March 3, 2025 • 28 mins
In this conversation, Ryan Girdusky and Catherine Ruth Pakaluk explore the complex relationship between politics and religion, particularly among young people. They discuss the demographic shifts in religious affiliation, the impact of education and homeschooling, and the cultural influences that shape religious identity. The conversation also delves into the gender dynamics of faith, highlighting how young men and women engage differently with religion. Ultimately, they consider the future of religion in America and its connection to family values and societal trends. It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Girdusky is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. Find out more HERE
Learn more about Catherine Ruth Pakaluk HERE
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#politics #religion #youngmen #religiousrevival #homeschooling #cultural #identity #gender #dynamics #education #familyvalues #demographictrends
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
As a baby of the eighties and child of the nineties,
If George Michael taught me anything it's that you gotta
have faith. And that's the theme of this episode. Welcome
back to It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Grodski. On
February twenty sixth, Pew Research, one of the premier think
tanks that looks at American life, put on their third
Religious Landscape Study. This is a study conducted in two
(00:23):
thousand and seven, twenty fourteen, and last week that examines
how It's a massive study. It examines how Americans think
about religion in multitude of ways, everything from raising children
to praying to church attendance. It's over thirty six nine
hundred people were part of the study. That's a massive,
massive study. So what it defined Between two thousand and
(00:45):
seven and twenty fourteen, these are the older studies. Christianity
and daily prayer decline substantially in this country, right, and
the number of people claiming to be part religiously unaffiliated
climbed pretty dramatically. That trend continued all the way through
their smaller studies. They have small studies between these major years.
All in these smaller studies until twenty twenty. But and
(01:06):
here's your data for this episode. In two thousand and seven,
seventy eight percent of Americans reported being Christians. The number
fell to seventy one percent by twenty fourteen and declined
further to sixty two percent by twenty twenty. Likewise, number
of Americans who said they prayed daily went from fifty
eight percent in two thousand and seven to forty eight
percent in twenty twenty, a ten point drop. Americans have
(01:28):
been getting more secular every day until twenty twenty, and
that's when the really interesting part of this survey happened.
Since twenty twenty, Christianitian America has remained stable and even
increased Among some segments of the population. The boomers, Zoomers,
and millennials are having a bit of a religious revival.
The number of people born between two thousand and two
(01:49):
thousand and six who reported to pray daily rose from
twenty percent to thirty percent. It's only ticked up slightly
from millennials born in the eighties and baby boomers in
the fifties and sixties, but they all so a flight increase,
a noticeable increase. These are the generations that are most
likely to also see an increase in reporting that they
identify as Christians since twenty twenty. For Zoomers once again,
(02:12):
those born between two thousand and two thousand and six,
the numbers identifying as Christian went from forty five percent
to fifty one percent. For millennials from the eighties, it's
going from fifty to two to fifty six percent, and
for older gen xers and young baby boomers going in
the sixties and fifties, the number one from seventy two
to seventy six percent. That's an average of a five
(02:32):
point increase in those three generations. And while that's not massive,
it's not like a thirty point increase. It's not this
you know, religious revival, it's in any like you know,
massive way, but it's a it's the first time in
almost twenty years that there's been any reversal or any
slowing down of mass secorism. That's worth noting. And while
young people are still far less Christian than their parents,
(02:54):
Zoomers went from being plurality agnostic in twenty twenty to
being majority Christian. So what happened in twenty twenty, Like,
why was that the thing? Why are did it spark
the change. Some of my readers onlines that it was
because of immigration by President Biden. After all, did let
in millions and millions of people demographically change this country,
(03:15):
possibly permanently and unless we get the mass deportations, really
you know, kicking big time. But these millions of peoplend
so maybe they changed the country, and that it's a
valid point. So I looked into it. The overall Christian
population America was sixty one percent white, thirteen percent Black,
eighteen percent Hispanic, and three percent Asian. Now look at
the overall composition of the US, which is fifty eight
(03:35):
percent white, twenty percent Hispanic, thirteen percent Black, and six
percent Asian. Basically, America's Christians look like the rest of America.
It's not overwhelmingly you know, Hispanic or overwhelmingly African. It's
it looks just like us. And I think people forget
that while America has grown more secular in the last
(03:55):
twenty years, so has the rest of the world, including
Latin America and even Africa. Like the image that we
have of like regions of Latin America where there's like
nine kids running around, you know, in a household, Crucifixes
in our lady of wild up statutes. That doesn't exist,
That doesn't exist anywhere, not in any big way. The
most of Latin America has a birth rate way below
(04:16):
fertility level. Some parts of Latin America have a fertility
oh you know, have fewer kids than we do in America.
So the study that the study is actually as They
also found out that people born outside the United States
actually have a less religious affiliation than those born in
the United States, which does make sense when you remember
that Asians Asian immigrants are the least religious group of
(04:37):
people of any demographic in the United States. So if
it wasn't mass immigration that stopped the decline and create
a slight resurgence in Christianity of the last few years,
what was it. Some analysts said it was COVID nineteen
that sparked maybe a slight religious change amongst some people.
With a lot of free time and the lockdown, I
think people re examine their faith. But there's a bigger story,
and that's the story of young men. Young men are
(04:59):
much more religious than they used to be. Religion was
something that women always did more often than men, and
that's true of the Silent generation, Baby Boomers, Gen xers Millennials,
but not much for Zoomers. Young men were basically as
religious as women for the very first time. Some sady
is actually besides the PUC, they have young men being
(05:20):
more religious than young women. Analysts like David Campbell, a
political scientist from the University of Notre Dame. He says
that young men who have also become more likely to
support Donald Trump because of cultural values, are saying that
they're more likely to identify as Christian. That there's an internet
personalities besides like the Joe Rogan's and the Barstow's sports
which are not religous at all, that have created this
(05:41):
cultural movement to sit there and say, you know, you
should at least identify as Christian because it's part of
our overall political values, are our moral values. You know,
people like Daily Wires hosts Michael Knowles, big big you
know podcast hosts. He talks about Catholic faith a lot.
Father Mike Schmitz who had a huge podcast called a
(06:02):
Bible in a Year and Catechism in a Year. There
were big hits. He's a prominent person on the alternative media.
