c-span2 postmaster general detroit and robert duncan share the united states postal service board of governors will testify before the house oversight and reform committee watch live coverage of the hearing friday on c-span2 and monday on c-span2, on-demand c-span.org or listen live wherever you are with the free c-spanradio . >> welcome, my name is sameer and i'm director of events at the strand . we are happy to have everyone here area before we launched into a discussion of perez new book strange right i like to share history about this. the strand was founded in 1927 by benjamin bass over on fourth avenue book road. stretching from union square to after place, but rome dwindled from an original 48 stores until 93 years the strand is the sole survivor and now run by third-generation owner nancy bass.

we also want to thank all of you for your support and for our community of booklovers and friends we wouldn't be here today . tonight we are excited to have with us tara burton who is celebrating the recent release of her new book strange rights, new religions for a godless world . is contributing editor at the american interest, at columnist at religion news service and the former staff and religion reporter. she has written on religion and secular national geographic's, washington post , new york times and more and holds a doctorate in theology from oxford. she's also author of the novel social creature. joining tara to discuss her new book is ross douthat,, columnist for the new york times op-ed page and offer up to change the church, bad

religion and privileged and co-author of brand-new party. before joining new york times was a senior editor for the atlantic. these film critic for national review and he cohosts the new york times weekly op-ed paul podcast. he lives in new haven with his wife and three children so without further ado please join me in welcoming cara and ross. >> thank you so much, thanks to all of you for joining us here in this exciting virtual experience. this slightly disembodied way of talking about a book that may be appropriate tothe subject matter . and,, thanks for letting me interrogate you about the future of religion in the united states and beyond . >> thank you so much for being here. >> just another thursday night in america. i want to make two comments before we start. the first is that in our era of covid i've now done enough

zoom events to know that sometimes people are more hesitant to ask questions when they are typing in questions and they would be at a real event when you can stand up and tell the author why he's wrong about everything in theworld . and you'll just have to listen to me ask questions for the entire hour and hopefully we will get about 50 or 20 minutes of your questions at the end so that the first point and the second one which is one i'll redirect at the end is that this is a challenging time for everybody. and authors are obviously among the least challenged in many ways but putting up 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 of weeks of promotion for all the bookstores closed but i just want to encourage you if you find, if you're listening , watching, enjoying this just

buy the book. don't just buy the book from the strand obviously, encourage your friends to buy the book and make it a bestseller it deserves to be so without further ado, let's start in with a big dumb question. this is a book about new religions for a godless world. that's the subtitle. so is our world really godless and if not or if so, whatreligions are filling that void ? >> so spoiler alert, no we don't live in a godless world . that's roughly theargument i make . so i want to draw a distinction when we talk about a secular age that we often want to do or world about religion what arewe talking about . just a couple of background statistics, about 23, 24 percent of americans say their religiously unaffiliated but also often referred to as the religious nuns.

about 36 percent of people born in america after 1985, identify as religious nuns a huge increase but of these nuns, these unaffiliated, 72 percent they they believe in some sort of higher power and 20 percent actually say they believe in the god of the bible. so we're not necessarily talking about people who are atheists, although about six percent of the population, it's true atheists under self-report so we're talking about people for whatever reason are alienated by institutional religion, organized religion, who feel it has nothing to offer them and who may as in the case of the people who believe in the traditional judeo-christian god actually still have him form of faith but who are

unwilling to identify with or participate in its as a religion in and of itself so we're talking about the spiritual but not religious but we're also talking about a broader category and in my book i call it the religiously remix which includes not just spiritual but not really just what i think is the most visible version of the phenomenon but also peoplewho do identify , the box at work with a particular religious tradition whose personal practices, belief systems are more eclectic and a statistic that i like to bring up here to get a sense of how widespread this is about 30 percent of identified christians they believe in reincarnation is not shall we say something one would associatewith christian orthodoxy . so we are living in an age i argue where religion, religious life, the components of a religious life meaning purpose, community, ritual are

