So that was in, in high school, you said. Yeah. 14, 15 years old. Okay. So you, so your sugern into agnosticism was relatively brief. Yeah.

A

couple of years. So the middle school, that was, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And tell us then, so, so you then went on to college and I continued as a Christian, tell us how you became interested in the subject of, of your book, the great de-churching. Yeah.

So long story short, myself and my co-author Jim Davis, we were both past. We were just pastoring at Orlando Grace Church in Orlando, Florida. And we had, we had run across some data from around 2017 that had said that about a little over two fifths of our city, 42% were de-charged. And we really, we were having a hard time kind of wrapping our mind around that, you know, whoa, how are they defining this? You know, who are all these people? And, but it kind of made sense to us because our city was the same percentage evangelical as Seattle or in New York City. Why does Orlando feel culturally a lot different than those two places? And it dawned on us, well, the reality is, is all these people have a cultural memory of church, even though we have the same percentage of people who, you know, go, you know, who are evangelical church. And so, you know, Seattle, New York City, those are unchurched cities, meaning people, you know, those are cities where a lot of people never had, you never had a regular habit of going to church. Whereas in our city, a lot of people have that in their kind of cultural memory. And so we're like, okay, well, if the second largest demographic behind gender in our entire city is church, well, we'd better know a little bit more about this if we're actually going to do our jobs in terms of, you know, as being, you know, missionaries, you know, to our city. And so basically that led us down a path to needing to get data. And because what was out there was, you know, the data that was out there at that time, it was too old, it wasn't academically credible, the sample sizes weren't large enough, the insights that were there were either too old to be relevant, or they weren't the data, it wasn't large enough to know, okay, well, like, who are these folks and why do they leave and what they were willing to return and under what conditions and all those different kinds of things. So I had, you know, something of a relationship with Ryan Burge, who's probably the best religion data person in America as a social scientist, he's also a pastor. So you know, part time on the side. So he has a very unique vantage point into religion in America. And so yeah, we engage him to see if he'd be willing to, you know, if we go and, you know, raise phones for this, hey, Ryan, let me tell you how much fun, you know, what do we need to raise, you know, to do a study at this scale. So he's like, yeah, you raise the funny, you raise the money for this and we'll do it. So we did. And we weren't originally intending to write a book. We were just doing, we were just going to use this data for our podcast called As In Heaven. So we did do a 20 episode, you know, entire season on detouraching in America, you know, on that podcast. But a couple of people in our life convinced us, hey, it would be irresponsible for you to have all this information and to only release it on audio. You need to write this up, you know, in a book form. So yeah, we did that. Not intending to, but we did.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I have two, two initial questions. One is a lot of people have the idea that America up until quite recently was a country in which the very large majority of people went to church. And that only in the last, you know, few decades has that, that number declined. So we sort of had this, this vision of America past where basically everybody went to church until, I don't know, maybe the 1960s or 70s and then people started to think, Oh, maybe I don't need to go to the church and that things have just kind of gone down in terms of church tenants from from there. Maybe at first in a trickle and then in a, in a great rush. My understanding from really, I think a portion of your book that was also pointing to, to another study that was done is that actually if we look at the longest through America, we see a country where surprisingly few people actually went to church and that number grew and built actually through the course of the 20th century before it started to come down to get so, so that's my sort of hand wavy picture. But give us a little bit more detail if we did a longer history of America right. So today.

Yeah. So you were astonishingly few people who went to church on a regular basis at the founding of this country in 1776, 17%. So basically one in six adult Americans went to church on a regular basis at the time of our founding.

So to calibrate that to today, so far fewer people were regular church attendees at the time of founding than today. Is

that accurate? So that meant set it, we've lost basically that same percentage of people going to church over the last 30 years. And we are still three times as church today at 49% as what we were at our founding. So kind of the high high watermark for churching in America was around 70%. And that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And so as the same percentage of people who went to church in 1776, we lost all of those people and more from the 1970s today. And we're still three times as church as what we were at our founding. So just to

clarify, when we're talking, so you mentioned 49% or something church. I see what you mean by that. It's not every Sunday, but people who ever go to church.

