- Hi, I'm Kirk Swenson here at Ideas Fest in Asheville, North Carolina.

In this next program, we discuss the impact of religion on American democracy.

Hear from educators, authors, and religious leaders in this next panel discussion, - [Narrator] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[soothing music] - For a long time, US history didn't really pay much attention at all to religion, didn't see religion as an important factor in public life.

Didn't see it as a factor driving history or driving change.

And then in 2004, George W. Bush got reelected, and that drove change in the historical profession.

Suddenly, historians, many of whom were really surprised about the reelection of George W. Bush, started to investigate, try to figure out what was driving the so-called values voters.

Folks who were coming to the polls, bringing their faith with them into the kind of public arena.

And over the last 20 plus years, historians have been doing all of this digging into the many connections between religion and public life.

And frankly, they've found those connections everywhere.

Not just in sort of what the clergy is saying, but in everyday life.

The ways that faith is motivating behavior and community life for, you know, everyone from housewives to activists to businessmen and more.

And not just in conservative evangelical worlds where we've often seen kind of news coverage, but in terms of a kind of religious left, a kind of wide ranging.

Obviously, we have a remarkably pluralistic public square in terms of religion in the United States these days.

And it's very much at the fore right now as we head directly into the heart of an election season.

Somehow I found four friends who are willing to sit up here with me in the middle of this really important moment and violate all the conventional wisdom about what you're supposed to talk about, imply company, and think through this complicated intersection of faith and public life.

So it's really a privilege and a pleasure to be here today with these four folks.

Introduce them in alphabetical order then, and then we'll kick off this conversation.

Rabbi Elan Babchuck is the Executive Vice President at CLAL, which is the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

Elizabeth Dias is the National Religion Correspondent for the New York Times.

And I'll just mention because it just came out, author of a fantastic new book called "The Fall of Roe," which is certainly weaving religion deeply into the fabric of the story about reproductive rights in this country.

Cherie Harde is the President of the Trinity Forum based in DC, and Dr. Celene Ibrahim, who's on faculty in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at the Groton School.

You can find their full bios and all of the important work that they're doing in your program.

I wanna start with the hard stuff.

- Let's do it.

- So we know that at its worst, religion can be corrosive of democracy.

There's been so much coverage, and I'm gonna come to you first, Elizabeth, on this.

In recent years about surging Christian nationalism.

We could talk about what that is, and what that means, but certainly, especially since January 6th, where we saw folks carrying Christian nationalist symbols into the United States Capitol Building on that day.

Just in the last few weeks, there's been, New York Times has covered the new Apostolic Reformation.

I don't know if this is a group that's familiar to you, but a group that really sees sort of Christian dominion in contradiction of a separation of church and state as a goal to be sought after.

And then very recently, actually, the flag that that group has embraced, the Appeal to Heaven flag, flying at Supreme Court Justices home, vacation home in New Jersey.

I wanna start with you, Elizabeth, and just tee up, you know, what are you seeing?

We're in June of an election year.

What do you see when we talk about Christian nationalism, what are we talking about and what are you seeing as you sort of survey the nation at this moment?

- This is such an important topic and conversation, so I'm glad we're starting with this.

You know, Christian nationalism as a term actually isn't one that I use in my reporting, mostly because of issues that you're saying about.

What does this actually mean in practical terms.

It's kind of become a slogan, a catchphrase that can mean a lot of different things.

And I think especially in reporting about complicated issues, it's very important to be very precise about the language.

So what I do write about and explore are questions of Christian power and what does that look like, and how might that look differently from what might be a common conception of just, you know, instituting theocracy or kind of lessons from history about what Christian power has looked like.

And it's important to know every culture has its own expression of this, right?

It's not, history may have repeated themes, but it's not always identical and you can miss a lot if you're just sort of expecting the exact same pattern to come out.

But we see a lot of expressions of conservative Christian power.

And it's important to explain this is a certain interpretive set of ideas about what Christianity should be, right?

This isn't, we could probably debate this a lot, but there isn't just one Christianity, right?

There's many Christianities across time and cultures.

And so in our country, in the United States right now, there has been an increasingly powerful strategic network of conservative Christians who are working to remake American culture aligned with their Christian values.

And we even, I mean, not just the examples that you mentioned, but we're seeing this even yesterday with the state of Louisiana passing a law requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public schools.

So there is, and I talk about this a bit in our book, "The Fall of Roe."

The way in which conservative Christian power brokers from lobbyists you don't even know, working for state, led by state legislatures across the country, all the way up to justices of the Supreme Court.

There is a sophisticated network that is finding ways to pull levers of power to change America.

And they talk about this as reclaiming what they see as the Christian foundation of this country.

That is not how majority of of Americans see it.

So this is a central theme that is critical to understand, if you wanna understand how America's politics are changing.

- And obviously even before sort of Christian nationalism came into the public eye as a term that is sort of popping up everywhere.

We've been hearing for a longer time about American evangelicalism.

And sometimes I think these days those terms get conflated.

Cherie, you work with evangelicals, you are really active in this conversation on faith and public life.

And I wonder if you can bring some light here.

- Sure, well, thank you, Heath, and great to be here.

One thing I'll just note is just as Elizabeth was saying, the term Christian nationalism tends to get thrown around a lot.

Its definition can be somewhat murky.

In many ways the term evangelical is the same way in that historically evangelical has been a credal term.

There was even what was called the Bebbington's quadrilateral, which some of you may have heard of, which kind of outlined some of the different credal beliefs associated with evangelicalism, including the centrality of Christ, the importance of sharing one's faith and the like.