And then there's even like subculture interne people, people who
are not huge like those people are as far as
you know, podcast hosts go and Internet people Dasha and
Arika Sova. I'm probably just butchered her last name, but
Dasha from Red Scare and she was on the TV
(06:23):
show Succession. She talks about her because a lot like
a lot a lot, and she has a lot of
women and young men and people who are maybe like
in more of the internet's subculture, but they are looking
and they're listening and they're talking about it. Is this
part of a permanent change? Are we just going to
get a much more religious country? No, because zoomers are
still way less religious than baby boomers are. So as
(06:45):
baby boomers die off and Zoomers go into adulthood, Christianity
will decrease as that time goes on. It's just a
generational shift, but it's not bleeding the way that it
used to be. And maybe if the door's open to
some kind of revival, maybe that means something else will happen,
you know, because religion matters more than just people's personal
morals personal faith. There's entirely different life experiences that are
(07:10):
happening from people who are religious than those who are
not religious. Eighty two percent of people who are politically
conservative say they have some kind of religion, compared to
just thirty percent of liberals. Those who are religious are
also more likely to babies, They're more likely to boleance
it for charity. They're more likely to affiliate with other
religious organizations like schools like religious schools and private schools,
(07:32):
and homeschooling organizations. Think about this. Among thirty eight year
olds church going Mormons, seventy percent have children under the
age of eighteen. Compare that to thirty year old atheists.
Only thirty eight percent have children under eighteen, half as
many are experiencing parenthood Like this life altering part of
(07:54):
your life as an adult, being a parent is only
being experience, or is being twice as experience among religious
people as non religious people. And that will bleed into
our politics, It will bleed into our values, it will
bleed into our economy and a million other things. And
while sixty three percent of Republicans say that they believe
in God without a doubt, just thirty nine percent of
(08:16):
Democrats do so. Is politics fueling a religious revival, especially
among men? Or is religious inspiring a political conversion? To
talk to me about it. This week is Catherine Ruth Bacullich.
She's a professor of economics at Catholic University and the
author of the great book Hannah's Children. Catherine, Welcome to
a numbers game.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Thanks Catherine.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
In your book hannash Children, which I am in the
middle of reading, it's a great book, by the way,
you interviewed dozens of college educated women who had five
or more children, basically demographic outliers, and they all had
college educations. That's the important equation. They had college educations,
and they had lots of kids, and you know, having
large families is a very obvious in the book. In
(08:56):
the book, they often talk about their religion, all these
women and how are and plays an important part in
their decision to have children. We've talked a lot about
religion earlier in the show and the and the change
in how people act with religion, how religion is changing,
and that there's been this small increase in number of
young people saying that they are religious that aside from
(09:17):
just marriage or is it just marriage and chowering? Is
there another thing that religion plays a part in?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Probably education?
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Really?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah, I mean meaning we're seeing a real shift. Let's
just say, explosive rise in homeschooling, Christian schooling, you know,
those kinds of things. I think that's probably something to
keep around. I haven't dug into the data on this.
I'm not actually sure I've seen any, but I think,
you know, if we were to break down the trends
and like the rise of homeschooling, you know, we're seeing
that motivated by a lot a lot of Christian.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Groups, a lot Jewish groups. So right, so I think
it's there.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
But of course education, I'd say, like in terms of
marriage and family, it's it's part of the transmission of values.
So it's it's probably part of this story of this
political interaction.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
The Pew study was interesting because there was the number
of people who are zoomers right generations see people worn
two thousand and two thousand and six who are port
being Christian is up from twenty twenty. But they are
not praying daily increasing there, but they're identifying as Christian,
Like they're over there Christian. What is it? Like they're
(10:20):
they're consumptly Christian. The door is open. They're kind of
like walking through. Yeah, is being culturally Christian just a
big part of it? Like to say, I'm not down
with blocism, so therefore christian.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Maybe, I think that's part of it. Another piece of
it is probably what we would call like immunity, So
like they're because they're Christian or the identify as Christian
if some of like other identity group that keeps them
immune from these trends or gives them like a safe
space to be I kind of wonder looking at your.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Point about like these are zoomers, they're certainty.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I mean like if they're zumors, they're born in like
two thousand, right, that means probably a lot of them
haven't started their families yet. Yeah, And we know in
terms of religious trends on behavior that actually a time
when sort of cultural religious people become like actual religious
people is when they have their first kid, see right right.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
You have something to take to church.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, and also if you go sit into a religious school,
that's a big part of it as well. Yeah, you're
listening to It's a numbers game with Ryan Gerdosky. We'll
be right back after this message. There's a big question
mark of like why did Christianity stop declining? Yes, part
of it could be it happens like twenty twenty is
(11:31):
like the figurehead. And there's a lot that happens in
twenty twenty, right, there's the racial riots, there's the wokeism.
There's also COVID, and there are a lot of people
who turned to podcasters. You know was a father, Mike Schmidt.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
As his famous that's true. Yeah, you have, you.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Know, Michael Knowles, you have even like sub texts of people.
What do you think it could be? You're college kids
a lot.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, No, that's right. I was going to say, I mean,
I think the alternative media has been a huge piece
of that.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
My sons are probably my sons who are exact that
age range, and two of them are married. I mean,
they listen to more podcasts than I do, and they're
probably like politically a little bit to the right of me,
you know which, and I'm like to the right of
most people, but my sons are definitely probably to the
right of me. Jordan Peterson had a big impact, and
of course he's like you know, and he talks about
God in religion all the time, even if he's not
(12:19):
a member of an organized religion.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Is oh is he I best?
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Like, I think I'm not a huge follower, but I
think like his wife was like dying, she had a miraculous.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
His wife converted, converted, I mean, and obviously he talks
about God all the time. And so if you were,
if you were, if you were like a kid growing
up in a religious family and looking for sort of
permission to be sort of politically religious or to express
yourself or identify as a Christian, Peterson would certainly have
been something that would support that. Yeah, I mean, and
(12:51):
actually just I'm thinking of another detail from my book
that I forgot to mention earlier. I tell that story
like in the second chapter of this Family, I walked
into their house. They lived in New England. It's a
super democratic area. There's like a Jewish family with a
bunch of kids, and the dad greets me with a
maga hat on, you know, and I.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Was like, I read part of your book.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, you know, and it's like.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
You know, you go look at the you go look
at those correlations, and there's there's obviously something going on
that I think it'll crystallize and the number is better
in the next decade. But like something we're seeing these
red states, I have more marriage and more family, more
traditional family behaviors, I'm assuming, although I don't have a
good chart of it, but I think the religious behavior
is stronger there as well.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, I mean yes, I think like the highest states
for fertility, off the top of my head is like
Utah is always usually number one because the LDS like
things still kind of even if the Mormons don't have
as many kids they used to, they're still higher than
the average. And then it's like Nebraska, Kansas sometimes the.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Dakota, Dakota's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
The Plain States and Utah really outstretched the rest.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Of the yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
True.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Yeah. The other thing about like young people becoming more religious,
and I'm thinking we may want to think about too,
is like religious college. There's this kind of story of
these kind of scrappy religious colleges, many of which stayed
open during COVID. And we've also got the homeschoolers coming
of age. I mean, that big shift, that kind of
growth in homeschoolers, which was like, you know, it's just
(14:14):
like a classic tipping point. You'd say, well, people were
out there homeschooling their kids in the nineties when I
hadn't even heard of homeschooling.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
They were out there.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Doing this, and then those kids had kids, and like,
are we just starting to see a sort of tipping
point of all those homeschoolers right, community.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
People said, like, I mean, my followers on Twitter were
saying to me, well, obviously this uptacking religion is all
because of immigration, Biden, let all these people.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
In No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Well. I looked it up the numbers and it's basically
the same exact demographic breakdown as America, So there's no
big change. And also I think that people forget that,
like Latin America is much less religious than it used
to be. People. Yeah, Westrola is a bunch of you know,
women with our lead to Guadalupe statues with nine children
running around, and that's not the way it is and
(14:59):
has hasn't been for quite sometimes.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, a lot of Pentecostalism, Yeah, a.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Lot of just secular people who don't have kids anymore.
