I was approached by a student who will be a senior next year, and she hasn’t taken her required religious studies credits, but she also wants to retain some flexibility in her schedule, so she asked if I would supervise an “independent study”. For those unfamiliar with this term, where I work, students can do self-guided research with the supervision of a faculty member to whom they’re accountable. This student is interested in sociology, primarily, so to meet her halfway, where she can both (A) get an introduction to sociology, but also (B) earn her religious studies credits, I proposed a sociology of religion focus.
My vision for the study is that in the fall, our primary focus would be on sociology and the sociology of religion. I have both Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and William James’ Varieties of Religious Experiencethat I would revisit over the summer in preparation. I suggested we purchase and read through some chapters from a book like Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments(4th Edition) by Christiano, Kivisto, and Swatos. As a social science, we’d want something cutting-edge, and that book was published in 2025. But maybe there’s something better out there. If you have suggestions, please comment!
In the spring, I want to direct this student toward an area that interests me (justifying the extra time dedicated to an independent study), but that fits her curiosity. I suggested two books: Bowling Alone by the American political scientist Robert Putnam, which deals with the demise of shared communities in America, and something like Ryan Burge’s Nones (2nd Edition) or Christian Smith’s Why Religion Went Obsolete. As the place of religious community shrinks in the day-to-day lives of many Americans, I’m curious to know what the sociological consequences will be. I think this pathway would give me a good reason to supervise the independent study. And I think this student would learn a lot!
If anyone out there knows a book that you think would be an absolute must-read for me, as the supervising faculty, or a book that you think would be good for this student, feel free to comment. Obviously, I would want to beef up my understanding of the subject matter in order to be prepared to adequately lead the study, so I will do a lot more reading than she will…I presume!
It may do the philosopher Simon Critchley an injustice to take these two paragraphs out of the context of his book, Mysticism, when they’re somewhat unfathomable without the context of chapter 2 (“Seven Adverbs that God Loveth”), but I have to post these words somewhere for future reference! Critchley writes (p. 87)):
I am curious about the meaningfulness of asceticism today. The forms of ascetic practice in which people engage are legion: hot yoga, ceaseless meditations, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive devotion to routine, which was particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism becomes pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and other ‘disorders.’
We are strongly drawn by the desire for asceticism, it seems to me. We are fascinated by the extremity of mystical practice—think of the wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics like Christina the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants in the early Middle Ages. But we find such behavior and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox, the flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.
Why did these two paragraphs grab my attention. I pondered that for a moment and I think it’s because it says something similar to the entire book by Carolyn Chen, Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in the Silicon Valley. She shows how religious we humans are…even when we’re super irreligious. We need patterns and rhythms. Religion used to provide that to most of us. As we become more secular, the desire for order and meaning doesn’t go away, we just plant it elsewhere. Harvey Cox made many similar observations in The Market as God. Even the great atheistic philosopher, Daniel Dennett, toward the end of the documentary I, Pastafari, says something about how secularism shouldn’t go back to the superstitions of religion but sure needs to discover all of the social benefits that those religions offered before it’s too late. I guess what I’m saying is that as annoying as statements like, “you may not be religious but you have a religion” or “we all worship something” may feel to those who have left organized religion, the fact is that they contain a truth. We humans can’t dump the things that made us human over all this long millennia of our evolution. At best, we can reword and reinterpret them. I think Critchley captures this with relation to the mystical impulse.
This week, I was thinking about social media. I hate social media. Also, I spent more time that I should on it. I’ll check Facebook, then Threads, then Instagram, then Bluesky. (X is a hellhole that I left long ago, and I’m too old—at least I see myself as too old—to care about TikTok.) I’ll post. I’ll get some interaction on Instagram, especially if I post pictures of my kid, but hardly any interaction otherwise. It’s kind of depressing. It’s like talking to yourself in a cafe.