In many ways recently, what it means to be an evangelical, much less a Christian nationalist, has become increasingly muddled in that the term increasingly is a tribal one, rather than a credal one.

And often refers to people with a vague sense that God is good along with a certain kind of voting pattern and political belief.

So you add kind of Christian nationalism on top of that.

Christianity is not Christian nationalism.

And again, the definitions can be somewhat murky, but usually we apply the Christian nationalist label to people who believe that not only was the country kind of founded as a Christian nation, but it's very important that it remains so.

And then you have a more extreme version of that called dominionism, which holds that it is important for Christians to seek leadership positions in the various sectors, including government.

And the very far end of that, you would have a more extreme Christian extremism.

One of the things I really wanna say is that some, is that there are many Christians who are pushing back against notions of dominionism and any kind of extremism.

And I think some of the really most kind of gripping and important books have come from folks like Paul Miller writing "The Religion of American Greatness," or Tim Alberta of "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory."

Or even Elizabeth Neumann's new book, "The Kingdom of Rage," who articulating that, you know, Jesus words, that the kingdom is not of this world in terms of essentially opposing some of those who believe that the kingdom is very much of this world.

So yes, one last thing I'll say is in many ways it's very unhelpful to equate Christianity with Christian nationalism.

And have heard different things.

Recently there was an NBC interview where the person kind of marveled in a fairly disdainful tone that there are people who actually believe that their rights came from God.

And it's not just Christian nationalists who believe that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

So Christianity is broad and expansive, and Christian nationalism is just a small sliver of that.

That's not to say that a small sliver can't have a lot of impact.

- Yeah.

- But still a small sliver.

- Can I follow up just briefly here?

'Cause I mean, Elizabeth, you said that there is sort of a growing movement, a significant movement that's sort of seeking power through your sort of wanting to make a distinction.

And can you give us any sense of the proportion, like how big is the movement that you're tracking in your coverage?

- It's a minority of the country.

The statistics, I don't know, I hesitate to give an exact number.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- But I think there's size and then there's power, right?

And so you can have a minority that has outsized power.

And even, it's the question of what evangelicals are, right?

And even that question, it's very hard.

It's very hard to know, so when you have to look at actions.

So one, for example, the percentage of people who, American adults who want abortion, for example, to be completely outlawed at, you know, life begins at conception and there should be no exceptions.

That's small, it's like 8% right now.

That's one one example.

- Yeah.

- That size.

- Yeah, yeah.

Helpful.

Celene, I wanna get you in on here.

I mean, so I know you think about similar dynamics in your own community.

Can you give us a little bit of a sense of, you know, your perspective on religion nationalism this moment?

- Well, it's a pleasure to be here and with my fellow panelists.

I'll talk a little bit from my role of what I'm seeing as a religious leader and then as a scholar.

And I tend to bounce back and forth between those to try to compliment the picture here.

What I'm seeing as a religious leader is in the US there's a number of very active civic Muslim organizations who are modeling themselves in terms of what we've seen from other political groups that want to get involved proactively in bringing values that come out of our religious tradition to the public discourse.

And we're looking as people who are millennial leaders in particular, to figure out how we do this through the democratic institutions that are in place in this country.

And so, for instance, I was trained, and I do trainings in my own religious circles, from an institute called the Polygon Institute, which takes basically Islamic values and thinks about where do these values intersect with the public conversations that we're having right now in the US.

And this is a form of activism that is inspired out of a faith commitment.

And for me, it's exciting to see many Muslim groups and congregations getting involved in these types of networks and really figuring out what does that mean to bring faith values into the public conversation.

So that's what I'm seeing domestically, I think it's a very exciting space.

What I'm seeing when I look abroad in some of the conflict driven places is that we find a type of political Islam that is again, interested in power in a way that is not to my more scholarly mind necessarily inherent in the fundamentals of religion.

And so I see religion as a way to transform consciousness, to bring values of introspection and compassion.

And when we sometimes translate this then to political systems that are more interested in control and in kind of totalitarian systems, it's very easy to have this phenomenon of group think.

And we don't just see this in places where we see Islam as the majority religion, but of course, this is to your original question, this is part of the danger that we find in religious affiliations.

That it's used to suppress descent.

It could be used to suppress religious descent or, you know, political descent or in religious descent within a majority groups within a dominant paradigm of a religion.

So I'm less hopeful when I assess the overall kind of global picture, even though I think for Muslim organizations, the US context is very dynamic and very vibrant and healthy.

- Yeah, so I mean, it's striking to me, religion is so much in the public eye right now.

There are these ways in which you can see that vibrancy at the grassroots.

And at the same time we know religious institutions.

I mean, there's this kind of really pressing questions right now for religious institutions, for religious communities all over the country and the world that have to do with sort of the challenges facing institutions more broadly.

We know younger generations have different ways of affiliating, of understanding belonging.

And one of the ways that that's cashed out, certainly here in the US is the rise of the nones, N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S.

The nones who are a really rapidly growing sector in American life, of folks who are not necessarily atheists, they're not necessarily secular.

There's been a lot of work done on this rising demographic.

But they're folks who, if you ask them what denomination or religious tradition they affiliate with, they say none, hence the name.

And we're trying to figure out, scholars have been trying to figure it out.

Certainly folks in religious communities all over this country are trying to figure out what to make of the nones.

So Elan, I wanna come to you first on this one, and help us to think about what's going on.

What does it mean?

How should we read this development?

- There's a couple of different ways that we can tell the story.

- Yeah.

- That we colloquially call, it's like very insider language to label a whole bunch of people about a third of America, as nones.