Mexico as well below the birth rate. Most of Latin
America is way below the earth. So I think that
that says a lot about who is If everything in
culture and everything in society it's as easy as possible
to be secular, and pop culture more or less mocks
religion more often than it celebrates it. What would make
(15:28):
a young person or a younger person gravitate towards faith?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Now?
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Is it just saying, hey, look I'm Christian, therefore I'm
not woke or is it something deeper going on? A
lot of young people, a lot of like zoomers especially,
really crave an authentic relationship with something all the time.
They're always searching authenticity. Do you see that? Do you
think that?
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean certainly in my time as
a college teacher kind of watching over the last ten years,
I mean, I would say I'm definitely seeing greater identification
with religiosity as a form of identity, but definitely political.
These are a lot of the same young men and
women that are part of the MAGA movement. The other
thing I kind of want to mention is like, and
I don't even know have I don't have a name
for it, but it seems to go along with this,
(16:12):
which is kind of these more traditional or sort of
throwback forms of religion which do seem sort of like
they're not doing what like we need to be more
granular when we talk about religion rates sort of like
we know what's happening with the sort of mainline Protestant churches.
They're all like super woke and progressive, right, and then
you know.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
You got are all like they have like you know,
Jesus was like a black trans feminist. Like that's the
sign that they have outside.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Exactly, and you're like, that's not going to be the
future of your church as it, you know. But I
would say, like in my church and the Catholic Church,
you know that you've got these sort of I mean
so called trad Catholics. That wasn't even a name tech
we didn't have a name for that ten years ago.
It was like, oh, there seems to be like Latin
Mass people. But actually it's much bigger what people call
trad Catholic stuff today. It's a lot bigger than Latin
(16:55):
Mass stuff. It's like young people that want to veil
and they want like older they smell them bets Catholicism.
They want to sort of like that, and that seems
to be broad. It seems like there's a lot of Orthodoxy.
I know literally no people older than zoomers that are
like becoming Orthodox Christians.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
I know Orthodox Christians too, that's like all new.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, And I know, well, there's two things that come
to mind. One is that people have this perception, like
the Obama perception that religions for lower income people who
cling to their guns and their bibles, when in fact
religious church attendance is higher among college educated people than
non college educated religion is really, if you're an active
(17:35):
participant in a church a physical building, you are more
likely to be middle class or upper middle class. It
is a bougie thing to belong to religion. Really, why
do you think that is? Is religion something that you
just have to have a lot of money in time
to sit there and be a participant in because the
cultural forces of that would make someone go to church
(17:56):
aren't there anymore.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Yeah, well, I definitely think that. I mean, religion is
always engaged the idea of the intellectual virtue. I mean,
religion has always been a part of kind of the
academic or the intellectual sphere. There are religious groups that
are popping up and protected on all all the college campuses.
I mean, this is another piece of this right, Like,
compared to when I was a student, it's much easier
(18:19):
to be part of a religious group on a secular
campus than it used to be. Like when I was
a student, was like you couldn't even find other Christians.
You'd look around. I went to Harvard for grad school
upin undergrad deeply secular places, very very secular places, not.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
A community college robout like myself.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
But you know, no, I honestly like, at this point,
I'm like, despite having gone to ivy like schools, I'm
still like a decent person. That's like, it's almost an
embarrassing thing on my vita at this point. But I mean,
for sure, like you would look around and be like,
those look like cheerful Asian students over there, they're probably Christian,
which is a funny sort of stereotype, but it was
it was kind of true at the time, and you'd
(18:57):
have to guess looking at people, like maybe they're Christian
and maybe they're religious. There was no like chat groups,
there was no way to find people today like that's
that's one of these things that's been enabled. So there's
a lot of that. But I did want to get
to that point that I think religion, the great religions
of the world, have always been engaged with the kind
of proposition about faith and reason.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
And so I think it is kind of natural.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
That that there we would see this reflected in the
sort of educated classes. That's a complete answer to your question.
But you you reminded me of something else, Like I
know that ARC Forum was in London last week? Was
it ARC? This like alliance? It's like Peterson's gig. It's
this alliance responsible sitisitions. There's all these people that want
(19:39):
to protect Western civilization. I mean, I would think of
it as like a political cultural thing. It has nothing
officially to do with religion. But the first ARC forum
that they had, like eighteen months ago, one of the
speakers was like, so organized religion, it's important raise your
hand in this group if you belong to an organized
religion unless you're just like Peterson, like spiritual, and you know,
like the hands went up, And so there is some
(20:02):
kind of story here about kind of whatever it is
that organized religion is providing in the wake of sort
of like the rest of it all fell apart, right,
like the old belief that like liberal like whatever the
old consensus about like liberal institutions will save us, Like
we'll all just kind of march towards this happy religious, happy.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Cour It's like the neoliberalism will all have Donald's.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
In every box.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yes, that clearly fell apart, right, And yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think there's three different bosses to it. I think
that there is like the people who are motivated by influencers,
whether they be like the whole crisis King, you know,
I think this is what I'm signaling, or whether it
be like the trad wife movements on Instagram. You see
those women who like they've got makeup and their milk
(20:47):
and cow and they have fourteen kids running around.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And then you have they're millionaires.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
You're millionaires, right, They're just millionaires.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Models and millionaires, I know.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
And then you have people who have real crave towards
towards authenticity where you I mean, I go to I've
gone to a lad of miss I'm Catholic too, so
I've gone a lot of mass several times in my life.
