Category: Religion

USA fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.

Here is more from the NYT.  The youngest cohort does not seem to be declining in religiosity (unlike earlier generational shifts), and for that youngest cohort the gender gap in religiousity basically has disappeared.

My excellent Conversation with Ross Douthat on God and religion

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  I am very glad Ross flew down from Connecticut to do it, we ended up cutting about 2x the normal length.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he’s less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he’s publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: In general, you weigh personal testimony higher than I do. Let me see if you can talk me into it a bit. Something is recorded in data sensors and confirmed across multiple sensors. Maybe I don’t know what it is, but I’ll believe there’s something there. But if people say X, Y, and Z — there’re all sorts of religions neither you nor I would sign onto, and plenty of humans who will assert, insist that there’s direct evidence for that particular religion.

The story of Joseph Smith, the plates from LDS would be one example, but there’re plenty of religions that don’t even exist anymore, where there’re very particular stories that people have attested to. We really do dismiss them in the numbers of the tens of millions or maybe even billions. So, if we’re willing to dismiss all those stories, isn’t David Hume right? We should not dismiss the stories, but they’re not going to budge us out of a more commonsensical worldview.

DOUTHAT: Yes. I don’t dismiss all of those stories. I guess that’s part of my strong departure from Humean assumptions. I think that certainly there are fakes and frauds and charlatans in religion, and there are people who are just sincerely mistaken, who think that they had a religious experience when really, they have a diagnosis or they should get a diagnosis of some form of mental illness or insanity.

At the same time, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual, just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have — of which, UFO encounters are a subset — that, again, has familiar antecedents going back millennia — I think we should take those seriously and have a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion.

Part of this is just knowing people who’ve had those kinds of experiences, reading a lot about those kinds of experiences — not just in my own tradition, but in other religious traditions. I think that they correspond to something real, even if the interpretation that people give to them is wrong or deluded or misguided. I don’t think that Joseph Smith was in fact chosen by God to restore the lost truths about Jesus Christ, polygamy, and the ancient civilizations of the New World. I don’t think that’s true.

Do I think that Joseph Smith didn’t have some weird supernatural encounter? I’m less confident about saying that. The same would go . . . I don’t think that Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets. Do I think that Muhammad either hallucinated or made it all up? Again, I’m certainly much less confident than you would be in saying that. I do not —

COWEN: It’s almost an Islamic doctrine you’re holding. There are these various tiers of prophets, and they’re imperfectly right, but they’re getting at the divine.

DOUTHAT: Yes. I think any coherent theory of supernatural experience — given what you can encounter just by reading William James — has to say either there’re infinite realms of deception out there . . . This is something that some religious believers would say. There’s one subset of totally authentic, trustworthy religious experiences, and then there’s a vast realm where it’s all demonic deception.

Or you have to say that there’s just a range of ways in which people encounter God and the supernatural that do get filtered through cultural assumptions and through — I don’t want to say imperfect prophets — let’s just say imperfect human beings. And that helps yield the diversity of religions in the world today.

But you can also see patterns in those things like near-death experiences. The range — there is cross-cultural variation in near-death experiences. If you have a near-death experience as a Tibetan Buddhist, you are more likely to see the Buddha. If you have a near-death experience as a Catholic, you’re more likely to maybe see an archangel or a Catholic saint or something. But at the same time, there are some pretty clear commonalities to suggest that people in Tibet and people in Indiana are having the same kind of experience when they die and are resuscitated and report the lights, the tunnel, all the strange things associated with those experiences.

Yes, there’s a challenge here, obviously, for any kind of dogmatic religion. You do have to figure out, “Okay, why is there this consistency but also this variation?” But there’s also a challenge for the Humeans to say, “Well, we’re just writing off this fairly consistent cross-cultural realm of human experience because it’s all supposed to be myth and hallucination?” The people who have these experiences are not generally the kinds of people who you would describe as prone to hallucination and insanity. There are of course cases, but that’s not the norm.

On the Humean point — if you go back and read Hume, he doesn’t exactly say this, but you really have the strong impression that Hume thinks that once you get rid of established religious authorities and the universal teachings of antique stories from the Bible, that a big swath of supernatural stuff will just go away. Now, he says humans still —

Interesting throughout, definitely recommended.  And again, I am happy to recommend Ross’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.

