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watch that live at 10 am eastern on c-span2. you can view both hearings online on c-span.org or listen live on the free c-span radio apps. >> good evening, welcome. i direct events here, we are happy to have everyone here. let's talk about the new book "troop 6000". this was founded in 1927 by benjamin bass stretching from union square, original 48 stores, over 93 years, for third-generation, want to thank all of you for your support, the community of authors, booklovers, wouldn't be here today. we are excited to have with us

tara burton, talking about the release of her new book "strange rites: new religions for a godless world," she is a contributing editor at the american interest, former staff are, has written on religion and secularism for national geographic, the washington post, the new york times and holds a doctorate in theology from oxford and the author of the novel social creature. a columnist for the op-ed page, the author of to change the church, religion and privilege. before joining the new york times he was a senior editor of the atlantic. he cohosts the new york times weekly op-ed podcast the argument, lives in newhaven with his wife and 3 children. without further a do please

join me in welcoming tara burton and ross douthat. >> thank you to all of you for joining us in this exciting virtual experience, slightly disembodied way of talking about a book that is appropriate to the subject matter. thanks for letting me interrogate you about the future of religion in the united states and beyond. >> thank you for being here. >> another thursday night in america. i want to make two comments. i have done enough zoom events to know people are more hesitant to ask questions when they are typing in questions. had a real event you stand up and tell the author why she is wrong about everything in the world.

you have to listen to me ask questions for the entire hour and hopefully get 15 or 20 minutes at the end. the second point that i will reiterate, this is a challenging time for everybody, authors are among the least challenged in many ways but putting out a book at a moment like this is a difficult thing. i had a book come out and i was lucky enough to squeeze in a couple weeks of promotions before the bookstores closed but i want to encourage you if you are listening, watching, don't just buy the book from the strand. encourage your friends to buy the book and make it the best seller it deserves to be. without further do let's start with the big question.

this is a book about new religions for a godless world. is our world really godless, and if not or if so what religions are filling the void? >> boiler alert, we don't live in a godless world. that is the argument i make so i want to draw a distinction when we talk about a secular age or world without religion what are we really talking about? some background statistics, 24% of americans say they are religiously unaffiliated often referred to as the religious and now am e s. 46% of people born in america after 1985, a huge increase but all of these unaffiliated, 72% believe in some sort of higher

power and, not necessarily talking about atheists or 6%, atheists tend to under self report. or for whatever reason are alienated by institutional religion, organized religion or feel it has nothing to offer or may in the case of people who believe in the traditional judeo-christian god have a form of faith, participate as a religion in and of itself. the spiritual but not religious but a broader category and the religiously re/max which is not

just the spiritual but not religious, but also people who kick the box with a particular religious tradition whose personal practices are more eclectic and the statistic i like to bring up giving us and how widespread this is 30% of christians believe in reincarnation which is not what one would associate with christian orthodoxy. we are living in an age where the components of religious life, purpose, community, virtual relate to them in a different way, mixing and matching, in their work and a sense in which the end point is

we are making our own religion. these and include not just traditional religion but things like wellness culture, political activism, the vast array of modern occultism and witchcraft, wicca is a fast-growing religion in america and so on and so forth. >> one initial response to a description of your thesis that someone well-versed in american history, how new is all this? there is nothing more american than being entrepreneurial and setting up a church of one. every kid in high school english class was assigned the collected works of ralph waldo emerson, you get a certain kind of individualized religion, the larger history of spirituality

is rife with what you call intuitional religion. what is the same as what is different? what do we have in common with nineteenth century america and what changed in the last 30 or 40 years? >> a catch all term for religious practices, focusing in words on the individual, institutionalism and reductive terms, your dogma, your external forces and the pendulum, the intuitional

awakenings, the self-help movement, you think about it hard enough it will happen. and various self-help books, and spiritualism and the rise, there is also evangelical revivals in the christian tradition, the narrative is something like the church or christianity has become desiccated, no one believes anymore, you go through the church on sunday and it doesn't matter or a personal relationship with god or something more intense or intimate or various

