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With every passing year, traditional religious belief continues its trend of steady decline in the United States. According to the latest Gallup Values and Beliefs poll, a record low of 81 percent of American adults believe in God. Thats a slip of 6 percentage points since 2017, the last time Gallup conducted the poll, which found 87 percent of respondents affirming belief in God. As traditional beliefs wane and a new generation increasingly makes its way in the world without them, a new American religious landscape is becoming visibleand it has features both familiar and unexpected.

What is changing profoundly is the decline of traditional, denominational religious organizations, especially among young adults, Notre Dame sociologist and author Christian Smith wrote in an email about the poll results. Within Christianity, the decline affects both liberal and conservative denominations. Scholars, journalists, and sociologists of religion have offered a range of explanations for the drop. While simple demographics account for part of the changeas young Nones come of age, they are beginning to have children of their own, whereas religious couples are having fewer children than their parents and grandparents didpolitics have also played a role, especially for those on the left. According to Gallups report, Democrats have seen the sharpest decline in belief in God while Republican rates of belief remain extremely high:

The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the U.S.

David Campbell, coauthor of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics, says that Many Americansespecially young peoplesee religion as bound up with political conservatism, and the Republican party specifically. . . . Young people are especially allergic to the perception that manybut by no means allAmerican religions are hostile to LGBTQ rights.

But while the Religious Right has played a role in the waning of traditional Christianity in the United States, the disillusioned young scions of conservative Catholic and Protestant families arent emptying the pews at home to fill them in more progressive church spaces. Liberal Christians traditions are in a faster freefall than conservative ones.

Notwithstanding the Episcopal Churchs progressive stances on a number of issues that align with the mores of liberal young Americansthe denomination ordains trans people, blesses same-sex marriages, and supports abortion rightsits membership and Sunday attendance have plummeted. Far from picking up large numbers of disaffected post-evangelicals during the Trump years, the church experienced a net loss of almost 170,000 members between 2016 and 2020. These numbers reflect a decades-long trend: In October 2020, the denominations own news service reported that membership is down 17.4 [percent] over the last 10 years. The average age of the average Episcopalian and the lack of generational replacement have contributed to an overall picture that prompted one scholar to say, The Episcopal Church will be dead in the next 20 years. (He later wrote to clarify and mildly soften his position: They will very likely be on life support.) Its been a steep slope: The denomination has produced more American presidents than any other, a reminder of the prestige and power it enjoyed as recently as one or two generations ago.

The story of decline is consistent across denominations with similarly liberal theological views on gender and sexuality, such as the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Church of Christ. Likewise, liberal seminaries and divinity schools across the country have also faced tough times, with some shutting down and others downsizing or even merging to avoid closure.

Progressive social stances and liberal beliefs do not appear to have helped these churches to attract younger people with similar convictions to join them in significant numbers. In attempting to explain the mainlines troubles with declining membership, economist Laurence Iannaccone arguedin 1994, when the longer trend had already been apparent for many yearsthat part of the problem for the liberal churches is low expectations for members: They require little in the way of time, resources, and support, and are hesitant to place strong moral expectations or theological boundaries on them. In Iannaccones view, Strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free riding. It screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain. Likewise, more conservative critics have long argued that the key problem for liberal churches is that they lack a religious reason for [their] own existence; combining this feature with their emphasis on social causes leaves them looking nigh-indistinguishable from any other advocacy group, let alone one another.

The urgency with which mainline churches pursue social justice does not extend to traditional missionary work, which could be another factor in their waning memberships. In his study of early twentieth-century foreign missionaries and their children, UC Berkeleys David Hollinger writes that one of the unintended consequences of liberal Protestantisms embrace of multiculturalism was a concomitant abandonment of proselytizing. In his view, the religious tolerance of the mainline advanced the larger process of religious liberalization and the attendant growth of post-Protestant secularism. It could be said that the commitment to inclusivity with respect to other faiths, traditions, and points of view became so total within the mainline that it resulted in a final self-abnegation.

Younger Americans are leaving their churches at a faster rate than has been recorded in similar polls previouslybut the question of where theyre ending up is complicated.