So, if I understand the past couple of decades, we outsourced clubs, churches, etc., to tech companies who spend all their effort trying to keep us doomscrolling so they can throw ads at us. I think this t-shirt that I saw in a store several months ago is correct in its messaging:
As I pondered the sad trade that we have made, I thought to myself, “I should join a book club.” I kid you not, this week a good friend of mine sent me a text asking if I’d like to create a book club with him. I think there will be three of us. It’ll have to be over Zoom because the other two live in Canada. But I’m excited. And I think this is our solution to the world social media has broken: book clubs, or at least some kind of club. Shared hobbies. Shared interests in general that bring us together. Zoom isn’t ideal but at least I’ll be interacting with a friend, and we’ll have a project that brings us together once a week for a half hour or so. This is the type of thing that will help us break free from Zuckerberg’s algorithms. And we need to become free.
The mall that is closest to my house is a sad place to visit. Many of the storefronts are empty. There’s minimal foot traffic. It feels like a ghost town. I shouldn’t care. I don’t like shopping. I don’t like crowds. There are two malls within driving distance—one indoor and one outdoor—that have a lot more life in them. I don’t make an extra effort to go to those two malls unless I need something specific. So, why would I feel sad about the empty mall?
I think it’s because, though an introvert, I like to know that there are public places that are flourishing. I like to know that our communities have a place where community happens. I think this is the same reason that I’m saddened sometimes by the closing of churches. But I’m part of the problem. I don’t make an effort to shop at malls, or to spend time socializing there. Much of what I purchase is delivered to my door through various services. And I won’t claim to be a consistent contributor to any local church. So, maybe I’m a hypocrite who wants to know these places exist for when I’m in the mood.
Or, maybe I feel like “I” don’t need malls and churches all that much but that the society of which I’m part does. People speak of America having a “loneliness epidemic”. If Derek Thompson is right, we may be becoming a country where people prefer to be alone, which isn’t the same thing as being lonely (see his article “The Anti-Social Century” in The Atlantic or listen to Thompson’s interview with Sean Iling: “The cost of spending time alone”). This is eroding our collective identity, our sense of community, and our trust in one another. No wonder our politics are so partisan! Again, I think the charge of my hypocrisy sticks because I’m one of these people who prefers to be alone, has lost interest in engaging fellow Americans who are on the far side of the aisle, and doesn’t do much to contribute to building my local community. Maybe the empty mall is sad because it’s a reminder not only of the problem but my unwillingness to struggle for a solution.
I was listening to the recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show when something Klein’s guest Emily Jashinsky said caused me to pause and google. Jashinsky claims about Gen Z’ers who are tired of social media and smart phones, who may want to give them up (starting at about 15:34):
“Do you know what Gen Z is binging hours of on YouTube? Its camcorder videos from the 1980s and 1990s of high schoolers. It’s the most boring camcorder videos on your old Sony that you could possibly imagine of people just at their lockers. No phones, just living in the moment and Gen Z is binging these hard, and it goes beyond just the curiosity of these historical artifacts. I think actually, if you asked a 22-year old that question and its through the lens of what your every day life would look like, and not just explicitly economic, I actually think a lot of them would take the deal. Not all of them, but the level of exhaustion with smartphones and social media…”
As she continues, she makes the case that younger conservatives, with whom she identifies, have a problem with modernity and that they would like to be free of some of its constraints, especially the dominance of technology and social media. I recommend listening to the episode yourself (embedded below) to hear her argument in its entirety, and I appreciate Klein, himself a progressive, hosting a conversation about the internal diversity of America’s conservative movement. I’m learning a lot as I listen but that’s not what I want to address. I want to address this claim about Gen Z’s nostalgia.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any information about Gen Z binging camcorder videos. I’m not doubting the claim, per se, just saying I can’t link to any study or news article on the topic. If someone out there finds something, feel free to share in the comments and I’ll update this post! I want to know if this is true because it would be eye opening, for one, but also affirming of the pedagogy I’ve implemented in my classroom.
