Policy to the director of the office of management and budget during the Obama Administration discusses his book which country has the worlds best healthcare . Watch booktv on cspan2 this weekend. Good evening everybody and welcome to. Stretching from union square, from an original 48 stores until after over 93 years the sole survivor. Now ran by third generation. We want to thank all of you for your support, authors, book lovers and friends, without you, we would not be here today. We are excited to have a woman celebrating the release of her new book. Tara is a contributing editor, the columnist and former staff religion reporter at fox. Com. She has written on religion through national geographic, the washington post, the New York Times and more. She holds a doctorate in theology from oxford. Also a novel social creature. Joining tara to discuss her new book is ross. Ross is a columnist for the New York Times oped page. The author to change a church and a privilege. Coauthor of brand new party. He was a Senior Editor for the atlantic. The film critic for National Review and cohosts the New York Times weekly oped podcast. He lives in new haven with his wife and three children. Without further ado, please help me in welcoming tara and ross. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us here. An exciting virtual experience. Talking about a book that may be appropriate to the subject matter. Tara, thank you for letting me interrogate you. A typical thursday night. Thank you so much for being here. Just another thursday night in america. I want to make two comments before we start. In our era of covid, i have done enough events to know that sometimes people are more hesitant to ask questions when they are typing in questions than they would be at a real event when they stand up and tell the author about everything she has wrong about in the world you just have to ask me as questions for the entire hour. That is the first point. This is a challenging time for everybody. Authors are among the least challenged in many ways. Putting out a book at a moment like this is a difficult thing. I was lucky enough to squeeze in a couple weeks of promotion before all the bookstores closed. I just want to encourage you, if you are listening, watching, enjoying this, dont just buy the book. Encourage your friends to buy the book and make it the best that it deserves to be. Without further ado, lets start in with the being dumb question. This is a book about new religions. It is our really godless and if not or if so, what religions are filling that void . A spoiler alert. No, we do not live in a godless world. That is the argument i make. Sort of when we talk about a second age like we often want to deal or a World Without religion , what are we really talking about . Some background statistics, some say they are religiously unaffiliated and often preferred deal. 36 of people born in america after 1985 identify as religious none. Huge increase. All of these unaffiliated, 72 say they believe in some sort of a higher power. 20 say they actually believe in the god of the bible. We are not necessarily talking about people who are atheists, although about 60 , they tend to under selfreport, we are talking about people, for whatever reason, are alienated by institutional religion, organized religion who may who believe in the traditional judeochristian god actually still have some form of faith. Unwilling to identify with or anticipate it as a religion in and of itself. Talking about the spirit of nonreligious. In my book i called the religious remix. Not just virtual, but not religious also people that do identify take the box as it were. Whose personal practice believe it is more a quest deck. The things i like to bring up here is that 30 of self identified christians believe in reincarnation. Which is not, shall we say, something that you would associate with christian orthodoxy. I would argue where religious life, the components of religious life, meaning ritual, relating to them in a different way. Mixing in matching, a term, there is a sense where the interplay of this is we are all making our own religions. Not just elements of the traditional religion, but things like wellness culture, political activism, a vast array of modernism, which craft among the Fastest Growing in america. So long and so forth. I think one sort of initial response to a description of your thesis, but someone wellversed in American History is how new is all of this . Certainly nothing more american than being entrepreneurial and setting up a church of one. Every kid in high school, at least back when i was in high school, you get a certain kind of, a certain kind of individualized religion there. The larger history of spirituality is what you and the book called intuitional precision. Can you talk about what is the same and what is different . What do we have in common with 19th Century America and what has changed in the last 30 or 40 years . Sure. A catchall term for religious practices and focusing inward. The got, individual, feeling versus institutionalism. Your church, your dogma, your external. We have seen quite a history back and forth in american religious life and these outcroppings of intuitional approaches to face the great awakening spared your revival, but also movements which were acute from the 1860s onward. The secret selfhelp movement where basically if you think about it hard enough it will happen which became hugely influential and led to a whole Publishing Industry of health bugs. Spiritual is a and contacting the dead and ouija boards. There is also, i would argue, evangelical revival where the narrative was often something like, christianity, nobody really believes anymore. People just go through the motion. People go to church and it really does not matter. You need to look for personal relationship with god. We need to look for something more intense, more intimate. It is absolutely not neal. A pendulum swing back and forth. Where i think something new about this great awakening is the internet. We are trying to gather in this way at this time. I would like to say that the Printing Press was the promise to reformation, the creation of a model of consuming information that was intimate