Welcome to Dwell on These Things, a podcast by Dwell Community Church in Columbus, Ohio, where we hear stories and examples of how God is moving in the church at Dwell and around the world. Dwell on These Things. I'm Pat Reeder, director of equipping. With me today is Rebecca McLaughlin, speaker and author. She's written things like Confronting Christianity and the recent How Church Could Literally Save Your Life. Rebecca also hosts a podcast aptly titled Confronting Christianity. Welcome, Rebecca. Glad to have you back. I'm impressed you pronounced my last name correctly. Yes, yes. Most Americans don't. That's right. It's quite fun. I don't know if you remember this, but last time we had quite a back and forth about this. Many people were, you know, it was McLaughlin. It was McLaughlin. It was, you know, all over the place. Yeah, McLaughlin. Actually, I think it helped me because I have listened to a lot, so to speak, read your books in audio form. So I hear you say your own name. Yes, yes. I mean, to be fair, my husband's family, you know, whence the name come, comeeth, say McLaughlin because they're Americans. But I said to Brian, I'm happy to change my name to yours so long as you start pronouncing it my way. That's great. That's a good deal. That's a good deal. So I actually wanted to start off, you know, we might take kind of a meta conversation, if you will. I'd like actually to talk about podcasting. So, you know, I started listening, frankly, to podcasts in like, you know, 2006 when Apple sort of snuck podcasts into an iTunes update. I was like, what's that? And so I started listening, frankly, mostly to like music. You know, I like electronic music and just, you know, mixes and, you know, these sort of blended mixes or whatever. But, you know, it seemed to me, as I've observed things since then, you know, I just kind of stayed on this music train. But in the last decade or so, these more spoken word, interview style podcasts, and there were some of those at that time, you know, like NPR started loading some of their stuff onto iTunes as well. But these spoken word podcasts have, I mean, for lack of a better word, exploded, you know, and I noticed that you started your podcast in 2022, it looks like. Is that right? Probably, yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, so, and it's funny though, because they're both, they have a kind of old and a new aspect to them, because on the one hand, they're really not substantially different than talk radio, right? So that's been around for, you know, decades at this point. But, you know, the funny thing is, unlike a syndicated radio show, anyone can put together a podcast, you know? Yes. And almost everyone does. At this point, yes, exactly. And so, you know, I thought it'd be useful to kind of like ponder, you know, what role can the podcast play in Christianity, like English speaking Christianity? So, you know, McLuhan says, you know, the medium is the message, right? But, you know, maybe whether we agree with that or not, like we can certainly agree that medium impacts message, impacts the ability to deliver a message. And so I just was curious if you had any thoughts on like, are there unique opportunities, but perhaps also like what unique hazards does the podcast medium present for Christian leaders, for people trying to share the gospel or trying to equip other Christians? Yeah, great question. So first, full disclosure, I was talked into starting a podcast, and I had no grand plan of doing that. Kyle Worley, who is part of the Knowing Faith podcast, actually a fabulous podcaster, and thankfully way more people listen to Knowing Faith than will ever listen to Confronting Christianity, which he does with Jen Wilkin and JT English, a really helpful sort of theology podcast they've been running for years. And Kyle wanted to do an apologetics podcast and he wanted me to do it with him. No, first he wanted me to do it. And I said, absolutely not. I have no interest in starting a podcast. And then he came, he circled back, I think a few months later and said, how about we do it together? You won't have to do any prep. You just like show up and we'll have a conversation. I was like, okay, okay, we'll do that. Can agree to that. And then it ended up he had too many things on his plate. And so I ended up being left holding the baby, as it were. And in many ways, honestly, it is the least satisfying thing that I do in terms of ministry. Because when I'm writing a book, I'm thinking really carefully about the exact words that I'm saying, and I'm able to kind of craft them. And I just, I'm very precise about exactly what I'm saying and how. When I'm giving a talk, I'm having a real time conversation with a specific audience. I actually don't, even if I've got a prepared talk that I've given in other places, it's always different depending on the audience. You know, to me, it's more of an embodied experience of communicating with the actual humans in the room. And that's really, there's something really sort of satisfying about that. And obviously, the embodied kind of local opportunities in our local church to love people and read Bible studies and to subject groups, all of that is very fulfilling and an incredible privilege. You have that sort of immediate feedback that comes from speaking to an audience, you know, you're seeing their faces, you're seeing their responses. Yes, yes. For podcasts, I often get to the end of a podcast episode and think, what did we really talk about? There was no, you know, that it doesn't deliver the kind of content that I hope to deliver in a book chapter, for example, where I've, I've carefully rhetorically constructed what's going on. And I've given people this sort of data and these story. I've said, really thought it through from beginning to end. And it's only because I frequently hear from people who find the podcast really helpful, that I carry on doing it. And in particular, actually, there's a young woman who I'll talk about this evening at the sort of live in-person event that I'm excited to do, who came to faith in part through the podcast. And so sort of meeting her was a reminder to me, oh, this is something worth doing, even if it was just for her. I think you talk about the positives and the negatives or the glories and the hazards, as it were, of podcasting. I think clearly there is an opportunity for people to be exposed to helpful ideas, whether it's, you know, something like knowing faith that's doing deeper dives theologically and working through the scriptures and really helpful in illuminating ways and helping people who may not necessarily have sat down and read a whole book about something to give them that kind of access is fabulous. And I think there's a place for the kinds of, you know, for example, the sorts of apologetics style podcasts that I'm involved in, where I'm often talking with somebody who's genuinely an expert on a question or who has something really interesting to share. And I'm able to connect what they're saying with a larger audience of people who could be benefited by it. I think the hazards of the podcast are twofold. One, that you can end up saying things that aren't so, you know, like more so than with a book or even with a talk, maybe. I guess I maybe sometimes say things that I shouldn't say in talks, but there's more of a risk of people just miscommunicating