Kate:
Today, we’re gonna get to learn from someone whose work has profoundly shaped how we understand religion in America. Dr. Mark Chaves is a sociologist here at Duke. He was also one of my professors, which is why you’ll see me very deferential to his authority. He’s also the person I call when I’m having intellectual, thorny problems and need sound, moral, and intellectual guidance. So he’s someone I both deeply respect and deeply trust. And he spent decades asking really big questions about religious life. And most importantly, doing the painstaking work of actually finding out what is true. Like, what are congregations really like? How are they changing? What happens when the stories we tell ourselves about religion don’t actually match the data? He’s directed the National Congregation Study. It’s just one of the most important long-term studies of American congregational life. And his scholarship has given us this unusually clear and nuanced picture about how faith, and institutions and belonging are changing over time. He is the author of many books, including American Religion, Contemporary Trends. I’m especially grateful for the way he brings both rigor, a hilarious desire to correct me when I exaggerate, and nuance to questions that become very easily oversimplified. He really helps us understand not only what’s changing, but what data can and can’t tell us about who we’re becoming. Mark, thank you so much for coming. I am more than pleased. Thank you. Everyone in this room has heard some version of America is either losing its religion or having a revival. Pick one. And I’m curious, what does the data actually tell us?
Mark:
Bottom line is that we are in a time of slow decline in religiosity, American religious belief and practice. It’s not new, it’s been going on for decades. It… Shouldn’t be overstated. It’s slow decline. I would never say that religion is dying or heading towards death. America, United States remains very religious by world standards, even with our recent declines. Um, so that’s the bottom line story. We are in a period of decline that has been going on for decades, driven mainly by generational differences. Cuz… Cohort that comes of age, a little less religious than the cohort before it. That’s been going on for a long time. Um, so it’s not new. Uh, today’s young people are less religious then they’re elders, but that’s true at every point in time. This is happening around the world, by the way, that that’s what’s driving, um, religious decline, decline in traditional religiosity. The Probably a lot of people have seen recent as in the last year. So has been recent. There’s been press reports about There’s a revive. There is a resurgence especially among young people And if People take away anything From this conversation. It’s that that is not true None of it’s true the claim
Kate:
determination to negate.
Mark:
Yes, because there were a couple studies, some of which were just bad data. Others were not such bad data, but they made too much of little short-term blips among young people that just shouldn’t be over-interpreted because blips happen. The data are noisy and things, and so it got tons of press. I mean I can’t tell you how many times People say to me, they say, I study religion, or just people I know I do, and I say, oh, so all the young people are returning to church. And so it’s amazing how widely spread this false idea is. So it’s not true.
Kate:
Can you think of me, I’m just thinking of, like any data points that support it. For example, when I was looking at non-fiction sales last year, Bibles had like surprisingly high sales. Are there any kind of like suggestive data points where you think maybe, but it needs-
Mark:
I mean, that might be one, things like belief in the afterlife have not declined. The way I interpret these things is that people remain kind of interested in religion and interested in spirituality. Um, but they’re It’s, they don’t want to be part of institutions. And so I call it diffuse spirituality. I think there’s a lot of diffuse spirituality out there that is less grounded in institutions than meaning churches, um, uh, synagogues, mosques, then it used to be. Um, so those indicators, uh I would include, uh Bible reading and, uh. Life after death are two that come to mind. Okay, cut. Maybe you like Bible reading, but anyway, who knows about Bible? Oh, I actually, the.
Kate:
It was the original coffee table book, I feel, the viral.
Mark:
Yeah, that’s right. So obviously, there’s a symbolic value to it. And, you know, we want to get into this, but there’s aspects of religion, especially in the United States compared to elsewhere in the West, Western world, I mean, where there’s identity issues and displaying of No. That. Uh. Is caught up with religion in ways that it’s not in the same way other places. And so I think that keeps some indicators from declining. But like I say, my interpretation of that is that there’s diffuse spirituality out there, but not enough of it to compensate for the declines And also, I think part of what I say diffuses. It’s, um, I don’t think it’s, it’s the kind of, I don’t find, I, I’ll think it so sociologically that important because I don’t think any new institutions are going to emerge out of it. I mean, there are people who will say, Oh, there’s all these spiritually hungry people out there, if only some religious entrepreneur would figure out how to, uh, you know, uh reach these people and attract them. It could be… You have some new movement, religious movement or some new bringing in or, you know, resurgence or something, but I don’t think that’s true. I think that the, the, um, the spirituality and the interest in spirituality, you know, leads to book sales and, uh, you know, self-help kinds of thing, you know, spiritually tinged self- help kinds of things. But, um, but, uh, I don’t see it leading to any kind of institution building.