and inward. Sort of internalize in such a way. One may well draw that connection to the protestant overall. We are kind of seeing these new religions of the internet age. We are all not just consumers of content, not just readers, but also inclined to culturally think about ourselves as people who have or want to have ownership over stories. With the added sort of dissenting embodiments of the internet itself. Theres hunger to create, to be involved, to have ownership in our stories have made up all the more resistant to orthodox ways of experiencing, receiving doctrine. I think our particular moment in the era of personal branding made us cognizant of the model of our identity based on our choices. What music we listen to, what musics we watch. They all create this odd publicprivate sense of identity within that culture, there is an odd strain of what app am i using to meditate . Am i going to a soul cycle class, i think wellness culture is the biggest most obvious example this. I think it is the way in which the consumption is seen to a defined us in the age of the algorithm. It is getting narrower and narrower to contribute to the modernization. I want to press you a little bit on the point that you made at the end. One of the interesting things about the book, at the core, you are talking about practices and experiments that fit some kind of definition of religious or spiritual right. It is a revival of a cultus practice in various forms in american life. Your generation of this spreads out some. Consumer culture, and aspect of consumer culture. Everything holistic and personalized. Convince me as someone may be a little inclined to skepticism that it makes sense to fit the world of brands and that type of self cultivation under the umbrella of religion or religious practice. I would argue there is an implicit theology shared by this very Consumer Base. That is sort of the implicit theology of what i will call best self exam. A moral, spiritual demand to be your best self, improve in a certain way that i would argue its rather solid to stick. The collapse between the effort, the purity that you get from having the right green juice with the minimum amount of toxins. The way that your skin looks after your 10 step beauty routine. The way that these things are sold and it talks about is so loaded with this selfcare not the word coming from a much more political placement. There is a sense in which if we are not taking care of ourselves, if we are not putting in the effort to be the best in this certain way, happen to make it prettier or sensibly prettier and sensibly more fit and extensively have twoweek complexion, or what have you, there is kind of a purity that we are reaching in so doing. There are elements of that that are taken. There are elements taken from the gospel tradition. It is kind of adjacent to that aired i think that the idea that more broadly, your job as a human being on this earth is to be your truest self, your best self, your most authentic self to release yourself from repression, from ways that society has acted upon you and kinda figure out who you really are. I would argue as coded as a moral and spiritual good. The language of energy is really popular in wellness circles, certainly in various, in these circles, there are versions that are much more political and much more outward looking and focus in solidarity. A capitalistic version of it does tend to equate to personal fulfillment with the kind of vibration on the right frequency of the right energy in a way that i find incredibly interesting and quite revealing. Yes. I would say so. I think that this is a brand for which we buy things and it does not have the community aspect. I do all of my shopping there. Well. And it shows. Sorry. Go on. Just that i think that soul cycle is an even better example because it combines a lot of the anesthetic and sense of purpose with a community and a ritual that let you experience that in the moment. I remember i went through a few soul cycle classes. I wish i could say they were all for research, but they were not. We are a community, a tribe, a path. We are a cult, it says it right there. Your energy affects your neighbors energy. Please do not do this, that or the other thing in a way that using this kind of nebulous spiritualized language to talk about or to lend what could just be an uncomfortable fitness class to burn some calories into something with an aura of spiritual attainment. Good for you. Good for the universe and your role in it. One thing that has struck me that i think fits in your argument about the difference between the early 21st century and the 19th century is just an absence of institutionalization. You know, the United States has a lot of the same kind of spiritual entrepreneurs and would be gurus that we had in the Victorian Era or the early 19th century. They do not seem as likely to found things that we call churches. Maryann williams, she is a preinternet figure. She rises to prominence in the 1980s. Updated new thought kind of figure. I feel like in the 19th century there would be a Church Founded by her. It would not be huge, but it would have to hundred thousand people and, you know, there would be chapels around the country. And, that does not seem to happen, especially over the last couple of generations. You have a little stuff in the 70s and 80s, but especially lately. How much of that is the internet . How much of that is in ambient skepticism . Why doesnt Gwyneth Paltrow have, i guess, kanye west has sunday services, wives in Paris Sunday Service for this . I am not sure it would not be successful, at least initially. I think the label of church or the label of making something a church is, as you say, met with a degree of suspicion. I think the fact that there is such a willingness to mixandmatch, weed, millennial s, at the broader here, me, personally, are so much, so much of contemporary is the precise individualization. In the end, we cannot get away from the endpoint being we are all the high priest of our own church that we dont have, i think this is true much more broadly, our religious institutions, our civic ones and our journalistic and media institutions as well, unfortunately, or fortunately, i dont know. I think