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June 19, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
54:02
Pastor Jim Davis on Fixing America's Crisis of Purpose | The TRUTH Podcast #52
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Today, less than 16% of Gen Z says they're even proud to be an American.
We have a 25% recruitment deficit in our U.S. military.
National pride is arguably at an all-time low in the United States of America.
It used to be that most Americans actually called themselves proud to be a citizen of this nation.
Now, especially in the next generation, it is a small minority that say the same thing.
How did it happen?
Well, it's not a coincidence, I believe, that we see the decline in civic pride over the same period that we also see a loss in individual self-confidence.
Reports of self-confidence report a national decline on that metric as well, with depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental health affliction spreading across this country like wildfire.
I don't believe these two things are unrelated.
I think they're deeply related.
They're symptoms of something deeper.
Now take individual's identity with their family.
The role of the family in grounding our own conception of our identity, too, has declined in America, and that's in part because of the facts.
In that case, 40% of kids in many ethnic subgroups are born into fatherless households across ethnic subgroups.
You're looking at 25% fatherlessness rates in the United States of America.
So whether it's guided by fact or by identity, The role of self-confidence in yourself as an individual, the role of yourself seeing identity in your family, and the role of yourself seeing yourself as a citizen of a nation, all of these are in decline at the exact same time in American history.
We can debate which one is causing the other, or are these all symptoms of a deeper void?
Well, today's guest might have an interesting theory on that.
He has described a very different phenomenon.
Not in the civic life, not in government life, but in religious life.
A great phenomenon of de-churching in the United States.
In his writing, he's discovered that a majority of Americans are now questioning whether or not they should even belong to the religious institution they were once a part of.
And we are seeing the largest mass exodus from the church, not necessarily from religion or faith, but from the church that we've seen in American history.
I don't think that's unrelated.
It's no coincidence to be able to see the great de-churching at the same time that we see a loss of national pride, at the same time that we see a loss of family identity, at the same time we see a loss of self-confidence responsible for a mental health epidemic in this country.
There is something deeper going on.
And that's the conversation we're about to have with my guest today, Pastor Jim Davis.
He is in Orlando.
He's joining us.
We're having a conversation that we're going to pick up and continue right now.
Thank you for having me, Vic.
It's good to talk to you.
And I know you have written about the phenomenon of de-churching, but before we get into your scholarship, I thought it'd be helpful to hear a little bit about your background, right?
You're, relatively speaking, young.
You came to religion maybe from a different vantage point than what many people would stereotype as a pastor doing scholarly work today.
So tell us a bit about your background, what brought you to be a person of faith, and what you do today, and then we're going to get into the details of what's going on in our country.
Well, I appreciate it.
I grew up in Orlando, Florida.
As I was saying before we started recording, I'm third generation Orlando, which means that my people were here before there was a good reason to be here.
I grew up going to church.
I was not a Christian until I went to college.
You went to Harvard and Yale.
I went to the Princeton of the Panhandle Florida State University.
And my goal when I was at Florida State was to be one day governor of the state of Florida.
That was my track.
Actually, my campaign manager for my senior class president campaign was Representative Matt Gaetz.
Is that right?
We go way back.
He was a good friend in college.
I wouldn't want to argue him.
I remember thinking back in the day, I wouldn't want to argue him that the sky is blue.
He was a brilliant debater, but that was the path.
We were both on that path.
I remember Realizing that I am, one day, that I didn't feel happy.
I didn't feel satisfied.
I was putting together my resume, which was everything to launch me into that career.
And there was a dissonance inside of me, you know, the dissatisfaction of I have everything that I think that I should have, yet I'm not fulfilled by it.
And so I began praying every day.
Really, God, if you're real, I don't want to just believe something to feel better.
I want you to really show yourself, because if you're God, you can.
And then a friend shared the gospel with me.
Actually, a guy with Campus Crusade for Christ walked up to my fraternity house.
Never seen a campus minister in my fraternity house ever.
He shared the gospel with me, and it really clicked for me that I was looking to my resume to do something that only Jesus can.
I was looking for my resume to fix my sin problem, and only Jesus can.
It just changed the whole course of my life.
My desires changed.
I decided to go in full-time ministry.
My wife and I moved around the world for 15 years, lived in Europe, lived in the Deep South, and finally came back here to Orlando, where I pastor Orlando Grace Church.
My wife is a counselor, and we have four kids, age 9 to 16. So it is a very busy time.
And one of the things I learned from you is that in Orlando, it turns out, but it turns out it's a trend in the United States, but apparently in Orlando, you see it with your own eyes.
People are actually leaving the church as an institution, going to church much less.
What do you think was going on there and what opened your eyes to that?
Was it anecdotal or was it scholarship from the start?
It definitely started anecdotally.
We began to see that the majority of the people who we interact with in Orlando who don't go to church used to go to church.
We then did see a Barna study that made the case that Orlando had the same percentage of evangelicals as New York City and Seattle.
Which really hit us.
