So this

is a danger of basically... I mean, let's make this practical. Like imagine I want to be a part of a group of environmental activists and we go out marching together and we do petitions together and we have blogs that we share. Or I want to be a part of Trump rallies and we make our signs and we get dressed up and we go to Trump rallies and we hang out afterwards. There's community there. I'm making friends and we're hanging out. We have a common mission to elect Donald Trump or to save the environment or save the planet. That's not analogous to religion. Or yeah, talk a little bit more about what would be the difference between that and sort of becoming a part of your local mosque or church.

Yeah, well the difference is what you invest your hope in. If your mission is tied to a narrow political objective, the danger is if you can't realize that objective, then you suffer through a stage of disillusion or you feel like life is futile. You often see this I think in conversations around climate. It can seem so overwhelming as a civilizational challenge that it actually does lead people to despair, including by not having kids. There is a phenomenon known as childless by climate. That's actually a real thing. It's crazy. It really is. If you are going to Trump rallies and you're all about that and then Trump loses in 2024, then what do you have left? These are things that are much more temporary and they're not transcendent. They don't speak to ultimate questions of who we are. At least they shouldn't. Some people might say that advocacy around climate is an ultimate concern for them and in some sense it's transcendent, but that suggests another danger. These things cannot replace religion or they shouldn't replace religion. I think people are looking for so much from their politics. They want politics to give them some kind of final judgment or some utopian sense of the world. They want their deepest questions answered through politics, but politics by its very nature I would argue is not capable of answering those questions on a deeper

foundational level.