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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Dominic Prezziosi, editor of CommonWeal, with a quick end of the year message for listeners of the CommonWeal podcast. After a brief hiatus, the podcast will return in January 2026 with brand
Speaker 2:new
Speaker 1:episodes. In addition to regular episodes, we'll also debut a limited podcast series hosted by Aaron Robertson, our inaugural Centennial Fellow, whose essay about parish closures and mergers in the archdiocese of Detroit is featured in the December print issue of the magazine. Be sure to keep an eye out or ear out for this series and all new episodes of the Commonweal Podcast. I also wanna take this opportunity to tell you about Of This World, a new podcast series about religion and politics hosted by commonwealth contributors, Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins and Nick Tabor. Together, they'll interrogate the political and theological ideas underpinning today's conservative right and examine how progressive politics can more closely align with religious teaching and traditions.
Speaker 1:Sometimes they'll invite authors on the podcast to discuss their books. Others, they'll bring on academics, journalists, and public intellectuals to talk about their areas of expertise. In every episode, they'll explore recurring and emerging trends in religion and politics and explain why knowing what's going on when the two come together is the key to understanding the world today. Episodes will air once a month, you can listen to them on the same channels you listen to the Commonweal podcast on. On the first episode, Steinmetz Jenkins and Tabor discussed the book Christianity's American Fate, How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular by David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkiss professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
Speaker 1:We hope you enjoy it, and be sure to follow the podcast to hear new episodes when they become available. And we look forward to bringing you new episodes of the Commonweal Podcast in the coming year.
Speaker 3:This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University. And this is the first episode of our new podcast of This World. There are so many podcasts out there today that one might wonder why another one. But we're gonna do something very specific here and I think original, which is talk about religion and politics and from the perspective of people who are practitioners or were practitioners and also are writers.
Speaker 2:We're going to do it in a number of ways. One, we're going to ask a question about what chance progressive politics has in terms of reconciling itself with religion. And then we'll also look at the right and all of the different fiefdoms that provide ideological, political, theological support for what we're seeing today. This is not a show just about Christianity, although probably we'll receive more attention, but it's a show about religion and society and politics in general. And we'll, at times, invite guests on to discuss their new books.
Speaker 2:Other times, we'll bring on people just to discuss areas of their expertise. But I think what the show ultimately will provide that's unique is voices who are in the world of religion and also people who are writing about it and have a reflexive stance about what's happening in the world with religion and politics. We both went to these Christian colleges. You mean you went to the Mecca town.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I studied at Hillsdale College, which is in the way that Wheaton College in Illinois is sometimes called Harvard for Evangelicals. I've heard Hillsdale called Harvard for conservatives. And I think that that's partly just kind of like a self congratulatory thing. I think that probably it's mostly something you would hear from Hillsdale people, but the point is that Hillsdale has a close association with the Republican party, the right wing, ecosphere in general.
Speaker 3:It's a small campus in Southern Michigan, but it also has a presence on Capitol Hill. It has a center, an institute, just pretty much a stone's throw from the Capitol. And in the first Trump administration, the president of the college, Larry Arn, was reportedly being considered for the position of education secretary for a little while before that post went to Betsy DeVos. And so I graduated from there in 2009 and I was a conservative going in and I became sort of apolitical while I was there, distanced myself from politics. And then eventually as time went on in the years after I finished, I found myself and the socialist left.
Speaker 2:Let me just add on that. I can't match it, but I'll just say just because it pairs quite well, I think. And I went to a obscure and still relatively unknown Bible college called Portland Bible College, which is located in Portland, Oregon, which was a school associated with the Christian denomination of which I was a part, which was a nondenominational charismatic church. Essentially, it was Pentecostal, but it wasn't formally associated with the domination.
Speaker 3:You were planning to become a pastor, right?
Speaker 2:That's right. So I went to become a minister. I had a very strong religious conversion to evangelicalism when I was in high school, and I also started doing trips with my church to Guyana, South America when I was a late teenager, and it really transformed my life. And I thought this is what I want to do. I want to help people.
Speaker 2:Want to, you know, I love the people at my church. So I went to this Bible College in Portland, and I I had a 2.3 GPA in high school. They didn't care about grades at this place. I had I had no desire to learn when I when I was in high school. And I got there.
