Belief and Belonging in the 21st Century | Panel Discussion (feat. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Matthew Hedstrom, Rosemary Avance, and Jana Riess)

Religious identities have shifted dramatically in the last quarter century. But how, and it what ways? Is religion as we once knew it dying in the U.S.? Or are people finding other ways of expressing the same kinds of needs for affiliation and meaning in different forms? What do people really mean when they say they are spiritual but not religious? Or religious but not affiliated with any traditional communities or institutions?

This panel discussion, held on October 25, 2025, centered around what recent trends might tell us about the future of faith and belonging in American life. Our panel of experts, moderated by Bushman Chair Laurie Maffly-Kipp, explored one of the most communitarian traditions, the Mormon faith, as well as other American religious affiliations and spiritual identities.

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Panelists

Rosemary Avance is Assistant Professor of Media and Strategic Communications at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the interplay between social dynamics, communication technologies, and identity formation across diverse domains. Avance’s recent book, Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age, examines case studies of practicing and former Latter-day Saints to understand how these individuals relate to the church, the internet, and modernity during our media-saturated age.

Matthew Hedstrom is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in religion and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly examining the intersections of American modernity and Protestant and post-Protestant religious modernity in the United States. Within this field, Professor Hedstrom studies the rise in spirituality among Americans who aren’t tied to particular religious institutions, as explored in his 2012 book The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, and his popular undergraduate course: “’Spiritual But Not Religious’: Spirituality in America”.

Jana Riess is an author, editor, and senior columnist for Religion News Service. Her written works have primarily focused on the intersections of American religion with popular culture, ethics, and society. Riess’s most recent book, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (Oxford University Press, 2019) discusses the faith practices and institutional distrust of Millennial Mormons. She is currently writing a follow-up book, based on her research with Benjamin Knoll, about the Mormon faith crisis and changing understandings of belonging among Latter-day Saints.

Moderator

Laurie Maffly-Kipp is the Richad Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia. She is a distinguished scholar of American religious history and has authored numerous influential works on Mormonism, religion in the American West, and African American religious history. Over the past few decades, Professor Maffly-Kipp has become an influential interpreter of Latter-day Saint history and participated in shaping the field of Mormon Studies. She is also a former president of the American Society of Church History and the Mormon History Association.

Transcript

00;00;47;15 - 00;01;09;27

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

I want to start by just sort of giving a background on what I've asked our panelists to talk about. They'll be talking for about 45 minutes, and then we will have ample time for discussion and questions later on. I've asked them to talk about the ways in which religious identities have shifted dramatically in the last quarter century.

00;01;09;29 - 00;01;31;02

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

We know that this is true. We know from some of the surveys that things are happening out there. The question is, how are they shifting? And in what ways? Is religion dying? And there are dire reports in some news reports that say somehow people are there are more nones, you know, and these people are less religious than they used to be.

00;01;31;04 - 00;01;59;02

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Or another alternative interpretation is that people are just finding their ways, finding other ways of expressing the same kinds of needs for affiliation and meaning in different forms. And I think here of a UVA grad, Lauren Jackson, who now writes for The New York Times and has a whole column on belonging in the 21st century, you might take a look at some of her, some of her articles in that regard.

00;01;59;05 - 00;02;30;14

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

But what do people really mean when they talk about being spiritual but not religious? For example, what does that what is that, saying about either religious affiliation or what spirituality means, or, religious? But if they say they're religious but not affiliated with any traditional communities or institutions, what does that mean? And what are some of the generational and technological changes that can account for this?

00;02;30;16 - 00;02;53;19

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

So those are the kinds of questions I've asked them, each, from their own perspectives to spend some time helping us think about. My only other task here, other than, keeping our Q&A in order when the time comes, is to introduce our panelists. So I'm going to go in alphabetical order. But then we will move, I think, from right–

00;02;53;20 - 00;03;30;04

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

You're right to left as we go. Rosemary Avance in the middle here is a community scholar whose research and teaching aim to improve information access for vulnerable populations. Her research expertise is interdisciplinary, focusing on the interplay between social dynamics, communication technologies, and identity formation by employing a range of qualitative and quantitative methods such as historical analysis, surveys, interviews, case studies, and thematic analysis.

00;03;30;06 - 00;03;54;09

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Her research shed light, sheds light on the evolving nature of societal structures, the challenges faced by traditional institutions, and the potential for innovative modes of influence, communication and expression. She has a new book out, which I guess I'm supposed to be holding it up at this point, but I do have a copy to hold up. Excellent.

00;03;54;11 - 00;04;23;10

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Her recent book is called Mediated Mormons: Shifting Religious Identities in the Digital Age, and it just appeared in February, I think, of 2025. In it, she uses The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a case study to examine how individuals navigate change in a strictly bounded system, given the challenges posed to traditional authority systems by the open text of the internet.

00;04;23;13 - 00;04;59;04

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

She was the 2012-2013 Mormon Studies Fellow at the University of Utah's Tanner Humanities Center, and she earned a PhD in communication studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. She is currently an assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at Oklahoma State University and a proud native of Tulsa, right. So welcome Rosemary. Matthew Hedstrom, just to my immediate left, is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies here at UVA.

00;04;59;06 - 00;05;23;27

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

He specializes in religion and culture in the late 19th and 20th centuries. He holds a degree from Haverford College and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His central interests probe the intersections of American modernity and Protestant and post-Protestant religious modernity in the United States. And you can explain to us what post-Protestantism is.

00;05;23;29 - 00;05;26;00

Matthew Hedstrom

I will, actually.

00;05;26;03 - 00;05;58;18

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

His first book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century, came out from Oxford University Press in 2012. And in it, he employs novel sources in book history to tell the surprising story of religious liberalism's cultural ascendancy in the 20th century. The religious middlebrow culture of the mid-century, He argues, brought psychological, mystical and cosmopolitan forms of spirituality to broad swaths of the American middle class.

00;05;58;20 - 00;06;33;29

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

This book was awarded the 2013 Brewer Prize from the American Society for Church History. Professor Hedstrom is now researching and writing a book called The Religion of Humanity: Faith, Politics, and the United Nations. Here at UVA, he teaches one of the most popular courses in our department called “Spiritual but Not Religious: Spirituality in America.” Last but not least, you'll hear again from Doctor Jana Riess, who is a historian, editor and senior columnist for Religion News Service.

