Unknown 0:00
Dustin's reflection was around that, because the church was caught up in, in that fear that Jerome articulated. You know if Rome is fallen, what can be secure. Rome is the eternal city Rome is the now Christian, the seat of Christian empire. What do you mean, Rome is Rome is fall, Rome is fallen and and so for for Christians and 911 You know that was a it was a very similar thing, and it wasn't just Christians of courses people around the world, just like if the twin towers have fallen, what could be secure, New York, as can be secure. And so the continuity is this sort of historical resonances I'd rather say between what a Gustin was reflecting upon in terms of the end of a civilization and what, what really counts as eternal. And this last 20 years, I actually think that a huge amount of the work that Brian and I have done is in that quest of this, the seeking out of what is lasting and joyful and beautiful and just, and we, you know, we've tried to do that, I can't wait either of us to destiny. I think both of us have tried to do that in our writing in our preaching and forming community and the questions we've raised because we've, we felt that, you know, in the same way of Dustin felt Jerome's question
Unknown 1:33
was really good. Now I'm gonna have to go check that drum thing, that's, that's high quality material, all the ministers just wrote it down. So the format we were thinking of doing, which we'll see if we keep it. By the time we get done is we're going to take turns kicking off, where each of us will dig into a particular feature that strikes us in thinking about this past 20 years since 911 and that will set up a conversation that will go well, wherever it goes, and will be informed by questions and topics you send in, everyone in the class, you get emails, before and after each session, you can reply to them. And any of those emails when you reply, just a good question at the time, or if there's a topic you want us to talk about. We'll leave some of them into the sessions, and also, Brian Diana will join a number of times, live just to answer questions. So, if it is specific, that, Oh, Diane you brought this up in the first session, what about this, then just make sure you tell me, and I will chronicle it and ask questions and maybe one of you I have a question so striking, it will inspire one of them to write another city of God. But with that, I'm gonna mute myself and lead by Hannah, take it away for the first session.
Unknown 2:54
Great, thank you, thank you trip. I wanted today to talk about the topic of Christian decline post 911 And it's a, it's a funny topic in certain ways, in order to really get our minds around what's happened in the last 20 years, I think it's important to step back into the 1990s and the 1990s were a time when religion publishing was huge, all you needed to do was write a book with Jesus on the top, in the title and the book would just Dart, to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. There were spiritual memoirs that were talked about just, not just in churches but as sort of regular common currency book groups would read spiritual memoirs, people like Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott, and Kathleen Norris, are considered to be sort of the literary masters almost as it were of the category of memoir, and they all wrote about they all worried about religion. And I remember that, Phyllis tickle founded at the Publishers Weekly religion, pages, and in the 1990s because the book industry around religion was so incredibly financially lucrative, and it was just it was, it was a giant market, and there were all kinds of really interesting trends in the 1990s, there was this big Angel craze that went on for several years, there were people who actually opened stores, and real life, malls that used to exist in states, brick and mortar stores and they would be sort of like spirituality shops I remember visiting one in the Mall of America in the late 1990s, and you could walk into the shop and you could buy tchotchkes from basically any world religion you could think of and there was a huge selection of books, and, and magazines and other kinds of materials that would help you aid you in your spiritual quest. Wayne Clark roof wrote a book called a generation of seekers, that sort of captured the moment, and the world of course was heading toward the new millennium, and so it was that anticipation, the new millennium, the 2000 Birthday of Christianity. The fact that we were getting this number that was turning it that seemed to foster a kind of a mystical kind of religious interfaith revival, where all the biggest news was about religion, and everyone who knew anything about religion from people sitting in classrooms at major universities to people at Publishers Weekly to the people at Time magazine to the people who were in congregations, everybody was expecting it. And even in the old mainline which have been going through 30 or 40 years worth of decline by that point, there was an increase in membership in the 1990s, and not just an increase in membership, these are the liberal Protestant churches which had suffered so much. Post 1970s Those, those liberal Protestant churches, not only were recording a little bit of a membership increase, but their average Sunday attendance numbers were actually shockingly high. And so there was this period in the late 90s where the Episcopal Church was around 2 million members. And that's a, you know, still fairly robust enough size denomination, but not a huge denomination, but what they were showing in terms of average Sunday was about 800,000 people. On Sunday, so it was almost half of the denomination that was showing up, or at least you know, registering their presence in buildings. So, so that was what it was like in the last years of the 1990s, this, this, this, this huge economically profitable bodies in buildings, people purchasing religious goods. Sort of. This is among the biggest news on the block. And