Speaker 2:I fell in love with theology, and it transformed my life. Going to this place essentially put me on the path to where I'm at now. Although many of the people there wouldn't wanna hear that because I I kinda left that world. But and then after that, I did a master's degree at a Baptist seminary called Western Seminary, which was also located in Portland, Oregon. And it was more formally evangelical, and mainly Baptist, I'd say.
Speaker 2:And a form of evangelical baptism had deep roots in the fundamentalist movement. And I learned a lot about the Bible there and it was a good experience. And so I had six years of theological training. I learned Koine Greek and Hebrew, and I studied philosophy of religion. And by the time I had gone through this, just thought, I think I should be a a theologian.
Speaker 2:And to make a long story short, I a bit became much more progressive in my politics, which was somewhat brought on by the war in Iraq. I also it really
Speaker 3:was Well, you were still there in this in this environment?
Speaker 2:So yeah. I mean, I started my senior year in college. I started reading people like John Howard Yoder, Stanley Harwas.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:I really became influenced by this kind of anti war theology that was pacifist. And there are real radical elements in it. And it was really the first time where I, intellectually speaking, I started to become critical of of the political establishment. I was raised in a Republican household. And it was theology.
Speaker 2:I wanna emphasize that. Not not not enlightenment rational science. It was it was that theology that pushed me in a progressive direction. I somehow ended up at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. So that you could do what?
Speaker 2:So that I could do a PhD in theology. And when I was there, I discovered intellectual history. I also started hanging out with people who were not at all in the world of which I had been raised in Portland.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It being Reed College.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, I wouldn't say I wasn't I didn't have too many friends at Reed, but I started working at a coffee shop and and the people at the coffee shop started inviting me out. I started hanging out. I started, for the first time in my life, listening to good non Christian music. You know, I went to a party once.
Speaker 2:I've never done that. So it wasn't really intellectual is what I'm saying. If and the theological stuff was a big factor. And then it was just it was I was no longer in this what I would describe as a very culturally repressive environment. And I felt like the world was a good place.
Speaker 2:I felt like some of the experiences I was having were liberating and made me feel free. And it was much more of that than intellectual stuff, which might explain why I'm somewhat sympathetic to a lot of my evangelical background because it wasn't like it wasn't the ideas that drove me away. It was more of the the moralism. I felt like it was it it was the strictness of the moralism. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it was really the denial of the goodness of the world. I felt like I felt like they had no real ontology to make sense of the goodness of the world. Even if it even if it was fallen, there's there's goodness to it. I started to enjoy things that I told was told were not shouldn't be enjoyed. Good music, for instance.
Speaker 2:Good experiences in the world. And that more than the intellect kind of pushed me away. I just started I essentially discovered intellectual history when I was at Reed College, which eventually led to me getting into a PhD program at Columbia University. So the but what I I guess what I wanna emphasize is that I, you know, like Nick, I went to I mean, Nick went to this incredible this place that's now some view it as a major factor for the intellectual trends of our time. I didn't do I didn't go somewhere like that, but I did I did go to a a Pentecostal Bible College and then this evangelical seminary.
Speaker 2:So we have a unique perspective I think we can offer based on this rather unusual path that we we have, which might make the show a little different than some of the others out there.
Speaker 3:For our first episode, we picked a book by the historian David Hollinger, who is an intellectual historian who teaches at UC Berkeley. The book is called Christianity's American Fate, How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. We took this book because it offers one explanation for how Christianity in particular became the domain of the political right in The United States. And it's a rather contentious explanation. It's not an explanation that I think either of us fully agree with but Hollander definitely makes a rousing argument and we thought that it would be a good book to kind of clarify some of the themes of the show and lay out some of the terrain that we plan to cover in future episodes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's David Hollinger's emeritus and he's one of the leading US intellectual historians. He's also written on multiculturalism and wrote a big book that preceded the one that we're going to discuss about Protestant missionary efforts and how liberal Protestants or what he describes as mainline or ecumenical Protestants essentially became kind of the secular liberal cosmopolitans that mark the democratic party today. So it's kind of a positive story about a more inclusive and open minded form of Christianity that's been in a rapid state of decline for the last sixty years. And this book that we're discussing today, in some senses, a mini version of the argument meant for a more general audience because preceding book was a tome, an academic tome.