or saying something that's not accurate or not theologically helpful because there are fewer guardrails around it. There's also, and I actually wonder if this is partly why podcasts are so popular currently, I think there is a strong parasocial element to it where people listen to podcasts because they don't have friends. That came out in a much harsher way than I intended. Oh no, but I think you're right. I think that's a deep point. But I think we, in our particular sort of epoch of modernity, have so collapsed relationships of all kinds down to the barest nub where a lot of people are getting most of their social interaction in parasocial ways. And so there is something comforting about listening to a conversation between people, you know, perhaps if there are two hosts, both of whom you've got to know by listening to them, or if there's one host and then somebody else who's being brought in, you feel like you're part of a friendship and you're not. I mean, the sad reality of it is that you're not. And again, I feel like I'm like sanding somehow judgmental or denigrating people, which I'm not intending at all. I think it's more, and this sort of connects up actually with sometimes I'll receive messages through my website, for example, where people will really want to talk to me about something that's happening in their lives because they've, you know, they've read my work. They know that some of the things I'm interested in, or maybe we have some shared experience or something, and they want to talk to me about it. And I almost always encourage people, actually, you are so much better off talking to somebody who lives in your community. Like none of us actually need any, you know, person whose book we've read or podcast we've listened to or whatever. What we need is embodied community with real people. I'm not that those people aren't real, but, you know, we need lived community in our actual local environment. And to the extent that things like podcasts can scratch an itch that should be being scratched by the people you're actually looking in the eye and hugging and, you know, sharing meals with, I think there is a potential downside to them. I think that's quite insightful. And frankly, I didn't expect you to say that, to be honest. But I think that, yeah, I mean, in a moment, we'll get to it here, but we'll be talking, you know, some about the importance of community and the importance specifically of a faith community. And I just, I think that you're right, that there's been such a breakdown in community, in long-term relationships. And, you know, I think even in some of those, people settle for very little. Settle for infrequent gatherings, settle for, you know, like, hey, if I see you a couple of times a year, like, wow, you're my best friend. Um, or they settle for, um, you know, all these, these heavily technologically mediated forms, whether that's crossing social media, whether that's, um, you know, whether that's texting, whether that's FaceTime, you know, FaceTime, you know, I think I remember seeing some ad where it was like, hey, it's really okay that you're, you know, um, you know, dad is like constantly outside of the home because he's traveling for work, but you can FaceTime him. And it's like, of course it's night. FaceTime is better than nothing. My in-laws are missionaries and we FaceTime with them when they're gone. And that's fantastic. That's better than nothing, but it's not the same as when they're here. And I think that, yeah, we're just, I mean, I think part of it is Americans are so neophilial, you know, it's like, oh, there's a new thing. I can relate to you this way. And now I can relate to you that way. And it's, and in fact, it, sadly, the new technologies, the new ways actually, actually lower the connection. Like let's just go back to the old ways, you know, I'm being a little bit silly here, but yeah, face-to-face interaction, you know, in person, uh, is instead of multiplying media. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, interestingly, a year ago, I think, or some number of months ago, the, the guy who runs the engineering for my podcast suggested that I should have a like YouTube channel rather than just the audio that we should have a video component. And I thought who on earth is sitting and watching a video of a podcast. I mean, in my mind, I just, to me, the benefit of a podcast is you can do something else. You can be washing the dishes while listening to a podcast. So why would you sit there with your laptop or with your, your mobile phone or whatever and watch people having a conversation? But actually, if it's true that we are increasingly dependent on parasocial relationships, then yeah, you might want to watch the people having the conversation because you feel closer to them now that you can actually see them. That's right. That's right. Yeah. It's like, it's the same kind of, there's a short circuiting occurred. So it's occurring, so to speak, where you, by seeing their face, you're one step closer. Um, yeah, that's, I think that's, um, yeah, I think that's a profound point that, you know, especially about the unique aspect of podcasts where the more, it's almost like the more conversational and the more familiar it becomes, that's the most attractive medium or the most attractive format when you're doing a podcast. And so I think that that fits, I think that's insightful. And I really liked, I thought it was interesting what you said about, um, writing because I actually prefer personally reading audio books over listening to podcasts. So, you know, it's funny, uh, here, here we are making a podcast. We've maybe got another level of meta here at this point, but it's like, here's two people making a podcast, talking about podcasts and saying, we don't like making podcasts. Um, just kidding. I, I do feel like though there is something in that where I personally, although I think podcasts can deliver a certain amount of information, there's kind of an upper bound on that. And I personally really like audio books and even just, and you know, everyday paper and ink. I love how hesitant you are that even, even dare I say it, because of what you said, there's so much more work that has to go into a book that you have to not, not just in crafting what you're saying, but also in, um, you know, editors are looking at this. There's, there's a lot more passes that occur, you know, there's a lot more guardrails, I think was the word you used when it comes to, um, the written, uh, word rather than just the spoken word and then launching it onto the internet. Yes. I think that's true. Although I do think also books are far less guardrail than they once were. Okay. Yeah, that's true. And there's a, there's actually a particular kind of intimacy that comes with reading a book because if you watch a podcast, let's say you're getting the data of seeing what somebody looks like and hearing their voice. If you're reading a book, you're getting a certain kind of access to their mind and it's being directly mediated to your mind in a really intimate way. So there's actually something curious happening there. That's interesting. I just have a quick question because as we're talking about media, uh, I remember last time you mentioned that you studied Shakespeare and that's an interesting thing. What you just said, because Shakespeare though, written was