Within Reason - #25 Andrew Mark Henry - What is Religion?

Episode Date: April 2, 2023

Andrew Mark Henry is a scholar of religion specialising in early Christianity and the religions of the late Roman Empire. He is also the host of "Religion for Breakfast", a YouTube channel with over 600,000 subscribers producing informative videos on a variety of topics related to religion. Dr. Henry joins host Alex O'Connor to discuss a number of questions: what is religion? Where does it come from? Why is it so ubiquitous? To support Within Reason, please consider signing up at support.withinreasonpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor, and you're about to hear a conversation between me and Andrew Mark Henry. Dr. Henry is a scholar of religion, specialising in early Christianity and the religions of the late Roman Empire, but also the founder and host of Religion for Breakfast, a YouTube channel with over 600,000 subscribers, which offers introductory material on a variety of topics related to religion. In this conversation, you can expect to hear us ask, what is religion? What counts as religion? political ideologies like nationalism, at least sometimes be considered religious. We also talk about the concept of atheist churches, why they exist, and whether or not they can

provide the same thing that religion does for people who don't believe in God. I also bring up the connection between this and Slavot-Zijek's theory of Diet Coke. Finally, the origin of religion. Theories about why religion is so ubiquitous across all human societies and where it might come from, evolutionarily and psychologically speaking. you enjoy it Andrew Mark Henry, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. We're going to start quite broad here. What is religion? So you're starting with like the ultimate annoyance for religious studies scholars, which is we just can't

seem to define it, which seems to be self-defeating that you go and get a PhD in this field that people can't even decide on what to define. I always like to define it as, first of all, something that people do. I think, especially in cultures that are so influenced by Protestantism, where we think of religion as something that people think about. It's like the conversion experience that happens deep inside your psyche. Religion is ultimately human behavior. And in some respects, it's up to the scholar to categorize what sorts of human behaviors under that category. For me, I try to define it as a mode of living that encompasses rituals and beliefs in supernatural beings and identities that people hold to, whether those

identities are a pan-national identity like Christianity or an ethno identity like Yazidis or the Druze. So many religions are intimately tied to ethnicity. So I kind of define it as a way of living that encompasses beliefs, behaviors, and belonging. So I have this 3B framework that my friend, Ben Marcus, developed. He's a scholar of religion. And I think that helps us to break out of this Protestantizing idea of what religion is. It's not just what we think. It does obviously involve beliefs, but it also involves a bunch of behaviors. And a lot of religions sometimes emphasize behavior over the belief. Sometimes they emphasize the belonging over the beliefs. So all of that encompasses what I think religion is, but of course any high fidelity definition of religion

is going to crumble under scrutiny. So the best we can kind of do in some respects is to come up with like a family resemblance definition where, you know, if something has supernatural beliefs and rituals and maybe authoritative functionaries that we call priests or rabbis or whatever, then maybe we can call this thing a religion. In some respects, it's easier to use it as an adjective like this human behavior is religious, going to a place that we think is significant and calling it a pilgrimage. Sometimes a pilgrimage looks like tourism. You go to Disney World and that's a, that's a tourist doing a touristy sort of thing. But what if you go to Jerusalem?

Suddenly it's called a pilgrimage because it's going to a sacred spot. But so often these trips of significance go on the either side of tourism or pilgrimage, which shows that some things that we might not. classically classify as religious can sometimes appear to be religious because it's almost indistinguishable from something that's more classically religious. So that's why I like to use it almost as an adjective more than a definitive noun because so many different things that humans do seem to be religious and sometimes that falls under an institutional systematized ism like, you know, Judaism or Confucianism and sometimes it's not quite so easily classifiable.

Yeah, I mean that's fascinating. I was just thinking about how Jordan Peterson would probably have a field day discussing whether pilgrimages to Disneyland could be considered religious in nature. But this is part of the problem. I remember the first topic that I studied as part of my theology degree was this topic of what is religion. And the tutors present it to the students almost concealing a laugh because they know that it's, well, of course we have to start here. And of course, this is a ridiculous question to think that's, um, undergraduate 18 year old is going to be able to answer. And one of the problems that you come across is that it's impossible to come up with a definition that is totally impenetrable. As you say, a family resemblance model is, in my experience, the most popular approach here. Maybe we should pin down what a family resemblance kind of definition is. This is like a Wittgensteinian idea. Perhaps you can just explain to the audience briefly, what does it mean to define something in a family resemblance model of definition. What does that mean? Sure. I'd like to think of it more like a check box. Like if you check a certain number of boxes, then we can say this participates more

in this idea of religion. It's, in some respects, avoiding a hard and fast definition because it's ceding that ground. Okay, if a definition is not, if a high-fidelity definition is impossible, let's check these boxes. If it checks, let's say, eight out of these ten boxes, then we'll comfortably lump it into this thing called religion. And you can do that for anything. Like going, you know, you mentioned Wittgenstein, but like, what's the idea of a language? What is a game? You know, tick-tac-toe is a game, but also football and also Super Smash Brothers.

Like these things are vastly different, but we put them under the category game or language, whether, you know, sign language or semaphore with flags or a language like English. Like so many things fall under that category of language. And at some point, you just can't come up with the definition. So family resemblance is sometimes, in some respects, a cheap workaround, but a useful workaround for checking some boxes if we're going to seed that ground that we can't possibly define this concept. Yeah.

So we end up with a situation of a list of characteristics or qualities where we say, as you say, maybe if you've got eight out of ten of these or something like that, we'll call you a religion. But it doesn't have to be any particular eight. you could, that there's no one of these qualities are such that if you don't have one of those qualities, you're not a religion. It's this sort of existing mesh of characteristics.

And I shouldn't say that religion can't be defined. It just can be defined a hundred different ways and oftentimes 80% of those definitions are terrible. And we see, you know, early in the late 19th century, early 20th century when the field of religious studies was starting to be pioneered in the universities, scholars were putting forth definitions of religion like oh religion is belief in supernatural beings or rudolph otto famously he was a theologian famously said that religion is like the the

mysterium tremendous awe-inspiring feeling that humans feel so it's almost like the the wondrous awe that you have that you feel in front of the divine so religion is this mysterium tremendous And I would say most religious study scholars today are influenced by Emil Durkheim, who's a late 19th century, early 20th century sociologist who really focused on the communal aspects, that religion is something that communities come up with, that are reinforced by kind of the social construction kind of idea that humans come up with these beliefs, behaviors and identities to keep what he uses the term church, it's very Christian-centric, but to keep a church cohesive as a cohesive, identifiable. entity. So I'm myself very much influenced by that idea because I see society just through and through of every religion out there, religious beliefs and behaviors are always, you know, they have a specifiable historical moment, specifiable social context that we can identify and study. How do you feel about, given that, as you say, religion might be best described as an adjective. People are religious in their behaviors and the way that they live their life.