Speaker 2:I think it was called Protestants Abroad, How Missionaries Try to Change the World but Changed America. And this this book that we're discussing now, Christianity's American Fate is just a more palpable version of the argument. I think there's a lot to discuss. So how should we jump into it, Nick?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think we should start by just kind of explaining the arc of this book, questions that Hollander lays out in the beginning and then the answers that he gives for them. So he begins by pointing out that statistically a smaller percentage of the population than ever in The United States identify themselves as Christians. And yet Christianity still has this dominant role in institutions, especially in politics. And as he puts it, Americans in the early twenty first century find themselves in an increasingly secular society saddled with an increasingly religious politics. He even says Christianity has become an instrument for the most politically, culturally and theologically reactionary Americans.
Speaker 3:And so one of the questions that he sets out to answer is how did that happen? And which he says, is a much broader question than a question we've heard thousands of times in the last decade, why did all these evangelicals end up supporting Donald Trump? But he also has a second question that he wants to investigate here, which is how we ended up in this, in what Barack Obama called this epistemological crisis, where a large share of Americans who like don't put a lot of trust in science anymore, who don't believe in vaccines, don't believe climate change is happening, don't necessarily believe the outcomes of elections, this condition where Americans sort of live in two distinct, disparate realities. And he wants also to assess how religion and in particular kind of the split between the old mainline Protestant churches and evangelicals has played into that. So we should explain what he means by mainline.
Speaker 3:I think this is a term that is a little bit counterintuitive. Surely a lot of listeners do know what it means, but I also think that instinctively when people hear it, they think that it means something like the mainstream of Protestantism, that it means like the center. And it actually has quite a different origin. Sort of the lore is that the name comes from the main line of the Pennsylvania railroad, which ran across Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. And it went through all these towns that were home to some of America's wealthiest families sort of associated with the elite WASP establishment.
Speaker 3:And so these are communities that have associations with old Protestant churches like the Episcopal church, the Presbyterian church USA, United Methodist church, the Evangelical Lutheran church in America. And so in terms of the religious landscape, they tend to not be in the center. They tend to be very liberal, but I guess the key thing about them is that they sort of have this attachment, this association with like the old ruling class of The United States, the Northeastern, you know, WASP elite.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's I'm a historian and I I know David for a number of years now. I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley and I think he had just retired when I when I was there and I had the privilege of going out and talking with him. And he's an intellectual historian, so I think he's probably looking for a way to address these this matter and and through the prism of intellectual history. And so he latched on to this remark about that that Obama made about epistemology.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, that's one way to try to get at what's happening in the country regarding MAGA and its connection to religion and evangelicalism, which is that, there's been a suspicion in in this world of mainstream media that, you know, social media and alternative media have essentially led us to a situation where there's no longer consensus about what truth is. And therefore people are prone to believe in alternative sources of media in this religious smogger world and that explains their views on vaccines, that explains their views on elections, that explains their views on pretty much anything that is associated with mainstream media, is, you know, Trump famously wrote off his fake news in the first election. So that isn't the only way though to explain what's happening. Plenty of people would say that this involves more than just the Internet. But that epistemic approach is very popular, especially amongst those who believe that the solution to MAGA or Trump is to somehow regain control over social media or somehow to solve the issue by pleading for truth, right?
Speaker 2:As if epistemology is the solution to the crisis we're living in. Right.
Speaker 3:So he talks early on about how when he was going to high school in Southern California, he would get into arguments with these fundamentalist students in the cafeteria. And Howlinger, I think is he's from one of the peace churches. It's the Church of the Brethren, is that right?
Speaker 2:That's right, yep.
