Are We Really Beyond Religion Now? — A Conversation with Phil Zuckerman

November 1, 2023

Albert Mohler:

This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Phil Zuckerman is a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College. After earning his PhD in sociology from the University of Oregon, Professor Zuckerman has had a distinguished scholarly and teaching career and innovator in the academic world. He has served as a guest professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, as well as an affiliated faculty member for the Claremont Graduate School since 2002. He also founded the first secular studies department in the nation at Pitzer College in 2011. He’s the author of numerous books and academic articles, but it is his most recent book, Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, that is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Zuckerman, welcome to Thinking In Public.

Phil Zuckerman:

Oh, thank you for having me. My pleasure.

Albert Mohler:

I should say welcome back. In 2015, we had a conversation about your book, Living the Secular Life. So this is round two so to speak.

Phil Zuckerman:

I’m so glad you had me back. I guess I did something all right. I wasn’t too offensive, I guess.

Albert Mohler:

No, you’re dealing with big questions and that’s what we like to grapple with. In your new book, co-authored with Isabella Kasselstrand and Ryan Cragun, you basically take on one of the biggest arguments of the last century, and that comes down to whether or not secularization is inevitable and whether or not the United States is now following in a secular rising trend. We both have a lot at stake in this argument and I think it’s a good thing we discuss this publicly. Tell me about the book and tell me about the argument you’re trying to make here.

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah, so I guess I wouldn’t say that we think secularization is inevitable. We would say it’s just simply possible and seems to be happening, and if we had to make a bet, we see it continuing into the future, but there are always things that can change, and so we don’t see secularization as some kind of inevitable model of history and it’s going to happen no matter what. In fact, I can think of many reasons why it may reverse and decline. So basically, in a nutshell, when I was in graduate school 30 years ago, the reigning scholar in sociology of religion was a man named Rodney Stark, recently deceased, and he had a whole group of scholars supporting him, people like Roger Finke, Laurence Iannaccone, and others who all felt like the old secularization thesis that had been first articulated or broached by some of the earlier founders of sociology, people like Emile Durkheim, a little bit from Max Weber, certainly others who, well Freud, he was a psychologist, but there were many who sort of predicted the demise of religion. They didn’t have much in the way of data, but they had this sense that that’s what was happening. Stark and his colleagues said, “Well, they were wrong. Religion is stronger than ever; secularization was perhaps a misguided wish by some cranky atheists.” The truth is that religion’s stronger than ever. So when I was in graduate school, that was doctrine, that was truth. Wasn’t the case in Europe, but it was here in the United States. Now, 30 years later, the data seems to show, and I remember Isabella Kasselstrand, my colleague, was also in school at the time, and she’s a Swede, and she was an undergraduate at the time at a Cal State School, and she read Stark’s work and was like, “I just don’t think this is right.” Her professor said, “Well, go do the research and see if you can prove it wrong.” Ryan, myself, and Isabella were all sociologists who studied religion and all the data that we’re accessing and looking at shows that religion has in fact plummeted in most countries around the world, certainly the developed democracies, no doubt about that. So we said, “You know what, Stark was wrong and secularization actually is definitely occurring all over the world.”

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, but not evenly. That was one of the points that Roger Stark and many others made say a generation ago. They really weren’t contesting in many ways what had taken place in Europe, particularly in Northern and Western Europe with a rather radical and high velocity secularization. But the question was whether or not the United States of America in particular was exceptional, is this an exception to the rule?

In your book, you cite one of the most, I think, suggestive sentences in this entire debate. It comes from Steven Bruce or Steve Bruce back in 2002 where he said that “Modernization creates problems for religion.” You mentioned Durkheim, you mentioned Weber, there was baked into that argument a kind of sense of inevitability, and I’m not holding you to it, but a kind of sense of inevitability that where the modern age reigns, religion is ipso facto in retreat. It didn’t turn out evenly true, but I think the point of your book is you think it is largely true.

Phil Zuckerman:

Well, basically it’s an empirical question. How do you measure religion? How do you define religion? Then what do you see it happening over time? People define religion different ways. So if you want to define religion as “concern for ultimate questions”, well, then a Marxist is a religious person. If you want to define it narrowly or broadly, that’s going to change. We try to limit it to the three “B’s”, belief, behavior and belonging. Belief in supernatural things, belonging to religious organizations and behaviors, church attendance and so on and so forth.

If you take those measures, the best available data over time shows that those measures of religiosity are definitely declining in the societies that secularization theory would predict it, where there’s existential security and so and forth. So yeah, the United States is following that trajectory. We’re behind. We’re not as far along as Sweden or Scotland, but those same measures and those same trends are now more than apparent, abundantly so, here in the United States as well.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, I think it’s good to have this conversation in part because you’re the author of Living the Secular Life. You identify personally with that worldview. I think you were the first professor of secular studies with that title in the United States, so that’s quite an historical hallmark.

Phil Zuckerman:

Well, thank you.

Albert Mohler:

I’m an evangelical Christian theologian, so we ought to be able to have a good argument or a good conversation here. Let me just stipulate upfront. I don’t think you’re completely wrong. As a matter of fact, a lot of what you present in this book is material I’ve basically been using in arguments because I do not deny that secularization is taking place. I have felt that the cost to Christian theology by many of the sociological arguments is that they’ll claim anything as evidence of a resistance to secularization. So I want to say as you define religion in belief, behavior and longing, and by the way, not in that order, but those three words, I want to say, I appreciate the fact you put belief in there, because I think there are many sociologists who are very tempted to look at anything that moves and say that that’s religion and you don’t do that.