How do you feel about people co-opting the word religious to describe things that are not traditionally associated with belief in supernatural beings, this kind of thing? You'll often hear political movements be described as religious. Social justice is a new religion. Veganism is a kind of dogmatic religion. How do you feel about what people are trying to capture by describing these things as religious? I think in some respects it can be a very lazy intellectual move to make, and if it's done carefully, it can be very illuminating. So I've done the same thing in my own work and on my own YouTube channel thinking about the concept of American civil religion. This is the idea that Americans are religious about America and thinking of how the American flag is treated as a sacred object.

And I think that's a very useful way, using the word religion is useful, because then you can highlight certain, certain human behaviors that are done with respect to the flag. So, you know, standing during the national anthem, putting your hand over your heart or saluting to this object, and sectarian debates that crop up if the human behavior is not done correctly toward that object. So the Colin Kaepernick debate, what, you know, him kneeling during the national anthem is viewed by some as this blasphemous act. And I think using the word religious is very helpful there because we start to notice something

oh wow this human behavior about this one object is very interesting and it's comparable to let's say you know blasphemous or sacralizing attitudes toward a vine image like an image of a god like zeus or something um i think it gets kind of lazy when you try to so because religion is such a contested category if you try to impose it on something as if it's a very cohesive integrated system i think it can fall apart pretty quickly. So I see people calling wokeism a religion, basically saying, you know, left-wing politics or social justice movements being a new religion. It's just, it falls apart so quickly because religion is so much more than like an ideology or a political movement because it also contains things like rituals. And suddenly I see these pundits trying to come up

with their own checklist. Oh, well, this sort of, you know, going to the ballot box is a ritual. I'm like, well, not really. Like, it just doesn't seem to have the same sort of characteristics as, say, baptism or the Eucharist. So whenever you're doing comparative religion, you always need to have, you know, A is like B with respect to C. And so many of the lazy applications of religion, blank as a religion, doesn't have the with respect to C aspect of it. So I would say, you know, certain rituals toward the American flag are religious, with respect. respect to, you know, sectarian disagreements, the repeatability of it, because they repeat it every single time at a massive gathering, like a sporting event. And I don't see that sort of rigorous

application in some instances. Yeah. So what people might want to say is that we have this list of characteristics. And sure, something like wokeism, it doesn't sufficiently tick the box of ritual. I mean, some people might come up with ideas, as you say, going to the ballot box or culturally engaging in protests or pride parades or whatever it may be. They might see a sort of ritualistic element of these kinds of things. But as you said, it doesn't need to tick all of the boxes, right? Because somebody might say that you have, this comes up a lot when I'm talking about

veganism. It's quite difficult to have a discussion with somebody who's saying that veganism is a religion because of the fact that when asked to define what a religion is, well, it's got something to do with a cohesive moral theory that binds a community together, sometimes has belief in supernatural agents, but sometimes doesn't, doesn't need that kind of thing, has a little bit of ritual going on, this kind of stuff.

And it seems like something as simple as being a vegan or being on the left of politics and engaging in protests with other left-wing politicians and political activists, it ticks enough of the boxes to raise an eyebrow, you know. And so when you say that you think it's a bit lazy how some people will call wokeism a religion, do you think it's lazy because it's inappropriate to call it a religion or because it could be described as a religion, but the way that most people are doing so is a bit lazy? I think it is lazy insofar as they make it, they make religion a very,

cohesive integrated category and not appreciate the fuzziness of the category so if we can call christianity a religion it's because it has identifiable theologies and you know the trinity the virgin birth of jesus jesus is fully god fully human like there's these identifiable characteristics of the system and so i guess let's use american civil religion as an example again i wouldn't say that there is a religion called american civil religion because you start stretching the metaphor so much that it kind of breaks apart. So I would say rituals conducted before the American flag are religious, but not quite the same way that versus like the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence

where some people might use terms like sacred to refer through those texts, but those texts are not nearly as ritualized as, say, the New Testament, in a Christian worship service. So no one's out there reciting the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights in the same way that Christians recite the Lord's Prayer every single Sunday. So there's no, the ritualized aspect just fault,

it's just not there. So even though it can be sanctified, like, oh, this is a sacred text. You can even say it's God inspired, but it's not the same as what the rituals that are done for the American flag, which are very, you know, they are systematized. They're done very frequently.

There's people know how to act. There's a, you know, to use another sociological term, there's a habitus there. There's a habit that people have acculturated on how we should treat this flag, which is very different than how Americans treat the Declaration of Independence. So I think that's a very careful way to use the word religion, applying it to American political life. But it can be done very lazily. Oh, there's something called American religion. It's called American civil religion. Let me check all the boxes.

The priests are, you know, American politicians. The saints are, you know, George Washington and the founding fathers. And the sacred texts are the American, or the Constitution. And I just find that extremely lazy. And when I see it applied to things like wokeism, they're like, oh, the ritual is going to the ballot box or going to a protest. The priests are, you know, YouTube pundit A or B. And I'm just like, you're just, the term has no meaning. This term religion for you is just a rhetorical move to help your articles.

stay more cohesive as you publish it. Yeah, it goes both ways as well, of course. Usually when somebody describes the political movement as religious, they're not complementing it. But the same people who will cool wokeism or religion may be the kind of people that you're describing is having this strange reverence towards the constitution and the founding fathers. I mean, I have seen people recite the Second Amendment, the First Amendment tend to be favorites. And they quote the views of the founding fathers as if they're quoting hadiths of the prophet Muhammad. It's quite funny in a way because if one can be described as religious, then the other can too. But you're quite right that it may well be inappropriate to refer to either of them as religious. Also, of course,

when it comes to something like Christian nationalism, so much of that has been tied up with Christianity in that, yes, there's a reverence for the flag and there's the Pledge of Allegiance. But the Pledge of Allegiance reference is God. It would be quite strange to say that Christian nationalism is this religion when part of Christian nationalism, oftentimes most of the time, involves allegiance to another religion, which is Christianity. And so you'd have this very strange situation in which you have a religious idea of nationalism that is somehow parasitic on a different separate religious idea of Christianity, which maybe doesn't make all that much sense. Yeah. And I think that's another category error that people make is placing religion in its own arena of culture. So you have politics over there. You might have like gender roles over there. And then you have, you know, religion is its own corner of culture. But religion is in every single aspect of culture, whether it's finance. You know, there's all these laws about not imposing interest on loans, whether it's in the Hebrew Bible or in Islamic tradition. So there's, you know, religions in finance. It's in how you dress. It's in who you hang out with, who you marry, food laws, what you're allowed to eat, and then all the way to political structure.