Yeah, basically a monthly habit. Monthly or greater habit.

So almost half of Americans today go to church at least once a month. Yes. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, that's all religious traditions,

but almost it's like I don't mean to be rude about these things, but the size of non-Christian traditions in this country are less than 5% of our population. Okay.

So let's call it 45% of Americans go to church at least once a month. If I would call something closer to between 30 and 35% go on a weekly basis, is that? Yes. Yeah, okay. And if we project that back then to the time of the founding fathers, like actually we're oodles better off then in terms of church tenants, then now than we were then. And I think, I mean, it's kind of fascinating actually that the high watermark was in the 70s when I think in an early 80s when I think in many people's minds, the 60s flowing into the 70s would have been the time of the kind of great erosion of Christianity, America. Actually, what I'm hearing you saying is like, oh no, it hadn't even quite peaked at that point. And it's since then that there's been more of an erosion. Tell us then about the trajectory from that high point in the early 80s to where

we are today in 2024. Yeah. So a lot of things have obviously happened in the last 25, 30, 40 years, you know, just from a cultural standpoint. You have three things in particular that we would point to as being kind of, you know, watershed moments. The first those could be the end of the Cold War, you know, so up to the end of the Cold War, you know, America's kind of greatest foil in the world. It's obviously the USSR and they're with kind of the main religion being a kind of atheism. And so in many ways to be American in some ways was to be not communist and, you know, in some ways by corollary, not atheist. And so I think in some ways that bolstered a sense of at least civil religiosity in American culture and society. The second piece would be the rise of the religious right slash moral majority. That movement in American culture and society certainly was polarizing. And so I think many people struggled with that, particularly those, you know, whose political persuasions did not lean in in that particular direction. And then the third piece that there's certainly a watershed was the rise of technology and the ways in which ubiquitous internet, particularly eventually high speed internet and then the internet being becoming more organized, you know, with search and these different kinds of things that allowed people to explore ideas far more rapidly from the comfort of their own homes as opposed to like reading library books, you know, on other ideas or, you know, because most people didn't have access to like, you know, different ideas in a, you know, in a very accessible way. Going back to the kind of America's foil on the world stage, you know, 9-11 was also a watershed moment, you know, because in that moment when those planes at the towers, America's kind of, you know, big foil on the on the world stage went from kind of Russia to atheist Russia to religious fundamentalists. And so I think that that I still don't think we've really understood the extent to which that probably paying the

psyche of American culture and society. So in that instance, obviously religious fundamentalist Muslim fundamentalist, rather than any other sort of species of fundamentalist and that that would have had an impact there. So those are maybe some of the some of the things that have flowed into the title of your book, The Great De-Chirching, give us the statistics on how many people or what a portion of Americans who previously had been going to church on a somewhat regular basis are now not what's that drop off kind of looked like over the last couple of decades. Yeah.

So basically 40 million adult Americans over the last 25 to 30 years stopped their monthly habit of going to a house of worship and now attend less than once per year. Okay. So that's basically one in six adult Americans just basically totally dropped off the map in terms of religious belonging. So, you know, attending, you know, corporate worship of some sort. That's all religious traditions. But again, like 95% of that's out of Christian traditions. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, I think in many people's minds, that makes sense in light of the new atheist movement, for instance, like, you know, spearhead of in some ways by my own fellow countrymen in the early 2000s, especially, I'm saying, actually, any seriously educated person can't take God seriously and especially can't take Christianity seriously. So sure, like educated Americans are going to start no longer being interested in going to church. Is that do you feel like that's a big driver of what's happened here? Or is that a misunderstanding of