There are a bunch of young people and they do
tend to sit there within the veils. And then I
think the third bucket are people who are defenders of
Western civilization or just see that the culture is rotted,
(21:17):
so they sit there and say, like, look, the West
is worth defending, and it's not in the terms of
like the post World War two neoliberal philosophy, like the
real West of what it means to be a West Journey.
I think that's more of like like a sense Trump thing.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Yeah, I was just going to say, like, when you
put that together, I'm thinking of like, you know, how
appealing JD. Vance was to so many or is to
so many, like my students and so on, that kind
of like he's religious. He sort of rejects that old
liberal consensus, you know, right, I mean he's like, well,
I don't know, like we're going to deal with western.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
North Carolina and their problems before we do other things.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, right now, I worked for JD. And I think
JD I fill out a lot of you know things.
Where as a kid, I don't think he went to
church very often. They read the Bible a lot, but
they didn't go to church. They weren't part of an
organized religion, which is a story of a lot of
people in lower income communities. And that conversion towards being
a practicing Catholic came once he had college degree and money,
(22:18):
and it's and I think marriage to that story is
something that is more common than people. Now, hey, we'll
be right back after this. The last question I want
to get to you, and you've written about this for
Hannah's Children, which is a really good book. I want
to emphasize that to my listeners. You bring up a
lot of times these women who have a lot of kids,
(22:38):
but we are seeing a big gender divide when it
comes to women and men. Women are more likely to
leave faith than not for the first time. Young men
are more likely to belong to a church than young women.
What is going on with young women? I hate to
say it, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
That's great, Like, don't give me an easy question to answered. Man,
I don't know. I mean, I'm inclined a little bit
towards the direction of the thesis that you know, people
people like Alibastucky talk about where you know, just you know,
as a kind of a class of explanations. I mean,
to some extent other commentators where you know, you look
(23:17):
at young women who are kind of they are other focused.
They're empathetic, they want to do good, they want to
help people.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
That's all.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
We kind of associate that with with a female charism,
if you will, And and they just are applying it
to the world, right, you know, like they want to
take care of stuff and mother things, but they want
to do that, you know, you know, so they kind
of take like, don't be nice, and then they sort
of spread that out. So it's like, I mean, the
thesis is it's like a misapplication of your desire to
(23:45):
take care of stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Is it also like a girl boss thing of like
rejecting things that seem oppressive? Is that because the religions
you know, allegedly oppressed.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, So I don't know, I don't know where we
are with the girl boss stuff. It seems like that
bubbles burst a little bit. I think that women don't
like to be mean, and so they don't associate with
politics that seems mean, and they don't associate with religion
that seems mean, right, And I think that's.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Like a really big point. That's a really way to
put it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, And that's why traditional things or like Republican politics
would seem too mean.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
For Republican politics seems evil. And you know, certain kinds
of traditional religion seems kind of mean too, right, Like
you don't accept all that love is love, and so
it looks kind of mean. That's the explanation out favor.
But we are seeing too, like once women get married
and have kids, like they tend to move way closer
to their to the to the men in the same
age range.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
I think what you could see is this really different
two different americas that people live in. You know, I
said earlier in the show that if you look at
like Mormons, for example, church going Mormons between eighteen and
forty seventy percent have kids, and if you look at
atheists in the same age range, like thirty eight percent
(24:55):
have kids, and the numbers just drop immensely among those
who are church going. Those are not going from doing
a lot of things that I guess are very sacrificial.
It's a lot of big sacrifice to have children, It's
a big sacrifice to sit there and do a lot
of things. You don't have as much freedom as you
would and there's no incentive to demand it. And so
(25:16):
I think that that is that you I think if
there is a fuel of religion and it marries with
political lines, you're talking at two immensely different life experiences
that kind of infused.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And both exactly. Well. I like this this line about
you know, sort of sacrifice and hard work. I mean,
I think I always think like in kind of archetype,
the universe of archetypes, there's kind of two things that
a lot of people have with religion. You know, one
is the sort of the nasty archetype, like it was
the cause of all the wars. Everybody fights a religion
and inspires people to do bad stuff. We don't want
(25:50):
people to be too religious, you know, that's kind of
a thing people have. But then there's this other part
of your brain. It's like you forget that part altogether.
The other part of your brain remembers that. You know,
every time you find these stories of heroism, the mother Teresa's,
the people who survive in prison for ages and ages,
I mean just the ones just released, you know recently,
you often find these amazing stories of faith that sustained
(26:11):
people through really difficult things.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Can I tell you I've never told the story before,
and I have flashbacks to it once in a while.
In a I worked in politics in my entire life.
That's my whole experience, working on campaigns, and I was
working on I was literally just doing like handing out
palm cards outside of mailhouse. I met a voting site.
This was like when I was eighteen years old, like
one of the very very first things I ever did.
(26:34):
And there was a woman there running for office as
a Democrat and someone said something anti Catholic to her,
and I will never forget this because she shouldn't win.
I forget what her name was, but she dressed down
the person who said the anti Catholic thing her because
she said, I never forget when, like I think, when
the AIDS epidemic happened, the person the first group of
(26:57):
people to take care of dying AIDS patients were nuns.
It was not the government. And she made this big
defense of none in the religious order, the women's religious
order that I found extremely well educated, extremely intelligent, and
coming from a very progressive side, which you would not
hear nowadays, probably at all. But it's something that was
(27:20):
really real and I think that obviously that meant a
lot to her and among religious sec religious liberals like
the Stephen Colberts of the world, who speak very profoundly
on faith and very.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Well educated on faith, Yeah, there.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Is something there that is just different than those who
sit there and say it's all hogwash and yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
So yeah, yeah, totally, And that's going to be the
big thing to unpack.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
It's just a fewer Stephen Colberts and they're used to.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Being, you know, right, And those are great stories they're
great stories, and so they're worth nursing our imaginations on them.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Well, Catherine, thank you for being on a numbers game.
Where can people go to find your book or read
what you write?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Give us your plug Amazon. Amazon's a great place to
get the book and audible. If you like to listen
to books on tape tape, that's not a thing anymore,
so Amazon.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
I'm on X.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
You know, I'm not as big as you are on X,
but I'm there. I'm holding my own, you know, God
willing in the next couple of years, I'll get more
out there.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
But well, I hope you write another book because I
really like Hannah.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It's coming, it is.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
I'm going to interview the men next, I'm going to
do the guy.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Well, that's fair. I really want to talk about that then,
because that's really really fascinating.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Absolutely good luck on the new book. Thanks. I will
definitely want I'll definitely pick that up because I'm interested
in the men's story. The women's story is very good though.