Like, how should you structure your political, your government? So to relegate religion to its own separate corner, I think, is a category error. So when I think of Christian nationalism, I think that is just part and parcel of Christianity writ large. It's just a certain expression of Christianity in a very specifiable moment of time, which is 21st century. American politics. And that term might, you know, Christian nationalism might look different 50 years ago or 100 years ago and it might look different 100 years from now. Is religious belief declining globally?

Globally, I don't think so because there are huge upswings in areas where, so for example, China, famously you have the cultural revolution in the 20th century under Mao Zedong kind of suppressed religious expressions, whether it's Taoism or Confucianism or Buddhism, and all three of those are making a huge comeback in the 21st century, and then Christianity in particular as well making a big comeback in China. And, you know, China's population is so gigantic that even a few percentage points moving in China globally shifts religiosity figures higher. I would say it's declining, though, in Western Europe, and the United States. If we define it in certain ways, which is affiliation and engaging in public and private rituals.

So I usually think of religiosities as difficult to define as religion. So the way I try to define religiosity is to come up with a few metrics. So you can measure religious affiliation. Who is actually identifying I am Christian, I am Muslim, I am Jewish, public and private ritual? So are you attending church on Sunday and doing baptisms and Eucharist and reciting the Lord's Prayer? and are you doing Christian stuff at home, you know, private devotion or praying over your food or whatever.

You can also measure the intensity of religiosity, so how strongly do you hold to those beliefs and how extreme are your beliefs? So I think if you look at several dimensions of religiosity, you can come to a certain understanding of how religious of a certain population is. And if you look at, you know, the Nordic countries are famously secularizing,

and when you look at these dimensions, you know, I recently did a study on Iceland, And it's a secularizing country. Like private and public ritual is going down. Religious affiliation is going down. Religious intensity is going down. Even though Christianity remains very influential in the culture still. People are still baptizing their kids into the Lutheran church,

even though they themselves might not attend church ever or very seldomly on Sundays. Do you think that might have something to do with the recognition of the importance of religion as a social structure? I mean, if religion is declining, at least in the West, seems to be declining in my country, uh, as somebody who doesn't believe in God, I have to offer an explanation of why religion exists in the first place. And it only makes sense to say that it must serve some kind of memetic purpose. It must have some social function, which makes me a little bit pessimistic about its decline. It's a bit like G.K. Chessison's fence. You know, there's, there's, there's,

this fence that we that we see stood up in a field and we go and look at it and we can't see any reason for it being there. And famously the conservative is the person who says, well, I know we can't see why it's there, but it exists. It must exist for some reason. So we should keep it up until we're sure about this. Whereas the liberal is the person who says, well, I can't see any reason for this fence to be here. So we should knock it down. And religion may be something like this fence, it may be that it serves some important purpose that as it was being built throughout the history of our species, evolutionarily speaking, that purpose was being served by religion, and now we look upon this fence, and we can't quite see what it is that it does.

Well, it provides community and a sense of morality, and we think, well, we can surely get that elsewhere. We can invent our own meaning, and we can invent atheist churches or humanist association. So I don't know if we need this fence. and so we knock it down. But I think if it were that easy, then we wouldn't have built that fence in the first place. We would have just invented our own meaning. We would have just created humanist societies from the start.

So given that religion must serve some purpose, otherwise I don't think it would exist, and so ubiquitously across the globe, I'm a little bit pessimistic about this decline in religion. Do you have any views about the effect that a decline in religion might have on a society and whether that could be a good thing or a bad thing, or if there are any kind of historical examples that we can use to inform

our views on this matter? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I can't tell the future, so I don't know, you know, in a country like Sweden or Norway, where institutional religion has declined, like are these countries in for a rough next century? I would agree with you that our species developed these behaviors for a reason. I mean, we can talk about religion as an evolutionary adaptation here, which it's outside of my wheelhouse, so a lot of this is relying on the reading I've done from these scholars.

But a lot of scholars argue that religion is an evolutionary adaptation, that our species evolved to do religion because it was beneficial to our species. That's not to make a value judgment to say that religion is therefore good. you know religious studies scholars at least i as religious studies scholar try very hard not to make value judgments like that but it must have been useful in in you know the Pleistocene era and one of those use cases you've kind of hinted at it already was social solidarity you know helping to bond a community together this is the theory of you know groups competing against other other groups so a group with a more effective religious system so more effective religious beliefs and practices could

help out-compete a group with a less effective belief ritual combo um and i find that pretty convincing that we we developed this thing and it was passed on because it helped certain groups succeed but i mean so so much of what we are today you know we're in many respects those same place to scene creatures trying to make it in this weird 21st century world and some of these social not you know it's not just social contracts i say i say i say religion's a biosocial construction because so much of it is biological so we can think of like the institution of monogamy you know monogamy is still around and humans are still doing it but even that institution is declining in certain countries as well and is that a good thing or a bad thing you know

I don't know yet but our species developed monogamy over the course of centuries and it became kind of the thing to do so I think I'd put it on the same level as that that it served a purpose in deep antiquity and whether or not humanity can thrive with or without it today it's it's hard to tell I have a fear that what's happening and we can we can talk about the atheist responses to the decline of religion in terms of inventing meaning you've done a video on the rise of atheist churches which many people would see as a contradiction in terms I think that what what might be happening here this is a hypothesis is that if we imagine this fence and let's say that the reason this fence is built is because

there are rats that are getting onto our farm and they're eating our food, but we don't know that these rats exist. You know, this fence was built thousands of years ago, and it was originally built to keep out these rats, but now we've forgotten about the rats. We don't even know that rats exist. All we know is that our food is fine. And we see this fence, we don't know why it should exist, so we knock down the fence. And the next thing you know, our food starts going missing. And we think, gosh, ever since we knocked down that fence, people have started stealing our food. And then somebody goes, well, you know what? I think it's a because when the fence was up, it was a very good-looking fence, and it gave people a sense of

aesthetic appreciation and a sort of sense of sublime, which distracted them from their, from their carnal desires to steal and eat food. So without this aesthetic beauty, people are more likely to give in to their animalistic drives. And someone says, that's an interesting theory, but surely we don't need the fence for aesthetic, you know, appreciation. But whatever, let's rebuild something a bit like the fence that just looks really pretty. And so they rebuild this fence and they see that actually the food starts sort of not going missing again. It's like, oh, well, maybe that was right then. I mean, we sort of rebuilt this fence that was a bit like the old one that looks really pretty. And, you know, it's doing the trick. It's doing the job.

