Want to meet great minds who don't think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this can't miss live experience in person at the Wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill, and Derek Thompson. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.

Religions influence is waning in America today. Roughly 28% of american adults identify as either atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular. In 2007, just 15% of Americans identified with no religion. That's all, according to the Pew Research center. It's taken as common sense that this is a problem. Just 16% of people in a September 2022 poll said that religion's decline was good, while a plurality said the decline was a bad thing. These conversations have become bound up in larger concerns about the loneliness epidemic and the decline in Americans. Hanging out my colleague Derek Thompson wondered in a recent article if, in foregoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. The surgeon general put out a report last year on our epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Religious groups have sought to market themselves as a solution. One Boston Glob, Ed, argued that religion can play a critical role in alleviating the loneliness epidemic. Now to lay my cards on the table. I'm a Christian, but I'm also skeptical about the broad narratives around the loneliness crisis, about the broad brush strokes used to paint people who don't consider themselves religious, and the treatment of church as a panacea for all our social ills.

After all, it's not like life was perfect before the declines in religiosity. This is good on paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I'm your host, Jerusalem Dempsis. I'm a staff writer here at the Atlantic, and today I asked Arthur Brooks to come on the show to talk with me about whether religion can solve America's loneliness epidemic. Brooks was the former president of the American Enterprise Institute but now is a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches a class on leadership and happiness. He's also a contributing writer for the Atlantic, where he has written that happiness comes in part through faith. This is a less wonky conversation than the ones you'll usually hear on this podcast. I press Brooks on what sorts of data he is resting many of his arguments on, and I also push him to try and weigh the harms of religion's decline against potential benefits. And he expresses a view I think is dominant in the american public. But as you'll hear in my questions, I'm not sure I'm convinced. Listen for yourself. Let's dive in. All right, Arthur, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Great to be with you.

So I'm interested in starting our conversation with an article that you wrote for the Atlantic. And I want you to answer, because I think this is not usually the answer you would give to this question in a religious context, but who are the nuns?

The nuns are not the women wearing habits. The nuns are nones. The people who are self professed to have no religious faith at all, whether or not they consider themselves to be spiritual or not. Most of them actually aren't spiritual either. But they say, I have no religion.

And so how many are there in the United States?

Lots. There weren't very many not that long ago. You know, when I was a little kid, it would have been somewhere around 3% of the population. Now it's more like 30% of the population. Is especially true among millennials and Gen Z.

So I was looking, because I was reading your article, and I was looking at the data. So you're looking at the Pew survey. And I wanted to sort of dig into, like, who these nuns really are, because when I first read your piece, I think that, like many people, my perception is people who identify as not religiously affiliated. I assume that they're, like, either atheists or agnostics. But what was interesting is that most of these folks do believe in God or another higher power, but they rarely go to religious services, and they don't identify with their religion. Is that surprising to you?

Not really. Most people are religious. Most people have a sense of something beyond what they see. They have a very strong sense of the metaphysical. Most people believe in life after death. What they don't always believe in is the human institutions around which we coalesce to figure out what those metaphysical things are and how we're supposed to worship. And so what people have is the same kind of sense of faith. What they don't have faith in is the institutions where they could go and worship.

And, I mean, part of why I like putting numbers on things is because often when we're talking about, like, increasing phenomena or something like that, like, people can begin to think like, oh, like everyone's irreligious, but, you know, 28% religiously unaffiliated, you know, 40% of people still identify as protestant, 20% as Catholic. I mean, the majority of Americans are identifying still with a religion. I think that's important, like baseline setting to do.

Sure, sure. Absolutely. I mean, most people still have a relatively traditional religious affiliation, whether they practice a lot or not. And that's an important thing to keep in mind. Sure. The nuns are of. Nuns are on the rise, but, you know, it's not as, you know, we Catholics, we're not dead yet.

Yeah, the nuns are on the rise. Of course. Of course. So the next question I have is for you, is why are nuns nuns? Right. Like, why is it that you're seeing this increase in people who, when they're asked what their religion is, they kind of just shrug?

