Ross Douthat

I don't know if I agree that we don't talk about it that much.

I feel like commentary on religion, as long as I've been a pundit, has been dominated by the sense that America is getting less religious.

People are disaffiliating.

But then something changed, right, around 2020, 2021.

Give me some speculation, though, about why we've seen the plateau.

Like, why do you think it seems like there is a sort of basically just a chronological pattern where for a while you could just count on.

each generation being substantially less religious than the previous generation.

And with Gen Z and the millennials, they are less religious, but it's just not as strong a pattern as you've seen before.

And I know this is outside the realm of data.

I'm going to do this to you repeatedly in the interview, but did something change in 2017 to 2025 that would put a floor under religion that would sort of make it seem a little more resilient?

Exactly.

How does the identification numbers interact with actual data on church attendance, which I know is itself, it's really hard to measure.

People also will say they go to mass or church or synagogue more than they really do.

But is it something where religious identification has fallen faster than church attendance or has attendance declined meaningfully in the last 20 years?

I mean, when we're making these comparisons... Exactly.

India, Sub-Saharan Africa, you see plenty of religious beliefs.

Absolutely.

But for historical context, I think there's a lot of people, maybe especially secular people, who sort of imagine that the story of religion in America is one where the country just sort of starts out super religious...

You know, maybe it's the Puritans, whoever else, and just has gradually become more secular over time.

In fact, America has gotten more religious at various moments across its history.