He deigns to step into this conversation and he says, I've got Phil's book on my desk.
00:26:50
Speaker
It's sitting right
Cultural Recommendations and Conclusion
00:26:51
Speaker
here. And here's what he says. So what? That's it. He just drops a two word. So what? With a question mark. And Phil is actually CC'd on the email chain.
00:27:03
Speaker
Right? Okay. So Phil, I'm sorry. I hope this isn't like boring people. This is great. This is what we're all here for. I mean, it's, you it's, it's really putting to lie the, the ivory tower academia stuff. Honestly, it's just like a musical and the two different sides, the sharks and the jets are approaching each other in the street and snapping their fingers. Oh, that's what's happening. Best side story. That's what it is. Please continue. Yeah, which is hilarious, right? So there are a bunch of people involved.
00:27:32
Speaker
Phil then responds to Rodney Stark and he's like, you know, and Phil, if you've never met him, you should have Phil on here. He's he's like, I try to be an engaging speaker. Phil's like me times 10. He's like super engaging. He's awesome.
00:27:44
Speaker
He's on my wishlist. Oh yeah. He's great. He really, really is great. um He jumps in and he's like, so what? Like, that's all I get. You know, I put years of my life into this book. I'm taking you seriously. I've read your books. I i teach your books in my classes.
00:28:00
Speaker
I've really tried to engage with what you're doing. And that's what led me to do what I'm doing right now, this whole book. And all I get from you is a so what? Phil unloaded on Rodney Stark.
00:28:13
Speaker
And Rodney Stark's response was, again, just super dismissive. He was just an asshole. Right. And I had seen this in other ways and he's kind of well known as just being a big bully and kind of a jerk. And he's also a terrible sociologist who's made factually incorrect, incorrect claims.
00:28:27
Speaker
He he's a terrible statistician. He messed up his numbers and like, like had made wildly fallacious claims in all sorts of ways. So all of these interactions eventually lead me up to, ah you know, I've been out for a few years. I finally get tenure and Phil and I,
00:28:44
Speaker
So I had the idea. It was floating in the back of my mind. This is a long story to get to that your question, right? but and That's all right. Phil and I were invited as part of a grant, right? So we were invited as content experts to to consult on a grant.
00:28:58
Speaker
And the people who did it, they are in Europe. They invited Phil and I and a bunch of other people to the Isle of Lesbos in Greece, right? like Okay. this is This is a long, rambling story. um But we're we're there consulting on this like simulation project, right? And Phil and I are the content experts, because they're trying to simulate like, how does religion decline?
00:29:16
Speaker
That's what we do, right? So we're not the simulation people, we're the ones who are helping them build the models. But um we work from like, i don't know, 9 a.m. until like 2 p.m. and then we have the afternoons off And i don't know if you've ever been to the Isle of Lesbos. Have you been to the Isle of Lesbos? I have not Beautiful island. No, it's absolutely gorgeous.
00:29:33
Speaker
um From where we were, we could they let us rent bikes. It was like a two-mile ride down to this beautiful lagoon where, if I'm not mistaken, was it Aristotle actually lived for two years? And so there's like a bust of Aristotle there, right? And there's this beautiful bay.
00:29:49
Speaker
And so I'm out there with Phil one day. And I'm like, Phil, I have an idea for a book. Right. I said, what I want to write is a book called Stark. raving mad why rodney stark is wrong about everything
00:30:07
Speaker
um to phil's credit he's like well we can't make it about him right and that's totally true it can't be about rodney stark it has to be about his ideas but i still love the name of that right that was my original working title was stark raving mad um so we talked about it and it's like you know all of the ways that rodney stark got secularization wrong like he was just wrong about all these things We talked about it literally on that, and like in the bay, we're just like waiting in the water. We have this idea.
00:30:35
Speaker
And then we both get busy and like nothing really comes of it for about a year. And then Isabella, who had been like working with Phil on a couple of things, she's like, I want i want to work on a book about secularization.
00:30:46
Speaker
And so Phil was like, well, Ryan just mentioned a book on secularization. So he, to his credit, he brought us all together. And we were actually at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in St. Louis.
00:30:58
Speaker
So Phil was like, hey, why don't we just do dinner? So we went to dinner at some Thai place and we sat down and we were like, let's write this book. We pretty quickly dropped the stark raving mad thing, right? Which I loved, but we dropped that and said, why don't we just make this about secularization?
00:31:12
Speaker
And at the time we were like, no one has really said, Hey, look, the data are overwhelming at this point. It's happening. Like it is happening.
00:31:23
Speaker
Why are we still debating this? And crazy thing is I literally just picked up a book that I'm supposed to review, uh, just came out this year. and this book is denying that secularization is happening. I'm like, what is going on?
00:31:35
Speaker
What's the name of that book? ah God's Warriors. So it looks actually like a pretty good book. Nylei Saia? I don't know her name. I'm gonna i'm probably butchering that. I think a lot of it is actually going to be pretty good, but the idea that people are still denying that secularization is happening is kind of mind-boggling to us.