Get it hannahs Children on Amazon dot com. And thank
you so much for listening. It's been great. This podcast
has been growing. Please like and subscribe wherever you get
your podcasts the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Give us
a five star review. It means a lot, and thank
(28:46):
you again. Come back next week and we will have
more numbers to break down.
As a baby of the eighties and child of the nineties,
If George Michael taught me anything it's that you gotta
have faith. And that's the theme of this episode. Welcome
back to It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Grodski. On
February twenty sixth, Pew Research, one of the premier think
tanks that looks at American life, put on their third
Religious Landscape Study. This is a study conducted in two
(00:23):
thousand and seven, twenty fourteen, and last week that examines
how It's a massive study. It examines how Americans think
about religion in multitude of ways, everything from raising children
to praying to church attendance. It's over thirty six nine
hundred people were part of the study. That's a massive,
massive study. So what it defined Between two thousand and
(00:45):
seven and twenty fourteen, these are the older studies. Christianity
and daily prayer decline substantially in this country, right, and
the number of people claiming to be part religiously unaffiliated
climbed pretty dramatically. That trend continued all the way through
their smaller studies. They have small studies between these major years.
All in these smaller studies until twenty twenty. But and
(01:06):
here's your data for this episode. In two thousand and seven,
seventy eight percent of Americans reported being Christians. The number
fell to seventy one percent by twenty fourteen and declined
further to sixty two percent by twenty twenty. Likewise, number
of Americans who said they prayed daily went from fifty
eight percent in two thousand and seven to forty eight
percent in twenty twenty, a ten point drop. Americans have
(01:28):
been getting more secular every day until twenty twenty, and
that's when the really interesting part of this survey happened.
Since twenty twenty, Christianitian America has remained stable and even
increased Among some segments of the population. The boomers, Zoomers,
and millennials are having a bit of a religious revival.
The number of people born between two thousand and two
(01:49):
thousand and six who reported to pray daily rose from
twenty percent to thirty percent. It's only ticked up slightly
from millennials born in the eighties and baby boomers in
the fifties and sixties, but they all so a flight increase,
a noticeable increase. These are the generations that are most
likely to also see an increase in reporting that they
identify as Christians since twenty twenty. For Zoomers once again,
(02:12):
those born between two thousand and two thousand and six,
the numbers identifying as Christian went from forty five percent
to fifty one percent. For millennials from the eighties, it's
going from fifty to two to fifty six percent, and
for older gen xers and young baby boomers going in
the sixties and fifties, the number one from seventy two
to seventy six percent. That's an average of a five
(02:32):
point increase in those three generations. And while that's not massive,
it's not like a thirty point increase. It's not this
you know, religious revival, it's in any like you know,
massive way, but it's a it's the first time in
almost twenty years that there's been any reversal or any
slowing down of mass secorism. That's worth noting. And while
young people are still far less Christian than their parents,
(02:54):
Zoomers went from being plurality agnostic in twenty twenty to
being majority Christian. So what happened in twenty twenty, Like,
why was that the thing? Why are did it spark
the change. Some of my readers onlines that it was
because of immigration by President Biden. After all, did let
in millions and millions of people demographically change this country,
(03:15):
possibly permanently and unless we get the mass deportations, really
you know, kicking big time. But these millions of peoplend
so maybe they changed the country, and that it's a
valid point. So I looked into it. The overall Christian
population America was sixty one percent white, thirteen percent Black,
eighteen percent Hispanic, and three percent Asian. Now look at
the overall composition of the US, which is fifty eight
(03:35):
percent white, twenty percent Hispanic, thirteen percent Black, and six
percent Asian. Basically, America's Christians look like the rest of America.
It's not overwhelmingly you know, Hispanic or overwhelmingly African. It's
it looks just like us. And I think people forget
that while America has grown more secular in the last
(03:55):
twenty years, so has the rest of the world, including
Latin America and even Africa. Like the image that we
have of like regions of Latin America where there's like
nine kids running around, you know, in a household, Crucifixes
in our lady of wild up statutes. That doesn't exist,
That doesn't exist anywhere, not in any big way. The
most of Latin America has a birth rate way below
(04:16):
fertility level. Some parts of Latin America have a fertility
oh you know, have fewer kids than we do in America.
So the study that the study is actually as They
also found out that people born outside the United States
actually have a less religious affiliation than those born in
the United States, which does make sense when you remember
that Asians Asian immigrants are the least religious group of
(04:37):
people of any demographic in the United States. So if
it wasn't mass immigration that stopped the decline and create
a slight resurgence in Christianity of the last few years,
what was it. Some analysts said it was COVID nineteen
that sparked maybe a slight religious change amongst some people.
With a lot of free time and the lockdown, I
think people re examine their faith. But there's a bigger story,
and that's the story of young men. Young men are
(04:59):
much more religious than they used to be. Religion was
something that women always did more often than men, and
that's true of the Silent generation, Baby Boomers, Gen xers Millennials,
but not much for Zoomers. Young men were basically as
religious as women for the very first time. Some sady
is actually besides the PUC, they have young men being
(05:20):
more religious than young women. Analysts like David Campbell, a
political scientist from the University of Notre Dame. He says
that young men who have also become more likely to
support Donald Trump because of cultural values, are saying that
they're more likely to identify as Christian. That there's an internet
personalities besides like the Joe Rogan's and the Barstow's sports
which are not religous at all, that have created this
(05:41):
cultural movement to sit there and say, you know, you
should at least identify as Christian because it's part of
our overall political values, are our moral values. You know,
people like Daily Wires hosts Michael Knowles, big big you
know podcast hosts. He talks about Catholic faith a lot.
Father Mike Schmitz who had a huge podcast called a
(06:02):
Bible in a Year and Catechism in a Year. There
were big hits. He's a prominent person on the alternative media.
And then there's even like subculture interne people, people who
are not huge like those people are as far as
you know, podcast hosts go and Internet people Dasha and
Arika Sova. I'm probably just butchered her last name, but
Dasha from Red Scare and she was on the TV
(06:23):
show Succession. She talks about her because a lot like
a lot a lot, and she has a lot of
women and young men and people who are maybe like
in more of the internet's subculture, but they are looking
and they're listening and they're talking about it. Is this
part of a permanent change? Are we just going to
get a much more religious country? No, because zoomers are
still way less religious than baby boomers are. So as
(06:45):
baby boomers die off and Zoomers go into adulthood, Christianity
will decrease as that time goes on. It's just a
generational shift, but it's not bleeding the way that it
used to be. And maybe if the door's open to
some kind of revival, maybe that means something else will happen,
you know, because religion matters more than just people's personal
morals personal faith. There's entirely different life experiences that are
(07:10):
happening from people who are religious than those who are
not religious. Eighty two percent of people who are politically
conservative say they have some kind of religion, compared to
just thirty percent of liberals. Those who are religious are
also more likely to babies, They're more likely to boleance
it for charity. They're more likely to affiliate with other
religious organizations like schools like religious schools and private schools,
(07:32):
and homeschooling organizations. Think about this. Among thirty eight year
olds church going Mormons, seventy percent have children under the
age of eighteen. Compare that to thirty year old atheists.