00;06;34;01 - 00;07;00;09

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

She holds degrees in religion from Wellesley College, Princeton Theological Seminary, and a PhD in American religious history from Columbia University. Her many books–and I got to say these last night, I just love the title so much, we're going to hear them again–her many books include The Prayer Wheel, Flunking Sainthood, What would Buffy Do?, Mormonism for Dummies, and The Writer's Market Guide to Getting Published.

00;07;00;11 - 00;07;30;22

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Her written works have primarily focused on the intersections of American religion with popular culture, ethics, and society. Her most recent book, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church, discusses the faith practices and institutional distrust of millennial Mormons, and she is currently writing a follow-up book based on her research with Benjamin Noll about the Mormon faith crisis and changing understandings of belonging among Latter-day Saints.

00;07;30;24 - 00;07;36;05

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Without further ado, I think we will then move to Jana.

00;07;36;07 - 00;08;00;28

Jana Riess

Good morning, and thanks so much for the invitation to be part of this panel. It's really an honor to be here at UVA as a guest of your Mormon Studies program. I'd like to focus these opening comments briefly on the role of the internet in helping people navigate their faith transitions, which is the topic of chapter three of the Leaving Mormonism book that Ben and I turned in this week.

00;08;01;00 - 00;08;29;13

Jana Riess

I want to say, in particular, that Rosemary's book Mediated Mormons was particularly helpful in writing that chapter, and I recommend that book to you if you're interested in how LDS belief and belonging are defined and redefined in the internet age. Rosemary's work examines how profoundly the internet has transformed individual Latter-day Saints' experience of being Mormon, as well as how the church shapes its messaging to members and to the outside world.

00;08;29;15 - 00;08;57;02

Jana Riess

She notes that although the church was for years able to,”maintain a broadcast model in an age of fragmentation and personalized media choice,” those days are over. She writes, “today, the open text of web 2.0 allows social media dialog and user generated content, which both threatens institutional control and creates openings for new negotiations of what it means to be Mormon.”

00;08;57;09 - 00;09;39;11

Jana Riess

Today, everything is open, and if it's not, people complain vociferously about that lack of transparency. Everyone can become a content creator, and the internet has flattened the power of many traditional authorities, including religious ones. In this, the LDS tradition is not alone. Sociologist Paul McClure's research has quantified that increased internet usage is negatively correlated with religious affiliation. He found that for each unit of increase in time spent on the internet, the odds of being religiously affiliated decrease by 29%.

00;09;39;14 - 00;10;11;19

Jana Riess

This was true even after controlling for a host of other factors, including demographics, political affiliation, and television consumption. Moreover, internet usage is also correlated with a decrease in religious exclusivism or thinking that your own religion is the only truth. McClure credits the internet for exposing users to other modes of thought and ways of living. All of which systematically chip away at one's certainty.

00;10;11;21 - 00;10;36;23

Jana Riess

In my research, I pinpointed three specific benefits that came up often in interviews as leavers reflected on their transitions out of the church. Number one, a language to use. Commonly, leavers are surprised when they lose their faith. Most people I interviewed, even the ones who had not been all in, didn't expect to ever be on the outside of the church looking in.

00;10;36;26 - 00;11;03;27

Jana Riess

Some had judged leavers as being lazy or under the influence of Satan, only to then find themselves in the same position. Once there, they realized that the prior categories they'd used to define leavers just didn't fit what they were going through. They weren't lazy. In fact, following church guidance, many doubled down in gospel study, temple attendance, and prayer so they could rekindle their former faith.

00;11;03;29 - 00;11;28;14

Jana Riess

Rethinking the stereotypes they used to hold about leavers necessitated a new language. The church had given them a script to describe religious faith, which was associated with things like joy, family unity, divine approval, and qualifying for heaven. It had also provided a script about the loss of faith, which was supposed to generate the opposite of all those good things.

00;11;28;17 - 00;11;55;16

Jana Riess

Given that socialization, people leaving Mormonism, especially when they grew up in it, have a twofold task. First, they have to unlearn the language they were given to describe religious disaffiliation, a language that turned out to be inaccurate and unfair when they were the ones disaffiliating. Then they need to learn an all new language to give voice to their actual experience and help them to process it.

00;11;55;19 - 00;12;23;04

Jana Riess

Before the advent of the post-Mormon Internet, they were often alone in navigating these tasks. Research about people who have left Haredi Judaism, also sometimes called Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox Judaism, can be helpful here. Lynn Davidson and Arthur Greil have called their Haredi research subjects characters in search of a script, a phrase that is on target for many Mormon leavers as well.

00;12;23;06 - 00;12;54;05

Jana Riess

Because Hasidism is a totalizing religion that determines followers' primary language, family lives, educational opportunities, and interactions with the outside world, those who leave it are even more at a loss than those who leave Mormonism. But the core dislocation sounds similar because there is no institutional assistance in unwinding what has long been wound. It is a reverse conversion, but without all of the community support that converts receive when they join a new religion.

00;12;54;07 - 00;13;28;20

Jana Riess

Davidson and Greil note that the most painful period was when their research subjects had a foot in both worlds. Seeing the problems with Haredi Judaism, but not yet fully able to leave it, the same was true for my interviewees. Those initial months were sometimes bewildering, and people had a hard time even describing the confusion they felt. My ex-LDS subjects had something the Haredi community did not, however: lifelong access to popular culture as a means of capturing the monumental change occurring in their lives.

00;13;28;22 - 00;13;53;06

Jana Riess

For example, Jessica, 33, drew from an animated movie to help me understand the ups and downs she experienced while leaving the church. I've used one of the default female millennial voices for Jessica, playing around with my ElevenLabs membership so you can hear her words in something sort of like her voice.

00;13;53;09 - 00;14;31;00

Jessica

“The image that's coming into my head is from the movie Tangled. When she leaves her tower for the first time. She feels free, but she also feels afraid, like she should go back to her tower and the restraints she had. I would have these moments where I felt like the path was wonderful and wide open, and I could choose whatever I wanted. And then there were other moments where I felt this huge sense of loss of direction, not just for this life, but also for the afterlife and also the loss of community. This was 30 years of my life when the church was among the top three most important things in my life. My friendships, my marriage–everything came directly from that.”

00;14;31;01 - 00;14;56;19

Jana Riess

This is an example of how popular culture provided leavers and liminals with fresh language and storytelling to help them understand their faith transitions. So to have the podcasts and various groups that have proliferated online for a full year, I attended a weekly online support group as an embedded researcher to observe how participants understood and verbalized their changing lives.