00:31:51
Speaker
So that was kind of the premise of the book, is like, why don't we just lay this out? um And then we kind of divided up the chapters a little bit, and Initially, ah Phil is, I mean, he's not a stats person, right? So he's the one who helped us with like all the stories. And he wrote a couple of those chapters where he did a really good job.
00:32:08
Speaker
I'm usually the stats person, but Isabella is really big into stats. So she ended up doing most of the stats in there and I got tasked with the theory stuff. So I ended up doing all the theory stuff. And originally what Phil wanted was just like a summary.
00:32:21
Speaker
And I was like, no, no, no, no. If I'm going to do this, I'm digging deep into this. And so I ended up um formalizing the theory, right, which um is part of what I think made Acts of Faith by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke so popular, is they had clear definitions, clear propositions, and it made it very testable.
00:32:40
Speaker
And i was like, this is why everybody loved it is because now you can see exactly what they're proposing and then you can go out and test it. So I went through and actually did that. And of course they gave a lot of feedback. So Phil and Isabella were super instrumental in that whole thing.
00:32:53
Speaker
But I was the one who was like, let's just formalize this and make it very testable. And then we can go ahead and show like, look, the evidence is pretty overwhelming at this point in most countries around the world where we have good data and they're, they're meeting certain criteria, right? They have freedom of religion.
00:33:07
Speaker
and they're developing. Secularization is absolutely happening. So that's like the background of the book. You wanted me to define secularization. Secularization is is basically, it's a two-parter, right? So there's the process and the theory.
00:33:19
Speaker
The process is how religion declines over time. But the theory is that modernization, this is a ah paraphrase of Steve Bruce. I got to give him credit. um Modernization causes problems for religion.
00:33:30
Speaker
That's the basic idea. Right. How I like to explain this to my students, I'm about to do this tomorrow actually, right? So I'm actually teaching that book tomorrow to my my class, is I like to ask my students, all right, how many of you drive, right? And most of them say, like well, yeah, yeah, I drive. And I say, okay, how many of you ones understand how an internal combustion engine works?
00:33:50
Speaker
Or even if it's an electric car, like how how many of you understand how it works? Occasionally, and I don't know, Daniel, do do you know how an internal combustion engine works? My father was an engineer, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.
00:34:03
Speaker
Got it. So you do have that insider, right? a Very, very small amount. Yeah. I'll usually get one student who's like, my dad helped me take apart an engine while he was restoring a car one time. But everybody else is like, I have no idea.
00:34:14
Speaker
Yeah. i said, okay. So you don't know how it works, but let's imagine that your car breaks down. How many of you, if your car breaks down, are going to try and pray over it?
00:34:26
Speaker
Or maybe get a priest to anoint it with oil, or maybe even just like sacrifice a chicken and like spill its blood on the car and think that's going to fix it. And they all look at me like, you're crazy. Of course I wouldn't do that.
00:34:36
Speaker
yeah I'm going to take it to a mechanic. And I'm like, and this is exactly what I mean. You don't know how modern things work, but you know somebody does, and it's not magic or religion.
00:34:48
Speaker
Right. Modernization causes problems for religion. It's our modern ways of thinking, right, which yeah are yeah causal explanations that we can actually root in reality, empirical reality.
00:34:59
Speaker
That's what actually causes problems for religion. And then there's like a big, long explanation beyond that, but that's like the short version of understanding what secularization theory is. Okay. Well, I will admit I've had cars that I would have probably tried the chicken thing Yeah.
00:35:13
Speaker
Or like, you know, you get that problematic. Yeah. You get some cars and you're like, do I need a mechanic or a young priest and an old priest or like all of them? like Exercise the demons of this. Yeah. Just, just throw everything on the wall. See what sticks.
00:35:28
Speaker
Just get the car to the next, to the next gas station. That's all you want. ah Thank you for that ah incredible background of that book and the explanation. No apologies needed. um i'm i'm I'm loving all the detail and just how you kind of and brought the this spirit of Aristotle ah into being and created a book. That's that's lovely.
00:35:51
Speaker
if it was Diogenes in that little cove, you probably could have kept the old title, I think. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. ah The book of yours that I read most recently ah is Goodbye Religion, the Causes and Consequences of Secularization, which you wrote with Jesse M. Smith.
00:36:08
Speaker
um That was a great summer read, I have to admit, read over this past summer. um I was intrigued by your conclusions. i was intrigued by your questions.
00:36:18
Speaker
um I think I can say with confidence that Goodbye Religion is the only book on secularization I've read that mentions furries ever. So that was that was that definitely stuck out.
00:36:30
Speaker
um But I was hoping to dive into some questions about them now, about the the book, not about furries. Yeah, but my my expertise on furries is is quite small, actually, unfortunately.
00:36:40
Speaker
so i Unfortunately. Okay, we can unpack that later. ah So the data you use as a foundation for your book, and and Goodbye Religion is one of the most data-driven books that I've read in recent memory that ah that doesn't get bogged down that actually keeps it like pretty accessible. So I don't think people are going to need graduate-level education to read this. Hmm. You explained very clearly the you know the approach you took to gather the data for this book.
00:37:10
Speaker
um Could you tell us a bit about the studies that you did and the kinds of questions you were asking when you were um when you were preparing and and writing Goodbye Religion?