What do I mean by this? Well, I share some of the concerns Jashinsky expressed about the Internet and social media. Obviously. In the past several weeks, I’ve written about how much better things seem at the school where I work since we’ve banned smartphones and smartwatches during school hours (see “Anecdotal evidence about phones in the classroom”). I’m skeptical of Artificial Intelligence’s ability to contribute to my students’ education (see “AI in the/my classroom”). Instead, I encourage my students to handwrite almost everything at this stage (see “Handwriting is good for the brain”). I have zero interest in engaging with trendy social media platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, as evidenced by the fact that I’m blogging like it’s 2010 (see “Why do I blog?”). This means that almost no one hears my views on topics like this one, and I’m fine with that! It’s freeing to do this sort of thing mostly for myself, to process my own thoughts in writing, to help me become clearer about my reasoning. I mean, I confess: I despise what algorithms are doing to us and I’m happy to pretend like the Internet is something else; something freer than what it’s become:
But most importantly: is Jashinsky’s claim true that many Gen Z’ers wish they could have the lives we had in the 80s and 90s? Would they trade social media and smart phones for camcorders, landline phones, and getting your sports scores either on cable TV or through tomorrow’s newspaper?
I don’t think I’d make a 1-for-1 trade but I do think there’s a lot about present modernity that we need to rethink, especially with regard to smartphone use, the Internet, and social media…especially for young, developing minds. To clarify, I was raised (partially) in fringe religious circles. The Internet provided me with information but also dialogue partners that made it impossible that I would continue in that religious movement once I became an adult. I imagine that pre-Internet, when your community was mostly people you know only in “real” life, I may have been more prone to settle for the sense of belonging that extreme religious groups can provide. But like the man being led out of Plato’s cave, the Internet gave me a map to freedom.
That being said, the Internet has also provided many people with a map into the cave. The conspiratorial thinking of QAnon is an Internet reality. Heaven’s Gate is famous for its use of the Internet to gain adherents and notoriety at the very beginning of the Internet Era. So the Internet has been used for variegated purposes since the beginning. It’s neither good nor bad in itself, nor are smart phones or social media.
But if Gen Z does have pre-Internet nostalgia, then we should pay attention to what it is that they wish they had from the eras of our childhoods. (I’m an older Millennial, or a “Xennial” as we who were born in the early 1980s are called, so by “our” I mean the childhoods of the 80s and 90s.) It may tell us what our young people need, including Gen Alpha who arrives in my classroom soon.
A final side note: I don’t remember being nostalgic for my parent’s youth. I had my own ups and downs as a kid and adolescent but I enjoyed my era. I liked some of the music from my parents era but I didn’t want to trade places. If even a sizable percentage of Gen Z does want to trade places with Millennials, or at least wishes that they had some of what made our childhoods unique, then this seems to be telling us a lot about what’s gone wrong over the past two decades. It may give our collective culture a guide for how to course correct. We should pay attention.
This was of interest to me because I teach high school age, emerging young adults.
Ryan Burge teamed with the people over at the “Freedom from Religion Foundation” to survey “Nones”. They came up with a lot of interest insights, though this is the one that stood out to me. Not surprising at all though. Probably just confirms what we know intuitively. Read the whole post: “We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Questions About Leaving Religion”.
I realized that this year will be the first year (I think) that I start teaching students who are classified as “Generation Alpha,” according to people who categorize this sort of thing. For example, the “social analyst and demographer” Mark McCrindle organizes Generation Alpha between the years 2010-2024. The logic behind these years is as follows:
“Generational definitions are most useful when they span a set age range and so allow meaningful comparisons across generations. That is why the generations today each span 15 years with Generation Y (Millennials) born from 1980 to 1994; Generation Z from 1995 to 2009 and Generation Alpha from 2010 to 2024. And so it follows that Generation Beta will be born from 2025 to 2039.”
