Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - "God and the Pandemic"

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

News just out of the CDC has created fresh opportunities for normal, communal time together, indoors — just like we did pre-Corona. One of the rituals I have missed over the past year has been attending synagogue. But long before the Covid-19 pandemic, participation in organized religion - across all walks of religious life - was on the decline. Americans had become less engaged in religious institutions, whether it was regular attendance or membership and donations to their local congregation. Did the pandemic arrest these trends? Did virtual platforms provide new opportunities for religious and communal engagement? Joel Kotkin is a professor and bestselling author. He has been described by The New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer.” He has authored numerous books, including The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, and also The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. He is also a regular contributor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Joel recently authored an essay for Quillette that got me thinking more about all of this. It’s titled “God and the Pandemic” and it’s what I wanted to unpack with him today. Will coronavirus have further isolated Americans from organized religion, or drawn them closer to religion in a durable way?

Institutionalized religion was a product of a certain time and a certain place, and I think its time has to some extent passed. It's going to have to reinvent itself. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, participation in organized religion was on the decline. Increasing numbers of Americans had become less engaged in, if not entirely detached from, religious institutions, whether it was regular attendance or membership and donations to their local congregations. Did the pandemic arrest these trends? Did virtual platforms provide new opportunities for religious and communal engagement? Joel Kotkin is a professor

and best-selling author. He's been described by the New York Times as, quote, America's uber-geographer. He's authored numerous books, including The Coming of Neo-Feudalism and also The Human City, Urbanism for the Rest of Us. Joel is also a regular contributor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. The Manhattan Institute is a premier urban and state policy think tank. Joel recently authored an essay for Quillette that got me thinking more about all of this. It's titled God and the Pandemic. I highly recommend it, and it's what I wanted to unpack with him today. Will coronavirus have further isolated Americans from organized religion or drawn them closer to religion in a durable way. This is Post-Corona.

And I'm pleased to welcome Joel Kotkin to the Post-Corona conversation. Hi, Joel, how are you? Doing pretty well. Good, good. We have a lot to cover in this conversation. And just to set the table, I want to throw a couple of pieces of data at you to react to. One is that according to Gallup surveys in the late 1940s, more than three-fourths of Americans, more than three-quarters of the American public were members of a house of worship. And it's about half that today. If you look at more recent history, yeah, if you look at most more recent history, and you wrote about this in your in your Quillette piece, God and the Pandemic, the percentage of Americans who say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque is down 20 percent over the past two decades, and it's at an all-time low of 50%. It was at an all-time low of 50% as of 2018, according to Gallup. And actual church attendance is even lower than that

with Americans and with Americans who profess no religious affiliation at all. That actually, as you called the so-called nuns, no religion at all, that's become the single largest denomination in the United States, according to Pew, numbering larger than Catholics and evangelicals. So we've been in this trend both over the last half century, even longer, and then even more accelerated in the last couple decades of what seems to be increasing disconnection from organized religion. And that's the backdrop of which the pandemic hits in a year of lockdowns become our reality. Now, there's two ways to think about how the pandemic would impact those trends that were already in place. One reaction is people may say, well, I know we've been moving in a direction of more disconnection from organized religion, but now I want more spiritual connection during this period. Sort of what my friend and colleague Robert Nicholson,

who heads the Philos Project, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that we could have like a coronavirus great awakening. He wrote, sometimes the most important ingredient for spiritual renewal is a cataclysmic event. And one could argue this pandemic provides such an example. Or you could say the trends were already off to the races and the pandemic accelerated them. And if people felt disconnected before, they're gonna feel more disconnected now

because they're physically, actually actually their options for physical connections Become fewer and fewer so just based on what we know so far Which of those directions are we heading in an acceleration of bad trends or or actually a potential beginning of a reversal? I'm gonna really a cop out here and say both. Okay. I mean, on the one hand, you have to look at the digital revolution, even pre-COVID, as being transformative and changing how people access religion. I mean, one of the big problems for organized religion is that people now can, A, go to other religions. They can go to more charismatic speakers. I remember talking to