Phil Zuckerman:

Thank you. Yeah, for sure, indeed.

Albert Mohler:

So play that out a bit, if you will for me. I mean, so how much belief do you have to have in order not to be secular? You used the word supernatural, and again, I appreciate that. So can you play that out just a bit in terms of how that operates?

Phil Zuckerman:

Sure. It’s actually the one area where Rodney Stark and I agree. Rodney Stark and his author William Sims Bainbridge, in many of their books, they said, “A religion that lacks supernatural assumptions or beliefs is no religion at all.” So that’s kind of where we make the cut. If you believe in the existence of entities or things or forces or beings that can’t be empirically proven through standard mechanisms, through appealing to our senses, that can be replicated in a double-blind study or whatever. So, that’s God, gods, goddesses, demons, devils, angels, reincarnation, all that stuff. That’s traditionally what we would typically mean by supernatural beliefs.

Now people can still identify as religious. There’s a lot of people who say, “Sure, I’m Jewish, but I don’t believe in the religion. It’s a cultural identity.” I have lived in Scandinavia. There’s a lot of Scandinavians who identify as Christian or Lutheran as a kind of cultural heritage, even though they don’t believe in any of the biblical stories or even Jesus’ resurrection. So there’s many ways to be religious. There are many Buddhist traditions. It’s more ritual-based as opposed to faith-based. But we would argue that what makes religion religion as a distinct from nationalism or Marxism or soccer fans or chess clubs is the belief in supernatural beings or forces or entities, for sure.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. So just let me press you on that. By the way, I agree with you, I appreciate that, that’s how this started out—I am very frustrated, on both sides of the argument by the way, there are religious sociologists, even those who identify with the Christian sociology-

Phil Zuckerman:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

Who I think make atrocious arguments in which they’ll claim just about anything as evidence of religious belief. As a theologian, I find that very problematic.

Phil Zuckerman:

I appreciate that.

Albert Mohler:

But, I do wonder what you do with something like three headlines in secular newspapers in the last couple of weeks on manifesting. There’s no theism there. So in what category do you put that stuff?

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s murky and fuzzy. That’s why we’re a soft science. We’re not isolating chemicals in a beaker. We’re dealing with social phenomena that have cultural context, historical context, even linguistic aspects. So yeah, I get that question a lot. What’s the difference between someone who says they’re spiritual but not religious? We hear this a lot, manifesting. “Oh, you want that job? Well, you got to manifest it.” Is that religion? Is it superstition? It’s too fuzzy for me. I can’t give you a hard and fast exact definition of when a belief is supernatural, when it’s theism. But generally, theism has to have some God component. That’s what the root of the word “Theo” is, God. What do we do with someone who says, for example, Jains, one of the oldest religions in the world are atheistic. They don’t believe in a God, but they certainly believe in the soul’s reincarnation and samsara and nirvana. So there’s a lot of supernatural stuff at play. It just isn’t directed by a god. So it’s not theistic, but it’s certainly supernatural faith.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I would say that as a Christian theologian, the key issue there is that theism requires identity of “theos”, some kind of personal theism, whereas supernatural can be just kind of baked into a cosmological cake.

Phil Zuckerman:

Can I ask you a question even though I-

Albert Mohler:

Certainly.

Phil Zuckerman:

So for example, when I was in Scandinavia and I would interview people and say, “Are you Christian?” They would say, “Yes, definitely we’re Christian.” I say, “Well, do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins?” “No.” “Do you believe Jesus was resurrected?” “No.” “Do you believe in Adam and Eve?” “No.” “Do you believe in God?” “Well, I don’t really know what that means.” I mean, would you call those people Christian?

Albert Mohler:

No. As a Christian theologian, I would not. I would tell you though, as you mentioned, you sometimes need a third category, and that is what kind of non-believer are you? In this case, they’re Christian non-believers. So that is to say their worldview, even their understanding of history, and perhaps their own family, is deeply saturated in historic Christianity, but they’re not believers themselves. So I mean, not only am I an evangelical by definition or as an orthodox, and by that I mean holding to the classical Christian tradition, but I’m of course a conversionist, so—

Phil Zuckerman:

Right. I love it. I love that you got me on your show.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. Well, there might be other Christian theologians who would define things more generously, but I would see them as the problem, not the solution.

Phil Zuckerman:

Sure.

Albert Mohler:

I want to talk about two massive, massive questions. One of them is kind of in the background to your book is in the foreground. So I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because I want to ask you some questions in the cracks of your book, so to speak, in between.

Phil Zuckerman:

Please.

Albert Mohler:

So in the background to your book, is the fact that what we call secularization, which I define as a recession in the binding authority of theism, secularization. There’s no sane person who questions that it took place in Northern and Western Europe and in a remarkably short amount of time, and that it didn’t happen here in the same way. So let’s just say it’s question one, question two. Question one, what in the world happened in Europe? How do you explain that sociologically?

