Derek Thompson

More vacuum.

The people who sometimes are least likely to go to church are the most likely to feel somewhat empty in their lives.

This is one way that you summarized it, I believe, in one of your essays.

You said dropping out begets dropping out.

Dropping out of religion leads to, and here I'm paraphrasing a little bit, dropping out of the rest of life.

And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about this phenomenon where a lot of the people least likely to be attached to church or attached to a belief system aren't necessarily replacing church with yoga.

They're replacing church with nothing.

And that's the real problem here.

You said in that answer that religion leads to, and then the thing you were alluding to was happiness and social connection.

And I want to interrogate that in just a bit.

But first, I want to strengthen your argument that there is something, or seems to be something special about religion, especially for young people.

You had this amazing graph that I can easily describe for those who are not watching, that looks at the difference

in the share of Americans who say they're very happy, not just happy, very happy, between Christians and non-religious people.

In the 1940s, that gap is 1%.

Christians are just 1% more likely to say they're very happy than non-religious people.

For people born in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, it's more like about a five percentage point gap between Christians over non-Christians.

Since the 1980s, the decade I was born, and up to the 2000s, the decade that Gen Z was born, the gap looks more like overall 10 percentage points.

So one way you could summarize this very, I think, both accurately and pithily is to say that the happiness benefit of religion seems to have doubled between looking at boomers and looking at millennials and Gen Z.

Why do you think that is?

And we're going to talk about the causation correlation thing in a bit.