Unknown 7:45
a lot of my early work was around that, actually, I was in those years that the New York Times. Wire Service hired me as a columnist and I wrote a weekly column that went over the New York Times syndicate on religion in America and wrote about many, many. So, so that's kind of where we were before 911 was in this highly successful religious sort of landscape. In the United States. There were other things happening in other countries around the world, I realized that, but the sort of the energy and enthusiasm I think of American religion was rubbing off in interesting ways. In Western Europe, certainly in Canada, and also in Latin America and Africa, with huge mission movements coming out of evangelicalism in those in those in that decade. So, where we were. And then 911
Unknown 8:45
I cannot think of anything that surprised me more than to watch this statistics, start coming in. After 911 decline. Around Christianity. At first, those statistics were not divided up by race, they were simply divided up by denomination. And so we had 911 in September of 2001. And that was a shock to sort of the religious ecology of the world. But then, there was a second shock that came just on its heels and were was equally as powerful, and it was also global, and that was at the beginning of 2002. The Boston Globe, began a series of reports on how Catholic priests in Boston had systematically abused children in their care, and that the systematic abuse of children had been covered up by the Boston archdiocese and that priests had never essentially been punished for this that they had just been moved around abusing creases just been moved around. And that story, which began I believe in January 2002 stretched into the report stretch into March 2002 Huge series, and it began to look like. It was a cover up well beyond the Boston archdiocese that there was some larger problems within global Catholicism, about abuse, sexual abuse, and how the church had handled it. So, you have the one story in September, followed by this story in February and March, and by the next September September 2002 What you begin to see is a radical decline of the number of people who are willing to call themselves Catholics, and you start to see numbers that are softening around Protestantism in America, and as late as 2001 Protestants were still the majority of people in the United States. And so, but that begins to shift as a result of these two huge, huge events. Just this past July it was on July 8 Public Religion Research came out with, I believe it's it's 13 report on religious adherence in the United States what we're, what people call themselves. And this report showed a couple of things that are old news, and a couple of things that are actually new news and the part of the report that wasn't entirely startling and that most people on this.
Unknown 12:09
In, in, in this course will be aware of is that that decline that started in the wake of 2000 2001 2002 in wake of 911 and the Catholic Church abuse scandal that that decline became precipitous through the last 20 years. But first it looked like, you know, the sort of the Protestant mainline decline was continuing, which it sort of did after a little rebirth in the 90s it kind of went soft again, in the early aughts, but the Catholic number, I mean that literally started falling like. And then we started softening of the angelical number in the early part of the aughts by 90 by 2020 this. That's what this PRI report covers, what we see is that those patterns have largely continued, with one exception which I'll mention in a moment. And while the religious quadrant was softening while people were leaving religion. People were bailing out statistically into a category that was called, none of the above. The religiously unaffiliated. And so, the, the way that that has tracked for most of the last two decades has been watching every year when these statistics come out the percentage of people who are Christian, and then they divided that into white, and Christian black Christians and Christians of color, eventually through the last 20 years we thought the racial sort of razor brought into, look at that data more closely, but the percentage of people who are white Protestants and white Catholics, that is going down. And the bigger surprise over that or what began to surprise people in this, this data was that evangelicalism once considered to be a category that was untouchable by religious decline was declining. And indeed, in the religious landscape skirt service survey this year, I got the number right here in 2006, the percentage of people in America who were white evangelicals was 23% of the population, and in the most recent data available 2020 that percentage is 14.5% of the population. That means that in a little bit more than a decade, the percentage of people who are willing to identify with evangelicalism This is white people who are willing to identify with evangelicalism has gone down 10 points and gone from being basically one and for every American to what is one, I guess six all Americans, that number this little number that I've got on my phone right here. If I had say sitting next to me the venerable Martin Marty who has been following his heart Marty is 25 years older than I am. And he's been following these kinds of statistics even longer. He years ago told me that evangelicalism always winds up being somewhere between 25 to 33% of the American population, never lowered never higher. Well, the great Dr. Marty, I would love to hear what he said about this because this is a shocking, shocking number if course if you add bundles of color to this. You do get a higher percentage of the population as a total.