Phil Zuckerman:

Oh, yeah. There’s no one single cause. So I’ll give you several. Number one, Europe, you have to remember, post-World War II, led the world in creating excellent, sound welfare for their citizens. So that’s cheap, affordable, excellent childcare; cheap, affordable, excellent elder care; cheap, affordable, excellent education all the way through graduate school; free, free, free and subsidized—extremely peaceful democracies, post-World War II, of course. So when you have societies where people’s basic existential needs are met very well, no one is starving in the streets homeless, people have excellent healthcare, mental healthcare, physical healthcare, elder care, childcare, free subsidized healthcare. I mean, when these things are institutionalized soundly and well, you will see the need for religion, for many people, plummet because religion tends to help when you’re suffering.

So when suffering is alleviated—it’s never erased, no matter how great things are, you still can get cancer, you can still get hit by a bus—but when you have excellent structures like that, which Northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, but also the UK led the way on that front, you see the same thing in Asia. Once Japan post-World War II puts in, again, excellent public education, public healthcare, elder healthcare, religiosity plummets. Same thing in South Korea. So it’s not just Europe, that’s number one.

Number two, you have a lot of societies in Europe that were fairly monocultural, right? So Norway was not a multicultural society for the most part. So you had a strong sense of belonging to your ethnic or national place that we don’t have here in the United States. Here in the United States, we have so much linguistic, racial, ethnic, class, religious diversity. We move around a lot for work, for jobs. So we don’t have that strong sense of community that you can get just from being a Dane or being a Scot. So you have the excellent existential security, you have strong cultural institutions already in place, and, I would say, you have a high percentage of women working outside of the home in the paid labor force. When you have a high percentage of women working outside in the home in paid labor force, we also see a plummeting of religiosity.

So there are a lot of things about Europe. We’re a nation of immigrants, Europe is not. So that immigration process tends to increase religiosity. But everything I just said about Europe, it’s the flip side here. We have the worst poverty rates, the greatest inequality, every 9-year-old with an AK-47, we have the highest murder rates, we have the highest obesity rates, we have the highest child poverty rates, we have no free healthcare—we’re the only industrialized democracy in the world that doesn’t have subsidized healthcare—so you can see how these things work in certain directions.

Albert Mohler:

But there’s one thing you didn’t mention that I think is an essential part of this, and maybe you just don’t factor this highly into your analysis. But it seems to me that the rise in the modern age of a new set of intellectual conditions has a lot to do with this, because—and this goes well before World War II, or for that matter, even World War I—although I would argue that just in terms of social processes, those two massive cataclysms certainly served as kind of a velocity accelerators for social change there in Europe.

But the rise of the modern European university I think has to have something to do with this. Even changing from say Christian orthodoxy being the curriculum to a basic suspicion of religion being built into the academic system. But we’ll just take the rise of the modern university, rising rates of higher education. Higher education itself being an engine of secularization.

Phil Zuckerman:

Oh, absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

The European models especially so.

Phil Zuckerman:

Absolutely, there’s no question that more population, I mean, there’s so many factors here it’s hard for me to keep all on top of my head, but the more educated a population is, literacy rates going up, scientific knowledge going up, all of those factors tend to decrease religiosity. No question about that. Whether the role specifically of the modern university in Europe, I mean, that’s tricky. Let’s remember that even John Stuart Mill could not attend university in England because he wouldn’t profess his faith in God and Jesus.

So up until well through the 1800s, the universities of Europe were still dominated by a certain theology, and if you didn’t subscribe to that, you couldn’t attend. So it’s only very recently that we have the so-called free thought reigning in universities. But yes, I would agree that strong universities and literacy rates certainly decreased religious faith, particularly in supernatural claims. No question about that.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I would also say, again, as a Christian theologian, that the de minimis theology that was represented kind of structurally in those, especially continental European universities, they implied far more than they delivered. Because I mean, if you have Adolf von Harnack provost of your institution, you’re not exactly a bastion of Christian orthodoxy, regardless of what the chancellor says.

Phil Zuckerman:

Got you.

Albert Mohler:

I want to ask you a couple of questions again in the background. So before we get to your argument of with Rodney Stark and others just still in the background a bit, let me ask you about a few nations, because looking at this longitudinally, at least in part and over your research. So let’s talk about Germany for a moment. I think most people will be shocked to know that in many ways, the central political tradition and power in Germany since World War II has been the Christian Democratic Party, and they still have Christian written not only into their name, but into their political philosophy.

Of course, every German taxpayer has to make a decision as to whether he or she identifies as a member of some church, and then there’s confiscatory taxation that then gets to the churches, which is why, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany is relatively small in numbers, but it’s massive in wealth. How do you explain a Germany? In other words, what was going on there? Konrad Adenauer, end of World War II, Cold War, welfare state, what’s going on there? How do you explain Germany?

Phil Zuckerman:

It’s not my area of expertise. I would say you have to account for it was split in two, East Germany, West Germany. East Germany saw a forced Soviet atheism. That was a disaster. West Germany didn’t experience that, experienced more prosperity, more democracy. Then there was unification. I don’t know enough about the details. Even the Christian Democrats, I don’t know if that’s Christian in terms of heritage or Christian in terms of I’m washed in the blood of my savior, Jesus. I don’t know the depths of that.

Albert Mohler:

I don’t think it was ever the latter.

Phil Zuckerman:

Right, right.

Albert Mohler:

I think it was far more Christian in terms of kind of a Bismarckian fusionism. Just that we need Christianity, we need the church as kind of the bulwark of the state.