relating to them in a different way. where mixing and matching, where unbundling to use a term harvard scholars use in their work. and there's a sense in which we are all sort of the endplate of this is we are all making our own religion culturally. these can include not just elements of traditional religion but things like wellness culture, fandom, political activism. the sort of vast array of modern occultism, witchcraft and neopaganism and wicca are among the fastest-growing religions in america so on and so forth. >> so i think one sort of initial response to a description of your thesis that someone well-versed in american history might have is how new is all this because after all, there is certainly nothing more american and being entrepreneurial and sort of setting up a church of one that is, every kid in high

school english class at lee's back when i went to high school was assigned the collected works of ralph waldo emerson and you get a certain kind of, a certain kind of individualized religion there and in the larger history of 19th century american spirituality is right with what you in the book called sort of intuitional religion. so can you talk about what is the same and what is different? what do we have in commonwith 19th century america and what's changed in the last 30 or 40 years ? >> so what i call intuitional is in in the book is a sort of catchall term for religious practices and the lead set focus inward on forgot, the individual, the feeling of institutionalism and again it's a reductive term but your church, your dogma, your external forces. we've seen quite a history of

the pendulum swinging back and forth in american religious life these sort of outcroppings of intuitional faith, intuitional approaches the faith. the various awakenings, your tantrum bibles also the birth of movements like news pot which was huge from the 1860s onward which was the sort of proto- the secret self-help movement basically if you think about hard enough it will happen. which became a usually influential and then led to a whole publishing industry of the various self-help books . there is spiritualism and the rise of sort of obsessions with ouija boards and contacting the day that became really popular on the east coast but i'd also argue there's evangelical revivals within the christian tradition where the narrative was often something like the church has become more christianity has become

desiccated and nobody believes anymore, people just go through the motions and you go to church on sunday and it doesn't really matter that we need to look for a personal relationship with god. we need to look for something more intense, more intimate and of course the various countercultural religions and of the 1960s and so that is absolutely not new. if anything i argue for the pendulum swings back and forth forever however many hundred years but where i think something is distinct and new about this rate awakening is the internet. given that we are trying to gather in this way at this time . i like to say that what the protestant reformation or what the printing press was the protestant reformation, the creation of a model of consenting information that was in many ways intimate and inward. you were reading a book, you have your directconnection to the text . and sort of internalizes much the way and one may well draw

that connection to the protestants egos overall. i don't hear these new religions being the religions of the internet age where we are all not just consumers, we are not just readers but we are also inclined to culturally think of ourselves as creators. to think of ourselves as people who have or want to have ownership over stories. two in some ways of course it this harkens back to various oral traditions as well but with the added dizzying embodiments of the internet itself . where i think that this hunger to create, to be involved, to have ownership in our stories has made us all the more resistant to perhaps orthodox ways for traditionally orthodox ways of experiencing, receiving dogma and doctrine i think as well our particular topic list moments are so in the

era of personal branding made us cognizant of a model of our identities based on our choices. what news we consume, what papers we read, what music we listen to and what movies we watch. what we post, what we tweet creates this odd identity and i think within the culture there's a sort of odd consumerist strain of what apps am i using to meditate, what purchases am i making ? am i getting a sweet cream salad, wellness culture is perhaps the biggest, most obvious example ofthis . i think the way in which our conspicuous and perhaps less conspicuous consumption is seen to define us especially in the age of the algorithm where our recommendations are getting narrower and narrower contributes to this kind of

hyper itemized individualization . >> so i want to press you a little bit on the point you made at the end because i think this is one of the interesting things about the book is that it sort of at the core you're talking about practices and sort of experiments that are we both agree that some definition of religious or schedule ritual. i think the core of the book is about certainly is a revival of pagan pantheists occultist practices in various forms in american life but then your definition of sort of new religion spread outward and encompasses as you were saying sort of consumer culture, or some of her saliva aspects of consumer culture , everything sort of holistic and personalized, wellness culture and so on so convinced me as someone maybe a little inclined to skepticism that it makes sense to fit the world of

