We also want to thank all of you for your support and for our community of booklovers and friends we wouldnt be here today. Tonight we are excited to have with us tara burton who is celebrating the recent release of her new book strange rights, new religions for a godless world. Is contributing editor at the american interest, at columnist at Religion News service and the former staff and religion reporter. She has written on religion and Secular National geographics, Washington Post , New York Times and more and holds a doctorate in theology from oxford. Shes also author of the novel social creature. Joining tara to discuss her new book is ross douthat, columnist for the New York Times oped page and offer up to change the church, bad religion and privileged and coauthor of brandnew party. Before joining New York Times was a Senior Editor for the atlantic. These film critic for National Review and he cohosts the New York Times weekly oped paul podcast. He lives in new haven with his wife and three children so without further ado please join me in welcoming cara and ross. Thank you so much, thanks to all of you for joining us here in this exciting virtual experience. This slightly disembodied way of talking about a book that may be appropriate tothe subject matter. And, thanks for letting me interrogate you about the future of religion in the United States and beyond. Thank you so much for being here. Just another thursday night in america. I want to make two comments before we start. The first is that in our era of covid ive now done enough zoom events to know that sometimes people are more hesitant to ask questions when they are typing in questions and they would be at a real event when you can stand up and tell the author why hes wrong about everything in theworld. And youll just have to listen to me ask questions for the entire hour and hopefully we will get about 50 or 20 minutes of your questions at the end so that the first point and the second one which is one ill redirect at the end is that this is a challenging time for everybody. And authors are obviously among the least challenged in many ways but putting up a book at a moment like this is a difficult thing. I had a book come out and i was lucky enough to squeeze in a couple of weeks of promotion for all the bookstores closed but i just want to encourage you if you find, if youre listening , watching, enjoying this just buy the book. Dont just buy the book from the strand obviously, encourage your friends to buy the book and make it a bestseller it deserves to be so without further ado, lets start in with a big dumb question. This is a book about new religions for a godless world. Thats the subtitle. So is our world really godless and if not or if so, whatreligions are filling that void . So spoiler alert, no we dont live in a godless world. Thats roughly theargument i make. So i want to draw a distinction when we talk about a secular age that we often want to do or world about religion what arewe talking about. Just a couple of background statistics, about 23, 24 percent of americans say their religiously unaffiliated but also often referred to as the religious nuns. About 36 percent of people born in america after 1985, identify as religious nuns a huge increase but of these nuns, these unaffiliated, 72 percent they they believe in some sort of higher power and 20 percent actually say they believe in the god of the bible. So were not necessarily talking about people who are atheists, although about six percent of the population, its true atheists under selfreport so were talking about people for whatever reason are alienated by institutional religion, organized religion, who feel it has nothing to offer them and who may as in the case of the people who believe in the traditional judeochristian god actually still have him form of faith but who are unwilling to identify with or participate in its as a religion in and of itself so were talking about the spiritual but not religious but were also talking about a broader category and in my book i call it the religiously remix which includes not just spiritual but not really just what i think is the most visible version of the phenomenon but also peoplewho do identify , the box at work with a particular religious tradition whose personal practices, Belief Systems are more eclectic and a statistic that i like to bring up here to get a sense of how widespread this is about 30 percent of identified christians they believe in reincarnation is not shall we Say Something one would associatewith christian orthodoxy. So we are living in an age i argue where religion, religious life, the components of a religious life meaning purpose, community, ritual are relating to them in a different way. Where mixing and matching, where unbundling to use a term harvard scholars use in their work. And theres a sense in which we are all sort of the endplate of this is we are all making our own religion culturally. These can include not just elements of traditional religion but things like wellness culture, fandom, political activism. The sort of vast array of modern occultism, witchcraft and neopaganism and wicca are among the fastestgrowing religions in america so on and so forth. So i think one sort of initial response to a description of your thesis that someone wellversed in American History might have is how new is all this because after all, there is certainly nothing more american and being entrepreneurial and sort of setting up a church of one that is, every kid in High School English class at lees back when i went to high school was assigned the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and you get a certain kind of, a certain kind of individualized religion there and in the larger history of 19th Century American spirituality is right with what you in the book called sort of intuitional religion. So can you talk about what is the same and what is different . What do we have in commonwith 19th Century America and whats changed in the last 30 or 40 years . So what i call intuitional is in in the book is