primarily performed in his day. So I don't know, that's a kind of a surprise remark. It's like, I don't know if you want to comment on that, but just, there's just something mysterious about something that's written that gives you access to their mind. But then, you know, was that even the way it was intended to be presented in the first place? Or is this, you know, I don't know if you see what I'm saying. So when I say access to that cross media, it's not, I mean, so Shakespeare's an interesting example of here, uh, on the one hand, when you read or when you watch a Shakespeare play, which you should definitely, it's much better than the reading. It's fiction and he is putting words into the mouths of characters. So there's no, there's no pretense that this is Shakespeare's own deep thoughts, uh, writ large on the stage at the same time, quite frequently when you're listening to or watching Shakespeare, it is evident that you are bumping into somebody's deepest reflections on life. You know, um, I, a few years ago, I was, I went through a very short phase of teaching my girls Shakespeare sonnets. I'm not, sadly, I'm not someone who's ever going to be, you know, homeschooling mum of the year or anything like that. Um, and my son, he was teenier. I think he was sort of two and a half or something at the um, this incredible speech from Macbeth tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. And it's, it's this extraordinary reflection on the futility of life and he delivered it from the mouths of babes. It was, it was too funny. I've got this delightful video of him. Um, cause at the end it goes, uh, walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon a stage and then has heard no more. And then he was like, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's just this like gloriously sort of jovial and joyful delivery of this very dark and poignant speech. But you, you hear a Shakespeare speech like that and you think, Oh, I am, I am encountering someone who has thought very deeply about some of the greatest kind of mysteries of human existence. So you're getting, you're getting a certain kind of access to Shakespeare's mind. That's fantastic. Yeah. I, yeah, I, I, that's, I just was surprised to hear you say, but I think it is worth deeper meditation is just that, that idea that the, the written, the way that the written medium conveys an aspect of someone's mind that maybe a conversation wouldn't. Right. So in a, in a sort of crass historical sense, it seems like the written medium was sort of to kind of work around, right. You know, we, well, I'm not here, so I'm going to send a message or I'm, I'm sending something on into the future, you know, something when, when my, you know, my literal tongue is decaying in the grave, my, you know, my, my quill continues. Right. And so it's, it's, it's an interesting thought, like also just the nature of writing, does the nature of writing place, does that access a part of one's mind that is not as easily represented with everyday speech? So anyway, speaking of books, let's talk about the book. Is, is this your most recent book? You have something else coming down the pike? Yes and yes. Okay, cool. Well, let's talk about this one. Then maybe we'll, I'll ask you more about the other one later, but so yeah, again, for those listening along, this is How Church Can Literally Save Your Life. And as far as I understand it, a central thesis of this title is that people who are regularly attending church experience a variety of health benefits, right? And I think those are sadly displayed most obviously in their absence for those who are not in, in church attendance. So I actually, I wanted to just start, you know, and I think you address this in the book, but I could see someone who even hears this thesis, this is maybe one of their first thoughts. It's like, look, I've, I've read Bowling Alone, you know, and I've, I've read my de Tocqueville or whatever, Democracy in America, like it isn't the real issue here, community, right? That would be a natural thought. And as, you know, frankly, that was our conversation a moment ago about parasocial connection and, you know, how, how much that's broken down. So yeah, if you could comment briefly on what, on, yeah, on that question. Yeah. Is this, is the difference that, oh, all the people that are in church, well, actually what's happening is they're in community and that's the difference maker. Yeah. If you, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I was saying to Ruth, you kind of picked me up at the airport. One of the funny things about this book has been people asking me questions about the research as if it's my research when it's not. So people are, well, have you, have you looked at whether this is correlation or causation because of this, this, I'm like, I'm getting this research from the Harvard school of public health predominantly, and also some other sort of academic sources. Um, and I am trusting their expertise rather than giving you my own, thank God, because I have no expertise in this area. One of the things that they looked at is whether this effect of regular religious participation is explained away by just the social component. So for example, if you went to the golf club once a week or more and saw the same people for the same kind of activity, would that have the same effect as going to church once a week or more and seeing this, you know, is that just what it's all about? It seems that that explains about 30% of the effect. It appears to be the case that there is something about religious participation specifically that we humans seem to thrive when we're involved in it. Now, the studies tend to not differentiate between whether somebody's going to a Christian church or whether they're going to a Jewish shul or whether they're going to a Muslim mosque, et cetera. So it's not the effects, at least in terms of the academic data, aren't validating Christianity over Judaism, for instance. But it does seem to be the case that there is something particular about gathering with others for the purposes of worship that is connected with mental and physical health benefits. Yeah, I think that's really fascinating and kind of surprising, you know, I think, especially in our culture where the, as it were, de-churching has occurred in tandem with other, a sort of like dissolution of community has made that harder to detect. But it's fascinating, as you say, like they've done a good job of controlling for that. Well, it's also all connected up because people who go to church also volunteer more and are also more involved in other kinds of communal activities. So it's not, you can't even really like separate these things out. That's, yeah, that's, I think that's fascinating. I actually read a few years ago a book by Putnam. It was kind of his Bowling Alone 2.0, if you could call it, called The Upswing. And part of, you know, that book was fascinating because it somewhat addresses that, you know, bowling alone back in, I think it came out in 2000, is sort of this, you know, gosh, people don't bowl anymore. And, you know, and everyone's watching TV and that's too bad. And, you know, I think that was a fascinating point. And there was sort of, you know, as he looked at it, he's like, this is probably, so in The Upswing, he looks back at bowling alone as like, that probably was more of a