Kate Bowler: Something strange has happened to American religion. For the most part of the 20th century, America was famously religious. Even as churches emptied across much of Europe, Americans kept going to church. In fact, religious affiliation remained shockingly durable. And then people started leaving. Today, almost three in 10 Americans have no religious affiliations. Sociologists call them the nones, like N-O-N-E-S. But that category is much stranger and more interesting than it sounds. It includes atheists and agnostics, yes, but also people who still believe in God, still wonder about the sacred, still want meaning and ritual and community. They just may not be looking for those things in church. So if this isn’t a simple story about people losing faith, then what is it? Hi. I’m Kate Bowler, and this is Everything Happens. And today, welcome to class. This conversation was recorded in front of my students at Duke Divinity School, because I wanted us to understand just how we got here. And for that, we really have to look backward. In the early 20th century, conservative Protestants were waging these enormous battles over what it meant to be modern. Did it mean that they believed in evolution? Did it mean that the Bible still had primary authority over all things? Who got to interpret scripture? Should Christianity accommodate modern science and scholarship? So, these were all the questions that were up for grabs. And after losing some very public battles, fundamentalists spent decades retreating and building something like a parallel world, their own colleges and seminaries, publishing houses, radio stations, churches, camps, and eventually television networks. I say that in an excited way because I wrote my first book about that stuff and I will just never not be the most excited person to describe to you conservative Protestant television networks. But here’s what happened. In the 1970s, evangelicals and fundamentalists came roaring back to American popular culture. And here’s where the story gets very interesting. The president, Jimmy Carter, became the very first evangelical president. Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist and a very devoted Sunday school teacher who could talk very comfortably about being, you know, worn again, his time reading scripture, and his evangelicalism just came very naturally to him. But it was also bound up with his commitments to human rights, to peacekeeping, to racial reconciliation, to care for the environment. But by 1980, a newly organized religious right was aligning conservative evangelicalism with a very different candidate, with Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. Organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped make a certain set of key issues the hallmark of what counted as evangelicalism. And those issues were, in particular, opposition to abortion, feminism, gay rights, and secular liberalism. So that became kind of like, what does it mean to be an evangelical? It means being in opposition to abortion, et cetera. So for the last 50 years, what we really thought of as conservative Protestantism has been both a way of describing a religious movement and also a way of describing a political realignment. And so typically when people say Christian, they’re really usually just swapping out the word, at least in the States, with the word evangelical. Now that kind of political realignment didn’t just kind of single-handedly create this other category, the religious nones. Historians and sociologists point to a lot of different causes of American religious disaffiliation. You know, like doubts, distrust, bad experiences. But it left a very strange question. What happens when people leave a religious institution, but not necessarily all the things they went there looking for? And that’s where my guest has been much of her career exploring. Dr. Diana Butler Bass is a historian of American religion and one of the most trusted voices helping make sense of politics, religion, and history. And you might know her through her best-selling books, her wonderful substack, or her podcast. Because she has lived this history as well as studied it. From being a teenage evangelical in the 1970s, to a Duke graduate student, to becoming what the late Rachel Held Evans once jokingly called the original ex-evangelical women. So today, what we’re gonna talk about is how did American Christianity change? And why did so many people decide that they could no longer find a spiritual home there? And what are they still hungry for? So if you like religious history, which is to say, you like understanding spirituality where we’re at right now, you’re gonna love my conversation. I guess I wanted to start by taking us back to the late 80s.
Diana Butler Bass: Okay.
Kate Bowler: You’re here at Duke, you’re working with George Marsden. Some of you might not know the name George Marsden. He was a historian who really laid the groundwork for how we understand conservative Protestantism. It used to be that we would, that this group, this is like a very broad picture, but a group we now refer to as fundamentalists had largely retreated from popular culture. They had for almost, I mean, about 50 years, retreated into a subculture and built their own schools, their own radio and television, but it was only in the mid-70s-ish that they began to reenter public life and galvanize as a political force. When you first start as a student, I imagine you’re in the context of people just trying to understand, like, well, what are conservatives doing and what do they want?