Unknown 15:49
But this decline among the among white evangelicalism is unlike any decline that we have numbers for in American history, period, full stop. And so, so, this chart showed that continuing decline to this point, Have a number that statisticians don't know what to do with, and at this point, that number has created on Twitter and other social media, a huge argument among people who don't believe it. My friends at Public Religion Research say they have fielded more calls from critics, than they have ever gotten for a survey in the last few weeks as the publication of this data. And yet, it's also been kind of the cause of people buying wow I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was that bad. So, so this is a piece of continuing news, not a total surprise but the actual number has been surprising. The other pieces, you know, we do see this same strength, among the community of people and that this is not divided racially, the community people who are religiously unaffiliated from 2006 to now. In 2006, the percentage of the population who were religiously unaffiliated was 16% that percentage has never gone down. And this data collection, until the last two years, it reached a high of over 25% in 2018 2019 it was 24% So, statistically almost in the same place. But, this past year, it went down to 23%, which was a surprise to people it means that there's some level of stability, or even a few sort of points of people who are peeling away from being identified to putting themselves in some category of religion now. And that's the, that's where the really big surprise came for me in this data. So if people are leaving white evangelicalism and if people are beginning to re affiliate with some form of religion from being religiously unaffiliated. The question emerges, where are they going, well, they apparently are not becoming white Catholics, because the percentage of white Catholicism has remained around 12% of the population for quite some time. It's a very sort of steady number, the only number on this data chart that went up, was among white not evangelical Protestants, which is a category that's also sometimes called mainline white mainline Protestant. And what we see in the last four years, since reaching their low of 12.8% of the population in 2016 Same year Donald Trump was elected, interestingly enough, each year since the number the percentage number of white evangelicals has gone or white main liners, non evangelicals has gone up in the population to this year to 16.4% were for the very first time since 1970 This this kind of data you just can't even. This is why people are calling PRI they can't literally believe these numbers but they're there they are, the first time since 1970 There's a higher percentage of white non evangelical Protestants, than there are of white evangelical and the hemorrhaging, out of white Protestantism has stopped. And it stopped because of liberals, not because of Jones. So, this is just really interesting data, and it's largely a story of the last 20 years. Two initiating crises, sort of shocking the system of global Christianity and in America that shock, became
Unknown 20:23
the
Unknown 20:25
most claws exactly I don't know if you can kind of say cause and effect, but it certainly became an initiating event that precip that that led to, or that contributed to a precipitous decline in adherence among America's white population. And then in the last four years since the election of Donald Trump. We've seen a sort of re arrangement of whatever is going on within that, that larger story of decline. It's literally, I got my PhD and in American religious history in 1991, like sets that thoroughly part of my career tracking the religious enthusiasm leading up to the millennium, and no one I know was prepared for statistics like this. In the 1990s, and yet we've lived this story for the last 20 years.
Unknown 21:29
Wow. Great, that you've given us a lot to chew on there. I should say, I don't want to mention any names here, but I just saw an article this morning, published in Christianity today, that is trying to present the data very, very differently, saying, you know that that means articles are doing it, Don't have much to worry about comparative mainlanders So anyhow, it was interesting to watch people tell stories, interpret data is one of those. As you were speaking, you know, when I was a child growing up in elementary school in the 1960s I think you could make an assumption that religion would never be mentioned in any of my classrooms, in public school, and that the assumption of most educated people, was that religion was under decline. And this sort of feeling that yeah religion will generally fade away to slowly fade away, then it seems like we had this period, maybe the Jesus movement represented one wave of this. And then, the religious right coming to life in the late 1970s and, which by the way. Watch fundamentalist Christians, line up behind Ronald Reagan, really was like a, a test case for the mining of behind Donald Trump. It's kind of bizarre to watch it being almost that you're on it because Ronald Reagan was from Hollywood for crying out loud, and he was divorced and not a church going on. But then there was this film that was 2000 September 11 2001 marked this moment, where the most secular people had to say. Religion is not gone, and it might not be. It might be here for good, but not for good and otherwise it might be here to stay, but for no good. And I miss memory, you know, You're still in the DC area Diana but I lived in the DC area, in 2001. And I remember going down a couple blocks from my house and I could see the pillars of smoke coming up for the Pentagon which just had a sort of, you know, Sodom and Gomorrah feel to it of just this apocalyptic vision that I was driving on September, 12, in my car and I remember exactly