Kate:
What about, I’m just gonna keep harping on the young people thing and satisfy all of my curiosity because at least one of the descriptions of like, is it, are people just becoming less religious or is there a revival? Is that particularly among young men that there is a desire for structure, for high expectations. And we see, of course, like all of the very negative versions of that with the rise of the Manosphere or in a certain kind of like. Influencer meme culture. Yeah, but it maybe just kind of reminds me of that and you’re gonna have to tell me the name of the book But remember Remember in the 90s, but there is that one book that was really popular in seminaries. That was about it was written by a main liar But it was about like why strict churches do butter
Mark:
Dean Kelly why strict churches are strong as that wasn’t true either. Yeah
Kate:
Wait, wait, now walk me through that. Why? Well, I repeated it a lot.
Mark:
Already. I know. It was one of those things. I didn’t know that you did, but I know that people did. A major story of American religion is the decline of the mainline, the Protestant mainline in membership. And evangelical churches denominations for a long time were holding steady. Yeah. Maybe increased a little bit in the 80s, but but mainly it’s like the evangelical percentage goes like this and the mainline percentage goes like that among Protestants. And so what was happening, partly what was was happening is that the evangelicals became and are today a much bigger chunk of the religiously active population. And so they were more visible. They’re like 45% of the church going population today whereas in the 70s they were 25%. Troll well. So. Part of why it’s wrong is that we’re exactly wrong. There was some growth, but it was more about the decline of the mates, relatively speaking. And by the way, Evangelicals are now starting to decline as well. Why is that? Because some of the forces that were in them stable, like higher fertility rates, like not losing as many people to secularity have started to shift. I see. But the part that was really wrong was the word strength. So the interpretation of that difference was that it was churches that were stricter, that had rules, that made demands of people. But the notion that, you know, the Southern Baptist as a giant denomination was straight was, is not sustainable. It wasn’t about rules, it was about, you know, a cultural sympotic with what people, some people wanted. And if you wanted traditional views of of sexuality and gender, um, uh, you were attracted to these things. It wasn’t, it wasn’t about, uh let’s impose rules and therefore that will be what would make it. Yeah. Um, So I feel like that’s the
Kate:
I feel like that’s the argument I would use now if I was going to describe like why the rise of stoicism, for example. I would think, well, there’s a largely secular ethos, there is an entire cohort of young men who want a set of guiding philosophical principles.
Mark:
Maybe. I mean, the…
Kate:
Then maybe is what you always say when you’re being polite, Jean, and I like that we’ve gotten there so quickly.
Mark:
What I know is true. So it is true, so women are historically more religious than men and what has happened and in particular among the youngest cohorts, the youngest people is that that gap has narrowed. But it’s not because the men are getting more religious, it’s because the women are less religious faster. So, some of the reports have said, oh look the No more gender gap among young people. And then some of them even claim that the young men are more religious than women, which I’m not so sure about the part of the problem with the studying. Young people is that it’s a very difficult population to study systematically. Yes, they move. They move. Yeah. Um, you know, when any kind of given national survey, they’re a small percentage of us with the sample sizes are really small. So the data is really noisy. So… If you look at six or seven surveys, you’ll see six or seven, some of them might show, you know, a tick up for me and some don’t when you kind of put it all together and take into account different surveys, strengths and weaknesses, you don’t see it.
Kate:
Man, you guys should do what credit card companies did to me when I was in college, which is just offer me a free t-shirt and like a thing to nail up my poster of Romeo and Juliet. And then like, I’ll give you all my data immediately. So anyway, I’m just spit balling here. These are really good ideas. Write them down.
Mark:
One of the things that’s happening is religion and politics are more closely tied together, as everybody knows that evangelicals are firmly Republican. The Republican party relies on evangelicals. And so there is this phenomenon that people who are politically conservative, at least are more likely to say they’re more religious, because again, because of the identity display and they’re kind of supposed to be, I mean, we kind of Traditionally of like religion is primordial. It comes first and that shapes politics, but we know from various users that the other, it happens in the other direction too, that people would become religious because of their politics and the more that religious religious or certain kinds of religions, kind of politics are connected, the more. That is so, so religion now partakes of our larger political and cultural polarization, um, in ways that were not true. 50 years ago and become increasingly true, um, you know, can last several decades. It’s possible that the religious identity part can become or set. And even if no behavior changes or no real beliefs change or anything.