countercultural religions of the 1960s. that is not new. the pendulum swing back and forth however many hundred years. what is distinct and new about this great awakening, trying to gather at this time. with the printing press was to the protestant reformation, the creation of a model of information that is intimate and in word, the direct connections to internalize in such a way, may well draw the connection to the protestant ethos overall. these new religions being religions of the internet age where we are not just consumers

of content, inclined to culturally think of ourselves as creators or want to have ownership over stories that harkens back to oral traditions as well. the hunger to create, to be involved, to have ownership in our stories has made us all the more resistant to orthodox ways of experiencing, receiving dogma and doctrine. our capitalist moments in the era of personal branding, made us cognizant of a model based

on our choices, what news we consume. what papers we read. what music we listen to and what papers we watch, we post what we tweet, all create this odd public-private synthesis of identity. within that culture there is an odd consumer strain, what apps am i using to meditate, what purchase am i making by getting a sweet green salad, wellness culture is the biggest most obvious example of this. the way our less conspicuous consumption seems to define us in the age of the algorithm where our recommendations are getting narrower and narrower contributes to this hyper atomized individualization. >> i want to press you on the point you made at the end. this is one of the interesting things at the core you are talking about practices and

experiments - the core of the book, revival of pagan, pantheist, occultist practice in american life but your definition of new religions spreads outward and encompasses as you were saying consumer culture and personalized aspects of consumer culture, everything holistic and personalized wellness culture and so on. convinced me as someone inclined to skepticism that it makes sense to strip the world of brands and self cultivation under the umbrella of religion or religious practice. >> i would argue what is shared by so many of these,

particularly something consumer-based and that is the implicit theology, the idea of a moral spiritual demand, in a certain way that is solipsistic, the collapse of the distinction between the effort on the purity you get from having the minimum amount of toxins, the 10 step beauty routine. the way these things are sold and talked about is so loaded with this language, not just as a nice thing to do although historically it does come from a more political place, in this sort of wellness paradigm in which is found itself, and and

it is rooted and happens to make us prettier or ostensibly prettier or ostensibly have another complexion. .. >> release yourself from repression, from ways that society has acted upon you and kind of figure out who you really are, i'd argue, coded as a moral, spiritual good.

there is -- the language of energy really popular in wellness circles, it's popular certainly in various occult circles, and i think that there are versions of that, that of course are much more political and much more outward-looking and focus much more on sol daugherty. but the sort of capitalist version of it does tend to equate perm fulfillment with the kind of vibration on the right frequency of the right energy in a way that i find uncredibly interesting -- incelled by interesting -- incredibly interesting and quite revealing. >> is goop a church? >> yes, you would i say so. that said, what it, what goop does it have because it is a brand from which we buy things -- >> i do all my shopping at goop, you should add. so -- >> well -- >> i'm my best self right here.

sorry, go on. [laughter] >> no, it's just that soul cycle an even better example because it combines, i think, a got of the goop-esque metaphysic and the kind of sense of purpose with a community and a ritual that leapt you experience that -- let you experience that in the moment. i remember i went to a few soul cycle classes. i wish i could say they were all for research, they were not. but when you go in, we're a community, we're a soul, we're a tribe, we're a pack. we are a cult. it says it right there. and then all of the signs say things like your energy affects your neighbor's energy, so please don't do this, that or the other thing which is, again, using a somewhat nebbizeed language to talk about -- nebbizeed language, lends to what could just be an

uncomfortable fitness class, you burn some calories, into something with an aura of spiritual awe townment. what you're -- attainment. what you're giving isn't just good for you, it's good for the universe and your role in the it. >> so one thing that has struck me that i think fits with your argument about the difference between the early 21st century and its gurus and the 19th century and its gurus is just, it's an absence of institutionalization, right, that, you know, the united states has a lot of the same kind of spiritualing entrepreneurs and would be gurus that we had in the victorian era or the early 19th century, but they don't or at least they don't seem as likely to found churches. we just had mary january williamson, a pre-internet