one of the local imams here in Orange County, California, and he was saying, well, my problem is now a lot of the people who go to the mosque, instead of listening to the boring local imam, is going to hear a charismatic guy in Dallas or a charismatic guy in, there's one in Africa. And so in a sense, you have access to spirituality, but it's not as place-based. So that makes it very rough for organized religion. The more, um, what, what we found in the Quillette piece is those religions that were able to go into the household and focused on the household did much better, um, and were more flexible. Um, if you look at, uh, the two big success stories we talk about are chabad uh in among the jews um and the lds church um uh in uh you know obviously you know known to what they would call gentiles as the mormons yeah but but let's take both of those because i think those are both

good examples so because they both the the mormon church and chabad were already very well organized and i would say cutting edge when it comes to um the way they're entrepreneurially organized their use of digital tools pre pre-covid yes you know there's this there's this uh i think this book the secret of chabad where one of the Chabad leaders is quoted as saying, if God gives you technology, use it to reach people. Right. And Chabad has been, so can you explain a little bit about what Chabad is as a movement and what it was doing pre-COVID to stay ahead of these technological trends? Well, you know, Chabad, you know, and I'm not an Orthodox, so, you know, I'm not making a theological argument here. But Chabad has the advantage of A, not being a membership organization.

In other words, one of the big problems with organized religion is you have to pay a fee to get in. And this is particularly bad for millennials and even Gen Xers because they don't have the money that us baby boomers have. And that's one of the big problems. I mean, if you're struggling to make your mortgage payments and the rabbi wants five grand a year out of you and then X more for the education of your kids, this is not a very attractive thing. And Chabad is open in a way that is much more, you know, they basically, even though they themselves are very orthodox, they will take you as you are. And they figure every step that you make towards identifying with Judaism, the better. And so,

for instance, when I asked my students, because at Chapman University, we have a fairly high percentage of Jewish kids, even though Orange County is not particularly heavily Jewish, in part because the rival school, University of California, Irvine is a center of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish

agitation. And I asked the kids, I said, where do you, you're Jewish, how do you engage? Friday night dinner at the rabbi's house. There's a kind of, or when my daughter- At Chabad, meaning at the rabbi for the local Chabad. Whereas the leadership of Hillel and a lot of the official Jewish leadership is A, very intellectualized, you know, a little bit, not so much Baal Shem Tov, but much more sort of legalistic.

And that just doesn't appeal to people. I mean, I know that they also, I also think that part of the problem for at least some people is that so much of Reform Judaism, and I think you can say the same thing for parts of the Catholic Church and certainly for mainstream Protestantism, really religion has been replaced by social justice agitation. And I think that is a very dangerous path. A, you alienate people. And also as people get older and they start thinking about engaging in religion, they may want some of the, if you will, more conservative values, the values of being committed to one person

or the advantage of accepting a certain degree of authority from parents or having some pride in your traditions. You know, so the problem is that you don't have a religion in a sense that's serving the needs. What are the needs of people in a pandemic? Some sort of explanation, some sort of sense of hope, some sort of reinforcing importance of family. I'll give you the LDS, which I'm really impressed with. And I'm a fellow at the University of Utah. I've had a lot of contact with them. Before the pandemic, they made the decision to start having their services at home, where people would actually participate in the service from their home for the whole family.

This was pre the pandemic. Via digital tools? Via digital tools. One of the great advantages. How long ago was that? A few months before the pandemic. And what was the impetus for that? They couldn't have known that the pandemic was coming.