brands and sort of kind self cultivation under the umbrella of religion or religious practice. >> i argue there's a sort of implicit theology that's shared by so many of these and particularly something very consumer base the wellness movement i talk about and that this sort of implicit theology of what i'll just call best help is him . the idea that it's a moral ritual demand to be your best self. to improve in a certain way that is either argue rather solipsistic. it's kind of the collapse of this distinction between effort you put on a bike, the purity you get from having the right green juice with the minimum amount of toxins read the sort of way that your skin looks after your 10 step beautyroutine . the way in which these things are sold and the talk about is so loaded with this language of self-care not just as a kind of routine

although historically the worst self-care does come from a more political place but it's in this sort of wellness paradigm in which it now found itself . we want to, there's a sense of which we are not taking care ofourselves . if we are not putting in the effort to be the best in this certain way which is of course also rooted in what happens to make us prettier or ostensibly prettier and ostensibly more and ostensibly has a beauty complexion or what have you. there is a kind of purity where we take in so doing and i see that the elements of that taken from example new thought and there's elements of that they can from the prosperity gospel tradition and adjacent to that i think that the idea that more broadly, your job as a human

being on this earth is to be your truest self and your bestself , also to be your most authentic self. to release your self from repression, from ways that society has acted upon you and kind of figure out who you really are. is i argue coded as a moral, spiritual good read there is the language of energy is really popular in wellness circles. it's popular certainly in various occult circles and i think there are versions of that that of course are much more political and much more outward looking and focused much more on solidarity but the sort of capitalistic version of it, the branded version of it does tend to equate personal fulfillment with a kind of vibration on the right frequency of the right energy in a way that i find incredibly interesting and quite revealing. >> such as google and church.

>> i would say so. that said what google doesn't have and i think this is because it is a brand from which we buy things and doesn't have the community aspect . >> i do want all my shopping at google i should say. >> and it shows, i my best self.sorry, go on. >> no, just that soul cycle is an even better example because it combines i think a lot of the goop metaphysics and the aesthetic and the kind of sense of purpose with a community and a ritual that lets you experience that in the moment. i remember i went to a few soulcycle classes, i wish i could say they were all for research, they were not but there's the signs of community. where a tribe, where a pack, we are a cult, it says it

right there and all the signs say things like pure energy affects your neighbors energy so don't do this or that or another thing which is in a way moving this kind of somewhat nebulous spiritualized language to talk about or two begin to what could be a uncomfortable fitness class to burn some calories into something with an aura of spiritual attainment. what you're doing isn't just good for you, it's good for the universe and your role in it. >> the one thing that has struck me that i think it's with your argument about the difference between the early 21st century and its groups and the 19th century and its gurus is just it's an absence ofinstitutionalization . the united states has a lot of the same kind of ritual entrepreneurs and, would be

gurus that we had in the victorian era, the early 19th century they don't or at least they don't seem as likely to found things that we call churches. so we just have marianne williamson as a presidential campaign and marianne williamson i think he's a pre-internet figure originally. he rises to prominence in the 1980s she's (dynamic updated new thought kind of figure. i feel like in the 19th century there would be a church on the binary and williamson and it wouldn't be huge and it would have like 200,000 people and it would be like the organs or something and there would be chapels around the country and that's doesn't seem to happen to anything like the same extent especially over thelast couple of generations . you have a little stop in the 70s and 80s but especially lately do you think that's, how much of that is the

internet, how much is just an ambient skepticism of institutions. why isn't, why doesn't gwyneth paltrow have, i guess connie west sunday services, why isn't there asunday service or group . >> i'm not sure that it would not be successful at least initially. i think that's, i think the label of church for the label of kind of making something the 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 , we, we millennial's , the broader we hear. >> me personally, yes. we are, so much of contemporary religious science i'd argue is about that kind of precise individualization so in the