As like, you all are just, but nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Ah, I'm unaffiliated again."

Like, right?

[audience laughing] So like, people don't identify themselves by what they're not, right?

They tend to wanna identify themselves by what they are, by what they do believe, by what they do represent, where they do go.

And so, I think, you know, first I just wanna apologize, you know, but that's the language we're gonna use colloquially, so I'll own it.

The first version of the story is this, we are about 15 years running in which annually 10,000 churches close in America, right?

And that's of a base number of about 344,000 back in 2010.

So numbers don't look great, right?

From those numbers, you had not a growth industry, right?

You might also look at the rise of the rise of the nones, right?

This group that identifies having no religion has tripled in size since the 1990s.

It's the majority, the largest religious group, the fastest growing religious group in America, the largest religious group among Gen Z and millennials.

So you can look at that set of statistics and you would say, "Well, we had a good run.

You know, it's over."

Okay, and I'm not gonna pay my dues this year because it's throwing good money after bad, whatever you might say.

That's a fair conclusion to come to.

I think there are other versions of the story though, right?

So the first is, yes, there was a pretty steep decline among millennials.

Now the millennial generation has a very good reason, multiple good reasons for having lost faith in faith, based on when they were formed, some of the major events that were happening around the time that their formation was taking place.

And Gen Z didn't have those same impacts.

So we look now at Gen Z for example, 68% of Gen Z identifies as at least somewhat religious.

So instead of having this, we're falling off a cliff moment.

It was actually just kind of, maybe there was a bump with millennials and Gen Zs are back on the way up, 77% identify as spiritual, 42% attend services weekly of Gen Z.

The ones who were supposed to be totally gone from religion.

So there is, okay, now there's another story that we can start to begin to craft.

By the way, religion is still the biggest business in America.

The World Economic Forum estimates religion is about a $1.2 trillion industry in the country, which at least, as of 2020, would've made it bigger, brought in more revenue than the top 10 tech companies combined, all right?

So you can say, "Wow, that sounds like it's kind of a growth industry."

So we can hold both sides and those, they're both partially true, but here's where I think as relating to this conversation about how it, what does all of that have to say about politics?

The first thing is this.

Even though we're at about 47% of Americans are members of a religious community, right?

47%, that's the lowest it's been since we've been measuring it.

It's about 70% in 1999, okay?

So the numbers going down.

Still, religion is the number one organizing mode, the number one shaper of identity and community of anything else, let alone the number one hamster wheel towards the voting booth in America.

So we have to take it really seriously and ask ourselves, How can we look at that as a real opportunity to engage people in civic life, right?

To become a body politic or a number of bodies politic.

And the last thing I'll say about the nones is that to identify people based on what they're not is largely a failure of the sociological categories that we're trying to use.

So it would be like asking, "It would be like saying, you know what?

The entertainment industry is dead.

You know how I know the entertainment industry is dead?

Because nobody rented a movie from Blockbuster last night."

It's over, we had a good run, right?

So that's not the case.

The truth is that people are practicing faith, religion, spirituality in new ways that we don't even yet know how to measure, it is emergent.

They are finding meaning and inspiration in ways and places and from people who might not be ordained.

They might not be talking about religion, right?

So I'm gonna give you a couple of examples of where that's happening, right?

If we brought in the category of what we mean by religion, this is my last, right?

Religion, maybe it's an organizing, organizing idea that has rituals with people taking pilgrimages that has liturgy, a certain choreography, scripture, shared belief.

You know, what's a religion?

Being a Swifty.

You wanna know how I know that?

58 million voting age Americans identify as Swifties.

Okay, that means fans of Taylor Swift.

And my daughter's only eight, she doesn't vote yet, but she would be 58 million and one, okay?

32 million identify as part of a BeyHive, fans of Beyonce.

Now this is where it gets a little more sinister.

60 million true believers in QAnon, okay?

And if you tell me that those are not religion, that they don't have practices, rituals, liturgy, ideology, choreography, and a set of practices and beliefs that holds them together as a community.

So now the question is how do we take that more seriously?

What would it look like to have an interfaith dialogue between a conservative Jewish rabbi and a Swifty?

And I mean that, that's not tongue in cheek.

I mean that really seriously because for the members of every one of those groups, they are dead serious.

And it really genuinely gives them meaning in life, and purpose every single day that they get out of bed.

So the more seriously we can take those folks, not identifying them as none, but as something very serious, I think the more that we can elevate their dignity and bring them into a much broader conversation that needs to be had.

- Please.

- Can I just kind of double click on something that Elon just said?

- Yeah.

- A part of what makes religion so tempting to authoritarians and people who would like to essentially channel or hijack that energy and that power is that it does provide authority, and meaning, and purpose to so many people, and would be authoritarians would really like to hijack that.

And when people are not finding that meaning, that purpose, that truth in that community through organized religion, they will go looking for it in different ways.

And just as Elon was saying, they'll go looking for it, whether it's, you know, concerts or the like, but they'll also look for it through politics.

And I think one of the trends that we have seen over the last decade in particular is the extent to which people increasingly ground their identity in the political rather than the religious.

One example of this is, it used to be quite common to marry outside of your party, but very uncommon to marry outside of your faith.

In the last 10 years that has completely reversed.

It is now much more likely to marry outside of your faith than outside of your party.

And when more of our sense of identity and purpose gets rooted in the political and in partisan combat, that's actually, I would argue, not a great thing for democracy.

And you know, you see all of that political combat play out on social media, just the norms are different.

And I think one of the things that we've seen is as we have become as a country kind of less connected to each other, and again, usually churches, synagogues, mosque, and the like, we're a primary way of doing that.