But we've missed what it was actually there for in the first place. And if the fence is built primarily to be good looking and aesthetic, it's probably not going to be that great at keeping the rats out. And the rats will still eventually find their way in. And so with religion, if it exists for some important reason that couldn't be facilitated by human inventions of, you know, creation of own meaning and, you know, hypothetical imperatives and this kind of thing and maximizing pleasure, then we build this fence of religion and now we're knocking it down and saying, well, actually, I mean, the decline of religion might have some bad effects because it seems to give a lot to our society, but we can build something just a bit like it. We can create our own moral theories. We can create our own systems of community and government and this kind of thing. And we try them out. And at least in the short term, look, they seem to work. A lot of atheists are perfectly happy going along to humanist meetings and finding solidarity with their other human beings. But I have a suspicion that this might be something like setting up this good looking fence that isn't actually that good at keeping the rats out and will realize that religion actually existed for a very important reason. This, I think, would tie in quite well, in fact, to the view that a lot of modern political obsessions are religious in nature because the theory often goes that they've come to replace religion. And it's this kind of unknowing subconscious approach that because this fence that we've constructed isn't very good at keeping the rats out,

people are plugging up the holes with wokeism or social justice or with, you know, Christian nationalism or whatever it may be. And that's that's sort of one rather pessimistic view of the decline of religion. I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, you mentioned atheist churches, and I think that's a great example we can start with. So I visited a so-called atheist church. I guess we can call it an atheist gathering in Houston a few years ago. It's called Houston Oasis. I'm not sure if they're still functioning, but at the time they were a thriving community. And they would meet on Sundays. They would sing songs together. The songs would be anything. It's not Christian hymns. They would have like a moral talk,

could call it a sermon maybe. So it takes elements from Protestant Christianity in Houston, Texas, you know, 22, but applies it in a very different context. And so if we think of religion as human behavior, as things humans do, you know, humans like gathering. They like gathering on a specifiable day each and every week. They like singing together. You know, it's something we've been doing time immemorial. So I see this as a very natural outgrowth. as trying to, you know, trying to replace something that people enjoy, which many Christians that I know enjoy going to church. It is a, it is a, you know, kind of a tent pole to their week.

So that's one evolution that we see here in the 21st century. I kind of share your skepticism on whether that's going to, you know, keep the rats out, as it were, to use to use your Chesterson metaphor. for. But we also see this in the corporate world. So a sociologist named Carolyn Chen recently wrote a book on religiosity in Silicon Valley and tech companies in California, where the upper management of these companies have integrated specific rituals. So whether it's meditation or a lot of it is meditation, also speaking of your compatriots and your business as a family so trying to build that sense of belonging so if we think of religion as beliefs behavior

and belonging these silicon valley tech companies are trying to create senses of belonging and sets of behaviors that you do to kind of create meaning in your life and a new community in your life all centered around your career um the there's a journalist at the atlantic named derrick thompson who calls this workism you know kind of replacing religion with work again i think it would be lazy to say this is there for a religion but I would say certain elements of these are religious and going to a gathering on a Sunday and singing together in a group is religious and so far as it looks like you know Christian service on a Sunday morning but I mean part of the power of religion and its ability to have communities thrive is the strictness in some respects and so a lot

of sociologists have found that strict religions or religions that have you know high barriers of entry and high-cost rituals that you do to prove that you're part of the group succeed the most. So ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel growing massively fast because they have higher barriers of entry and higher barriers to prove that you are part of the group. The Amish in the United States, their population has doubled in 20 years. And it's birth rates, obviously, but also just having what's called high, you know, costly signaling. So signaling to your fellow, you know, your fellow people in your religion that, hey, I am part of this.

And to prove that I'm part of this, I'm not going to engage in sex. I'm not going to drink alcohol. I'm going to, you know, attend this meeting every single Sunday and be very visible about it. Those, just on a very social and psychological level, those behaviors help the group stay together and grow faster and bigger versus, let's say, like the liberal Protestant denominations in the United States are some of the fastest dropping, you know, sloughing off members because they just have lower barriers of entry and require less costly signaling. So when I look at

Houston Oasis, you know, there's no barrier to entry. If you want to come, go ahead. And there are no costly signals that you need to do to prove that you are part of it versus just showing up on a Sunday. So lacking those costly signaling rituals, I am skeptical about these groups thriving into the 22nd century, if you will. And do you think that's about sunk cost, essentially? As a social tool here, if you make people pay a heavy price to enter into your community, then even if they start harboring doubts

and thinking maybe this isn't really for me, they think, but look, I've done all of this stuff. You know, I've paid all this money, I've given up this job, I've stopped talking to my family, I've cut off my foreskin, whatever it may be. And I think it kind of puts them, off the idea of leaving the faith or the community. Is that what you think is going on there? Honestly, I don't think so. I mean, some of these same studies show that members of strict

religions also have very high rates of happiness. Like high sense, like I belong here. I have meaning here. I have the keys to knowledge about the universe. Like, we are the correct group. and part of it is you know you can gain a certain level of social standing and social clout in a small strict community if you're a deacon in a very strict fundamentalist Christian church like you know on a grand scale of an American hierarchical power you hold barely any power but if you're one of the four deacons in this small church of 30 you know that's a high level of social clout which then helps your own sense of social well-being this is not to diminish religious trauma that happens in many of these religions. So that's obviously a factor as well,

but studies have shown a high level of self-satisfaction when you're in a group that is kind of giving you these signals, like, hey, you belong here, you have social currency in this group. So I don't know if it's so much sunk cost as it is this powerful sense of belonging. But why would that sense of belonging exist more strongly in a community that asks a lot of you in terms of sacrifice to be part of the community compared to something like an atheist church that you visited that basically says anybody can come and anybody can go as they please yeah i don't know if i have an easy answer to that i think it probably comes down to a sense of camaraderie a sense of proving yourself to the the people that matter you know

the 25 other people in your church who are also not having sex and drinking or going to movies or whatever. And there's just that strong sense of, you know, we are in this together that when I say social solidarity, that's kind of what I mean, like just this tight bondedness between individuals because you're kind of sharing the experience. I mean, one of the famously, one of the things that ties people together and gives them brotherhood for life is something like traumatic experiences. if you went to war together, if you're in the army, if you had a similar upbringing, if you were in a family and your siblings, you had a bad experience growing up. Oftentimes people find themselves much more closely tied to each other.

