James Talarico

And so those Christians understood that once the government—

starts preaching your religion, starts making decisions about your faith, that that doesn't lead anywhere good.

And so we should be very suspicious of the state usurping the role of pastors and Sunday school teachers.

If you want to deepen your faith, we have churches on every street corner.

A lot of them don't have a lot of people in them, right?

We've got mosques and temples and synagogues that have a ton of room in them.

And so why would we have the government start to teach kids about or preach a certain religion when we have houses of worship that can do that?

Yeah.

As they should.

I mean, I honestly think that Christianity has a lot to share with the world at this moment of kind of crisis everywhere.

But this, again, is giving Christianity and religious people broadly a bad name.

Because this is what people think about religious people, that we're more interested in imposing our faith or our values or our beliefs on others instead of living it out ourselves.

I think fear.

Fear.

And I get that fear.

I want to acknowledge that I also feel this fear that –

You know, I look across my church on Sunday mornings and I see a lot of gray hair.

I worry about the future of my church, of my faith in this country.

Everyone has seen the charts of declining religious participation and the decline in the number of people who belong to faith.

I think a lot of it is well justified because organized religion has done a lot of damage to people, particularly if we're talking about this country.