end we can't necessarily get away from the end point being we are all the high priests of our ownchurch . we don't have and i think this is true much more broadly not only in our religious institutions in our civic ones and political ones and journalistic and media institutions as well unfortunately. unfortunately we don't know what i think that there is, i think that suspicion does just lend itself to such a focus on the self and i want to be careful here because i think there's an easy narrative that we could go to says kids these days with their selfie, they're so narcissistic all the priests of their own religion and that something way that one could go about reading these situations but i think that what we're seeing isn't necessarily a story of narcissism narcissism of institutional failure. i think it's perfectly reasonable and in fact completely understandable that it institutions have

failed you, if you don't think you can trust the media, the scientific establishment, the political system, the academic system and so on and so forth it makes perfect sense to turn inward, to rely on yourself and your own instead and desires and affinities and feelings as authoritative because at least you know that, you might be lying to yourself on a broader theological way but at least you might have slightly more trust that you're aware of yourself and you are of other people. >> so i guess to push on that point, is this sustainable? because 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 millennial generation z. these are people who are sort of conducting experiments in religion at the time that their conducting experiments

in relationships and professional experiments and so on . and i think you tell a plausible story where these are the children of baby boomers who had their own rebellion and often thought of onto an institutional affiliation and obviously you talk a little bit about this kind of person. >> and a generational turnover there. where they took one step out the door of their institutions but kept one foot in the door and their kids have taken the other step. but their kids, and for the most part gone through the you know, 50 to 60 years of life that awaits after your 20s . and in which the forms not necessarily the dogma or doctrine of religion but the computer communal forms of religion , the sort of solidarity of a religious institution or community that

it's not clear that google or even soulcycleprovides the role that a bar mitzvah were first communion plays and so on . obviously this is more and like a prophecy line but what does this look like in 25 years for the people and ductingthese experiments now . >> i think you're right that sort of the more let's say inward looking, the sort of nihilism of soulcycle that it's not just health focused but present. those are the things i think are good examples . i think we will see a hunger for solidarity that the pure, self-interested versions of these new religions, the wellness cultures of the world can't offer. i think that what we see will see and i'm interested in particular in for example social justice as a movement in part because what it does offer is an ideology of community and an ideology of solidarity which i think is, there's a real hunger for.

and the way that i have, i'm interested to more broadly and i talk about this in the chapter on polyamory and on kind of the free love as a continuation of ideas of human perfectionism in the 19th century but ways in which the term, that's been used in the queer community but choosing a family and where people who are or marginalized by court experiencing marginalization from traditional religious institutions , people who for whatever reason are alienated from traditional religious institutions or civic institutions, whose family of origin might not be in touch with in the same way you might be able to find one another and i think there's a hopefulness in the idea that as a result, as a result of the kind of tribal is a can you find on the internet people can find like-minded people or people can find communities, there are options for solidarity, for

coming together, for the creation of ritual in a way that may not look like organized religion as perhaps additionally practice but nevertheless offer that sense of community. i always remember there's a woman i interviewed before starting the book and it was my last piece. who lost her husband unexpectedly, quite young and didn't, or wanted his friends to celebrate and commemorate his life in a way that was pacific to him and so the friends got together and they played music from his favorite videogame area there was this service that was very much designed not around religious lines or traditional religious lines but rather around what this, who this person was and what his life was like and he wanted to play is equal to the videogame.

he wasn't able to do that and she kind of wish people that she met online played this game in his memory and this was she reported usually important to her and i think that's such an important example of how these communal bonds and our desire for these communal bonds can survive the sort of reshaping even as ice think this sort of perhaps pure selfish inwardness, i'm being really mean about soulcycle. i hope they don't see me but the inwardness ofa certain kind of wellness culture . i think is unsustainable. >> so let's drill down on the question of belief. we're talking about community . but you know, the core of what we think of as religion has always been belief and that there's a lot of sociological debate about how important our actual credo