And if there's some kind of trauma might be too strong a term, but difficulty, you know, some labor involved in something you have to overcome in order to become part of this community, and you know that everybody else there has done that too. It has the sense of tying you together. this atheist church business sounds to me a bit like is it Slav or Jizek who talks about Diet Coke

I don't know if you've come across this where he mentions that people sort of want the thing without the thing You know I want Coke But I don't want the sugar Even though really that's what Coca-Cola is about It's like well why not just have water Why not just have some orange juice or something

Because well if you don't want the sugary drink You still want to somehow feel as if you're kind of participating in a kind in a way because there's this special place that this idea of the sugary drink holds in your brain so you want the thing without the thing pornography is sex without the sex atheism atheist churches might be something like you know religion without the religion a lot of people treat that like a good thing they say you know if i could have a religion that didn't need the belief in god that didn't have apostasy laws and punishments that didn't have dogmatism that didn't have ritual this kind of thing and i join it in a heartbeat

But what you're essentially saying is if I had a glass of Coca-Cola that didn't have any sugar, didn't have any coloring, didn't have anything except, you know, H-2O, then I would drink that Coca-Cola. It's like, maybe that's just not Coca-Cola anymore. And if you engage in a atheist church like that, you might, the kind of camaraderie that you were expecting to feel, the whole reason you're going to participate in this communal, this communal ritualistic experience with other people isn't actually there. at all because the stuff that you see is the bad thing that you want to get rid of to have just the

good stuff, it's actually a necessary prerequisite of the good stuff. Yeah, I suspect you're correct. I mean, part of the bonding of, let's say you're a young earth creationist Christian attending a church where young earth creationism is literally part of your bylaws. There's some camaraderie there, like, oh, we all believe in this difficult to believe idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Versus an atheist church like Houston Oasis, you know, there's this. There's there's there's less things holding you together in common and i suspect you're right that there there might be i don't know if there's this illusion i mean i haven't attended these groups before but i this is why i say i suspect they're not they wouldn't thrive in the same way and i suspect

people construct these these communities because they're trying to create something that they do enjoy which is hanging out with people on a sunday communal you know eating together singing together these are things that humans just like to do, jettison, while you jettison the things that you don't like, like believing in high-cost beliefs like Youngerth Creationism, engaging in high-cost rituals like abstaining from alcohol. But by lowering those barriers, you kind of ironically and simultaneously decrease the solidarity that might exist there.

Yeah. Do you think there might also be something to say, about the importance of exclusionary practices in the creation of communities, in that when we talk about what defines a community, we usually talk about people coming together in a shared location, participating in activities together, but it also must involve exclusion in some sense. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a community. It would just be an open door. You need to say that there are members and non-members. There are people who are not part of this community. And some places or some communities will say that people just aren't members of the community. It's not a

bad thing or a good thing. They're just not. Other places will antagonize people outside of the community. And so maybe if you have this kind of open door policy where you can come and go as you please, there's absolutely no barrier to entry, then it's not so much a community as it is a room with an open door that people are just walking in and out of. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, to go back to the evolution of religion again. So if we say religion is an evolutionary adaptation that helped certain groups outcompete other groups, the flip side of that are, you know,

behaviors that we would consider negative. So expelling certain members from your community, marginalizing people that do not agree with the community writ large, intergroup conflict, you know, you know, sectarian violence is, again, a tale as old as time when it comes to religion. So what we, so on one, hand it can boost pro-social behaviors like cooperation and altruism like we're going to help each

other even though we're not related to each other biologically which is what species usually do when we talk about altruism as an animal behavior but it also has these negative aspects of attacking the marginalized member within your group so i i definitely think that could be part of the part of the equation when we think about new religious groups or groups that are you know mimicking religion, but lacking sort of the other aspects of religion that have made certain groups succeed. It's all just Diet Coke. Yeah. I think, well, as you'll well know, the word paradise literally means walled garden or something

like that. The imagery of paradise being a walled garden, why do you need a wall in paradise? because it's as much about what you keep out as what you keep in. I think in the attempt to build utopian social communities, people like to focus on the good stuff. They like to focus on the things that we do, but oftentimes things are as much defined as by what you don't do. I think relationships, you know, romantic relationships

are more defined by what you don't do than what you do. It's about not sleeping with other people. It's about, you know, not going on dates, not being on Tinder or whatever it may be. and religious communities and communities in general, I think, can be thought of in the same way. They're as much defined as what you don't do and what you keep out as they are by what you keep in, which has been interesting. But I want to make sure that I have time to talk to you about some theories of religious origin,

because we've talked about sort of the nature of religion, what it is, and what it means to be part of a community. But we've hinted at the idea that this serves some evolutionary, purpose, that there's some reason why it is that religion exists. Now, of course, we can remain agnostic on the question of religion's truth. If you are a, if you are a believer in Christianity, you're going to think that the origin of the Christian religion has something to do with God. If you're a Muslim, you're going to believe that the origin of Islam has something to do with a revelation to the prophet Muhammad. But if you were to be a secularist, if you were to take

a historical approach, or if you were to put on an atheist hat for a moment, what do you think are some plausible theories of why it is that this thing called religion exists and not only exists, but exists ubiquitously across human cultures? Anywhere we look across the planet, we seem to observe something like religious behavior. What do you think best explains this? Yeah, that's a really good question. Most of my knowledge about this comes from the world of cognitive evolution, anthropological evolution. So a lot of these,