a sort of catchall term for religious practices and the lead set focus inward on forgot, the individual, the feeling of institutionalism and again its a reductive term but your church, your dogma, your external forces. Weve seen quite a history of the pendulum swinging back and forth in american religious life these sort of outcroppings of intuitional faith, intuitional approaches the faith. The various awakenings, your tantrum bibles also the birth of movements like news pot which was huge from the 1860s onward which was the sort of proto the secret selfhelp movement basically if you think about hard enough it will happen. Which became a usually influential and then led to a whole Publishing Industry of the various selfhelp books. There is spiritualism and the rise of sort of obsessions with ouija boards and contacting the day that became really popular on the east coast but id also argue theres evangelical revivals within the christian tradition where the narrative was often Something Like the church has become more christianity has become desiccated and nobody believes anymore, people just go through the motions and you go to church on sunday and it doesnt really matter that we need to look for a personal relationship with god. We need to look for something more intense, more intimate and of course the various countercultural religions and of the 1960s and so that is absolutely not new. If anything i argue for the pendulum swings back and forth forever however many hundred years but where i think something is distinct and new about this rate awakening is the internet. Given that we are trying to gather in this way at this time. I like to say that what the protestant reformation or what the Printing Press was the protestant reformation, the creation of a model of consenting information that was in many ways intimate and inward. You were reading a book, you have your directconnection to the text. And sort of internalizes much the way and one may well draw that connection to the protestants egos overall. I dont hear these new religions being the religions of the internet age where we are all not just consumers, we are not just readers but we are also inclined to culturally think of ourselves as creators. To think of ourselves as people who have or want to have ownership over stories. Two in some ways of course it this harkens back to various oral traditions as well but with the added dizzying embodiments of the internet itself. Where i think that this hunger to create, to be involved, to have ownership in our stories has made us all the more resistant to perhaps orthodox ways for traditionally orthodox ways of experiencing, receiving dogma and doctrine i think as well our particular topic list moments are so in the era of personal branding made us cognizant of a model of our identities based on our choices. What news we consume, what papers we read, what music we listen to and what movies we watch. What we post, what we tweet creates this odd identity and i think within the culture theres a sort of odd consumerist strain of what apps am i using to meditate, what purchases am i making . Am i getting a sweet cream salad, wellness culture is perhaps the biggest, most obvious example ofthis. I think the way in which our conspicuous and perhaps less conspicuous consumption is seen to define us especially in the age of the algorithm where our recommendations are getting narrower and narrower contributes to this kind of hyper itemized individualization. So i want to press you a little bit on the point you made at the end because i think this is one of the interesting things about the book is that it sort of at the core youre talking about practices and sort of experiments that are we both agree that some definition of religious or schedule ritual. I think the core of the book is about certainly is a revival of pagan pantheists occultist practices in various forms in American Life but then your definition of sort of new religion spread outward and encompasses as you were saying sort of consumer culture, or some of her saliva aspects of consumer culture , everything sort of holistic and personalized, wellness culture and so on so convinced me as someone maybe a little inclined to skepticism that it makes sense to fit the world of brands and sort of kind self cultivation under the umbrella of religion or religious practice. I argue theres a sort of implicit theology thats shared by so many of these and particularly something very Consumer Base the Wellness Movement i talk about and that this sort of implicit theology of what ill just call best help is him. The idea that its a moral ritual demand to be your best self. To improve in a certain way that is either argue rather solipsistic. Its kind of the collapse of this distinction between effort you put on a bike, the purity you get from having the right green juice with the minimum amount of toxins read the sort of way that your skin looks after your 10 step beautyroutine. The way in which these things are sold and the talk about is so loaded with this language of selfcare not just as a kind of routine although historically the worst selfcare does come from a more political place but its in this sort of wellness paradigm in which it now found itself. We want to, theres a sense of which we are not taking care ofourselves. If we are not putting in the effort to be the best in this certain way which is of course also rooted in what happens to make us prettier or ostensibly prettier and ostensibly more and ostensibly has a beauty complexion or what have you. There is a kind of purity where we take in so doing and i see that the elements of that taken from example new thought and theres elements of that they can from the prosperity gospel tradition and adjacent to that i think that the idea that more broadly, your job as a human being on this earth is to be your truest self and your bestself , also to be your most authentic self. To release your self from repression, from ways that society has acted upon you and kind of figure out who you really are. Is i argue coded