Like New York City and Seattle, the cultures of those cities feel so different than Orlando, Florida.
How could we have the same percentage of evangelicals?
But then it's like our anecdotal experience began to match, make sense of what we were hearing, because the majority of the people here still carry with them biblical knowledge, biblical foundation, in many cases seem to very much be Christians, embrace Christianity and Jesus Christ.
And so we began to look for more scholarship.
We could not find it.
My wife was actually in grad school at the time and wanted to do a research paper on de-churching.
And the professor said, I'd love that, but you can't.
There's nothing to research.
So we then commissioned the largest nationwide quantitative Academically peer-reviewed study that has ever been performed, which may not sound that impressive once you know there was nothing, but it's a legit study.
7,000 participants over 600 data points.
We hired social scientist Ryan Burge to oversee this study.
And our thesis was that this is not just an Orlando issue, that we could, in fact, be in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country.
And the study, in fact, definitively proved that we are.
And of course the big question, and we'll spend some time talking about it, is why?
What do you think is going on?
So that is the question.
Up until recently, I think if your media or information diet is more to the left, you're going to hear that it's the church's problem.
It's misogyny in the church, racism in the church, abuse in the church, scandal in the church.
If your information intake is more from the right, you're going to hear the culture's problem.
It's secular progressivism.
It's the sexual revolution.
These are the problems.
What's fascinating is that both of these are right and both of these are wrong.
So yes, you see both of those things as reasons for people who are leaving the church, but of the 40 million adult Americans who have left church in the last 25 to 30 years, that group, both of those stories only account for 10 million of the 40 million people.
We call those the de-church casualties.
The lion's share, the 30 million, is what we call the casually de-churched.
So the number one reason for de-churching in the United States is simply, I moved.
Attendance was inconvenient, became a single parent.
So the people in the left and the right articulating those stories, they're louder, they're loudest, so it can make it feel like that's the lion's share of what's going on.
But the majority of the de-churching, like I said, is pedestrian and the people experiencing that are de-churching unintentionally and they're doing so more quietly.
Well, if I just push you on that just for one second though, It's interesting that that's a mundane story and it has a happier valence to it, that it's just a mundane reason I moved.
Well, people have been moving from one home to another for a long time.
So I think that still doesn't account for why the phenomenon of now, why is it the last, say, decade, accounts for this level of purposeful migration, not to the church, but away from it.
What do you think accounts for that, acknowledging that people have moved from one city to another for a long time?
Yeah, historically, we really have to focus on the 1990s.
That's the inflection point for what's going on.
Now, any social scientist worth his salt would argue that these inflection points don't come out of nowhere, and they would be right.
We can go to 1776, we can go to theological liberalism, we can go to immigration, but going up to, that led up to the 1990s, four very important things happened that kicked this off.
The first was the fall of the Soviet Union, and people don't realize how significant this is to lay the groundwork for de-churching.
Before the end of the Cold War, you know, I'm 44, you're younger than I am, but I can remember a time, I'm not sure if you can, when if someone were to say, I am no longer a Christian, it wasn't uncommon for the next question to be, well, are you a communist?
I mean, because it was a battle between American Christianity and our godless atheist enemies.
And it's no coincidence that under the Eisenhower administration is when we got in God we trust, on our money, under God, in our pledge.
And so once the Soviet Union- Was it that recent that it was added to our pledge?
The Eisenhower administration.
It was a part of Cold War propaganda.
I mean, I'm not against those things, but that was what it was.
No, no, no.
That's actually an interesting fact.
So under God was only added to our pledge under Eisenhower.
That's right.
And the same thing in our coins, in God we trust.
Now, that was always part of the national, I suppose, seal and creed of the United States, right?
You've had in God we trust for a long time, going back to our founding.
The phrase has been there, but we put it on our money.
Yeah, got it.
Very interesting.
Okay.
So anyway, you think that was that was part of it was part of a spike that was created.
So now you could you could be a Christian and a patriot for the first time.
So second, you have the rise of the Internet.
So we're not even talking social media here, which is a whole nother conversation.
But by 1994, you had Internet cafes.
By 97, you had Internet.
While not in most homes, only about 20 percent of homes, it was in schools and libraries.
And you could comfortably research other worldviews in a way that you couldn't before.
You have the rise of the religious right.
So there were a lot of people, well, I'll just leave it at religious right for now.
And they would say, to be a Christian means to be where I am politically.
And a lot of people said, well, if that's Christianity, I'm out.
And then at the end of the decade, you have 9-11, which was overnight, really, our Our national enemies went from godless atheists to religious fundamentalists, and people felt like, well, if that's what religion is, I'm out.
Now, what we would argue is the 1990s created an opportunity for people who really didn't fully embrace Christianity to have an excuse to be open with that fact.
And in the 1990s, you're going to have more people de-churching from the secular left and from mainline and Roman Catholic churches.
But as you continue through the 2000s, it's actually the secular right that's de-churching now at twice the pace of the secular left.