Well, there's kind of three things. Number one is that they don't like traditional religious practice. They don't like it. They don't like the way it's done or they don't. They don't trust churches or synagogues or houses of worship. And so it's the commitment part, it's the practice part that they don't like. The second group of people say that they're nuns because they actually just don't believe what these traditional religious organizations say. They have to believe. If you want to be one of us, you got to believe these things. There's a creed. Everybody's got a creed. You can't join a church and then not believe what the church thinks. If you're going to have any sort of integrity, they figure. So the first part is the practice, the second part is actually the belief. And the last part is they just don't feel it. I don't feel it. I don't feel it. I don't feel like going to church. I don't feel like what they're saying. I have to believe. I don't feel it. So in other words, it's practice, it's belief, and it's feeling with practice.

I think this is interesting because I could imagine someone goes to church and then they're just like, well, I'm just going to go to a non denominational protestant service, or I'm a reformed jew, so I'm going to go to a more secular sort of religious kind of environment, and maybe I'll, I'll participate, but I won't really engage in the practices that I find either distasteful or I find kind of boring or unnecessary. Why is that such a reason for people to not go to church at all?

People want to live with integrity. They want to live sort of true to themselves, and they don't want to be part of something and feel hypocritical. It's really important for most people not to feel hypocritical. There's even pretty interesting psychological research that shows that when you induce a cognitive dissonance into your lifestyle, it's incredibly uncomfortable and makes you unhappy, and you want to do something where it's like, yeah, I don't know. I don't really believe that. It's not great. You want to join something where you can do it full blast. You don't want to join a club and think that the club is kind of lame. That's sort of what it comes down to. And that's the big problem that we typically see with people. And I argue in my work as a social scientist, that's actually a mistake.

Why?

It's a mistake because you can't agree with all of anything. I don't know people who agree, who have the happiest marriages, who agree with all of the views and values of their spouse. I don't know anybody who's a super serious Catholic or Jew or Muslim who agrees with everything that comes out of the mouth of every imam, priest, or rabbi. It's just not reasonable to think that and this hyper focus on being hypocritical or not and having this perfect integrity, this is making the perfect, the enemy of the good. And it makes it impossible for people to figure out how to become part of institutions that can become a huge source of meaning in their lives.

So I think are going to pull you in every direction all the time. And it's nice to have something that you can actually count on, whether you agree with every single part of it or not. And so it's in this way, it's much like any other relationship. You find that the happiest people, they have a sense of their faith or life philosophy. It doesn't have necessarily to be faith, but a philosophy around which they can actually organize their sense of right and wrong, good and bad. They have family life that's reliable. They have close friendships. And the apex of both friendships and family life is spousal life. And last but not least, they have a sense of love in their work.Those are the things that the happiest people have in common. And when you take one of those things away, people just tend to feel sort of rootless and aimless. Not everybody. Look, I know a lot of people, they seem to be doing just fine with this. But these are the empirical regularities I see as a social scientist. People who have a sense of how I'm gonna practice what I believe, even if I believe every single bit of it or not, is gonna give me kind of a better, more organized life.Well, let's dig into the social science here a little bit, then, because I think that a lot of times there is sort of an implicit feeling that religion plays something unique in people's lives. But at the same time, when I press people on this, it's often kind of goes towards, well, what actually is happening is that religion facilitates other things that are really important. Like religion facilitates community or the friendship or helps you find your spouses. So is it religion, or is it these other things that this question that is asked in other social science research. If you had to choose, which thing on this list would you pick as the most important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life, I'm an academic, to say people who aren't free thinkers have something defective about them. That's just as bad, that's just as intolerant as people who are pretty dogmatic about their beliefs. To say that free thinkers are heretics and defective on their face, that's actually one of the great conceits of our society today is to say, because I'm not bigoted, I'm an anti bigot, and I'm an anti bigot bigot. And, you know, there's just a complete Many of the traditional and orthodox moral norms of Christianity or Judaism. They tend not to work as well. They tend not to be as popular, the way that it turns out, and one of the reasons, by the way, is as people get more religious, they become more attracted to thoseI'm Jerusalem Dempsis and I'll see you next week.Want to meet great minds who dont think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill and Derek Thomas. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.

are going to pull you in every direction all the time. And it's nice to have something that you can actually count on, whether you agree with every single part of it or not. And so it's in this way, it's much like any other relationship. You find that the happiest people, they have a sense of their faith or life philosophy. It doesn't have necessarily to be faith, but a philosophy around which they can actually organize their sense of right and wrong, good and bad. They have family life that's reliable. They have close friendships. And the apex of both friendships and family life is spousal life. And last but not least, they have a sense of love in their work.

