Travis has a conversation with well-known scholar Philip Jenkins. Jenkins is an award-winning author and scholar. Travis & Philip discuss Dr. Jenkins's book, Fertility and Faith, and how secularization may affect the institutional practice of religion worldwide.

Dr. Philip Jenkins has a doctorate from Cambridge in history, and taught at Penn State University and Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He is a well-known commentator on religion, past and present, having written about 30 books including The Next Christendom, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South and God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis, The Lost History of Christianity, Jesus Wars, just to name a few.

He has published articles and op-ed pieces in several media outlets across the U.S. and Europe, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New Republic, Foreign Policy, First Things, and Christian Century. The Economist has called him “one of America's best scholars of religion.”

He has been interviewed on several television and radio shows, including CNN documentaries and news specials covering a variety of topics, such as global Christianity, the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, as well as serial murder, and aspects of violent crime.

Jenkins is much heard on talk radio, including multiple appearances on NPR's All Things Considered, and on various BBC and RTE programs. In North America, he has been a guest on widely syndicated radio programs such as NPR’s Fresh Air, as well as the nationally broadcast Canadian shows Tapestry and Ideas. His influence goes beyond North America to newspapers and radio stations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Brazil.

Now, in the highlight of his life ;-), he is on Apollos Watered! Travis & Phil discuss tacos, sushi, the 80's movie Matewan, and the possible correlation between secularization, religious institutions, birth rates, and gender roles in society. It's not just a European thing, but a global thing. It's truly a deep and heady conversation that helps us wrestle with our world and our place in it.

Takeaways:

• Fertility rates in the United States have declined to European levels, signaling a demographic shift.
• The relationship between secularism and declining birth rates is evident across various cultures.
• Understanding the trends in global fertility can provide insights into religious institutional health.
• The rapid decline of religious practices in Europe raises questions about the future of the American faith.
• As societies become more secular, the role of family structures and values is changing significantly.
• Immigration can introduce new religious communities, potentially reshaping the landscape of faith in the West.

Get Fertility and Faith and be sure to check out many of Philip's other books.

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In the last decade, the fertility rates have gone to European levels. Demographically, the United States now looks a lot like Denmark.

And the suggestion is that if there's anything to this experience worldwide, then that foreshadows a much more secular United States. So if you are an American and you're concerned with religion, this is a very pressing issue indeed.

It's watering time, everybody.

It is time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today in our show, we're having.

One of our deep conversations.

With historian and author Philip Jenkins. Is secularism a bad or good thing? Some of you might look at what's going on in Afghanistan and conclude that secularism is a great thing.

Who would ever want to return to that type of religious fundamentalism that is so tribal and barbaric, while there are others that are in the religious world that see all that secularism brings with it, all of the different questioning of sexual mores and upturning of families. And they might say, how could secularism ever be a good thing?

No matter where you fall on the secularism spectrum, this is a conversation that you want to be a part of because secularism is affecting every single one of us. Hence why Dr. Jenkins is on this show now. Dr.

He's a well known commentator on religion past and present.

By himself, he has written about 30 books, including the New Faces of Christianity, Believing the Bible in the Global south and God's Continent, Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis, as well as the Lost History of Christianity, Jesus wars, just to name a few. It was his book the Next Christendom that how I became acquainted with him, and that book won a number of honors.

He has published articles and op ed pieces in many media outlets across the US And Europe, including such periodicals as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New Republic, Foreign Policy, First Things in Christian Century. The Economist has called him one of America's best scholars of religion.

And over the last decade, Jenkins has participated in several hundred interviews with the mass media, newspapers, radio and television. He's been interviewed on Fox's the Beltway Boys and has appeared on a number of CNN documentaries and news specials covering a variety of topics.

He is much heard on talk radio, including Multiple appearances on NPR's All Things Considered and on various BBC and RTE programs in North America. He's been a guest on the widely syndicated radio programs of Diane Raim, Michael Medved, and James Kennedy. He's appeared on NPR's FRESH AIR.

And now he is on Apollo's Water, the highlight of his life, to discuss his newest book, Fertility and Faith and the power of Secularism in the World and how it's affecting the very formation and shape of of the family. This was an earlier conversation that we had this past March, and I have to say that this is one of our deeper conversations.

It's one that requires us to think deeply because it has dramatic effects. This isn't one that we find on the surface.

This is one where we have to put on our thinking caps and think about what he's advocating, what he's saying, what he's writing, and what may happen in our contemporary culture.

Because we as Christians need to be equipped to live in this world and we need to be aware of all the things that are going on around us that might be affecting us.

Those currents that we've talked about that carry us along, that have disastrous collateral damage and affecting us and the people around us in very negative ways. Too often we're just trying to keep up and we can't think deeply. But this is an opportunity to change that a little bit at a time.

As my wife likes to say, when, whenever we're talking about subjects like this, she says our goal is to reverse the river of discipleship one drop at a time.

It's true these kind of conversations enable us to reverse the river, to think about the forces of the world and how they are bearing upon us and shaping how we think and how we live in the middle of, especially when it comes to secularism. Dr. Jenkins advocates a great deal of things, but his central thesis is one that affects every single one of us.

It shapes us each day and how we view the family and how we are shaped by it. So I would encourage you to listen in and enjoy this conversation that I had with Dr.

Jenkins as we talk about his book and the findings of that book, Fertility and Faith. Happy listening.

Philip. Welcome to Apollos Watered.

Thank you. Very good to be here.

It is a delight and again, an honor to really speak to you. I've read your works over the years, had a huge impact on my life. So I'm just real excited to be in this conversation.

Great.

But here we go. We have what we call our fast five. Are you ready?