This sort of thing is pretty subjective. In her book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future, Jean Twenge offers a more concrete reason for arguing that “Generation Alpha” shouldn’t begin with 2010 but instead 2012. Twenge called “Generation Alpha” “Polars” because they’re born into an era of extreme political polarization. I like Twenge’s name better but also I liked “iGen” better than “Gen Z” and yet it’s clear that “Gen Z” is the more popular label. Anyway, for Twenge, “Gen Alpha/Polars” begins at 2012 because of the following reasons (from pp. 451-452):
Technology: “smartphone ownership crossed 50% in the U.S. between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013”.
Black Lives Matter: “founded in 2013”; “gained widespread support before the first Polars entered kindergarten”.
COVID: one of the youngest groups to remember the global pandemic as Twenge argues “the time before March 2020 will be only vaguely remembered by those under age 7 at the time”.
I appreciate Twenge’s taxonomy because it provides a rationale like this one. That doesn’t mean “generations” can be found in nature. They’re social constructs of a weaker variety, for sure. But they’re helpful for understand trends and cultural transitions. That being said, they’re fragile. In many ways, when I was younger I shared in the optimism that was characteristic of the mid-2000s Millennial but as I’ve aged I’ve hardened in many ways that might place me among stereotypical Gen X’ers. I was born in 1982, so depending on who you ask, I’m one of the first Millennials. (Twenge marks 1980 as the start for Millennials.) But when I meet people born in the early to middle 90s, I have sometimes felt like there’s no way we’re from the same generational cohort. Often, I relate closer to the slightly older than me Gen X folk in my circles. So, let’s continue to embrace the subjectivity while respecting the effort made by people like Twenge, who organize generations around important methodological markers like major changes in technology (e.g. TV; home appliances; AC; birth control; computers; the Internet; social media) and to a lesser extent, major events (e.g. AIDS epidemic; 9/11; the Great Recession; COVID-19 pandemic).
Maybe I’m teaching Gen Z for a couple more years. Either way, if the sociologists who study this topic are right that in marking generational divisions along lines of about every 15 years or so, then we’re about the experience some transitions in the classroom. As Twenge writes, “generational differences are based on averages,” like how much time someone spends on the Internet or a social media app. Those changes are real and it’s best to be on the look out for whatever is coming next (e.g. the AI revolution?) if we want to be prepared to educate tomorrow’s children.
Mostly, I’m writing this post so that I can have this information in one place in case I want to come back to it at a later date. But I guess this is an opportunity for me to process some of the data as well. First, I begin with the new PRRI study, “Religious Change in America”. This was the major finding:
Around one-quarter of Americans (26%) identify as religiously unaffiliated in 2023, a 5 percentage point increase from 21% in 2013. Nearly one in five Americans (18%) left a religious tradition to become religiously unaffiliated, over one-third of whom were previously Catholic (35%) and mainline/non-evangelical Protestant (35%).
This isn’t fueled by a growth in the “Nones” i.e. people who answer “nothing in particular” when asked what their religious affiliation is. Instead, it’s because we’ve seen atheist and agnostic identity double in a decade:
While the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” is similar to a decade ago (16% in 2013 to 17% in 2023), the numbers of both atheists and agnostics have doubled since 2013 (from 2% to 4% and from 2% to 5%, respectively).
This doesn’t minimize the demographic impact of Nones though. Earlier this year, Nones became the largest single block in the United States when it comes to religious affiliation: see NPR’s “Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the United States”. Many headlines make it sound like this should be a moment for Mainline Christianity to shine, especially when we read titles like Texas Public Radio’s “People say they’re leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse”. But the Mainline continues to die quickly. PRRI found, as mentioned above, that “over one-third of” the previously religiously affiliated “were…mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (35%).” The branch of Christianity that has had the most openness to LGBTQIA+ peoples is disappearing.