as a moral, spiritual good read there is the language of energy is really popular in wellness circles. Its popular certainly in various occult circles and i think there are versions of that that of course are much more political and much more outward looking and focused much more on solidarity but the sort of capitalistic version of it, the branded version of it does tend to equate personal fulfillment with a kind of vibration on the right frequency of the right energy in a way that i find incredibly interesting and quite revealing. Such as google and church. I would say so. That said what google doesnt have and i think this is because it is a brand from which we buy things and doesnt have the community aspect. I do want all my shopping at google i should say. And it shows, i my best self. Sorry, go on. No, just that soul cycle is an even better example because it combines i think a lot of the goop metaphysics and the aesthetic and the kind of sense of purpose with a community and a ritual that lets you experience that in the moment. I remember i went to a few soulcycle classes, i wish i could say they were all for research, they were not but theres the signs of community. Where a tribe, where a pack, we are a cult, it says it right there and all the signs say things Like Pure Energy affects your neighbors energy so dont do this or that or another thing which is in a way moving this kind of somewhat nebulous spiritualized language to talk about or two begin to what could be a uncomfortable fitness class to burn some calories into something with an aura of spiritual attainment. What youre doing isnt just good for you, its good for the universe and your role in it. The one thing that has struck me that i think its with your argument about the difference between the early 21st century and its groups and the 19th century and its gurus is just its an absence ofinstitutionalization. The United States has a lot of the same kind of ritual entrepreneurs and, would be gurus that we had in the victorian era, the early 19th century they dont or at least they dont seem as likely to found things that we call churches. So we just have Marianne Williamson as a president ial campaign and Marianne Williamson i think hes a preinternet figure originally. He rises to prominence in the 1980s shes dynamic updated new thought kind of figure. I feel like in the 19th century there would be a church on the binary and williamson and it wouldnt be huge and it would have like 200,000 people and it would be like the organs or something and there would be chapels around the country and thats doesnt seem to happen to anything like the same extent especially over thelast couple of generations. You have a little stop in the 70s and 80s but especially lately do you think thats, how much of that is the internet, how much is just an ambient skepticism of institutions. Why isnt, why doesnt Gwyneth Paltrow have, i guess connie west sunday services, why isnt there asunday service or group. Im not sure that it would not be successful at least initially. I think thats, i think the label of church for the label of kind of making something the church is i think as you say would be met with a degree of suspicion. I think as well the sort of fact that there is such a willingness to mix and match , we, we millennials , the broader we hear. Me personally, yes. We are, so much of contemporary religious science id argue is about that kind of precise individualization so in the end we cant necessarily get away from the end point being we are all the high priests of our ownchurch. We dont have and i think this is true much more broadly not only in our religious institutions in our civic ones and political ones and journalistic and media institutions as well unfortunately. Unfortunately we dont know what i think that there is, i think that suspicion does just lend itself to such a focus on the self and i want to be careful here because i think theres an easy narrative that we could go to says kids these days with their selfie, theyre so narcissistic all the priests of their own religion and that something way that one could go about reading these situations but i think that what were seeing isnt necessarily a story of narcissism narcissism of institutional failure. I think its perfectly reasonable and in fact completely understandable that it institutions have failed you, if you dont think you can trust the media, the scientific establishment, the political system, the academic system and so on and so forth it makes perfect sense to turn inward, to rely on yourself and your own instead and desires and affinities and feelings as authoritative because at least you know that, you might be lying to yourself on a broader theological way but at least you might have slightly more trust that youre aware of yourself and you are of other people. So i guess to push on that point, is this sustainable . Because this is a book about our whole culture but it is obviously focused on i guess you could say people younger than me. I just turned 40 so millennial generation z. These are people who are sort of conducting experiments in religion at the time that their conducting experiments in relationships and professional experiments and so on. And i think you tell a plausible story where these are the children of baby boomers who had their own rebellion and often thought of onto an institutional affiliation and obviously you talk a little bit about this kind of person. And a generational turnover there. Where they took one step out the door of their institutions but kept one foot in the door and their kids have taken the other step. But their kids, and for the most part gone through the you know, 50 to 60 years of life that awaits after your 20s. And in which the forms not necessarily the dogma or doctrine of religion but the computer communal forms of religion , the sort of solidarity of a religious institution or community that its not clear that google or even soulcycleprovides the role that a bar mitzvah were first communion plays and so on. Obviously this is more and like