And so you could make the argument, well, that's because the secular left- When you say now, how recent is that, that the secular right is actually de-churching at a faster pace?
Our research goes until the beginning of 2022. So by the beginning of- When did that trend start?
Well, it began to, early 2010s would probably be, the way we did our survey, we can see the shift, but we didn't ask the specific year.
We could say how long since, well, we could say how long since you've been in church.
And it seemed like the early 20 teens was when we began to see, around 2010s, when we began to shift From the secular left to the secular right de-churching.
But the secular right now has caught up in full number to the secular political left.
So you have equal shares of people who have de-churched on both sides of the political spectrum, which impacts a lot of not just the church, but the political field.
I didn't screen or know what your answer to this would be before the conversation.
Do you have a political leaning yourself, left, right, none of the above?
I am definitely a conservative.
I'm a Republican.
As a pastor, I probably shouldn't get too much more specific than Republican.
It's not as an honest matter as which way you lean, but what that has to do with your ministry is a separate matter.
Yeah, I would say I'm conservative.
I'm a Republican.
I also would feel very strongly that no church should be politically synchronized.
I don't think that the Christian faith aligns perfectly with one party or another.
Yep, fair enough.
But anyway, back to the question of, I was actually just going to gauge your familiarity with politics when I asked you this question.
That phenomenon you described in the last 10 years of the secular right de-churching at a much faster rate than the secular left and in absolute numbers catching up to be the same.
That's actually another surprising fact that I've just picked up in this short conversation we've had.
That's, to me, shocking, actually.
But when I think about it, do you think that accounts for some of the changes we have seen in the Republican Party and the direction of the Republican Party and where the priorities of the party are?
I do in many ways.
So I'm glad you asked me if I was a conservative or not, in not so many words, because I don't want to lose your entire audience when I say this.
But from a social science standpoint, when you have so many people leaving the church from the secular right, it changes the dynamic.
I actually would argue that it helps Donald Trump.
And the reason that I would argue that is because it's hard to imagine the The Republican Party of the late 90s and early 2000s, who's still battling the Bill Clinton ethical situation.
It's hard to imagine them nominating somebody like Donald Trump.
And I'm not for or against in this podcast.
I'm just saying the landscape has shifted as millions of Christians have left the church.
I think they're They're not in the same space as the Republican primaries were in the late 90s and early 2000s.
So I hope that you can push on that if you want, but I think it changes the political landscape.
I also think that we see a lot of Christians who have left church on the secular right, who find church-like ideals of mission and community in the political landscape.
And so that changes things, too.
I think that you find some people who feel even more strongly than they did, say, 10 years ago on certain topics.
Politics is a substitute for religion.
I think it can be.
For people.
I'm not saying it's an adequate substitute.
I'm just saying it is for millions of people.
You know, that's an interesting detour that we may just go on and then come back to in a second, because I think a lot of this relates to a theme that is near and dear to my heart.
I think it's important in the country and motivated my presidential campaign is the essential human purpose we have for human hunger we have for meaning that goes unfulfilled.
But I do think that one of the funny things that happened when I came to Orlando, since you're in Orlando, I'll give you an Orlando story for CPAC a couple of years ago, the conservative conference.
I noticed a greater affinity.
That was a year where there was actually probably one of the first years where there were a lot of ex-US conservatives, populist nationalists from Europe and other parts of the world that descended on CPAC. And it struck me, leaving that particular occasion in Orlando, that the ties, the commonality of tie between the Conservatives from different parts of the world who were in that room We're probably stronger, right?
The human connection and relationship and sense of camaraderie and sense of even shared lowercase c citizenship of a shared set of ideals.
That was a tighter tie amongst people of different nationalities in that room than I see actually even between many people who would be in that room, myself included, and many people who are citizens of the United States of America but of a different political ideology.
And so I bring that example up because it's a different axis of saying that you might find greater common cause grounded in your political beliefs than you do necessarily in your citizenry, even if it's somebody from Spain or France or Italy that comes from a nationalist conservative background.
Even though you're citizens of different nations, the nationalist conservative right today might find greater common cause with any of those people than they do with somebody who's voting for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a given day.
And I see a parallel in what you're saying with respect to the church in some sense is you might overtake your sense of commitment goes to where your national ideology is rather than somebody who's sitting in the same pew as you on a Sunday, even if they're going to support, you know, put a transgender flag in their yard or a Ukraine flag and you're going to put only an American flag and reject those.
displays at your home, you might find greater common cause for a neighbor who is a, you know, an atheist or a Muslim or a Jew or whatever, even though they're of a different faith.
Is that a little bit of, to go double click on what you said, is that a bit of what you see going on?
Yeah, I don't think you're wrong on that.
I think it's an interesting thread to pull on.
Obviously, we have nationalistic situations like 9-11, where for a hot minute, everybody loves everybody.
And that bonds us.
But we haven't had a situation like that in the United States for quite some time.