00;14;56;22 - 00;15;28;04

Jana Riess

A faith crisis could be recast as a faith expansion, and a movement away from the groupthink of the church, understood as a necessary kind of differentiation. If the old script from the church was that doubt was dangerous, the new one in online spaces is that doubt is a standard part of adult development, a feature, not a bug. This brings us to number two: the normalization of doubt as a predictable stage of faith.

00;15;28;07 - 00;15;53;01

Jana Riess

I'm not going to spend much time on this one, except to say how deeply influential the book Stages of Faith has been for many counselors and therapists in the post-Mormon online world, and through them, for thousands of Mormons undergoing a faith crisis or transition. In a nutshell, Fowler taught that there are predictable stages of human faith development, all of which build upon one another.

00;15;53;03 - 00;16;20;16

Jana Riess

We begin in a childlike state of obedience for our own safety, looking to religious leaders to help us distinguish right from wrong, pure from impure. Fowler categorized people who remained deferential to authority as being in stage three, an adolescent period of synthetic or conventional faith, and noted that some adults never progressed beyond this stage to the subsequent stages of doubt.

00;16;20;19 - 00;16;48;27

Jana Riess

Acceptance, integration, and universalism. The tension here is that this is precisely the stage that church leaders encourage. For members who are instructed to follow, obey, and trust that the leaders are speaking directly to and for God. As a researcher, I am fascinated by the way that Fowler's stages of faith have been embraced and adapted by so many in the post-Mormon and questioning-Mormon world.

00;16;48;29 - 00;17;19;25

Jana Riess

It's logical to imagine that former Mormons, many of whom were raised in a tradition that delineated, for example, three levels of heaven and four principles and ordinances of the gospel, might well appreciate the you are here nature of Fowler's stages of faith. These are people who prefer to navigate life, armed with a roadmap for individuals raised in a dogmatic religion that professes to know the answers to all of life's biggest, and often even its trivial questions.

00;17;19;27 - 00;17;46;21

Jana Riess

A roadmap like Fowler's can feel like a godsend, a new canon to cling to. Fowler's map teaches that the critical thinking stage that orthodox church members may misinterpret as a deviation from the correct path, is actually a step on the correct path. The carefully outlined rubric of the stages of faith promises doubters that exercising their agency is a necessary component of full adult development.

00;17;46;24 - 00;18;14;00

Jana Riess

Even when doing so means losing faith in the institutional church. That's a good segue to my third and final point about what the internet has offered to LDS doubters and leavers, which is: replacement community. This is something I came to understand better through my oral history interviews, and by attending the weekly support group. And I want to emphasize that I was not as embedded in the support group as I could have been.

00;18;14;02 - 00;18;35;13

Jana Riess

In addition to our 90 minute Zoom meetings each Wednesday, the participants came to know one another well through their daily Marco Polo group text and a private Facebook group they used to keep in touch. I figured they deserved to have private arenas in which to discuss their lives without a researcher eavesdropping. So I declined to be part of the Marco Polo or the Facebook page.

00;18;35;16 - 00;18;58;23

Jana Riess

But even in the weekly support group, I could observe participants’ growing ease and confidence over the course of the year. I also saw how their own grief about their relationship with the church was triggered in March, when the leaders of the support group were pushed toward resigning their church membership because their stake president was convening a disciplinary council to excommunicate them.

00;18;58;25 - 00;19;25;22

Jana Riess

Members of the online support group suspended the usual curriculum that week to simply be there for one another, as some encountered renewed grief about their own roles in and out of the church. Mutual encouragement was also evident in a later session, when the assignment asked group members to share which parts of their faith they could reclaim, which they wished to jettison, and which they were still negotiating.

00;19;25;25 - 00;19;48;07

Jana Riess

During this exercise, one woman in the group discussed her choices, and then another commented on how much stronger the first woman seemed now than when the group had begun months before. As she noticed that, I realized she was right. The first woman seemed happier and more confident than she had in the early meetings. Such encouragement is an expected part of community.

00;19;48;10 - 00;20;12;21

Jana Riess

But several in the group seemed surprised by its development. They reported being all the more grateful that they could bring their whole selves and still be accepted. This was often not their experience in the church itself, and in this they are not alone. In interviews, people sometimes reported being disappointed by what they perceived as the shallowness of their LDS communities,

00;20;12;24 - 00;20;39;18

Jana Riess

but simultaneously afraid of exiting those communities. Leaving Mormonism can be deeply scary because it often functions as a core identity and offers a primary circle of friends. If members leave that, who will be their people? An interviewee named Tim, age 44, told me this fear of losing community was very much on his mind during the two, and a half years he was thinking of leaving the church.

00;20;39;19 - 00;20;43;19

Jana Riess

But before he made the leap, here's a snippet from his interview.

00;20;43;20 - 00;21;05;23

Tim

“I'm also part of the Pilgrim group, which is mostly people who have left the church. It's a very respectful group for the most part. We've had many people from that group over for brunch and barbecues and stuff. We went camping with them last year. It's helpful in replacing some of the community lost when leaving the church. I'm also in a mixed faith marriage group.

00;21;05;25 - 00;21;24;14

Tim

A couple of years ago, ten of the couples went on a cruise together. My wife and I really bonded with 3 or 4 of the couples. Last month we went to Texas and spent several days with a couple of them. We don't really participate in the Facebook chat much anymore, because our feelings about the whole thing aren't as raw as they used to be.

00;21;24;16 - 00;21;35;09

Tim

I think this group was mostly helpful for my wife to see that just because I left, I wasn't all of a sudden a bad person. Despite the church's best efforts to make it seem like I was.”

00;21;35;12 - 00;22;01;23

Jana Riess

Many people will doubtless object that these are not real communities. People come and go from them at will, often maintaining only a temporary connection. Yet many participants in the post-Mormon infrastructure have told me that their LDS wards that were supposed to be real only cared for them on the condition that they not speak up, voice doubts, question authority, or even dress how they wanted to.

00;22;01;26 - 00;22;22;22

Jana Riess

But among fellow leavers and liminals, they do not have to hide what they think or who they are. So who is to say what is a real community? The vitality of the post-Mormon Internet suggests that the institutional church is not the only way to find and enjoy sustained Mormon community life. Thank you.

00;22;32;13 - 00;22;55;28

Rosemary Avance

Hello. Thank you so much for inviting me to be here. That was–that was really interesting. And you and I share an interest in former Mormons and the the act of leaving, and what goes into that choice. Thanks for the the shout out for my book. That was fun. I, I was thinking about this panel, the description of the panel that Laurie shared.