correlation, right? That there's something else going on deeper in the society as people are breaking away from one another. And he said what you just said at one point, where he observed that people who are in regular church attendance are actually much more active in community broadly. And I thought that was a pleasant surprise because, you know, I think there's a temptation to think like, oh, the church people, they're just over doing their thing. And I think that's like, no, people who are following God are, I think, desire, I think, appropriately desire if they have, I think, the right sort of theology of creation, that they're not just kind of huddling together for, you know, when Jesus comes back and that's no, we should be outwardly focused as well, that we have a responsibility to our neighbor, for lack of a better word. And I think that that, so it's good to see that that's actually bearing itself out in scientific studies, right? You know, we know the theology and we're like, gosh, I sure hope that's true. But to see that working its way out is, I think, is encouraging. Yeah, I think one of the, you know, so as I was mentioning a moment ago, there's kind of this breakdown in church involvement. There's this great breakdown in community. And we actually had Michael Graham here at XSI last year. And even he joined me and John Marriott and Ian Harbour on this show, Dwell on These Things. And we kind of went through the three Ds, you know, deconstruction, de-churching, de-conversion, you know, it's kind of interacting with all, how do these relate to one another? But focusing is just on the great de-churching. And I was curious, like, you know, so if it seems like if what you're saying here and, you know, what these Harvard researchers, you know, I think Putnam is also there, though I don't think he's in the public health. I think he might be in political science or something. If all that's true, I mean, then we're kind of facing a public health crisis, right? Unquestionably, yeah. And so we look, you know, when generally when we look to when we face public health crises, you know, pandemics, for example, or any number of things, we sort of look to the government. But the funny thing is here, this is our job, right? Yeah. And honestly, if any other practice came with the kinds of mental and physical health benefits that regular religious participation comes with, it would be a major sort of public information campaign. That's right. But if you were to Google top 10 hacks for improving your mental health, what are you going to find? You'll find exercise, you'll find eating healthily, you'll find sleeping, you'll find yoga, you'll find meditation. You almost certainly won't find church. That's interesting. But if you're looking at a list of the actual benefits, church should come in only a little bit after exercise. And, you know, eating more fruits and vegetables is a similarly good for you is going to church once a week or more. Yeah, I think actually in the book, you kind of made a sort of a joke, like, what if there was a pill that did this? You know, like, it's like that would be the miracle pill. You know, it's and I think that that was a really clever, clever analogy, because yeah, like if this was if it was any other therapy, like, you know, pharmaceutical therapy or any other form, right? It'd be like, you got to do it. Yeah, I think that's insightful. And perhaps, you know, yeah, I don't know if I have any more to say about that. I do think though, so if this is on us, what do you think like, what can or what should the church do with this information? Yeah, I think that the health warning that comes with this information is that we don't want to give the impression that there is a sort of prosperity gospel here, you know, come to church and be happy, healthy and longer lived. On average, if you go to church, you will be happier, healthier and longer lived. That's true. At the same time, that is not the gospel message, nor is there any guarantee of that. Right. And so I think there's a there could be unhelpful ways that this kind of information could be wielded. At the same time, I think that what I don't just think I know, not least from Michael Graham's research, there are millions of people in America right now who would come to church if somebody invited them. Wow. It's actually not the case that most of our neighbors would never dare to darken the doors of the church and, you know, only hate Christianity. Right. For sure. I mean, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so plenty of people who would fall into that category and I still want to invite them to church. But a lot of people actually just being invited would be enough for them to say, oh, do you know what? I'd like to do that. And this, in my mind, is one tool in our toolbox of saying, hey, I don't know if you're aware, but there's actually a ton of research showing that going to church could be really helpful in terms of mental health. Like, for example, you know, maybe you have a friend whose teenage daughter is really struggling with her mental health, history of, again, millions of Americans right now. To say, oh, interesting piece of information maybe for you to consider. Actually, regular church attendance can be incredibly helpful for people's mental health. I know that's not something you guys have grown up with or tried sort of previously, but would love to invite you to come along if you'd be interested. So there's the relational opportunity there. There's also, I mean, our church up in Cambridge has been sort of toying with the idea of even doing like an ad campaign on the local buses and the subway, where one of my friends at church came up with this and I was just like, I'm tired of the gym, try church. Tired of yoga, try church. Like all these things that people are doing, because people are desperate for the next mental and physical health hack. And they just don't know. And so even things like that, that could nudge people who, again, may not have a church, it's just not something that they are in a habit of doing to try a local church and see what happens. Yeah. And I remember finding that aspect of The Great De-Churching to be one of the most encouraging aspects of that book was how open many of the people, and I think there's this array of categories they give, that there was like only one group that was like, I'm never, ever going back. And that was a quite, quite small, all things considered, I don't remember the number, but it was on the smaller side of like, these people have left, but many of them would come back. And yeah, as you said, like, so just to clarify, you were saying, so there's many people, so that their focus was on people have left who would come back. And you're saying, not even people have left, just people are out there, many of them, according to surveys are saying, I would go. Yeah. Yeah. So I think of a friend of mine who I've got to know through the coffee shop where I typically work and he never been to church in his life, aside from weddings, you know, he'd been to a couple of weddings. That was his only exposure to church. And then he had lived with a guy for a number of years, they'd been roommates and his friend was a regular church goer. And he'd sort of seen over the years, his friend had kind of got more and more serious about church. It was like, oh, now