They just felt that this was the future. They thought this was the future. They were concerned that people were not going to church because, you know, it was either boring or it was too inconvenient. And they felt that the kids were separating from the parents and they wanted it to be, you know, Mormonism or the LDS, they don't like Mormon as a term anymore. But the LDS is very family oriented. You know, that's one of the things I think that's really critical is a religion has to be family oriented to survive. People tend to be oriented towards religion when they're raising kids. And the Mormon church was

very aware of that. The other thing that we found is that the traditional religions, let's say take in the Jewish case, very expensive. And also, you couldn't get, you know, really, you live in a world where people get what they want specifically. So if I want to pay for the B'nai Mitzvah training for my kid, I don't need to have to go join a temple. So that happens. There are now organizations organizations in uh i know in atlanta and the boston area which directly serve that purpose without your being a member of a temple you can get your b'nai mitzvah training yeah it's what my it's what one of my friends as

a rabbi says this we're experiencing now the u Uberization of these services that you would normally get from being part of one congregation. You can break out the service and it's like for hire from different service providers. Right. It's what the late Al Toffler called the prosumer. The consumer decides what it is. He doesn't have to fit or she does not have to fit into a pattern that has been preordained. You know, the kind of, you know, institutionalized religion

was a product of a certain time and a certain place. And I think its time has, to some extent, passed. was a product of a certain time and a certain place. And I think its time has, to some extent, passed. It's going to have to reinvent itself. Now, does it mean, get to your original question, the end of religion or the end of spirituality? There's no evidence that the desire for spiritual commitment has disappeared. I think it's still there.

It's just going to express itself in different ways. And there are some faiths that seem to be doing a better job of making that transition. One of the ones that I am most concerned with, and I've been trying to help on this issue, is the Catholic Church. The problem of the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church is very, first of all, it's very ritualized. But to be clear, the problems you're identifying were problems before the pandemic. Yes, yes. But they've gotten much worse. Right, right.

The other problem is, as a good friend of mine who's a, as he calls it, a cradle Catholic from East LA, he's an astrophysicist. And he says, look, the part of the problem is the church is run by a bunch of old men who are digitally illiterate. And it functions as a bureaucracy. So the very thing taken, you know, through history as very successful, very powerful force begins to become a disadvantage because the people at the top are not technologically gifted, whereas Chabad had young Jewish people who were technologically advanced, and obviously Israel is extremely advanced. Or you have the situation with the LDS Church, where Utah, for instance, is a major center of

the technology industry in the United States. There were plenty of LDS members who were very adept with technology. The other thing is the mega churches had already been there. They were already sending their message over the internet to start with. The other interesting thing about Chabad is when Chabad enters a new market, it's like a franchise model almost. There's a young rabbi who's willing to go into the new market and build a family there and open a local Chabad center there. And they're very entrepreneurial. They go, they have to go recruit people to get involved with Chabad, they have to, you know, reach out to the local Jewish community, get to know, build a network with the local Jewish community, start drawing people in. So they're,

they, these rabbis on the front lines in these new markets for Chabad have to be extremely entrepreneurial, which means they're very connected to the market, which means they can follow local market trends. And if there's a demand for more technology access through the Jewish experience, then that local rabbi will figure out how to meet the consumer. To your point, there are Tofflers, you know, Toffler's prosumer, like meet the consumer where he or she is. Well, and they were already doing that geographically. I remember going to a Chabad meeting with Chabad rabbis in a strip mall in South Orange County.

You know, when we say you cannot get any more different than the Wilshire Boulevard Temple or any of the great synagogues in New York City, which are institutional, gigantic places that require enormous capital. This was like a little place in a strip mall. And yet, you know, one has to think about, well, how fancy were the synagogues in the shtetls in Russia? Weren't they pretty basic? Weren't they very close to where people lived? And wasn't the rabbi part of that? My great-grandfather was a rabbi in Latvia.

