Transcription
Wesley, I have this fascinating uh graph in front of me here and it shows several things that I find to be really really interesting. One of them is that as of 2024, the decline of religion has started to level off and actually increase a little bit and now 63% of US adults identify as Christian, which is roughly 160 million people. In 2025, Bible sales hit a 21-year high in the United States with 19 million units sold. Weekly Bible reading amongst US adults has increased to 42% which is up 12% since 2024. And in 2024, Christian and gospel music streams in the US increased by roughly 20% according to the Washington Times.
Wesley, what is going on in society if we zoom out? I think we're in a unique bubble where we found ourselves in a time frame where we're connected more than ever. We've kind of come out of a period of time where the new atheism is very very popular. You had Dawkins, Daniel, uh Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and they made a big impact in the early 2000s. I think we should probably just give some color to what new atheism is.
>> Sure. Yeah.
>> I've actually got a graph here which I'll throw up on the screen which shows the rise and then the fall of new atheism. I was pulled in by new atheism and that meant that I and again I should probably preface my beliefs because people are going to want to know what my bias is when I'm asking questions. I grew up in a very Christian household up until the age of 18. I then became agnostic/ atheist when I started consuming a lot of this stuff from Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and all of these people. And then I found myself at a point now where I'm just open-minded and curious. But I have lots of questions.
>> Yeah, you had these individuals who are writing these very influential works. But I sometimes wonder whether the new atheism movement worked a lot more effectively in print than it did in actual real life. Like in terms of the practicality of the application of the things that were being talked about, especially in regards to meaning, if you apply ideas like you being a product of time plus matter plus chance, what does that actually give you in terms of the ultimate identity questions? And so I think I think that's true in a lot of circumstances where you have these seeds that are planted and they grow and they produce trees that produce fruit that are kind of hard to digest in their actual application. And along with that, we have a world that's very complex. We're more connected than we ever have been. I don't know if we're truly we were ever truly meant to know as much information as we do, especially about things that are going on around the world and things that are hard to to comprehend. And so what I think that all kind of adds up to is people asking questions about, okay, I'm here. I'm right now trying to figure out what's going on. How do I actually find out the answers to a lot of these questions that just go beyond the here and the now that I'm experiencing? This is what um individuals like James K. Smith called the dynamics of disenchantment where people are struggling with these transcendent questions, questions that are metaphysical that go beyond just the here and the now in the world. Why is the three pounds of gray matter in my brain able to comprehend the complexities of the universe? How do I how do I come up with a solution to that problem? So, I think that's part of it. I think it's kind of moving on in a world that just is probably more messy than it's ever been. A lot of countries, the UK, Europe, Canada, America, all of these western countries, they they were founded on these Judeo-Christian ethics of foundations that come from the Old and the New Testaments, what we call the Bible. And a lot of people kind of attempted to divorce the religious aspect from the societies. And societies became less and less overtly religious in those natures. And then a lot of people saw that their parents were no longer going to church. Like the Bible wasn't part of kind of the household any longer. And I talked to a lot of young people who look at that and they say in almost like a rebellion against their parents, they're now interested in that. Their parents rebelled by disassociating from religion. And now I wonder if there's part of a rebellion in kind of looking back and trying to reclaim some of that religious stuff.
I think in part as well this younger generation Gen Z's and I guess to some extent also millennials have been told to live more individualistic lives and that's really been glamorized like be your own boss and now we work remotely and stand on your own two feet and we're even seeing people getting into sort of relationships later and later in their lives and having less children. So they're more it appears people are more unanchored than they've ever been and that was to some degree glamorized. Um but it also appears that when we are unanchored when we don't have responsibilities or we're not part of something mental health issues um are quick quick to follow and for this generation they're suffering the most with those types of mental health issues and then one would assert that they would therefore be searching more for answers to some of these existential questions.
Expressive individualism I think it rose that's the kind of the terminology in soc in the sociological literature that they refer to it but I I think you touched on a good point in that like as we've removed God, part of the intellectual light enlightenment was that we would move away from the shackles of religiosity and the concept of a creator and that would lead us into a utopia. And I think the more and more we've removed that from society that hasn't decreased our levels of anxiety and depression and meaning. I I think it's increased it.
>> Yeah. And especially celebrity worship, social media, building a following of your own like sort of low-key narcissism.
>> Yeah.
>> Has made us more and more and more and more important. And that seems to correlate with worse and worse and worse mental health when you start to become more individualistic and think more and more about yourself versus others and a bigger picture.