he's like sitting and reading his Bible in the morning. And eventually, for one reason or another, I think his friend invited him to his wedding. And so he sort of met a bunch of Christians there. And eventually his friend invited him to church. Now, he, this friend of mine identifies as gay. And he said to me, he was like, I don't know why he hadn't invited me before. And when he said that, I thought, I know exactly why he hadn't invited me before. He has decided, and I'm not faulting his friend for this. My guess is that his mental process was, oh, my roommate identifies as gay, clearly wouldn't be interested in coming to church. And so I'm not going to invite him to church. He just wasn't in the category of people who seemed like they would receive the invitation well. And actually he would have done. He would have done years ago if he'd been invited. So it's just a reminder to not categorize people for whatever their demographics, to not say, oh, well, because this person identifies with another religious tradition or because this person dot, dot, dot, like we shouldn't be writing people out. Yeah, I think that's a very important observation, not just about the LGBTQ community. But yeah, there could be other religions that we consider like, oh, they're Jewish. There's no way. And I think I was in a teaching once where someone said something like what you just said, which was don't make up their mind for them by not saying anything. Because you basically, by saying nothing, you're making the choice for them. And I was like, man, that cut me to the quick. And I thought that was really, really penetrating insight. You dignify them by letting them have a choice. And if they reject you, I mean, how hard is that? I mean, the persecution we face in the United States is still quite mild. Yeah, it's not persecution. Yeah, that's right. By any international standards, it's infinitesimal. So this great de-churching book came out. Ian Harbour did this thing on deconstruction. And there's Ian Harbour a year ago, it's like, oh my gosh, all this new stuff about people kind of becoming interesting in Christianity. It was like, everyone's just gonna like chuck my book. And it's like, no, people are still... I think obviously people are still gonna read it, because there's all these other people kind of working their way through past experiences, and that is what it is. And we should pray for them. But there has been this interesting phenomenon that I think has at least creeped into the National Awareness, New York Times, The Economist, there's all these different articles about people becoming more interested in Christianity, more baptisms. And some people are even calling this a revival. So I guess I was just curious, what do you think is happening? Do you think people are becoming aware of the benefits of church? What do you think is happening there? Let's just start with that question. I think a lot of different things are going on. I think one thing that's happening is we've talked about the epidemic of loneliness in this country and across the West. And I think there are some people who are realizing, oh, I don't have deep, rich community, and those people over there seem like maybe they do, and perhaps I could join. So I think there's an opportunity in this terrible kind of climate of loneliness. There's also the reality that non-religiousness doesn't transmit very well down generations. So you often hear a lot of statistics about, oh, well, this proportion of the population is now nuns, you know, people who would check none on a census form if you asked for their religious background. There's been a decline in people who identify as Christian and an increase in the people who identify as none. And that data is true. But it's actually quite hard to find three generations of non-religious people, because quite often if people are raised without any religious tradition, either they or their children will sort of rebel against that and be like, oh, well, but wait a minute. A friend of mine invited me to church because at the end of the day, it's no way to live. I mean, if there is no God, then your life and mine are pointless. All the things in which we most deeply believe like universal human rights and justice and care for the poor and equality and all these things go up in the smoke. So people tend to cotton onto that after, you know, if they've been raised with nothing, they often feel that hole and find a way to fill it. There's a really interesting statistic, which I think was sort of from the last generation to this, looking at how likely people are to identify with what they were raised with. And so it was looking at Catholics, Protestants and people who have no religious belief. And I think the statistics were that 80% of people raised Protestants still identified as Protestant in adulthood. So, you know, 20% didn't, 80% did. The Catholics, it was about 60% raised Catholics still identified as adults. So 40% drop off. For non-religious people, also a 40% drop off. But it was 60% of people who were raised non-religious who still identified as non-religious as adults. And so that's just really interesting because it points to, we're not only seeing, oh, well, people raised with something then walk away. We're also seeing people raised with nothing, showing up at church and saying, I think maybe there's something here that I need. I've never heard that figure before, about three generations. Here's an interesting question. So some of those who put down none are very casual on just about everything. Maybe they believe in God, maybe they don't. It's not that they don't go anywhere. But then there's people who are, well, for lack of a better word, religiously atheistic. And I'm curious whether that same three-gen thing applies to the religious atheists. Because at least one of the things that I might imagine that impacts these nones is, I have no worldview. I'm kind of out to sea, and a religious outlook could give them an anchor. Now, I think atheism provides a very poor anchor, but it is a comprehensive worldview. I mean, it doesn't provide any anchor. People, I mean, it's quite secular humanism, which borrows Christian ethics and tries to wrap it up with an atheist bow. You could have some kind of worldview there, but it's... It's unstable. Absolutely. And I mean, I think... And it's unjustified. I mean, the people who say, well, I want to be intellectually consistent about what I'm saying. If there is no God, wave goodbye to all of your moral beliefs. They're gone. Right. And I think the, I mean, actually, it's funny, we've talked, I think in the last time you were here, we talked about dominion. And you mentioned Scrivener's book as well. But I think those, I think, make a fantastic case that secular humanism is borrowing, if not stealing, from Christianity, in terms of its outlook. Yeah. I mean, Tom Holland in Dominion, who came to the research as an agnostic, so didn't have a skin in the game, as it were. His research on the last 2000 years of Christian history convinced him that many of his moral beliefs that he held as an agnostic were actually Christian beliefs. And one of the interesting insights that he has and shares in that book is that if we look at something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it's framed as not tied to any religion and sort of a secular kind of mandate for