Only thirty eight percent have children under eighteen, half as
many are experiencing parenthood Like this life altering part of
(07:54):
your life as an adult, being a parent is only
being experience, or is being twice as experience among religious
people as non religious people. And that will bleed into
our politics, It will bleed into our values, it will
bleed into our economy and a million other things. And
while sixty three percent of Republicans say that they believe
in God without a doubt, just thirty nine percent of
(08:16):
Democrats do so. Is politics fueling a religious revival, especially
among men? Or is religious inspiring a political conversion? To
talk to me about it. This week is Catherine Ruth Bacullich.
She's a professor of economics at Catholic University and the
author of the great book Hannah's Children. Catherine, Welcome to
a numbers game.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Thanks Catherine.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
In your book hannash Children, which I am in the
middle of reading, it's a great book, by the way,
you interviewed dozens of college educated women who had five
or more children, basically demographic outliers, and they all had
college educations. That's the important equation. They had college educations,
and they had lots of kids, and you know, having
large families is a very obvious in the book. In
(08:56):
the book, they often talk about their religion, all these
women and how are and plays an important part in
their decision to have children. We've talked a lot about
religion earlier in the show and the and the change
in how people act with religion, how religion is changing,
and that there's been this small increase in number of
young people saying that they are religious that aside from
(09:17):
just marriage or is it just marriage and chowering? Is
there another thing that religion plays a part in?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Probably education?
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Really?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah, I mean meaning we're seeing a real shift. Let's
just say, explosive rise in homeschooling, Christian schooling, you know,
those kinds of things. I think that's probably something to
keep around. I haven't dug into the data on this.
I'm not actually sure I've seen any, but I think,
you know, if we were to break down the trends
and like the rise of homeschooling, you know, we're seeing
that motivated by a lot a lot of Christian.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Groups, a lot Jewish groups. So right, so I think
it's there.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
But of course education, I'd say, like in terms of
marriage and family, it's it's part of the transmission of values.
So it's it's probably part of this story of this
political interaction.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
The Pew study was interesting because there was the number
of people who are zoomers right generations see people worn
two thousand and two thousand and six who are port
being Christian is up from twenty twenty. But they are
not praying daily increasing there, but they're identifying as Christian,
Like they're over there Christian. What is it? Like they're
(10:20):
they're consumptly Christian. The door is open. They're kind of
like walking through. Yeah, is being culturally Christian just a
big part of it? Like to say, I'm not down
with blocism, so therefore christian.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Maybe, I think that's part of it. Another piece of
it is probably what we would call like immunity, So
like they're because they're Christian or the identify as Christian
if some of like other identity group that keeps them
immune from these trends or gives them like a safe
space to be I kind of wonder looking at your.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Point about like these are zoomers, they're certainty.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I mean like if they're zumors, they're born in like
two thousand, right, that means probably a lot of them
haven't started their families yet. Yeah, And we know in
terms of religious trends on behavior that actually a time
when sort of cultural religious people become like actual religious
people is when they have their first kid, see right right.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
You have something to take to church.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, and also if you go sit into a religious school,
that's a big part of it as well. Yeah, you're
listening to It's a numbers game with Ryan Gerdosky. We'll
be right back after this message. There's a big question
mark of like why did Christianity stop declining? Yes, part
of it could be it happens like twenty twenty is
(11:31):
like the figurehead. And there's a lot that happens in
twenty twenty, right, there's the racial riots, there's the wokeism.
There's also COVID, and there are a lot of people
who turned to podcasters. You know was a father, Mike Schmidt.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
As his famous that's true. Yeah, you have, you.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Know, Michael Knowles, you have even like sub texts of people.
What do you think it could be? You're college kids
a lot.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, No, that's right. I was going to say, I mean,
I think the alternative media has been a huge piece
of that.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
My sons are probably my sons who are exact that
age range, and two of them are married. I mean,
they listen to more podcasts than I do, and they're
probably like politically a little bit to the right of me,
you know which, and I'm like to the right of
most people, but my sons are definitely probably to the
right of me. Jordan Peterson had a big impact, and
of course he's like you know, and he talks about
God in religion all the time, even if he's not
(12:19):
a member of an organized religion.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Is oh is he I best?
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Like, I think I'm not a huge follower, but I
think like his wife was like dying, she had a miraculous.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
His wife converted, converted, I mean, and obviously he talks
about God all the time. And so if you were,
if you were, if you were like a kid growing
up in a religious family and looking for sort of
permission to be sort of politically religious or to express
yourself or identify as a Christian, Peterson would certainly have
been something that would support that. Yeah, I mean, and
(12:51):
actually just I'm thinking of another detail from my book
that I forgot to mention earlier. I tell that story
like in the second chapter of this Family, I walked
into their house. They lived in New England. It's a
super democratic area. There's like a Jewish family with a
bunch of kids, and the dad greets me with a
maga hat on, you know, and I.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Was like, I read part of your book.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Yeah, you know, and it's like.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
You know, you go look at the you go look
at those correlations, and there's there's obviously something going on
that I think it'll crystallize and the number is better
in the next decade. But like something we're seeing these
red states, I have more marriage and more family, more
traditional family behaviors, I'm assuming, although I don't have a
good chart of it, but I think the religious behavior
is stronger there as well.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, I mean yes, I think like the highest states
for fertility, off the top of my head is like
Utah is always usually number one because the LDS like
things still kind of even if the Mormons don't have
as many kids they used to, they're still higher than
the average. And then it's like Nebraska, Kansas sometimes the.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Dakota, Dakota's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
The Plain States and Utah really outstretched the rest.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Of the yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
True.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
Yeah. The other thing about like young people becoming more religious,
and I'm thinking we may want to think about too,
is like religious college. There's this kind of story of
these kind of scrappy religious colleges, many of which stayed
open during COVID. And we've also got the homeschoolers coming
of age. I mean, that big shift, that kind of
growth in homeschoolers, which was like, you know, it's just
(14:14):
like a classic tipping point. You'd say, well, people were
out there homeschooling their kids in the nineties when I
hadn't even heard of homeschooling.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
They were out there.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Doing this, and then those kids had kids, and like,
are we just starting to see a sort of tipping
point of all those homeschoolers right, community.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
People said, like, I mean, my followers on Twitter were
saying to me, well, obviously this uptacking religion is all
because of immigration, Biden, let all these people.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
In No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Well. I looked it up the numbers and it's basically
the same exact demographic breakdown as America, So there's no
big change. And also I think that people forget that,
like Latin America is much less religious than it used
to be. People. Yeah, Westrola is a bunch of you know,
women with our lead to Guadalupe statues with nine children
running around, and that's not the way it is and
(14:59):
has hasn't been for quite sometimes.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, a lot of Pentecostalism, Yeah, a.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Lot of just secular people who don't have kids anymore.