Maybe.

So here we go. First question. Is this sushi or tacos?

Very definitely tacos. You'd be expelled from Texas otherwise.

So you're in Texas right now?

Not as I speak, but normally.

So, yeah, Texas sushi is not really allowed in Texas unless it has beef in it, right?

Probably.

Okay, here we go. Here's the next question in. Favorite 80s movie or do you have one?

Oh, boy. I could give many, many examples of that, I think. Does Matewan belong in the 80s? I think it does.

What is that one?

Oh, I'm going to write that down and make sure that I see it. I want to see that. I've not heard of that one, but I want to hear that one. So here we go. You're really a historian.

I mean, you're into demography, but world history. And I know you're not an American, but an American history, because you seem to have just. You're all over there, but you know a lot of stuff.

World history or American history?

I work on both. It's very hard to say America in the world. No possible answer.

Okay, all right. And then what is your then just favorite Absolute period of time to study.

Again, many, many possible answers, but I would probably say the centuries or so at the end of the Roman Empire in the west and the barbarians and the Dark Age.

Oh, all right, that's cool. Now, how about this one? What is a weird habit that your.

Wife says you have agreeing to speak to podcasts?

That is the best answer I think I've received for this show. And how about this one? Last question of the Fast 5. If you were a restaurant, what restaurant would you be and why?

Definitely Greek.

A Greek restaurant?

One that you can go into and just have food and not have to worry about anything. That's a great.

You remember those?

I do, I do, I do. Now, let's hear a little bit of your story.

Where are you from and what made you want to get into studying history and specifically demography and looking at global Christianity?

I got more into religion and then in the end of the last century got very much into the idea of global history, which was kind of a new field at that point.

And the more I got into it, the more I found that demography and fertility and birth rates and so on were such a powerful predictor and that nobody was really working on them. And that led to the book that we're talking about today, which is Fertility and Faith.

So how many books have you written?

Single authored books? About 30.

30. And so, I mean, I'm sure each one is like its own child.

But out of all the ones that you've written outside of this one, which was the one that you really enjoyed? I mean, I'm sure you've written and enjoyed writing each one, but which is the one that's really the one that you treasure the most?

One of the ones I really enjoyed was the book Jesus wars, which is about the church councils in the 5th century and how orthodoxy about Christ's identity was made.

And that was my favorite because you ended up dealing with so many individuals and characters and people in a way that you often can't when you're dealing with ideas or movements.

And that's an area that a lot of people just don't really think about in our modern world.

So when you're researching these things, do you feel like you have a hard time explaining this to really, I mean, non academics, that they can understand it?

That's a basic point in writing a book, which is that you really have to get it in what you might call the elevator test, which is to explain it in the time it takes you to go up 10 stories in an elevator.

That's not easy, not at all.

If you can't do it in relatively simple form, then there's something wrong with the structure of the book and maybe it's too complicated or something or you haven't got the point of the book.

I'm going to use that, I'm going to use that in explaining a lot of different things from now on. I love that illustration. But let's talk about your book Fertility and Faith, the Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religion.

What was the impetus behind this book? And it's a fascinating book, but what was the impetus behind?

Well, like I said, I was working on global Christianity, I was working on Christianity worldwide, and there was an observation which was that birth rates were falling in many parts of the world. And the consensus was they were falling in Europe.

And what I found when I looked at different countries was, no, they were falling in all sorts of unsuspected countries. And that there was a very close correlation between birth rates and levels of faith, in other words.

And it got to the point where it's almost like a parlor game, which is, what is the birth rate in X country? And I can tell you how well religious institutions are doing, how committed people are to religion, how advanced secularization is.

And it really became a very predictable, very reliable kind of tool.

So what are some of the findings? I mean, and it's varied because you're not just hitting Europe, you're talking about Africa, you're talking about the world, really.

And you're noticing this correlation between secularization and birth rates, as you just said. And one of the things that I noticed in your book, you said it's very important that we have a right definition of what secularization is.

So what is that definition that you prefer using in understanding secularization?

Yet when people talk about secularization, they sometimes take it as meaning abandoning religion as such. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about abandoning institutional, organized religion.

Now, there might be a second stage, and often is where people move from that to abandoning God, if you like. And that's not what I'm talking about. You can have a society that is very religious and might be kind of spiritual, but not religious.

But people have nothing to do with religious institutions, institutions. And that is what I call what I call secularization. Traditionally, people used to think of the whole secular thing, something that hit Europe.

But very early on, I made a discovery which kind of mapped the road for me, which I was looking at a country which everyone has an opinion on, which is Iran. And you think of it in terms of, you know, Islamic revolution and religious fanaticism and also very high fertility rates and lots of kids.

And my comment was, well, myth, myth, myth.

If you look at Iran, it has a very low birth rate, very low fertility rate, and actually, as you might expect, it is way more secular than we might expect from the common stereotype. And my thought was, well, gee, if that's true of Iran, what about every other country in the world? If it's true, there's isn't it true everywhere?

And we can talk about that. So Iran was actually a great way of getting into that.

So studying this and seeing the birth rates and seeing secularization and how it is affecting, because most people don't think of secularization of birth rates. Those aren't the first things that come to their mind. I mean, really, though, what precipitated?

I mean, I know you talked about that briefly, you touched on it, but why is that really important, not just precipitated, why you did it and why you went. You wrote the book. But why is that important for us to understand?

For one thing, it provides a very good predictor, if you like to cut out the middleman. It provides an interesting warning sign of the decline of religious institutions in particular countries, including the United States.

And for many years people have said, well, you know, the United States is different. It's a very wealthy society, but it's a relish high fertility society. And that correlates with high religious practice.

