We wouldnt be here today. Tonight we are excited to have with this tara burton. She is the release of her new book. The contributing editor at the american interests in a columnist at religious news services. She is written on religion and secularism with the National Geographic the New York Times and more and holds doctorate in theology from oxford. Ross is a columnist for the New York Times oped page. He is the author of to change a church bad religion and prayer just privilege. He was a Senior Editor for the atlantic he is the film critic for the national review. He lives in new haven with his wife and three children. Without further ado please join me in welcoming cara and russ. Thank you so much for all of you. For joining us here in the exciting virtual experience in the disembodied way of talking about a book. Thank you for letting me interrogate you about the future of religion in the United States and beyond. I just want to make two comments before we start the first is that in our era of covid19 ive now done enough as the events that sometimes people are more hesitant to ask questions when they are typing in questions than they would be at a real event when you can stand up and tell the author why she is wrong about everything in the world. You have to just let me ask questions for the entire hour. The second one which i will reiterate for the edge. This is a challenging time for everybody. Authors are among the least challenged. Putting out a book at a moment in a moment like this. Is a difficult thing. I just want to encourage you if you are listening. Dont just buy the book. Encourage your friends to buy the book. Lets start in with a big dumb question. This is a book about new religions for a godless world. That is a subtitle. Is our world really godless. What religions are filling that void. Spoiler alert. We dont live in a godless world. Thats basically the argument i make. When we talk about a secular age. A World Without religion. What are we really talking about. A couple of background statistics. About 23 or 24 of americans say they are an affiliate with any religion. They believe in some sort of a higher power. Were not necessarily talking about people who are atheists. About 6 of the population. We are talking about people who for whatever reason are alienated by institutional lives in who feel like it has nothing to offer them. Who may be in the case of the people that believe in that traditional judeochristian god. They are unwilling to identify with or anticipate as a religion in and of itself. Were also talking about a broader category and in my book i call it the religious remix. After people who do identify with a particular religious tradition but whose personal practices or Belief Systems are more aesthetic. About 30 of self identified christians say they believe in reincarnation. We are living in an age i would argue where religious life and the component meaning purpose and community and ritual they are related to them in a different way mixing and matching. There is a sense in which we are all the endplate of this. These can include not just elements of the traditional tradition. But while this culture fandom. Political activism. Neopaganism and wicca are among the fastestgrowing. One initial response that someone wellversed in American History may have as how new is all of this. After all there is nothing more american than being entrepreneurial in setting up a church of one and every kid in High School English class was assigned the collective works of wealth dash mike ralph waldo emerson. The larger history of 19th Century American spirituality is rife what rifle but you and the book call institutional. What is the same, what is different. What we head in common with 19th Century America and what has changed in the last 30 or 40 years. These are kind of reductive terms. Your external forces we have seen quite a history of the pendulum swinging back and forth. The outcropping intuitional faith in approaches. Your tent revival but also the birth of Movement Like new thought it was huge about the 1860s moving onward. If you think about it hard enough it will happen. It became hugely influential. And then it led to a halt publishing industry. There is spiritual wisdom there is also i argue those in jellico revivals. Christina has become desiccated nobody really believes anymore. You just go to church on sunday and it doesnt really matter. We need to look for a personal relationship with god. Something more intense and intimate. In the culture of the 1960s. It is just the pendulum swings back and forth. Where think something as distinct and new about this great awakening is the internet given that we are trying to gather in this way at this time. I like to say what the protestant reformation was for the creation of the model in many ways intimate and and would. We have the direct connection to the text to internalize in such a way and one may well draw the connection to the protestant egos overall. We are seen these new religions being the internet religions. We are all not just consumers of content or readers about we are also inclined to culturally think about creators people that want to head ownership in stories. With the added part of the internet itself i think the hunger to create and be involved to head ownership in our stories has made up although more resistant to have orthodox ways of experiencing and receiving doctrine. I think as well our particular capitalist moments in the era of personal branding made us cognizant of the identities based so heavily on her choices. What we post what we tweet. It creates this publicprivate part of identity. There isnt odd strain of what app in my using to meditate. My going to a i think while this culture is the biggest most obvious example of this. The way in which our consumption is seen to define us especially in the age of the algorithm where our recommendation is are getting narrower and narrower can contribute to this kind of and mice. I want to press you a little bit on the point you made at the end. One of the interesting things about the book is that as a core you are talking about practices and experiments they fit some kind of definition of religious or spiritual rights. The court