Diana Butler Bass: I was literally part of this generation that first came through like the Jimmy Carter presidency. And I had grown up United Methodist. And when I was 14, 15 years old, my church just felt boring. And so I started looking around. I lived in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I wound up in a fundamentalist Bible church that was called actually Scottsdale Bible Church, back then it had only 300 people, which was considered to be sort of small now. It has 30,000 now. But I remember going to Bible study with friends and it was so exciting to me to be around other teenagers who took the Bible seriously. And that wasn’t happening in my Methodist church. People had different kinds of theological and spiritual concerns. And so here I was with my peers and we were reading the Bible for ourselves and people were engaged with theological questions. I remember thinking about things like double predestination when I was 17 years old and hearing about what was the issue about men and women? Why were women told to submit in the book of Ephesians? I was kind of a theological troublemaker.
Kate Bowler: I can’t see that for you. Crazy.
Diana Butler Bass: People usually do. And so I was part of that whole revival that happened in the mid 70s. And I went to a Christian college and then I went to an evangelical seminary and it was at that seminary that the academic sort of analysis of what we’d all been through began to come out. I graduated from college in 1981, went to seminary in 1982. George Marsden, who became my graduate advisor, wrote a book called Fundamentalism and American Culture in 1980. And as I’m pretty sure you know, but it was one of those books that was like a bombshell book. It was published by Oxford University Press, but it sold an enormous amount of copies. And Marsden was interviewed on every television show, every newspaper, like, what is this about fundamentalism? Explain to us the Carter presidency and what is Ronald Reagan all about? And I could not believe that somebody could make a career talking about stuff like that. And I went, oh, I wanna go study with him. I wanna do that.
Kate Bowler: And for people who don’t know, can you give a little background on Jimmy Carter as an adorable very first evangelical president?
Diana Butler Bass: The Bible that was happening sort of under people’s noses in the mid 70s was about things like the end times and dispensational premillennialism, you know, all these theories and theologies about what was going to happen in the last days. And so there was energy around what seemed like big theological questions for evangelicals. And it was right at that time that evangelicals began to come out of this long hibernation from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and even up through the 1960s and re-entered the public square. And the first person that we saw do that was Jimmy Carter, who was a Southern Baptist and he called himself an evangelical. And in the very famous interview he did with Playboy Magazine while he was running for president. He confessed that he had committed adultery by looking at women.
Kate Bowler: With his eyes.
Diana Butler Bass: With his eyes.
Kate Bowler: It wasn’t anything exciting. It was just with his eyes. And people were like “Oh! Ohhhhh.”
Diana Butler Bass: But he had lusted in his heart after other women besides his own wife and everyone was so shocked. Just like, what is this? Is there really a religion where people think this? And that’s when of course when the academic work started coming into play where scholars started to need to explain this stuff to reporters, but Carter got elected and we all knew that he was, I guess, what we want to call now a liberal Southern Baptist. There aren’t many of them left, but he was for women’s rights and he actually was very supportive of abortion. He was a peacemaker. He was the first person I ever heard talk about the Palestinians and the idea of a Palestinian state. He also was very keenly aware of the responsibility that we bear morally towards the environment. He put solar panels on the White House.
Kate Bowler: Oh, wow.
Diana Butler Bass: Yeah, Ronald Reagan put them down.
Kate Bowler: No way.
Diana Butler Bass: Yeah, Bill McKibben has them in his garage now. If you know Bill McKibben, the great environmentalist writer, when he heard that Ronald Reagan had taken down the panels…
Kate Bowler: He put them in this garage.
Diana Butler Bass: Bill McKibben went and tracked them down, put them into his truck, took them up to Vermont and has them in his garage.
Kate Bowler: Deep cut umbrage. I really like that. That’s so funny.