In the last decade, the fertility rates have gone to European levels. Demographically, the United States now looks a lot like Denmark.

And the suggestion is that if there's anything to this experience worldwide, then that foreshadows a much more secular United States. So if you are an American and you're concerned with religion, this is a very pressing issue indeed because it's showing.

That there is a movement away from institutional religion, as you alluded to. But you said it's not a removal yet yet an indicator yet of God. So go back for a second, talk about what that means.

If they're going away from institutions. Are we talking about the spiritual but.

Not religious as a base? Let's take the society that people always talk about when they talk about fertil, which is Europe.

I have various reasons why I think that's happening. And at the time, everyone said, well, gee, that's Europe.

There are all sorts of peculiar European factors, but it needn't affect anywhere, anywhere else. And then it affected lots of other places. It affected East Asia, it affected Latin America, it affected the Middle East.

And like I say, I use the analogy of Scandinavia. Think of all the stereotypes we have of Scandinavia, Scandinavian religion, most secular society in the world.

And that echoes through not just religious practice, but the relationship of religion and law. When can you make laws despite what all the churches say? And in the flat face of opposition from the churches?

Well, in Scandinavia and Europe it's very easy. And I suspect that in that sense we are heading for a very secular setup in the us.

So then, I mean, hearing that not just in the us, but you're talking globally as well, because you talk about some of the countries with the lowest birth rate, which would be in Western Europe, if I remember correctly. And you talk about at least the countries with the highest birth weight. Originally you were mentioning, like Uganda. Am I correct on that?

Sure. Yep.

So in referring to that, you're saying that.

And let's talk about the birth rate here for a second, because you use an abbreviation, you talk about the TF Total Fertility rate and you talk about the replacement rate. So this is why this is important. Because if in a country and you have a couple and they have two children, that's just the replacement rate.

That means that as time goes on, those people will replace the children, will replace the adults within society, thus enabling things to continue on.

But when it goes below the birth rate, well, that's a kind of a harbinger for trouble because that has economic problems, religious problems, so many other problems. Go ahead.

Yeah, sure, yeah. And so the magic number that I use a lot is 2.1, which is a couple has on average 2.1 children.

And the problem is that means you get a much more aged society. Now the great news is you get a much more stable society.

You know, 50 year old people tend not to form gangs and go out and have fights in the street, and that's very fine. But also often they retire, they need to have their health and their pensions paid. Who does that? Well, you have to bring in new people to do that.

And society cannot sustain itself without that kind of major dose of immigration. You also have very high fertility states with lots and lots of young people.

And that's wonderful in its way, but often they're quite turbulent in terms of crime and disorder. So there are lots of possible situations that arise from this demographic fact.

But I'm particularly concerned with the decline that particularly hit in Europe, and as I say, the religious implications. But you come back to that absolutely right figure, the total fertility rate, when Its replacement is 2.1, everything just jogs along.

But what's happening is in many countries in the world, not all. It is falling way, way below that. The US rate at the moment is about 1.7, and that poses some real issues.

So taking that, though, because one of the things that you do talk about, when you talk about. Yeah. I mean, it has massive repercussions.

But you're also seeing a shift because we have the world refugee cris, we have immigrants, we have all of this transitioning going on right now, and you're seeing some of those rates change.

So when I hear you say the rates have gone down in many of these secular European countries, but you're also seeing an influx of immigrants which are traditionally known to have children, and you're seeing them having larger families.

So are you seeing then a shift in what's going on in those European countries as more immigrants are coming in and in some ways shift, upsetting the apple cart, if you will, by having them having more children? And you're also seeing a rise in those religions. I see within France and within Denmark and the Netherlands.

I mean, are you seeing that, or is that something that's just an anomaly or something that might be almost a red herring?

Yeah, you have the new populations and they bring in their new customs and often new religions. So it means, for instance, that you have considerably more Muslims in Europe than you used to. And, you know, that's perfectly fine, but.

And one consequence of that is, over a generation or two, those immigrants become European in their fertility styles, and they also have that fertility drop. So you have to bring in more and more people from outside.

Now, as I say, there's nothing wrong with that in itself, except that it foreshadows real change. It means that there are much larger Muslim populations in Western Europe. And also.

And something we don't pay attention to, new and quite large Christian populations in the Arab Gulf, in Saudi Arabia. They also have those declining fertility rates. They need people to do the work. And they end up bringing in Christians from India and the Philippines.

When religion is associated more and more with immigrants, that just redraws the map in ways that we're only just starting to think About.

So it's not just happening. I mean, you're saying that secularization is causing all religious groups, fertility rates, to go down across the world.

Now, let me. Precisely, what I'm saying is secularization and fertility decline are happening together. I am not saying A causes B or B causes A.

What I'm saying is they march together and we can figure out why that's happening. But what's interesting for me is you look at a country like Saudi Arabia, far as we can tell, that there's not a trace of secularization as yet.

But the fertility rate is declining sharply. Let's see how that's going to pan out. What it does mean is those countries are going to be much more religiously diverse because of immigration.

So you're saying then that a lot of conservative religious groups have a higher fertility rate. Is that correct?

That's traditionally the case, yeah.

So what do we draw from that?

I mean, on one level, I think I've been a pastor for many, many years, and I remember going and reading just through the scripture where the nation of Israel has the ark of God return and David sends them home with raisin cakes, which is an aphrodisiac, basically saying, go home and multiply. The blessing of God is upon us. And yet we're seeing some places where that seems to be going down.

I mean, I know it's hard to draw necessary complete causation or correlations with that, but it seems like in many ways that the blessing of God is removed from that. And again, I know that's not an academic exercise per se, but is that something that you're.