Kate:
What about all those revivals though a couple of years ago? I harp on this because when I sometimes go study women’s conferences, some of the conservative women who found that like the, after Trump was elected the first time that a lot of the center right kind of bottomed out as a market, they could only turn more right, but there was kind of an empty market space. And so. A number of them went into college ministry, basically revivalism full-time. So, I mean, I would always see a lot of like, just college students, like that sort of like very touching high- There’s a-
Mark:
There’s always pockets of things, always. So, you know, from my point of view, the question is, first of all, how fleeting or lasting is it, but does it aggregate into something that affects the national picture and that shows up, and so far it hasn’t. But I don’t want to say outright that I’m certain that nothing’s going on among young people because There are some indications that something’s going on, but my view is that it’s the data are too mixed and too thin and too scarce to say anything with confidence. I really wish there were press reports about it because it’s too early. I mean, this is one of the bigger themes that I like to sound also, which is that what drives American religion and trends in our religion are long-term. Thanks. Demographic changes.
Mark:
Yeah, exactly. The short term, there’s blips, you know, all the time, but I mean, even 9-11, you know made church sentence go up for literally two weeks, and like two weeks later, it was back to what it was before.
Kate
Americans are still, by almost any global compare-
like pretty religious as you were saying so much so that you refuse to change the title of your book to more bummer titles which I would have suggested to make like a just a sexier book
Mark:
This has upset the publisher very much.
Kate:
The Roots sell more books if we call them… Yours is just calling them religious trance.
Mark:
Yeah.
Kate:
And you said it that way. But I would have been like, religious decline, exclamation mark, the salacious tale of generational decline.
Mark:
I really I would have sold a lot more books
Kate:
Yeah, at least library copy. I think, so you cite like lost people believe in God, heaven, miracles, and afterlife. That’s like, it’s a little surprising to realize like how stubbornly persistent some of these kind of like basic points of spiritual orientation are. I mean, just thinking of those categories like about how we keep time, like belief in God is going to dramatically change how you think about memory loss. Grief, heaven is going to change how you think about life.
Mark:
By world standards, we remain very religious. That’s, we have to say both these things at the same time. Americans remain very religious by world standards and there’s slow decline. Yeah. So yeah, if you add up all the different versions of the way people say they believe in God or a higher power, it’s still like 86 percent. Yeah. But it was 97 percent decades ago. And, uh, so it- Every measure of traditional belief, like belief in the afterlife might be an exception, but the, um, is like that. It’s remains high by world standards, but it’s declining slowly. That I don’t want to overstate the decline, but slow decline is still declining.
Kate:
One of the statistics in your book that made me laugh, and I had to think about it twice because I’m not in social science. The median congregation is something like 70 regular participants, but the median churchgoer attends a congregation with around 360 people.
Mark:
Yes, this is very important, I think. Most people are in big churches. So, I think it’s something like half the people are the biggest 10% of churches. So, we say the distribution is very skewed. Lots of small churches, very many fewer, very big churches, but that’s where all the people. And this, uh, I think is a very important fact about American religion because it, um, uh you know, it, it shapes, um, you know the, the, the health of the average congregation is very different than what the average church grower is experiencing. Cause the average church growers in a bigger is a bigger, that’s one thing. Um, the other thing that I think, uh very important is that this skewness this concentration of people in the biggest churches is increasing over time, has been started increasing in the 1970s, meaning a bigger percentage of people now are in the very biggest churches, like the biggest 1% of churches then were in the 70s. This started, I’ve plotted this over a century and until sometime in the 1970s. If you plot the percentage of people in the biggest one percent of churches, it’s pretty flat. Then sometime in 1970s, somebody flipped the switch and it starts going like this across Protestantism. That’s where these data are from.
Kate:
And was that like migration to EXERV?
Mark:
I don’t think there’s any one explanation for this. Um, it can’t be totally that because the timing’s not quite right. You know, the, the biggest, uh, wave of suburbanization in the United States was the fifties, basically. And the churches started to happen in the seventies.
Kate:
Was it the rise of the prosperity gospel, which did take place in the 1970s?
Mark:
Bye!
Kate:
Secretly? Maybe?