that that suspicion does just blended self to such a focus on the self. I want to be careful here. I think that there is an easy narrative that we could go to. Kids these days with their selfies. They are so narcissistic. All being priests in their own religion. I actually think that what we are seeing is not necessarily a story of narcissism, but institutional failure. I think it is perfectly reasonable and understandable that if youre institutions have failed you, if you dont think you can trust the media, the scientific establishment, the political system, the academic system, so on and so forth, it makes perfect sense to turn inward, to rely on yourself and your own gut instinct and desires and feelings as authoritative. At least you know you are not wrong. You may be lying to yourself, but you may have slightly more trust that you are aware of yourself and other people. So, i guess to push on that point a tiny bit, is it sustainable . A book about our whole culture. It is focused on, i guess you could say people younger than me. I just turned 40. These are people conducting experiments in religion at a time there conducting experiments, you know, and relationships and professional experiments and so on. I think you can tell a plausible story where these are the children of baby boomers hill had their own rebellion and often sort of hung onto an institutional affiliation. You talk a little bit about this a generational turnover where they took one step out of the door their institution, but cap 1 foot in the door and their kids taking the other step. Their kids have not come up for the part, gone through though, you know, 5060 years of life that await after your 20s. Not necessarily the dogma or doctrine of religion, but the communal forms of religion. The solidarity of a religious institution that is even soul cycle providing. The role that a bar mitzvah or first communion plays and so on. Obviously, this is more the prophecy line. What does this look like in 25 years for the people conducting these experiments now . I think you are absolutely right. The more, lets say, inward looking, the minority some of soul cycle, those are the things that i think are unsustainable. I think that we will see a hunger for, a hunger for solidarity that the kind of pure selfinterested version of these new things cannot offer. I think that what we will see, for example, social justice as a movement because what it does offers an ideology of community, solidarity. There is a real hunger for it. I am interested more broadly and i talk about this on a chapter on polyamory and kind of the free love as a continuation of ideas of human perfectionism in the 19th century, but ways in which the term that has long been used, chosen family. And where people who are marginalized by or experience marginalization from traditional religious institutions, people who for whatever reason are alienated from traditional religious institutions whose family of origin may not be in touch within the same way might be able to find one another. I think there is a hopefulness in the idea that as a result of the tribal lives nation that we find on the internet where people can find likeminded people or people can find communities, they are our options for solidarity for coming together from the creation of ritual in a way that may not look like organized religion as perhaps traditionally practiced, but nevertheless offer that kind of sense of community. I would remember there was a woman i interviewed before starting my book who lost her husband unexpectedly quite young and wanted his friends to celebrate and commemorate his life in a way that was specific to him. The friends got together and they played music from his favorite videogame. A service that was designed not around religious lines or traditional religious lines or along who this person was, what his life was like. He wanted to play a videogame they played together. She kind of wished people she met online play this game in his memory. She reported it was hugely important to her. I think that is such a good example of how our desire for these bonds can survive that sort of reshaping, even as i think that perhaps the pure selfishness, i am being really mean about soul cycle on this call, the inwardness of the culture, shall we say. Then lets drill down then on the question of belief. We are talking about community, but, you know, the core of what we think of as religion has always been belief. A lot of sociological debate about how important our actual statements adult people really take their religious identity from community rather than creeds. I think there is truth to that, but also the major World Religions have been structured around claims of the universe. One question, we have had these conversations before and i always asked these questions, but i will ask it again. I think it sort of radiates through the more supernaturally oriented experiments which you are writing about. How much do people really believe in what they are doing. Specifically when youre talking about neopaganism, people who are sort of reaching back or reinventing prechristian or nonchristian traditions. They are revoking gods, they are revoking demons, they are doing which craft. Some of it seems like play, some of it seems like experiment, some of it seems to have real belief. How do you see the question a belief playing out there . I think it is very difficult to quantify. Very difficult to disentangle from any of these other practices. As you say, as i argue in the book, many definitions of religion, certainly definitions that would say does not matter at all. Definitions that say are they claimed, yes or no. I think that the truth is something a little bit more complicated. If you have found something to be true and you act as if it were true or if you act in accordance with the values that you create, you kind of reaffirm the truth of that within a community such that there is a social reality that is something a little bit more complex than i would argue inward than a model where everyone is doing something and no one believes it, but they are pretending to get along which i think is the strawman version of what a community would look like. Practice the acts of faith and t