As we have become more disconnected and our politics have become more central and identitarian, they've also become more dysfunctional and even apocalyptic.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Celene, if you want to, - Well, what I- - Jump in on this one?

- What I'm seeing as a religious leader is that trying to think into this current moment using the tools of the tradition to really speak to the current moment.

It's difficult because on the one hand, as a religious leader, part of your authority comes from having legitimacy in the past that you're bringing to the present.

And so to be new, or creative, or to speak to the present moment in ways that actually break down the divides, it's risky.

You could get canceled, you could get de-legitimized, isolated.

And oftentimes for religious leaders, their whole system of meaning making is connected to a tradition, so they have so much to lose if they're collectively ostracized.

But I feel this tension in my own work.

I do feminist theory, I think about women and gender and Islam.

And on the one hand there's so many tools that I'm drawing from the legacy that is so rich in the past tradition.

But I also have to bring people gently to speak to the present moment in ways that don't just replicate the past.

And so I think this, I feel that most acutely in the areas that I work in, but I think so many religious leaders are in this position where if they, you know, try to make alliances, or take a different line, this requires them potentially losing their community, losing their platform.

And so one of the strengths that I find is actually in inter religious networks where you can find maybe a bolstering from people who are also having to steer their communities in slightly new ways.

So that's one of the things that's exciting me amidst all this fracturing, is this possibility for new alliances, and creativity, and a redefining of values that are not myopic, but that are thinking about what we share and what we can build together.

- On that building together point.

I think, I mean, in some ways this question, and the last one are connected.

I mean, so I appreciate the kind of glass half full perspective here, Elan.

And I think it's worth wrestling with, and I think a lot of the kind of nostalgia for an earlier period is also can be quite misplaced.

At the same time, we know that, you know, and I work at a Presbyterian seminary in New Jersey where we have really a changing kind of, our student body has really shifted over the last generation.

And it would've been a generation ago that everyone who came to Princeton Seminary would've wanted to go on, almost everyone wanted to be a member of the clergy.

These days our students are just gripped by questions about God and meaning in the ways that I think you're suggesting, but look much more askant at institutional participation, institutional leadership as a way to live out their values.

And I think about that in the context, and this came up in a couple of your remarks, of Hyperpolarization today.

And the ways that at their best congregations, synagogues, religious communities, can be places where people come together.

It was a great book a couple decades ago by a sociologist, "The Restructuring of American Religion," which tracked exactly the kind of thing that Cherie is talking about here.

Where it used to be that, you know, your denominational affiliation really mattered.

And if you were Methodist, you know, Methodists came together in church across political divides because they were Methodists.

And Robert Wuthnow in that book tracked how, and it's something that's certainly really accelerated in recent years.

The kind of political identities have become the primary identity.

And so people tend to worship now with folks that already agree with them politically and they don't find themselves.

So I want to think here with you all for a moment about kind of religion and polarization in this moment.

Obviously many of you are involved in interfaith work or observing interfaith stuff.

And I wonder what you see as the future for that.

I wonder, I mean, I know again, back in my world that one of the, you know, the great resignation of the last five years, one of the things driving it for Christian clergy is hyperpolarization.

And people just during the pandemic and the kind of controversy over mask and all this kinda stuff, it just drove people out because they couldn't manage to the extent that there was difference in their communities, they couldn't manage it and they couldn't live with it.

So I wonder to what extent you all see, you know, either in your reporting, Elizabeth, or in your work around religious communities, the others of you, religion as a thing that can bridge divides as opposed to exacerbate divides, which is what I think we more often hear about?

I'll open that up to anyone who wants to take it.

It's a toughie.

Yeah, please.

- I'll jump in, one thing I'll say, just to kind of double click on what you just said is, yes, there are a lot of pastors right now who are really struggling.

There's like a Barna survey and Barna was kind of like Gallup for kind of, for Christians in the sense.

And it found that 40% last year of pastors had seriously considered leaving within the last year.

The top three reasons were loneliness, stress, and polarization.

And, you know, they're in the very hard work of trying to keep together diverse congregations, and all that to say is, be nice to your pastor.

But, you know, but one thing I wanted to mention just in regards to Heath's question is one of, I think, the incredibly positive things about faith communities is that you are presumably gathered together out of a shared love.

Increasingly in politics, the coalitions that form are gathered together around shared hates or antipathies.

- Yes.

- And it's a, it's a phenomenon called affective polarization in politics.

It's the easiest way to get a coalition together, frankly.

Is, you know, rallying around something you all can't stand.

And that can be really good for social media engagement.

And it is really bad in terms of building social and civic capital and relationships in real life.

And so I think just by their very nature of gathering people with a shared love, you know, among Christians, a love of God, a love of neighbor, this is a pro-social thing.

And you'll actually see that kind of reflected in a lot of the literature as well.

People who go to church but also participate in synagogue and mosque.

They are more likely, you know, to give to charity, to volunteer, to know their neighbor.

People who are very involved with social media.

And so much of, of course, political kind of activity is all online, are actually less involved to give, to volunteer, to be involved, to know their neighbor.

So I think just by their very nature and by their very mission, the church being the church is a helpful thing to combating polarization because it's necessarily personal, it's necessarily oriented towards shared loves.

And it is inevitably gathers a group of people who disagree with each other, who have to figure out a way to get along at least enough to worship with each other.

- Can I just follow up briefly there on that and ask you, so I really resonate with a lot of what you're saying there.

And I also know for you in this moment, like this is a, this is a hard time to navigate these conversations.