I don't know if that's something you're seeing or would you agree with that? Would you disagree with that? I mean, what would you say?

Well, you know, let's. Let's think it through. I think the two processes tend to work together very closely, and it's very hard to tell which causes which.

We can be much more open to contraception, to abortion. Never mind what the priest used to say. We don't have to think in terms of these larger Families, we can just be us.

We can just be a little nuclear family. Fine, that's one possibility.

The other possibility is it's only when you take children out of the equation that you realize how central children are to what churches and other religious institutions do. They are the reason why many people stay in contact with those institutions and don't just drift off from the community.

Those children go through the system, they go to the same schools. People define themselves in terms of children and families. Take the children out of the picture, what happens?

There's no longer any need for people to stay in touch with churches or synagogues or whatever. They don't have to think about putting them through first communion, bar mitzvah classes.

And I don't know which comes first, the drop in fertility or the drop in faith. But in a sense, it doesn't matter. When it all happens in the space of about five to 10 years, it's really hard to measure.

What I can tell you is that they drop together and the one is a really good indicator of the other.

And then there's all sorts of other consequences that flow from that, which is once people are cut off from the religious institution, they're much more prepared to go against that institution on moral issues, legal issues.

Italy, for instance, you can just trace a series of referenda on things like contraception, divorce, abortion, same sex marriage, where people become more and more willing to go against what the churches say. And the more that happens, the more they regard the churches as something that just doesn't belong in any kind of political or moral role.

So you're talking about a social revolution, and the fact it's happened more or less in our lifetimes maybe prevents us seeing just what a historical, unprecedented revolution that is.

And that's one thing that I was really caught in reading your book. It's not that it just moved over time in our lifetimes, but it's how quickly it's moved in our lifetimes.

So when you talk about a social revolution, what can we gain from that? I mean, what do we take away from that?

Well, as I said, that sense of speed, just to give you one gauge, it's almost impossible if you are below about 50 years old at the moment, to try and tell anyone just how attitudes have changed to something like Same sex marriage. Give you an example.

In the space of 20 years, things do change that fast. Which raises the next question of, okay, you come back in 10 or 20 years from now, what will have changed? Well, that's an interesting thought.

Well, in some ways it's quite disturbing just because of how fast things have changed. Who knows how fast it could change before and the rates in which they're changing. And you're not just referring to the United States of America.

One of the things that you really draw out is the fact that these attitudes are changing globally. What else can we learn from that? The fact that it's not just a Western phenomenon, but these are happening the world over.

Yeah, you see, when fertility rates dropped originally, they dropped in Scandinavia. And people looked at that and said, huh, this is to do with Scandinavia. It's to do with the kind of Protestantism.

They've got their, you know, interesting, but who else cares? Then it hit Catholic Europe, then it went to other countries.

And some of the countries where these changes are now most advanced in terms of the drop in fertility, drop in faith are countries in, for example, Latin America.

Now if I was to stop many Americans on the street and ask about Latin America, they'd say, oh yeah, yeah, they all have, you know, six and seven children and they're all kind of fanatically religious. Well, no, in fact, countries like Brazil and Chile and Argentina have got very European fertility rates.

And one way in which you can measure this is the number of people who, if you ask them what their religion is, they say none. N o N E, the nuns famous thing in the United States.

Very large numbers of nones in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, many such countries, many Americans, they might be aware of Brazil and they think, well, there are lots of faithful Catholics, but there's also this explosive new Protestant growth. And that's true. Really, Brazil these days has got three groups.

They've got Catholics, they've got Protestants, and they've got nuns who are very secular. And the background to that is Brazil has a completely European fertility rate.

I sometimes ask people to think what is an example of third world population growth? And India always comes up. Half the states in India have got replacement rates below, have got fertility rates below replacement.

Some of them are at European levels. I mean, that's shocking for those of us who remember all the stuff about the population explosion.

So this is not just a Protestant thing, it is not just a Christian thing. It is a global thing. Or let me rephrase that, much of the globe, with some important exceptions that we'll come back to later.

Now, in mentioning that, you mentioned that an older population has a tendency to be more stable. They don't join gangs. And a younger population has a tendency to be much more tumultuous.

Exactly.

And in looking at that though, and these replacement rates, not happening. But yet at the same time, it seems like there's almost even an assault on the foundation which of human society which is a family.

Because if you're not having families, it's, it's really hard to have human flourishing. Taking the stats now. And I know it's hard to be a predictor because stats can change. There's always an anomaly.

Factors can totally reverse everything. But what does the future hold for the very for the family?

Well, for one thing, as we have seen in the last 20 years, the concept of family changes, not least through changes like same sex marriage. You see far more people living alone. You see people defining their social setting not in terms of blood kin, but in terms of larger networks.

And of course, I know your podcast is deeply concerned with issues of missiology. That's an absolutely vital background and context.

If churches are trying to reach people, if you're trying to reach people at their families and schools and places of work, good luck. They're not so much there anymore. The concept of family have changed and are changing. One of the sad consequences is far more people living alone.

Families can be very restrictive and repressive places, but they also give very large support networks. Many millions of people around the world are going to have to figure out how to deal with that.

And that's not just true in Europe and the United States. It's true in countries in the Middle east and Latin America. You know, the oldest country by age profile in the Western hemisphere is Uruguay.

If you have to deal with a country with basically old and lonely people, governments can't solve those problems. There's a whole new set of problems and opportunities for churches.

Phil, hold that thought. We're going to be right back after a word from one of our sponsors, the most important Bible translation is the one you read at Apollos Watered.