Mexico as well below the birth rate. Most of Latin
America is way below the earth. So I think that
that says a lot about who is If everything in
culture and everything in society it's as easy as possible
to be secular, and pop culture more or less mocks
religion more often than it celebrates it. What would make
(15:28):
a young person or a younger person gravitate towards faith?
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Now?
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Is it just saying, hey, look I'm Christian, therefore I'm
not woke or is it something deeper going on? A
lot of young people, a lot of like zoomers especially,
really crave an authentic relationship with something all the time.
They're always searching authenticity. Do you see that? Do you
think that?
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean certainly in my time as
a college teacher kind of watching over the last ten years,
I mean, I would say I'm definitely seeing greater identification
with religiosity as a form of identity, but definitely political.
These are a lot of the same young men and
women that are part of the MAGA movement. The other
thing I kind of want to mention is like, and
I don't even know have I don't have a name
for it, but it seems to go along with this,
(16:12):
which is kind of these more traditional or sort of
throwback forms of religion which do seem sort of like
they're not doing what like we need to be more
granular when we talk about religion rates sort of like
we know what's happening with the sort of mainline Protestant churches.
They're all like super woke and progressive, right, and then
you know.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
You got are all like they have like you know,
Jesus was like a black trans feminist. Like that's the
sign that they have outside.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Exactly, and you're like, that's not going to be the
future of your church as it, you know. But I
would say, like in my church and the Catholic Church,
you know that you've got these sort of I mean
so called trad Catholics. That wasn't even a name tech
we didn't have a name for that ten years ago.
It was like, oh, there seems to be like Latin
Mass people. But actually it's much bigger what people call
trad Catholic stuff today. It's a lot bigger than Latin
(16:55):
Mass stuff. It's like young people that want to veil
and they want like older they smell them bets Catholicism.
They want to sort of like that, and that seems
to be broad. It seems like there's a lot of Orthodoxy.
I know literally no people older than zoomers that are
like becoming Orthodox Christians.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
I know Orthodox Christians too, that's like all new.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, And I know, well, there's two things that come
to mind. One is that people have this perception, like
the Obama perception that religions for lower income people who
cling to their guns and their bibles, when in fact
religious church attendance is higher among college educated people than
non college educated religion is really, if you're an active
(17:35):
participant in a church a physical building, you are more
likely to be middle class or upper middle class. It
is a bougie thing to belong to religion. Really, why
do you think that is? Is religion something that you
just have to have a lot of money in time
to sit there and be a participant in because the
cultural forces of that would make someone go to church
(17:56):
aren't there anymore.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Yeah, well, I definitely think that. I mean, religion is
always engaged the idea of the intellectual virtue. I mean,
religion has always been a part of kind of the
academic or the intellectual sphere. There are religious groups that
are popping up and protected on all all the college campuses.
I mean, this is another piece of this right, Like,
compared to when I was a student, it's much easier
(18:19):
to be part of a religious group on a secular
campus than it used to be. Like when I was
a student, was like you couldn't even find other Christians.
You'd look around. I went to Harvard for grad school
upin undergrad deeply secular places, very very secular places, not.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
A community college robout like myself.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
But you know, no, I honestly like, at this point,
I'm like, despite having gone to ivy like schools, I'm
still like a decent person. That's like, it's almost an
embarrassing thing on my vita at this point. But I mean,
for sure, like you would look around and be like,
those look like cheerful Asian students over there, they're probably Christian,
which is a funny sort of stereotype, but it was
it was kind of true at the time, and you'd
(18:57):
have to guess looking at people, like maybe they're Christian
and maybe they're religious. There was no like chat groups,
there was no way to find people today like that's
that's one of these things that's been enabled. So there's
a lot of that. But I did want to get
to that point that I think religion, the great religions
of the world, have always been engaged with the kind
of proposition about faith and reason.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
And so I think it is kind of natural.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
That that there we would see this reflected in the
sort of educated classes. That's a complete answer to your question.
But you you reminded me of something else, Like I
know that ARC Forum was in London last week? Was
it ARC? This like alliance? It's like Peterson's gig. It's
this alliance responsible sitisitions. There's all these people that want
(19:39):
to protect Western civilization. I mean, I would think of
it as like a political cultural thing. It has nothing
officially to do with religion. But the first ARC forum
that they had, like eighteen months ago, one of the
speakers was like, so organized religion, it's important raise your
hand in this group if you belong to an organized
religion unless you're just like Peterson, like spiritual, and you know,
like the hands went up, And so there is some
(20:02):
kind of story here about kind of whatever it is
that organized religion is providing in the wake of sort
of like the rest of it all fell apart, right,
like the old belief that like liberal like whatever the
old consensus about like liberal institutions will save us, Like
we'll all just kind of march towards this happy religious, happy.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Cour It's like the neoliberalism will all have Donald's.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
In every box.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yes, that clearly fell apart, right, And yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I think there's three different bosses to it. I think
that there is like the people who are motivated by influencers,
whether they be like the whole crisis King, you know,
I think this is what I'm signaling, or whether it
be like the trad wife movements on Instagram. You see
those women who like they've got makeup and their milk
(20:47):
and cow and they have fourteen kids running around.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
And then you have they're millionaires.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
You're millionaires, right, They're just millionaires.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Models and millionaires, I know.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
And then you have people who have real crave towards
towards authenticity where you I mean, I go to I've
gone to a lad of miss I'm Catholic too, so
I've gone a lot of mass several times in my life.
There are a bunch of young people and they do
tend to sit there within the veils. And then I
think the third bucket are people who are defenders of
Western civilization or just see that the culture is rotted,
(21:17):
so they sit there and say, like, look, the West
is worth defending, and it's not in the terms of
like the post World War two neoliberal philosophy, like the
real West of what it means to be a West Journey.