figure. he rises to prominence in the 1980s, but she's an updated new thought kind of figure. and i feel like in the 19th century there would be a church founded by marian williamson, right? it wouldn't be huge, but it would have 200,000 people, and there'd be sort of chapels around the country. and that doesn't seem to happen to anything like the same extent especially over the last couple of generations. you have a little bit, you know, a little stuff in the '70s and '80s, but especially lately. and do you think how much of that is the internet, how much of that is sort of an ambient kept such of institutions? why doesn't gwyneth paltrow -- i mean, i guess kanye west has sunday services. why isn't there a sunday services for goop? >> i'm not sure that it would not be successful at least

initially. i mean, i think the label of church or the label of kind of making something a church is, i think as you say, would be met with a degree of suspicion. i think as well the sort of fact that there is such a willingness to mix and match manager that we millennials, the broader we here -- >> you. >> me personally, yes -- >> i'm -- >> are is so much of contemporay individual land scape is about -- in the end, we can't necessarily get away from the endpoint being that we are all the high priests of our own church. and i think this is true much more broadly not only in our religious institutions, but in our vividdic ones, -- civic, journalistic, media, but i think

there is, i think that that suspicion does just lend itself to not just focus on the self. but i want to be careful here because i think that there's an easy narrative that we could go to that says, oh, kids these days with their selfies, they're so narcissistic. and i think that's a tempting way that one could go about reading the situation. but i actually think that what we're seeing isn't necessarily a story of narcissism, but of institutional failure and things that it is perfect hi reasonable and, in fact, completely understandable that if your institutions have failed you, if you don't think the you can trust the media, the scientific establishment, the political system, the academic system, so on and so forth, it makes perfect sense to turn inward, to rely on yourself, to rely on your own desires and affinities

and feelings as authoritative because at least you know that you're not -- well, you might be lying to yourself in a sort of broader theological way, but you might have chutely more trust that you're awe aware of yourself than i you are of other people. >> so i i guess to push on that point a tiny bit, is this sustainable, right? because, you know, this is a book about our whole culture, but it is, obviously, focused on i guess you could say people younger than me. i just turned 40. so millennials and generation z. and these are people that are sort of conducting experiments in religion at a time that they're conducting experiments, you know, in relationships, in professional experiments and so on. and i think you can tell a plausible story where, you know, these are the children of baby with boomers who had their own rebellion and often sort of hung on to an institutional affiliation. and, obviously, you talk a little bit about this kind of

person -- [audio difficulty] generational turnover where -- [audio difficulty] took one ten out the door, and then their kids are taking the other step. but their kids haven't, for the most part, gone through the, you know, 50-60 years of life that awaits after your 20s, right? in which the form's not necessarily the dogma or doctrine of religion, but the sort of communal forms of relugs, you know, the sort of solidarity of a religious community that it's not clear that goop or even soul cycle provides, you know, the role that a bar mitzvah or first communion plays and so on. so, obviously, this is more in, like, the processing line. but, you know, what is the, what does it look like in 25 years for the people conducting these experiments now? >> so i think you're absolutely right, the more, i'd say, inning ward looking, the sort of knew lumbar of soul cycle -- not just

self-focused, but present, those are the things that i think are unsustainable. i think that we will see a hunger for collect i., a hunger for solidarity that the kind of pure sort of self-interested versions of these new religions, the wellness cultures of the world can't offer. i think that what we will see, and i'm sort of interested in mar in, for example -- in particular, for example, sort of social justice as a movement in part because what it does offer is an ideology of community, an ideology of solidarity which i think there's a real hunger for. and the way that i sort of -- i'm interested, too, more broadly -- and i talk about this in the chapter on polyamri and on kind of the free love as a continuation of free love of ideas of human perfectionism in the 19th century, but ways in which, and this is a term that's sort of been long been used