this is well outside my subfield as a scholar of late Roman religiosity. But from what I've read, one very interesting theory is what's called the hyperactive agency detection theory to explain the rise of beliefs in non-obvious beings like gods, fairies, demons,

your ancestors watching. over you so invisible beings comes from this idea that you know as our species is evolving you are rewarded to be hypervigilant because if you are at all lax in your vigilance then you'll be eaten by the saber-toothed tiger out on the savannah but if you're hypervigilant and you think you see agency everywhere you hear a noise behind you you're like oh my god what was that if you evolve that sort of cognitive bias in your brain that rewards your survival as a species but what is tied to seeing invisible things everywhere and seeing agency everywhere could also be tied to this idea of oh there is agency everywhere you know that that tree over there does have a a spirit living

within it um these things happen to me all the time sometimes good sometimes bad i it must be some sort of divine entity watching over me or punishing me for what I'm doing. So this is one theory on the rise of belief in gods. And then tied to that, how that would help one group out compete another group is the idea of big gods. So gods that care about your morality. Hey, society, you're not acting right. So I'm going to send a tornado and destroy your community. And then the community would respond by, oh, we need to placate this spirit that just punished us. Therefore, let's do the necessary rituals or the necessary moral behaviors that we need to do to placate the spirit that just punished us.

So the idea of moral gods, so gods that care about what we do, might have played a role in the evolution of humanity as groups that believe in moral gods may have acted more altruistically and more cooperative between each other, helping them out-compete other groups that do not have beliefs and big moralizing gods. Everything I'm saying here has many asterisks after them because, you know, as is the case with the academy, there's just constant debate happening especially when it comes to something like cognitive evolution where we're trying to examine humans that lived 150,000 years ago.

But these are some of the theories floating around in the world of the evolution of religion to help explain its rise. And because I've read so much of this literature, I'm very much convinced by calling religion a biocultural construction. We're so quick to say, oh, this is a social construction. But so much of religion has a biological basis

in our brains, and one of which might be this hyperactive agency detection, that we've just evolved this quirk in our cognition that is still with us today and still affects how we perceive the world to this day. Sigma Freud said that religion will exist as long as human beings are afraid of death. Do you think he's on something with that?

Possible. I mean, related to this is the idea of religion as a terror management system. So we are, you know, uniquely, cursed as a species that we know we're going to eventually die and that thought if we think about it too much is traumatic and we need to cope with it somehow we need to negotiate it somehow and so much of religion is you know coping with the idea of death thinking about the afterlife and what might come after this this earthly life it's i it's full of stories about people that have cheated death and have survived death.

And so much of it are rituals dealing with death, funerary rituals being some of the most conservative rituals out there. Like they look the same century after century after century, burying people in a special place and marking that grave. I mean, it's amazing how funerary rights stay the same over the course of millennia. I don't know too much about this scholarship, but from what I've read, it seems to be empirically proven. So if you show people, so you'll have a control group or you just, you know, show them normal images.

And then you have the experiment group where you're showing them like deeply traumatic images like dead bodies, decomposing bodies. And then measuring people who have strong belief in the afterlife versus people that don't have a strong belief in the afterlife. The people that believe in the afterlife are less distraught by the images. Yeah, Andrew, it's so much worse than that. I had a look at terror management theory as a subject, and it is one of the most interesting things that I've ever come across. Terror management theory is this idea that we have a self-preservation instinct within us to stay alive, but we also, as you say, are in a unique position among other animals of knowing about the inevitability of our own death.

and this creates a psychological conflict. We want to preserve our lives, but we know that death is inescapably coming our way, and this produces terror, which needs to be managed, hence terror management theory. And so the idea is that people invent ideas to give themselves a sense of immortality, most obviously in religion, which literally promises immortality, but also in things like the creation of the nation or engaging in the arts, you know, creating some magnum opus that will exist long after you die. He's a seen by terror management theorists as ways of denying our own death.

Ernest Becker's famous book, The Denial of Death is the origin of this kind of thought. Now, some of the examples that I found are just incredible. The first study, one of the earliest studies that was conducted that you'll surely have heard of, was municipal court judges in Tucson, Arizona. Judges, of course, have a very clear set of values as part of their worldview, which is upholding the law. Terror management theory has an idea within it called the Mortality Salience Hypothesis. And this is the idea that if these constructs of religion and community and engaging in arts are a result of the denial of death, then when people are reminded of their deaths, they should momentarily or temporarily, have an increased need for affirming these religious ideas, these community spirits, this kind

of thing. And so these judges in Arizona, they were given questionnaires. And the questionnaires, they weren't really heavy. They weren't showing them traumatic images. They weren't reminding of their own death in a significant way. But they just mentioned death on the questionnaire. The control judges, no mention of death. The other judges, when they filled out the questionnaire, there were asked some questions about their own death. Maybe what do you think happens when you die, this kind of thing. And afterwards, they were asked to do something very simple, which is to look at a court case, this one being the solicitation of prostitution. And they were just asked to recommend a bond for the prostitute. The judges who were reminded of their death

before being asked recommended an average bond of $455. The control judges recommended an average of $50, which is a huge difference, just based on being reminded of death. Now, it's been shown that you can produce similar results just by flashing the word death on a screen so quick that the person doesn't even register that they've seen it, but by doing so, here are some for you. Christians become more derogatory towards Jews, Jews become more derogatory towards Muslims. Germans, reminded of their death, will sit further away from Turkish people. Americans become more physically aggressive to other Americans with different political views. Americans also become more enthusiastic about preemptive nuclear chemical and

biological strikes against countries which pose no immediate threat to them. Iranians are more supportive of suicide bombing and more likely to consider becoming suicide bombers themselves after being reminded of death. It can also increase our contempt and disregard of, our contempt of and disregard for nature. People who are reminded of their death are more likely to deny that humans are animals. They have more negative views towards animals, considering it more appropriate to kill them for reasons other than food and medical research. It also makes people more uncomfortable in natural settings. So there were some Dutch psychologists who showed Dutch people pictures of forests and then pictures of suburban neighborhoods and asked them which they like

the look of better. The control groups like the look of the forest. They like the look of the nature. But people who were reminded of their own deaths preferred the suburban neighborhoods. And the mortality, salience hypothesis here, says that the reason this is happening is because upon being reminded of your death, the need for these death-denying aspects of our community are increased. And so when you look at a forest, which represents the natural world, death, this kind of thing, and you look at a suburban neighborhood which represents community and the fostering of a sense of immortality and that this community will exist after you, you're more likely to prefer it.