where I was on route 29 in silver spring if anybody knows where that is. And there was a press conference, and somebody, some military figure for the Pentagon was speaking and a journalist said, Do you have any experts helping you understand Islam and Islamic extremism. And it was, I remember this because you don't normally hear somebody laugh in a grave moment like that, but he had like a chuckle, where he said something like, we're not in the religious business. So, it's September 11 marks this strange moment where religion, we've assumed religious goes away. It's coming back with a vengeance. But that very act of coming back with a vengeance. It seems to be so is the seed for this decline because people of goodwill, people are just nice people don't want to be associated with something that seems that hateful, And that's to me why September 11 2001 and January 6 2021 really have this resonance, because in a sense we saw the ugly at the ugliest face of Islam, of extremist Islam, that he doesn't want. And then, you know, I think he got Rene Girard and the whole idea is an emetic theory that groups, react, and as they react they imitate. And so you end up with a violent hostile religious insurgency, showing up at the Capitol, and people like Franklin Graham in Texas and Robert Jeffers, and Jerry Falwell Jr, and many other things. I think needs to be mentioned. I just think we need to mention those names. We have to say there. As the supporters of Donald Trump and I think we just have to assume now you're at this, this is the perfect time. Yeah. Oh my gosh. A prime Elementary School in Rockville, Maryland.
Unknown 26:23
You see, I always think it's so funny because our lives were so close to one another, and we just, we didn't know each other until. What was it 202 2003 But, you know, I grew up in Baltimore City. So I was in the state I was in Maryland public school systems, you know, at the same time and as soon as you say, you know, we grew up in this world where religion was never mentioned in public school, and there was this idea of a very strict separation of church and state. People were very religious and this, this is the interesting thing to me is that we were kind of in the same school system that we're all different sides of the religious divide as my parents were liberal Methodists and you know I was in church every single Sunday as a little kid, and everyone in my neighborhood was, and they were either in Methodist church or Catholic Church. And there were very few people who would admit to not going to church, and at the very edge of my neighborhood there was a sort of independent Pentecostal church, and it didn't have a real church building event and some other kinds of buildings, and everybody in the name in our neighborhood kind of looked at that church and kind of went, what were those people. But I think that they're probably the people your family was.
Unknown 27:40
You know one of the things about that is, I grew up in rural North Carolina until we church planted in a city, and America, the way it was secular. Was that it kept the public and private line clear right like that used to be how we did it, so you wouldn't worry about religion showing up at school, because that was a private thing. Unlike right, so the way secular it later gets played out where it's kind of, is something religious or not religious, that kind of older account of secularity was such for America, when the church was culture dominant, like in rural North Carolina, the religious diversity was the kind of Baptist you were in Granville County, North Carolina. I remember when a Missionary Baptist moved in, and we were worried, like, aren't they, Christian, you know, and, and I, and I just know. My children never had that they grew up in Los Angeles that are now in Scotland in it, so it is like a huge shift, just to think about the, who your neighbor is in the tactile sense changes, questions of religion, and I, and I wonder if there's a way that, you know the because Protestants took beliefs so seriously. And then chronicle the correct beliefs in all sorts of different ways you get all these different denominations, but the anxiety for so many Christians was like, Are you believing the right things, and then the threats were the ways in which outside forces or ideas fragile eyes, these beliefs, and that was problematic, right and the evangelical movement emerges as a resistance to the way maternity brings in different types of critical thinking and such, but what's shocking to the way you were telling the story and the interesting thing is that the big fragile isation that actually changed our demographics are when religion is public, something like 911 for a and I think what we're seeing now is something like January 6 That these public demonstrations of religion problematize the traditions in ways evolution doesn't really do that.
Unknown 30:05
Yeah and if you think about that, the Catholic Church abuse scandal. I mean, you're talking about something that happened in private, being made. And what had this secret was kept you know so that the people who were victimized, you know, they live in shame they lived in this sort of shadows and as and pressing out of their stories, created a public narrative about abuse, and, and, and violence and all.
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT, PART 2
Unknown
0:00
And I think Brian just said it so perfectly, is that people began to see that
religion was around for good and it wasn't for good. And I, the comparison that
I come up with and the reason I was sort of asking Brian was that about his
elementary school experience was that in the 1960s the primary narrative that
there was about religion in the United States, it was partly this public
private split narrative religion was private and then this sort of secular
space that we share that was the public space.