Mark:
It’s way easier to describe this than it is to explain it. But if you plot the appearance of big malls, that exactly tracks the suburbanization trend in terms of timing. The church concentration starts 20, 25 years later. Now, maybe there’s a delayed reaction. It’s some more complex story. You know, maybe technology got better, uh, for bigger churches, although, you know, there’s been very big churches with big spectacles for a very long time. Yeah. Uh, you think of Amy Semple, but first, and this is not just about stereotypical mega churches. This is happening in the Episcopal church and then, you know, in every denomination that I’ve had data on, this is happening. People are moving from the, and it’s not by the way, because big churches. Have figured out how to reach the unchurched. You know, we know that church sentences is declining.
Kate:
To see a poll from others.
Mark:
That’s exactly what’s happening. It’s people leaving smaller and medium-sized churches and going to bigger churches. I think one of the things that happened in the 1970s, the Americans are very generous to their churches. Donations to religion keep going up. Those increased donations are rarely tracked against increasing costs. And one of the things that happened in the 1970s is that costs of running a church started to increase faster than the income. And so I think that created a dynamic where bigger churches had more of an advantage economically than they did before.
Kate:
It’s just so interesting to think about all the, I mean, I think especially right now with just AI infiltrating every part of how we interact with one another, the number of things that a church does that is just not, you can’t make it more efficient. You had like, visiting the people who can’t leave their home to bring them communion or care or visiting people in the hospital or…
Mark:
Yeah, exactly. And this is why churches are constantly asking for money is because the, um, they always need more because the costs keep going up and there’s no way, obviously you can have less, which has happened. You have less staff, you know, you have a, uh, uh music director who’s fewer hours or you don’t have a youth minister anymore and so on. Yeah. Um, I don’t think this has happened in synagogues, this concentration. And I think part of it is cause they have a do system. Also dues, people pay dues, membership fees, and so, you know, they can raise the dues. We don’t do that in Protestantism, you rely on voluntary donations, of course. And so it just creates this pressure if the giving doesn’t keep pace with the cost increase, then I think that Big churches have always been attractive for certain kinds of reasons to people. Part of the attraction of very big churches is actually part of the secularization story, which is you can free ride. If you’re in a 75 person church, within two weeks of showing up, you will get asked to do something.
Mark:
And, uh, you know, it’s possible to say no, but it, you know, you have to be a special kind of person to be in a small or even medium sized church and always saying no, when you get asked to serve on this or that board or whatever, if you’re in a thousand person, you can just show up when you want you, there’s always opportunities to get more involved, of course, but you don’t have to, there is not the same pressure. And I think that’s part of the attraction. That it is part of the larger phenomenon of even people who want to still be church people, but don’t want to be as active as their parents were, or they were before, and I think that’s part of this story also. So unlike sometimes people point to big churches and say, oh, you know, this is showing a greater, more interest, but I don’t think it is. It was actually sort of the opposite. Yes, it’s a little of le- lower levels of interest in being more deeply involved. Yeah.
Kate:
Like a Gearshift 3 instead of 5.
Mark:
Yes, I think so. I think that’s part of what’s going on. So people look at megachurches in particular and point to those as evidence that there’s a revival going on or something. But I think it’s really important to recognize that this concentration does make religion more visible and it maybe makes it more politically powerful because a pastor of 2,000 present church will get to meet with the mayor easier than you know, the pastors of 200 person churches. So it does have real consequences, but it’s not a sign of more. Yeah.
Kate:
One of the categories that I’m seeing
that you and I can argue about is religious nuns. We use it like everybody knows what that means, but you argue that none is actually a pretty, when people say I’m spiritually not something, you think that’s actually a be a pretty wide bucket. Can you give me a sense of what that might include?
Mark:
So it’s important to start by recognizing literally what it means. Literally what it mean is that if a survey researcher calls you up and asks you, what is your religion or what’s your religious affiliation, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, something else or nothing, you say, I’m nothing. That’s literally what means that that’s you answer that question that way. It’s not a question about what you believe. It’s, not a, question about your behavior. Um, it’s simply that you say that. So then we asked, okay, what does that mean? Everybody knows the percentage of people who say none has been going up. Uh, for a long time, by the way, it accelerated in the 1990s, but it’s been going out since the night.
Kate:
It was such a really big deal when it accelerated, remember? It was like every public person came out with their, I’m going to explain atheism.