And can you speak to what extent are there folks in and around, you know, kind religious communities today who are looking to tear down bridges, even though those possibilities for bridge building exists?

- Yeah, they are there.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- That is very clear.

- Yeah.

- Yes, you know, I think part of the reason so many pastors are, you know, on the verge of quitting is because it has become so difficult.

- Yeah.

- And you know, something that Elizabeth was saying earlier, it doesn't take a lot of people, you know, you can have a small group of pirates or berserkers or whatever who, you know, really create a lot of havoc within an organization, not just a faith-based organization, but others.

And, you know, I think there's often a group dynamic where if a small number of people are kind of intent on really pushing their way, most people kind of want to get along.

They're kind of curious, you know, they're not, you know, kind of all sold out for one agenda.

And so there's a sense of, you know, perhaps not getting involved or, you know, maybe we can pacify them.

And so it is a hard time.

And those of us who are in bridge building work, you know, there's a lot of incoming, you know?

In many ways the act of being a bridge builder, it's a dangerous work 'cause I think in culture wars, like in land wars, bridges are usually the first things targeted.

But at the same time, I think it's just, it's incredibly important in this time.

- One of the things that's exciting me about the space of inter religious engagement is the learning opportunities.

Because again, we find that there's both, when we think about democracy and religion, there's a deficit of public understanding about religion and about the mechanisms of democracy.

And when we're in these relationships, whether we're focusing on a third thing like homelessness, or healthcare, or whatever the social cause is, there's an organic bond that forms between the players in these networks for social good.

And so that's exciting me about the potential of this space.

And as the US is becoming more and more, and this is your territory, but the business spaces infused with this realization that religion matters to so many people.

Spirituality matters to so many people.

So it's not something that we can just kinda push away and not talk about or not study.

And I do get worried about the state of our education in terms of what are we teaching about religion and spirituality, metaphysics, what are we teaching about civic life?

Where is the younger generation supposed to be getting their knowledge if these topics have become taboo or so polarized that there's not a plethora of sources to learn from.

- I'm thinking about something that Keisha Lance Bottoms said a couple nights ago, which was that when people get along, it doesn't make the news.

And I wonder, Elizabeth, from your perspective, I mean, I read the New York Times religion coverage, I think a lot about these issues, and certainly we see religion showing up a lot around conflict, makes sense.

I wonder if in your work, you see, do you see interfaith cooperation popping up?

Do you see, also do you see religious and I often think that we get in the national news these days because of the prominent role that religious communities and folks have played on the right.

Sometimes, you know, religious engagement and progressive causes can get lesser attention.

So I wonder whether you agree with that?

Whether you see a lot of vibrancy in terms of those interface spaces, progressive religious spaces.

What do you notice?

- Well, part of the job of the reporter is to cover like action and impact.

- Yeah.

- Right, where there's limited even though there's so much news.

I'm sure everyone is very exhausted by all of the news that everyone is confronted with all of the time.

You still have to pick, right?

That's the choice about what is most urgent for the public to know about, where the developments and changes happening.

And the, especially over the last decade, the change, right?

The action, the money, the influence, the cultural transformation is being driven by conservative, especially Christian actors.

And there's a lot to be covered there.

You know, sometimes people ask, "Well, where are the good news stories?"

Right, like, "Why is it always bad news all the time?"

And I think if there are wildfires, like you have to cover that your land is burning, like, I don't know, I'm not entirely sure what else to say about that.

And there has to be ways of measuring impact.

I mean, I do think like if you had asked that question 10, 15 years ago, it would've sounded different, right?

The time I was covering the rise of President Barack Obama.

And there was a lot of change.

I mean, I remember the stories.

It was, "Look at the progressive change in American Christianity, look at the interfaith work."

And it turns out right now, I mean, we'll see but that was a shorter timeframe.

Like it was not linear, right?

Like that was a pocket in this massive, massive power of conservative Christianity and the backlash to a lot of that, what looked then like increasing pluralism.

- I think a little bit about though Shawn Fain, who's the head of the UAW, who's been really interesting, I don't know how much you followed the UAW's recent organizing campaigns, but he has talked so extensively about his own faith and the ways that his faith motivates his union activism.

I think about the representatives in Tennessee last year who were expelled from the legislature.

And- - Covered extensively.

- Covered extensively.

- From a religious perspective - Totally.

- As well.

- Totally, but to think about where do those moments where religion seems to come up in those spaces, what's going on in kinda the everyday level such that those don't sort of seem almost weird, you know, where we sort of understand conservative religion, but does that make sense?

- Well, those are anomalies.

- Interesting, interesting.

- Right.

I mean.

- Yeah.

- Everyone remembers it 'cause that was such a powerful moment in Tennessee, right?

It stands out.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting, so, okay, I wanna keep moving, but that there's more to say on that.

Celene, you wanna?

Yeah, yeah.

- I think there's also a need for religious leaders themselves and folk who are doing this great work in bridge building to learn how to tell their stories in compelling ways.

We can't just sit back and wait for someone to discover what we're doing.

And that could be through all different types of media.

I know, you're also thinking about this space as well.

But we have to be proactive in creating stories that people are uplifted by, that they can see that there are other options out there for how to be a person inspired by values and building networks.

So we can't let just the stories of gloom and doom dominate.

We have to keep creating our own.

- Yeah.

- One other just piece of context that I toss into this conversation, we're mostly talking about two macro institutions of religion and politics.

But, and you briefly touched on this, but there is a third enormously important institution that's affecting this conversation right now.

And that is the internet.

And the complete revolution that is this technology.

I mean, if you look back historically at key moments for religion and politics, just look, you know, you have the invention of the printing press.