Phil Zuckerman:

Exactly. I mean, what I can tell you though is that secularization has been extreme in Germany as well. Faith in God is all time low, belief in Jesus, all time low, church attendance, all time low. I mean, every indicator, whether it’s frequency of prayer, belief that the Bible was written by a deity, whatever you want, it’s really plummeted in Germany, both East and West.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. The other really interesting test case for me is it hits closer to home in the English speaking world, and that is the UK. I studied there back in the middle of the 1980s for a brief time. I thought I was witnessing a hinge of history, honestly, as I was there, because that was during the Thatcher years. There was just this enormous sense of public commitment to Christianity. But at the same time, the attendance figures were plummeting and it wasn’t a soft glide. It was more like a walk off a cliff after World War II. So again, I’m not asking you to be an expert on Britain, but I mean, that’s getting closer to home. At the very time people were saying, “Well, the United States is not doing this.” Everyone was acknowledging in the UK secularization was happening.

Phil Zuckerman:

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Not only is church attendance at an all-time low, but we now have six democracies where there’s more people who say they don’t believe in God than do, that’s a historical first, and UK is one of them. It’s Estonia, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, UK and South Korea. I’m excluding dictatorships because I can’t do reliable social surveys there, whether they’re religious dictatorships or atheist dictatorships, it’s the same problem. So among democracies, UK now, I mean, the dramatic decline in all aspects of religion is just stunning there. You bet. Scotland particularly.

Albert Mohler:

Right. Where, quite frankly, my Presbyterian colleagues would be most offended because it was thought that even as you look at logical positivism and all these things happening in Britain, but that’s not going to happen in Scotland. So if anything, Scotland’s plunge may be steeper and less predictable.

Okay, so at the same time, here’s the big question number two. people were saying, “Is the United States just on a delayed fuse?” Because at the very same time, the plummet was happening in the UK.I mean, people are talking about massive Christian identity. I mean, we’re putting “In God We Trust” on coins. We are putting “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Dwight Eisenhower goes and dedicates the headquarters of the National Council of Churches and says this is central to American identity and it looked like it was true. Will Herberg, I know you’re familiar with him, he basically said, “The American identity comes down to a three-legged stool, Protestant, Catholic, Jew.” Everyone outside of that is outside of mainstream American culture. Okay, so why did they think that then? Were they wrong?

Phil Zuckerman:

Our big enemy was the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was proudly, disgustingly, barbarically atheistic. So we had to go the other way. If the Soviet Union loved apple pie, we would have denounced apple pie. If the Soviet Union loved classical music, we would’ve say, “We are the land of jazz.” I mean, the bottom line was you had an unfree, totalitarian, human rights nightmare in the name often of atheism. So we doubled down on our theism. We said, “Oh, if that’s what communism looks like, and we’re the land of the free, we’re going to double down on our faith in God”, and I’m so glad you acknowledged that—we added those sentiments to our coins. We changed our national model from “E Pluribus Unum” to “One Nation Under God”, we inserted that phrase into the Pledge of Allegiance, so I saw that more as a rallying the troops of democracy, capitalism, Christianity, theism in the face of this horrible Soviet menace. And, we were quite religious back in the ’50s in terms of the measures. Church attendance, belief in God was well over 96%. Identification, almost nobody identified as non-religious.

So back then it was fairly accurate. Eisenhower had his finger on the pulse of the general American public. Now, every church attendance rates are down, rates of belief in God are down, rates of belief that the Bible is divine in origin is down. Rates of, I mean, people even just saying they’re religious. So all this, so I just think there was a delayed reaction here. The United States didn’t secularize as soon or as early or as swiftly or dramatically as say Scotland or Sweden, but we’re catching up. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to that level, but we have certainly shown that we’re not immune to secularization here in the United States.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, that’s very helpful, professor. By the way, Dwight David Eisenhower was the first and only president of the United States to be baptized as a Christian while president.

Phil Zuckerman:

Wow.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. Something that a lot of people don’t recognize.

Phil Zuckerman:

That is so interesting. I had no idea.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, absolutely. At a church right there in Washington, D.C. That still begs a question to me though. So in other words, the Cold War is, if anything, just as threatening to Western Europe. After all, they’re even closer, and more scarred by World War II. So in other words, still, I’m pressing that a little bit, I still want to understand why this collapse happened in Europe and just to say, in the UK, let’s just limit us to the English speaking world, and it just didn’t happen here. I’m still trying to understand what arguments could be made as to why it didn’t happen here, and we’re also hyper modern, so modernity can’t just be the answer.

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah. Those are great, great questions, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to solve the mystery, and I’m pontificating off the top of my bald head here, but you’re absolutely right. The Soviet Union was knocking on their door. The Baltics had been occupied. Much of what we call Eastern Europe really wasn’t all that East. I mean, Czechoslovakia was Central Europe. So you’re absolutely right. Why wouldn’t they have been more threatened by the Soviet Union that’s doubled down more on their own theism and freedom of religion and so on and so forth? I really don’t know.