the nations, as it were. But it's very clearly, it was deliberately packaged that way. Because if you say to, obviously, this is Christian ethics, you're not going to get it passed. And in fact, there were some, you know, some Muslim countries that said, Oh, no, no, no, we don't see that this is Christian ethics. And we're not in for this. Yeah. But it's not even just that there has been a sort of theft of Christian ethics by our secular friends. But there's also been a kind of well-intentioned hiding, you know, sort of Trojan horse, as it were, of Christian ethics, which has said, you know, take this in like all these beliefs about universal human rights and value and care for the poor and the equality of men and women and the wrongness of rape and all of these things. They came from Christianity in the first place. Without Christianity, they don't have a basis. But wouldn't it be nice if we just all agreed to believe in them? Yeah, yeah. That's right. And I think that that's, well, sadly, dishonest, you know, and I think, I actually was struck, I think it was, I think I was reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and how much, how far he's willing to go in terms of the importance and necessity of spirituality for the human organism. Yeah, I mean, he's read the research, he knows his stuff. Right, exactly. But then he stops short of that. It's like, he's like, no, I'm still an atheist, sorry. Yeah, well, we can pray for his children, or at least his grandchildren, right? And for him as well, of course. But I guess that's, I have never heard that before. And that's a really interesting figure about the ongoing, or sort of the intergenerational transmission of secularism. Yeah. And obviously, one of the other interesting things is the lack of generation of more humans from folks who aren't religious. That's right, yeah. I mean, I had an interesting exchange with Mike Graham a few months ago, because he was presenting some of the sort of discouraging data about the proportion of people who have no religious belief and are kind of living that way. And he raised the important question, like, how are they, like, think about how they're going to raise their kids? That's right. And I said, I mean, most of them aren't going to raise their kids, because a lot of them aren't having kids. And that's a whole other conversation. And I think Christians sometimes sort of swing the pendulum too far on that question, which is, again, a whole different conversation. But the reality is that religious people are having way more kids than non-religious people, both in the US and around the world. And so there's something of a kind of natural drift there, let's just say. Yeah, I think Jonathan Haidt also, sorry, don't mean to keep bringing him up. He had this really funny remark, and I think this is the righteous mind, but he says, Western Europe is one of the worst countries at converting resources, of which there are many, into reproduction. Or like he has some kind of like formula he had kind of cooked up that like, a large part of the sort of, quote, unquote, evolutionary project is converting resources into reproduction. He's like, we have lots of resources, not much reproduction, which I thought was really comical, because essentially saying, the people who are most gripped by the naturalist picture, the evolution picture of the origin of species are actually the worst at being in the, as it were, value system suggested by that. They are not converting resources into more people or more. It's like, I just thought that was like a really comical irony. So I was actually, one thing that's also kind of come up in these recent studies or recent, yeah, just this new information about, quote, unquote, revival, I'll just call it that. I want to say quote, unquote, because I think there's a lot of, like Ryan Burge, actually, I think one of Michael Graham's co-authors is really reluctant to call this more than a revival for a variety of reasons. I think he was on the BBC a couple of days ago, this video I saw, but he's like, okay, people are expressing interest in Christianity. This is not a revival yet. So I'm going to call it a quote, unquote, revival. It seems like a lot of men are stepping forward in their interest in Christianity, and not as many women, which is an interesting inversion of something that has been historically true, which is that the church is kind of a place for women and men kind of are not into it. So I guess I was curious, like, why do you suppose this inversion has occurred? And perhaps even, what can the church do to faithfully reach women during this time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting, actually, the data on the mental and physical health benefits of church indicate that it's actually even better for women than it is for men. Interesting. So for example, if you look at deaths of despair, so people who die from suicide, alcohol, or drug abuse, and you compare people who never go to church with people who go to church once a week or more, women who go to church once a week or more, I think it's 66% less likely to die of despair. Yeah. And for men, it's more like 33. So it's actually, if we were only data driven, women should be flocking to church more than others. Was it your time? I read a book recently, it might have been yours. So I apologize if this is just like buried in your book. There was something that said that women who live alone don't feel physical touch because they're alone, and that that specifically was very negative for their mental health. Is that in your book? It's not, but I think that's true of both men and women. It may be more acute for women. I haven't looked at the research on that. But yeah, I think physical touch is incredibly important. And I actually think one of the, and I'll talk more about this at the conference, but one of the ways in which we in Christian communities are often missing the clear instructions of the New Testament is that we reserve physical affection for marriage and parenting. And we're not, typically, often we're not building affectionate community that is not dependent on being married to somebody or having children or having grandchildren, but it's because you're part of God's family here. So I think there's, yeah, I think there's a huge miss there, which can be a byproduct, actually, of our emphasis on marriage. And I think one of the things that a lot of churches have done in recent decades is that we want to be, for good reasons, we want to uphold marriage as a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman. We want to support married couples. We want to encourage parents. All of these things are good and godly things, but we've done what the New Testament doesn't do, which is privileging marriage over faithful singleness. And we've acted like the only kind of love that counts is nuclear family love when you cannot come to that conclusion from reading the New Testament. You know, what does Jesus say to his disciples the night that he's betrayed? This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this that he died on his life for his friends. And he says this, you know, the same night the author of John's gospel is snuggled under Jesus' arm, like during dinner. There's a clear affectionate community that we see modeled and commanded throughout the New Testament and the mandate, the command