>> Mhm. I think we were created for community. I think we are as human beings a creature that is created for community ultimately like cards on the table as a Christian because I believe we are created in the image of a God who exists in a set of living loving relationships like that's what the trinity is when we talk about that idea within Christian theology God exists in father son and holy spirit and so being created in the image of God part of that is you are created for relationship ship. And so in a society that's continually removing us, you know, you need to be an influencer. You're influencing everybody else when I think we're not created to be lone wolves or lone rangers. We're created to live amongst community and have that be something that likewise gives us fulfillment. It's not that people who are leaders are, you know, rise to the top are wrong by any stretch, but in a society where we're alone together because we are sitting behind computer screens and we're talking to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in some cases, but but we're secluded. I think that that does something to our souls because we were made to be in relationship with other people.
I agree with everything you've said as it relates to the sort of crisis of meaning in society and I also agree with many of your reasons as to why that's occurred. The part that I've always struggled with is then the answer being Christianity or any other religion.
>> Sure. I agree with, you know, so many of the things you've said, but then I my brain has, I think, especially after the age of 18 when I started reading about all this new atheist stuff and these questions of evil and am I going to hell and all these other things, I've not been able to get there.
But I'm having this conversation with you today because I am open-minded and although I've got like difficult questions to ask, I'm in pursuit of the truth, not any particular ideology or answer. So, how do you take someone like me who agrees that there's clearly something missing, who believes that there's something transcendent? Like, it'd be a crazy thing to assume that this is it.
>> Yeah.
>> How do you take them from this position to believing that what's written in this book in front of me, the Bible, is the thing that should guide my life, right? Because I I like again, I say, I'm going to say this again, that like I think I require a really high standard of evidence because of the way that I am.
>> Yeah. You know, I think there's a historical case for it which I'm very much invested in because my training formerly is in historioggraphy. I study ancient biblical manuscripts and their kind of reliability and fidelity over the last couple of millennia. So looking at some of those manuscripts that actually can trace back to the actual time frame of Jesus and answering questions like is what we have now what the original authors wrote back then? So, I think there's a historical question to it. And I in my own personal investigation genuinely think that the evidence, the publicly available evidence gets us back to not only the time frame of Jesus, but to early eyewitness testimony that proclaims that this first century Jewish itinerate rabbi who was walking the dusty streets of first century made these claims and then there is sufficient evidence to say that he predicted his own death and resurrection and did it.
How do I know Jesus Christ was real? And then how do I know what's written in that book is real versus just some guys thousands of years ago made a book?
>> Yeah. So that is a question of historical reliability. So there are a couple different ways we could go about it. First, we have four biographical accounts of Jesus's life, which is very unusual. So we call them the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Um those aren't actually our earliest source material for the life of Jesus. that comes in the person of Paul. Paul is actually writing before the gospel accounts and he is uh someone who was hostile originally to the Christian message and he's persecuting Christians. He comes along and he has this radical conversion experience when he's traveling to Damascus where he says he's he's literally thrown off a horse. He hears God's voice and it's Jesus and he says, "Paul, why are you persecuting me?" And then he writes these things about his experience and and then ultimately goes and connects with the individuals who are who we call the disciples who are like this this close Jesus community and connects with them. So he's our earliest source but then you have these gospel accounts these these biographies and the gospels are interesting because they fit within the historical framework of ancient Greco Roman biography. So let me give you an example. The most well-known person in Jesus's day was the emperor. His name is Tiberius. Tiberius has four biographical accounts that are written about him. Valasculus, Casiodio, Sutonius, and Tacitus.
>> So, this these are the four guys. Okay.
>> And what's interesting in sort of a comparative analysis of Jesus and those people is that they're all writing around the same time period. So the biographies are coming from the first century for Jesus. They're coming in this time period where you have an early eyewitness testimony for the emperor for the most well-known person in the ancient world. All of the sources except for uh Valas Peterculus are coming from the second century.
>> Val Petculus is coming from the first century. He's very close to the source, but he's a paid propagandist. So even though he's the earliest, he's the least reliable. And for the gospels that comes around to the 4th century. So there's a comparison with the source material for someone like Jesus even though we really shouldn't have anything about him because he's he's kind of a nobody from nowhere in terms of the Roman Empire and the grand scheme of things.
>> But we have a phenomenal amount of source information for his life. If you love the D CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor. Become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button. It helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.