I have to say to me, and I ponder this, I’m not a historian, but it can’t be an accident that Darwin comes from the UK and his writings are first published in the UK. Hume comes from the UK and his writings are first published there. We see some of the early skeptical beacons coming from Europe. I mean, that’s an excellent question. There must be something about European culture that’s different than American culture that caused the different responses, whereas the U.S. felt like it needed to double down on its faith and its theism, Europe certainly did not, even though they were in, as you said, greater danger. I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, it’s a really good question.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I will step into your field for a moment as an amateur and just say that at least one question, and I guess this could be more properly in history than in sociology, but one question to me would be the role of the elites, and in particular the elites of wealth. Because as you look at the UK, there was an erosion of Christian commitment that was pretty evident. I mean, you see this in Evelyn Law’s works and so many other things in a way that seems to have been delayed.

I think this distinction was noticed by even someone like William F. Buckley, Jr., very comfortable on both sides of the Atlantic, who said the elites over there, I mean, over here you got George, I mean, you’ve got Rockefeller building University of Chicago and building a chapel, this monstrous gothic chapel, I mean, monstrous by large, in a way that the British aristocracy had walked away from. So I don’t know if that’s just a little rabbit hole of historical interest, but the British have an aristocracy, and so do we. Ours are kind of homemade.

Phil Zuckerman:

Indeed.

Albert Mohler:

The argument I walked into as a young man and as a young Christian theologian was largely shaped by people like Peter Berger and others. Berger, I heard him speak in person a couple of times, and he basically, by the ’90s, was revising a thesis he helped to develop in the ’50s and ’60s, because secularization didn’t happen the way he thought it was going to happen. But you’re arguing in the book, and you mentioned Berger, respectfully I would say, but basically you’re arguing that the early Berger was more right than the later Berger.

Phil Zuckerman:

Well, it’s not us that’s arguing that. It’s the data. I mean, Peter Berger was brilliant, a brilliant man, never did a single study of his own, never talked to a single human being, never did a survey, never did any in-depth interviews, never did any field work. The guy just stayed in his office and wrote brilliant book, amazing writer. I love him. I still assign him.

Albert Mohler:

I just have to pause and say that is one of the most devastating take-downs I have ever heard by a sociologist, but I just don’t want that to pass without notice.

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah, thank you.

Phil Zuckerman:

When you actually get your hands dirty, you resent people that don’t. When you actually have to talk to individuals and try to make sense of what they’re saying, when you actually have to run some regression analysis, which Peter Berger never did, so this man has this amazing reputation, because he was so brilliant. Like I said, I still assign his books. I think Rumor of Angels is genius, I think Sacred Canopy. But what he did in Sacred Canopy in 1967, I believe, yeah, he argued that the greater pluralism, religious pluralism you have in a given society, you’re going to see secularism.

He didn’t provide an ounce of data to support that. It was all pontification, all theorizing, without any evidence to support it. So now you can run the numbers, and what you find is that’s exactly what, absolutely, when there’s greater religious pluralism, it’s not the only cause of secularization. So even though Berger recanted and Berger was a right-winger, he loved Stark, he loved the Lord, and I think at the end of the day, he abandoned his own sociological wisdom to fit more comfortably with his worldview as an older, older gentleman.

But the data, if anybody can show me evidence to the contrary, I’ll revise. That’s the difference between, I guess, an empiricist and a non-empiricist. If you can show me data that’s contrary to my position, I’ll change my position. But the data shows that Berger, despite his own recanting, was correct in his early theorizing. It’s one of the best theories we have for secularization.

Albert Mohler:

Okay. So this is a great intellectual puzzle. You and I may see it differently, but it is a great intellectual puzzle. Why did Peter Berger in the ’90s think that he was wrong in the ’60s? In other words, what was he looking at that led him publicly to say, “I thought modernity would mean secularization in the United States”? It hasn’t happened. That’s his assertion, and so I have to revise my theory. So was he wrong in the 1990s? I think you’re clearly saying so, but I’ll say, why was he wrong? What should he have seen then that he didn’t see?

Phil Zuckerman:

Well, that’s a good question. This is great. Couple things. He was swayed by Rodney Stark, and Rodney Stark, you have to remember, did present himself as an empiricist. Rodney Stark presented all kinds of so-called evidence and data. So there was a lot there to contend with. But in the end of the day, I think, I don’t know what was going on in Peter Berger’s head. I mean, there’s a couple factors that I remember in the ’90s. Okay, so you saw this big upswing in Pentecostalism, particularly in Latin America, and that got everybody, “Oh, Pentecostalism is on the move.” That was a biggie.

You had a real surge of what we call the Christian right, or the religious right, which nobody saw coming. So post-1980s, you suddenly saw all these groups seeming to have a tremendous sway in our American culture, media empires blossoming, taking over school boards, taking over city councils. So you saw this great success on that front. So there were various indicators of—Mormons seemed to be growing, although that’s leveled off a bit—but so there were, if you wanted to find strong religious movements, you could find those around the world.

Also, just in terms of who has more babies, the more religious you are, the more babies you tend to have, so demographically. But when you say, what was Peter Berger looking at then, I would say it’s what was he not looking at? Just look at basic data of frequency of prayer, church attendance, faith and belief in God, the data, it was just emerging then. There wasn’t a lot, but now it’s all there. So I personally think Peter Berger was more ideological in his later years. The exact things that Stark and Berger accused the early secularization theorists of, it was very ad hominem. They said, “Oh, these guys, they don’t like religion, they want it to go away, they wish it would go away”, so they’re theorizing it’s going away. I would say it’s the exact same thing with Stark and Finke and Iannaccone and Christian Smith and Peter Berger, they were all theists, more or less of varying shades, who liked religion, thought secularism was a bad force in society and just didn’t want to accept that it was on the rise.