I think birds of a feather flock together, where our highest hopes and ideals are, is going to bond us the most.
And so it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people with conservative desires and ideals across many different lines would feel that way.
As a Christian, you know, our understanding is that we have a citizenship that's even greater than that of whatever earthly citizenship we have.
Well, I guess there's at least two implications to that.
One, when we gather across national barriers, we have something greater that bonds us than even our national barriers.
But it should also make us some of the best citizens.
Because we have a higher citizenship, our Our ultimate value and purpose is not found here, which would make us more willing to sacrifice and pray for our leaders and serve our leaders even if we don't agree with them.
So I would argue that the loss of that in the United States, that we have a higher citizenship, that we have something that bonds us above politics, It has eroded at the political foundation, the fabric of our society, because we don't have something bonding us anymore, so the political landscape becomes more polarized.
And what is your perspective on...
Whether the inclusion of, greater inclusion of public displays of faith in the public and civic sphere would be a good thing in the country or not.
Speaking from your vantage point as a pastor, as a conservative broadly, that's I think a debate that's percolating beneath the surface of the American right right now and I think it's a worthy conversation to have.
What do you believe?
Well, my theological tradition, my stream, I would advocate significantly for religious freedom.
Significantly.
I would fight for your right as a monotheistic Hindu to worship the way that you want.
I think there's a large misunderstanding of what the separation of church and state means.
It doesn't mean that religion can't spill over into the state sphere.
It means that the state can't tell us how to worship.
So we can go different directions with this question, but my first and main thought is that we should be able to have the freedom to worship how we want.
That's a part of the founding of our country.
There are challenges that come with that, and I can talk about those challenges.
But that's where I stand.
I would fight for those freedoms, I would argue for those freedoms, and I would argue against those that use the separation of church and state to erode at those freedoms.
So back to the phenomenon of de-churching then, what do you think is going on with the casual de-churcher?
That's the majority of them, so let's talk about that.
What makes the current moment—you gave those four reasons, right?
You get the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s as a turning point.
We're pretty far from the 90s, though, right?
I think a lot of people—I mean, I spoke to a young audience in Washington, D.C.—where not a single one of those people was born or even close to being born at the time 9-11 when those Twin Towers went down.
I buy that inflection point, but right now, and especially a trend that you saw, which was the secular right going further in that direction, you're talking more than a decade after 9-11 when that began.
It feels to me like there's something else going on right now where it might manifest itself as, oh yeah, I guess I casually don't have time to go to church anymore because I've got to take the kids to soccer practice.
But kids have been going to soccer practice for a long time.
People have been moving cities for a long time.
time, it feels like there's a greater sort of ennui that has a blanket of ennui that has really enveloped the country over the course of the last 10, 20 years.
I think social media probably does play a bigger role in it.
That's exactly where I was going to go.
That's exactly where I was going to go.
So I don't think we can understate the fact that the 90s people have had children now.
And so that's contributing to the rise of the nuns in a significant way.
But social media, I mean, if you want to talk about the erosion of institutional trust and the church is one of 16 institutions that the Gallup poll has followed for 50 years now in terms of the trust in the institutions, social media creates this Like funhouse effect.
You remember to look at the mirror in the funhouse and something that's normal or even small looks very big.
And so that's what happens because in social media, you have people who are more willing to, A, talk about politics and culture than they were in the 90s and early 2000s.
But then because not only do they get likes when they say something, the algorithm feeds them people who are going to give them likes Which makes them more bold and more honest and you see this across the political spectrum and the net effect is an erosion or a liquidation of the trust that we experience here in this country.
So I think social media has done so much to To make us louder, to isolate us, and to individualize us.
So you teed that up very well.
I 100% agree.
When you move into the sphere now, that's a major factor.
I wouldn't undercut children's sports as quickly as I feel like you maybe just did.
I think that's what is expected of Christian parents with their children in terms of travel sports.
And I say this as the father of three teenagers.
I feel it.
I experience it.
I'm sympathetic to it.
But we've gotten busier.
We've gotten more fluent in some ways.
But the great de-churching actually doesn't affect the people that you would expect it to probably.
It's not only the upwardly mobile and affluent.
It's actually hitting the less educated and those with less income more than anybody else.
Because if you think about ordinary life transitions, It's affecting somebody.
Who is it going to affect the most if you lose your job and have to move?
Who is it going to affect the most if you become a single parent, however that happens?
It's going to affect the ones who don't have the financial and social safety net.
They then have to work longer hours or more unusual hours, and the way that church exists right now, for many, the church isn't going to work for them.
So I think there's a few things that we can follow, threads that we can pull into the early 2020s that affect this casual dechurching.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
You know, I think the social media strand is interesting.
That's also one that we can study, actually.
And you'd be probably the best person suited in the world to do it, perhaps given your scholarship already.
You probably know which Americans are using social media and which ones aren't.
And my hypothesis is that you probably do see a greater de-churching effect in those who are regular social media users versus those who aren't.
And I just think that'd be such a fascinating question to actually answer.