to love one another. It's the hallmark of disciples. How will people know that you're my disciples because of your love for one another? Yeah. And we often run over it, but you know, the greet one another with a holy kiss, you know. We run over it. We misappropriate texts, like what's the most famous wedding text? Oh, I was going to say 1 Corinthians 13. I don't know. Yeah. If I speak with the tongues, men and angels have not love. I'm a clanging on a sounding cymbal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We think that's about marriage. It's not. Because if it was, Paul is not married and he would be saying that he has not love. Right. Exactly. It just makes absolutely no sense. Now, is it transferable to marriage? Sure. Yes, in marriage, love is also patient, kind, et cetera, et cetera. But he's talking about love between believers in the local fellowship, and we have just completely drained the blood out of that and put it all into marriage and parenting. I forget what your original question was. Oh, you're fine. Just on your last point, 1 Corinthians 13 immediately follows 1 Corinthians 12, which is all about the body of Christ. Right. So there's a very natural kinship between those. Although, of course, you spend a lot of time with your spouse, those same principles come to bear like patience. Gosh, I love my wife, but yeah, there's things she does and I'm like, I need to bear up under this. That's good. That's healthy. But yeah, there's many, many people in the community as well, where it's like you have to develop that patience and kindness and trust, essentially. I remember your question was about men versus women. Right. That's correct. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that we're seeing politically at the moment is that younger men attending more conservative and young women attending more progressive, and there are certain reasons for that. But one of the things that it means is that if you have a more, quote, sort of conservative mindset, you're more likely to be open to some of the aspects of sort of cultural Christianity. You're not going to have the same kinds of barriers. So I think of a young friend of mine who became a Christian partly through listening to my podcast, Praise the Lord, who Gen Z young woman had spent 18 months dating other young women, you know, complete with lesbian tattoos on her on her leg, very much sold on all the progressive sort of political narratives around abortion, etc. So somebody in her situation is going to have a whole lot of barriers. That's right. To stepping into a church because she knows that at least the large majority of churches, or at least the churches where people are actually going in any large numbers, are ones that are teaching marriage is male, female, that are holding to abortion being morally unjustifiable. It's like there are core beliefs that she has from her political perspective that are going to keep her from coming to church or are going to drive her out of church. And likewise, we're seeing young women in church context who are experiencing and witnessing a wholesale kind of marriage between what people in their church are saying and what one particular political party is saying, whether or not it has any correspondence to the scriptures. And they're seeing that and thinking, okay, I know that there is something really wrong here, and nobody else can seem to see it. And so I'm walking out because I know that this is not in fact representative of Christian ethics. And so I think there's a way in which a sort of disillusionment has driven a lot of young women out of the church, and disillusionment for good reasons. The hypocrisy of the church. Yeah. And yes, the ways in which we end up kind of picking and choosing from our New Testament ethical plate, as it were, and being okay with justifying flagrant immorality on the grounds that it fits with our political perspective. That's right. So I think there is a real phenomenon, and potentially for the first time in Christian history, actually. I mean, it seems like there have always been more Christian women than Christian men for one reason or another, at least from the data that I've seen. I'll hold that loosely. That we're in an unusual situation where young women are less likely to be showing up at church than young men. And it was actually really poignant. I read and reviewed a book called Girls by an English woman, Freya N'Diaye. Oh, I think I saw your... Was that on Gospel Coalition? Yeah, exactly. So she wrote a book. She actually had worked with Jonathan Haidt, and she herself, you know, Gen Z girl, grew up in the UK, went through all the things that Gen Z girls have been going through, which is a whole lot of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things. And her book is pointing out the ways in which our modern culture in the last 15 or so years has really abused and abandoned young women and told them that this is great. You know, there are extreme versions of this that have normalized around like consensual sexual violence, for example, that we've told a generation of young women that they should not be okay with, but this is what they should think is cool. And they're realizing, okay, I actually don't love being like throttled by my boyfriend or by some guy I just met online, like, you know, but they're being told, oh, no, there's something wrong with you. If this doesn't float your boat, you know, it's just like... I think there was an astonishing article, but I think maybe Peggy Orenstein or something that was about like 60% of women they interviewed had been choked by a sexual partner. Yes. And they were doing those studies at mainstream American universities. So on all sorts of fronts, we have put a generation of young women, as a culture, we have put them through a horrifying experience and told them that this is great, like that they should be so pleased. And that's just one thread of it. So her book, Girls, looks at all the threads of it. And one of the conclusions that she sort of seems to come to personally is like, oh, actually, it looks like Christian ethics might be what's needed here. You know, she's coming out of a not out of a Christian context and very honest about the fact that like, it feels really weird and frankly, a bit embarrassing for her to go to church because everybody around her is going to be like, what are you doing? This is... You can't... Christianity is the last place that these people should be looking for answers kind of thing. And one of the pleas that she poignantly makes, I think it was in an interview with Justin Brierley, who's a podcaster based in the UK. She's basically saying like churches, don't abandon young women. Don't content yourself with sort of ushering in the young conservative men who sort of stumbled into your churches and think that the young progressive women are too far gone. They're not. They're desperate. They need Jesus. I mean, she comes close to saying it that explicitly, but she's saying, please don't count out this demographic. That's great. And that fits what you said earlier about the gay roommate and the Christian roommate and how, look, don't count them out. It's like, just because they fit a profile or a certain kind of social or political identity, if you assume based on that, they're not open to Christ and then therefore don't say anything, that's so