statements and don't people take their religious identity from community rather than from tweets and i think there's truth to that but it's also true that the major world religions have been entered around actual metaphysical claims about the universe and one question that we had this conversation before and i always ask this question ask it again because i think it's sort of radiates through a lot of the more sort of supernaturally oriented experiments that you're writing about since, she people believe in what they're doing. like, specifically when you're talking about neopaganism and the people who are sort of reaching back or reinventing pre-christian or non-christian traditions, their invoking god, they're invoking demons read their doing witchcraft. some of it seems like play, some of it seems like experiment and some of it seems to have real belief. how do you see the question of belief playing out there. >> i think that you say

belief is very difficult to quantify. it's certainly difficult to disentangle from any of these other practices. and i think as you say and as i argue in the book, there's many definitions of religion as there are scholars of religion and certainly there are definitions that say it doesn't matter, it's about the community and there's others that say the metaphysical truth i think the truth is something a little bit more complicated is that if you have found something to be true and you act as if it were true for you act in accordance with the values that you create and espouse, you kind of reaffirm the truth of that within a community such that there a sort of social reality that is something a little more complex than i would argue inward a model where everyone's doing something and no one believed it but they're all just sorting sort of pretending to get along is the sort of

strawman version of what a community model would look like . a prophecy ask the same 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 were saying belief has to proceed ritual community. >> so then to sort of take that, there's also then the ways that these things sort of feedback into political life and i think one of the more interesting aspects of the sort of neopagan theme that happened in american culture is it seems to have left-wing and right-wing manifestations so you have chapters in the book that sort of follow what we might call pagan threads two very different political and

cultural destinations. do you want to talk alittle bit about that ? >> sure and perhaps the most prominent example of neopaganism conceived the probably again, the terms are a bit blurred here is there's the religion of wicca itself and the people who aside self identify as wiccans but might not belong to a common area that sort of rough umbrella of progressive witchcraft or progressive which culture is i think a hugely significant phenomenon so in 2014 when alex marbury wrote a book called riches of america he identified about 1 million self identified which is in the country and said at the time was the fastest growing religious tradition. that was before 2016 which is i argue where it all changed. so i think in the wake of donald trump's election and in the wake of the women's

mark in particular and the sort of feminist movement around that there was a real interest in on the part of virtually interested progressives, young progressives particularly young women, also queer people who found within the imagery of witchcraft and sort of conscious transgression of a nasty woman, the sort of difficult woman, the woman who is sexually in charge of her own sexuality. found these images liberating in part because they were so coded in opposition to the way evangelical trumps gop alliance so you see you have which is axing trauma or later which is axing cavanaugh as the son of mass cathartic symbolic but also i'd argue gradually real outpourings of anger, of greek and i say when i say spiritually real i think it

would be fair to say that it was a single set that many people were able to use to process their anger but also their hope for a different world rather than it's just being like a convenience set 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 atavism and reactionary desire for and then you find this in hands of jordan peterson on the one hand, members of men's rights groups and the rental on the other. people write more generally, it's kind of quasi-nietzsche and or kind of neo water down nietzsche and is him. this returned to the good old days and a hybrid of ancient greece as seen through hercules legendary journeys and the 1950s as seen through pleasantville or the good old days when men were men and

women were women and we all had our place and this kind of obsession with physical strength, with a kind of primordial truth of the blood and there's a sort of implicit blood and soil here i'll just let hang in the air but i think this kind of reactionary atavism which is itself codes itself as a response to the desiccated modern world and the corrupt modern world and the civilization which feminism and pc culture has destroyed. it's a kind of desire to reclaim and imagine primal past that it's often this very strong interest in sites and what nature says goes. i 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. >> do you just in listening to you describe and the figures that you reference it seems to be in part that you can see that as a kind of sex and gender polarization in religion are obviously there are male witches and mail pagans on the pagan left and there are i guess traditional wife, all trikes neopagan women but there does seem to be a sense in which the larger polarization of the sexes in our culture which is kind of that in politics and other areas seem to play out in this religious way and you can come closer to the center and say it's oprah winfrey and joel osteen are the nn yang of the religious center and there are witches texting

kavanaugh and broad-based perverts supporting donald trump in certain ways this reflects the religious failure in the sense that you would expect that successful religious community to sort of socialize men and women together in certain ways which navy is not happening, what do you think that? >> i'd say it's a broader failure than religion. when i look at the wide range of these groups, and i don't think they are exactly comparable. i certainly have a lot more condemnation for the adventists than i do for the witches but that said i think what we're seeing and what i find fascinating is that so many of the subjects of their higher other than one another are the same. is certain newspapers for example.