00:37:22
Speaker
oh Could you tell us bit about that? Sure. Yeah, so um both, well so Jesse is really more qualitative, right? I mean, he's he's really the expert. And when I say expert, like this is what he teaches. He's really, really good at qualitative research, and analyzing interview data and other qualitative data.
00:37:42
Speaker
I'm mixed methods. I lean quantitative, right? But I've done lots of interviews and so and even we'll talk about the interviews, but like some of them were mine, right? So it's a mix. But the approach that we decided to take here is a mixed methods book.
00:37:55
Speaker
So it's not just quantitative. It's not just qualitative. We're combining both. And it really does bring our areas of expertise together in a really nice way. So combined, I think we have about 120 interviews that we use for the book somewhere around there. And I think I did 20 or 30 of those. Jesse did the rest um over a roughly 20 year period where we asked people mostly who had left religion about their life history and things that led to that, things like that.
00:38:21
Speaker
um And we can get into some of the details of like where we got those people, how we got them. But they're good life history interviews where we get lots of really rich detail um talking about how this process played out for a lot of these people. And then to kind of work with that, right, we have a bunch of quantitative data. Most of it is the General Social Survey in the U.S., which is kind of the gold standard of survey research.
00:38:47
Speaker
um I say gold standard because um it's just it's just really, really well done. Response rates are amazing. It's representative data. The data are really, really rich. And so I'm kind of mining that and working with that to give us a lot of kind of broad level data. And then we're combining that with our qualitative data.
00:39:05
Speaker
But then we pull on other studies, right? And we'll talk probably about some of those other studies. So we have a time use survey that we use. We use Pew data occasionally. We use world value survey data. We use whatever data we need to actually be able to answer the questions that we're looking at.
00:39:19
Speaker
And of course, the really big question, I mean, the the whole book is basically framed as a series of questions, which was intentional, right? That that was kind of the idea. ah So our first one was like, who is leaving?
00:39:29
Speaker
And then we ask, why are they leaving? Where do they go? What happens to them and how this is affecting society? um So the the the big, I think the big overarching question is like, why are people leaving religion?
00:39:42
Speaker
We actually try and answer that in a very robust and theoretical way using a lot of data. And then, of course, we get into a lot of details about like the consequences. So I think that's the big question. And then we can certainly talk about like our theoretical framing and where we're going with this. But yeah, so that's, I think, the data that we were really working with.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I like how you framed it with those with those questions, kind of leading people through the book of ah this is who's leaving, this is why they might be leaving, and this is kind of what happens to them afterwards. And for the benefit of our listeners, I'm not sure we define it, but when we talk about quantitative versus qualitative data, with quantitative, we're...
00:40:18
Speaker
Usually talk about things that we can assign some kind of numerical value to and then do some statistical stuff with qualitative is much more like people's stories, people's narratives. And then you look for the the themes that emerge in those narratives. A mixed method study would be one that uses both of those approaches.
00:40:35
Speaker
either on the same group of people or as in your book, you have ah different data sets, one qualitative, one quantitative, and you see how they complement each other and explain each other. So that's just for for their ah benefit.
00:40:48
Speaker
um the The big question ah for Well, for me, when I was reading your book, the big question, I think probably the longest chapter, although I might be wrong, is the the why chapter, because that's where you start digging into a lot of ah ah the the factors that are, I think you call them push and pull factors. Push and pull factors. Yeah. um And I was going to ask about those, but I also thought it was interesting how you identified three pathways, right?
00:41:13
Speaker
ah out of religion or into non-religion or into secularism. Like where people end up. yeah Yeah. But you were very clear you're not making a typology of atheists. You weren't saying there's there's not three types of atheists. These are three pathways. Why is that distinction important?
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is actually really, really important. um So I'm going to be very careful. We're getting a little into the weeds now, right? And I hope that's okay. I hope your listeners really care about this. Well, I hope so too, because I do.
00:41:46
Speaker
um I think a lot of people in the kind of secular community, um Laurie Beaman's going to hate that I'm using that word, but like people who are not religious, who care about this, um they have a tendency to think that a lot of people who are not religious are like them.
00:42:03
Speaker
And the reality, based on the data that we have, is that the vast majority of people who leave religion, and even the vast majority of people who are not religious, don't care about religion at all.
00:42:13
Speaker
right ah they were They are arguably what we would call religiously indifferent. They're also the people who just kind of gradually slipped away from religion. um So that is a ah sizable chunk of people.
00:42:26
Speaker
um And I don't even necessarily want to label them in a meaningful way, right? Because yeah maybe they're apatheists, maybe they're indifferent, right? The point is, this is not a central part of who they are, their identity.
00:42:38
Speaker
They're living their lives without religion. And to give credit to to who really deserves this, Isabella Castlestrand in that previous book, right, Beyond Doubt, she's the one who said, actually, they're the most secular individuals.
00:42:51
Speaker
So we had this debate when we were writing that book that we're like, okay, well, what about like the atheist activist who's like actively working against religion? And she's like, no, no, no, religion still matters for them.