You have then the transformation of Europe, right?

And complete, like the invention of the nation state, and the Protestant reformation.

So, and these things, the timescale of that is a hundred plus, you know, 200 years, right?

And we are just at the very, very beginning of something.

We're like 2, 3 decades in, right?

So to something that is unfolding that is dramatically restructuring all of society and how everybody functions, right?

Not just how you get information, but when you think about the disruption that a technological revolution, like the printing press or the internet is creating, I think it's valuable to take, this is the work of historians also, but to take that step back and think about the moment we're actually in and to take it in, frankly like a pretty sober way.

Like there's the micro discussion of bridge building, right?

In local community, but it's happening in this enormous, I mean, that terrain has left the station.

Like there is just like limited control that any one person or institution has over where the future of democracy, religion, any of it is going.

- I think I have a couple thoughts about it.

And the internet thing I think is so important as sort of as a institution, right?

Among these other two.

If you use Google Ngram, right?

Google, it's a tool that Google offers that tells you in, you know, in the history of this published, of published works, here's how often this word shows up.

So you do Google Ngram, you pick the word and words like unprecedented, best, worst, right?

Those are at an all time high if you use Google Ngram.

And part of that is because historic, everything is historic.

Like, you know, you go to espn.com, you're trying to find out what the sports score was.

Everything's historic.

This was the first time that something has ever, everything is the first time something has ever happened, right?

But we wanna feel like this is a historic moment.

Now, the challenge when we look at the world through that lens is it creates such remarkable deep anxiety among every single person.

Because if this is a historic moment, then the next thing you do has the potential to change history.

Wow, that's a lot of pressure to put, especially on young people who are the ones that are immersed and being raised by these technologies for the most part, right?

So I think, you know, in my experience, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

And yes, this moment of the internet is absolutely unprecedented.

You can quote me on that.

And it's not gonna make the news, okay?

It's not gonna make the news.

And I have a deep and abiding faith that we've been here before.

And that we have tools to have made it through this kind of thing before, right?

Folks love to say, "We've never been this divided in the country, right?"

Have you studied the Civil War?

Okay, like, yes, all of that is absolutely true.

It is true in our moment right now.

But what we need to do as leaders, as practitioners, as people who consume the news, write the news, engage in the news, or just talk to our neighbors, is to actually stretch the bounds of our historical narrative.

Yes, if you only have a memory, right?

If we're like elephants and you have a memory of one year, yeah.

This is the worst day of the year, right?

Yeah, this is the first time that's ever happened.

This is historic, this is unprecedented.

But what if we stretch that narrative out to 20 years, or 40 years?

And this is part of why religious communities are suffering so much because they've stopped, not only have they stopped being diverse places, but they're no longer multi generational, right?

You know what gives a young person real confidence when they're going through a hard time?

Talking to an 80-year-old who has gone through 10 hard times, right?

And someone who cares for them.

In fact, and I know the mental health and young people as a whole different conversation, but I'm on the advisory board for a research institute called Spring Tide Research Institute.

We focus on young people, mental health, and spirituality, right?

And what they found was that for young people who are experiencing mental health crisis, which is about 40% of Gen Z, having one trusted adult in their lives lowers their risk for self-harm by 40%, okay?

And we're not in those communities right now.

What we need to do is stretch the historical narrative, stretch the arc of people's memories, and then not only will our ability to look back become stronger, but our ability to expand our own moral horizons will grow exponentially.

Yes, we're in an unprecedented time.

There's no arguing that, and we have historical precedents that can at least give us guidance, hope, nourishment, and faith that wherever it is that we're going can be brighter than where we are now.

- This is why we need religious leaders.

- We talked about this before that.

Yeah, let's get a round of applause there.

All right.

[audience applauding] We knew we were gonna run out of time and not have time to get to everywhere we wanted to go.

I wanna open up the conversation and invite you all into it.

So if you can, please, I think people have said this in every session.

Make your question a question, make it brief, so that we can hopefully get as many questions into the mix as we can in the time we have remaining.

I'll start right here.

- Good afternoon, thank you so much for your work done.

This is Strong Robinson.

As someone who's deeply invested in this work, I'm very interested in expanding the conversation a little bit.

And the question is, what role do you think power, patriarchy, and racism, specifically anti-blackness has in this conversation?

- Anyone want to?

- Sure.

I can talk.

I'm happy to hop in.

It's interesting, I was thinking especially about the patriarchy part of your question throughout this conversation, but that's also because I've been just finished writing this book about the fall of Roe.

Which is, yes, it's about abortion, but it's about really the role of conservative Christianity and power in America, and what that has meant for women.

And I think it is helpful to talk more about, I'm trying to think about what question it would've been from, from this conversation to redirect it, but the way that religion and politics, that intersection, the way each is being reshaped, what that means for the future of being a woman in America is, I mean, it's like at the heart of so much of it.

I mean, I think that the history that we wrote about in the book shows the influence of conservative Christianity on politics, specifically learning how to pull levers of power in order to change futures for American women and families specifically, right?

So until, I think, so much of the public conversation, it feels very male.

Like January 6th was a very male like, or event.

I mean, having covered it, you can see it's one thing and we, one thing to say, "Oh my goodness.

Like look at this Christian takeover."

Like, coming literally for the capitol and this kind of thing.

But it's easy to identify, right, in many ways.

'cause it's like happening on all of your TV screens and there's like, massive invasions going on of the capitol.

But the way in which power worked with a similar like ideological value set, like that conservative Christian network that was into election denial and supporting former President Trump that led to January 6th, right?

