Losing Religion with Diana Butler Bass

Kate Bowler (0:02)

LEMONADA This episode is brought to you in part by the With and For podcast.

Oh, hello. Well, as a listener of Everything Happens, you totally get it. Sometimes life just happens. The good and the bad and everything in between, which is why I think you'll also enjoy the podcast With and For, hosted by Dr. Pam King.

With and For's latest season brings together psychology and spiritual wisdom in a way that feels thoughtful and grounded and very human. It's hosted by Dr. Pam King, a developmental psychologist and ordained minister who offers practical guidance toward a meaningful life. Not sure where to start? Check out their episode with the host of No Small Endeavor, Lee C. Camp. Together, they discuss some misconceptions about the four virtues, prudence, justice, courage and temperance, and how to turn virtue into a daily habit. It's a conversation filled with wisdom and wit and some practical advice too. Also check out With and For's special summer series of wisdom practices, released every Monday. They're short exercises shared by guests that will become your toolkit for thriving. Consider them your experiment and becoming more fully alive. So go ahead, follow With and For hosted by Dr. Pam King, wherever you're listening now.

SPEAKER_2 (1:12)

Hey guys, we're Elizabeth Chambers and Marissa Hermer. You may know us from television, business and other things. We're talking about the stuff that really matters. Every week we're celebrating women and getting real about divorce, dating, motherhood, sex, friendship, and everything in between. It's honest, hilarious, unfiltered, and proof that this chapter of life is the best one yet. So if you're ready to laugh, feel seen, and join the conversation, come hang out with us. This is The Dash.

Listen and subscribe to The Dash wherever you get your podcasts.

Kate Bowler (1:43)

Something strange has happened to American religion.

For the most part of the 20th century, America was famously religious. Even as churches emptied across much of Europe, Americans kept going to church. In fact, religious affiliation remained shockingly durable.

And then people started leaving. Today, almost three in ten Americans have no religious affiliation. Sociologists call them the nuns, like N-O-N-E-S.

But that category is much stranger and more interesting than it sounds. It includes atheists and agnostics, yes. But also people who still believe in God, still wonder about the sacred, still want meaning and ritual and community. They just may not be looking for those things in church. So if this isn't a simple story about people losing faith, then what is it?

Hi, I'm Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens.

And today, welcome to class. This conversation was recorded in front of my students at Duke Divinity School because I wanted us to understand just how we got here. And for that, we really have to look backward. In the early 20th century, conservative Protestants were waging these enormous battles over what it meant to be modern. Did it mean that they believed in evolution? Did it mean that the Bible still had primary authority over all things? Who got to interpret scripture? Should Christianity accommodate modern science and scholarship? So, these were all the questions that were up for grabs. And after losing some very public battles, fundamentalists spent decades retreating and building something like a parallel world. Their own colleges and seminaries, publishing houses, radio stations, churches, camps, and eventually television networks.

I say that in an excited way because I wrote my first book about that stuff. And I will just never not be the most excited person to describe to you conservative Protestant television networks. But here's what happened. In the 1970s, evangelicals and fundamentalists came roaring back to American popular culture. And here's where the story gets very interesting. The president, Jimmy Carter, became the very first evangelical president. Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist and a very devoted Sunday school teacher who could talk very comfortably about being worn again, his time reading scripture, and his evangelicalism just came very naturally to him. But it was also bound up with his commitments to human rights, to peacekeeping, to racial reconciliation, to care for the environment.

But by 1980, a newly organized religious right was aligning conservative evangelicalism with a very different candidate, with Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. Organizations like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority helped make a certain set of key issues the hallmark of what counted as evangelicalism. And those issues were, in particular, opposition to abortion, feminism, gay rights, and secular liberalism. So that became kind of like, what does it mean to be an evangelical? It means being in opposition to abortion, et cetera. So for the last 50 years, what we really thought of as conservative Protestantism has been both a way of describing a religious movement and also a way of describing a political realignment. And so typically, when people say Christian, they're really usually just swapping out the word, at least in the States, with the word evangelical. Now, that kind of political realignment didn't just kind of single-handedly create this other category, the religious nuns. Historians and sociologists point to a lot of different causes of American religious disabiliation, like doubts, distrust, bad experiences. But it left a very strange question.