00;22;56;00 - 00;23;22;28

Rosemary Avance

It starts by saying so much has changed in the last quarter century. And at first I was insulted that it's a quarter century since the year 2000, because a century is a really long time. So, I don't know, it's a whole quarter that's, that fact that it feels like yesterday and also like ancient history to me personally, is probably mostly because I'm getting older and that's how time works.

00;23;23;00 - 00;23;44;00

Rosemary Avance

But also, I think it's a sign, kind of into an index of the exponential growth and change that's happened in 25 years. And how much things have continued to change for all of us in our lifetimes. When you think about religion, and one of the questions that Laurie also posed in that, in that description is: “Is religion, as we once knew it, dying in the U.S.?”

00;23;44;02 - 00;24;15;00

Rosemary Avance

That's a really compelling question. And I think, it's hard to answer, but but when you think about whether it–religion as we have known it–is dying or dead and in what ways it has changed. I'm a cultural historian of media technology and how it impacts society. So of course my first thought is: how have the technologies through which we experience religion, and how we shape religion and how we extend our religious culture and beliefs around the world through communication?

00;24;15;01 - 00;24;36;29

Rosemary Avance

How have those technologies changed? And that, to me, is what I'm most interested in. Both as a sort of explaining variable and also as sort of a predictive variable, because those changes are occurring yet again. So first, I don't necessarily know that there is a thing called religion as we once knew it at all, that may or may not be changing.

00;24;36;29 - 00;25;03;29

Rosemary Avance

Instead, religion is a sort of living concept that we've constructed around sets of practices and institutions. But I don't think there's necessarily a specific golden age we can refer back to, although we have seen peaks and, and, ebbs and flows in participation and belief, in self identities. And those things have sort of contracted and expanded with other broader cultural shifts.

00;25;04;01 - 00;25;22;15

Rosemary Avance

We can track those, and they're very interesting, but we can only track so far because we don't have great survey tools everywhere. We don't have international capabilities. In some ways, we don't have historical data that tracks the same metrics we want to track today. So not only is it impossible to know if religion as we once knew it is dead.

00;25;22;18 - 00;25;43;26

Rosemary Avance

I think it might be the wrong question. And there are other questions we could ask, which is instead, if religion is a thing we do and we're not dead, as you see, then maybe we can talk about the ways in which religious expression has changed and continues to change, and what we might think of as the coming changes in religion, in America and throughout the world.

00;25;43;29 - 00;26;16;24

Rosemary Avance

So think about art, for example. All cultural movements and manifestations are always in transition. Art history will teach you that about expression. Art produces and reproduces our culture, and it moves through eras and style and medium and political economy. Emphases and more. Religion is the same. I don't mean that religion is just art, or that it has nothing more to it that it offers or that it has no more consequential power, although art is really powerful.

00;26;16;26 - 00;26;42;26

Rosemary Avance

Instead, I mean, there is not a stable historical moment. That was religion, as we once knew it, or religion, pure and simple. Or like the religious time. It's always been a moving target and studying it, whether you study history or you study the current moment, it will always be studying changes and movements. So religion as it was experienced and expressed is dead.

00;26;42;28 - 00;27;10;11

Rosemary Avance

So there's that. But it has always been dying and being reborn in every moment throughout history. So that's okay that it's dead. Just like the past is dead. But it's also living because we see the overlays of the history that we've lived up till now and every moment, and we will continue to see them. So sort of like the artistic, painting over a painting that we continue practicing in our lives.

00;27;10;11 - 00;27;35;24

Rosemary Avance

So this new moment of religion is alive and well, and it is shifting to reflect broader changes in the world. And we see it in the changes, happening more broadly in geophysical, political, social, economic, technological changes all throughout the world. So as history moves through epochs and periods of types of religious expression, we're moving through these bigger, broader changes simultaneously.

00;27;35;26 - 00;28;00;02

Rosemary Avance

I'm not going to chicken and egg it. As far as which thing is leading to which thing and how things are working. But I will say there's a very strong case to look at how we can communicate as an indicator of what we will do with that power. And so when we have new technologies for communication, we communicate in different ways because we can and then when we can, that changes the things we're doing with our communication and the power that it has.

00;28;00;04 - 00;28;21;15

Rosemary Avance

So my interest primarily, I'm, I wouldn't call myself a technological determinist. It's controversial to do where I come from. That's the idea that technology determines your life, and that you're constrained by that. However, I don't know if you've got your phone on you right now. You might feel differently–whether you're constrained by your technology.

00;28;21;18 - 00;28;46;14

Rosemary Avance

While the historical and cultural question of what factors cause the rise and fall of various forms of religions is super complex, and I don't want to minimize them and say, it's one thing. However, I'm going to take a 100 mile view of the history of religion, illustrate the shifts in communication and how they map on to what we think of as religion in the past, and religion and the president–present, not president, although that would be a different discussion.

00;28;46;17 - 00;29;21;15

Rosemary Avance

Communication history is often partition history. Communication historians often partition history into periods based on the dominant social, socially available technologies for communicating. So we start with the oral period in which humans spoke only and there was no other way to communicate with others. Then writing is invented and introduced, then print. Then we have the electronic era, and then we have the internet era, and those are the sort of the big periods we have the pre-history period, which is prior to even orality.

00;29;21;17 - 00;29;50;28

Rosemary Avance

And really, history is technically, once you've got drawings and writings. So there's a lot of conjecture about that period. Historians suggest that human beings first developed the ability to speak in about 100,000 BC, 100,000. So kind of picture a timeline, you're going to keep that in your mind. Okay, 100,000. So for 95,000 years, language was the communication technology.

00;29;51;00 - 00;30;21;06

Rosemary Avance

And of course it probably started out like “Ugh”, you know, and then it ended up being like, you know, poems, epic poems that you would repeat and pass down. But over that time period, very, very slow changes in the technology increase accuracy, increase thoroughness, nuance, complexity, synonyms. And those of you who like the English language and how ridiculous it is, know how complex some of those things become over time.

00;30;21;08 - 00;30;58;08

Rosemary Avance

This time period, 95,000 years, human cultures were small, geographically isolated tribal communities, primarily, more flattened in terms of hierarchy. They tended to be collectivist. They tend to express religion through stories passed down from generation to generation, which tended to be epic stories. That explained the big things, where we came from, what we're doing here, what happens when we die, what thunder is, you know, the big things.

00;30;58;10 - 00;31;19;21

Rosemary Avance

And those those things, shifted, as you can imagine, if you ever played the game of telephone from telling to telling, the stories change and the story sort of evolves. They sort of start to help explain the things that you're seeing happening at the moment. So as they develop and as they're being used for different utilitarian purposes, those stories change.