Albert Mohler:

So are you just doing that in reverse?

Phil Zuckerman:

Except we have data. So I think there is a degree of it. We are like, “Ah, nah, nah, I told you so.” But I had to fight my, I don’t want to say who, but I would say one of my co-authors was definitely more Starkian in his or her approach, and I tried to say, this is not “tit for tat”. We have to let the data speak for itself. That’s what I think we’ve done in this book. I think we’ve presented, these are our reasons why we think secularization has occurred exactly along the lines that the classical thinkers predicted it would. They didn’t have the data. I think we do.

Albert Mohler:

So let’s talk a little bit about the conversation we’re having now. Evangelical theologian talks to a professor of secular studies. So we’re talking. We know who we are. We can have a conversation here.

Phil Zuckerman:

Love it.

Albert Mohler:

I think what might surprise many people is that I think both of us have a great deal of investment in the data. I’m not a sociologist, I’m a theologian, but I respect the presentation of the data. I also think there’s something else going on here, and that is that I am not encouraged by false claims about religiosity, nor are you, maybe for equal and opposite reasons. But I think there’s a grave danger that a lot of Christians in the United States will claim more for Christianity than can be sustained in any kind of honest argument on the ground.

Phil Zuckerman:

Interesting.

Albert Mohler:

So I lament the fact that more Americans are not Christians. I think others may celebrate the fact that more Americans are not Christians. But I think it’s at least a matter of intellectual honesty to say, I think both sides in this argument may well be troubled by false claims about religiosity that just don’t impress me.

Phil Zuckerman:

I appreciate that. It is interesting. Even though we’re on such opposite sides of our worldviews, I think it’s fun to have this conversation. So I’ll give you an example of how what you just said plays out in my work. There’s a lot of talk about the rise of the nones, the N-O-N-E-Ss, not singing nuns from Sound of Music, but people who when asked what is your religion, they say, “None. None of the above. I’m none of these.” So you see this big rise of the nones in the last 30 years or so, certainly generationally it’s exploded.

Whenever I talk about that data, there’s always people in the audience who say, they’ll raise their hand and say, “Well, just because someone says non-religious, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus or they aren’t a believer in God.” They’ll say, “So your numbers are screwy Zuckerman because you’re saying these people are secular. All it means though is that they don’t call themselves a Lutheran or a Mennonite or whatever, but they still believe in God or Jesus.” I’ll say, “You’re absolutely 100% correct. There’s a church half a mile from here where they say, ‘We’re not religious. We have a relationship.’” So they won’t identify as religious.

On the other hand, what I’ll say to them is, “Do you know how many people I interview who do identify as religious but don’t believe? Why would they identify as religious?” Of course, I’m Catholic. My family’s Catholic. Yeah, sure. We’re Episcopalian. I went to a summer camp when I was a kid. Yeah. Well, I think we’re Methodists because my wife sings in the choir. So there’s a lot of people who identify as religious, who even go to church because of a spouse or whatever who do not have any personal faith whatsoever. They don’t even know about the details of the faith in order to reject it, right? Do you know how many people don’t even know, I could go on and on, so from my perspective, I think-

Albert Mohler:

You can almost assuredly answer that question yes.

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah, exactly.

Albert Mohler:

I think for different reasons, we share a common concern about how much cognitive commitment to Christian theology is found among many people who claim to be Christian.

Phil Zuckerman:

Exactly. So it’s interesting. So I agree with you obviously for different reasons. I think I’m curious, I’m interested in that because I think secular folks are being under counted. You’re probably tentative to that because it has to do with people’s salvation and whether or not they’re really truly saved and so on and so forth.

Albert Mohler:

There is kind of a two track thing going on here, because in the larger social context of American political and cultural life, I would argue against many who would call themselves secularists that there’s an essential Christian background to so many of these commitments that I try to foreground. But at the same time, having an honest conversation about these things is difficult and such conversations are rare. I am not a sociologist. I’m a theologian. However, I want to respect the data. I want to ask you about the data for a moment. One of the things that frustrates me when I look at polls, or just about any survey, and this would include even I think work of the quality of Pew, for example. I think a lot of what they do is just incredibly credible. It still doesn’t answer my questions. So it’s all how you define terms.

Phil Zuckerman:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

So how do you actually determine, even just sociologically, if someone is a theist? In other words, how do you Professor Zuckerman actually define that? How would I know how you’re defining it?

Phil Zuckerman:

Great, great, great stuff here. This is really getting to the heart of methodology and how we even understand what it is we’re trying to analyze. What you just said about surveys and polls, you mentioned one problem, like the terms you’re using, what do they even mean? They can mean different things to different people. That’s just one problem. Don’t get me started on sampling methods and generalizability, response rates. I mean, there’s a host of problems with polls and surveys. So we’re really making do with the best available data, which itself is not perfect. It’s quite flawed.

So what I try to say is there’s different ways you can approach terms, right? There’s general understandings of terms, but there’s what an individual person might mean by a term. To be quite honest, this is where, this is why I do in-depth interviews. So a survey, I can ask a person, “Do you believe in God?” I can give them some options, yes, sometimes, not sure, probably not, no, I don’t know. We can give them different answers, but what does God even mean to them? What if God means to them an ultimate force of all being? I don’t even really know what that means, right?