the story? Yeah. So I think that there were two two dominant stories before we were doing this research. And so if you're if your media diet kind of leaned in one direction, the story that was being told was maybe a little somewhat in that direction. And it was something to this sort of, well, racism, misogyny, clergy scandal, clergy abuse, political syncretism, Christian nationalism, or just these ideas aren't compelling, you know, that those would be the reasons why, you know, people in a particular direction would have said, oh, why all these people have kind of stopped their their habit of, you know, religious religious attendance. The if your media diet leans maybe in it in the other direction, the kind of the large story that was being told there was, well, this is secular progressivism, secularism, the sexual revolution, those forces, the combination of those forces are why, you know, many people have, you know, stopped attending, stopped attending church. Now, the reality is, is neither of those stories are incorrect. Both of those stories are true. You can find a few million people that fit that first story and the second story. And so they're not wrong. The problem is, is those stories are incomplete. So of the of the 40 million people who left houses of worship, you would say that probably 10 million of those people might fit those, those two, those older two stories. But there's this huge group of people, 30 million people who didn't really seem to leave for reasons that, you know, that you and I would say, oh, wow, that's a really compelling reason to stop going to church. So the top three reasons that people gave in our study were going for, you know, for stopping going to church was number one, I moved. Number two, attendance was inconvenient. And number three, there was some kind of family change, marriage, divorce, remarriage, the birth of a child, one of those kinds of things. And so when we kind of drilled down more into the data, we kind of came to realize at the highest altitude that there's really two different kinds of deterging. There are the people who left with some kind of significant pain. And so we called those people, decharged casualties, decharged casualties. The people who left the other, that's like 10 million people. But then the 30 million people who left, who didn't seem to have, you know, who'd reason seemed more about habit or a very pedestrian reason. We called those that group of people, decagually, decharged, the casually decharged. And so that was the thing that was like really surprising to us. And, and I think this is where, you know, Rebecca, where some of the hope comes in to, you know, because when we went, we weren't sure what to expect, you know, going into the study and we didn't really have a tremendous amount of hope kind of going into this. We were kind of expecting, well, you know, we've got these two, we have these two stories. It's these are the only two stories that we have, you know, and neither of them are super happy stories. And the, the, the hard part about those old two stories was you can't really, if I'm an individual, well, I can't do, I can't affect change, you know, with just me on racism, misogyny, clergy scandal, clergy abuse, political syncretism, all these different things at the cultural level as an individual. I might be able to make some progress on some of those issues, like in my neighborhood, or maybe in my community, or maybe in some institutions that I'm connected to. But like, I can't do much about that, you know, at the cultural level in the same sense, you know, for things like, you know, secularism and secular progressivism and secular revolution, like, what am I going to do about those cultural forces? There's so much, there's so much more, you know, these are deep structures. Like, I can't change these things. But the good news is, is because you're talking about 30 million people being casually detourged and over half of those people, over half the people who left evangelical, you know, churches, which is 15 of the 40 million people, over half of those, you know, eight million of that 15 million people that they're willing to return to an evangelical church today. And so, and, you know, if, you know, if you just got out of the habit for, you know, kind of very pedestrian reasons and very habit-centric reasons, it's very reasonable that many of those people will return. And they told us why, and the reasons why we're very reasonable is basically things that boil down to, am I going to find good relationships? Am I going to find friends? And am I going to be connected to a healthy institution? In other words, am I going to find the truth, the goodness and the beauty of the gospel in this institution? And so in other words, am I going to find a church that's going to be consistent with, you know, with God's word? Yeah. And so, well, that's something that's a really encouraging story because I can invite somebody to church and I can, you know, I can be a decent being to somebody else. You know, I can have people at my dinner table and I can just, you know, do the things that the Bible talks about in terms of, you know, how we should treat other people. And when we do those kinds of things, and when we organize ourselves in a way where we're doing church in a way that's consistent with, you know, the ethics that we've been given, then like people have told us, yes, this is something I want to be connected to. And so that's like tremendously good news. And so, you know, we came out of this study far more hopeful than what we were going in.