Corin Wagen defends Leviticus (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

In your recent conversation with Misha Saul, you and Misha discussed your joint dislike for Leviticus. I can’t say that I find Leviticus a page-turner, but the book that’s done the most to help me understand why it’s important and what role it plays in the movement of the narrative is L Michael Morales’s book Who Shall Ascend The Mountain Of The Lord? (Amazon). A number of folks I’ve talked to have found this book very helpful. (Disclaimer: Morales is a Protestant, as is D. A. Carson (the editor), so the biases are apparent.)

Briefly, his argument is that Leviticus serves to resolve the narrative tension introduced by the ending of Exodus. Exodus 40:34–35: “Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” The tension introduced by Genesis 3 is that God and man can no longer co-exist because of sin. Moses is able to ascend Sinai, speak with God, and bring the people his laws, but even after building the tabernacle and the ark, even Moses is unable to reside in the presence of God—let alone the people who cannot even touch Sinai!

The rules of Leviticus presents the conditions to resolve this tension and allow the people access to God—protected by the rules that God gives them. In particular the book has a chiastic structure centered around Leviticus 16 (Yom Kippur) where the high priest himself is able to enter the Holy of Holies. There’s other points about how the structure of the tabernacle and later the temple mirrors Eden, etc. “Interesting throughout,” as they say.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix) is one of the best and best-crafted documentaries that I have ever seen. It tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian boy living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As the disease relentlessly robs him of mobility, Mats turns to the online world, spending much of his time immersed in World of Warcraft. (No spoilers.)

To Mats’ parents, his growing screen time is a source of worry and a reminder of the physical limitations imposed by his condition: a life confined to a wheelchair, seemingly isolated and devoid of traditional social connections. By his early twenties, Mats is capable of moving only a few fingers—just enough to click a mouse. But what else, his parents wonder, is there for him?

The documentary follows Mats’ until his death at the age of 25. On the surface, it’s a tragic yet predictable narrative of a young life overshadowed by illness. What happens next transforms the story. After Mats’ passing, his parents post a notice of his death on his blog. To their astonishment, messages pour in from all over the world. Strangers write heartfelt tributes, sharing stories of how Mats profoundly impacted their lives. In the online realm, Mats was known as Ibelin, a vibrant personality who had cultivated deep friendships, inspired others, and even experienced romantic relationships.

The documentary then retells Mats’ story but this time as Ibelin and it does so in such a way that we feel the exhilaration and freedom that Mats must have felt when he discovered that he could have a flourishing life in a new realm. It’s brilliant conceived and aided by the fact that Mat’s entire online life–which in many ways is his life–has been recorded. Everything he said and did, 42,000 pages of text, is preserved online. (As Tyler has said, if you want to be remembered, write for the AIs.)

The film raises profound questions: If heaven is incorporeal, is an online existence closer to a heavenly life than the physical one? What defines an ideal romance? What constitutes true friendship? Highly recommended.

Those new service sector jobs, LDS edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bob Sagers was walking around an indie music festival in Salt Lake City when a friendly stranger approached and asked for his number.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have a Jesus look to you?” the man asked, according to Sagers, a 25-year-old who works as a cheesemonger at a grocery store. It wasn’t a pickup line—the man’s wife was an artist looking for religious models.

“I didn’t really get that a lot,” says Sagers, who is 6-foot-5 with dirty-blonde, shoulder-length hair and a beard he says gives Irish and Scandinavian vibes. “I make for a pretty tall Jesus.”

And so it was that Sagers began a side hustle as a savior.

Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a growing number of people in the state, a picture isn’t complete without Him. They are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. Models are showing up to walk with a newly engaged couple through a field, play with young children in the Bonneville Salt Flats, and cram in with the family for the annual Christmas card.

Since being recruited about four years ago, Sagers has posed as Jesus nearly a dozen times. Others have done so far more often, charging about $100 to $200 an hour to pose with children, families and couples at various locations in the Beehive state.