00:43:02
Speaker
Yeah. Right. So they're actually more religious, not that they're religious, right? But like more religious, they're actually less secular than the people who are like, I never think about religion. but Religion plays no bearing in my life on a daily basis.
00:43:16
Speaker
I just have zero interest in this question. Yeah, occasionally it'll come up because you know some stupid politician did something or you know somebody did something on the basis of religion, whatever. But on their daily basis, it just doesn't get inside their headspace. right They're the most secular, if you will, people.
00:43:34
Speaker
And so one of the things that Jesse and I were trying to do is say, that's actually the vast majority of them. The vast majority of people who are not religious and leave religion don't want anything to do with it. So we need to then think about, well, what about these other people?
00:43:47
Speaker
Right? Yeah. And then even like to complicate it another way. So we could kind of see that as a continuum of like, how much do you care about religion, even though you're not religious? Right. But then there's like other elements that you can include here of, okay, let's say I left.
00:44:01
Speaker
But what if I'm still spiritual? And I'm gonna use that term recognizing like it's a muddy term. I hate the term, right? But there are plenty of people, i still love this. I used this example the other day.
00:44:13
Speaker
And it was actually one of those, interview the interviewee um who gave me this was in the book, right? okay I don't think this made it into the book, But I remember doing my interview with her and she had said like, oh, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in a God or a higher power. And I was like, okay. right Then later in the interview, i was like, okay, so I just have to ask these questions about like religious practices. so I'm like, do you ever attend religious services? No, no, no. I never attend religious services. You ever pray? And she's like, oh yeah, I pray all the time.
00:44:38
Speaker
And I was like, what the fuck is going on? I'm so confused. Right. But of course I'm doing the interview. So I have to just like yeah blankly go, can you explain that? Right. Like yeah I'm really confused.
00:44:50
Speaker
So she has said, i don't believe in a God or a higher power. That's very clear. And then like two minutes later, she tells me that she prays regularly and I'm like, I'm really confused. Can you explain? She says, oh, um, I'm not praying to a God or a higher power.
00:45:05
Speaker
I'm just sending my thoughts out into the ether. Yeah. Right. And I was like, I just have never even thought about that as a possibility. Right. Like, yeah, I grew up religious.
00:45:18
Speaker
I used to pray, but like, i don't because as soon for me, like, i hate to say this, i but like, logically consistent, right? If I'm not believing in a higher power, what am I going to pray to?
00:45:29
Speaker
Now, this doesn't mean that i don't engage in self-talk. I absolutely engage and so engage in self-talk all the time. I think a lot of us do. But what she was describing, she still used the language for prayer,
00:45:41
Speaker
even though maybe it's self-talk, right? But she's just she's, in a sense, saying, like, this is prayer. And we see this in surveys all the time. I just saw the numbers the other day. It's something like 6% of atheists, people who say, when you ask them their religion, which atheist is not a religion, I get that, right? But they ask it on surveys.
00:45:58
Speaker
About 6% of the people who say they're atheist then say they believe in a God. And I'm like, what is going on here, right? would Like, what? if I've learned anything in my years of being a sociologist, that humans, most humans are not logically consistent.
00:46:12
Speaker
Right. Right. So, so one of the things that we're trying to unpack, right. It's like, okay, we have a continuum from, I care a lot about religion, but I'm not religious. And so I'm kind of working ah to like minimize its impact in society and let me do what I want to do.
00:46:25
Speaker
Right. So there's like that continuum from, I care about it to I don't. And then there's the continuum from like, I don't do anything religious or spiritual at all to the people who are, just on the outside of religion saying like, I pray all the time, I read scripture, I do all of these things.
00:46:40
Speaker
They're still non-religious. They don't have a religious affiliation, but there are all sorts of aspects of arguably the supernatural that still matter to them. So we're trying to capture like all of that diversity and saying, look, these are all people who have left religion.
00:46:54
Speaker
we We're doing a disservice to the empirical data if we don't reflect that it's actually really complicated, right? There are people who range on a lot of spectra how this work this plays out.
00:47:07
Speaker
Right. And if there's one thing we can say about humanity is that we are a complicated species and sometimes we aren't internally consistent. Like you said, we're not always logical.
00:47:19
Speaker
And yeah, I've, I've done the same. I've, I've engaged in this, in the self-talk and that, what am I going to say to myself? You know, you when you were anxious, you used to pray. What do you say now? Well, some of us ah kind of coach ourselves through things.
00:47:33
Speaker
Some of us say the litany against fear from the Dune novels. Whatever works, right? And I think that it's interesting that there's still this recognition that some kind of practice is what I want to do.
00:47:48
Speaker
I'm not going to define it any more than just saying I'm putting thoughts out into the universe, but it's still a practice that I'm kind of deciding to engage in. We need some kind of, you know, some kind of practice to regulate ourselves and to, you know, feel grounded in tough times.
00:48:05
Speaker
And isn't it interesting how the language of religion can be a little adhesive in that way? Yeah. No, I think it's fascinating. One of the other things that popped up in your book was the ah the cliff diving metaphor, which I thought was really fantastic. And it comes in near the end as you're kind of going more of your conclusions. You're describing how believing religion can be different for a different kinds of people.