horrible pc feminist bastions of the horrible work age or are they sort of these white supremacist patriarchal papers and i'm not naming names that should be struck down because they failed in that way and these are often both charges are leveled against institutions more broadly and i think that whatever else we want to say is that our civicinstitutions have failed us more broadly , not any paper in particular but speaking more broadly i think there is a sense in which not the center but are, 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 and how widespread the

mistrust is of institutional targets. >> i'd like to thank everyone who has followed the instructions and actually ask some questions. so we've got about 15 to 20 minutes now and i'm going to take questions out of the queue. maybe adapt them slightly using the moderator's prerogative but we will start with a question from avi, he cites the catholics philosopher charles taylor, the canadian author of a secular age . the largest book you can possibly buy andmaybe possibly read . and obviously that taylor suggests that some version of what you're describing is inevitable if we get the history of the last 500 years right and religion have been

decoupled from the state in north atlantic society and humans are still on the quest to find fullness and meaning which can only be understood in religious terms so taylor calls this kind of nova effect. 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, i think that dovetails with some of what you've been saying. i want to take it and link it to we briefly mentioned the social justice movements, black lives matter and this protest politics that are dominating thediscussion right now . one thing that struck me about those protests is it seems like there is, the nova effect and the desire for individualism but there's still a desire or a kind of religious unity . it's sort of striking to see and some of it is corporate bullshit but this sense that

we want to win in a society where every institution high and low, corporate and governmental is on board with this cause you that seems almost to push against the nova effect and the idea that it's all going to be individualism but there's him desire to have a sort of unified church of total justice. you see that? >> absolutely and if anything i think it's one of the reasons that speaking more productively but the social justice movement i think is works so well and it is so powerful and is so effective in part because it sort of on the one hand, insofar as it is in its current version is a version of our times and it's sort of rooted in a degree of intuitional is him and a degree of inwardness and it also offers asian of solidarity, of unity and of a common good, a common good

that can be shared a better world and i think there's something vital in, there's a hunger for something vital that i see more broadly which is a sense that our, our institutions shouldn't just kind of work in a sort of functional way. they should be for something good. and i think it's often the case that when i read social justice culture as a religion, there's a version of that that i realized that's basically using that as a pejorative red it's saying it's a cold or their zealots or so on. i think a better way of phrasing that is yes, it works because it is a religion and it works because it can harness a real sense of meaning, of purpose, of community and ritual that actually points beyond the self. it gives us and eschatology. at sort of other iterations of more self yearly insulation list let's say

both intuitional is, that's hard to say and self focused religious phenomenon don't. and i do want to draw a distinction between the social justice movement as a kind of organic phenomenon and it's sort of corporate titration of it as indeed pretty much everything that one can think of, yet sort of assumed by corporations to sell products so i do want to adjust, 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 now certain brands have are going to just say the right thing at the right time and the right instagram read like kendall jenner t, black lives matter the ad and that's sort of its own thing. >> but isn't that sort of how

our religion wins weapon market if you go back to the fourth century roman world, you had to zealots of christianity and then you had the roman aristocrats who sort of the equivalent of brahms i guess today . who didn't really care one way or another about the doctrine of the trinity but decided well, i'm going to sort of and now the church over here. i'm going to sort of the christian parts. it seems to me that kind of corporate virtue signaling is itself inseparable from in certain ways the essence and triumph of underworld you. >> i think that is certainly one path let's say victory is true is kind of corporatization. i can't help but wonder though whether another might be be through politics.