For the newly sought-after models, the job can be freighted with meaning and responsibility. Look-alikes find that people expect them to embody Jesus in more ways than the hair and beard. Some models said they feel like a celebrity when they don the robe—and get treated like one too. (One felt compelled to remind an onlooker he wasn’t the real Jesus.) Others said they’ve had their own semireligious experiences on the job.

And note this:

Finding a model can be difficult. Areas of Utah with high concentrations of Mormons—who also call themselves Latter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack potential Jesus doppelgängers. Some men who work or volunteer for the church, one of the state’s largest employers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.

Here is more from the WSJ.  Via The Wisdom of Garett Jones.

Science and religious dogmatism

by  Tyler Cowen in

Today’s leading historians of science have “debunked” the notion that religious dogmatism and science were largely in conflict in Western history: conflict was rare and inconsequential, the relationship between religion and science was constructive overall. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of a group of economists, who are beginning to report empirical evidence suggesting pervasive conflict, either in the present or during various historical settings. Who is right? This article provides quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.

That is from a new paper by Matías Cabello. Of course you can believe those results, and still think Christianity was a necessary institutional background, even if being Christian did not help the individual scientist.

Sales of Bibles are booming

by  Tyler Cowen in

Worries about the economy, conflicts abroad and uncertainty over the election pushed readers toward the publication in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of October, compared with the same period last year, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. By contrast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that period.

“People are experiencing anxiety themselves, or they’re worried for their children and grandchildren,” said Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. “It’s related to artificial intelligence, election cycles…and all of that feeds a desire for assurance that we’re going to be OK.”

Here is more from the WSJ, via Anecdotal.  And what is up with Netflix Mary?

Should Notre Dame charge admission?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, as the Cathedral is reopening in December.  The government wants to charge visitors five euros, but the Church is opposed.  Here is part of my proffered solution:

First, charge a fee — but make it €10 rather than €5. If seeing Notre Dame is worth only €7 or €8 to someone, I don’t mind excluding them, for the benefit of those who really want to see the place. The crowds should diminish — and if they don’t, just raise the admission fee. St. Paul’s in London, by the way, charges £25 for adult admission, and Saint-Denis in Paris charges €11. Anyone who can afford to visit Paris can afford to pay more than €5 to see Notre Dame.

Second, assign a priest, nun or other religious counsel to the church, to service any religiously minded visitor who might require assistance in matters of the soul. If need be, that person can walk the God-searching visitor to a nearby church where visits are free. Admission fees will help fund this service, which would be symbolically important even if little used.

Third, set aside further time for Notre Dame to be a quiet and more religious place. Maybe make admission free for one day per week — but only for residents of Paris. Since most visitors stay in Paris for more than a day, the determined tourist still should be able to see the church.

And note this:

The commercialization of churches has some major downsides — but an admission fee can be a partial antidote to commercialization, not its apogee.

And this:

To put it another way: Extreme crowding is a fee of another sort, even if its nominal price remains at zero.

Let’s hope they do it.

*Conclave*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I would say this was a good not great movie, but I pass along word because it is rare to have a movie so exclusively devoted to both public choice and social choice theory, and realistically so.  (Thomas Reese said in an interview that the details on the conclave were pretty realistic too; if you don’t know of Reese his book Inside the Vatican is perhaps the best book on bureaucracy ever.)

I cannot say much more without spoiling the plot.  Needless to say, Richard McKelvey would not have walked away from this one feeling refuted…

The film also takes itself seriously in a good way, which these days in Hollywood is increasingly rare.

My Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.  As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler and Musa explore the rise and fall of the “Great Awokening” and more, including how elite overproduction fuels social movements, why wokeness tends to fizzle out, whether future waves of wokeness will ratchet up in intensity, why neuroticism seems to be higher on the political Left, how a great awokening would manifest in a Muslim society, Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, why Musa left Catholicism, who the greatest sociologist of Islam is, Muslim immigration and assimilation in Europe, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Let me give you an alternate theory of the Great Awokening, and tell me what’s wrong with it. It’s not really my view, but I hear it a lot.