00:48:35
Speaker
And this kind comes up earlier in your book, too, as you're describing a person who you know grows up in a nominally religious home where you're going to church on Christmas and Easter. Yep.
00:48:46
Speaker
And you, you know, you, you kind of pray a little bit at bedtime and you kind of don't, then like you're, you're in your twenties and you realize, gosh, I haven't really thought about that God stuff in a while. That's,
00:48:56
Speaker
That's a very different journey than someone who like goes to Bible college, goes to seminary, becomes a minister, is doing ministry for 20 years and then walks away from all of it. Those are very, very different stories.
00:49:09
Speaker
And um as someone who fits fairly firmly in the second category, that wasn't 20 years, but it was some time. Right. um I thought your cliff diving metaphor was ah a really great explanation.
00:49:23
Speaker
Would you mind just kind of sharing it with our listeners? I think that would be something that they would really appreciate. Yeah, um it's going to sound weird, right? the the I don't know if this happens to you, right? But it came to me in a dream, right? So it's actually kind of weird. And I do, I used to keep a pen and paper by my bed, but now I don't want to wake up my wife and like turn on the light. So it's on my phone.
00:49:45
Speaker
But I woke up and I was like, ooh, I think I have a metaphor to explain what's going on. Cliff diving, right? And it it it seems really weird, but like it actually does make sense. So basically the argument is,
00:49:57
Speaker
um Life without religion is the pool, right? it's the water at the at the bottom of these cliffs. And then there are cliffs that are different heights, like radically different heights, right? And we kind of joke, and like I don't mean to be mean about this, right? But um some religions, like the difference between being in the water and not is so thin...
00:50:20
Speaker
Right. that It's almost like there's a slide in from Unitarian Universalism straight into the water. And I'm not trying to be mean, like I totally respect Unitarian Universalism, but like the differences are so marginal. Right. It's literally like non doctrinal religion that like there's no there's no doctrine whatsoever. Right. yeah so So for them, like moving in and out of the water is literally just like it's a shelf underwater almost, right?
00:50:42
Speaker
But then you can move up in different levels. So you could have like the the nominal Catholic who, you know they were a Christmas and Easter Catholic, and it just like their parents lost interest, they lost interest.
00:50:53
Speaker
The jump into the water for them is not that high. And the nice thing about like secularization as it's happening is as more people get in the water, they can see the consequences.
00:51:05
Speaker
And we're we're trying to be a little bit careful of like not making it out as though the water is a panacea and everybody's happy and it's wonderful. Right. They can see into the water and realize like it's not shark infested. Not everybody's dead. It's not full of dead bodies. Right. They can they look into the water and it's like it looks fine.
00:51:20
Speaker
Right. Like there are people swimming in the water and it's fine. So for that nominal person, it's not a big jump. It's, you know, five feet or something. It's it's just a little bit of a jump into the water.
00:51:31
Speaker
But then ah the more exclusive religions, ah the religions that are kind of really strict and demand a lot, the cliffs basically get higher until you run into like ah I don't know, a member of Sea Org in Scientology, right? Where that cliff is so high that it's above the clouds.
00:51:50
Speaker
yeah And they are terrified, but they know that they can't stay on the cliff anymore. Like the cliff is going to kill them. They know there's like, there there is a cliff edge, but they don't know what they're jumping into. And so for some people, it is a huge risk. Like this is super scary.
00:52:06
Speaker
yeah They jump and they survive. Right. So, so that's the idea of the the cliff metaphor. But the other nice thing is, is like, of course, as secularization continues, the water level keeps to rise, you know, and like more people are getting in, yeah the water keeps rising.
00:52:20
Speaker
They see more people in there. It just makes it easier and easier for more people to jump off of those cliffs. And you know, the cliffs of course are shifting. People are moving on the cliffs. It's not like you're only ever on one place. Like somebody could start really high and like walk down a little bit and then see the water and then they decide to jump in.
00:52:38
Speaker
So it works well to illustrate what's going on in our modern age when we're dealing with people leaving religion. That's the idea. Right. And I love the analogy for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the idea that the the water becomes less scary the more you see people in it and not getting eaten by sharks, yep for example, um the more it kind of puts to lie...
00:53:02
Speaker
some of the things that you might've been holding onto in your own belief system. I'm not sure what it's like in Mormonism, but in evangelical Christianity, there is this kind of idea that, well, you know, we've got the joy of the Lord. So outside the joy of the Lord, you can't ever really be happy.
00:53:19
Speaker
And I remember seeing an interview with um with somebody who grew up in the American South and who wound up going to university, a secular university. and they And they said, i was having like this conversation with my roommate saying, but you can't actually be happy.
00:53:33
Speaker
You're an atheist. you You must not actually be happy. You must not realize that you're not actually happy. and And the roommate's like, what the hell are you talking? I'm perfectly happy. I mean, yeah, like life's tough sometimes, but I'm not like miserable. like What are you talking about?
00:53:48
Speaker
And um seeing people you know walk away, jump off the cliff and and hit the water and survive, shows the people who are still on the cliff that maybe it's not actually the death sentence that they were told it was.