i like many others was rather excited about the bernie sanders campaign so i do, this is probably something i might have wondered about with slightly more hope a few months ago that now but i do wonder whether these religious nuns and particularly these progressive nuns do vote there actually i think in 20 states i want to say they are the single biggest religious demographic. and if we think about for example white evangelicals who are the only sort of block turned out for trump, 81 percent. but it's specific now but they're what, 13, 14 percent of the population read a book in an outside way but there's 13 percent of the population and declining and where were talking about the religious nuns and that the group and sort of social justice progresses more broadly although of course there's a lot of crossover we're talking about 23 percent.

we're talking about 36 percent of young americans. so i do wonder one way in which this might make its way into the culture is through the ballot box. whether we might at some point see a political experiment that take the values and put them into practice and sees how they work and i'd be curious. >> this is one of our questions asking how do you think these new religions will affect our current parties and you sort of let me suggest this darker scenario which is that to the extent that one of our political coalitions comes out 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 in america has had in the past. even our civil war was essentially an intra-christian theological conflict with people having huge arguments they were still arguing about the interpretation of thesame bible . >> .. one could certainly say a danger but another way to look at it is we are in a vacuum moment in something you brought up earlier and i want to reiterate is it's not just a purely new phenomenon so much of the tail end of a multigenerational phenomenon and we talked about, 1 foot out the door in terms of a kind of disillusion that would in this case religious but also more

broadly and i just think as a sidebar i think most of most people who leave were the tradition one of the biggest predictors and indicators is how much religion is spoken of in the home but you do have your tail end of none who are leaving the faith are doing so and in part having witnessed a certain apathy in their own terms and so, yes, i think there is a sort of bleakness to or potential bleakness to this coming vacuum but i'd also argue it's been a long time coming. >> we have a question for maxing the drills down what you were just talking about which is defined there was any really specific patterns in the religious background who are involved in these news movements, beyond their religion in the home and tended to be

more attenuated or were they more likely to be lapsed evangelicals, lapsed catholics, mainline versus evangelical and so on? >> the midline have or in terms of churches have emptied faster than evangelical churches, particularly white evangelical churches and as a side note, historically back churches and white even yellow gold churches and polling data are looked at differently and that is why i make that distinction. but at the same time at this point the nuns come from everywhere at this point. they are relatively reflective of the united states as a whole and a little whiter but not by much but there is only one very big predictor and that is that 46% of cleared people rather

than 24% of the national average are religious unaffiliated so that is one of the only kind of really big notable and perhaps expected given [inaudible] that had been marginalized institutions but that is the big one. >> is there any gender or big gender breakdown? >> there are slightly more women unaffiliated over all slightly more men are likely to be full on atheists or agnostics. >> and they wear fedoras? [laughter] well we got six minutes left so let me try to squeeze in a couple more questions. one question someone brings up i guess when you mentioned religious ceremonies the idea that colleges and college admissions and graduations fill that role. one thing we have not talked

about is the harry potter phenomenon and so maybe this would be a chance to talk about the peculiar role that the school played in a certain kind of cause i religious, and that the idea of yet, anyway, talk for three minutes about harry potter. >> all right, go. there's a remnant of civil institutions that we still have a kind of cultural but about harry potter specifically over the past week as jk rowling has alienated quite a bit of percentage of her fan base i find it so fascinating that harry potter is a canary in the coal mine for so much of these cultural shifts and sons of publications. in 1987 when the first book was published and in 97 when the fourth book was published at home internet in america grew from 90 million households to 100 million so five 100% increase in that dovetailed and

burgeon of fandom on the witch fan culture developed around it develop detailed so with the rise of barrier internet culture that was one about further expand fiction or creation or memes but the idea that you could have ownership of your text and have ownership of the things you love this was not a model where someone came down from on high and the powers that be show runners were want to be called in fandom have the final word on what property was and we certainly see that in our relationship to media and the shows that are for fan service or designed for the fans are being a much bigger back-and-forth between consumer -based and creators of information and the idea that jk rowling exiled from her creation because it's not seen as hers but seen as everyone's and the