book. But then your definition of new religion spreads outward. Consumer culture and personalized aspects. Everything kind of holistic and personalized convict me as someone who may be is a little bit inclined to skepticism of that that it makes sense to fit the world of brands in that kind of self cultivation under the umbrella of religious practice. There is an implicit theology that is shared by so many of these. That is the implicit theology that is a moral or spiritual demand to improve in a certain way the collapse of the distinction between the effort you put on the bike. The way that your skin looks. The way in which these things are sold and talked about is so loaded with this language. And selfcare not just as a nice thing to do although historically it does come from a much more political place. Its been the wellness paradigm. There is a sense if we are not taking care of ourselves if we are not putting in the effort to be the best in a certain way which is of course also happens to make us prettier and more fit there is a purity that we are reaching in so doing. I would argue that there is an element of that. There are efforts that are taken from the prosperity gospel definition. The idea that more broadly your job as a human being is to be the truest self the best self to be the most authentic self to release yourself from repression and the way that the society has acted upon you. Is that quoted as the moral or spiritual good. The language of energy is really popular. Its popular in various fear much more political and outward looking. The capitalist version of it. It does tend to equate personal fulfillment with the kind of vibration in a way that i find incredibly interesting. In a way that i find incredibly interesting. Is a brand from which we buy things. And doesnt have the Community Aspect from the way. I think that soul cycle is an even better example. It combines a lot of the metaphysic and the kind of a sense of purpose with the community and ritual that let you experience that in the moment. I went through a few classes the signs that if you go in. A community all of the signs say things like your energy except affects your neighbors energy. In a way that is again using this kind of bag nebulous spiritual language to lend to what just could be an uncomfortable fit this class to burn some calories with an aura of spiritual attainment. It is good for you in the universe. One thing that has struck me that i think fits with your argument about the difference between the early 21st century in the 19th century and its gurus is an absence of institutionalization. The United States has a lot of the same kind of spiritual entrepreneurs and would be gurus that we head in the victorian area. They dont seem as likely to sound like something we would call a church. I think she is a pre internet figure. She is an updated new thought kind of figure. I feel like in the 19th century there be a Church Founded by her. It would it be huge there would be chapels around the country and that doesnt seem to happen to anything with the same extent. If a little stuff in the 70s and 80s especially lately. How much of that is the internet. Why doesnt Gwyneth Paltrow i guess kanye west has sunday services. See mike im not sure that it would be successful at least initially. I think the label of church or making something at church is as you said would be met with the degree of suspicion i think as will the facet there is such a willingness to ask and match. We millenials so much of the contemporary landscape is about that kind of precise in the village solicitation. We cant necessarily get away from that endpoint. In our civic ones and political ones. I think that suspicion doesnt lend itself to such a focus on self. There is it easy narrative. These kids are so narcissistic. I think it is attempting way that one can go about reading. I actually think that what we are seeing isnt necessarily a story of self is him or narcissism its an institutional failure. If your institutions have failed you. If you dont think you can trust the media and the scientific establishment makes perfect sense. The instincts and desires in authority. You might have slightly more trust that you are aware of yourself and other people. To push on that point a tiny bit is this sustainable. It is a book about our whole court jury. It is focus on people younger than me. I just turned 40. So millenials and generation z. These are people who are conducting experiments in religion and a time in a time that they are conducting experiments i think you can tell a plausible story where these are the children of baby boomers who have their own rebellion and often sort of hung onto an institutional affiliation and obviously you talk a little bit about this kind of thing. Generational turnover where they took one step out. Their kids have it for the most part gone through the 50 to 60 years of life that awaits after your 20s. In which not necessarily the doctrine of religion. Its not even clear what they provide in a roll. This is more in the prophecy line. What is a slick like in 25 years conducting these experiments now. The more inward looking. Those are the things i think our understandable. I think we will see a hunger for this. That we kind of the selfinterested versions of these cannot offer. I think that what we will see and im interested in particular for example social justice as a movement in part because of what it does offer is an ideology of community and solidarity which there is a real hunger for. Im interested more broadly. On the free love as a continuation human perfection in the 19th century. But the ways in which the term has long been used. Where people who who are marginalized by it. For whatever reason are alienated. His family of origin might not be in touch with them the same way. They might be able to find one another. As a result of the kind of trivialization that you find on the internet they can find likeminded individuals. There are options for solidarity for coming together for the creation of ritual in a way that may not look like organized religion but nevertheless offer that sense of community. I always remember there was a woman i interviewed before the start of the book. They