n -- in the queer community, people who are marginalized, people who for whatever reason are alien nateed might be able to find one another. i think that there's a hopefulness in the idea that as a result, you know, as a result of the kind of triballization we find on the internet where people can find like-minded people, where people can find communities, there are options for solidarity, for coming together, for the drugs of ritual -- for the creation of ritual in a way that may not hook like organized religion as perhaps traditionally practiced. but, nevertheless, offer that sense of community. i always remember there's a woman i interviewed before starting the book, my last piece

for bach who lost her husband unexpectedly quite young and didn't -- or wanted with his friends to celebrate the memory of his life in a way that was specific to him. and so the friends got together, and they played music from his favorite video game, there was a sort of service that was very much designed not around religious lines or traditional religious lines, but rather among who this person was, what his life was like, and she ended up -- he'd wanted to play a video game they played together, he wasn't able to do that, and she kind of, with people that she met online through this game, played this game sort of in his memory x. this was, he reported, hugely important to her. and i think that's such a telling example how these communal bonds and our desure for these communal bonds can

survive the sort of reshaping even as i think the sort of perhaps pure selfish inwardness -- i'm being really mean about soul cycle on this. oh, i hope they don't see me. but there's an image of a certain kind of wellness culture, shall we say, i think as an example. >> then let's drill down then on the question of belief, right? because we're talking about community. but, you know, the core, the core of what we think of as religion has always been belief and that, you know, there's a lot of sociological debate about how important are actual credo statements, and don't people talk their religious identity from community rather than from creeds. i think there's truth to that, but it's also true that the major world religions have been structured around actual metaphysical claims about the universe. and one question -- we've had these conversations before, and i always come back to this question, but i'll ask it again because i think it is sort of

radiates through a lot of the more sort of supernaturally-oriented experiments that you're writing about. just how much do people really believe in what they're doing? and specifically when you're talking about sort of neo-paw begannism, the occult, people who are sort of reaching back or reinventing prechristian or non-christian religions, they're invoking gods, demons, they're, you know, doing butch craft, some of it -- witchcraft. some of it seems like play, some of it seems like experiment, some of it seems to have real belief. how do you see the question of belief playing out there? >> i think that, as you say, belief of is very difficult to quantitify. i mean, it's certainly difficult to disentangle from new of these other practices. i think as you say and as i argue in the book, there's many different definitions of religion, and certainly there are definitions that would say it doesn't matter at all, it's just about the community. there's definitions that say yes

or no. but i think that the truth is something a little bit more complicated which is that if you have found something to be true and you act as if it were true or you act in accordance with the sort of values that you create and espouse, you kind of reaffirm the truth about, within a community, such that there's a sort of a social reality that is something a little bit more complex than i would argue a model where, like, everyone's doing something and no one believes it, but they're all sort of pretending to get along which is, i think, the straw man version of what a community mold would look like. practice feint and the faith will come. i think that ritual and community can, indeed, be a precursor to faith or to a spiritual awareness rather than simply being kind of an

either/or thing belief has to precede community. >> so, i mean, then to sort of take that, there's also then the ways that these things sort of feed back into political life, right? i mean, i think one of the more interesting aspects of the sort of neopagan scene that's happened in american culture is it seems to have left-wing and right-wing -- [inaudible] so you have chapters in the book that sort of follow what we might call pagan threat to very different political, cultural destinations. do you want to talk a little bit about that? >> sure. so perhaps the most prominent example of neopaganism conceived of broadly, again, the termses are a bit -- there's the religion of wicca itself, people

who self-identify as wick can but might not belong to a coven, sort of rough umbrella progressive witchcraft, witch culture is, i think, a hugely significant phenomenon. so already in 2014 when there was a book called witches of america, she identify about a million self-identified witches in the country and said it was the fastest growing religious tradition. that was before 2016 which is, i'd argue, where it all changed. so i think in the wake of donald trump's election, in the wake of the women's march in particular and the sort of feminist movement around that, there was a real interest in, on the part of spiritually are interested progressives, young progressives, particularly young women, also queer people who found within the imagery of butch craft and -- witchcraft