They were very much a part of a particular culture. One of the problems I see, and not just with Jews, I see it in the mainstream Protestant churches, is that the clerical class has become really indistinguishable from the academic class, from the media class, same dynamics, same attitudes, same, oddly enough, level of intolerance. You know, if you have, as we did in my synagogue, a very liberal rabbi who was wonderful in many areas, particularly with children. But if you were anything other than a far left Democrat, I mean, even if you're like a, you know, an old Bill Clinton type Democrat or

a Harry Truman type Democrat, you had, you know, you felt completely alienated. You felt, you know, everything, you know, I didn't want to go to a synagogue and then have somebody try to tell me what housing bill I should back in the California legislature. I happen to know quite a bit about housing. And, you know, I don't really think that the rabbi should be pushing this particular point of view. I don't think they should be pushing conservative points of view. So, And I think, by the way, there is almost a reverse problem in parts of the evangelical church where parts of the evangelical movement have become so identified with the right wing of the Republican Party that if you're evangelical but not that conservative, you also might feel excluded.

We've somehow – I think religion has to go back to being a family and spiritual force. And whoever is able to do that will come out ahead. So coming back to where people are connecting or not connecting with organized religion now there was a study published by this danish uh economist that uh jeanette zindi sending benson so professor benson argues that based on rates of google searches okay so this this professor is looking at google searches for prayer that the demand for religion has risen dramatically since the onset of pandemic. People going online looking for anything related to religion on Google, people downloading religious-based apps, downloading the Bible, these numbers are through the roof.

So that's, one could argue, a positive indicator about desire for connection to spirituality and religion during the pandemic. On the other hand, Benson's own research shows that Googling for prayer during a crisis doesn't necessarily mean there's not a lot of durability in terms of connection to religion. And in fact, another piece of research points out that after 9-11, people, you know, the number of people turning to religion went through the roof. Nine out of ten Americans reported turning to religion after the September 11th attacks, according to one study. But since 2001, per the Gallup and pupils, churchgoing has been plummeting.

So on the one hand, you got this spike immediately after the crisis, and then you have a long-term decline. So where does the current moment fit into that kind of precedent data? Well, I think you're talking about, you know, just like people talk about fluid genders, we have fluid religion. You know, Wayne Roof, who taught religion at UC Santa Barbara, talked about the spiritual marketplace that people were grazing, you know, spiritual grazing. They weren't sitting down and eating a big piece of fish or a big piece of meat. They were nibbling at lots of different things. And so there's a tendency to sort of sample different religions and sometimes mix them. The other thing that we found is that some of the, it wasn't all, you know, people, Chabad, which is more conservative. It was also Jews who identified with gay causes or LGBT causes or with the environment or with just the outdoors. Those sort of specialized groups did well.

And the other group that was doing was really- Did well during the pandemic? During the pandemic. And now I think as things open up before the pandemic, the minyanim, the small groups- So can you explain that? Explain these- Yeah, like eight, 10 people who get together for Shabbat every Friday, and then they maybe have a discussion about the Torah or about some other issue. So I think there are new ways of forming, and I don't know where they'll end up.

But I don't think organized religion in the way that we've seen it has a particularly bright future. I think there will be, I mean, there are people in all the religious communities, ah, when it's over, it'll all go back. It's like the people who own, you know, huts and yards and cannot imagine what is going to happen to that investment over the long run, which that's certainly some paper I'd rather not have. You know, so, you know, we're in a transformative period. It's not necessarily negative, but it's going to be different. You wrote in the Quillette piece that we are witnessing a shift as important in religion. We're witnessing a shift as important as that brought about by Gutenberg's press and Luther's Vernacular Bible during the Reformation. So what was seminal about

those periods? Sure. And how do you put those moments in the, you know, or how do you put this moment in that historical context? Sure. All right. First of all, what Gutenberg did is he made the Bible something that could be reproduced very quickly and much lower cost. What Luther did, and it was actually done in England even before that, is translated into the vernacular so that you had... So you didn't have to be a Latin speaker in order to access Scripture. Right, exactly. And, you know, now I happen to have had seven years of Latin,

so, you know, my mom always used to say to me, well, what are you trying to become, Pope? And I said, well, the first Pope was Jewish too. But the reality is that people now could make their own minds. They could move from one tradition to another, and they could look at the Bible themselves and say, well, the priest said this, but, you know, really, I read this as saying something very different.