And suppose that hypothesis is right.
Do you have any basis to believe it is or isn't?
Yeah, I mean, none of our research would cover that.
Anecdotally, I think because we know from research that social media has an isolating effect, it would make a natural sense that it would affect de-churching.
I will say that one of our most unpopular opinions here at this church, I've written on it in the book, The Great De-Churching and elsewhere, is that we are pro-technology.
We use technology in many ways, but we have stopped live streaming.
Because what God has given us in terms of embodied worship, we don't want anybody to have the impression that what they're doing when they sit on the couch and watch a sermon and music is in any way the gathering that the Bible tells us not to neglect.
It does not take the place of the fellowship, the singing, the prayers, the sacraments.
So as a point of this is what we are here to do.
We are here to worship in an embodied way, to be known and to know each other.
We have cut our live streaming and our plan is to never launch or reinvest in that again.
And honestly, after we did that, we saw a pretty good uptick in people coming to church.
Yep, absolutely.
It's like a return to work.
There's a return to the office culture.
And there's a real parallel there from the world of business to the world of church.
I will say that if the hypothesis is right that more people on social media or active users of social media are disproportionately represented in the de-churchers versus those who haven't de-churched, as you put it, leaving church, It raises the question of what vacuum in your heart that sort of social media usage is actually filling, right?
And I know that the argument for any person of faith to believe in God is not a utilitarian one.
It is one that is grounded in truth.
And I think it could be denigrating to somebody to say, well, the reason to believe in God is it's good for you.
But acknowledging that there's many different people of different faiths who might be listening to this, I think that there is a, regardless of your basis of faith, I think that most people of faith would agree that it does happen to be also good for you in order to believe in God.
And when you stop believing in God, I think there is an innate human impulse wired in us as fallen human beings to believe in something, right?
You and I spoke about this previously.
In the rise of the modern climate religion, I believe it's no coincidence that you see increased climate fanaticism.
You talked about the 1990s as a turning point.
Well, I think that that is a new substitute for religion that may have come from the early 1990s.
And so I do think that there's some of that innate hard wiring and it may be that social media is not only A cause of potentially the de-churching, but as a substitute, as a substitution effect for at least the void it fills in your heart and the way that an addictive drug might make you think that you don't need, you know, to pursue happiness in the ways that real pursuits of happiness would give you rather than the way an addictive drug would.
So I might say the same of climate ideology to the number of likes you get on a social media post.
Well, I agree with what you're saying.
Let me back up just a little bit and affirm.
There's been some fascinating research in terms of physical and mental well-being and attending services and houses of worship.
In our study, we polled those who had de-churched and the levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidal ideation were off the charts.
You can, again, read about it in the book, but it was off the charts.
We cite a Harvard study.
What was his name?
Tyler.
I'll think of his name later.
But he was at Harvard.
They did a big Harvard study.
And actually, Harvard's not a bastion of Christian thought.
And they came to the conclusion that physicians would do well to consider religious services as a form of healing for people because they can't deny the data.
It's good for people.
Now, going forward to the second part of your question, you know, Martin Luther said our hearts are idle factories.
We are constantly looking for some place to find purpose and find meaning.
And I would argue that this is this is I appreciate you use the term fallen nature.
It's a part of our fallen nature.
We've been separated from God.
We're looking to be reunited.
And from my perspective, Jesus Christ, because he died on the cross as a payment for our sin, so he took our sin, but then he gave us his righteousness.
That is the only way that we're going to find the purpose and the meaning that we're looking for.
But even as Christians, we're susceptible to finding new places for meaning, to falling off.
Martin Luther also said, you jump back onto the horse and you fall off the other side.
So we're all prone to find meaning and purpose in places that are ultimately not going to fulfill us.
And the more it doesn't fulfill us, the more we're going to go down that path looking for it even more significantly.
So I think that's what you find.
You find it in politics.
You find it in academia.
You find it in sports.
You find it in health.
You find it in every facet of life that a person can possibly look to to find purpose and meaning when Obviously from my perspective, I have a strong view that it comes from Jesus and Jesus alone.
Yeah, look, I think actually this point about the utilitarian value of religion or that need to believe in something, I'd love to probe actually on whether that is embedded a little bit into Christian theology itself, as you just laid out.
Speaking as you well know, I'm a Hindu, but I've gone to Catholic school and take a great interest in Christian theology because I also think it is intimately linked with the founding culture of this country.
In some ways, that is the heart of the matter, where in the Old Testament, you have the Old Testament God that asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac didn't follow through with making him make that sacrifice.
But in the New Testament, the New Testament God sacrifices actually his son for the fallen man who needs...
You said Jesus Christ gave us his righteousness, but in a certain sense, tell me if I'm understanding the heart of...
New Testament Christian theology here correctly when I say that it was in part because we needed to see Christ's sacrifice that allowed people who were otherwise fallen to actually believe in that example.