response to rally [inaudible] while hogwarts is bigger than she has and we can still write fiction in this community and love these characters and i think that tendency written in large so much about the wider questions of intuitional is on, institutionalism and inwardness individualized that we are seen at large in the book. >> last question, let's do a post covid world question and one person says do you think in a post covid world where people would be looking to find meaning and purpose and community that these newer, stranger face will be fast tracked and do you think there is a vent in which they could be more likely to form actual communities or even colts which is word we haven't used that much in the way, like this

is one way to put it, overseen the 1968 in politics right now where the 1970s were the highest tide of weird communal experiments strange religious cults. what do you foresee after covid and maybe after donald trump? >> well, i think the accommodation of our increased ability to and unawareness together remotely with a increased awareness with our need for social bonds and the pure itemization in the quarantine experience were able to interact with each other online and yet we were in our own houses if we are privileged enough to be able to be in that loneliness is itself, i think, mainly into an increase so absolutely i think we should see people gathering digitally and

perhaps not when we open or navy able we are able to not but i think more people will be like interested in intentional communities especially if we get to the point of thinking about our pods and our bubbles and who are our space chosen family and i wonder if that tendency will lend itself out toward a form of intentional community and a disembodied form of intentional community. >> to think it's also possible there could be, i mean, look, this has been fantastic but it's not the same as doing a panel in the flesh right? and that goes double and triple for a lot of religious practices so could there be an anti- internet religion backlash that manifests itself in a desire for in flesh communities or communes with large gardens and we are

polyamorous living arrangements? >> some of those things i would personally like to grow a vegetable garden right now but i think that is certainly possible and i think however i think that it may be that even if you see these do come about in the flesh ultimately it may well be that we are find one another online the same way 40% of americans find a partner online and that doesn't mean they never meet in real life or maybe they will but that has not thus far ended up that way. the digital space and the promise of that will be a launching pad for people to find and seek out communities that may manifest themselves as chosen family. >> it is 8:00 o'clock so i want to apologize to everyone who asked questions that we didn't get to. you were terrific and many more wonderful questions further down the queue. thank you all for joining us.

again, to repeat what i said at the outset, i hope you found this an illuminating experience that you will buy tara's book, by many other books, support the strand, support your local bookstore. as my final word since i didn't say anything in my capacity as a practitioner in one of the ancient institutional as a roman catholic while you are dabbling in the strange new rights that tara describes, stay safe out there. with that, thank you all so much for joining us. >> thank you. >> weeknights this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on c-span2. tonight, starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern, former defense secretary robert dates and james madison take a look at the use of u.s. power around the world since the end of world war ii. christian roads, former staff

director of the senate armed services committee who talks about the future of high-tech warfare. william perry and director of policy talk about the nuclear arms race since the end of world war ii and the threat of nuclear war today. enjoy book tv on c-span2. >> postmaster general louis dejoy testifies before congress amid concern about postal service operations and their effect on the upcoming november elections. live friday and 9:00 a.m. eastern on c-span before the senate committee on homeland security and governmental affairs. then on monday live at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span2 postmaster general louis dejoy and robert duncan chair of the board of governors will testify before the house service and oversight, reform committee. watch live coverage of the hearing friday on c-span and monday on c-span2, on the man at

c-span .org or listen live wherever you are with the free c-span radio app. >> book tv on c-span2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. coming up sunday at 4:55 p.m. eastern, and the lead up to next week's republican national convention coverage we are featuring authors who have written about president trump and the upcoming election, including former speaker of house newt gingrich and his book, trump and the american future. ralph reed and his book, for god and country. david haro it's with his book, slick. then an idea eastern on "after words" in her book, covid-19, science journalist deborah mckenzie on on covid-19 became a global pandemic and ways to prevent future outbreaks. she's interviewed by georgetown university's center for global health professor. watch book tv this again on c-span2.