Diana Butler Bass: And so that just, right there, that little story says an incredible amount because when evangelicalism came bursting back onto the scene, it was this very unexpected, nice Southern Baptist from Georgia who had very progressive social views. And that’s kind of what I thought, because I was a teenager then, I’d just become an evangelical. So that’s what I though evangelicalism was. I thought that if you were an evangelical, you were environmentalist, peacemaker, a person who cared about the rights of women, and a person who was globally oriented towards the idea of a different kind of way of being in the world as Americans. And so that was what I thought. But the historical part, which I know that you’re well acquainted with, is it was such a shock when all of a sudden evangelicals turned on Jimmy Carter in 1980. And there were several reasons for that, and our colleagues have written many books and articles trying to explain it. But for our purposes here, I think it’s just really the main thing that needs to be said is that evangelicals looked at Carter and there were a certain number of them who said, no, that’s not the political agenda we want to support. And they started instead supporting Ronald Reagan.
Kate Bowler: Who was a divorced actor who frequently did not attend church.
Diana Butler Bass: Right. And didn’t have this kind of clear understanding of the Bible or any kind of, honestly, he didn’t have a testimony. Which is one of the things people always look for in evangelicalism that you could tell your story about conversion, which Jimmy Carter could. But Reagan became the carrier of evangelical hopes and political aspirations, and it changed really everything in a very short period of time. The Moral Majority, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, all these names that became associated. And that’s when George Marsden wrote his book. And all of a sudden, the media was as confused as everybody else. And so, here was this professor, he then taught at Calvin College, who found himself in the middle of big public discussion about the direction of religion and American life. And so, and again, that was when I was in seminary and looking and thinking about what I wanted to do. And I realized I wanted it to be, I needed to understand it too. So first of all, I think there was a quest for my own understanding. What happened here? You know, what happened between the evangelicalism of the 70s? That I knew so well and thought was the Gospel and then what we were experiencing in the 80s. So thus began my Duke career.
Kate Bowler: I think it’s having that kind of perspective, it really sets the table for how shocking it is to be here in 2026, looking back at a time in which we really thought that with Europe constantly in religious decline, empty cathedrals, religion as heritage, that America would always be the exception to secularization. That it would be, maybe always jockeying between liberal and conservative, which was becoming increasingly like at odds, but that whatever that was, there would be some kind of pluralism, perhaps religious pluralism. But that this was fundamentally like a story of two competing versions of Christianity. And then like cut to now and that seems like a bet that really ended up failing.
Diana Butler Bass: It did, and I can remember my first job post-Duke was to go back to the place where I had been a student. So I got hired by the same evangelical college that I went to as, now, a professor of religious studies. I was the first woman ever
Kate Bowler: Stop!
Diana Butler Bass: in American history to teach at an evangelical college in a religion department who was not teaching Christian education or women’s studies.
Kate Bowler: Stop!
Diana Butler Bass: I was teaching theology and church history.
Kate Bowler: I did a chart one time, not out of boredom, I promise it was for a book, but like of now if you look at all the data of where women are teaching in theological schools, it is insane how low the number is of women teaching in theology or history. It was women’s studies, what was the other one? Maybe sometimes Christian counseling?
Diana Butler Bass: Christian Education, usually.
Kate Bowler: Yeah, Christian education, and then library sciences. There was always like one lady librarian that was like, I don’t care if it’s all men. I’m staying. Between the story of like this conservative uprising and the story that we’ll talk about soon, which is the pretty rapid secularization story, there was a squeezing out of the middle in which, a moderate identity for evangelicalism really became collapsed in the 80s, and which is partly why we have, I mean, I cannot throw a rock in Duke’s campus without hitting at least three cooperative Baptists.
Diana Butler Bass: Right.
You know, like there’s certain denominational identities that formed around trying to find a separate place. When did you think you noticed that like, wow, this emptying out of this moderate middle is creating kind of an enormous religious vacuum that nobody is really looking at?