That was the true sacrifice that God made in sacrificing His Son, is giving people the example of Christ who actually, when we say, died for their sins.
That's part of what maybe God is acknowledging about the fallen man is he needs to see the example of somebody who actually made that sacrifice, sort of linking it to that utilitarian argument we had for religion at the start of the conversation.
Does that make sense?
And I'd love to hear your...
Yeah, and I've heard, I mean, I think you probably know more about evangelical and, you know, even Roman Catholic beliefs than the majority of evangelicals and Roman Catholics.
I've heard you speak enough.
But so I would argue, I would ask the question, what makes Jesus' death on the cross good?
Is it an example?
Is it just a display of love?
I mean, because if I was with my family at the Grand Canyon and I told my family, hey, let me show you how much I love you, and I jump off the edge of the Grand Canyon, that's not good.
That's not going to communicate something that we call love and goodness.
Now, if one of my children were about to fall off the edge, and the only way they wouldn't fall off the edge was for me to fall off instead, then that's true love.
That's good.
Sacrificing for their good.
And so Jesus didn't just die, and I don't hear you specifically saying this, but you hear this in our culture.
Jesus didn't die just as an example or a He died to actually take on the wrath of God in our place because he lived a life without any sin.
He fulfilled the law in every way.
And so he alone can take on the wrath that we deserve.
And it's his righteousness that he earned that he gives to those who put their faith in him.
And so we, connecting this to the beginning of your question, we as humans were born to worship.
We were born to worship.
We were born to worship the God of the universe.
Without Jesus Christ, we don't know how to adequately worship.
We're gonna look to worship in other areas.
We're gonna worship lots of different things that aren't going to fulfill us.
And so Jesus came to not only redeem us, but give us his spirit.
And now we know how to properly worship.
And it is as we follow him and as we are conformed more into his image, the process we call sanctification, we find more joy.
We find more satisfaction from worshiping him.
And worshiping isn't just on Sunday.
It's all of worship.
Romans 12 talks about that.
It's worshiping Him in the decisions that we make publicly and decisions that we make privately.
But every human being, and this is where you're spot on, was born with a desire to worship.
We just don't all know what it is we're to worship and what kind of worship is going to give us the purpose, the meaning, the joy, and the satisfaction that we long for.
And just because it's interesting to me, even though it's a little bit tangential to our conversation, That is a slightly...
There's some daylight between the view.
Forget the idea that jumping off the Grand Canyon because you want to show how much you love your kids as a crazy person.
That's just not good, as you put it.
But as you did parse carefully, it's another matter if your kid was actually going to fall off the Grand Canyon, but for you actually be the one to jump.
That is a slightly different theological account of...
Why Jesus died on the cross and why it was good than to say he was taking on the wrath of God and he was alone able to take on the wrath of God.
Is that, you know, amongst the theological strand, amongst theologians and whatnot, is that a subject of debate or do you think that there is a unified view of Christian theology on that distinction?
Orthodox Christianity has always held that the gospel is good news because the wrath that he received is the wrath that was coming our way.
All of us.
And so that's why I give the Grand Canyon analogy.
That wrath is what we deserve, every human being.
And that wrath is what he willingly took on, the Bible says, for the joy set before him.
That joy was the glory of God and his love for his people.
And so that's the connection point.
That's what makes it so good.
It's the same explanation.
So if you do believe it is a problem, all else equal, de-churching in the United States of America, for either utilitarian reasons or reasons grounded in what we might call truth and the pursuit of truth, wherever you land on the reason for why, if it's a bad thing, What do you think is the right steps for us to take as a society to fix that?
Does it start from within the church or does it start elsewhere?
That's a great question.
I think it starts within the church.
I think we have front doors and we have back doors.
I think the good news that we see in our study is that 51% of de-churched evangelicals are willing to come back today.
Now, we work really hard in the book to articulate that the de-churched are not a monolithic group.
They're not.
We worked...
All the information through machine learning algorithms.
But there are different kinds of de-churched people.
But roughly about 16 million have articulated that are willing to come back in some way.
And so there are things we can control and things we can't control.
You know, we can't control your average person.
You may have more influence than I do in this, but your average person can't control the sexual revolution, secular progressivism, radical individuality, those kind of things.
Um, but what we do have access to is to make sure the church is, uh, is doing what the church is to do.
And so again, there's a lot written on this in the book, but, um, but yeah, churches, even though as a whole churches are not doing well, because so many people are leaving, um, churches that hold onto the historic gospel and do so in a winsome and contextual way, they're actually largely doing well right now.
I know a lot of churches that are growing and being very fruitful.
So I think when we can, I think churches should expect to have leadership that knows its people, that knows how to substantively pray for every member of their church.
They should know who's in and who's out, how to care for them, how to invest in them, disciple them, the defensive side of caring for people, the offensive side of equipping them and sending them out, providing adequate ways to worship and grieve and find hope.
No matter what's happening in our life in Jesus Christ, the more churches can do those things, I think they're going to do quite well.