The values, the ideas about Christian government, how Christian values should shape America, those are the same ones that played out in a more behind the scenes way often for reshaping the futures for American women and families.

And it's easy to just focus on these massive often, like male coded events, like January 6th, instead of doing the longer term work of paying, like to those nuances of how that same power can dramatically reshape lives for women.

- I can jump in briefly on anti-blackness and just say that's been a huge theme in the scholarship on Christian nationalism in recent years.

Obviously, we don't have time to get into to sort of all of the depths of it, but I would highly recommend if you're looking for a kind of accessible treatment of that theme, Jemar Tisby's book, "The Color of Compromise" really does a nice job of laying out the connections between white Christian communities and anti-blackness in American history.

It's a good read and an accessible and an open one come.

- Hi, before I ask my question, Rabbi, would you mind restating your definition of religion?

That you mentioned earlier?

- Oh, yeah.

- It's important to the question, so.

- Yeah, I mean, I think, you know what I did is I sort of gave categories inside, that help us.

- Okay.

Yeah.

- Identify if it's a religion, like does it have rituals?

Does it give people space to make meaning, find their purpose?

Do people take pilgrimages?

Is there liturgy, choreography, scripture?

Sort of just give, you know, an idea.

- I think that's a very good functional way of looking at it.

- Yeah.

- I think that one thing that's missing there is that it's often, it either functions as or is framed as a one stop shop for fulfilling every need and answering every question, that's how it's treated.

And so that's where my question comes in, because the foundation of democracy, you know, E Pluribus Unum, "Out Of Many, One" seems to be the exact opposite of that.

It seems to necessitate many perspectives, many points of view, many people acting in different directions.

So how can we more effectively emphasize, I wrote this down so that I wouldn't ramble.

How can we more effectively emphasize and illuminate our intersecting and overlapping identities within and between these religious frameworks, especially when silencing dissent and seeking kind of supremacy, for lack of a better term, seems to be baked in, right?

If it's a one stop shop, that's one stop.

But there are many, many other stops.

- I think maybe functionally a lot of this has to do with the construction of religion as institutions, right?

And that's a much more modern framework for religion than perhaps was initially intended.

And I'll speak just personally, you know, from the Jewish faith that was never, I think, the design or the intention, you know, perhaps in like biblical Judaism when we're talking about sacrificing goats, yeah, there's kind of one place you do that, you know?

And it's in, there's only one person who does it, the high priest.

He wasn't really democratized concept, but after the destruction of the temple, right?

Everything became decentralized in fact.

And the goal was actually to equip every single person to find meaning, to understand, to interpret the tradition, to teach others, in fact, that's why we didn't even write down scripture because it had to be an oral tradition that was given through relationship, right?

So if you look through the Talmud, for example, right?

The Talmud is sort of a codified text of all of the ramblings and conversations that the rabbis had over hundreds of years as they were trying to ask some of the same questions that we're asking today, right?

What is this thing supposed to be?

And there were 5,000 arguments in the Talmud.

And you know how many get answered?

You know how many get come to an actual conclusion?

50, right?

So you can either look at that as we have a 1% success rate, right?

Or you can say, "No, actually we have a 99% success rate."

Because the key, the fundamental truth about all of that is we learned how to disagree, right?

We learned how to disagree among one another, among our neighbors, right?

To actually love our neighbors doesn't mean to agree with them, but it means to love them as they are, to see them in the eyes of God, to recognize that they have infinite value, not regardless of their opinions that we disagree with, but because of them, right?

And I think the more that we can approach our neighbors that way and not think of ourselves as the one stop shop, or the answer to all questions, the less certainty, more curiosity.

That's I think, when all of our religious traditions, institutions are deinstitutionalized, centralized or decentralized, have the ability to help every single individual feel beloved in the eyes of their God or any other God.

- To underscore this point, it's to be deeply steeped within an intellectual tradition, whether it's a religious one or a political philosophy, is to be aware of all of these differences and nuances.

And this is part of what we're losing at the present moment.

But it's also, to add to your list, we could add religion as a tool for introspection.

- Yes.

- And we've also lost some of that in this opinion kind of dominated space.

And so I'd say that there's a, when we use these tools for introspection, whatever they are, meditation, prayer, reflection, there comes to be a balance between a healthy self-interest and an other interest.

And balancing that is at the heart of religion, it's at the heart of democracy, but it's this balance that I see at the core of both ideas.

- I'll just also really briefly add.

You know, part of at the core of faith is an idea of a certain epistemic humility.

- Yes.

- That is, you seek the truth, but you also have a healthy skepticism for your own ability to apprehend it fully.

And you know, the Apostle Paul talks about how he sees through a glass darkly.

We all do, I mean it's part of, at least in the Christian tradition, part of our fallen nature that we don't apprehend or perceive perfectly.

And so, you know, often the people who may try to talk about, you know, like the one stop shop, it's often their interpretation that they are pushing.

You know, as opposed to the faith itself.

- We're low on time, so I'm gonna ask if we can get the last three questions out on the table, and then we'll do our best in the few minutes we have, and we'll start here, yeah.

- Thank you, I think this question is actually a good bridge from that question.

As someone who was raised in a quite a Zionist community and am now a big Palestinian liberation activist, I'm curious if you could speak to some, like, tangible conversation, support between parents and children who, you know, are now living in a time of very, very polarized religious and political ideology?

Especially, you know, I can speak for the group of millennial and white-assimilated Jews who were disillusioned by their education around Israel, and how we can keep, you know, our connection to the spirituality and ritualism without seeping into the nuns-ness of it.

- Can we get my other two questions?