tragic. And I think that's really important. And I think a lot of... I feel like this comes across in almost everything you've written, frankly, but part of a really vital Christian community will be very attractive to women coming in and being like, I have some great friends here. And I think just thinking about... I mean, in other words, I think you rightly sort of in prophetic voice challenge the sort of anemia of American Christian community. And I think I just look at, say, John, you mentioned John, John 13, I think it's 35 where Jesus says, by your love for one another, they will know you're my disciples. And I just think when people don't just get that invite, the invites, that's step one, but when they actually walk through the door and they see those authentic relationships and they see people, yeah, the warts and all, I mean, it's not like everyone there is perfect, but people devoted to one another, working through conflict, working through confusion, ministering to one another, discipling one another. I think that's gonna have a kind of radiance, thinking about Paul's language and Philippians two about the stars shining in the dark sky. I think that would be really powerful. So I wanted to, as we kind of start wrapping up, I sort of preview of coming attractions. I think you mentioned you have something in the hopper. So if your publisher will let you, tell us what you're working on. I feel, I don't know, there's so much... I always find it slightly cringeworthy when people are like, oh, I have something so exciting coming and I can't possibly tell you about it. I'm like, goodness me, get over yourself. Thankfully I have no such qualms. I have a bit coming out next April, which has recently acquired a title, which is lovely. It's going to be called How Christianity Changed Sex, Recovering the Bible's Revolutionary Vision for Love, Sex and Personhood. And it's looking at Christian sexual ethics from the Greco-Roman empire to the present day and quite how revolutionary it was back in, you know, when Christianity sort of first rose up in the ancient world, how much it changed how people thought about sex in both the senses of the word. So it's both talking about men and women as well. And then, so the first half of the book is looking at that and it has chapters like how Christianity conceived consent and how Christianity changed same-sex love and how Christianity birthed women's rights. That's cool. And then the second half of the book is looking at the second sexual revolution of the 1960s and the subsequent, you know, sort of the gay rights revolution, the trans rights revolution, polyamory and partner bots, and looking at what is often called feminism today. And I say that the word feminism is a bit like the word pants, because where I come from in England, the word pants means underpants, you know, what you'd call underpants. And in America, the word pants means trousers, what I would call trousers. Okay. So it's not that they are such different things that if I use the word pants in England, that you would necessarily cotton on to the fact that I'm saying something that I'm not talking about American pants. Right, right. Because that, you know, they cover some of the same areas, but they're actually also very different take a while. And likewise, I think the word feminism has that kind of semantic range. That's right. And we often in Christian circles, we have lost sight of the fact that what today seems to be anchored on sexual freedom in the worst sense, radical autonomy and abortion as the kind of center points of women's rights. And so a lot of people want to sort of throw out feminism as this sort of terrible anti-Christian movement. We forget that actually, what you could call sort of first wave feminism, it's not quite as simple as breaking first wave and second wave feminism, because there were people at the time of second wave feminism, like Fannie Lou Hamer is a great example of this, who are essentially first wave Christian feminists who are in the same time movement and working in some ways in concert with, but in some ways very much against some other feminists who are rooting their claims in a sort of atheistic view of the world. So again, it's slightly more complicated than first and second wave. But if we look at the the, the things like access to education, opportunities for employment, care, like protections and provisions for women, all of those things are actually delivered to us by first wave feminism, which is a specifically Christian movement. And so one of the things that the book does is sort of do a compare and contrast of those things and say, actually, we need to, on the one hand, not jump in with everything that most of our contemporaries identify as feminism today, because many of its features are specifically anti-Christian. At the same time, we need to not throw that baby out with the bathwater, because the baby is a Christian baby. And you can in fact, extract the baby from the bathwater and leave the bathwater just right there. And if we're followers of Jesus, reading our Bibles carefully, that's what we need to do. That's really great. Yeah. Thinking about the bathwater, I mean, take the baby out, let the bathwater drain. You don't have to let them, or I guess they're throwing it. I don't know what that's about. But in any case, I thought sounds like a really fascinating project, especially the kind of, for lack of a better word, first century sexual revolution, or if we could call it that, the intervention of Jesus, and then the 20th century sexual revolution and contrasting those. I think that sounds exciting. I have to ask, what's the length of this book? Right now, it is about 74,000 words. Okay. And a couple of hundred? I think it's about the same length as Confronting Christianity. Although if you booked it, then you can't visualize it. It's going to be hardback, so you're expecting something a little more substantial, but it's not a porky hardback. It's a slim and toned hardback. That's right. Yeah. This isn't Dominion or Bacchum's, what was it? The Eyewitnesses. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Oh, such a great book. It is a good book. Yeah. I just confess, I love this title, the one that, how a church could save your life, but I was just like, gosh, I just wish it was longer. Oh, you do? Okay. Well, I wrote it intentionally. I'm a big believer in the goodness of short books. Not always. The book I'm writing now needs to be long, but longish. Yes. And of course, saying less and saying it well is better than repeating yourself endlessly. So I just was like, oh gosh. I read through it and I was like, well, now it's over? Oh, I think I read it in an afternoon or something. I finished my coffee and now I'm going to finish the book. Yeah, exactly. But I'm excited because that, and frankly, yeah, I mean, that sounds like a very rich and complex subject that would require care. And so I'm excited to hear that there'll be a little bit more meat to tear my teeth into. So yeah, well, I should probably wrap up here. It's been a real pleasure. Rebecca, thank you for joining us again on Dwell on These Things, three years hence, and I'm looking forward to hearing you speak tonight and tomorrow morning at the Zenos Summer Institute. And I also want to thank our listeners for tuning in. And for more resources like this, check out dwellcc.org.