Ross Douthat

And so you have much more of kind of a cycle of revival decline, revival decline, rather than sort of just a long narrative of secularization.

Right.

And so in some of these vibes based debates,

You have been the guy with the data, you know, critiquing the vibes that people will say, oh, you know, the country's turning back to Christianity.

And you're there to say, sorry, it's a plateau.

No big evidence of people going back to church.

I want to talk about a few sort of subcategories within that larger narrative where it seems to me like something genuinely novel is happening.

So let's start by talking about men versus women.

What is the historical pattern of this?

gendered behavior around religion, and how is that changing, maybe?

Is this true across religions?

Is this true in Islamic countries versus Christian countries, or is it mostly a Christian phenomenon?

Now, can you tell in the data whether this is what this means for specific churches?

Right.

So, for instance, you know, one of my colleagues just wrote a big story about

that I think you commented on about Eastern Orthodoxy in America, right?

Which is a very small part of American religion, but there are a lot of stories, and I've heard them myself, about male converts to Eastern Orthodoxy being a big thing, right?

So that would be a small example where you might say, okay, you have men...

sticking with Christianity or returning to it in particular places, but it's going to create a dynamic where some churches are much more male and some churches are much more female.

Do you think that that balancing out is good for churches?