Diana Butler Bass: It was really tied up with this sort of personal journey that was happening to me when I was this young professor. I was at a conference and my professor, George Marsden, my former professor and I, went out to dinner together. Here I was with my professor who had just taught me the whole history of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. And now he’s saying that things are changing right now and it’s not good. And that caused me to pay attention in a different way. I wound up on the very short end of the whole series of events that happened at that college. So I was only there for four years. I can’t exactly say what happened to me because there are three little letters called NDA attached to my name. But what I can say is that we all came to an agreement that it wouldn’t work for to be teaching there any longer. And so I was out. And I had no job. And there I was. Rachel Held Evans used to say to me sometimes, she said, Diane, I think you might have been the original ex-evangelical woman. And I said, oh, good. I’m glad I carved a path for everybody else to follow. But I can remember how frightened I was because there was nowhere to go. And so that’s what you talk about, the carving out. I lost so many friends. I lost my job. I lost my colleagues. There were so many people who stopped talking to me. I was like radioactive at that point. If you couldn’t hold onto a job at a small evangelical college, you know, it must have been your fault. I didn’t know what to believe, you know, theologically anymore. And the people who sort of came along and picked me up out of my depression, was a very quirky, extremely liberal Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara. Trinity Episcople is the name of the church. And that church had called the first ever out-gay minister in the Diocese of Los Angeles. So this is in the early-mid 1990s. And I went to church there. But that, I think, is the problem. In a nutshell, is that evangelicalism created such a total world with particular kinds of moral ideas, ideas about the nature of church, and political affiliation, that when you violated any one of those things, and you found yourself outside of the circle, then you felt lost, because you literally just didn’t know where to turn. And so, this very liberal Episcopal church picking me up and brushing me off and feeding me, telling me I’d be okay. They didn’t tell me everything had happened for a reason.
Kate Bowler: Thank goodness. That’s wonderful.
Diana Butler Bass: No, they said that I had been treated very badly. But because I’d had this really dramatic and painful personal episode, years later, many people forgot that I ever. Yeah, consider myself an evangelical or had anything to do with the evangelical subculture. They just understood me as being like this liberal, Episcopalian who was a champion really for liberal Protestantism and mainline religion and main line for anyone who doesn’t know or the old-named churches that people think are dying.
Kate Bowler: Oh yeah, right. Mainline sometimes we pretend that it means centrist but it means like churches that were on the main line where the railroad was so like anytime there’s an old building.
Diana Butler Bass: Right. And they’re clustered around the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, some Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans. And there are conservatives in all those denominations, but the ethos of all of them is more open, and they’re very old traditions. And so I was in that group, and I remember around the year 2000 or so, I was talking to Jim Wallace, very well known evangelical leader. And we were having a little bit of an argument. And he said, he was making the claim in a public conversation we’re having that the antidote, or that what would stop conservative evangelicalism was really good evangelicalism. Is that when conservative religion failed, that people would turn. He really thought people were gonna turn to progressive evangelicalism. And I remember saying to him at the time, I said, no, Jim, the opposite of conservative evangelicalism and what I think is the coming crisis for them, I was actually predicting a failure for them as early as around 2000. I said they will become nothing. And so I said they’re not going to return to church, I said they’re going to leave church. And so the conversation that we’re having about religion isn’t just how are we gonna bring back kind of liberal evangelicalism of the 1970s, or what is the main line going to do to pick up these people who are leaving, who will be leaving evangelicalism, but we’ve got to figure out how to walk into an entirely different conversation about religious trauma and post-religious life in order to be in community with people who have been really wounded by religious faith.
Kate Bowler: To prepare for your brilliance, I was brushing up on my secularization theories and I didn’t realize how many flavors of arguments there are about how to describe the experience of people who are leaving. And the one that you were framing about a story of identity then rejection, like with something as eclipsing as evangelicalism. Two sociologists, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, their argument, which sounds you and our historians, but I like how sociologists are like, I’m gonna create a taxonomy for you. Their argument was like this is not a crisis of faith, this is a crisis of association. So once the American public will start connecting organized religion to a conservative political agenda people who are liberal or moderate, and maybe they weren’t even necessarily that observant to begin with, are going to stop telling people that they are Catholic or Baptist. So they’re not necessarily even losing a faith they once had, they’re just gonna decline to be counted from among that number. Do you think that that’s like a fairly robust argument for what we’re seeing?