00;31;19;29 - 00;31;58;22

Rosemary Avance

95,000 years of culture slowly, slowly developing. So this is really when human culture starts to find its little niches in various communities and continents around the world. Writing evolves very, very slowly out of oral languages. You can imagine the changes that came when someone realized they could put a mark in the sand or carve it into a rock or, I don't know, tear it on a leaf and that could represent something and that you could hand it to someone and they could interpret the thing.

00;31;58;25 - 00;32;25;26

Rosemary Avance

And so a message could be passed through space and even through time, from person to person, without having to be there and speak face to face, that it was a very slow process. Started with early pictographic language, cuneiform and hieroglyphics developing in, around 5000 years B.C. and every culture, every community had a different language they had developed by this point.

00;32;25;26 - 00;32;45;26

Rosemary Avance

So it's an extremely slow process of each one developing a written form, and some never did. There are several Native American tribes that never developed a written language and cultural preservationists today are working together with historians to try to do that in retrospect, in some cases, and with tribal communities that no longer have anyone that speak the language.

00;32;45;26 - 00;33;17;08

Rosemary Avance

So it's very difficult, as you can imagine. But every culture had a different language, and every language was fairly unstandardized and fluid because you couldn't write it down, you couldn't make up all these grammar rules, right? I mean, you couldn't enforce them anyway. So it took thousands of years for writing systems to develop, and they only really developed in very, detailed forms and in societies that had close physical proximity and resources to, to seeing the community and those became the powerful societies of the time.

00;33;17;11 - 00;33;37;19

Rosemary Avance

Once writing had diffused and became a teachable skill, it was a skill for the elite, and it shifted society from the tribal, largely egalitarian model of oral culture to these increasingly hierarchical societies where some people could talk, everybody could talk. Mostly some people could write, some people could read. And that was a very rare skill to have.

00;33;37;19 - 00;34;01;16

Rosemary Avance

So this is a scribal communities where the only things that were being written down for a long time were religious texts, you know, monks being trained in reading and writing, and they would sit in their dark caves. I don't know why they decided dark caves were the place where they would sit in their dark caves with their small little light, and they would write every word and make it beautiful, because it was the text, it was a holy text.

00;34;01;16 - 00;34;29;10

Rosemary Avance

And there was that. And this laborious, time consuming process made it so that a written text was extremely valuable and rare, and only certain people could read it. Many kings couldn't read. They would have to have a scribe read it to them. It was such a rare skill. And imagine the hierarchy that you can establish when the laws and the words of God can only be read and accessed by very specific wealthy people.

00;34;29;12 - 00;34;54;21

Rosemary Avance

You can tell people anything you want and they can't read it and they can't go and check for themselves. This skill of writing, did not diffuse across culture until the print era, and even then, there are large swaths of the population of the world that still, today, are not able to read and write. It's not a skill that everyone has ever had.

00;34;54;21 - 00;35;25;01

Rosemary Avance

All of our technological skills have always been structured by power and access in every community. Okay, back to what I was saying before, in this period of writing, only before there was the ability to reproduce writing through print, communication across space and historical time is possible. I can hand you an advertisement that I have written up, and you can hang it in the square.

00;35;25;01 - 00;35;47;11

Rosemary Avance

And if someone can read it, they can see that there's an announcement from the king or something. Writing in this period emphasizes permanence. Of course it does. Think about you're now able to write down the Ten Commandments so they aren't going to change because you've written them down. Now they're there. And in written form, we can tell you these are what the Ten Commandments are.

00;35;47;12 - 00;36;08;12

Rosemary Avance

This is how they exist. These are the words that are the Ten Commandments. And if you change the words, it's no longer these Ten Commandments. Prior to this, there was not a way to standardize those things. So these complex systems of legal systems–religious systems–were only possible in a world in which you could standardize and make a record.

00;36;08;14 - 00;36;51;03

Rosemary Avance

And so monarchies, governments, religious systems, even trades become more and more specific and specialized and complex, extremely complex and hard to access. This culture makes it possible to have complex governance, trade and cultural expression, and large-scale warfare. It also made it possible to ensure that religion became a system of power and authority and dominance, where only some people could talk to the heavens and hear back.

00;36;51;06 - 00;37;19;11

Rosemary Avance

Also in this time, it is important to note that even the language in which the holy texts would be read to the masses was not a language they spoke. So you still have to listen to it in Latin, whether you speak Latin or not. This writing period is about 6000 years. So we had the first 95,000 years in the oral period, and now we're at 6000 years, a much shorter period before a new technology disrupts this mode, which is the printing press.

00;37;19;14 - 00;37;41;26

Rosemary Avance

The printing press actually first develops in China. And that's about the 11th century. And then Johann Gutenberg famously introduces his press in 1436. Look, and now suddenly it's easier. Still not easy. Movable type means a lot of work. You have to line up all the words before you print out one page, and line them all up again.

00;37;41;28 - 00;38;03;16

Rosemary Avance

And that's a complex and difficult process. But it's cheaper than doing it by hand and sitting and crafting it. So as that technology develops and becomes more and more streamlined, easier to do and cheaper to do and more people have access to press, you can make pamphlets, you can make newspapers, you can distribute information across society.

00;38;03;16 - 00;38;25;19

Rosemary Avance

You can make, you know, broadsheets. That was not a possibility before. And now with the access to increasing texts, you have access to, learning to read for the first time, because there's something to learn from. Someone can teach you to read more. People begin to learn to read who are not elite and wealthy. Still not a lot, but more than before.

00;38;25;22 - 00;39;00;15

Rosemary Avance

Literacy spreads throughout, especially throughout Europe and Asia. And although access to information is still not democratic, think only of the 95 Theses to think of how this could impact religion and religious experience. Without print culture, how do you challenge the authority of the Catholic Church? How could Joseph Smith get a new text back to the old world and build a following for a new religious movement?

00;39;00;18 - 00;39;32;25

Rosemary Avance

The print era spread ideas throughout the world through trade, colonialism, immigration, mission work, and, this is the era in which most religious movements proliferate, beginning with Protestantism. Every other branch, that is not an orthodox branch of Christianity has mostly started during this time period. So this started again, around the time it really took off in the 1400s.

