‘Oakland Faith Project’ Documents a Shifting Religious Landscape

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A dark night, a quiet house, but inside danger was lurking.

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Oh, not really.

SPEAKER_4 (0:42)

We have Xfinity Shield, so we're not worried.

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What if protecting your home and devices could be drama-free?

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Xfinity, imagine that.

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Restrictions apply, not available in all areas.

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Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Like many people, Nicolò Sertorio had his life turned upside down by COVID. He was a photographer and suddenly his normal business was gone. Italian by birth, raised by two science professors, he'd been on his own spiritual path and had been struck by the pluralism of the religious scene in his adopted home of Oakland. So when the pandemic started, he set out on a personal quest to photograph all of the city's churches, mosques, synagogues, and other places of worship. Four hundred and sixty-six locations later, the Oakland Faith Project has expanded to include portraits of faith leaders and fascinating audio of them talking about their views and work in the community. So this hour, we're going to be joined by some faith leaders, as well as the Oakland Faith Project folks. We're joined first by Nicolò himself. Welcome.

SPEAKER_7 (1:41)

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_6 (1:43)

We're also joined by James Campbell, Edgar E Robinson, professor in United States history at Stanford, a partner and I guess the house historian at the Oakland Faith Project. Welcome, Jim.

SPEAKER_5 (1:54)

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_6 (1:57)

Nicolò, when COVID hit, you started this project. What do you think you were getting from this work of doing this photography of these houses of worship?

SPEAKER_7 (2:07)

Well, taking a brief step back, like you mentioned and you can probably derive from my accent. I grew up in Italy and so I was used to having pretty much just one church in each town, the Roman Catholic. And they're typically all kind of looking the same. They all made of stone in the shape of a cross.

So one of the first things that really marked me when I moved to the US was the number and diversity of houses of worship. And particularly in Oakland and how free and diverse they are. And at the same time I kept noticing how many of them were shutting down, being raised down or re-converted to private apartments. And for years I was wondering why nobody is recording this cultural phenomenon happening right around us.

And so like you mentioned when COVID hit and all of a sudden all my business were shut down within hours, I realized I was the one that had to do this project and this was the perfect time. Honestly at the time I didn't know what I was getting into.

SPEAKER_6 (3:11)

Do you consider yourself more or less religious since you started working on this?

SPEAKER_7 (3:15)

Oh, since I started?

SPEAKER_6 (3:16)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_7 (3:20)

Interesting question.

I still consider myself spiritual but not religious. But I was positively impressed by the people that I met during this project. And so I confess I might have entered with a little bit of a bias from my Italian heritage. And instead, I found people that are truly open-minded and liberal, and many have become friends.

SPEAKER_6 (3:45)

Yeah, that's cool. Jim, give us some of the kind of sociological context here. I mean, we know in Europe, obviously, religious affiliation started declining a long time ago, and the US didn't really follow that trend at first, but now has.

SPEAKER_1 (4:02)

Yeah, I think in terms of the United States is an outlier in this. There's just no question. When we started getting a general social survey in the 1970s, and American respondents were asked, I think you were given, it wasn't a very finely grained survey. It's given every two years. You had five categories. You could identify yourself as Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, other world religion or none, none of the above, religiously unaffiliated. And when that survey was started, about 5% of Americans identified themselves as religiously unaffiliated. By the 1990s, believe it or not, that figure had only gone up to about 7%.