And in a similar way, now you have access to all sorts of interpretations of religion, different traditions. Look, I've known people who were brought up Baptist, became Jewish, joined the Baha'i, and ended up somewhere else. I mean, you know, here in California, we've always been on the cutting edge of that kind of movement. And I think that's going to become more the case. You're going to have people who say, hey, I was brought up this, but I became that. And then I shifted to this. And maybe I never really join, in the traditional sense, an institution, even though I may participate. My sense of it is that

our society has become so mechanistic and that the religion of the tech oligarchs, which is essentially, how can I live forever? You know, sort of very much an old religious belief, this whole singularity. I don't think it's, A, very practical right now, and B, it's not really a very spiritually rewarding worldview. So let me ask you, in terms of the economic model of congregations. So you say that the LDS movement and Chabad have, were ahead of the curve in terms of figuring out how to reach people. And with the LDS, which is interesting,

they were dealing with issues where their younger members of the religion were increasingly isolated or disconnecting from the religion. So that was one of the challenges they were dealing with. And so they were figuring out models, Chabad and LDS, to reach people not through an institutional model. But the institutional model, congregations have been the bedrock of most of organized religion in the West for as long as you and I have been alive. So what I, I'm trying to understand how that model is potentially going bankrupt for some, not all, for some institutions because of the pandemic. So Bill Wilson, who is with the Center for Healthy Churches, it's a center in Clemens, North Carolina, and Bill works on studying the financial models of religious

institutions. He predicted during the pandemic that up to one-third of U.S. churches could be out of business by 2025. He pointed to Lifeway Research, another institution, their data. He pointed to Lifeway Research that was reporting that 5% of U.S. churches were already closing within the year, the first year of the pandemic, which is five times the average closure rate for churches in a normal year, according to Christian Century magazine. So there is this risk that just institution after institution is going to go bust. And the pushback, when I cite this data to friends who lead institutions in the organized Jewish world, they say, well, look, once the pandemic, there will be a post-corona period

and people will come back and then the institutional model will be alive and well again. But a lot of the, when you ask the leaders of the institutions, who comes to services on a regular basis, on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning? Who are your most reliable donors? And they, in terms of the demographic, they typically are people who are older, senior citizens, who after the pandemic, there's a risk they will be the least likely or the latest adopters of post-corona, right? Older people will be the most reticent about going back into places, whether it's public transportation, movie theaters, airplanes, live theater, or churches, synagogues, and mosques that are really crowded when, while we've gotten to post-corona yes but the experience

has made them feel more fragile well i think that that that's certainly a factor and um and i also think that that one of the things that you're you're seeing you know what the institutionalists if you want to put it that way, is that they were empty vessels already. You'll explain that. Otherwise, I remember sometimes you'd go to a, if there wasn't a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, maybe there'd be 20 people in a sanctuary that could hold 400.

The same thing's true, you know, obviously, we can see this, where this is going by looking at Europe, where the churches are empty. I mean, that's just the way it is. I mean, you know, like, I was talking to my Catholic friend who I'm helping with some things, and he said, well, you know, there's a statement from the German bishops about X, Y, Z that, you know, that Pope Francis, you know, should follow. You know, that's what they're telling him, you know, more liberal policies. I said, yeah, but the German bishops have no flock. You know, there are very, very, very, very few religious people left in most of Europe. And many of those who are religious are Muslim. So, you know, the disconnect is pretty severe. The money will run out eventually. I mean,