Unknown 0:36
But there was a second narrative, and that was that
Unknown 0:43
wealthy civil wealthy societies, wealthy democratic societies had all become
more secular, and that the United States was more secular than it had been
perhaps several generations earlier. But because of this private religious
thing that was so robust that we sort of bucked the trend of secularization in
the same way that the European European public's had embraced secularization.
And we could see religion in decline, rapid decline post World War Two
throughout European European countries. And so, so I think it was in the United
States, it's a little bit of this worry that, you know, are we going to become
like Europe, religiously, and even the liberal Methodists that I hung around,
they didn't want that to happen. They, they wanted Protestantism, we understood
ourselves to be a Protestant country I mean it's, I can't even believe I grew up
in a world like this, but we understood ourselves to be a Protestant nation,
and that we were proud of that. And, and we didn't want to be like the
Europeans, and yet there was this, this, this undertone that that might happen
to us too because it had happened to them. And I think that the connection
there to 911 is really fascinating because the Europeans had to deal with the
religion is here for good, but not for good reasons, or not for good purposes.
In the wake of the Holocaust,
Unknown 2:23
where you could really see how Christianity had been manipulated and abused, to
the point of murdering 6 million people in a systematic genocide. And so, the
Europeans had to face that public ugliness, a lot earlier than we did in the
United States where we're still holding on to this, this sort of myth oh so
Protestant purity, and we're gonna save the world for democracy and we're the
good guys in this movie, and all of that kind of stuff that we that we grew up
with. And it really did not come on done for most Americans until 911, when I,
and, and I really do think the combination of 911 and the very worst of
Catholicism. At the same time becoming Pope that there's publicly inactive.
Unknown 3:19
Just cores. In the name of religion.
Unknown 3:25
It's so ironic that Protestants thought of themselves as so pristine, with the
history of slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples, but I think it's very
hard for even people your age, to believe how how totally successful that
purity narrative was for kids, for when you know and I'm older than that about
when we were kids, it still was attacked and so ironic that right as we're
having this conversation through all these battles about critical race theory,
and attempts to dumb down public education to not tell the truth about about
American history, there's this desperate grasp to reclaim that that mythic
narrative of purity.
Unknown 4:15
I wonder if I could. This might take us too far afield.
Unknown 4:19
So, Troy, feel free to, you know, redirect us here. But, Diana. I'm thinking of
you as a historian, and I'm thinking that that the 30 Years War. What was it
1618 to 1648. I think it was that the 30 Years War. In some ways prepares away
for the enlightenment and sort of a super powering of secularism to say
whenever religion gets involved, we have bloodshed. Could we just get
reasonable, percent of men around the table and reasonable white landowning
privileged men around the table and, and they'll agree and solve all the
problems that religious violence, leading to decline in religion. And then I've
often wondered if, has anybody talked much about World War Two, being seen as a
failure of Christianity, or all of these so called Christian nations, most of
them, Protestant, Protestant in the north and Catholic in the south, unable to
stop Hitler and Mussolini.
Unknown 5:27
And, you know, if that really becomes an interesting, because if religion has
power, then its power to stop these horrible things from happening. And if it
didn't have any power, what good is it, it's like a lose lose for religion when
violence breaks out like I'd love to hear any thoughts you both have Yeah.
Unknown 5:50
Well, the thing about the 30 Years War is, that's a really important point.
There were some lectures I remember giving, probably about 15 years ago, where
I looked at what I called maternity one and maternity two and I pitched
maternity one beginning in the wake of the 30 Years War, which most historians
do picture there and talked about how coming out of the 30 Years War, you get
this. You do get a kind of decline of conventional religiosity across Europe,
you get the first understanding of atheism. As far as I am aware, that is when
the term atheist was actually coined, and you get the first people coming out
of the closet as actual non believers in God, and we didn't even have language
for that, in European cultures, until after the 30 Years War, which I think is
a really interesting thing, if you look at what happened post 911 and the
growth of new Atheism. And then you also have, you also get, you know, people
just sort of questioning the religions they were born with these newly first
fourth actually religions of Protestantism or the new form of Catholicism that
was born after the Reformation. And the people were saying, Well hey, it didn't.