This appears to be due to the reality that most people who are leaving their religions are doing so because they have stopped believing the teachings of their religion, plain and simple. PRRI summarizes:
The reason given by the highest percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans for leaving their faith tradition is that they simply stopped believing in their religion’s teachings (67%).
While Evangelicals have been able to limit the bleeding since 2016, they’re not growing. As Religion News Service presented it: “Study: Unaffiliated Americans are the only growing religious group”. But the PRRI study does note that, “The net loss of members among white evangelical Protestants has declined since 2016. In 2023, white evangelical Protestants have one of the highest retention rates of all religious groups (76%), an improvement since 2016, when white evangelicals retained just two in three members (66%).”
On the whole, we’re becoming secular, even among the religious: “A slim majority of Americans (53%) say that religion is the most important (15%) or one among many important things in their lives (38%) in 2023, notably lower than it was in 2013 when 72% of Americans reported that religion was the most important thing in their lives (27%) or one among many (45%).” While only 22% of Republicans say that religion is the most important thing in their lives, increasingly, being religious and being Republican are coming to be seen as one and the same: “Americans continue to lose their religion as GOP pushes it”.
Ryan Burge, the political scientist that I’ve referenced on this blog a few times, released an interesting find last week just as all of this PRRI information was being made available. His research shows that religiosity (as measured by attending religious services) among high school seniors (which in turn reflect high schoolers, the demographic with which I work) is plummeting. Here’s his graph:
That religiosity is declining because people have stopped believing may indicate that religion is being understood as increasingly anti-intellectual or irrelevant in our scientific, Information Age. That high schoolers who attend religious services are the ones displaying the highest level of “smarts” (as measured by GPA) may push back against that. But high GPA could mean that religious families are more stable, or supportive. It could mean that the type of kid who will do well in our education system is one who can conform and regurgitate the “correct” answers. And who knows how many of these high performing religious teens remain religious during and after their college years?
Neil distinguishes factual beliefs from religious credences. If you factually believe something – for example, that there’s beer in the fridge – that belief will generally have four functional features:
(1.) It is involuntary. You can’t help but believe that there’s beer in the fridge upon looking in the fridge and seeing the beer.
(2.) It is vulnerable to evidence. If you later look in the fridge and discover no beer, your belief that there is beer in the fridge will vanish.
(3.) It guides actions across the board. Regardless of context, if the question of whether beer is in your fridge becomes relevant to your actions, you will act in light of that belief.
(4.) It provides the informational background governing other attitudes. For example, if you imagine a beer-loving guest opening the fridge, you will imagine them also noticing the beer in there.
Yesterday, as I celebrated Easter, I wondered whether most of the people with which I was saying, “He is risen!” thought of this as a factual claim along the lines of how Van Leeuwen defines factuality. (I was in an Episcopal Church, for what that’s worth.) Do they think of Jesus’ resurrection as something that’s as clear to them as the fact that if they don’t eat all day, they’ll feel unwell, and if they don’t eat for many days, they’ll die. Is their believe falsifiable in any way? Could they be convinced that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Do they live as if they know that no matter what happens in this life, resurrection awaits them in the future? Does it shape their ethics and morals, what job they work, how they spend their money, or how they raise their children? Or do they accept that their beliefs are a different category: religious credence? Back to Schwitzgebel’s summary:
(1.) Voluntary. In some sense – maybe unconsciously – you choose to have this religious credence.
(2.) Invulnerable to evidence. Factual evidence, for example, scientific evidence of the non-existence of Hell, will not cause the credence to disappear.
(3.) Guides actions only in limited contexts. For example, it doesn’t prevent you from engaging in the condemned behavior in the way a factual belief of the same content presumably would.
(4.) Doesn’t reliably govern other attitudes. For example, if you imagine others engaging in the behavior, it doesn’t follow that you will imagine God also condemning them.