Diana Butler Bass: I would think that it’s a crisis of identity. Because if you go through your life and you’ve been linked to a particular institution like a church, or even if it’s just a tradition, my family’s always been Catholic and I would say mine not mine, but if that’s what you would say, it’s very hard, when then all of a sudden you’re outside of that circle. And so people feel really disassociated, what has given their family a sense of groundedness and meaning over time. And they feel lost. And so I always thought of it more in that way. And if people feel that sense of disassociation, there’s a depression, there’s an anger, there’s all kinds of things. I’m not a psychologist, I’m a historian. But I know from my own experience is that and I know from the experience of so many others and also reading history, that when you get to that place, you don’t know where to turn. And so it’s easier to sort of almost not turn anywhere and so I think that some people have just sort of given up labels and they don’t want to be associated with the negative labels any longer and certainly conservatives. When the word Christian in the United States came to mean conservative evangelical, that happened in the first 20 years of this century. So liberal Christians disappeared, Catholics more or less disappeared, except for the ones…
Kate Bowler: Except we’ve got a cool pope now. People are Poping hard right now. People love that Pope. It’s big time.
Diana Butler Bass: Yeah! They go, what a surprise! What a surprise! Look at this cool look.
Kate Bowler: Oh look, they have a whole theological world!
Diana Butler Bass: Yeah, they do. And he’s even named himself after a labor organizer pope in the 19th century, you know? And so, but yeah, people are just kind of like, oh, I don’t want to be called that any longer. And so the people who still might feel affinity for it, or even maybe go to church occasionally, or on a night when they’ve had too much to drink, say that they’re Catholic, will not say that in public. So you have those folks who are sort of the drifters, but then you have this huge group of people who bought it, who bought that Christian equals conservative evangelical. And now they’re no longer conservative evangelicals or otherwise conservative Christians. And so now they are just nothing. Or they’re spiritual but not religious, or they’re trying to figure out a way of reorganizing their spiritual lives that gives them a different sense of meaning. So I don’t have any, I am not angry at all at the people who left and found themselves in that situation, because when I got fired from the college, I was worried that I was gonna be living on the beach in Santa Barbara with a grocery cart full of Karl Barth’s church dogmatics and have no way to pay my bills. And so I’ve tried both in my longer career to help people who have still stayed attached to the church really understand the space of the nones, that’s we call them now, the people who have left religion behind. And see it as a far more textured space with a lot of psychological, spiritual, theological…there’s a lot of interesting stuff in that space. And then also I’ve really tried to be a champion for those other kinds of churches. I remember describing one time to a reporter that my job, when she asked me what my job was, I said, have you ever read Dr. Seuss’ book about the Whos down in Whoville who are going to get thrown into the vat of boiling oil? And they’re screaming up, we’re here, we are here! And I said, that’s, that was always me for the, that’s me for The Main Line. I’m the Who who’s standing there saying, we’re here, we’re here, we’re here, don’t throw us in the boiling oil yet. And so I still don’t know that anybody’s ever paid attention to it. But I certainly have given a lot of my heart to helping these older, more liberal denominations try to find a sense of real passion for who they are and why they’re important.
Kate Bowler: Mm-hmm. One of my complaints about that group, she said lovingly and respectfully…
Diana Butler Bass: Oh, go ahead. I’ve said everything about them…
Kate Bowler: I think for people who belong to a subculture, like there’s not just music, there’s Christian music, there’s a particular, there are certain influencers, there are places they go, and Bible camps. So people who live in a spiritual world, they’re used to people building things that agree with them. But I find that if you’re moderate or liberal, sometimes they forget to build things that, to create a world that other people can live into because they just figure like, oh, the New York Times will cover it. I think one of the concerns about Christian or cosmopolitans is that they’re so porous in the way that they think about their identity that they forget, they struggle to create belonging. And then there was one other like, I thought kind of interesting piece of this, Ryan Burge, who is a political scientist who does, he has a really nice substack called like religion and graphs or something, which I think maybe only you and I are like gonna really enjoy. But he says like, look, we shouldn’t think of them as doing, being spiritual exiles, because when many of them are done with religion, and this is the part I thought we would both find very interesting is, apparently it’s not that they’re replacing religion with Peloton or with their book club, like, they’re not doing much of anything else. Like they’re not joining civic organizations. They’re not joining like, I mean no one’s at the Rotary Club anymore, but like they’re finding an alternative. So what do you think is happening when people then describe themselves as spiritual?