Unknown 7:06
It's brought us a lot of trouble. So is there a better form, and that's when
you begin to get the development of quietism and what eventually becomes the
movements towards the religions of the heart, you get the devotion of the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, you get very pious warm is sort of inwardly directed
forms of mystical Catholicism that become quite popular, so that all happens
post modernity one, but I you know I really, I think your question about World
War Two is really fascinating. I am not aware of a book that does that but that
could be because most of my reading in the last 10 years has been in different
fields other than that particular one. But the thing that really just burst
into my imagination while you were talking, is the fact that, yes, it was a
failure of Western Christianity.
Unknown 7:59
English speaking Christians did not see it as a failure. As a matter of fact,
you could catch World War Two as a sort of, I mean, I've been mean to say World
War Two. World War Two as a failure of continental Christianity.
Unknown 8:21
But Anglo Protestant Christians thought that they had succeeded. And so what
you get immediately following World War Two, in Anglo Protestant countries, is
you get Billy Graham, you get the revival of sort of a really pious form of
Christian personalized form of Christianity that will eventually feed, what
becomes the Religious Right. So I think that we could look at sort of Anglo
Protestant hubris in the years following World War Two as a sort of a last gasp,
that sort of racially energized.
Unknown 9:05
Protestant vision first articulated that was particularly really strongly
around 1900 100 in a book called our country by Josiah strong who was a liberal
minister who really created a whole vision of white Anglo Saxon supremacy as
being the sort of moral vision for the world. And I think that we're we're to
sort of put up an approved stamp of approval on that. And, and that's why I
think the racial issues have been so hard to deal with. And that's just a really
interesting question to me. I was binge watching the Queen, or the crown this
week.
Unknown 9:47
And I watched the episode I just recently watched the episode about the Queen
and the Billy Graham visit, and think about how incredible that that moment was
in the late 1950s I think it was 1957. And yet, everybody in those episodes,
Everybody thinks that England is right because it's an English Christianity is
morally superior to every other Christianity, there is. And so I just think
that's fascinating because that might well be the last gasp of that particular
vision, and it just so happens that you and I were born, that at the end, you
know, we born in born into that, I mean that was that was the, the air that we
breathe. And so trip when Brian says you don't remember it because you know
you're 20 years younger than we are. It really shows a kind of a break in the
culture, where folks who are my agent and Brian's age, we've had to work really
hard to stay in church, we had to literally self consciously reject everything
that we were taught as children, we had to re learn history, technology,
politics.
Unknown 11:20
We had to relearn our own senses of our of identity. And then we had to decide
if it was worth it to do all that work.
Unknown 11:29
So you kind of understand if you, if you'd like me and Brian, and obviously we
think you do, is that people who are our age who have done
Unknown 11:44
kind of rare.
Unknown 11:46
I mean it's not, it's impossible. We Brian I have plenty of friends who have also
done this work with us as why we could do the work. But when you look at our
generation, you know, there's a whole lot of people who would just much rather
capture the mythologies that they hadn't placed when they were kids, is just
too hard to do anything else.
Unknown 12:08
You would you agree with the World War Two thing is passing you mentioned,
strong, and that triggered.
Unknown 12:17
I read a bunch of the Walter Roush biographies because they're both social
gospels. And one of the big things that World War One did was get all the
ethnic churches, or B, churches attached to a particular part of continental
Europe to attach themselves to American Protestantism, and after that you get
the finalization of a lot of the denominations we have today. So that World War
Two. The role of America and the UK played in World War Two, that comes as a
means of justifying right Anglo shaped Christianity.
Unknown 12:54
And luckily capitalism, and a whole host of other things that go along with it.
Right, so they, I know. Brian's talked a lot about it before about the way the
post world war two Christianity, sets the stage for, really, the explosion in
the global south gets more and more taken over by Anglo forms, essentially,
Christianity, so that, you know, now one of the things we've exported, right,
is a Christianity that has is able to tell itself. That sanitizing self stories
that are a little blind, right to the fact that we've inherited stolen land is
built on dead bodies, right, like we, we, we have internalized that and then
export it. And I think that's part of what for me and definitely those younger
than me that I was their youth minister Christianity in America after 911 We
never had a moment where we really thought we were the good guys. Right. Like,
I watched the church. Say no to the biggest protest, that's happened globally
around the war in Iraq. The number of people protesting and wants is huge, and
who wasn't the Methodists, in the White House, or his denomination could tell
him no, he didn't care, right, so there's this sense that like after that all
these institutions that set the stage for export. Across the globe, just get
falsified by 911 and everything that goes in after it being the collapse all
that stuff I'm sure what you're talking about. But I do think that that's, I
hadn't thought of it that way but there is a real shift that. What if your
memory of the big institutions in the in the state, the economy, religion, for
those that 911 was coming of age and younger, When were the glory days.