the sort of transgression of the nasty woman, the sort of difficult woman, the woman who is sexually in charge of her own sexuality found these images kind of liberating in part because they were so coded as in opposition to the trump/gop if alliance. so you'd have sort of witches hexing trump or later witches hexing kavanaugh as these kind of mass cathartic, symbolic but also, i'd argue, these spiritual outpouring of anger, of grief. and when i say spiritually real, it would be fair to say it was a symbol that, a language that people are able to use to process their anger but also their sort of hope for a different world rather than it just feels like a convenience. but then if you say sort of going completely across the political spectrum, there's also the rise of what i call a

certain kind of reactionary desire for -- and they define this, fans it is of jordan peterson, members of men's rights groups, the red pill and the other, the alt-right more generally is sort of neo-watered down religion of let's return to the good old days when the hybrid of ancient greece as seen through hercules' legendary journals and the 1950s as seen through pleasantville. men were men and women were women, and we all had our place and this kind of obsession with physical strength, with the kind of primordial truth of the blood, and there's a sort of implicit blood and soil here that i'll just let hang in the air. but i think this reactionary --

which itself is a response to the desiccated modern world and the corrupt modern world and the civilization which feminism and p.c. culture have destroyed is a kind of desire to reclaim an imagined primal past and a very strong interest and slightly dubious -- and what nature says goes. i kind of would call it a kind of nature worship. so that's a very different form of paganism that takes very different things from our pagan past, shall we say. >> so do you, i i mean, just in listening to you describe it and, you know, the figures that you reference, it seems to be, you know, in part that you can see that as a kind of sex and gender polarization, right, in religion. where, obviously, there are male

witches and, you know, male pagans on the left, and there are, you know, i guess, you know, alt-right, neo-pagan women. but there does seem to be a sense in which, you know, the sort of larger polarization of the sexes in our culture which is manifest in politics and other lawyers seems to may out -- in other areas seems to play out in this religious landscape. you could come closer to the center and say, well, oprah winfrey and joel osteen are sort of the yin and yang of the religious center, and then the yin and yang of the american religious extremes are, you know, witches hexing kavanaugh and bronze age perverts supporting donald trump or something, right? that they're sort of -- and in certain ways reflect the kind of religious failure in the sense that you would expect the religious community to sort of socialize men and women together in certain ways. which maybe is not happening.

what do you think of that? >> so i'd say it's a much broader failure than just religion. i mean, when i look at the wide range of these groups, and i don't think they're exactly comparable. i certainly have quite a lot more condemnation for the -- [inaudible] than i do for the butches. that said -- for the witches. i think what i find fascinating is so many of the subjects of their ire other than, of course, one another are the same, is -- are certain newspapers. depression -- for example, feminist bastions of -- [inaudible] or are they these sort of white supremacist, patriarchal papers that should be struck down because of their, they failed in that way. these are often sort of both

charges that are leveled against institutions more broadly. and i think that whatever else you want to say is that our civic institutions have failed us more broadly, that there is some -- not any paper in particular, but sort of speaking more broadly, i think there is a sense in a witch not of the center, but our, the institutions that make up our lives have lost our trust. and however we may understand or give voice to those failings, there is, i would argue, something interesting to me in how widespread the distrust is of kind of institutional targets. >> so i'd like to thank everyone who has followed my instructions and actually asked some questions. so we've got about 15 or 20 minutes now, and i'm going to take some questions out of the queue, maybe adapt them slightly

using the moderator's prerogative. but we'll start with a question from ark v -- avi. he cites the catholic philosopher charles taylor, the canadian author of "a secular age," the largest book that you can possibly buy and maybe possibly read. and avi says that taylor suggests some version of what you're describing is inevitable if we get the history of the last 500 years right since religion has been decoupled from the state in north atlantic societies, but humans are still on a quest to find fullness and meaning which can only be understood in religious terms. an explosion of religious options. and he defends this pluralism against charges that it's too individualistic or too narcissistic and so on. and so that, that, i think that dovetails, avi's point dovetails