And all of this kind of stuff comes about just by being reminded of death, not having some long meditation on what it means to die, but just having it somewhere there in the subconscious. People become more uncomfortable in their own bodies. Sex becomes more averse of people who are reminded of their own death. People have higher physical aspirations and say that they intend to spend more on clothing and entertainment. They also want more like cars and Rolexes and this kind of things. And I'll give you one more because I found this one really interesting.

People who were reminded of their own death, there's a link between this and becoming more materialistic. People were asked to draw pictures of dollars and coins. And the people who were reminded of their own death drew physically larger pictures. of dollars and coins, there is just this, this Niagara of evidence that the mere reminder of death in our minds astronomically increases our need for reminders about community, material goods, religion, you know, there's obviously a strong link. People who are, who have a high death anxiety have been shown to be more religious. And that includes atheists. And that includes atheists, by the way.

Even if you're an atheist, if you're reminded of your own death and you induce death anxiety within an atheist, they might not become religious, but they become more religious than they were before. The problem, of course, is that all of this seems to point to the idea of religion being essentially, as you say, a management of our fear of death, which many people might find quite upsetting and offensive. because one of the key points of terror management theory is this happened subconsciously. People aren't going. This is what I think people need to understand. When I suggest that religion is an exercise in the denial of death, I'm not saying that people are consciously going, I'm going to die, I'm really terrified, I'm going to invent this story to help myself get out of it.

This happens subconsciously. People really do believe that this stuff is actually true and has good philosophical and historical grounding because they have to. because you couldn't deny death just for the sake of denying death because you would know that you're deceiving yourself. So, of course, people are really going to believe that this is a result of genuine philosophical inquiry. But there's a good deal of evidence here

that seems to suggest that at least part of religious belief has a lot to do with just the denial of death. I find that fascinating. But do you think that this is a troubling thing for religious belief? Is this, are these kinds of findings, things, things that religious people can take on board and find interesting responses to, or do you think this is quite damning for the truth of religious belief? Yeah.

I see it no more damning or troubling than saying, like, monogamy is a construction to own women and pass women between, you know, monarchs back 500 years ago. You know, like, monogamy itself doesn't have this beautiful evolution to it, but today, for many people, they derive a great deal of beauty and meaning to merit. is someone that they love for their life, you know? So I could see it being troubling for some people. For me, it is very close to a theory that's really convincing to me, which is the idea of existential anthropology. A lot of what humans do when it comes to religious ritual is about trying to manage our own existence and trying to gain agency in a world that's constantly

trying to thwart our agency. So you're trying to build wealth for yourself. but then you get cancer and it devastates your savings account or you're trying to, you know, get that promotion at work and then the boss passes over you. So we're constantly trying to make our way in this world, and the world is constantly trying to thwart us. So this idea of existential anthropology was pioneered by an anthropologist named Andrew Jackson, ironically, not the singer, but he's a professor at Harvard University. he really focuses on magic and magical ritual. So humans doing things that, you know, from a scientific method perspective, seem kind of silly. So I study ancient Christian magic, and you would have somebody,

you know, fashion an amulet that calls upon Jesus and the Archangel Michael. And if you wear it around your neck, then demons and sickness will stay away from you. And I'm sure if you put this to a double-blind study, that would not work. But if you view it through the lens of existential anthropology,

that humans will do anything, absolutely anything to augment their ability to thrive in this world, do anything to augment their agency in this world, then it seems a little bit less crazy to put a little scrap of the gospels around your neck to not get invaded by demons. So I see this closely related to terror management theory. There's other studies that have shown that religious ritual helps cope with your sense of fear and terror in a dangerous situation. So there's a study done on Israelis during the Lebanese-Israeli war in the early 2000s. And women who prayed with the Psalms on a daily basis reported less sense of terror in the midst of being bombed. And the people that benefited the most from

engaging in that ritual were closest to the Lebanese border. So like the practice of chanting Psalms daily helps cope with with you know terror in the midst of a literal war and I see this intimately tied to this idea of existential anthropology you're just trying to cope with this existence and ritual being one of those strategies to do so not just belief because we mentioned belief in like the afterlife maybe help dampen your your fear of dying but that's that's a psychological thing that's happening in your brain what about a ritual that you do on a daily basis and how that can help inculcate these feelings even even more strongly yeah that's that's interesting not just the idea

that the people who engaged in these kinds of rituals are less fearful but that the closer they are to the action the more likely they are to be engaging in such rituals it's an interesting microcosm of religious belief it's an interesting bird's eye view of the effect that coming close to disaster can have upon religious belief. We live in one of the most peaceful times that the world has ever known. Of course, there are wars happening all over the place and violence and tyranny still before us, but on a global scale, this is one of the most secure, prosperous times to be alive.

It is the most secure and prosperous time to be alive in human history, at least here in the West. Do you think that maybe then that has something to do with this decline of religious belief, As you mentioned, it's kind of in the West where religion is most obviously declining. Do you think this might have something to do with the fact that it's actually very difficult to imagine a war breaking out in the United States? Well, it's getting to that point. But it still seems surreal in the way that it doesn't feel surreal when a war happens elsewhere. If we heard that there was another civil war in America or the US goes to war with Mexico or something like this or the UK and France, it's just so unthinkable and do you think that maybe the development of this sense of security

and peace has something to do with the decline of religion because as you say part of the benefit of having religious belief and religious ritual is to manage our terror in situations of conflict and disaster yeah i don't have hard data to back this up as more of a hunch and i think it's correct because when you look at the countries that are secularizing they tend to be the wealthiest countries, countries with lowest rates of homicide, violent crime. So there may be a correlation there. Another way to think about this, though, is there are more options now to try to augment your agency in this world. So if you do have wealth, you can try to buy your way out of problems. So when you think of, you know, what was available to you as a, you know,

a Roman living in rural Asia Minor back in the fourth century, you know, what was available to you to cope with existence? And there wasn't that many things. You know, you could do religious ritual. You could rely on your community members. This is how I think about magical ritual in the Roman Empire. It was just one of the creative strategies that people turned to to try to cope with something like typhus or, you know, losing a limb in fourth century Asia Minor, you know, something that would be devastating to your livelihood versus today there's just so many more options than religious ritual. I think it's interesting you mentioned religious wars. A lot of people like to say or they like to point out or make a point of the fact that so many wars involve religion