So when I have an in-depth interview, I can sit down with a person and unpack it. So the good thing about an in-depth interview is I can really get to the heart of what they mean. The bad thing is I can’t give it a numeric value. I can’t run it in a survey. So if I have an hour conversation with someone about what God means to them, I’m getting a very rich understanding of what it means to them. I can’t then turn around and say 68% of Estonians think God is this. I can’t do that. It’s a conversation.

When I think of a theist, I think it’s someone who claims to believe in God. Now, I’ve never understood the God concept. I’ve never heard of a reasonable definition of God that makes any logical sense to me. So it’s not that anybody’s ever defined God, and I’ve said, “Oh, I see what you mean.” Any definition of God I’ve ever heard always just raises more questions, seems philosophically unreasonable, untenable, contradictory. You can’t be omniscient and omnipotent at the same time. These things don’t work. So I don’t really know what a true theist is, but if someone tells me they believe in God, I think they’re a theist.

Albert Mohler:

All right. Wow. An awful lot to unpack there.

Phil Zuckerman:

Sorry, I’ve got to warn you. I haven’t had my lunch yet, so I’m even going to get more crazy as the hour goes.

Albert Mohler:

Well, the conversation’s lively because we’re talking about matters of ultimate importance. It also gets down to something else, and that is we’re talking about the data. I’ll tell you what informs me, data about who goes to church and who doesn’t.

Phil Zuckerman:

Okay, interesting.

Albert Mohler:

That informs me. There you talk about behavior. I think of the belief, the belonging, the behavior, the one that’s actually more objectively verifiable, if people are honest, is the behavior.

Phil Zuckerman:

Absolutely. You could see it. You can observe it.

Albert Mohler:

So what does that tell you now?

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah. I totally agree with you. Behavior is the one, belief is in someone’s head. So we either have to interpret it because they tell us something or they write something or they sing a song. We don’t really know what’s in people’s hearts and minds. We can watch them go to church. We can watch them attend a Bible session. We can watch them circumcise their kids. We can watch them ritually scar themselves. What people do around their religion is much more reliable as it can be observed, it can be counted and so on and so forth.

But I’m curious, so when you say church attendance, I think church attendance is a very valid indicator of religious behavior, but I think you were saying it’s not necessarily a good indicator of theism because they could be attending church and still not believe. Is that correct for you?

Albert Mohler:

No, I would say I think the causal link is much stronger than that. I was kind of arguing-

Phil Zuckerman:

Okay, okay.

Albert Mohler:

What I’m saying is I’m not putting a whole lot of trust in what any poll or survey tells me about what people say they believe about God. Do you believe in God enough not to golf on Sunday morning but to come to church?

Phil Zuckerman:

Got you. So the person that’s just out there driving their car and going to work and whatever, hunting and singing and whatnot, and says, “Oh, yeah, sure, I believe in God,” carries less weight for you because there’s no provable commitment. But if you’re going to go to church once or twice or three times a week, that’s going to be kind of an indication that you take your faith seriously.

Albert Mohler:

Judaism has its own way of defining this. But for Christianity, and by the way, in all, just take the three major historic branches where you have Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, all three have been absolutely united in a Lord’s Day duty.

Phil Zuckerman:

Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah.

Albert Mohler:

So wherever you look there, you find out who really is signaling faithful adherence to the theology by whether or not they show up in church or not.

Phil Zuckerman:

I like it.

Albert Mohler:

So it’s plummeting church attendance statistics that speak most powerfully to me.

Phil Zuckerman:

I like that. I think it’s sociologically sound too. There’s something about people, you can ask someone who they’re supporting for presidency, but if they don’t go to the voting booth, it’s all for naught. You can ask someone, do they play violin? If they say, “Sure, I’m really talented,” but if they never pick one up, so I agree with you that what people actually do is probably a stronger indicator of what’s going on.

Albert Mohler:

In your book, it’s a little pugilistic at times. I think for a book of this length in this market, so to speak, it definitely makes punches. You kind of outline these. As a matter of fact, at times you kind of set it out thesis, we disagree with that, here’s the data, and you go on. You do raise the question, and you, in honesty, raised this earlier about reversibility or inevitability. So I guess the question I’m asked by other Christian leaders rather constantly is, is there any way to undo this? Or is there some circumstance that might lead to change? By your own definitions, what would that look like?

Phil Zuckerman:

How to reverse secularization?

Albert Mohler:

No, I’m not saying how to.

Phil Zuckerman:

Okay.

Albert Mohler:

I’m not suggesting you have a machine. I’m just saying you in the book, you lay out, here are some things that would perhaps slow down the process of secularization and you have to deal with the real life situations, or at least apparently, Poland, Hungary, Korea, Africa. But I think Poland and Hungary, and Poland in particular, presents a real challenge you might say to both sides in this argument to describe.

Phil Zuckerman:

Okay, so let me just make sure I got the question. So you’re asking me what do I think might hinder secularization? Is that it?

Albert Mohler:

Or slow it down?

Phil Zuckerman:

Or slow it down.

Albert Mohler:

Or even put the process into reverse? Is that conceivable? What would that look like?