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If Phil's findings are correct and secularism. Secularism is the direct cause of the lowering of birth rates in the world, what does that mean? How do we as Christians respond?

Are we against secularism? Is there any time that we see it as beneficial? How come we as Christians don't talk about this kind of thing?

These are just some of the questions that we're going to keep talking about. Let's get back to my conversation with Phil.

So what do you see then as the churches need to do?

I mean, I know again, not a pastor, not a theologian, historian by trade, but yet, just looking at the demographics, what does the church need to reconsider? I mean, these are new realities.

How do they deal with the opinion that people have within a secular world when it comes to family, when it comes to, I mean, even as you said, different family setups, if that, but not only just the foundation of family, but secularization itself. How do churches need to rethink even the mechanism of secularization? Because it seems to me we're looking at the byproducts.

And I know you said it's hard to determine which one goes first, but it's my contention that some of these currents that carry us along, we need to address the very current. And we might be so caught up that we can't stop that tsunami me, but I look at something with the Gospel, that it confirms something in a culture.

I mean, it confronts something in every culture. But it also affirms something in every culture.

And so how do we then deal with this concept of secularization without becoming methodologically Amish or monks in our hermitages? But how do we then engage that process and help people see that?

Because in some ways, and you might disagree with me, but in some ways it's like we're caught up in it. There's some great things that have come as a result of it.

And I don't want to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, but I'm saying is, how do we then address these things and help people then incarnate the gospel and address these issues so that we might navigate them? Well, any thoughts on that?

Well, a couple of things.

First of all, when a society secularizes, as we just said, one thing it means is if that's associated with declining fertility with an older population, it means that there are lots of very religious immigrants who are very anxious to be involved in different ways. And you could regard that as a whole set of opportunities.

So it does not mean that churches are going to close, but they're going to be putting up new signage representing new languages and new groups and in some cases new faith. So there's a new religious landscape like that.

It also means a society that is aging very dramatically and that, you know, should make people think very hard about how to speak to different audiences. If a church has very few children, what is its emphasis?

You know, I remember once upon a time going to one church and they had a, a card that new members would sign up and it had please tick your age category.

And the Highest one was 55 and up, which I thought was interesting because in a few years there are going to be different ministries and services for 55 to 65, 65, 75, 85 to 95. And we're going to have to get used to the super old with their particular talents and needs.

So there's a whole range of ministries to think through in that way. By the way, I haven't mentioned this, but accompanying all this is a fundamental change in the way economies work.

So you can no longer assume people living in, working in the same kind of factories and offices and working for long periods. Employment is much shorter, much more casual. How do churches reach people like that?

Well, there were all sorts of suggestions that you aim for networks rather than trying to reach families and workforces. But there are fundamental ways of rethinking here.

And I would also add one, which is if you look at Europe, there's a great deal of evidence that people are looking for kinds of spirituality and spiritual experience that are not necessarily associated with religious institutions. One example I give is we live in the golden age of European pilgrimage.

A huge number of Christians who never ever set foot in a church, have the slightest idea where a church is, make huge use of pilgrimages every year and very medieval looking pilgrimages of the Virgin Mary and saints with healing powers and so on. They are looking for something certainly true in Latin America.

Well, that does not speak in any way to Protestant America, but it does raise the issue of how do you respond to that kind of need without giving, letting people indulge in, you know, really kind of foolish and out of the way ideas. How can you give them what they are looking for in that way? So I can give you a great series of questions, not necessarily so good.

On the side of answers, understand, because there are a series of questions and it's hard.

I think everyone's kind of clamoring for answers because a lot of this has happened so quickly that we have to catch our breath and it's been hard to do that because things are changing so fast.

Now going back for a second, and you referenced this and I know you've written about this there, in many ways the confidence in institutions is at, and I don't want to say an all time low, but it certainly seems that way that people have lost their confidence in institutions. And yet it's through those mechanisms that people have been nourished for generations.

Are the institutions completely lost or is there an opportunity to redeem them in order to help nourish? Because we'll never be away from them completely. But yet can we regain confidence in institutions in order to help people?

Such as with the church, the institutional, and I even hate using the term, but the institutional church.

Well, one of the things that really does worry me is if you look at, you know, society as a whole, people have a, a desperate need to belong to not just communities, but what frankly you can describe as herds or packs, which emerges when you look at what happens when a mob gets going on Twitter and thousands of people or millions of people feel the urge to join in, in these very, very passionate and sometimes very misguided campaign. So there is definitely an urge to belong and share experience.

Maybe the more atomized or decentralized the society is, the more people feel the need to engage in that. Some institutions are actually doing very well.

If you look on the global scale, for example, in the United States, there are many people who are very critical around Roman Catholic Church they'll tell you it's in deep trouble. It's got all these internal problems. Sure it has. Its numbers are absolutely booming. It is flourishing worldwide in many places.

It has the terrible problem of having far too many vocations to train all the people. It is doing great, just not in this neighborhood, not in the United States, but in Africa, in Asia.

Catholic Church has no problems as an institution in that way.

So maybe one question is to look at a global scale, look where things can be achieved or saved or won, and see what can be gained from those parts of the world.

Now, taking that into consideration, you refer to how oftentimes people think that the United States follows where Europe's at. But in many ways, the United States has proven an outlier and has bucked that because of a variety of different reasons.

And I know you've also written about how Christianity is grown exponentially in the global South. So here's my question. Is African or the Global South? Christians in the Global South.

And I know it's hard to put them together as a collective, but just for the sake of argument, let's do so for a moment. Are they going to head down the same path of secularization that we see in Europe and in the United States? And let's take that first.

Then I got a second part to that question.