Diana Butler Bass: I think it’s varied. And there of course are some pretty good sociological studies showing there are people who are spiritual but not religious who are who actually still are kind of searching. Yeah and so they’re kind of hewing a little close to institutional worlds so they go exploring for a little bit and they might walk into a few churches and an aft, no, it’s not for me. So they wander back out again. A friend of mine refers to them, a friend of mine who’s a pastor calls them the slinkers.
Kate Bowler: They just like slink in and then they slink out.
Diana Butler Bass: Right.
Kate Bowler: That’s really good. It’s like online lurkers, but for institutions.
Diana Butler Bass: Yeah. And we had a lot of them during the pandemic, which was interesting.
Kate Bowler: Is that because they’re dabbling in other people’s spiritual services?
Diana Butler Bass: And I know people who actually would slink in on Zoom services and then wind up members of congregations because of it. So there’s that group. And then there’s the people who have sort of like, just throwing up their hands and said, oh, there’s nothing here. I don’t know what to do. I’m just giving up. And then, there is the people who are kind of looking around in the alternative space. And so, oh, and then there is atheists and agnostics who are very like, no religion, I’m over it. It’s gone.
Kate Bowler: And what’s the numbers on that? I don’t know what the percentages are. I like to look stuff up to sound smart in anticipation of you coming. Pew survey 2023 says 28% of Americans are not religious. Only 4% are atheist, 5% agnostic, and then 18% said nothing in particular, which I took to be sort of like a myth.
Diana Butler Bass: Yeah, and those are the people who public religion research has further divided them up into these kind of subgroups of closer or further away. Still searching, or just kind of neutral, or blah, give up. So within that category, there’s just a huge amount of play. I run into people from all sorts of different places. I’m sure you do, too. I go, and here I am confessing this in front of your podcast audience, but one of the things I do because I write so much in the Christian space, and even when I’m now writing more broadly, my work still comes out of and speaks most easily to people who have some familiarity with Christianity. And that means that I can never go to like a Christian retreat place and be left in any peace. And so when I need to retreat myself, I go to a very broad, let’s say, you could call it woo-woo, sort of a meditation center in a western state. That’s all I’m gonna say. And so I go away to a far away place. And I’m with people who have never heard of me, never heard in my books, never heard of Christianity, don’t know who Jesus is. And I hang out and do meditation and other things with them. And one thing that’s fascinating is over the years as I’ve showed up, I’ve made friends with different people who are there. And there are people there who used to be Christians and who gave it up for whatever reason. And as we’ve had more and more serious talks over the years, any number of these folks, all of whom are women, said to me that I was the first Christian who ever took them seriously. And when I heard people tell me that, that I can sit in a space with folks who are often dismissed by mainstream Christians, whether they’re liberals or conservatives, things that they have come to trust in, believe in, the practices they’ve embraced in their lives. I just let myself learn from them, and I love people’s stories. I don’t know, maybe we get this as historians, is the ability to read a text and suspend judgment. And I look around so often at the worlds that I enter, and I think of them as texts to suspend my judgment until I understand what people are saying around me, and then I can make some judgments if necessary. But here, you know, in my Wu Wu Meditation Center in the far western state, I just find myself learning. Because they know things about quiet and groundedness and the environment and mystery that are often actually missing, even in very good, you know, kind of more contemplative Catholic spaces or contemplative Episcopal or Lutheran spaces. So that’s one of the things I think that I’ve always dreamed of as people have moved away from Christianity and 28, I’ve seen numbers as high as 32% of the population now, is to carefully listen to the stories of the people who no longer want to be identified with the tradition. And then to hear where their lives are linking with meaning and morality and beauty and even what we might want to call the divine, the sacred, or God.