The U.S. is not undergoing secularization of a type that leads to hard-core rationalist, materialist, disenchanted atheism, at least in the near term, Smith, the Notre Dame sociologist, wrote. If anything, the broader culture has become re-enchanted. Everybody and their cousin now wants to be spiritual and to practice mindfulness.

Polls of American religiosity give unaffiliated participants more options than simply Atheist and Agnostic. On the question of religious preference, Pew offers Nothing in particular, and Gallups question about religious affiliation includes the option of selecting Nonethe negation that gave rise to a new sociological category.

But Nones are not simply agnostics or atheists by another name. A growing subsection of Americans positively identifies as spiritual but not religious, a catch-all of personal religious orientations that can entail anything from cultivating private Christian faith apart from an ecclesial tradition to an open agnosticism inflected with principles derived from the practice of yogaand much more besides. So although explicit atheism has made modest gains among Americans in recent years, it is not the philosophical upshot for most Americans who are leaving their churches, and its wrong to assume that a person who identifies as a None is a person bereft of religious conviction.

The decline into irreligion of a nation of natural believers has a strange and unpredictable character. In fact, some observers have argued that what we are witnessing is not the decline of American religion at all, but rather a remix.

Tara Isabella Burton, in her book Strange Rites, argues that the decline of confessional Christianity in America has been taken to imply the waning of religion in the country more generally. But religion is as strong as ever, in Burtons view; you just wont find it in church. Rather, comic book conventions, yoga studios, cyberspace, and a myriad of similar destinations have become the essential sites of a new American religious culture. Carrying forward some of the ideas of nineteenth-century French sociological thinker mile Durkheim, Burton takes religion to be less about creeds and dogma than community and meaning making. This religiosity finds its expression through the collective energy of its adherents, a process [Durkheim] calls collective effervescence, a shared intoxication participants experience when they join together in a symbolically significant, socially cohesive action.

Burton cites Harry Potter as a paradigmatic example of this collective effervescence. Children born to Potter fans are being christened Albus and Hermione in honor of Rowlings characters; their Hogwarts-tattoo-sleeved parents derive moral teachings, ethical notions, and a larger message from the books, which amount to a foundational text for their livesjust as scripture may have been to their own parents. This quasi-religious devotion to the imaginative universe of Harry Potter helps explain the otherwise unaccountable ferocity of the backlash to J.K. Rowling: Her controversial public statements about trans women have elicited something akin to a crisis of faith among devotees who may have first learned about the importance of inclusion and acceptance in the Potter novels. Fans of the fantasy series are not unique in the degree to which they give themselves over to their enthusiasm. Yale religion scholar Kathryn Lofton has long argued that the obsessive fervor generated by celebrities like Oprah, Britney Spears, and BTS has elements of organization and function that appear far more similar to those of religious communities than of more pedestrian fandoms.

But these tendencies offer a brief glimpse of a much larger emerging religious landscape. Thanks to TikTok, Instagram, and the pandemic that kept everyone inside and on their phones, astrology has made a significant apparent comeback with Millennials and Zoomers. Promising a more authentic and spiritually attuned feminism, Wicca and Neopaganism have grown from 134,000 [adherents] in 2001 to nearly 2 million [in 2021]. Young men, some of them nervous about any kind of feminism, have elevated Canadian psychologist and self-help writer Jordan Peterson to the status of a mystical guru. There is the cult of Peloton, known for its collective affirmations and liturgical calls to fitness. Followers of QAnon could be described as initiates because of the relationship they develop to an esoteric body of beliefs. The Disney community treats a visit to Disney World as a secular pilgrimage. And the dominant contemporary form of progressive social consciousnesswokeness, as critics call ithas features that resemble Burtons notion of remixed religion. From calls to atone for unearned privilege (original sin, if you squint), to chants and kneeling as forms of protest, to the targeting of dissenting opinions for conveying heretical forms of thought, the parallels with elements of Christian history, theology, and practice are suggestive. Columbia University linguist John McWhorter is a well-known proponent of this view, arguing that an anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.

The predominance of remixed religion, religion-substitutes, religion-alternatives, and spiritualized hobbies among younger Americans attests to a basic truth about our countrys culture: We are natural believers. While scholars may debate the meaning and significance of any of these examplesand deeper questions about what constitutes religion as a unique form of social lifethe durably high level of spiritual enthusiasm is a feature of the culture of the United States that sets it apart from that of secular Europe. In its many new forms, American religion may very well turn out to be with us always, even unto the end of the age.