I've written through the years about Christianity in the global south, which traditionally means Africa, Asia, Latin America. One of the main things that has happened over the last decade is that in a sense, the global south no longer exists.

You have very high fertility, high faith societies, above all in Africa, but societies that 20 or 30 years ago we would have said fit this exact model don't anymore. Give you a great example. The nation of South Korea. South Korea, Absolutely.

Explosive growth of Christianity, booming Protestant and Catholic churches. Everyone knows about the flourishing of Christianity in Korea.

Unless you start talking to Christians in Korea, where they'll tell you, oh, brother, we're in deep trouble. It's all to do with shrinking families, fertility rates. Nobody wants to do with the Church anymore.

We have this enormous increase in the number of nuns. Buddhists are almost vanishing. Christians are declining, but it's the nuns that are taking over.

So there's a country that is a global south country which is heading beyond Europe. It is much more secular these days than any European country. You could argue that some Latin American countries are heading in that same direction.

Where you have the big exception is Africa, where virtually every country is very high fertility, very high faith, whether that faith is Christianity or Islam.

And if you project in the next 20 or 30 years, what's going to happen is not just an absolute growth in religious numbers in those countries, but a relative growth. So the proportion of the world's Christians or Muslims who are African will grow steadily.

And, and you know, barring a comet strike or something, nothing is going to stop that.

So that was the second part of my question is, though, the.

If there was something to stop the bleeding, is it the immigration crisis or immigrants coming to the United States or Europe, Is that stop, is it, is that going to. Or could it stop the flood, if you will, the leak? Could that plug that up or stop it for a, I mean, just for, even for a temporary period of time?

If you go to a European city, you will find a lot, many a lot of very active Muslim communities and also Christian communities. You know, one example I always give is the top four megachurches in Britain are all pastored by Africans.

The leading mega churches in France or Belgium tend to be pastored by people from the Congo or Madagascar. So, I mean, this is certainly happening right now. Now, the big question, and I didn't answer this earlier, is how long can you sustain that?

You know, if you look at Africa itself, it's quite possible that in 30, 40, 50 years it'll embark on that European direction. It'll become much more low fertility, secular society. I don't know about that because that's way beyond any time frame I can reasonably project.

I can talk about the next decade or so, and it's certainly not happening.

Well, that, and you mentioned, even if they did come to the United States or Europe, and you'd mentioned this, alluded to it a little bit earlier, is that while they, as the 1.0 generation, might have a larger family, their children will become much more secularized or acclimated to that culture that they're living in rather than their home culture. Correct?

Yeah.

And the number of Latino nuns grew very steeply.

So let's talk about the nones here for a moment. What are the characteristics that you're noticing of the nones world over?

Right. They're very different in different countries. Nones in the United States tend to be much more religious in orientation.

And you'll see surveys that show that many people who say, you know, no, I don't have religious affiliation. Do you pray daily? Yes. Do you read the Bible? Yes.

You know, America has very religious nones right now that's very different from Europe where if you probe, you'll find what's your religion? None. Do you believe in God? Do you pray? No. No, no, no. So you're much more likely in European countries to have a totally non religious orientation.

Now one question there is, is something like the American model a stage along the way? In other words, is the United States heading in that direction or is America pursuing its own path? I don't know the answer to that.

But in many European countries you really have not just, just nuns, you have people with no religion at all whatever. You know, I'll just give you an example closer to Homer. What I'm very intrigued by is if you go to Canada, you have the province of Quebec.

Liberalization and Catholicism basically collapsed. Quebec by the end of the century was one of the most secular societies on the planet.

And the big problem that they had was what to do with all these wonderful churches they'd built and they became apartments or dance studios or carpet warehouses.

And the only exception is those churches that are frequented by people from Haiti and Africa and Vietnam, where you had all these good Catholic people. But that, that could happen to Quebec basically in 10 or maybe 20 years, I think should set up an alarm flare for people anywhere else in the world.

This is Quebec. This was not somewhere that was averagely religious. This was religion on steroids.

So taking that into consideration, you're talking about religion on steroids. And of course, America's been known for that, the Bible bell known for it. Its kind of resilient faith entrenched in the culture.

It's been part and parcel of the country since its very inception.

And taking that into consideration, the current manifestations and the arguments within the church right now, specifically with, on racial issues and the criticisms that have been lobbied at the white evangelical church. Let's take that for a moment.

And a series of scandals and revelations of hypocrisy have beleaguered the church and I don't think that's anything completely unique to the United States. I know you've also written about the abuses within the Catholic Church, and this is something that people have noted.

But in its current manifestation, is the American white evangelical church destined for demographical suicide?

Oh, brother. I would not put it in terms that are anything like, so raw.

In some ways, I would say of turn the issue of scandals on its head, and they'd say, you know, some people look at scandals and think they drive church decline. I sometimes think it works the other way, that people lose confidence in the church, therefore they're more prepared to speak against it.

Therefore, they're more prepared to believe stories that are out there in ways that they would not have done beforehand.

I think you're seeing a larger trend, and that is manifesting in a willingness to believe and publicize these scandals. The racial issue, I think, is a different one, but I would see the white evangelicals as part of this larger phenomenon.

One reason, by the way, why white evangelicals did so well in the late 20th century was they had significantly higher birth rates than mainline churches. So often they were having three kids while, say, Episcopalians or American Baptists were having one and a half. So obviously there were more.

It's not demographic suicide, but it is a larger direction in many ways.

I don't want to say a falling away, but you're seeing then the decrease.

But what I'm trying to figure out is if evangelicals are having more children, it would seem to me that evangelicalism would continue on in a similar trajectory in its makeup, at least from a numbers standpoint, even. Let's go with your replacement idea, because they're having that many kids, but you're not.