Mark:
Yeah, I mean, atheism overlaps with nuns, but it’s not the same thing, obviously, because some percentage of the nuns say they believe in God. The percentage of people who will just outright say I’m atheist is very low still. And I think that’s also because in American society, that’s…
Kate:
Kind of it’s socially. Yeah
Mark:
Yeah, it’s socially awkward. So, um, so the AC isn’t a whole nother thing. It’s going up, but not anywhere. So what else should I say about the monks? Some people say, oh, the nuns, look, some of them still believe in God. And that is kind of what I was saying before. People look at them and say, these are the people who are right for, you know, mobilizing and some religious entrepreneur. But it’s very important to recognize that, yes, it’s true that the percentage of nuns who say they believe in god or even attend religious services is higher than zero. It’s massively lower than everybody else. And so it again I think it’s a mistake to see that population and people overstate their interest in religion.
Kate:
So I think for the most part, they’re characterized as like meaning seeking in some way.
Mark:
Right? Y-Y-Yes.
Kate:
And then you use that voice.
Mark:
I use that voice because we’re all meaning-seeking. I mean, I don’t find that, I mean people have one of the things that’s happened in the academic study of religion is because of the decline of traditionalist people have broadened the definition of religion to include sometimes so much that of course there’s no decline because if you include any meeting-seeking behavior as religion… Yeah, that’s what we do. We need jobs, Mark. Yeah, exactly. I think that is part of the dynamic, actually.
Kate:
You also say that, like, one of the measures of this decline is religious leadership losing its reputation, its prestige, its kind of attractiveness as a job. What other murfers do we find that we see that clergy is, like losing cultural or has lost significant cultural cachet? Um…
Mark:
There’s several, one is there’s a long, long-term survey of college first-year students asking, what do you want to be? And so the percentage would say they want to be clergy and steadily declined. Yeah.
Kate:
When was it really high? Because in 19 something, Miss America married a lewd print passer and he took that around to dance for Olaf.
Mark:
Yeah, this survey goes back to the 60s, I think. And I don’t know it before that, but it was, I mean, it was higher in the 60’s than it is now by like a factor of 10 or something. But this is obvious in Divinity schools. You know, it’s made up by second, you know, more second career people. And yeah, but, it also shows up in the, so it shows them the average age of Divinity school students, also the average age clergy and the You know, the clergy are older and older because the fewer than 22-year-olds are going into it. Another indicator is, like in the general social survey, they ask about, they say, I’m going to tell you a bunch of institutional leaders and ask, do you have a great deal of trust in them? And clergy or religious leaders is actually what they said, is the wording. Thank you. And the American saying they have a great deal of trust in road to sleep has gone down. Uh, over time. So, uh, now we can put that in a little bit of context because, and I would never know whether to construe this as good news or bad news, the, because. Confidence in almost all leaders are almost all institutional service has gone down from so, so the credit, the respect for clarity or trust is the, is a literal word has gone down, um, but so has everybody. BUT The trust in clergy has declined faster than the average for the other. So that in the, even the first time I asked these questions, maybe in the 80s, maybe 70s, I can’t remember, clergy were above average in the percentage of people who said they have a great deal of trust relative to all these other institutional spheres. Now they’re right about the middle. So they’ve kind of lost, they used to have an edge and they’re kind of now.
Kate:
It really, your description of how Americans speaking politically now has become like a stand-in for people speaking theologically in some people’s minds. So like conservative and evangelical clearly sound the same in people’s mind, but maybe even like conservative and Christian sound the same in the public’s minds? Yeah. And that, it sounds like that’s quite alienating in terms of how people. Are choosing their primary identity markers right now.
Mark:
Yes, um, yes, I mean, one of the things that’s happened and one of the explanation for the rise of the nuns, for example, remember, it’s the reason it just means more people are likely when asked to say I’m nothing that it’s always been that there were religiously inactive people, of course, it used to be that religiously inactive people when asked that question would still say I am Catholic or absolutely fraternally. So what the rise of the nuns mainly means is that the religiously inactive people have kind of taken a final step in their identities to say, um, you know, I’m nothing and that’s, that’s not nothing. That’s an important cultural shift. I think that the religion is inactive. People used to still say that religious identity and they’re less likely to now. Are more likely to have taken that step. And one of the explanations and why it started to accelerate in the 1990s because of the rise of religious right is and the increasing identification of Republican politics with evangelicals is that if you’re a religiously inactive, politically a leaning person,
You’re just more likely to think, you know what? I don’t want to associate, I’m not that. And so I’m going to say nothing. And so that is pushed, so the political liberals have moved faster out of our religious identity. That’s part of the polarization story.