Speaker 3:And they're like a German Anabaptist denomination, kind of they're sort of similar to like the Mennonites or the Quakers. So I get the sense that he felt like he was just banging his head against the wall when he was a teenager talking to these other students. And I think that that encounter with the fundamentalists when he was young was formative for him. He's, you know, understandably, I feel like he's still kind of having the same argument here, maybe in a more sophisticated way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my read kind of too, which is that in some ways, this distinction between evangelical and mainline is really just the modernist fundamentalist controversy being, you know, replayed through his own personal experiences. And, you know, if you look at that controversy, it was all about, you know, what is the basis for truth? Is it science? Is it Darwinism? Or is it Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know, scriptures? Right? And these are two very different epistemologies that create a clash. So I think that's right. I think it's good to historicize him because even though I think he now identifies as being an atheist, I still think I mean, there's a way in which you can read the book as saying that the mainline Protestants were inspired by the enlightenment.
Speaker 2:It's almost a Hegelian argument and that eventually they realized that the basis or the crux of what they believed in didn't require religious affiliation. And so they became the secular liberals of the Democratic Party. So in some sense, I think what he's doing is essentially saying in some ways, he's essentially saying like, we are maybe the true Christians, even though we don't believe in God anymore. We're the true inheritors of the enlightenment, and the opposition is the counter enlightenment. The opposition is unreasonable.
Speaker 2:The opposition is irrational. Mhmm. And as such, that explains where we're at today, the reign of the irrational, the reign of the counter enlightenment.
Speaker 3:Right, but it's not just we're the true inheritors of the enlightenment, as you said, it's also we're the true Christians in a sense. He doesn't quite go that far, but it's like we are the, because of our liberal social values, we're the ones who are reflecting, carrying out the demands of the gospels and the evangelicals. These people who have this culture entrenched in homophobia and bigotry that they're transgressing the gospels.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're heretics, they're Gnostics, they're not true Christians. Some And of this is the kind of I've lived in Germany for a while and there is a kind of Hegelian Christian that still is there that thinks in this manner. But I think the only thing that's a little bit strange about it is that it seems as though this phenomenon is a global one. And you could make the case that this move towards greater and greater rationality has led to the demise of that tradition and the rise of the other one and unto its success, politically speaking, if you go this route, right? Because we're not just seeing this in The United States, we're seeing this everywhere in Europe, Right?
Speaker 2:And so you can make this argument, which some people have, which is that, well, maybe maybe you're more rational, but you've lost your soul in the process. You've lost the the Ilan Vitao, the lost something in the process that the other side hasn't, that the convictions, the grounding is no longer there. Right? And you have Marxists make this argument. Terry Eagleden, for instance, talks this way about liberal left sentimental religion.
Speaker 2:Who's willing to die for what they believe amongst liberals today, where there are plenty of people who are willing to do that on the right or something like this. He was saying this in the context of post nine eleven. But, yeah, I think I think it's what's the point of toleration? What's the point of cosmopolitanism if it ultimately means that you're going to lose one election after another? And essentially, maybe maybe you need something a little little bit different, know, in order to get back on track.
Speaker 2:And that's where we can really talk about maybe a place for return of some kind of religious left that's rooted maybe in something that's more perfectionist and more oriented towards the old social gospel or more expansive vision than what these inheritors of the enlightenment or so called inheritors of the enlightenment seem to offer, at least as expressed in this Right.
Speaker 3:So I want to get into the book a little bit more. The basic argument that he makes here is that over the course of the twentieth century, the leadership of mainline Protestant churches tried to make their denominations, the word that he uses again and again is cosmopolitan, tried to make these denominations more cosmopolitan, more accepting of pluralism, but a lot of the people in the pews weren't ready for this kind of transformation. And so part of the story he tells is that some of those longtime parishioners defected for evangelicalism. A lot of others simply decided that they didn't need Christianity anymore. The way he describes it is an out migration by many people from the mainline traditions who became harder to distinguish from secular liberal institutions, like the next generation sort of decided, well, what do we need the churches for?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so you could just see the connotation of some of this. Again, I'm sounding critical. I am an admirer of Professor Hollinger's work, and this isn't meant to be biting in what I'm saying, but there's a way of reading what he's saying in a very class oriented manner. You know, that's something that isn't really discussed in this book. Where are the workers?
Speaker 2:Who Christians are that are the laborers? What is the class status of the evangelicals and the fundamentalists? And I think if you do that, it becomes a little bit different of a story. It seems like the people with the good epistemology are the ones who went to the elite universities, the one who have, you know, come from in general, there's exceptions, but the ones who are part of the WASP, right? And the whole idea of the mainline being more ecumenical, being more open to the other, being more tolerant.
