Ross Douthat

It seems like you can tell.

You can tell a lot of different stories, right?

But one story would be, okay, it's obviously good for churches to have more men in the pews, but if organized religion generally, Christianity in particular, has a specific problem losing young women, then you get a kind of, you know, bro-tastic, would-be patriarchal culture in these churches, and maybe it accelerates a female exodus.

Or alternatively, you say, look, no, actually, if you have a lot of churches that are suddenly 50-50 male-female, these are the only institutions in American life, maybe, that might have that kind of balance.

You get more marriages, more successful communities.

Which of those two stories sounds more realistic to you?

Male-dominated in their hierarchies and in their pastoral leadership, but not in who goes to mass and church.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's talk about class after gender.

Yeah.

Again, I think there's a ... Like the story that women are more likely to go to church or be religious than men, there's a longstanding story that's very popular among political pundits that says, okay, America is a nation with a secular elite and a very religious lower middle class or working class, right?

The reality is more complicated, right?

Talk about class and education and American religion.

Which is like the most.

Yeah, that's the tough question.

Yeah.

Non-denominational church or marijuana dispensary.

That doesn't quite hold, though, right?

When you go into graduate and sort of postgraduate degrees, right?