Even if the total number of Christians, air quotes, decreases, I think there is kind of a purification that's going on because in the 20th century, which is our high watermark, there was...
People went to church because they wanted to run for politics or have a good business.
And now those kinds of incentives have been removed.
And I think what we're seeing is something that's more true and more pure.
So I actually think there's a lot of hope in the research that we've done.
I think there's some reasons for concern.
The social safety net of our country, by most accounts, 40% of it is accounted for by religious nonprofits.
If you take the 40 million people who have left, that's a GDP of about $1.4 trillion.
You apply evangelical giving standards of 2% to that people, you're looking at $24 billion.
That is, I wouldn't say has left the church and religious giving, but is leaving.
That's going to have a major effect.
So there's things to be concerned about, but I think there's reasons to hope too.
And I guess if you're talking about the churches themselves taking that step, there's one strand in an earlier episode of this podcast with a different guest.
We explored a topic that I'd love to just get your take on as well.
He spoke, at least in his scholarships, I can't represent the facts of it, but a change in the rate of flow of conversion from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism that actually is a recent reversal of a historical trend that actually went the other way.
And so even though in absolute numbers it's still more in the other direction, there's been in recent years a reversion in the other direction.
Is that something that Is it all, I don't know if you observe that in your studies or you have any view of that, but does that in any way relate to the conversation we've been having in terms of what people might even be doing within an intra-church movement and what that says about broader de-churching more generally?
Yeah.
So it's funny, I know who your guest was just by your question and the way you framed it.
Yeah, I think he's right.
What we're seeing, especially among younger generations, is an increasing value of return to the historic church, in some cases a high church, or just something you can connect with the long tradition of the Christian church.
So there's been the rise of what has been called, you know, church as Coldplay in a TED Talk.
And I don't want to overly vilify it.
I think the hearts of many of these people are good.
But the entertainment is what we're more relying on in that stream.
And I think that that's...
The front door is big, but I think the back door is a bit larger because what you win them with is what you win them to.
And it tends to be, in these cases, entertainment, not discipleship.
And so I do think there is a return that we've seen, that we've studied to higher church historic movements.
So while I'm not a Roman Catholic and could articulate why, it doesn't surprise me that that kind of data is coming out.
And do you believe that there is going to be, as I actually do, an organic revival, regardless of whether the churches take steps to do it or not, of people coming back in some ways with redoubled vigor after this revival?
Pass of the cloud of ennui, social media induced or otherwise.
I think that that's something that I think is more or less inevitable because of how we're wired.
I don't think that the transhumanist vision of all of us converging into a giant ball of light is exactly going to transpire the way that the transhumanist vision supposes, which means there may be a great awakening coming, whether or not you like it, Christian or not.
Of a religious revival in a variety of some kind.
What do you think about that if you're a man of making predictions here?
Yeah, well, that's the question, man.
That's the question.
I tend to be hopeful.
We're told very clearly in the Bible how this story ends and the church prevails.
But even outside of the American context, there are more Christians alive on earth today than all the Christians who have ever lived from the first century to the 18th century.
I mean, so in the global east and global south, Christianity is booming.
So I don't lose hope.
I do think that we're seeing churches that are returning to, you know, what we're calling people to in our research isn't something new.
We're calling to a return to something that's very old.
And I think the churches that are doing that well are being fruitful.
I'll be the first to admit 2020 was chaos in our church.
Absolute chaos.
You had political, racial, pandemic chaos.
And I was a brand new pastor of this church at the time, which wasn't helpful at all.
But I'm so encouraged at where our church is now.
There is this deep sense of why we're here.
There's much less fighting.
We can have our opinions, but they're secondary and tertiary to why we've come together as a church.
So in my own context, but also in a lot of other churches that I'm in contact with, I'm very hopeful.
I'm hopeful that the church is going the right direction.
We're owning the things that we need to own in terms of major mistakes that we've made along the way.
We're able to more boldly and winsomely confront the changing culture and communicate a hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ that is ultimately what I believe everybody is looking for, whether we realize it or not.
And, you know, putting the predictions, you know, of what's going to happen automatically to one side.
I do think that maybe we'll close on a theological question, actually, which is the question I just asked you is what he predicts going to happen if the church doesn't intervene.
Let me just go in the other direction for a second, which is to say that if God sacrificed his son, Jesus Christ, so that people may be saved, I think that That raises the question of why God Permits the de-churching effect that you're talking about.
And just from a theological perspective, I'd love your reflection on that as a pastor in terms of what you think is going on.
Because the version of the world I gave is this is a cycle we go through from time to time.
And people come back to not new ideas, but very old ones, as you put it.
But what do you think is the theological backdrop against which this is happening as well?
Well, I thought, and I think it's a really good question.
I don't presume, obviously, what I know, I don't presume to speak for God on this, but I think God cares that his church is as pure as possible before Jesus has returned.
And I think that the high watermark in terms of church attendance of the 20th century, I would not say was a high watermark for Christianity in this country.