00:54:04
Speaker
And the the other piece of that, which you, I don't recall if you bring up at that point, or or I think it's earlier in the book, but you mentioned that community becomes so terribly important because religion has been where you find community for most most ah towns, villages, cities, et cetera, for most of recorded history.
00:54:26
Speaker
that's where you That's where you go to get community. And now we're starting to see communities pop up in other ways. You have community gardens, you have social clubs.
00:54:37
Speaker
ah You guys specifically mentioned Dungeons and Dragons, which I appreciate because that's been one of my regular communities got for for many years. And um And it really kind of brought home how one of the things that makes the water more clear, one of the things that um makes it an easier thing to do to walk away from stuff that's not working for you anymore, as in terms of like religious beliefs or community, ah is other people, is that interconnectedness that we have because we're a very social species and it can be a terribly lonely thing to to walk away.
00:55:12
Speaker
and And so I really loved how throughout your book, you kind of wove in this, ah the importance of human connection, of the the communities that we build together. And and you know mentioned earlier how it's terribly difficult to find humanism sometimes when you don't know what it's called, when don't know what you're looking for.
00:55:34
Speaker
um I think that that's one of the things that but that we're trying to do at Humanist Canada, that other organizations across the United States and the world, Humanist International,
00:55:45
Speaker
or trying to do is to, to clear the waters a little bit and show people, Hey, there, there's community out here. We're, we're not as a species. We're not very good at not building community.
00:55:57
Speaker
We tend to do it wherever we go. And I thought that was a terribly comforting message that I got from your book ah that kind of reinforced other things that, that I'd been seeing and experiencing myself. So um I wanted to,
00:56:11
Speaker
you know I wanted to kind of end the the discussion of your book by just encouraging our listeners to to check it out, because I think that there's not only good data there, not only some good insights that might the like scratch some kind of academic itch you may have had in an accessible way, ah but also just there's a good reinforcing of how important our relationships are with each other and how important it is to keep building those communities wherever we go.
00:56:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's beautiful. that's ah That's a great summary. I i really appreciate that. No problem. And I want thank you for ah for writing it and for bringing up Dungeons and Dragons and furries and all the other things you got you did to keep to keep the readers interested and hooked.
00:56:54
Speaker
um yeah I had one last question for you before um you know before we start wrapping up. you Your talk of secularization and the research around secularization has kind of been showing the trends as being fairly...
00:57:08
Speaker
ah fairly unidirectional. It's going in one direction. um There was a Pew Research report in February 2025 that seemed to indicate that for American Christianity, at least, secularization was leveling off ah or or you know possibly reversing.
00:57:26
Speaker
ah Elsewhere, then there was a recent report in France as well. now but Take it with as much salt as is needed. It's coming from the Catholic Church in France, that the number of Catholic baptisms yeah had quadrupled in the last few years in a very surprising demographic group, which was the 18 to 25 year olds.
00:57:45
Speaker
Now, neither one of us is Catholic. Both of us have probably been aware that that ah typically they don't baptize many adults. It's usually infants. um I was wondering if you might ah comment on those. are these Is the French Catholic Church an outlier? Is there something else going on there with a Pew report?
00:58:03
Speaker
what's you know what what's What's going on? Is the ghost of Stark coming back to tell us that ah that we were all wrong? Secularization was wrong. Yeah. He actually wrote a paper once called Secularization R.A.P.
00:58:17
Speaker
Rescott the Impossed. um Which is hilarious, right? And then Steve Bruce responded and was like, no, no, no you're wrong. Anyway, um so two two things there. ah Conveniently, I was at a conference this summer, um International Society for the Sociology of Religion in Lithuania, and there's a big name researcher who's a good friend, David Vose, now an emeritus professor um in the UK.
00:58:42
Speaker
who had seen some of these things and he, to his credit, like I hadn't looked at it. I hadn't seen the thing about France in particular, but he looked at like a dozen of these and his presentation was just like tackling these questions. And so I do remember exactly what he said. Luckily, I was in that presentation.
00:58:58
Speaker
The one in France in particular, which again was by the Catholic Church, he dug a little deeper into that report. And he's like, well, you know, this is kind of interesting. They increased the number of dioceses that were reporting baptisms.
00:59:13
Speaker
Right? So not surprisingly, the baptisms go up when you report more diocese instead of the fewer diocese that they were reporting in previous years. That kind of got left out of the report. And doesn't that change the dynamic a lot?
00:59:27
Speaker
Yes, it does. it It really also kind of makes you appreciate the need to stop and ask more questions when you're looking at research. Yes.
00:59:37
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, he, he went through several others, uh, and on almost all of the ones that he was looking at, he's like, oh yeah. So this person was saying like young men, they're joining religion. And then he said, and if you get all the way to the bottom of the article, which most people don't these days, right? Like we're really bad at reading everything.
00:59:53
Speaker
He read them very carefully on like four out of the seven that he presented. He's like, and at the very bottom of the article, they say, I have no empirical, like quantitative data for this. These are all anecdotes.