And then, we'll do our best.

- Mine is, like, in looking at other wealthy Western nations where the percentage of people identifying as religious has been low or getting lower for years, I'm curious whether are, do faith groups still try to impact democracy in the same way that they do in the US or has that changed?

- Thank you.

- Hello, hi, panelists, mother.

[panelists and audience laughing] Speaking of parent-children conversations, I'm really glad that you guys brought up the Gen Z perspective, because as probably the only person of Gen Z in this room, I'm sorry, but if you just look, there's a very disillusioned, kind of nihilistic view of religion and politics.

'Cause our generation started in 1996 onward, and there's been absolutely no religious and political conflicts since then obviously, that's called sarcasm, we use it as a coping mechanism.

[audience and panelists laughing] But if you look at America, where there's such an emphasis on, like, secularity, and secularity has to be the one to influence democracy because you see, like, politicians and governments using religion, as you spoke about in Louisiana, to influence politics, using politics to influence religion.

And you see overseas, people of totalitarian regimes using religion to influence their politics, and foreign affairs, and all that.

Do you guys actually think that there is a way to mesh religion and politics?

If it's a good idea, or is it best to keep them separate?

- Okay, we're officially in the bonus now.

So we're gonna give it just a few words on any of those questions.

- I'll take this one.

- Yeah, okay.

[panelists laughing] - I wanted dibs on that one.

- Yes, the decline of, if I'm understanding the question correctly, the decline of religion in politics, like in terms of, like you were saying in Western society, as America becomes specifically less Christian, there's less white Christian, the backlash to that is actually making more groups, conservative Christian groups especially, want to increase their political system even more because they're responding to what they perceive to be their declining power.

- I'll have a brief comment on the last question, which is it is almost impossible to keep religion and politics completely separate, because people will bring their deepest convictions to the public sphere, it's sort of how we are wired.

And I think that one of, you know, for all of its flaws, one of the great things that liberal democracy has enabled is a way to kind of sift through deep differences over ultimate questions.

Because, in many ways, before, when you had different theologies, the religious questions were political questions.

And it provided a way to kind of, you know, absorb the give and take, provide constitutional order, and provide a way forward.

And so one of the great things I think about liberal democracy is it enables and allows essentially a mix of the two that does not necessarily need to result in kind of totalization and in violence.

- And we've been having a policy-based conversation about specific issues.

If we step back and have that values-based conversation, we can have that from people who identify with a particular religious tradition and feel like they're speaking out of that tradition, or who identify conscientiously or not as nuns.

So we have to take that step back to ask not just what is your political outcome, but what are the values?

And are there other ways that we can commingle our values to come to an outcome that maybe neither one of us is advocating for, because it's a mesh of our ways of looking at the issue?

- And I'll answer, can I do 30 minutes quick on Zionism?

[audience and panelists laughing] - If you can just, 15 seconds.

- I think we can cover everything in 30, 45 minutes.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I'll answer it in two ways.

The first is, I do think it's really, there actually is no such thing as Zionism, right?

There are Zionisms.

In same way, Christianity, Christianity.

And I think it's very important to distinguish between a civic Zionism, a revolutionary Zionism, which Jabotinsky kind of co-opted and made the new Zionism, right?

Revolutionary Zionism, religious Zionism, those are all different models and visions of what Zionism originally stood for.

So the first thing I think is worth unpacking is maybe exploring eight, or nine, or 10 different historical versions of Zionism.

And the second thing I would say, and this is a tongue-in-cheek answer to a really serious question, I'll frame it this way.

I'm 42 years old, thank God, just turned 42 last week.

And if you ask me what channel I would turn on when I turn on Sirius on my radio, I want you to guess what station am I gonna listen to?

'90s on 9.

And here's why, 'cause the '90s were the best era of music.

There's no question.

[everyone laughing] No, no, no, I wanna be really serious.

Now some of you are like, "No, the '70s were," '70s were terrible.

'80s were terrible, the 2000s were terrible, 2010s are terrible, and modern music is terrible.

'90s on 9 is the only station worth listening to, okay?

And my kids believe the same thing right now because every time we're in the car, that's what we listen to.

There will come a time, and I'm dreading this, when they realize that there is other music.

[everyone laughing] Okay?

And when they come to learn that Celine Dion is not the only power ballad that one can listen to, it is gonna break my heart.

And when they have that awakening, they will wholly reject me, and I understand it and I'm ready for it.

It is the job of children, the job of parents to raise their kids in such a way that aligns with the values that they believe in most deeply, right?

And, as children come of age, it is their job to question, maybe poke holes in, and sometimes wholly reject that which their parents have taught them, right?

- John Adams- - Thank you.

- Yeah, except for Celene's daughter, right?

No.

[everyone laughing] But, what did John Adams say?

John Adams said, "If I have a son who is not liberal at age 20, I will kill him.

And if I have a son who is not conservative at age 40, I will kill him."

Meaning to say that it is our job to liberate from our parents and separate from what they taught us, this is psychologically, and sociologically, and historically true.

And then, once we come into our middle ages, to begin to try to conserve that which we believe in most.

So to answer the question really seriously, what would I do if I were engaging parent-child dialogue?

I would actually, in a really curious way, try to understand what it was that your parents did to separate from their parents, 'cause I promise you, even in their heart of hearts, "No, no, no, we did exactly what our parents did," I promise you they didn't.

- Okay, that's a great note to end on, thank you.

[audience clapping] - We hope you enjoyed this program.

I'm Kirk Swenson.

Thank you for joining us for this year's Asheville Ideas Fest.

[gentle mellow music]