yeah, there are a lot of people, religious people, like in the Catholic world and certainly in the Jewish world who may bequest some money to the church or the synagogue. But that supply is running low. And the next generation, whether they're Catholic or Jews, will not have the money. The other thing is proximity drives a lot of it. Like I support the church or temple near me but if i'm accessing religion online i don't really have to give money to that institution um so i and what we're clearly seeing also is and i and this is from research on the sacraments, fewer people send their kids to the Catholic school, fewer kids after they come out of school have any particular religious affiliation. I can tell you in teaching over all these years, because I teach a class on, which deals a great deal with the marketing of religion,

fewer and fewer of my students have any kind of religious education at all. Many of them are from mixed families, somewhat evangelicals, but that's about it. On that exact question, Brian Cluth, who is with the National Association of Evangelicals in Denver, he lectures and he writes about the state of finances in uh obviously primarily in churches so he basically says coming out of the pandemic there are four options for churches faced with difficult difficult financial decisions because as you say most of these churches don't have a real cushion they don't have reserves uh they don't have any kind of endowment

and they've lost huge numbers of donations and membership fees for all the reasons you're citing. So he basically says there's four options for them. For these smaller congregations in these smaller communities, either merge with one or more other congregations. That's the first one. Second one, become a satellite campus of a larger church. Third is transform into a house church where the remaining members meet, you know, in each other's homes.

Or the fourth is just close, disband, call it a day. What's your reaction? Is that, is that, are those the options left? Is that it? I think that's it. Although I do think there's a potential of creating new affiliations by using the internet. Like, for instance, this is sort of a funny example. There's a woman rabbi in Boulder who a walk outside and conduct the ceremonies outside.

So I think there will be new affiliations that could be developed, but they're going to have a different revenue model. And one of the great advantages of doing things online is how cheap it is. Go ahead. But I think he's very accurate that there will be new models. When he talked about meeting in the home, I was thinking of the Mignonim in particular. And look, let's face it, many of the early Christians met in each other's homes. Going back? Right.

Going back? To Roman times. Wow. Yeah, they met. Okay. Because they couldn't worship openly, so they had to do it surreptitiously. And so I think that you're going to see maybe a growth of a kind of new grassroots religion. evangelicals will just say, okay, you know what? We give up. This society is not really interested in us and our values, so we're going to go and create our own communities. And I think

you may see more of that. So there could be some new forms of religion and new kinds of religion that will come out of this crisis. And frankly, it may be a good thing because these religions were headed to a very ignominious conclusion anyway. So what you're basically saying is the retreat of, if we are going to deal with a post-corona retreat from organized religion, if we're going to deal with a post-corona if we're going

to see uh uh if we're going to see a retreat of from organized religion it's not necessarily the it's not necessarily a retreat from religion it's just from institutional religion you know people's beliefs will you know could default to something else or they could be expressed in different ways and their and which could drive their activities it doesn't have to all be anchored around a place exactly and and that it could be disaggregated into different things uh you know whether it's the b'nai mitzvah or you know uh or or um you know just a a local group, a Bible study group in the Christian world. Again, there could be new forms. The old forms were in trouble anyway. And unfortunately, we have a lot of people in the institutional world,

and this includes the owners of big office buildings and things like that, that they don't want to deal with the fact that we are going through a major shift. People are dispersing. They're using the internet to access information at an unprecedented rate. And because they're unanchored themselves, they're going to

tend to shift from thing to thing because they have not been brought up. I've been shocked how few of my students, for instance, have been brought up with a really strong education either in Jewish or Christian faith. You know, it just isn't part of their world compared to, let's say, 20 or 30 years ago, where, you know, a good number of the students were coming from, you know, fairly religious backgrounds. So I end up, you know, sort of discussing the importance of St. Paul. Here I am, a Jewish guy, explaining the importance of St. Paul to predominantly Christian students. You know, there's another phenomenon which is directly related to the pandemic, which is because overnight so many professionals, young and not young, figured out that they could do their job from anywhere and their productivity wouldn't necessarily go down. So the notion of being physically attached to a place in order to advance your career