You're still seeing the numbers go down, even though they're traditionally having families going up. What's the differentiation there?

That they are part of the. Of the larger culture, and it's very hard to resist that, that larger culture, and that's.

That echoes through things like women's roles, definition of women's roles, women in the workplace, attitudes to career and family. And when evangelicals do not live, you know, separate from the large community. This is just what's happening to America.

In fact, the mystery is not why you're getting decline in American fertility, it's why it happened a generation after Europe. And that's something that, you know, scholars can argue about for decades to come. But that's the real mystery is how.

There's been a pause. That's what you're saying. How come it's had a lagging time.

2007, 8 was an economic crash that had major cultural consequences. It was devastating in particular areas, particularly in the south and the south and the West.

It was ruinous for many working classes communities who previously had been aspiring to middle class status. That's white, that's Latino. A great many people lost their homes.

A great many people who would have been able to establish homes otherwise were not able to do so. And the very traditional pattern of people setting up homes, having kids, sending them to school, sending them to church was interrupted decisively.

And that's where you see a really marked check in American demographics. And that's where the number of nones starts going through the roof.

So the crisis then enabled nones to increase rather than religiosity.

Right.

Did you think it just accelerated it?

I think that's what we're seeing. I mean, and I use an analogy.

Look at any trend in American history, whether it's business or retail or whatever, and look what's happened to it over the last year. How trends that had been moving very, very slowly, we're going to take a decade or two, were suddenly condensed into a year or two.

So I use the rocket sled analogy. Things that would jog along slowly, suddenly move like a rocket sled. Look at what happened to retail, look at what happened to stores.

Look at what happened to malls. The trends weren't new, but they were just vastly accelerated.

I will be very, very interested to come back in a year or two and see what has happened to American churches and synagogues and mosques and other religious institutions.

Do you think there's a way to stop the bleeding?

I am not sure of that. Probably the worst thing to do is to keep applying band aids.

I think what people need to do is to look at the large trends in society and maybe the worst thing they can do is say, aha, this is happening because of the Church's failed response to this issue or this issue or this issue, and recognize that now, now this is a larger trend. Look at what's happening in other countries. Look and realize it's the same trend and start planning on the basis for that.

This is what maybe living in the 21st century is.

Do you think, though, that we're still hidden in the United States that we're headed in the same trajectory as Europe now, except accelerated, where religiosity is on the wane and the nuns will continue to rise and the birth rates will continue to go down in the same way that Europe has?

I think that's very likely. And the analogy I use would be Quebec is one example. And the other example I use and I mentioned this is the book is the nation of Belgium.

It's not one of the countries that's very well known to Americans, but it's interesting because traditionally it was among the most religious countries in Europe. It had phenomenally high vocations, Chinese church attendance. It was a near total Catholic country.

The fertility rate collapsed, religious practices collapsed, and Belgium became the most liberal country in the world in terms of social policies, in terms of approving abortion and same sex marriage and euthanasia, and euthanasia extending to children. And in every one of those cases, the Church fought desperately and said, you know, this is a terrible, terrible crime that's happening.

And in every case the Church was ignored because it didn't matter anymore. And if you are not disturbed by that as an example, I think you would be making a mistake because, well.

I mean, even mentioning that, and I know some of our listeners are probably going right back right now trying to rehear what you just said. And you said not only euthanasia, but euthanasia for children.

Right.

So what age are we talking about?

I can't give you the exact ages here, but that was one of the most contentious. And the Catholic Church said desperately, no, no, you cannot do this. I think I'm speaking from memory here.

I may have this wrong, but I forget if that was a referendum or a parliamentary decision, but if you want an assisted suicide, Belgium is an awfully good place to be.

So hearing this, I mean, in some ways it's, you know, being a pastor, being a Christian, hearing some of this on one level is extremely depressing to hear the stats, but there is always embedded in some of the most dire circumstances, hard hope.

Where do you see hope as you're looking at demographics and you see this going around the world, the trends, I mean, where are the places where you see glimmers of hope?

By the way, I'm just going to cheat. Go back to the next question, the last question.

Sure.

The parents must also consent to euthanasia for the child. That's fairly wide ranging anyway.

If you believe in or are interested in religion in any kind of traditional kind, then from a Christian perspective, Africa is your place. The level of religious involvement, participation, passion, enthusiasm is near total. And as I said, you show me the fertility rate and I'll tell you.

How well religion's doing there, which is totally incredible. That's the marker, because you mentioned this. It's the fertility line. That's what you called it, the fertility line.

It's the replacement rate. Yeah, yeah.

The fertility line is where that's at.

But when now, and you know, you could immediately say, is this a mixed blessing? Absolutely not.

Because if a society is a very high fertility society, it is quite likely to be more violent, it is going to be poorer, it is not going to be as open on issues of rights and that Americans regard as normal and essential. But if you are just looking at religious practice, if you look at that figure, it is an awfully good guide.

So taking all of those, and we're only in a little bit of time left here, I mean, what else do you see with this? I mean, there are so much just trying to take this in, trying to process that. There's so much information that's here.

The secularization aspect, the families, the religiosity, I mean, globalism, globalization. There's just so much to take in and really try to interpret this data and where it's headed. But you were mentioned, you refer to it as a revolution.

I mean, and it's really upending everything that we see globally, the world over. And globalization has helped aid in that. Is there a way, I mean, how. Again, I'm trying to. Probably searching for an answer here.

How do we respond to that?

Well, it entirely depends on who you are and what you're trying to do.

So but just imagine, for example, that you're running a business and that business assumes a particular knowledge of what families do, the age profiles you're doing, you're dealing with, and these change totally. You have to absolutely restructure and rethink your business or you go out of business.