Originally posted here:
America, Land of Unbelieving Believers - The Bulwark

A Greek butcher shop selling offal. Photo via Getty Images.

There are many curious things about Evie Magazine, which brands itself as a conservative alternative to mainstream womens magazines. There are, of course, its many weird and wrong claims about COVID vaccines and COVID more generally, which seem aimed at laundering a certain brand of disease denialism to a young, female audience. The magazine also trots out a variety of other essays about feminism (bad), classical femininity (good), and so on. But amidst its many odd little wares, nothing is weirder, or more amusing, than Evies obsession with meatmore specifically, with organ meats. And, as it turns out, the organ meat lifestyleconsuming liver, kidneys, intestines, hearts, testicles, and other edible animal organsis a passion thats now uniting the anti-vaccine world, Joe Rogans audience, the so-called alt-right, conservative outlets like Evie, and, overall, a new and presumably somewhat constipated brand of meatfluencer.

Evie has run many articles extolling the virtues of meat and denouncing vegan alternatives. Nearly all of them link back to a 2021 blog about incorporating offal like hearts and liver into ones diet. The insistent meat takes, and promotion of organ meat specifically, also dovetail with Evies larger project: rejecting whatever smacks of liberalismBeyond Burgers, acknowledging the existence of trans peopleand embracing a traditional or classic lifestyle, in this case the classic lifestyle of a gout-addled medieval king.

As with many things Evie does, its also the result of a strange effect in which much larger cultural forces trickle down. The carnivore dietor, more specifically, an organ meat-centric onehas proved to be a meeting place for a variety of extremely online and highly bizarre people, all intent on showing you how to live, and many promoting one regressive worldview or another in the process.

As VICE wrote in 2017, the paleo dietmeat-heavy, but with nuts and some vegetableshad begun to emerge then as the preferred diet of right- and libertarian-leaning public figures like billionaire vampire Peter Thiel. Soon after, Mikhaila Peterson, the daughter of clinical psychologist and extremely odd manosphere personality Jordan Peterson, began promoting the so-called Lion Diet, which is far more extreme, consisting solely of ruminant meat, salt, and water. (Eating a gazelle would be fine, but an apple would not.) Both Peterson and Fuller have claimed that this diet cured them of many autoimmune issues; objective assessments of the diet tend to point out that its both nutritionally unbalanced and profoundly unsustainable. (The family has made other extreme medical claims: In 2020, Jordan Peterson also spent eight days in a medically-induced coma, an unorthodox detox treatment for what Peterson and his daughter said was an addiction to benzodiazepines. Experts that VICE interviewed at the time questioned some of the details of Mikhailas claims about the care hed received in Canada prior to going to Russia and said such an extreme method of weaning off an addictive medication is rarely used, to reduce the likelihood of relapse.)

The carnivore diet, which is now in vogue online, goes a step further than paleo and is more complicated than the lion diet, often cutting out most food groups besides meat, fruit, and honey. It is, as Dazed Digital recently pointed out, still awash in far-right associations, equating meat with both traditional masculinity and red-pilling, although there are any number of female carnivore diet influencers.

The Carnivore Diet is the red pill that wakes you up to reality, wrote one meatfluencer on Twitter, who goes by Carnivore Aurelius. It's hard at first. Your eyes have been closed for so long, so the light is blinding. But it exposes you to the fact that society is structured around lies. It all starts with diet. This movement is unstoppable. More recently, he celebrated, Everybody is waking up to seed oils, birth control and tap water poisoning them. Grand global awakening happening right now. Beautiful to watch. (Seed oilswhich include nearly all vegetable oilsare another recent target of the extremely online.)

There are a variety of carnivore diet influencers on Instagram and TikTok, all insistently energetic, very red, and constantly in the gym or doing something strenuous in the great outdoors; their feeds are a wash of red plates, bulging muscles, and proclamations about the distant time they last ate a vegetable. One is the Liver King, aka Brian Johnson, an intensely muscled man from Texas who dines on a variety of raw liver, testicles, and an incredibly specific brand of hype, declaring himself CEO OF THE ANCESTRAL LIFESTYLE. (As he told Buzzfeed, speaking in the exuberant third person, You know what Liver King says? Start with liver, get some really good sleep, move like Liver King, eat like Liver King, shield like Liver King. Live like the ancestral man, and youll have the hormone profile thats double or triple of the manicured modern man.)