Kate:
I find that to be one of the trickier parts about doing like faith and public life stuff is I’m kind of center left. And on the left, if I say I’m Christian, it comes across as either like kind of not printable. Like we don’t really want to do Christian stuff in that way. We want you, if you’re explaining conservatives, we don’t want you like being. Christian, we’re not all that interested in you being Christian. I think part of it is they’re like, well, we sort of already know what Christianity is about, but they said, but, and also you’d have to be three glasses of wine in them to like volunteer that they go to an Episcopalian church. So I think sometimes like, it’s a real thing. Absapolitans are like very sort of shy about their religious identities, which makes it, I just found that it makes it hard to, to make stuff for that because They think why don’t. I don’t need you to make stuff for me. I’ll just read it in this high end. Yeah.
Mark:
Yes, it’s true. The very word Christian has become co-opted, I think, by the right. And that makes people on the left to, in fact, our Christian, less likely to say it out loud, because it is misunderstood. So, yeah, I thought that’s a real thing.
Kate:
One thing that you were always skeptical about when everyone thought it was very cool was the idea that people’s spiritual hungers would make them form alternative associations, that they would join Peloton as a replacement or a book club or other kinds of proxies. And I think you gave a lot of eyebrows at that argument. And I wonder now that people are really hungry for community and connection. I think experience, in-person experience is kind of at an all-time premium feeling. Does it make you want, if you were going to, I’m gonna ask you to not be a sociologist for one second and be a guy who actually loves institutions and has spent your whole life supporting institutions. Does that make you wish that people would invest or reinvest in boring, small… Institutions because there won’t be a replacement.
Mark:
I mean, short answer, yes, the, these other, it’s back to the spirit, diffuse spirituality thing is that bigger picture, there’s always been, you know, humanist societies and so on and that, but they’re, they’ve never taken off. Um which is an interesting question of my mind anyways, why does it seem necessary to have an actual religious component to have lasting communities anyway? But I think these other communities are just, the economists talk about positive externalities, the things that these. Groups do, like your typical church will do community service things. They give money out and they denominations nursing homes and orphanages and hospitals and institutions of higher education. So that kind of, I find it very difficult to see how these newer forms of gathering, let’s say, are because I don’t think people want to spend the money, you know, they’ll spend money on a service or a product, but the kind of, you knows, contributions that are necessary to both sustain institutions that have some outward-looking, other-regarding feature to them. And I don’t want to overstate, a lot of churches were inward and, you know, they’re mainly inward, but they do. More than any, I think any other institution have this, uh, uh that’s not a, that’s not, uh and when any other institutions that’s not directly dedicated to serving the community, if you serve them. Um, I just think one of them.
Kate:
My yoga studio is a community, gathers people all the time, but we’re not gonna build a hospital. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Mark, this was exactly my joy to think of a hundred questions I’ve had for you over the years and be able to ask you right now. Thank you so much for doing this. What I love most about Mark is his insistence that we resist the exciting story when a more boring story happens to be true. Religion in America is changing. It is declining slowly in some measurable ways, mostly as each new generation comes of age with a little less religion than the one before it. And there may not be some special plan for creating new institutions that gathers up all that diffuse spiritual hunger. We may continue to see people leave smaller churches for larger ones, and we may continue to see religious affiliation decline. As our religious and political identities become too tangled up with each other. So maybe this is a useful reminder for all of us who are tempted to turn a blip into a trend or a fear into a fact. Sometimes the truth just requires a little more patience and someone willing to say very kindly, that’s not what the data says. And in the meantime, May we stay stubborn about the things data can’t do for us, forming real community, showing up for each other, serving our neighbors, giving to those in need, practicing what we believe, no matter the label we give ourselves. And since you know that I love to bless the crap out of you, here is a blessing for all of us today. Blessed are we who want the story to be simple. Who want to know where all this is going, and who would prefer a headline to all of this uncertainty. Bless us with patience for what changes slowly, with humility when the facts complicate what we hoped was true, and with curiosity when certainty would be more convenient. May we keep practicing what matters now, showing up, making room, and belonging to each other. All right, blessing, my dears. And hey, I would love to know how today’s episode resonated with you. Like, what did you learn? What did you find interesting? What do you wish you knew more about? And where do you find yourself in this story of slow decline? Come over and find me on Substack. I’m at kateboehler.substack.com or I’m on socials at Kate C. Bowler 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 my wonderful team, Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