If you're running a school or a university and the demographics change fundamentally, ditto. If you're running a church and you're not putting these demographic issues and trends front and center, you will soon be running an ex church.

So it's learning how to read the culture and how to not just read the culture, but interpret what we need to do and like of that. So those. That's a good word.

And also just do not reinvent the wheel. Look at what has worked or not worked in other countries.

But the great mistake that people make is they'll see a trend in the United States and assume it's resulting from some change or development within the United States. You know, this church leader made this stupid decision and a consequence followed, fine.

But if exactly the same thing is happening in Korea and Taiwan and India and Brazil, gee, it suggests that there's a larger trend at work and it really pays to understand that trend.

That's good. And I think it's true. It pays to understand the trend so that we can.

Because I mean, we have to rethink how we do what we're doing and be able to help and answer the questions that we see going on within our society rather than our own little just tribal issues. Because our tribal issues in some ways are parochial in nature.

And we need to be able to see and understand some of these global trends in order to combat the bleeding. Because if we don't, as you said before, it'd be an exchurge.

And I think it's harder for many Americans to see this just because it doesn't seem that way in their immediate vicinity. So how can we help people to see these trends in a greater way? Because they don't necessarily.

Some do, but some are saying, hey, I'm fine right now, things are going great. But yet we know, culturally speaking that tsunami is coming if it's not already been there. How do we help people to see that?

Well, you know, I hate to say it, but one of the best ways to do it is to travel a lot internationally. And gee, that's not neither easy nor possible right now.

You know, one thing is to be very, very careful when making any kind of comments about the larger world or about, you know, America does this. And just think and just pay attention to what is happening globally and in a comparative way.

And none of the material I'm talking about is hard to guess. If you want to find out the fertility rate in a particular country, you can find it in 30 seconds in Google.

If you want to find out the rates of religiosity, you go to a wonderful resource called the CIA Factbook, which you can track down easily on Google. You can put these figures together literally in seconds.

But what I'm trying to do in something like my book is to offer people an interpretive framework with a number of slots into which they can put those pieces of evidence. And I go back to one of my original things, which is know about history, know that we have probably been here before.

Okay, where is that then? You said we've probably been here before. I mean, you're a historian. Where do you, where do you draw that inspiration from?

Well, like I said, you look at the experience of a country like Quebec. It's not a country, bear with me, a province like Quebec.

You look at the experience of that quiet revolution, that violent, dramatic overnight secularization in a society that was, shall we say, as religious as Texas. And then you think, well, gee, it couldn't happen here. Well, I wonder.

You go to European cities and you see a landscape of churches, synagogues that are out of business, that are used as commercial facilities that have become mosques.

And please do not understand me here saying bad things about Muslims or about mosques if they're using those facilities, well, or good fortune to them. But I'm saying they do represent the landscapes of a church that is not there anymore.

And when you go to a big city in the American south and you see all these many churches that are still operating, ask yourself, will it be like Europe in another 20 years time?

Well, I want to thank you for your time. I recommend the book to people, Fertility and Faith, if they want to know more about you, obviously go onto Amazon.

You've got a lot of books that are there that have been very illuminating for myself and actually help, help me.

Because the church that I pastored when I started there, I've been a pastor for 20 years, but my last church was pretty ethnically white Caucasian when I started. But yet seeing How God brought the world to our neighborhood. We saw a massive shift when I left.

We were about 40, 45% non white and we had people from Africa and from Asia, all around the world. And it was exciting to see what God is doing.

But at the same time, seeing these stats and seeing this shift makes us wonder, want to know how do we then stop the bleeding but ensure that the mission of God continues to go forth?

And as you mentioned, in many ways there is always a purification that goes on historically and there is a consequence of actions for those who have failed, unfortunately, and people lose confidence in institutions.

But at the same time, I think that there is an opportunity there for people to rediscover the mission of Christ, to purify motives and wean the vine, if you will, so that the church might be able to be strengthened and that the mission of God might continue to go forth.

And let me just speculate that the new communities who are in your church, boy, I bet they brought a really rich range of their own experiences and ways in and really did revive.

Yes, very much so. And we learned a lot. I mean, we learned a lot from one another. And I'm a big believer in that.

The gospel affirms something in a culture and it challenges something in a culture.

And so I want to take those positive insights that were formulated there and their experiences and their understanding of lament and joy and celebration and how to endure suffering, and I want to incorporate those.

And yet I also want to take some of the best of Western society and what the church has done well historically and help introduce that to the global group that we had that's there to learn one another, to truly be the community that God desires us to be. And it's not easy, nor is it pretty at times. There's a lot of cultural misunderstandings.

But this is where I think your work helped me to see what God was doing.

And I just want to thank you for writing that and for putting out there and the work that you do, because I believe it is extremely important for us to understand that the mission of God might be able to continue to go forward. So, Philip, thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you very much. A great chance to chat.

That was Philip Jenkins, distinguished historian and author. And it was great to really have him on the show, to be able to talk about these things.

How often do you get that opportunity to have a world class scholar in front of you talking about stuff that is on the very edge? I'm not talking about the stuff that people post on Facebook they're posting his stuff. He's not posting other people's stuff.

He's posting the stuff that's right on the fringe. The stuff that's right at the precipice. That's why I loved dialoguing with him and reading his book.

And I understand that it's not a book that is for everybody. If you're not a person that likes a lot of data and stats, then this isn't the book for you. But.

But if you love research and if you love what's going on and studying what's on the very fringe and coming up down the road, then he is your guy.

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This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Water Stay watered everybody.