with some of what you've been saying. i want to take it, though, and link it. we briefly mentioned some of the social justice movements, you know, black lives matters and the proit's politics -- protest politics that are sort of dominating conversation right now. one thing that struck me about those protests is it seems like there is, there is the nova effect and sort of the desire for individualism, but then there's also still a desire for a kind of religious group -- unity, right it's sort of striking to see some of it is corporate bullshit, right, but the sense that we want to live in a society where every institution high and low, corporate and governmental and so on, is onboard with this cause. that seems almost to push against the mauve have effect -- mauve v.a. effect and the idea that it's all going to be individualism. there is some desire to have a sort of unified church of social

justice. >> absolutely. >> do you see that? >> yes, absolutely. and if anything, i think that's one of the reasons that -- and, again, speaking somewhat reductively -- it works so well and it is so powerful and is so effective is in part because it sort of, on the one hand, you know, insofar as it is, its current version is a version of our times. of course, it is sort of rooted in a degree of individualism, in a degree of inwardness, but it also offers that vision of solidarity, of unity and of a common good that can be shared of a better world. and i think there's something vital in, i would say there's a hunger for something vital that i see more broadly which is that our, yes, our institutions shouldn't just sort of work in the sort of functional way, they should be for something, for something good. and i think it's often the case

that when i've read social justice culture as a religion, there's a version out that is basically using that pejoratively. it's saying, oh, it's a cult, so on and so forth. i think a better way of framing that is, i mean, yes, it works because it is a religion. it works because it can harness a real test of meaning, of purpose, of community and ritual that actually points beyond the self. it gives us, you know, an eschatology that sort of other iterations of more purely intuitionalists -- that's hard to say -- and self-focused religious phenomena don't -- [inaudible] between the social justice movement as a kind of organic phenomenon and its sort of

corporatization as, indeed, pretty much everything that one could think of gets sort of consumed by corporations to sell products. so i sort of do want to -- i am -- i want to draw the distinction between kind of a movement in and of itself and the way in which it kind of gets fed through the shredder of and now there's certain brands that are going to say the right thing at the right time and post the right instagram like kendall jenner's pepsi ad in 2017. and that's sort of its own thing. >> but isn't that sort of how a religion wins, right? if you go back to, like, the fourth century roman world, right, you had sort of the zealots of christianity, and then you had the, you know, roman aristocrats, sort of the equivalent of brands i guess today who didn't really care one withdraw or the other about the doctrine of the trinity, but

decided, well -- [audio difficulty] you know, i'm going to sort of, i'm going to endow a church over here. i'm going to sort of act, act the christian part. i mean, it seems to me that that kind of sort of corporate virtue signaling is itself inseparable from the triumphs of a new world deal. >> and i think that that is certainly one path, let's say, to victory, is through this kind of corporatization. i can't help but wonder though whether another path might actually be through politics, might actually be through it. i, like many others, was rather excited about the bernie sanders campaign. this is something i might have wondered about with slightly more hope a few months ago than now. but i do wonder whether, you know, these religious nuns and particularly these progressive nuns, they do vote.

and they're actually in 20 states, i want to say, they're the single biggest religious demographic. and if we think about, for example, white evangelicals who are the only sort of bach that turned out consistently for trump, the statistic now that was bandied about, there is like and, 14% of -- 13, 14% of the population, they vote in an outside way, their turnout's already great, but we're talking about the religious nuns. i'm sure that's a bigger group than social justice progressives more broadly, of course there's a lot of crossover. we're talking about 23 president of americans, 36% of young americans. so i do wonder if one way in which this might make its way into the culture is through the ballot box, which we might at some point see a political experiment that takes these values and puts them into

practice and sees how they work. and i'd certainly be curious. >> so this is actually one of our curious from young avi, and you sort of answered this. will the me suggest the sort of darker scenario, right, which is to the extent that one of our political coalitions becomes sort of defined by and dominated by some version of these new religions and our other political coalition is still defined by and dominated by whatever remains of institutional christianity, that creates a much bigger religious political divide than america has had in the past. i mean, even our civil war was essentially an inter-christian theological conflict with people having, you know, huge arguments. but they were still arguing about the interpretation of the same bible, right? so this, i mean, the vision you just set up does seem to set up a version of the culture war that in certain ways could be even more profound and divisive,