01:00:05
Speaker
Oh. Yeah. Well, in my defense, the one I read about the French Catholic Church was in French and I was having some difficulty with it. Google Translate only goes so far and I did not stay in French class very long in Canada. No, that's all good. So I think some of them, you know, there there's something else going on. Now, maybe there is something happening and and like, I'm totally down to that. I like to tell people, this is always sounds weird, right? But like, if there's anything that's sacred for me now, it's data.
01:00:33
Speaker
right Right. I really care about data. I will never fudge data. I've published a lot of things, but I'm more proud of the fact that I've never had to retract anything. No one's ever challenged my analysis because the data are solid and I'll share my data with anybody.
01:00:45
Speaker
So the last one is the Pew piece. Yeah, I was actually a consultant on a lot of this stuff. um So I know the people at Pew. They're actually really good researchers. Here's what I would just tell people is Yeah.
01:00:58
Speaker
The non-religious as a percentage of the U.S. population has been growing up pretty consistently from 1990 all the way up until about 2022, 2023. was going year over year. That's a remarkable trend. Yeah. And then flattened for three years. Mm-hmm.
01:01:09
Speaker
it was going up year over year that's a remarkable trend yeah and then it flattened for three years why are we making any hay out of a three year flattening, right? If over those three years, we'd seen a dramatic reversal and it had gone down by 20 percentage points, I'd be like, oh, something's definitely up. Like this is really, really weird, right?
01:01:36
Speaker
And if it stays here for the next 60 years, then like, okay, something else is going on, but it just kind of leveled off for three years. Why do we care?
01:01:48
Speaker
Right. So to me, like this is just natural fluctuations. And um it's it's a nice, very convenient straw man argument that somebody could set up that it's like, oh, secularization theorists say that it's going to be linear and it's every year.
01:02:02
Speaker
Actually, none of us say that. right So those of us who are writing about it say, well, the general trend is in this direction, but it can pause. It can even reverse. There can be you know revivals. like Things happen. It's not that yeah the arc of history is always in one direction and it will never change and it must be consistent.
01:02:21
Speaker
That's a great setup for me to just show that I'm wrong. I'm going to make it very easy for somebody to be like, you were wrong. I'm not going to say something like that because that's just a dumb way to do it.
01:02:32
Speaker
So could I be wrong? Absolutely. I'm just waiting for more data, right? and Give it five to 10 years. If things are still flat after another 10 years, then like, okay, what's going on? What has shifted in the American climate to suggest that something's different?
01:02:48
Speaker
Now, of course, that is just the U.S., is the same thing happening in Canada? Is the same thing happening in the UK and Australia and all of these other countries where we're looking at the same things? And it turns out it's not, right?
01:03:00
Speaker
we We see year-to-year fluctuation, but the general trajectory is less religious. but That's absolutely true, and that's still the case. um One of the big kind of also critics of secularization, Christian Smith, he just published a book this year where he admitted secularization is happening, and one one of the things he looked at ah Well, not one of the things. He looked at lots of things.
01:03:23
Speaker
Religious attendance is down. Belief is down. Affiliation is down. It just leveled off, right? So if we're looking at a lot of these things, they're all down and they're they're not going back up, right? So and just I just urge caution, right? Three years does not a trend make.
01:03:41
Speaker
Give it a few more years. Let's see what happens. Yeah, and I like how you ah you're presenting the response with an open and curious mind and not a, oh gosh, this could be like this could be the end, folks. We're looking at a snapshot in time and the sociologists I've known have said they're not that great at predicting the future, even though i keep asking them to, ah but they do ah they they are able to shine some insights into the present and the past.
01:04:11
Speaker
and And if we're seeing the... I feel like you and i may both have an opinion that the the trend towards a more secular society, more probably equitable secular society is a positive one, is a sign of progress.
01:04:25
Speaker
ah Before we got on the call, we both expressed a love of Star Trek. So we'll just lay that out there. I i bring up Star Trek once an episode at least. If we do see that as part of the the ongoing ah progress of humanity, I think it's important for for us and for our listeners to remember that progress is not necessarily linear either.
01:04:45
Speaker
um a few months ago, a historian Dr. Heather McGee was on the Jon Stewart show. think the weekly show now with Jon Stewart, not the daily show anymore. yeah And she's an African-American historian. and And as they were discussing, you know, Trump and lots of other current events that we're not going to get into right now. and And John was kind of expressing this, like, oh, my gosh, like the sky is falling. What are we going to do um And Dr. McGee was very clear in saying, like, listen, African-American people in America have always known progress wasn't linear because that's not how we ever experienced it.
01:05:19
Speaker
You know, some civil rights are granted and then others are taken away. And there's Jim Crow laws. And then there's you know segregation and there's that you know the the march of progress was never linear but it does go on and so I found that to be an encouraging thought in general and I think for people who may see secularization increasing in society as a comforting idea even though it does not as you and I both know automatically make people any better and being humans yeah ah we actually have to do other work to make that happen yeah ah it it may be comforting for them to think of progress as not being linear either
01:05:54
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely what I would say. Like, just, you know, relax. Like it, sure. i'm I'm in the same boat, right? Like I am an empirical researcher. i follow the data.
