Derek Thompson

In fact, the same thing that's happening in media, where you used to have to start off at the local newspaper and then become a beat reporter and then become an editor at the local newspaper and then get pulled into the New York Times and then slowly work your way up, that has been demolished.

And now it's go online, start a Twitch, start a YouTube, build an audience that is anti-institutional that can grow to be even larger than people who work at the major newspapers.

That's the familiar story that people tell in media.

And it's so interesting that you're telling that story within religion, which I would typically think of as being the domain of traditional ideas.

And it raises one question, which is, some of these media startups...

are somewhat, I don't want to call, they're not exactly personality cults, but they're certainly personality businesses, right?

People read the New York Times to read the New York Times.

They watch Hasan Piker or whatever, Tucker Carlson, to watch one individual.

Are these fast-growing, non-denominational religions

Are they well understood as personality cults or cults?

Or are they better understood as tweaks of Protestantism that catch on because they are seen as grassroot rather than tapping into a 500-year-old tradition?

You've really changed my mind and introduced a new concept to me in the last five, 10 minutes, because let me try to get this right.

I came into this conversation with a pretty clear frame that the rise of secularism in America was all about

the decline of institutions, and the rise of individualism.

But the story that you're telling is that many of the biggest success stories within Christianity right now in America are about anti-institutional individuals building a broadcast that is one to one million audience.

And so it's kind of interesting that the same

underlying sociological engine or phenomenon that one could use to describe the rise of nones, N-O-N-E-S, non-religious believers, is the same thing that is describing or powering the renaissance of

Christianity in some parts of America.

It just makes you realize how unbelievably powerful some of these zeitgeists are, that they can explain and power movements that seem, in terms of their outcomes, to be entirely opposite.

On the one hand, people becoming less religious.