00;39;33;01 - 00;39;59;04

Rosemary Avance

Then 1800 things start to shift again. So we have an even smaller time period that this that this change lasted and impacted, the world predominantly in the industrial revolution. Electronic media became the new thing. You might have seen pictures of photographs from the Civil War. So photography, the telegraph trains, transoceanic lines under the ocean–

00;39;59;04 - 00;40;29;19

Rosemary Avance

that's amazing to me–satellite radio, television; over the course of a few decades, these new technologies were introduced slowly, integrated into society until and, you know, by the 1920s, everyone was going to the movies. Not everyone. Most people were going to the movies. Most people had access to a radio, and could hear and see culture, news and information, rather than just reading it and accessing it that one way.

00;40;29;19 - 00;40;57;15

Rosemary Avance

This is the closest that media has come throughout history, to kind of replicating that embodied experience of communicating face to face, because you can hear and see, communication instead of just having to while reading is seeing, in that context, but seeing it in the sense of seeing embodied people delivering a message. This era combines the immediacy of oral communication with the immutability of print.

00;40;57;15 - 00;41;23;19

Rosemary Avance

Because now there's a record. If you video something, there's a record of that. If you record a broadcast, you have a record of that. So it's no longer this transient communication that disappears. So the impact of this era on our religious identities and expressions is massive. This makes it possible to make emotion happen through our communication in a way that wasn't possible before.

00;41;23;19 - 00;41;52;15

Rosemary Avance

Although if you've read, you know Jane Austen, you know that you can be moved by words. But having visual aspects and other aspects makes manipulation easier. It makes the emotional impact of a message, kind of that stirring is much more possible when you can use multimedia, which the church has shown through investment in other multimedia, because it's very powerful.

00;41;52;18 - 00;42;23;22

Rosemary Avance

This starts threatening some of those established structures that rely so heavily on authority and boundaries because now it's easier to get your information around the world in real time. You don't have to wait. It's not as expensive. And those boundaries for being a messenger start to fall even faster. So the information age, beginning in the 20th century, has lowered the boundary to participation dramatically.

00;42;23;25 - 00;42;45;24

Rosemary Avance

Access to the internet makes it possible for anyone to participate in instant worldwide communication. You don't have to wait for a book or a VHS tape to be mailed across the world to your friend for them to see something that you want them to see. You can just share it, you can text it, you can tag them in a thread.

00;42;45;27 - 00;43;06;22

Rosemary Avance

This also makes communication extremely ephemeral, in some ways, but also permanent in other ways. They, you know, they say the internet never forgets. But also, how hard is it to find the things you need sometimes because there's so much, and some things are instant, or ephemeral in the sense that there isn't a record if it's deleted.

00;43;06;24 - 00;43;33;12

Rosemary Avance

If someone posts something and then changes it and you can't find the edit history, it makes communication less reliable in many ways and more reliable in other ways. And my book focuses on that moment, and it's about, the time period in 2012 and 2013 when the “I'm a Mormon” PR campaign, Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy and the Book of Mormon musical brought a lot of public attention to the church.

00;43;33;15 - 00;43;46;11

Rosemary Avance

And in that book, I'm arguing largely that the digital age created unprecedented challenges for, for the LDS church, but also for all religious and other institutions.

00;43;46;13 - 00;44;09;11

Rosemary Avance

In many ways, it makes previous modes of communication outmoded, and in a lot of ways irrelevant. Anyone with a microphone or a keyboard can share their opinions, form networks with like minded others, contribute to the narrative of what it means to be Mormon or member of any other group, and it's impossible to correlate or even fully monitor Mormon identity.

00;44;09;11 - 00;44;33;05

Rosemary Avance

In a world of social media influencers and open access digitized historical documents, it's been only less than 75 years. I'm being generous with starting the information age in the 50s because the technologies were there, but, you know, the internet was not in households really until the 90s. It's been only a minute since these technologies started.

00;44;33;08 - 00;45;03;25

Rosemary Avance

But the characteristics of that era seem to be almost over, and we seem to be shifting into a new age, marked by the rise of the technocratic elite, where technologies like extremely personalized social media algorithms ensure that you're seeing different content that I'm seeing at all times. The widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence means that any of us can make a message that sounds like it's coming from someone else.

00;45;03;28 - 00;45;25;21

Rosemary Avance

And you cannot necessarily rely on what you see or hear. You can't trust your own senses or your own–there are multiple versions of reality happening at the same time in terms of the content that we consume. If you see that there's a riot in LA, I might see that the streets of LA are peaceful.

00;45;25;21 - 00;45;52;08

Rosemary Avance

And unless you can get there, you have no way to find out which of those is true. So in a lot of ways, this new technological era threatens the gains from the previous eras, while reintroducing some of the risks of the earlier, the writing only era. Techno-billionaires control the algorithms and they control the access to information.

00;45;52;08 - 00;46;33;16

Rosemary Avance

And, who can share who's banned who, who gets to have a platform in the first place? And they are also controlling the federal funding in our country on how that will be regulated in the future. Mass surveillance through biometrics and facial recognition, internet blackouts, those types of things are already being used in other countries, and maybe in ours, by the government for, repression of dissent and expression and, viral disinformation and propaganda campaigns influence elections and shape individual thoughts.

00;46;33;19 - 00;46;58;14

Rosemary Avance

And we would be extremely remiss if we didn't consider what are the impacts of this technological communication shift on religious identity and expression, because the era that I, my book explores, and the era we've been spending our time talking about seems to be over in terms of its cultural implications. And we have entered a new era, and we don't want to admit it because it sucks.

00;46;58;16 - 00;47;34;29

Rosemary Avance

But, as scholars of religion, if we want to understand religious identity, where it's been and where it's headed, this is the era in which we now find ourselves. And so the church, any institution that's interested in things like retention, recruiting new members will be operating in, in an, in a, in communication environment in which you can't guarantee that because you create an ad and post it online, people will see it, or because you send an email, it'll be delivered so or that it won't be impersonated or shaped.

00;47;35;01 - 00;47;59;18

Rosemary Avance

And I don't think it's too far-fetched to think that it's already impacting religion, retention and membership and identity today. And that's what historians of media and religion are really looking at right now so that we can start to predict these trends and begin to address them in this cultural moment. Thank you.

00;47;59;20 - 00;48;06;13

Rosemary Avance

Thank you.

00;48;06;15 - 00;48;40;12

Matthew Hedstrom

Hi. Good morning everyone. I'm Matt Hedstrom from here at UVA, and I'm delighted to be here with you all and in conversation with UVA Mormon Studies and to get a chance to share a little bit about what I teach and to learn to learn from all of you. So as you heard, I teach a course every spring called, “Spiritual But Not Religious,” a course about the roughly one quarter of Americans who self-identify as spiritual but not religious.