Speaker 2:Well, the conditions for that would involve being in a position to where you're around others. In other words, being able to travel, being able to go to other parts of the world. And if you look at the book that he wrote prior to this, Protestants Abroad, it's people like Henry Luz who grew up in China. It's the missionaries of the mainline, who often came from, not in every instance, but came from, you know, solid middle class, upper middle class families. And so we're really talking about the people who have the means to do some of the things that he's describing.
Speaker 2:Then the group that he's critical of, the evangelicals or the fundamentalists, did they have these means? Can we just reduce this to them being xenophobic or intolerant? And if we open it up, I think, a little bit more and say, well, what were the material conditions, right, that allow for the kinds of experiences he's describing amongst the main line? Then I think the story is a little bit different. I mean, one other thing I'll say on the side is like, were these mainline Protestants when it comes to politics?
Speaker 2:Essentially, I think the mainline when I think of mainline, I think of Cold War liberals.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 2:think of people who dominated WAS politics in the 50s and the 60s. Of course, there's JFK, but we're really talking about mainstream politics and their children were the ones who rebelled against the war that they caused, essentially the Vietnam War. And if you look at some of the most advocate defenders of America first today, and the ones who are most critical of ending America's forever wars on the right, it's often people who are very much influenced by the old America first rhetoric of the 1930s, and these were often fundamentalists, often evangelicals. In other words, it seems to me that part of the reason why, you know, of the story that could be told is, you know, the group that turned against the mainline Protestants were their children who were at these fancy universities. And because they didn't like their parents' decisions to support a war, that actually gave the chance in the 1970s for the religious right to actually mobilize because the Democratic Party in particular had been humiliated with the with the Vietnam situation.
Speaker 2:And then if we look today at what's happened in terms of these same groups, terms of the genealogy, Trump, even though he's a hypocrite, essentially says that he wants to pull America from these wars abroad. He's received 80% of the evangelical vote. And his biggest critics are some of the liberal internationalists and neoconservatives who supported the Iraq war. In other words, I guess what I'm saying is, again, just to kind of, you know, make this less about epistemology and to make it more about class and American foreign policy. Once we go in this direction, whatever cosmopolitanism that this group put forward has to be counterbalanced by the role that this group played in violent wars from the fifties to the present, including their children, some of whom were anti war activists like Bill Clinton, who later became much more who moved away from this tradition.
Speaker 2:So again, it's it's I'm not praising the right. Not at all. I'm firmly on the left. I'm just saying that at times, there's there's a kind of nostalgia for the main line in this book that when you look at the actual consequences of it are not as yes, maybe they're more epistemically open minded, but that doesn't mean they didn't bomb people.
Speaker 3:One of the questions I wanted to ask you or that I wanted to think through together is whether he puts too much weight on racism as an explanation in the story, because it's pretty key for him for the way he tells this. Effectively says that in the sixties, as the civil rights movement was going on and the country was desegregating, that a lot of people kind of fled to evangelicalism because they wanted to keep things segregated. They wanted to keep their institutions all white. They hated black people. And he says something like evangelicalism offered them a form of Christianity that didn't require them to live out the demands of the gospels, you know, unlike the mainline tradition.
Speaker 3:And certainly, it would never dispute the idea that racism goes against the gospels or that segregation went against the gospels, but as a kind of a sociological explanation for what was going on, this really carries a whole lot of weight in his argument, and I feel like he kind of singles it out and discounts other things that were going on in that period.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think it I mean, there's most certainly evidence that race was a huge influence in terms of mobilizing Southeastern Christians in particular against Brown v Board. Randall Baumer is another evangelical historian who's written at great lengths about this showing how Brown versus Word of Education played a key role in the rise of like Jerry Falwell, for instance, and attempting to establish private schools based on being religious schools that would allow for segregation to remain intact in these places. So most certainly is important and crucial. I think the only problem with these arguments is that they kind of committed genetic fallacy, which is to say that I just mentioned that the mainline because it was probably embraced in various places, social Darwinism, that it itself has some racial background.
