The Enduring Relevance of Religion

Surviving the age of extinction, role reversals, and more in this week digest.

Leading off the digest this week Ross Douthat - who has been on a tear lately - wrote a superb essay for the Times on how to survive the coming age of extinction.

Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.

…

This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.

That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.

In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.

Mere eccentricity doesn’t guarantee survival: There will be forms of resistance and radicalism that turn out to be destructive and others that are just dead ends. But normalcy and complacency will be fatal.

It’s a superb piece. Click over to read the whole thing.

Lauren Jackson also had an interesting and to some extent related essay in the NYT, arguing that we have not found a good substitute for religion. She writes:

America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion. Secularization is on pause in America, a study from Pew found this year. This is a major, generational shift. People are no longer leaving Christianity; other major religions are growing. Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults, both inside and outside of religion — say they hold some form of spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond the natural world.” The future, of course, is still uncertain: The number of nonreligious Americans will probably continue to rise as today’s young people enter adulthood and have their own children. But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion. Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.

…

I have spent the last year reporting on belief, interviewing hundreds of people. I’ve visited dozens of houses of worship, spiritual retreats and wellness centers. I also heard from more than 4,000 Times readers who responded to a survey. Many of the demographers, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians I spoke to offered the same explanation: Americans simply haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion.

For all the real attractions of a life outside of institutional faith — autonomy, time back, a choose-your-own-adventure adulthood — there are important benefits that have been lost.

…

But I don’t feel I can go back [to the LDS Church]. My life has changed: I enjoy the small vices (tea, wine, buying flowers on the sabbath) that were once off limits to me. Most importantly, though, my beliefs have changed. I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the propulsive, uncritical belief I once felt. I also see too clearly the constraints and even dangers of religion. I have written about Latter-day Saints who were excommunicated for criticizing sexual abuse, about the struggles faced by gay people who want to stay in the church.

I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Role Reversals

A while back I undertook a project of reading some populist literature from the 1990s. As part of this I read Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation and Up From Conservatism. Lind broke from his affiliation with William F. Buckley and conservatism, and the latter book was his tell-all divorce story (of a sort). It’s overwrought and not one his stronger books. (By contrast, The Next American Nation holds up well).

Obviously, movement conservatism did not care for Lind’s book. I read some of the reviews, including one from David Brooks in the Washington Examiner. This part caught my eye:

Then Lind accepted a job at National Review. Now, it so happens that I held a similar slot at NR a year or two before…Now when I left NR at age 23, I felt lucky to get any job.

…

Lind moved on, as his intellectual quest took him to job after job, to the State Department and then to the National Interest, the foreign policy magazine published by Irving Kristol….Shortly thereafter, he went to work for Harper’s. A bit after that, to the New Republic. A year after that, he accepted some sort of mysterious role at the New Yorker. That is where the scourge of the Overclass, the man who despises Manhattanites with their nannies, now finds himself — working for Tina Brown.

This review was written in 1996. Back then, Lind was sitting on top the world as a staff writer at the New Yorker. David Brooks was toiling away at the Washington Examiner, a low status conservative paper.

Fast forward 30 years. Today, David Brooks is a fêted New York Times columnist and Lind is all but exiled from mainstream media. It’s quite a role reversal. This is an example of how things can change in ways perhaps we couldn’t imagine.

One thing you have to give Lind credit for: he’s stuck to his same basic position since Next American Nation in 1995. Whatever the marketplace thought of them, he remained consistent to his ideas from about 30 years ago. That’s all too rare in today’s world.

Best of the Web

A state representative from Kentucky says that able bodied men who aren’t willing to work are “America’s biggest economic problem.” Our biggest problem? Really? Nobody hates the American man as much as many conservative leaders do.

NYT: The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive - A great podcast in which Ross Douthat interviews Jonathan Keeperman aka “@L0m3z” on X. Keeperman runs the dissident right publishing house Passage Press.

NYT: Theo Von Dismantles the Interview Show - Theo Von has a huge podcast. I’ve never watched it, but he appears to be a very influential person.

Noah Smith: How to have friends past age 30.

In response to my essay on the four conservative aesthetic styles, Bonnie Christian wrote a great piece on the five aesthetics of Republican womanhood.

5 aesthetics of Republican womanhood

The Guardian: Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican

NYT: White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children

Josh Howerton had another interesting episode in his Resurge podcast, this one with Spanish language evangelical influencer Carlos Erazo on pastoral use of social media. A couple of points jumped out at me. The first was again that people today respond to clarity, a point I noted in my book. Secondly, a further observation on why Gen Z people don’t want to become pastors. It seems for a lot of them, they are more interested in becoming influencers, because the people they follow and who are their heroes are influencers.

New Content and Media Mentions

In his latest column for First Things, Liel Leibovitz called me his “Protestant rabbi.” That’s high praise indeed. I also got a mention in the Blaze and from the Civitas Institute.

New this week:

• Cracking the Communication Code - How we communicate is as important as what we communicate

• Thoughts on Trump's First 100 Days (paid subscriber exclusive) - What Trump’s first 100 days reveal about power, policy, and the shifting cultural moment

• My podcast this week is with Saagar Enjeti on how sports betting apps hook you and ruin lives.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.