that is, you know, religious countries are always going to war with each other. It may be that religious belief and the totality of religious belief and the conviction involved in religious belief drives people to defend it to the death and go to war with each other and engage in military expansionism. But it's possible that this could be the other way around as well. If religion is a result of our management of terror and fear, then it might not be that the most religious communities are going to war, but that the communities that are going to war have to be the most religious because this is an exercise in managing the terror that comes along with with war. I mean, I don't know what you would expect. If there was another World War that

involved the UK and the US and the way that they were involved in World War I and World War II, I would predict an increase in religious belief because of this no atheists and foxholes type narrative, which I think may well be true. I don't think that should be paraded by religious people, by the way. I don't think it, well, I think it says a lot about a religion. If some somebody proudly says, well, there are no atheists in foxholes, it's like, okay, so you're not going to be convinced by reason or argument, but I tell you what, when you're at absolute most desperate, then you might actually start to believe in me. I don't think it's a good look for them, in other words. But I think it's accurate. And so when people talk about

religion being tied up to so many wars across the globe, the causation might go the other way around. If religion is indeed an attempt to deal with our fears involved in being in disaster situations, then what do you expect? Of course people are going to be more religious who are constantly going to fight each other and risk their death every single day. There is a theory called the war sociality hypothesis that war makes people more religious, and it is tied to what we've been talking about. If you have a society that experiences a traumatic series of traumatic events, people will seek out a community. They'll they'll seek out religious ritual and they'll seek out religious beliefs in the decades

after. So some of the scholars that study the war sociality hypothesis have focused on Uganda in Sierra Leone, which experienced horrific wars throughout the 80s and 90s, and rates of church attendance and rates in belief in God and belief in the afterlife all increased in the decades after in these countries. Some of this research comes from the same evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrick, who's done research on the hyperactive agency detection. So his research has kind of been in the background this whole time. And I was unsurprised reading this research because it kind of cohered with everything that I've researched on existential anthropology and the terror management theory that because this happens

even after natural disasters. So a hurricane, a tornado, earthquake, religiosity sees a bump because as the theory goes, this you know mass trauma can can be cope you can cope with mass trauma using these strategies that humans have developed over the course of millennia which is communal ritualized gathering do you think that's troubling or ought be troubling for a religious believer in terms of their conviction and the truth of their doctrines the fact that belief seems to be so dependent upon environmental circumstances probably more so than you know the the philosophical convictions of intellectual circles at the time I suspect so I'll just focus on Christianity because I know

more Christians than other religious groups but I suspect the Christians that I know would not be troubled by that they'd be like well no shit like this is where you find your peace and and love in the arms of Jesus so this is where you should go after a war whether they would be bothered by the idea that so much of it is explainable I think very possible I think religious studies as a field can be troubling because you are trying to explain things that are so often brushed aside or spoken in such sublime ethereal language that it kind of removes it from scrutiny. So there are people that describe religion as like the world's wisdom traditions. Houston Smith was this famous 20th century religious studies scholar who describes

religions as these transcendent timeless wisdom traditions. Joseph Campbell was very similar. And see Jordan Peterson in the exact same vein here in the 21st century. Like for him, it's, you know, something like the Torah can tell us these timeless truths to the here and now. But from the religious studies perspective, these are all specific texts created by specific people for specific audiences in specific times and spaces. And by making them explainable, that might remove some of the mystique. So I can see that being the case for religion.

If you think of religion, oh, it's a biocultural evolutionary adaptation. that helped social bonding in the Pleistocene era and that's why we have it today that could be troubling but you know I use the example of monogamy again because it's so obvious that that is a biocultural invention as well

and so many people derive a great deal of you know meaning out of that institution so I think there are different resolutions of explanation I don't think this is a perfect analogy I have troubles with it but I think it's instructive here you may have come across it, the kettle analogy. You ask, why is the kettle boiling? There are two answers to that.

One explanation might be because the molecules are becoming more excited and moving more rapidly and therefore increasing the temperature because of an electrical signal coming from the plug socket. The other answer of why the kettle boiling is because I'm thirsty and I want a cup of tea. And they're both legitimate, but they exist in different spheres. And so people might see religious studies as a threat because you're trying to take this quite meaningful pursuit of feeling thirsty and wanting a cup of tea and reducing it to molecules bumping around. You're taking this sublime, this chasm of human meaning and trying to fill it up with anthropology and science. Maybe these are just explanatory piles that can exist next to each other.

I think that's perhaps a more diplomatic way of looking at things. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a different mode of, it's a different method. You know, the idea of theory and method. You know, method are the tools that you use to study your data. You know, as somebody who does archaeology in ancient history, my methodology involves textual analysis and sometimes material analysis of ancient objects. And then theory is being very circumspect with the categories that you use. What is religion? What is math? magic, what is ritual? And I see people that, you know, say, you know, wokeism is religion as being pretty messy with their theory. So religious studies as a theory and method is different from, say, something like theology and hermeneutics, where you take an ancient text like the Hebrew Bible, which is created by Judah Heights, which is an identifiable kingdom living in the Iron Age 2 period, and then trying to apply it at what does, what meaning can we derive from this text. You know, that's hermeneutics. It's a very different field. It's not what I'm doing. I'm not necessarily

you're going to say it's illegitimate. Sure, if that's your thing, is to try to derive meaning from this judahite text from the Iron Age, then that's your prerogative. But religious studies is trying to do something different, which is usually what I call like the text and context method, where you're trying to put the text in its context and explicate what it means. Andrew Henry, where can people find you online? You can find me on YouTube at Religion for Breakfast. I'm also on Twitter and Instagram at Andrew Mark Henry. Well, I'll recommend that people do that as soon as they can. I've, I've seen your channel grow to a crazy extent since I first became aware of it. And I think it's got something to do with the clarity and instructiveness of the

videos. I think they're wonderful sources for reliable and, well, nothing's ever neutral, but as neutral as it gets. Information about religion and religious history. So for people watching and listening, recommend that they go and check you out as soon as they possibly can. but this has been this has been fun this has been interesting and there's so much more to discuss with you and perhaps we'll get the chance to do it at some point in the future maybe even in person but with that said thanks for coming on thank you so much for having me Thank you.