Speaker 2:And I don't know about you, but if you go to Maine, country's elite universities, you can hear to this day that they have problems with racism. In other words, these places that are supposed to be rational and enlightened deal with these controversies to this day. I only say that because one gets the impression that just because someone like Jerry Falwell essentially was a segregationalist, that the movement has to remain wedded to that origin. That's a genetic fallacy. And the reason why it's important is because we now know that growing numbers of racial minorities are embracing evangelicalism, particular Hispanic community.
Speaker 2:And we know that at least under Trump in 2024, he did significantly well with Hispanics, some of whom many of whom were religious. So the idea that people will base their votes solely on the color of their skin, I think, is an assumption that many liberals had and used as a way to tell those groups, you just by default have to vote Democrat. Right?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I think what it the problem is is that what it does is that it it fails to deal adequately with the theologies and maybe even the specific socioeconomic circumstances, which led them to vote Republican. Mhmm. So, yes, I I to answer your question, yes. I mean, I think it was huge. These the role that race played.
Speaker 2:Also, you can make the argument that even more than race, it was eventually the women's movement, new new conceptions of gender, and then this, of course, exploded with in the aftermath of Roe e Wade. The pro life, pro choice debate became crucial to evangelicalism.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But I don't think that the that this can explain necessarily what's happened under Trump, who from my understanding had the most diverse racial coalition of any Republican president since Ulysses S. Grant. Mhmm. Increasing numbers of black men, Hispanics. If I'm not mistaken, more Muslims voted for Trump than they did in the previous election in this despite the Muslim ban.
Speaker 2:So it's just that the goal is to play up the racial origins to explain white nationalism, Christian white nationalism in the day, but then it has a problem dealing with all this other stuff that's going on. And I think that's maybe the limit of this kind of intellectual genealogy because it just does away so much with socioeconomics and also, like, groups that don't really fit in this in this framing very well. Daniel Bell, the famed sociologist, he wrote a piece on the turn to the sacred into the 1970s talking about the return of religion in the public sphere. He's talking about the Iranian revolution, the charismatic movement. You know, every ten or twenty years, there seems to be a return to religion.
Speaker 2:He said in this piece called On the Return of the Sacred that, you know, we just have to accept that in our modern Western industrial societies, given the fact that they create the conditions for loneliness, isolationism, alienation, meaningless work, that a lot of people are going to be drawn to the simple sermon. A lot of people are going to derive a great sense of meaning from the sermons that their pastors give them, and that for a lot of people, millions of people in this country, that gets them through the week. You know? That's a source of strength for them, and it's not intellectual, and it's not rooted in the enlightenment. It's just rooted in the attempt to kind of, you know, provide for one's family, to try to have some sense of balance and have some hope of just of a decent life.
Speaker 2:Right? And that's enough for a lot of people. Right?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And yes, this is anti intellectual. Yes, this is not enlightenment. Right? Mhmm. But the idea that this could ever go away, the idea that somehow there's an alternative to this, Well, there could be, but I don't see what it is coming from this group other than extreme rationality, science, which has a difficult time, I think, dealing with this kind of day to day question of what is the meaning of my life?
Speaker 2:What gets me up in the morning? What makes me want to keep going? Right? And that religion does that. Right?
Speaker 2:Religion
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Has this ability to answer these existential questions. We might disagree with it. It can become dogmatic. It can become essentially, you know, exclusionary, totally problematic, but it also doesn't need to go in that direction at all. It can just be just that.
Speaker 2:The, you know, how can I get through my week and be a good wife or be good son or daughter or husband or partner or whatever? And I think this is where when I read something like what David is saying, I just wonder about this very, very practical simple thing for millions and millions of Americans in this country. Right?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And you've essentially said that your form of religion has become so secular it doesn't even exist anymore. The people have just abandoned it. A lot of people will never be able to that's not gonna be the decision that they make. They're not gonna be in the conditions where that comes about. What do you do about them?
Speaker 2:And that's where I began to wonder, well, can what you're offering, you know, yeah, makes you open minded to people. It makes you good cosmopolitan. Mhmm. It makes you more tolerant. But does it make you wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning and, you know, a desire to be a good human being?
Speaker 2:And, you know, and I I don't necessarily think that's the case.
Speaker 3:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.