I think you had a lot of people in churches because it was socially beneficial.
And I can see God being a great blessing to the church.
Churches that have departed from the historic faith, from all the orthodox things that we have believed for millennia, they're the ones who are suffering the most.
And so suffering in terms of church attendance.
And so I can see God giving us a great blessing of purifying the church.
I would rather there be 500,000 devoted Christians in the Church of the United States than 500,000 devoted Christians and 9,500 more people just here.
Now, let me say, if they're here to hear the message, that's great.
But here's just to get something other than the gospel.
I just think there's a clarity that comes across.
So I could see God's grace in that.
I think the church in many ways has...
It could be letting go of the main tenets of our theology.
And it could be where pastors and church leaders have built a tower of Babel of sorts.
How big can we be for my glory, not God's glory?
So there's a lot of things that I could imagine God doing and being good and right.
And even if we don't understand it all, we can trust that it's good and right because he's in control.
Yeah, and it's an interesting calmness with which you and a smile that you approach the whole study of what is otherwise someone in your shoes could think as a discouraging phenomenon.
And, you know, let me just ask you about leaving the topic of religion and even the topic of de-churching for a second.
What in a civic sense is your diagnosis of how we're doing as a country and where we're headed?
I'll ask you the same question, not in theological terms, but in civic terms.
I mean, obviously we're experiencing a great polarization.
We're experiencing in that Gallup poll, institutional trust is just reeling.
I would argue that when you get to the extremes of the left and the right, it's more of a horseshoe effect in terms of It's eroding away at some of the trust that we have, whether it's military, Congress, you know, whatever it is.
So I think the extreme left and right work on the same way.
I think, you know, I've wondered the question, you know, Does the polarization in society, is that what's causing the polarization in the church or is it vice versa?
Because if you look at Christian Twitter in 2019, it's solidly six months ahead of anything that Fox News or CNN or MSNBC are talking about.
So in some ways, I think the church has failed.
But I digress from the bullseye of your question.
Civically, you know, I hope for civil discourse for I mean, we can we can be clear and Yeah, I don't know.
I long for something that feels more stable.
I long for more compromise rather than my way or burn it down.
And I see that in multiple areas.
So, you know, I don't know if I'm getting the bullseye of what you're asking, but those are some of my civic desires.
Well, look, I ask those two questions together because I think that they're, even in your answer, maybe a tie between them.
You surmised, of course, you never purported to speak for God, but you could offer a theory or a vision of why the de-churching effect may have a purifying effect in the church itself, which in theological terms would be in preparation for the return of Christ.
And the second coming.
And at the same time, in the civic sense of the word, one of the things you said you long for is greater institutional trust, to which I would just inject a view that I have, which is a tough thing to ask of a citizen at a time when many of those institutions have behaved in ways which is a tough thing to ask of a citizen at a time when many of
And I think that it's a complicated question where we are in American history of whether institutions ranging from the media to the federal government to local governments to universities have so badly betrayed the trust of everyday constituents or citizens or stakeholders that they're supposed to represent.
Is the right answer to incrementally reform that institution or is it to in some way gut the rot of that institution so that it may be, to borrow your language in the theological context, purified before it is restored?
And so in some ways, I think that there is a connection between those.
The last two exchanges we had and, you know, what God's plan is that God knows.
But I think in terms of the United States of America, I am increasingly of the belief that institutional trust is something that we're badly missing in this country.
But the cure may be different than trying to rectify the corpus as it exists.
But at some points, a little bit of creative destruction through the through the model of the Phoenix of really Abandoning the edifice once it has been so badly corrupted and rebuilding on a new one might be the last best choice that we actually have.
And there may be a deeper parallel between what's going on in the context of the church, which we spent most of our time, And part of the civic path forward in our country, which is certainly of great interest to me.
So I didn't mean to get so abstract there at the end, but I think that there are some deep parallels between both of those strains in our conversation.
Well, I can see that.
I would leave that to leaders like you and others to figure out on a larger scale.
Certainly, that's kind of how our country was formed.
Amen.
I'll stick to what I know best and leave some of that other stuff to people whose lane it is more solidly in.
I enjoyed our conversation and I hope this is the beginning of more we have.
One of the things that I hope more Americans can take away from you, apart from Apart from what members of your church get from you every week is for everybody who watches you and speak about your book so eloquently is The joy with which you're still able to approach complicated and at times even otherwise depressing topics,
to be able to bring to that a personal level of positivity, I think is actually something that we're too often missing.
You could both see something with clear eyes without seeing it through a rose-colored prism or lens.
But still be able to approach even some of the darkest subject matter with a sense of hope of what's possible on the other side of understanding it.
And I think that that is a great gift that you have that I hope you're able to share with a lot of our fellow citizens at a time when we could use it.
So thank you for joining me today, and I hope this is the first of many more times we talk.
Thanks.
So I really appreciate you having me, and I'd love it.
Hit me up when you're in Orlando someday.
Will do.
Take care.
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