Those are the things that the happiest people have in common. And when you take one of those things away, people just tend to feel sort of rootless and aimless. Not everybody. Look, I know a lot of people, they seem to be doing just fine with this. But these are the empirical regularities I see as a social scientist. People who have a sense of how I'm gonna practice what I believe, even if I believe every single bit of it or not, is gonna give me kind of a better, more organized life.

Well, let's dig into the social science here a little bit, then, because I think that a lot of times there is sort of an implicit feeling that religion plays something unique in people's lives. But at the same time, when I press people on this, it's often kind of goes towards, well, what actually is happening is that religion facilitates other things that are really important. Like religion facilitates community or the friendship or helps you find your spouses. So is it religion, or is it these other things that this question that is asked in other social science research. If you had to choose, which thing on this list would you pick as the most important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life, I'm an academic, to say people who aren't free thinkers have something defective about them. That's just as bad, that's just as intolerant as people who are pretty dogmatic about their beliefs. To say that free thinkers are heretics and defective on their face, that's actually one of the great conceits of our society today is to say, because I'm not bigoted, I'm an anti bigot, and I'm an anti bigot bigot. And, you know, there's just a complete Many of the traditional and orthodox moral norms of Christianity or Judaism. They tend not to work as well. They tend not to be as popular, the way that it turns out, and one of the reasons, by the way, is as people get more religious, they become more attracted to thoseI'm Jerusalem Dempsis and I'll see you next week.Want to meet great minds who dont think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill and Derek Thomas. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.

this question that is asked in other social science research. If you had to choose, which thing on this list would you pick as the most important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life, I'm an academic, to say people who aren't free thinkers have something defective about them. That's just as bad, that's just as intolerant as people who are pretty dogmatic about their beliefs. To say that free thinkers are heretics and defective on their face, that's actually one of the great conceits of our society today is to say, because I'm not bigoted, I'm an anti bigot, and I'm an anti bigot bigot. And, you know, there's just a complete Many of the traditional and orthodox moral norms of Christianity or Judaism. They tend not to work as well. They tend not to be as popular, the way that it turns out, and one of the reasons, by the way, is as people get more religious, they become more attracted to thoseI'm Jerusalem Dempsis and I'll see you next week.Want to meet great minds who dont think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill and Derek Thomas. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.

, I'm an academic, to say people who aren't free thinkers have something defective about them. That's just as bad, that's just as intolerant as people who are pretty dogmatic about their beliefs. To say that free thinkers are heretics and defective on their face, that's actually one of the great conceits of our society today is to say, because I'm not bigoted, I'm an anti bigot, and I'm an anti bigot bigot. And, you know, there's just a complete Many of the traditional and orthodox moral norms of Christianity or Judaism. They tend not to work as well. They tend not to be as popular, the way that it turns out, and one of the reasons, by the way, is as people get more religious, they become more attracted to thoseI'm Jerusalem Dempsis and I'll see you next week.Want to meet great minds who dont think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill and Derek Thomas. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.

Many of the traditional and orthodox moral norms of Christianity or Judaism. They tend not to work as well. They tend not to be as popular, the way that it turns out, and one of the reasons, by the way, is as people get more religious, they become more attracted to thoseI'm Jerusalem Dempsis and I'll see you next week.Want to meet great minds who dont think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill and Derek Thomas. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.

I'm Jerusalem Dempsis and I'll see you next week.

Want to meet great minds who dont think alike? Join the Atlantic for our annual festival on September 19 and 20th, featuring two days of lively exchange and debate on the issues that matter most. You can attend this cant miss live experience in person at the wharf in Washington, DC, or online from anywhere. Hear from best selling authors, elected officials, notable actors, CEO's, and more. This year's speakers include Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Karl Rove, Anna Devere Smith, Jake Tapper, Jonathan Haidt, Senator John Fetterman, Noah Hawley, Elaine Welteroth, and more of today's most influential thinkers in conversation with Atlantic journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, Jamel Hill and Derek Thomas. Tickets are on sale now@theatlanticfestival.com.