Phil Zuckerman:

Yeah. So for me, I would say there’s a bunch of ways to approach that. I personally—I can’t speak for my co-authors—think that if life gets more and more precarious, you’re going to see a greater need for faith and religion and the comfort that comes with certain forms of theism. So what do I mean by precarious? Well, I think as global warming increases and there’s more tornadoes and more hurricanes and more floods and more droughts and more people are suffering, you’re going to see an uptick in the need for supernatural help.

I think if inequality increases, if we continue to slash funding for hospitals and healthcare and education, I think if life gets more miserable, I hate to say it, I think that’s good for religion. I think people turn to religion when they’re suffering or when there’s crises. So you can see where I’m going here. I don’t want those things to occur, but I think that will do it. Another one I think is what we talk about cultural defense. When people feel threatened for other reasons, when they feel that their ethnicity is under attack or their race is under attack or their nationality is under attack, religion helps bolster all of those three.

So religion is a strong feeder to national sentiment, not always. Religion is a strong feeder to ethnic identity often. I’ll give you, for example, I can see a kind of surge in religious identity as Islam becomes more prominent or numerous in the United States. There’s kind of like a, well, if that’s coming, we need to, and that’s not really, is it really about theology? I actually don’t think so. I think it’s about social identity, group belonging, tribalism, et cetera, et cetera.

The other thing I would say is, and I don’t know how to say this, but I will tip my hat a little bit to Rodney Stark, and that is there is something about marketing to religion, certainly. How does one spread good news? If you want to spread the good news of Jesus’ resurrection and potential to salvation, you have to do that in a compelling way. It seems as though, again, this is not my wheelhouse, this is your wheelhouse, but I guess you got to—I don’t think having a egocentric pig of a leader as your front man is going to do much good here in the United States. I think Trump holding up a Bible did more to damage the Christian brand than anything some frothy mouth, angry atheist could ever do.

I would be very careful not to align your faith with some despotic gun loving dictator who wants to subvert the Constitution. I know people are going to disagree about my characterization of Trump, but I believe history will bear me out on that front. Also, I think that the baby issue’s big. People tend to stay in the religion they’re raised in. So as long as Mormons keep having more babies, I mean, let’s take the case of Israel. Israel was quite secular, at least in terms of belief, for much of its founding. But it’s going to be a Jewish Iran in about 20 years. The fundamentalist Orthodox Jews have about 12 kids, have five times as many kids as the secular Jews, so simply in terms of birth rates, you’re seeing Israel turn into a Orthodox Jewish, it’ll be a theocratic nation very soon. That’s almost just a demographic shift. Off the top of my unfed head, those are some thoughts there. I’m curious if I provoked you at all.

Albert Mohler:

No, I’ll get you quickly to lunch, but I’m not going to bite on the political apple you offered me there.

Phil Zuckerman:

Wise move. Wise move.

Albert Mohler:

But I am going to say that I wanted to get to the birth rate issue, because just about every major newspaper has in the last six weeks run major front page articles. Japan, they’re having to look at robots in nursing homes. Israel is the other big situation. But you could talk about Manhattan or Brooklyn where among the Jewish population there, it’s going to be demographically a reversal of what had been. Largely reform Judaism in the center, it’s going to be a far more orthodox Judaism at the center. I don’t think that’s an accident. That’s one of the reasons why I think that as the birth rate plummets, I think big cosmological, metaphysical, theological questions are going to come more to the forefront. I think that’s where it enters into my terrain.

Phil Zuckerman:

Got you. Yeah, I think there’s no question that as societies become wealthier, more prosperous and more secular, they have fewer kids. I mean, there’s no question about that. While I think there’s a lot of good that comes with secularization and secularism, it’s not all good. It’s not all balloons and roses from my perspective. There’s other pathologies that seem to correlate with it as well, and that’s one of them, the low birth rate for sure.

Albert Mohler:

Well, our time’s coming to an end. I want to ask you one last question. So by the time this is published, you’re already working on something new. So what are you working on now?

Phil Zuckerman:

Oh, that’s interesting. Thanks for asking. Right now, so you mentioned something earlier about how a person, for example, in the United States today could say they’re not religious or even not a believer, but they are so embedded in the Christian heritage and Christian culture, either of their parents’ generation or their grandparents’ generation, or just the society in which they live in. So right now, I’m trying to study the most secular humans I can find, the most atheistic on planet earth.

So these are people that live in societies that are majority non-theistic who have parents and grandparents who were not believers. So I’m trying to really understand their worldview and what can we learn about them and from them. I think the findings would surprise your average American. They’re not the bloodthirsty, amoral psychopaths a lot of people would imagine. So I’m looking into those kind of people.

Albert Mohler:

Well, I can say honestly, I look forward to reading that research. I want to thank you for joining me today for Thinking In Public. Once again, it is been a privilege to have the conversation.

Phil Zuckerman:

I am so glad you’re out there. We may disagree in a lot, but man, you are a beacon in many ways. Just I’m so grateful that you had me on and I’m so grateful you do the work that you do. So thank you.

Albert Mohler:

Well, may the conversation continue. God bless you.

Phil Zuckerman:

Take care. Bye-bye.

Albert Mohler:

Many thanks to my guest, professor Phil Zuckerman for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking In Public, you’ll find about 185 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking In Public. Until next time, keep thinking.