I mention this because I think of Mainline Christianity as a way of practicing Christianity that’s sees the doctrines as more akin to poetic knowledge than scientific knowledge. Mainline Christianity has been a way to continue to participate in the communities and rituals that provide meaning without being forced to assent to the irrationality of fundamentalism. But the Mainline is vanishing. And I think this may mean that religion as poetic knowledge is vanishing as well. This makes me wonder whether the debate over religion, and who participates or doesn’t participate in religious community, has begun to boil down to rationalism (for lack of a better word) v. fundamentalism. People like me—people who see the doctrine of the resurrection as a poetic symbol pointing to the hope I have that we’ll experience some form of continuation after our death—may be going extinct in America. On the “rationalist” side (again, for lack of a better word), I’ll be seen as kooky because I haven’t abandoned all forms of my inherited superstition. On the fundamentalist side, I’ll be seen as heretical for doubting the literalness of Christianity’s claims. If most Nones have left because they don’t believe the doctrines any more, then this makes me think that they were told that they have to choose between these two poles and when forced to choose, they chose the rationalist worldview (and I don’t blame them). But again, the Mainline seems unable to keep people, so if they’re making space for a more poetic religiosity, is it a failure in marketing or have we arrived at the point where most people, especially younger people, feel like even poetic religion is basically a fundamentalism?
Recently it dawned on me that in a few short years I’ll be teaching so-called “Generation Alpha” (we’ve got to get better named for the post-Millennials!) but for now, my concern remains “Gen Z”. If you parent and/or work with Gen Z-ers (c. 1994/96-2010/12), I have a couple of podcast episodes worth listening to:
The argument that there’s not just correlation between smartphone and social media use and mental health but causation, and negative causation at that, seems to be strengthening.
On a slightly related note, I deleted my Twitter account today, probably for the last time. I did it back in 2016 and I don’t know why I rebooted it. It’s truly a terrible platform. If, like me, you keep your account private, then there’s almost nothing “social” about it.
Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder (New York: OR Books, 2021). (Amazon; OR Books)
I’ve started reading Žižek. But I started at the end with (what I believe is) his most recent book: Heaven in Disorder. According to a friend who is familiar with Žižek, this is one of his most readable and easy-to-understand books, so I think I made a good decision!
Mostly, it’s a collection of very short essays. Often, his essays are blog post size: three-four pages. There are a few longer essays but even those are less than twenty pages long.
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is what ties together this collection. Žižek has a lot to say about American presidential politics as well, seeing that several essays reflect on the end of the previous administration and the election of Joe Biden.
As to the name of the book: Žižek talks about how “One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: ‘There is a great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.'” I don’t know if this refers to the Chinese view of the “mandate of heaven,” but that’s secondary to how Žižek uses it. He comments (p. 1), “Mao speaks about disorder under heaven, wherein ‘heaven’, or the big Other in whatever form—the inexorable logic of historical processes, the laws of social development—still exists and discreetly regulates social chaos. Today we should talk about heaven itself as being in disorder.” For Žižek this means that even the symbolic universes that held countries and cultures together are divided. The turmoil isn’t just “on the ground,” if you will but in the fact that “heaven is divided into two spheres” in a way that is similar to the Cold War, except that there’s one major difference (p. 2). He says, “The divisions of heaven today appear increasingly drawn within each particular country. In the United States, for instance, there is an ideological and political civil war between the alt-Right and the liberal-democratic establishment, while in the United Kingdom there are similarly deep divisions, as were recently expressed in the opposition between Brexiteers and anti-Brexiteers…Spaces for common ground are ever diminishing, mirroring the ongoing enclosure of physical public space, and this is happening at a time when multiple intersecting crises mean that global solidarity and international cooperation are more needed than ever.” (p. 2) In other words, the pandemic demanded global unity but even within nations, there’s no unity: “heaven” is torn in two.
It’s a great collection. It’s thought-provoking as always and easy to read, as my friend noted, and as I’m recognizing as I’ve dived into The Sublime Object of Ideology, which takes a lot more work!
The blog of Brian LePort 