00;48;40;14 - 00;49;00;04

Matthew Hedstrom

I thought when I developed this course about 12 or 13 years ago, I thought, “Okay, this will be a trendy course. It'll kind of be a course of the moment, it'll have its moment, and then it'll probably fade away as the trends move in another direction.” And so far, that hasn't happened. This is a course that has continued to grow, and attract real student interest.

00;49;00;06 - 00;49;24;14

Matthew Hedstrom

And I thought I'd offer some reflections from that. So first of all, the term “spiritual but not religious.” This is a term that dates, not the ideas behind it, as I'll say, but just the term itself, scholars have found uses that go back to about the 1920s using the Google Ngram tool. You know, where you can search the sort of all kinds of, print text for, for language.

00;49;24;14 - 00;49;44;03

Matthew Hedstrom

So there are scattered references that go back to the 1920s, but it's a term that really took off in common usage in the 1990s. And if you think about it, that makes a certain amount of sense. It's in the 1990s that we start to see a significant rise in religious disaffiliation. Right? People leaving in bigger numbers.

00;49;44;03 - 00;50;09;29

Matthew Hedstrom

So, okay, that makes sense. But, colleagues who have studied this and I'm, I'm pretty convinced by this, have identified something else in the 1990s that really led to why this term took off, that and that's online dating, if you think about it, it was just it was just kind of a perfect descriptor for what you're trying to achieve in online dating.

00;50;09;29 - 00;50;32;16

Matthew Hedstrom

Right? You kind of want to make yourself maximally appealing. And so if you say check the box right now, it's also a kind of check box thing. So if you check the box it says religious. People, I think you're not going to be so much fun on a date. Right? But if you check the box that says atheist or, you know, not religious, that carries some stigmas in American culture.

00;50;32;16 - 00;51;03;00

Matthew Hedstrom

And that also might come across as kind of judgmental. Right? And so this is that sort of sweet spot in the middle that, that, and that's probably why it came into common usage to, to describe these sort of neither fish nor fowl kind of identities. That said , the terminology is fairly new, but I think that the dynamics that produced it are quite old and sort of big picture here.

00;51;03;00 - 00;51;29;24

Matthew Hedstrom

I think in many ways that SBNR is the sort of long, long tail of the Protestant Reformation, that it's really rooted in the kind of religious logic of Protestant, but not Catholic, right. Meaning this kind of criticism of corrupt institutions, of hierarchies, of empty rituals. You know, you have to really believe it in your heart. That's what matters.

00;51;29;24 - 00;51;56;18

Matthew Hedstrom

Not just what somebody in fancy clothes does right? This sort of idea of a priesthood of all believers that direct, unmediated access to the divine. So I teach my course, starting with the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Divinity school address, in which he talks about having to actually leave the church in order to find God.

00;51;56;25 - 00;52;28;08

Matthew Hedstrom

There's the first great moment of American religious disaffiliation. Right? And he admonishes this graduating class to seek God without mediator or veil. He also says, “acquaint thyself at first hand with deity.” This is when I think the Protestant starts to become the post-Protestant. That phrase you heard earlier, in other words, the logic of Protestantism, that kind of Protestant, but not Catholic sensibility is now being turned back on itself, on Protestant religious institutions.

00;52;28;08 - 00;53;03;26

Matthew Hedstrom

And taking that next step that says, okay, if we want to truly, be a priesthood of all believers and to seek God without mediator or veil, that means stepping outside of the institutions of the churches itself. Now, if you think about it, of course, this is deeply troubling on a social level. And potentially very anarchic. And we saw the wars of religion that ravaged, you know, Europe in, in the 17th century and that we're this kind of deeply traumatic cultural memory for Americans, right?

00;53;03;26 - 00;53;35;18

Matthew Hedstrom

Thinking like, if religion spills out of control in this way, it's very likely to lead to a lot of people, killing each other. And so, so important guardrails were established to kind of keep these anarchic tendencies of the kind of Protestant religious logics in check. And in some ways, I think the sort of story of spiritual but not religious and religious disaffiliation is in some way the story of the slow erosion of these guardrails, important guardrails such as religious establishments, right?

00;53;35;18 - 00;54;05;11

Matthew Hedstrom

Official, legally established official religions of societies, a high sense of the scriptures and a high sense of the sacraments. And the US, of course, we tore down that, that first one rather, ceremoniously the religious establishment, we have the First Amendment. So at the federal level, we have, you know, Congress shall make no laws respecting establishment of religion, but this took a little bit longer than most Americans, I think.

00;54;05;11 - 00;54;36;12

Matthew Hedstrom

Remember, that that led to disestablishment at the federal level. There were still state establishments through the 1830s. And historians have written about the ways in which there were kind of informal establishments, both legal and kind of cultural, really through the 1950s and 60s and a series of important Supreme Court cases that some people call the second disestablishment, that, you know, things like prayer in schools or Bible readings in schools, religious displays on public grounds.

00;54;36;12 - 00;55;04;07

Matthew Hedstrom

Right. There was a kind of informal Protestant establishment that was only, sort of legally, eroded in the 1960s. Protestants, of course, did a lot of work, sort of decentering and dethroning the sacraments in important ways. They got rid of a whole bunch of them. And the ones that they kept, they kind of regenerated oftentimes as kind of, not efficacious, sort of on their own terms.

00;55;04;07 - 00;55;30;06

Matthew Hedstrom

They were merely symbolic. And what really mattered was kind of the transformation in one's heart rather than the work of the sacrament. Itself. This is one of the reasons why I think kind of low church Protestantism, especially evangelicalism, is really the the kissing cousin of SBNR. It's, sometimes I think about it as kind of like the photographic negative of spiritual but not religious.

00;55;30;06 - 00;55;59;15

Matthew Hedstrom

The other side of the coin, I say this to my students all the time. They always look at me like I'm crazy because they're like, how can you say that? These most religious of people over here are the most like the people who are leaving religion over here? But I think if you understand the kind of logic that Protestant but not Catholic, spiritual but not religious post-Protestantism, you can understand that sometimes I call certain kinds of evangelicalism spiritual, but not religious, but religious.

