Ross Douthat

But among people who are religiously affiliated, it's non-denominational Christianity.

Yeah.

Yeah, but I'm going to ask you to generalize.

We were joking earlier about the kind of cliched names of non-denominational churches for people who aren't familiar with that world.

What is non-denominational Protestantism right now?

Does that depoliticize things?

We were talking about, you know, evangelical identity as a kind of tribal political identity.

But if you're totally fragmented and everyone is sort of loyal to a particular pastor in a particular setting, do you think that non-denominational Christianity is less Republican than the evangelicalism of today or 10 years ago?

Does this just make American Christianity more supernaturalist in some way?

You mentioned that a lot of these churches are Pentecostalist.

Pentecostalism, for those who don't know, is, you mentioned the gifts of the spirit.

It's very focused on speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, very different from the mood of old school mainline Christianity, right?

So that's already changed.

Does it change more?

Would you expect...

religion as practiced in 2050 generally to be more supernaturalist.

I was raised Episcopalian in Southern Connecticut, so I have some familiarity with mainline customs.

Yeah, no raising of hands in those churches, huh?

No raising of hands, but also just the idea that Christianity is a supernaturalist religion, which is woven into Catholicism in its own way, saints and healings and so on, was altogether absent.

Right.