Unknown 15:01
Like, when was some time that you can even convince yourself, we were on the
right side.
Unknown 15:07
What would it look like to do so. Well I think January 6 is an example of what
it looks like to try to convince yourself at this point that our inheritance,
and our institutions are telling a winning beautiful good story. And so those
1611 Project critical race theory is crazy.
Unknown 15:25
Here's a perfect example, I just saw this, it just came out. The trailer for
the new God's Not Dead movie about homeschooling I've heard that yeah but not
just homeschooling. It's telling a story where they are literally going to
outlaw talking about religion, in America, even in homeschooling curriculum
they're going to go in and then forcibly move these, these students in the
schools so they can tell them about trans identity and how secularism is the
greatest thing ever, like the phobia around that, right, is what's God's Not
Dead he's surely a lap bra, and you're like that, that's, that's what we've
gotten to that I think it's, it's real, it's connected to that piece. Ryan
talks about it in his fourth area like this, this, this need for a story that
justifies the preservation of ill gotten gains, and your, your place in the
world, and trip you know historically what I think is really fascinating
because this is the conversation about decline, you know, is that liberal
Protestantism, that mainline denominations, for as easy as it is to heap on
them to see everything that's wrong with them. They did possess self correcting
mechanisms.
Unknown 16:50
And so despite Anglo Protestant triumphalism post World War Two.
Unknown 16:57
There were people in the, in the main line, who did look at the flow of
history, And who did say, Wait a second.
Unknown 17:08
We have black people who were soldiers, sailors, in World War Two helped us win
this great victory and now they come back to the United States and look
they're, they're treated like shit, you know, and so this isn't right, this is
what we're about. And so, so the main line, at least in some portions of it,
and that those are the portions we valorize now.
Unknown 17:31
They began as sort of a self corrective journey about race, it didn't happen
fast enough, but it happened it was happening, and it still is happening,
Interestingly enough, they also be in a self corrective journey about violence
around, Vietnam, and they began a self corrective journey about women around
feminists. And so the liberal traditions, because that's enough sort of
theological liturgical communal resources to be able to do that work of self
interrogation and examination and say, We need a different type of shirt for
different kinds of things, and to try to create a different story, that would
go along with that. But the tragedy of it is, is that those are the churches
that decline in the 60s and the 1970s. And so, so they became a parable for
other Protestants, of what you can't do.
Unknown 18:34
And when they became that terrible but you can't do other process say well what
can we do.
Unknown 18:40
Well, we're going to become more patriotic and so by 1980 You got Jerry Falwell
standing on the stairs of Thomas Road Baptist church with a big choir behind
him all wearing red, white and blue waving flags. And, and so, so, um,
literally every single time you turn around, that form of that highly pop up a
pious paper patriotic Protestantism, all like was heaping on the mainline at
the same time, saying oh you can't do liberal Christianity because if you start
doing that kind of stuff here, there's no, there's not gonna be I love your
churches, nobody wants to nobody wants to hear all that.
Unknown 19:22
And so this tradition, became actually a tradition of denial and a tradition of
rejection of any kind of self criticism or genuine cultural reflection. And
then they created a narrative of growth around that. If you go into that place
of denial. If you go into that place where you, you refuse to look at this
other historical evidence. Your church is going to grow. And that's why this
narrative was so dangerous at the end of the 20/20 century, and why there is
nobody happier in America, that that narrative is dying right now, then me and,
and if that Christianity day piece was written because I've been making a big
fuss about how much they're dying and the media is finally paying attention to
me. God bless them, I hope Christianity takes me on every single day for the
rest of my life,
Unknown 20:25
literally shut up.
Unknown 20:30
Have you ever heard me say that it's like that narrative that that
evangelicalism are always going to grow narrative was the narrative that
propelled this kind of white supremacist Christianity, right to the steps of
the Capitol in January 2021 And I have, I don't want to hear any more of it,
I'm over it and I'm really glad this just sticks are showing that I'm not
alone.