I think that's more of like like a sense Trump thing.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Yeah, I was just going to say, like, when you
put that together, I'm thinking of like, you know, how
appealing JD. Vance was to so many or is to
so many, like my students and so on, that kind
of like he's religious. He sort of rejects that old
liberal consensus, you know, right, I mean he's like, well,
I don't know, like we're going to deal with western.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
North Carolina and their problems before we do other things.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, right now, I worked for JD. And I think
JD I fill out a lot of you know things.
Where as a kid, I don't think he went to
church very often. They read the Bible a lot, but
they didn't go to church. They weren't part of an
organized religion, which is a story of a lot of
people in lower income communities. And that conversion towards being
a practicing Catholic came once he had college degree and money,
(22:18):
and it's and I think marriage to that story is
something that is more common than people. Now, hey, we'll
be right back after this. The last question I want
to get to you, and you've written about this for
Hannah's Children, which is a really good book. I want
to emphasize that to my listeners. You bring up a
lot of times these women who have a lot of kids,
(22:38):
but we are seeing a big gender divide when it
comes to women and men. Women are more likely to
leave faith than not for the first time. Young men
are more likely to belong to a church than young women.
What is going on with young women? I hate to
say it, but yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
That's great, Like, don't give me an easy question to answered. Man,
I don't know. I mean, I'm inclined a little bit
towards the direction of the thesis that you know, people
people like Alibastucky talk about where you know, just you know,
as a kind of a class of explanations. I mean,
to some extent other commentators where you know, you look
(23:17):
at young women who are kind of they are other focused.
They're empathetic, they want to do good, they want to
help people.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
That's all.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
We kind of associate that with with a female charism,
if you will, And and they just are applying it
to the world, right, you know, like they want to
take care of stuff and mother things, but they want
to do that, you know, you know, so they kind
of take like, don't be nice, and then they sort
of spread that out. So it's like, I mean, the
thesis is it's like a misapplication of your desire to
(23:45):
take care of stuff.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
Is it also like a girl boss thing of like
rejecting things that seem oppressive? Is that because the religions
you know, allegedly oppressed.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, So I don't know, I don't know where we
are with the girl boss stuff. It seems like that
bubbles burst a little bit. I think that women don't
like to be mean, and so they don't associate with
politics that seems mean, and they don't associate with religion
that seems mean, right, And I think that's.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Like a really big point. That's a really way to
put it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, And that's why traditional things or like Republican politics
would seem too mean.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
For Republican politics seems evil. And you know, certain kinds
of traditional religion seems kind of mean too, right, Like
you don't accept all that love is love, and so
it looks kind of mean. That's the explanation out favor.
But we are seeing too, like once women get married
and have kids, like they tend to move way closer
to their to the to the men in the same
age range.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
I think what you could see is this really different
two different americas that people live in. You know, I
said earlier in the show that if you look at
like Mormons, for example, church going Mormons between eighteen and
forty seventy percent have kids, and if you look at
atheists in the same age range, like thirty eight percent
(24:55):
have kids, and the numbers just drop immensely among those
who are church going. Those are not going from doing
a lot of things that I guess are very sacrificial.
It's a lot of big sacrifice to have children, It's
a big sacrifice to sit there and do a lot
of things. You don't have as much freedom as you
would and there's no incentive to demand it. And so
(25:16):
I think that that is that you I think if
there is a fuel of religion and it marries with
political lines, you're talking at two immensely different life experiences
that kind of infused.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
And both exactly. Well. I like this this line about
you know, sort of sacrifice and hard work. I mean,
I think I always think like in kind of archetype,
the universe of archetypes, there's kind of two things that
a lot of people have with religion. You know, one
is the sort of the nasty archetype, like it was
the cause of all the wars. Everybody fights a religion
and inspires people to do bad stuff. We don't want
(25:50):
people to be too religious, you know, that's kind of
a thing people have. But then there's this other part
of your brain. It's like you forget that part altogether.
The other part of your brain remembers that. You know,
every time you find these stories of heroism, the mother Teresa's,
the people who survive in prison for ages and ages,
I mean just the ones just released, you know recently,
you often find these amazing stories of faith that sustained
(26:11):
people through really difficult things.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Can I tell you I've never told the story before,
and I have flashbacks to it once in a while.
In a I worked in politics in my entire life.
That's my whole experience, working on campaigns, and I was
working on I was literally just doing like handing out
palm cards outside of mailhouse. I met a voting site.
This was like when I was eighteen years old, like
one of the very very first things I ever did.
(26:34):
And there was a woman there running for office as
a Democrat and someone said something anti Catholic to her,
and I will never forget this because she shouldn't win.
I forget what her name was, but she dressed down
the person who said the anti Catholic thing her because
she said, I never forget when, like I think, when
the AIDS epidemic happened, the person the first group of
(26:57):
people to take care of dying AIDS patients were nuns.
It was not the government. And she made this big
defense of none in the religious order, the women's religious
order that I found extremely well educated, extremely intelligent, and
coming from a very progressive side, which you would not
hear nowadays, probably at all. But it's something that was
(27:20):
really real and I think that obviously that meant a
lot to her and among religious sec religious liberals like
the Stephen Colberts of the world, who speak very profoundly
on faith and very.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Well educated on faith, Yeah, there.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Is something there that is just different than those who
sit there and say it's all hogwash and yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
So yeah, yeah, totally, And that's going to be the
big thing to unpack.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
It's just a fewer Stephen Colberts and they're used to.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Being, you know, right, And those are great stories they're
great stories, and so they're worth nursing our imaginations on them.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Well, Catherine, thank you for being on a numbers game.
Where can people go to find your book or read
what you write?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Give us your plug Amazon. Amazon's a great place to
get the book and audible. If you like to listen
to books on tape tape, that's not a thing anymore,
so Amazon.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
I'm on X.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
You know, I'm not as big as you are on X,
but I'm there. I'm holding my own, you know, God
willing in the next couple of years, I'll get more
out there.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
But well, I hope you write another book because I
really like Hannah.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It's coming, it is.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
I'm going to interview the men next, I'm going to
do the guy.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Well, that's fair. I really want to talk about that then,
because that's really really fascinating.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Absolutely good luck on the new book. Thanks. I will
definitely want I'll definitely pick that up because I'm interested
in the men's story. The women's story is very good though.
Get it hannahs Children on Amazon dot com. And thank
you so much for listening. It's been great. This podcast
has been growing. Please like and subscribe wherever you get
your podcasts the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Give us
a five star review. It means a lot, and thank
(28:46):
you again. Come back next week and we will have
more numbers to break down.
Host
Gill Alexander
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