lost their husband unexpectedly. And with his friends he wanted to celebrate and commemorate his life in a way that was specific to him the friends got together and they played music from his favorite videogame. It was not arranged around that. Who this person was and what his life was like. He wanted to play a secret videogame he played together. She wish that they played this game in his memory. It was hugely important to her. I think it is such a toning example of how this desire can survive the reshaping even as i think the pure selfish inwardness the inwardness of a certain kind of wellness culture. I think it is unsustainable. Lets drill down on the question of belief. And were talking about immunity the core of what we think of as religion has always been fully. There is a lot of sociological debate of how the poor important those things actually are. I think there is truth to that. The major World Religions had been structured around meadow physical claims. I always ask you this question. I think it radiates through a lot of the more to soup you logical oriented experiences that you are writing about. How much do they actually believe in what theyre doing. It talks about that pre christian or nonchristian traditions. Theyre doing witchcraft. Some of it seems like play some of it seems to have real belief. How do you see the question of belief playing out there. Belief is very difficult to quantify. To disentangled from any of these other practices. There are as many definitions of religion. It doesnt matter at all. Theres ones that say are the true claims yes or not. Is something a little bit more complicated. If you had found something to be true and you act as if it was true. And the values that you create. You reaffirm the truth of that within the community. There is a social reality that is something more complex and i would argue a model where everyone is doing something and no one believes it. I think it is the strawman version of what community would look like. I think that ritual and community can indeed be a precursor to faith or a spiritual awareness rather than simply being to take that. They are feeding back into political life. One of the more interesting aspects of the neopagan thing and at what has happened in that culture. You have chapters in the book that follow what we might call peg in a thread. Do you want to talk a little bit about that. The most prominent example conceived broadly. There are people who identify but not belong to that. The rough umbrella of progressive witchcraft i think it is a hugely significant phenomenon. They identified about a million self identified witches in the country. The Fastest Growing religious tradition. That was before 2016. I would argue that that all changed. In the wake of the donald trump election in the womens merge in particular and the feminist movement around that. There is a real interest in particularly young women. They found within the imagery of witchcraft the difficult which the woman who is in charge of her own sexuality found these images liberating in part because they were so much in opposition of the white g and evangelical trump. As these kind of symbolic but also spiritually real outpourings of anger of grief. I think would be fair to say it was a single set in a language that were people were able to use to prop up their anger and their hope for a different world. Rather than emptying a convenience symbol. If were going completely across the political spectrum and there is the rise of what i call a certain site of activism. The desire with members of members rights group. This watereddown typed up each and is him the good old days when the hybrid of ancient greece was seen through the journeys in the 1950s. The good old days when men were mad and women were women. We have this obsession with physical strength in the primary truth of the blood and this implicit blood and soil that i will just let hang in the air. I think this reactionary atavism it goes itself echoes itself as a response to the desiccated modern world and the civilization which these cultures have destroyed. Its kind of a desire to reclaim a primal past. A strong interest what nature says. I would call it a kind of nature worship. Its a different form of paganism that takes very Different Things from our pagan past. Just in listening to you describe it and the figures that you reference it seems to me in part that you can see that as a gender polarization. Obviously there are male witches and pagans on the pagan left. And there are alt right neopagan women but there does seem to be a sense in which the larger polarization of the sexism in our culture seems to play out a little bit in this religious landscape. Opera winfrey are the jewel or scene are the american center. They are bronze age perverts supporting donald trump. And certainly this is a kind of religious failure in the sense that you would expect this community to socialize men and women together in certain ways which maybe is not happening what you think about that. When i look at the wide range of these groups i dont think there exactly comfortable. I have a lot more condemnation for the at a best than i do for the witches. I think that what we are seeing so many of the subjects other than what they are explaining it is the same. Horrible pc. Feminists the horrible brook age. Or are they patriotic all these are in both the charges that are leveled against institutions more broadly. I think whatever else we want to say. Is that they have failed us more broadly. Speaking more broadly i think there is a sense in which not the center but the institutions that make up our lives have lost our trust. And however we may understand or give voice to those feelings. I would argue Something Interesting to me and how widespread the distress distrust is of the institutional targets. I would like to thank everyone who has followed my instructions and actually ask some questions. We head about 15 or 20 minutes now. Im gonna take some questions out of the queue. Maybe adapt to them slightly using the moderators prerogative. But we will start with a question he cites. The catholic philosopher charles taylor. The canadian offer author of a sexual or age. He says. That t