you know, than the one we've had for the last 30 or 40 years as christianity has slowly retreated. >> i mean, i think that's right. that's certainly -- i mean, one could certainly say a danger, but another way to look at it is we are in a kind of vacuum moment. something you brought up earlier, and i sort of want to reiterate it is this isn't a purely new phenomenon so much as the tail end of a multigenerational phenomenon. we talked about, as you said, one9 foot out the door in terms of a kind of disillusion, in this case, religious are, organized religion but also more broadly a certain way of doing things. and i think -- just a sidebar here, i think most of, most people who leave religious traditions actually do so, one of the biggest predicters and indicators is how much religion is spoken of in the home. you do have your nuns who are

leaving the faith are doing so in part kind of having witnessed a certain apathy in their own parents. and so, yes, i think that there is a sort of bleakness or potential bleakness to this coming vacuum, but i don't feel like it's been a long time coming. >> so this is, we have a question from maxine that drill down on what you were just talking talking about. did you find that there was anything, any really specific patterns in the religious background of people who were involved in these new movements beyond just their religion in the home tended to be more attenuated, were they more likely to be lapsed evangelicals, lapsed catholics, main line versus evangelical, so on? >> yes. so the mainline churches have emptied faster than evangelical churches, white evangelical churches. just as a sort of side note,

historically black churches and white evangelical churches have different polling data, which is why i'm making that distinction. but at the same time at this point, the nuns come from, come from everywhere at this point. there aren't actually -- they're relatively reflective of the united states as a whole. a little whiter but not by much. one, actually, very big predicter, and that is that 36% of queer people rather than, again, 24% of the national average are religiously unaffiliated. so that's one of the only kind of really big, notable and perhaps expected given how -- marginalized traditional institutions, that's kind of the big one. >> is there any gender, like, is there any big gender breakdown?

>> i look at it slightly more women are unaffiliated overall, slightly more men are likely to say that they're full-on atheists or agnostics. but, again, these are -- >> and they wear fedoras. [laughter] >> all right. well, we've got about six minutes left, so let me try and squeeze in a couple more, a couple more questions. one question someone brings up, i guess when i had mentioned sort of religious coming of age ceremonies, the idea that colleges and sort of college admissions and graduations sort of fill that role. and one thing we haven't talked about the harry potter phenomenon, and so maybe this would be a chance to talk about sort of the peculiar role that sort of the school plays in a certain kind of quasi-religious event, like the idea of -- yeah. anyway, talk for three minutes about -- >> harry potter. all right -- >> go. >> i think that is true that

sort of the remnant, there are civil institutions that still have a kind of cultural cache, but harry potter specifically, especially over the past week as j.k. rowling has -- i find it fascinating that harry potter's been a canary in the coal mine since its publication. 1997 when the first book was published and 2000 when the fourth book was published, at home internet had a more than 500% increase x. that dovetailed, that version of fandom and the way in which fan culture kind of developed around it dovetails to completely with the kind of the rise of a very particular internet culture, one that was about whether it's fan fiction, creation or memes but the idea that you could have ownership of your text, you could have ownership of the things that you loved.

this was not a model where someone kind of came down from on high and had the final word on what a property was. we certainly see that in our relationship with media now, the amount of shows that are designed for the fans, a much bigger back and forth between consumer base and creators of information. and i think the idea that j.k. rowling is, you know, exiled from her creation because it's not seen as hers, it's seen as everyone's. often the response to rally has not been let's never read harry potter again, it's, well, we can still write fiction in this community, we can still love these characters, they belong to us. and i think that has kind of writ large can tell us so much about the wider questions of