So on the Left, there’s some long-term investment in teaching in America’s top universities. You produce a lot of troops who could become journalists, and they’re mostly left-leaning. Then 2011, 2012 — there’s something about the interaction of social media and, say, The New York Times and other major outlets, where all of a sudden they have a much bigger incentive to have a lot of articles about race, gender, Black Lives Matter, whatever. When those two things come together, wokeness takes off based on a background in Christianity and growing feminization of society.

By the time you get to something like 2021, enough of mainstream media has broken down that it’s simply social media out there going crazy. That just gives us a lot of diversity of bizarre views rather than just sheer wokeness — and besides, Elon is owning Twitter, so wokeness ends.

What’s wrong with that account?

AL-GHARBI: For one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. For instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting, academia, journalism — they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions. Not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter.

Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out. But you can see, actually, that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010 — one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard, then, to understand how or why it was the case that . . .

There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s through the early ’30s, one in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, and then one in the late ’80s through early ’90s. In all cases where we didn’t have social media, where the structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their idiosyncratic attitudes, or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today.

I think all of those factors you said actually do matter, and they matter in the sense — because each of these episodes, there’s so much in common, an insane amount. When you read the book and I walk through some of these — I think a lot of readers will be troubled, maybe, by how similar these episodes are. But they’re also importantly different. They don’t play out identically. They are importantly different: The role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century. The constitution of these fields has changed immensely. There are a lot more women; there are a lot more nonwhite people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth.

All of those factors you described: I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening might differ from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why awokenings happen at all.

COWEN: If “woke” recurs, do you think there’s a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time, a bit like the destructiveness of war? Or is it more of a random walk? Like, the next wave of woke in 37 years might be half as strong as the one we just had. What’s your model?

AL-GHARBI: I think it’s random; that depends a little bit on . . .

What I argue in the book is that the — for instance, when we look at the last period of awokening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was much less — that was the last time we had these struggles over what they call political correctness, or the PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last as long, that awokening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually. Shorter than the one in the ’60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter, and it also wasn’t quite as dramatic.

I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it’s able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get — enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it’s more of a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.

Definitely interesting.

U.S.A. facts of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.

Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.

Here is the full report.  Note that by early 2024, that figure had risen to 27 percent.

My excellent Conversation with Tom Tugendhat

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff.

Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK’s centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London’s architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more.

And here is an excerpt:

COWEN: Okay. First question, what is your favorite walk around London, and what does it show about the city that outsiders might not understand?

TUGENDHAT: Oh, my favorite walk is down the river. A lot of people walk down the river. One of the best things about walking down the river in London is, first of all, it shows two things. One, that London is actually an incredibly private place. You can be completely on your own in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world within seconds, just by walking down the river. Very often, even in the middle of the day, there’s nobody there. You walk past things that are just extraordinary. You walk past a customs house. It’s not used anymore, but it was the customs house for 300, 400, 500 years. You walk past, obviously, the Tower of London. You walk past Tower Bridge. You walk past many things like that.

Actually, you’re walking past a lot of modern London as well, and you see the reality of London, which is — the truth is, London isn’t a single city. It’s many, many different villages, all cobbled together in various different ways. I think outsiders miss the fact that there’s a real intimacy to London that you miss if all you’re doing is you’re going on the Tube, or if you’re going on the bus. If you walk down that river, you see a very, very different kind of London. You see real communities and real smaller communities.

And:

COWEN: Can the British system of government in its current parliamentary form — how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?

TUGENDHAT: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truly liberal foundations are maintained. I mean that not in the American sense; I mean in a genuine, the old liberal tradition that emerges from the UK in the 1700s, 1800s, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property, and all those principles that then became embedded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own. I think it does very well at doing that because it forces you, our system forces you, into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in Parliament over the next four or five years.

And there’s four of us currently going for leadership at the Conservative Party. There’s one reason why, despite the fact that we’re competing almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we’re all going to have to work together for the next four years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other three, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true. There’s only 121 of us Conservative MPs in Parliament, and what this system forces on us is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with somebody if you’re going to deal with them tomorrow. I think that’s one of the reasons why the British political system has endured because it forces you to remember that there’s a long-term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short-term one.

Recommended, highly intelligent throughout, including on China, Russia, and Yemen.

USA religion fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

Here is the full story (NYT).