01:06:05
Speaker
I could be wrong. I'm totally open to that that. That is the reality of it. This is what it means to be open-minded. You follow the data. Yeah. do I want certain things, right? So if I step back as an individual, as a private individual, yeah, I think like that is the general trend.
01:06:19
Speaker
um i I don't know if I can one up you on the Star Trek, but I've been doing star Trek role playing all summer long, right? Oh, wow. Combine Dungeons and Dragons with Star Trek. And that's how geeky I am. so i'm mean the I'm moving in the wrong wrong circles, man. I'm just in the wrong circles right now.
01:06:35
Speaker
Build your community. Find your game master, not dungeon master. It's a game master. There you go. ah So yeah, like I do have this vision that it is a way to move society forward. Again, that's personal, right? That's not me as a scholar that I have to keep those lives separate.
01:06:53
Speaker
um But I'm also just trying to be, you know, recognizing like, It doesn't move linearly. but Let me just calm down, like calm down. Let's see what happens. Give it some time. Yeah.
01:07:04
Speaker
And in the spirit of human progress and becoming better people, I mentioned at beginning, I was going to ask you for some homework for our listeners. And something we're to this year on the podcast is asking our guests, what is one book and one band that you would recommend for ah the people listening to the show today to to finish it off?
01:07:26
Speaker
So, um, I, I love this question, right? Um, I just found out about this book series, so I'm going to recommend the first one cause it is amazing. And I don't know if you've, if you've heard of it, uh, the latest, uh, version or like the the next book in the, in the series apparently is coming out this month. So I'm going to have to try and find it, but the book series, it's not, it's not nonfiction, right? Maybe I should be recommending nonfiction, but it's fiction.
01:07:50
Speaker
It's called, it's called dungeon crawler, Carl. Have you heard of dungeon crawler, Carl? I've had like eight people recommend it to me in the last two months. yeah It is amazing. It's absolutely wonderful. um Like I said, I found out about, I think in April, a friend of mine said like, oh, you really need to check this out. It's like it fits. Right. Because it's almost like this weird mix of fantasy and science fiction.
01:08:16
Speaker
Um, so somehow they combine both and it's, it's, it's absolutely stellar. Um, I devoured all six or seven books that are out in like a month and they are thick, big books, but like, it just sucked me in.
01:08:29
Speaker
It's so much fun, right? If you just need some escapism and fun, but also there's a lot of morality in this series, right? Like, It's actually really, really good. it challenges you to think about a lot of things, but it's a great, great series. So if I could recommend a book that like, if you're into sci-fi fantasy stuff, it it really combines the two dungeon crawler, Carl, you'll love it. And it's just continuing. It's amazing.
01:08:54
Speaker
So that would be my book recommendation. All right. I'll add that to the to the list of people who've recommended that book to me. Yeah. You got to read it. The series is is stellar. um My son, who's 16, who doesn't necessarily love reading.
01:09:05
Speaker
He did the same thing. Devoured it all in like a month and a half. Loved Dungeon Crawler Carl. Okay. As far as music, um i I do listen to a lot of music. I kind of have to have music on in the background whenever I'm writing.
01:09:18
Speaker
um and whenever i'm like doing email and stuff like that i just like music so um but i mentioned and i'm gonna butcher this and i feel really bad like i have lots of bands most of the music that i listen to if i'm just listening to music is folk music but um i i somehow encountered this uh french canadian band um and i'm gonna butcher the name so i apologize but i absolutely love their music uh i Les Vents du Nord, I think is what you told me. like that That sounds right to me. Yeah. um But I can spell it for people, right? L-E space V-E-N-T space D-U space N-O-R-D.
01:09:56
Speaker
It's delightful, right? I mean, it's it's kind of like ah very traditional folk music at times. Okay. But with like ah almost like a sea shanty element to it that's like great. It's really really engaging.
01:10:07
Speaker
And one of the things that I really like about the music is it's very upbeat. Okay. They do have some that are a little bit more morose, but a lot of it is just like, it makes you happy. It's like happy music. Right. um Absolutely love it.
01:10:18
Speaker
ah French band or like Canadian band. Right. But like, yeah, French and all the, all of the lyrics are in French. Like, I don't even know what they're saying most of the time. I don't care. i do speak Spanish, yeah but not French. I just love the music. The music is absolutely stellar. And I think they just released a new song last week um that I saw. So I need to go get that.
01:10:35
Speaker
So, well, ah These are great recommendations. I'm probably going to have to read Dungeon Crawler Carl now. that it's it's It's just going to happen. And that band sounds really interesting, and I'm sure they'd forgive our pronunciation.
01:10:49
Speaker
I'm also not a Francophone, so I couldn't to do much better than that. If you like that band, you also might like Cour de Pirate, which is a French band that has some ah has some folksy folksy vibes.
01:11:02
Speaker
The spelling is... a i I'm not even going to tempt the spelling on that one, actually. Okay, I'll look it up. I'll figure it out. Google will correct you. In any case, ah Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a delightful conversation and I've enjoyed every single rabbit trail. Thank you for this conversation.
01:11:20
Speaker
And I look forward to the next one. Thanks. That was a lot of fun.
01:11:28
Speaker
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01:11:47
Speaker
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