has become less central, not totally irrelevant, but less central than people, I think, thought before the pandemic, right? If you want to be in certain professions, you had to be in New York City or Los Angeles or the Bay Area or London. And suddenly that notion is, a number of people are questioning it. And companies are responding to that, right? Companies are saying, you know,

if you want to be, if you're a top-notch engineer, we're no longer saying you have to work in the Bay Area. If you want to move to Asheville, North Carolina, or Bentonville, Arkansas, or wherever, you can, because you want to be in those places for reasons that have nothing to do with your career, right? You want to be in those places because that's where you want to raise a family, that it's a communal, local communal situation that is more aligned with your values. And the big tech companies will say, you know what? You can be an engineer in Asheville, North Carolina and still do your job and still work for this company.

Whereas before we required you to be in the Bay Area and move your family to Bay Area, you can be in those places and live a life that is, again, more connected to and more aligned with the values in terms of how you want to raise a family. So that potentially creates a lot of opportunity for organized religion in those places because people will be more communally involved while having these big careers. And obviously they'll have money, and they'll have connections and interesting things to bring to bear. Look, Fayetteville has a thriving Jewish community, you know, as people have been able to go and work in Fayetteville, whether for one of the big companies or as consultants. And I also think that these, you know, I've worked at home all but three months of my life.

Okay. So as Al Toffoli used to say, I invented the electronic cottage before it existed. And, you know, and I can tell you that when you work at home and in the communities that I work in, for instance, here in Orange County, I don't think any of my neighbors go to an office. I don't think a single one goes to an office. When I lived in the Valley Villages, sort of North Hollywood, almost everybody worked from home. So what you really cared about was the coffee shop and where you could meet people. I mean, that's why the whole lunch breakfast scene in Hollywood is so important, because most people essentially don't go to an office every day. So it creates new ways of being. And what will be important is will organized religion capture these people as they disperse and as they work at home? Because in some senses, working at home to go to Irvine every day, an hour and a half on the death march

on the 91 freeway, you don't have much left when you come home. Same thing if you live in New York. If you live in Suffolk County or you live in Northern Westchester and you're spending an hour, hour and a half, it could be subway and by the Metro North or the Long Island Railroad, you don't have the time to explore these other things

that you now will have. And, you know, there is a great opportunity for organized religion in a different form. I don't think you can go back to the form that you had, but I do think that you can develop new forms. And what's very exciting is whether it's Fayetteville or Nashville or Dallas or Houston, I know Dallas and Houston pretty well, there's all this intellectual capital and experience that's going to these places that could be added and uh to the religious aspect it's a question of how do you capture those populations um and that's going to be a challenge

uh televangelism is an interesting case study of a religion adapting well to technological developments and potentially meeting their market where it is the prosumer to to bring alvin toffler back into the conversation but here with televangelism you have organized religion that decided they you know they won't be blockbuster in the 1990s, that they're going to be Netflix. Right. And, you know, obviously one of the case studies in this is Rick Warren. Right. In your neck of the woods, in Southern California, where he's used an established media presence, as you've talked about, to great effect. And after COVID-19, his online church attendance more than doubled. So after the pandemic, his church attendance more than doubled to something like 100,000 participants, and his charitable, his philanthropic fundraising has increased.

And he was quoted, and I think you quote him in your Quillette piece as saying, our buildings have been closed, but the church is not a building we are living breathing body the church is a family not a fortress we are a people not a place we are an army of servants not an event of attenders so the mega churches televangelism the the intersection of the two that is a model of of uh that that adapted early yes and they also adapted in in many other areas um uh taking it doing a lot of work with families doing a lot of work on on you know the issues that that people have with with their. I mean, there's been, these institutions have really, you know, shown a new direction. And, you know, the reality is, you know,

that listening to Rick Warren's probably more interesting than listening to your local preacher. And so what you end up with is you end up with this disaggregation, but also enormous opportunity. I mean, there's a lot of opportunity in, for instance, the way the internet, not just for a megachurch, but if you have people who have intellectual programs that are religious, those are doing very well.