Kate Bowler: Just one last question, I think one of my great hopes for this community is that we see with clarity, even sometimes like kind of a devastating clarity, the way that institutions have not met people’s needs and yet feel like a deep hope about how communities, how churches, create shelter and belonging. Like your pastor is always like also the only person in your life you’re never going to pay to be there who will hunt you down in times of duress and and and volunteer services in a way that our pay to play helping culture just like won’t. What do you, what is one of the most like hopeful pieces of like looking ahead at our church and our future leaders and thinking like, no, this is I think what they’re going to take with them.
Diana Butler Bass: One of the things I find very compelling right now is the number of younger adults who are finding sort of their way over to Christian spaces, and it’s usually through practices or traditions or just things like silence and beauty, which is fantastic to me. I’m really excited that those things, to me, have always been the best part of liberal Protestantism, that and some of our amazing theology. So that’s why I’ve always been a fan of these churches, is that they have within them treasures that are really very compelling, and that those people who find their way to those treasures are benefited by them. And some of them are pastoral, as you just mentioned, but some are intellectual, some are moral and some are related to the life of sort of esthetic spirituality, the beauty of mystery. So, for me, that’s been a really important part of what I do. But it is hilarious because a lot of post-evangelicals and a lot people have left church behind just don’t know that that other thing exists. So when you talk about institutions, I do not think of, say, the Lutheran church as an institution. I think of it as an incredibly schooled community in practices related to hospitality. Lutherans have always actually been very good about hospitality. And they are also formed spiritually around ideas of grace and freedom. And those ideals of grace and freedom, those theological ideals, are so healing and so needed. And so what you have is you have both the, you know, the E-L-C-A, and you see churches closing and you see struggles and you see the amount of clergy decreasing and you see membership declining and all that sort of stuff. So there’s this whole raft of institutional challenges. But, there’s still these communities of formation around deep theological truths, deep spiritual insights, generations of practice, and I think a kind of, when you find it, you really find it, that intellectual curiosity that those old mainline churches at their best have always been homes to. So that’s the good stuff. And when institutions fail, you know, what we can’t afford right now is have all of the beauties and those traditions fail with them.
Kate Bowler: That’s right.
Diana Butler Bass: And that’s, that’s what I actually try to do in my writing is that I’ve been trying now, well, books, 25 years, whatever it is, sometimes I feel like I’m just kind of spinning in the wind, but I’m trying to remind people, like the little Who, we’re here and there’s something, there’s something different. And I hope that people find their way to it.
Kate Bowler: Maybe you’re listening to this and are one of the spiritual nones. Maybe you love the church because you just stopped believing or maybe because the politics became impossible to separate from the faith. Some of you were hurt, some simply drifted, and some are still reaching for something sacred. You just have a hard time trusting the institutions that used to give you the vocabulary for it. So for those of you who have left or are leaving or aren’t entirely sure what you call yourself anymore. This is a blessing for you. A blessing for when you don’t know what you believe anymore. Blessed are you when the old words don’t fit, when certainty has become exhausting, or when belonging came with too high a price. Bless you who ask different questions now, who hunt for meaning and God and beauty, still. May it find you. Alright darlings, I know a lot of you listening are pastors or faithful churchy types, of which I consider myself, and some of you stayed while asking very hard questions about the institutions you love. That can be so complicated too, and at Everything Happens we see you and we bless you too. And hey, I would totally love to hear from you. What box do you check these days? Do you stay in a tradition that raised you or do you leave it? Did you wander into something totally different? Come over and tell me on Substack. I’m at katebowler.substack.com. And to my Duke Divinity students who joined in the conversation, thank you so much for bringing your questions, your histories, and yourselves into the room. I love learning with you and from you. It is my great joy. Everything Happens Studios is made possible through the generous support of Lilly Endowment. And today’s conversation was made in partnership with the Richard J. Reynolds III and Marie M. Reynolds Foundation. And a big thank you to the work of my team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