Perhaps no one in the meat space is more influential than Paul Saladino, the self-proclaimed Carnivore MD. (Saladinos credentials are that he is, his Facebook bio says, Trained in medicine at the University of Arizona and the University of Washington. Board-certified as a Physician Nutrition Specialist and in psychiatry. Licensure records in California, where Saladino lives, though, show that his license to practice is currently listed as delinquent for a failure to pay fees, and that no practice is permitted, according to the California state medical board.)

On his extremely active TikTok and Instagram pages both banned once, accordin to Saladino he makes a variety of claimsfor instance, that spinach and beans are essentially toxic, that hygiene products like soap and toothpaste and shampoo are unnecessary, and above all, that organ meats are crucial. They include everything your body needs to thrive: vitamins, minerals, peptides, proteins, and growth factors, proclaims the website for Saladinos supplement company, Heart and Soil. Thats why our ancestors were strong, virile, and vital! Thats how they thrived generation after generation in the worlds harshest environments. Should you not be able to access beef heart, for instance, on a daily basis, the company sells bottles of encapsulated organ meat-based supplement products, ranging from $28 to $52 a bottle.

Two notable things happened in Saladinos world in the past few years: First, he went on Joe Rogan, back in 2020, rocketing him to a new level of audience and fame. (Rogan himself went on a carnivore diet soon after, prompting a round of explosive diarrhea, as he detailed on a subsequent episode of the show, elaborating, with regular diarrhea I would compare it to a fire you see coming a block or two away and you have the time to make an escape, whereas this carnivore diet is like out of nowhere the fire is coming through the cracks, your doorknob is red hot, and all hope is lost. Just like our ancestors, presumably, shortly before many of them died of dysentery.)

As the pandemic has progressed, Saladino has also used his new, Rogan-inspired reach to become increasingly dismissive of the efficacy of vaccines. Hes not explicitly anti-vaccine, tweeting in August 2021 that they may help avoid some severe Covid complications, for instance. But hes repeatedly suggested, too, that metabolic health is more important in preventing severe COVID outcomes, and claimed that natural immunity is better than the kind created by vaccines. (The claim that natural immunity is superior to vaccination is a common anti-vaccine talking point.) In other words, of course, that a hunk of liver, or a supplement in a bottle, will do more to fight Covid, a claim many health cranks have made throughout the pandemic, in one form or another.

Unsurprisingly, the carnivore diet has also become the purview of the body-hacking crowd, seeking to optimize themselves by engaging in extreme diets. One of the best known is Dave Asprey, the inventor of Bulletproof Coffee, who was ushered into the diet by Saladino. Asprey has become more overtly anti-vaccine, declaring on Facebook, Show me an mRNA vaccine that will stop cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or cancer, with a clean safety record, and I am all in. Willing to wait until then! Hes also approvingly shared posts from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s anti-vax organization Childrens Health Defense, in particular a post praising fringe medical group Americas Frontline Doctorin all a sort of pseudoscience turducken.

Above all, the insistently carnivorous and very online crowd exists both to eat meat and to create buzz and attention for themselves by posting about it (which explains why former Hills star and mid-2000s tabloid staple Heidi Montag, another Saladino devotee, was recently seen out and about munching on a raw bison heart in a sandwich bag for the paparazzi, which she claimed to be eating for fertility).

The meat world is broad and full of self-styled iconoclasts, and their commitment to intense and common sense-bending diets is as strong as their commitment to broadcasting every move they make, every morsel they eat, and every resulting bowel movement online.

Today, then, the anti-vaxxers, the Instagram doctors, the podcasters, and the anti-feminists find themselves at a long table, urging each other to swallow the toughest morsels, the weirdest cuts. Their commitment to not wasting edible food is admirable, and, as a metaphor, well, the whole thing couldnt be more fitting.

See more here:
Why Are the Weirdest People Online Obsessed With Organ Meats? - VICE