Unknown 21:00
Oh my goodness. I know, we're probably getting near the time we need to wrap
this up. But it strikes me that one way to describe this decline growth pattern
is to say that churches can broadly speaking, identify themselves as civil
religions, where their job is to bless the war, the nation's wars to bless the
nation's policies to pray for forgiveness if the nation does wrong, whether or
not the praise for forgiveness pronounces forgiveness and justification.
Unknown 21:40
And there's other positive things maybe that civil religions do to their
standards of decency and all the rest.
Unknown 21:48
But then your prophetical within it rises up to say our nations of mass, our
nations hypocritical our nations, nations got very skeletons.
Unknown 21:57
Let's face the truth. So you have civil religion versus prophetical.
Unknown 22:03
I think part of what we've seen is mainline Protestantism served as the silver
religion through the world wars, and then the 60s came to have the courage to
become a prophetical named feminism and name, what is the density of native
peoples who talk about the environment and exploitation the environment as it
talks about poverty and make racist central issue by liberal Protestant clergy
doing that in the 1960s They broke the contract of the civil religion and
evangelicalism were opportunities. At that moment, and they said here's our
opportunity to sneak in and become the new civil religion, steal away mainline Protestants.
And I think there's a way to say that Roman Catholics in the in the religious
writing effusion white conservative process by Conservative Catholics, Roman
Catholic sees their opportunity to say we can be the civil religion.
Unknown 22:59
And in many ways. These 20 years from 2001 to 21 from September 11 to generate
these 20 years it seems to me.
Unknown 23:12
The were being a civil religion and and reckoning.
Unknown 23:22
And so, even though a lot of people hear the word declined and they think it's
really too bad. I think part of what you're saying is, good riddance of civil
religion that defends the indefensible. Good riddance. And that maybe sets is
tough for some of our future conversations because this decline is one of the
best opportunities that a genuine form of Christianity has ever had to say that
race is a pivotal gospel issue. Poverty is a pivotal gospel issue, caring for
the environment is a
Unknown 23:59
radical reframing of of our faith, so that that decline, it seems to me, is a
phenomenal opportunity, and I think we have to say, as you just did.
Unknown 24:14
I don't want to go back. i There's nothing I want to go the extra hour.
Unknown 24:20
And that little tiny uptick in the statistics that were present in the July, 8
data.
Unknown 24:29
I don't see that as hopeful and good news in the sense that oh my gosh the
churches could be big again, but I see it as a hopeful good news is that maybe
this much reduced mainline has finally done enough public work that people who
are searching for Protestant identity that is reflective, that wants to engage
issues of race, that's happy to have women that's welcoming to LGBTQ people
that's trying to create a different kind of vision of a truly, Truly
pluralistic table Eucharistic table, that there are legitimately enough,
Americans who are searching for that, that they're wandering toward some of
these older churches again. And that's where I think the good news is not that
the churches are going to grow or that they're going to become you know
influential in the public square.
Unknown 25:32
But that may be the long part of inviting some percentage of white people into
a new story might finally be paying off in terms of people understanding what's
been happening in that quadrant American religion. And so that's one of my
places of.
Unknown 25:59
I really enjoyed the first session, and getting the talk.
Unknown 26:05
I'll just say one of those participating. The second half we're going to
intentionally be more positive the first three were digging in to trying to
look into problematize like setting this anniversary aside, and not in like
making each little moment right have shaken the last couple of years and
exception. We're trying to recognize that they are regulatory but we have to
deal with and one of the things, when I've just been thinking about doing this
with you is that both of you represent, To me, people who are invested in it,
or maybe recognize that liberation involves a kind of unlearning and there's a
call for new framing stories. And so like that's where we get to write in the
second half, but the act of unlearning is really important and I think the
notion of the client. There's so many bits that are connected to it. But the
idea that civil religion is the only driving religion in the empire.
Unknown 27:16
Is that something that would be wonderful to unlearn. Because I'm regularly
told that's the case.
Unknown 27:27
So, yeah. Any final thoughts like I I'm just super excited to do this.
Unknown 27:36
I'm glad we're talking about this, I feel like I learned some things today.
Unknown 27:41
All right, well we will see you next week. Remember, apply to any of the emails
have questions. And, yeah.