intuitionalism, institutionalism, inwardness and individualization that we're seeing writ large in the book. >> the last question, let's do a post-covid world question, a right? part one, one person says do you think in a post-covid world where people will be looking to find meaning and purpose and community that these sort of newer, stranger faiths will be fast tracked? and do you think that there is a sense in which they could be more like lu to sort of form -- likely to form actual commitments or even cults which is a word we haven't used that much. in a way -- like one way to put it, we're seeing this as sort of a 1968 moment in our politics right now. well, the 1970s were sort of the high tide of weird commune aleck peoplers, you know, strange religious cults. what do you foresee after covid and and maybe after donald

trump? >> well, i think the combination of our increased ability to and awareness of the ability to gather remosley with a kind of -- remotely with a kind of increased reliance on one another, of our need for social bonds and the kind of loneliness of pure atom, i think the core can experience simultaneously both. interact with one another online, and yet we are in our own houses if we are prejudiced enough to be able to be. and that kind of honeliness is itself -- loneliness, itself, absolutely i think we will see people gathering digitally and perhaps not when we're able to not. but i think people will be much more interested in forming intentional community especially if we get to the point of thinking about our pods, who are our bubbles, who are our space-chosen family. i wonder if that tendency will sort of lend itself out toward a

form of intentional community and maybe even a disembodied form of intentional community. i'm curious what that might look like. >> but do you think it's also possible that there could be -- i mean, look, you know, this has been fantastic, but it's really not the same as doing a panel in the flesh, right? and that goes double and triple, i think, for a lot of religious practices. so could there be a sort of anti-internet religion backlash that sort of manifests itself in a desire for in-flesh communities or, you know, communes with large vegetable gardens and weird polyamorous living arrangements? >> i mean, some of those things are very tempting. i personally would like a vegetable garden right about now. i think that's certainly possible. however, i think that it may be even if these communities do come about in the flesh ultimately, it may be that we will use the internet to get there. we will find one another online the psalm withdraw 40% of

americans find a partner online. has not thus far ended up that way. so i think the digital space and the promise of that had been a sort of launching pad for people to find, seek out and find communities that may then manifest themselves as -- [inaudible] >> all right. it's 8:00. so i want to apologize to everyone who asked questions that we didn't get to. you are terrific, and there are many even more wonderful questions further down the queue. and thank you all for joining us. again, to repeat what i said at the outset, i hope that if you found this illuminating and interesting, that you will buy tara's book, buy many other books. support the strand, support your local bookstore. and as my final word with since i didn't say anything as a roman

catholic, while you're dabbling in the strange new rites that tara describes, stay safe out there. with that or thank you all so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> binge watch booktv saturday evenings at 8 eastern, settle in and watch several hours of your favorite authors. saturday we're featuring programs with award-winning biographer robert caro e whose books include working, the power broker and and the multivolume biography of president johnson. and watch as we feature programs with the late christopher hitchens. binge watch booktv on c-span2. >> weeknights this month we're featuring booktv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span2. tonight starting at 8 p.m. eastern, former defense secretaries robert gates and

james mattis take a look at the use of u.s. power around the world. then christian groves, former staff director of the senate armed services committee, he talks about the future of high-tech warfare. and later, former defense secretary william perry talks about the nuclear arms raisins the end of world war ii and the threat of nuclear war today. enjoy booktv on c-span2. >> postmaster general louis dejoy testifies before congress amid concern about changes to postal service operations and their impact on the upcoming november elections live friday at 9 a.m. eastern on c-span before the senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs. and then on monday live at 10 a.m. eastern on c-span2 postmaster or general dejoy and robert duncan, chair of the united states postal service board of governors, will testify before the house oversight and

reform committee. watch live coverage of the hearings friday on c-span and monday on c-span2, on demand at c-span.org or listen live wherever you are with the free c-span radio app. >> and we thank you all for tuning in. finish in what we can only describe as interesting times, we're grateful for the opportunity to invite virtual audiences together in dialogue each when we're not exactly, you know, together in space. i'd especially like to thank erica and claire. tonight's presentation will like lu run about 40 minutes followed by audience q&a. you can view the event on crowd cast, facebook or youtube directly using the ask a question button on crowd cast. keep it succinct. if you need closed captioning, youtube is your best bet, and you can click the cc button in th