We write about that in both Tablet and also in Quillette. Your Tablet piece, Future of the Jews. Right, yeah. And that, you know, basically you now have the option of listening. Like, you know, my wife, you know, we are members of a temple, but, you know, she now very often will listen to, you know, the programs, the Jewish programs that are national or, you know, I know we listen to some of the tablet people and their podcasts or their shows.

Again, yes, you can spend your time worrying about the fact that probably in 20 years, half the synagogues in America maybe will either be shrunken or gone. But you could have a thriving Jewish community without them. So, you know, speaking of these, some of these religious leaders who have a big media presence, I think of David Wolpe from LA, Angela Buchdahl at Central Synagogue here in New York, David Ingber at Ramamu, New York, Meir Soloveitchik. They're doing a lot of interesting things where people are tapping into Jewish learning and Jewish programming with them that otherwise may never have engaged with Jewish programming and organized religion, obviously, in a different kind of way. They're sort of becoming

media presence. They're like a media presence. They're media personalities with a mass audience. One other area that is promising is I've seen a lot of this with the TICVA fund, and I know you've done some work with TICVA. They, during the pandemic, offered a lot of terrific programming for students in middle school and high schools who wanted to supplement the, in many cases, what was lackluster Zoom program, Zoom education they were getting from their schools with additional learning, with great teachers. My son, who was getting a good day school education in the city, even during the pandemic, took a couple of these classes, terrific, really incredible classes on Zoom.

And what you realized is Tikvah built this opportunity for Jewish students, whether they were in day schools or public schools or secular prep schools, to augment their experience and make terrific teachers available to them no matter where they were. That is something that could outlive the pandemic. Because if you have a small Jewish day school in Columbus, Ohio, I'm not picking on Columbus, but Columbus is not going to be the magnet for the best Jewish teachers and the best Israeli teachers at a place like New York City or Los Angeles might be, and suddenly you can integrate into the local Jewish day school curriculum in Columbus, Ohio, classes taught by a teacher in L.A. or New York or Chicago

that is world class and the students in Columbus would have never had access to that teacher. So there's all sorts of creative things that could be done that could bring life back or bring new life to communities that were shrinking and the quality of the content had been on decline. And I think that this is going to be a pattern that we see generally. You know, what the Internet has done is it's had a cultural leveling effect. In other words, you know, years ago, if you lived in Iowa, you had two, maybe three stations. Movies came a long time after they had been in New York and LA. Access to information

was very limited. Today, if I go to Western Iowa or North Dakota, that guy in a farmhouse has the same access to information that the investment banker in New York has. And the same thing's true in religion. You don't have to be at one of the elite Jesuit Catholic schools to get access to Jesuit teaching. You don't have to be in New York to listen to really interesting people, rabbis or scholars. So, you know, although I agree there are tremendous dangers in this world that's emerging, there are also tremendous opportunities. And I'm just hoping that we put as much emphasis on the opportunities as bewailing the negatives. No pun intended, but from your lips to God's ears. Right. Joel, thanks for this conversation, and thank you again for the really illuminating essay in Quillette, God and the Pandemic, which I encourage our listeners to read,

as well as his piece in Tablet on the Future of the Jews, and also his book, which is called The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, A Warning to the Global Middle Class. Joel, thanks for being with us. Thank you. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Joel Kotkin's work, you can find him on Twitter at Joel, K-O-T-K-I-N. You can also find him at Manhattan Institute City Journal. And of course, he's got numerous books that are available wherever you buy books. I highly recommend you go to barnesandnoble.com. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, Dan Senor. Today's episode is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.