Ross Douthat

Yeah, I guess I would just, this isn't my personal belief structure, but I feel like someone could stay in the pews

for a long time disagreeing with the Catholic Church about whether abortion should be fully banned, if they still believed that the mass was what it claimed to be and that Jesus rose from the dead, right?

Do you think that's right or do you think it's all sort of just a continuum of...

Political beliefs, supernatural beliefs, and so on.

Exactly right.

Like on my best day, I do believe these things.

Right.

I guess I'm just sort of interested in finding like, you know, what is what is the unexpected lever that changes religion in some way in America?

Right.

And so, you know, if you had a bunch of liberal Protestant pastors who were still political liberals, but who suddenly were

less squishy on the core religious questions.

I'm just interested in like, what does that change?

And maybe the answer is not that much, that it's always just a numbers game.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't.

And what's so then just just to go big picture for America, what for the nonreligious person who's like, why do I care about the Protestant mainline?

What is what is the takeaway of mainline decline?

So let's talk about the religious America of 2050.

What parts of American Christianity are growing right now?

Right.

That's number one.