00;55;59;17 - 00;56;27;17

Matthew Hedstrom

Right? And you can you can think about this. You can here you can find things on YouTube, young evangelicals saying, I'm not religious. This is not a religion, right? I'm just a follower of Jesus and these kinds of things. You know, on the question of the sacraments, I think, Mormonism would be a very interesting sort of conversation partner along these lines because of the the very high sense of ritual and sacrament, much more Catholic than evangelical

00;56;27;19 - 00;56;44;20

Matthew Hedstrom

in that sense. And of course, the thing about the sacraments, especially if you have a certain high sense of the sacraments, is you can't do them on your own, right. You can't do that if you're a very low church Protestant, you have no sense of apostolic succession or ordination. That doesn't really matter. Maybe you can kind of do it on your own.

00;56;44;22 - 00;57;08;25

Matthew Hedstrom

But for traditions, that care about, about ordination, and, and the kind of, in a way, almost material efficacy of the ritual itself. It's not something you can do on your own. And so, you know, I think about that, but of course, the data doesn't show that Catholics are any more immune to religious disaffiliation.

00;57;08;25 - 00;57;44;02

Matthew Hedstrom

It hasn't created a kind of barrier to leaving, even though you can't administer the Eucharist at home by yourself. So does this create greater barriers to exit? Does it create a greater sense of loss upon exit? If you have this, a certain sense of the sacraments? A couple other elements that I just kind of want to mention more briefly, when I think about the sort of SBNR and where does it come from, and what are some of the social, cultural dynamics behind it?

00;57;44;05 - 00;58;10;15

Matthew Hedstrom

I'll mention just real briefly here, consumerism, pluralism and scandal. I'm very interested in some of the work that some social scientists have done who relate a kind of religious culture to questions of political economy. So these are scholars who have tracked the shift in the US from what they call a producer economy to a consumer economy.

00;58;10;18 - 00;58;32;02

Matthew Hedstrom

Right? The economy used to be rooted in making things like agriculture, industry… Right? And economic activity was probably primarily: you make things and you sell them. And that we have shifted over time to very low percentage of Americans who are actually involved in making things and selling things. And much more of our economy is driven by consumer spending.

00;58;32;04 - 00;58;51;13

Matthew Hedstrom

And, and the argument here, which is the one that I find so provocative, is that this shift, this shift in how we make a living and how our sort of society is organized economically has effects, culturally and religiously, and that we have moved from a sort of producer ethic to a consumer ethic. These are big shifts, right?

00;58;51;13 - 00;59;11;14

Matthew Hedstrom

They're not sort of a light switch that turns on and off, but a sort of, a tipping of the scales. And, and in the matters of religion, this might incline us less to see religion as a good that needs to be produced, that we need to come together to make it show up for the minyan, you know, show up for the Wednesday night potluck, right?

00;59;11;14 - 00;59;35;24

Matthew Hedstrom

Like you like it has to be made, and more as a good, a sort of preexisting good, a cereal box on the shelf that you can then go and sort of pick which one you like. Of course, the most important form of religious production, how religion is made, is reproduction. It's having kids and raising them in your tradition.

00;59;35;27 - 00;59;55;07

Matthew Hedstrom

And I think, even there we see some shifts towards a more kind of consumer ethic. I have met people. I've had conversations with people who say, well, I'm purposely not raising my kids in any sort of religious tradition because I don't want to impinge on their autonomy. I want them to be able to choose when they become adults.

00;59;55;09 - 01;00;25;01

Matthew Hedstrom

Right. And so it would be it wouldn't be right for me, to be a religious producer in that sense. I want my kids to be fully actualized religious, consumers, pluralism. I think, I'll just say briefly that, the United States has always had a context of religious pluralism. And in many ways, the First Amendment and religious establishment was trying to solve the problem of American pluralism, even at a moment when the United States was roughly 95% Protestant.

01;00;25;01 - 01;01;04;26

Matthew Hedstrom

There's still a lot to fight about among 95% Protestants. Right. And so, so that's sort of always been the case. But since the 1960s, since the opening up of American immigration laws in particular, the United States has now been sort of open to the world. And I think we can see in some of the survey data, a growth in, in people who say things like, you know, I'm looking at a survey here that was done by the, sociologist Christian Smith from Notre Dame, who looked at what he calls emerging adult 18 to 28 year-olds and asks the questions about religious truth.

01;01;04;28 - 01;01;29;20

Matthew Hedstrom

“Only one religion is true,” agreed 29% of these emerging adults. But “many religions are true:” 57%. You know, majorities say it's okay to pick and choose religious beliefs. I think I think the sort of demographic diversification has led to a kind of, greater cosmopolitan sensibilities. In other words, truth is, multiple truths may be found in multiple places.

01;01;29;23 - 01;01;53;08

Matthew Hedstrom

And these kinds of things, this this might, be part of the reason why we've seen an increase in the SBNR sort of check box, but also the other check box. And I'm very interested in these surveys, which is nothing in particular. Which certainly I think for many who check that box might be an indication of “I don't really care.”

01;01;53;08 - 01;02;20;01

Matthew Hedstrom

“I don't think about this very much.” Right? But it might be actually, as well a very studied and thought out, rejection of the phrase in particular: “no, I'm not I am nothing in particular because I am many things or I am more than one thing.” Right? So it's a rejection of the particularity rather than claiming of the status of sort of nothing.

01;02;20;03 - 01;02;43;22

Matthew Hedstrom

The last thing I'll say that I think is important to say here is, is the role of scandal in religious affiliation broadly in sort of the rise of SBNR sensibilities in particular. Of course, scandal is as old as humanity, 100,000 years old. Right? And, every human institution has been plagued by it in certain ways. It's part of the founding dynamics of the kind of Protestant logics that I talked about.

01;02;43;25 - 01;03;16;02

Matthew Hedstrom

But when you think about the rise of religious disaffiliation from the 1990s forward, I think it's not a coincidence at all that it coincides with the, child sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and other, you know, other prominent, religious denominations we've seen it in, in the Southern Baptist Convention, many other places. And I think also the increasing political polarization of American life broadly and the way that religion and religious communities have been entangled in that.

01;03;16;04 - 01;03;39;09

Matthew Hedstrom

You go back not too many decades and you sat in the pews of your Methodist or Presbyterian churches, and you likely didn't know how the person sitting next to you voted. And that is increasingly not the case in American religious life. And therefore many religious communities, come to assume political identities and therefore carry the baggage of those political affiliations, in really significant ways.

01;03;39;09 - 01;03;55;24

Matthew Hedstrom

And so people see a political actor acting a certain way and they say, oh, if that's what religion means, I'm out. And I think that's a very, very important driver there. I think I'll leave it there. Thank you so much.

01;03;55;26 - 01;04;01;27

Laurie Maffly-Kipp

Well, I want to thank all of our panelists again for a wonderful, rich session. Thank you so much.