Audio only:
Are 9 out of 10 Catholics really leaving the Church, as many headlines say? Joe examines the study referenced in these articles and shows how it actually paints a much different picture…
Transcript:
JOE:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery and I want to come back from vacation by addressing what sounds on the surface like horribly bad news. There was a story from Catholic News Agency saying nine in 10 cradle Catholics are leaving the church or have left the church. And it didn’t take long for Protestant channels like Cleve to antiquity to seize upon this. Ben sat down with miles from answering Adventism, who now has his own channel called Canon and Creed, and they claimed these new statistics of Catholic apologists scrambling. And the problem is if those numbers sound unbelievably bad, it’s because they are literally unbelievable. They are not true. And we’re going to get into what the actual numbers are and how we know that and see how this is actually a very good piece by Olivan and Rhoda that has one false line that took the internet by a storm. So I want to address that, unpack what the data actually says, and then the positives we can take away from that because there’s actually some good news in there if you know where to look. So with no further ado, here’s the kind of misrepresentation of the data that Ben and Miles and a lot of people did where they took this to mean if you raise 10 kids, nine of them are statistically likely to leave the faith
CLIP:
Nine in 10 cradle Catholics leave the church. That’s a ton. That’s almost everyone. That’s 90% of people who grew up Roman Catholic are leaving the Roman Catholic Church. That’s absolutely insane. I just did a show with Javier Perdomo where we’re talking about this kind, sort about the big pull that they had for all the social media influencers to go to the Vatican. Like we got to come up with a strategy, we got to rectify this asap. So I mean, I can see why nine out of 10 cradle Catholics are leaving the church. That’s insane numbers, man.
JOE:
Look, I want to start by saying two things. Number one, he’s right. Those are insane numbers. Those are just literally unbelievable numbers. If we were losing 90% in each generation, the Catholic church would be gone within two generations or so. I mean it would just be infinitesimally small. And so while there has been a decline, it hasn’t been anything on that scale and we’re going to see that very clearly in the numbers. But the other thing to say is I want to sort of defend them. I think they should have done their research better than they clearly did, and there were even people telling them that they were reading the numbers wrong. But part of the reason they’re reading the numbers wrong is Catholic News Agency has a headline that says Study nine in 10 cradle Catholics leaving the church. And one of the reasons Catholic News Agency says that is because of this line from Rhoda and otherwise excellent journal article, which is called Religious Transmission, a Solution to the Church’s Biggest Problem.
So I’m going to let you hear their argument, see if you can figure out what went wrong with the numbers and then we’ll unpack what the numbers actually say. So first they start off by saying that in 1973, 80% of all those raised Catholics still identified as Catholic when surveyed as adults in 2002, that figure was 74% by 2022 to drop to 62%. More and more of those raised Catholic are leaving. Now already you might say, well, 62% is not 10%, that’s not a 90% drop. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Okay, that should be the first red flag, right? Okay, that doesn’t sound like the data is saying 90% of cradle Catholics are leaving, but then Rodan Boli VI think reasonably argue, well, it’s a pretty weak criterion to say, well, they continue to check the Catholic box on a survey. Now I want you to remember that because we can’t eat our cake and have it too.
That’s the order that phrase goes by the way. And so if it’s not enough to just claim Catholic, you have to actually do something. Then we’ll want to remember that when we’re saying, okay, what does it mean to say you were raised Catholic? Were you just checking the box? Then we’ll get into that. But they’re saying that’s too low of a bar to really be a Catholic in a meaningful sense, we need some measure of Catholic commitment. And so a more salient question would be something like, do you still go to mass every Sunday? And on that score in 1973, about 34% of those raised Catholic were still attending Mass weekly or more often. By 2002 it had fallen to 20%. By 2022, it had plummeted to 11%, and it’s on the basis of that 11% number. They say, we are losing nine out of 10 cradle Catholics.
Can you spot what went wrong with that analysis mathematically? Because there is a very basic mathematical error and we can just ask the question like this, okay? Is it really true in any sense of the term, however you want to define what it means to be in the church or to be Catholic? Is there any sense in which it is true that nine out of 10 cradle Catholics leave the church or have left the church or are leaving the church? And I think there’s a couple ways you could pose the question. The first would be to say, okay, well did nine out of 10 people raised Catholic stop calling themselves Catholic. And we already saw the answer to that is no. 62% of those who say they were raised Catholic continue to call themselves Catholic. Now, what it means to say they’re Catholic, what it means to say they were raised Catholic is left a bit undefined, but it’s certainly not a 90% drop anyway, you cut it.
But then the second, and I think they’re right to say maybe more meaningful question would be, well did nine out of 10 people who went to mass as kids stop going to mass. Now you might say yes, because only 11% of people calling themselves Catholic or saying they were raised Catholic rather say that they go to mass every Sunday. Well, here’s the problem with that. You can’t assume that a hundred percent of those people were going to mass in the first place because remember the numbers they gave you that even back in 1973, only 34% of people calling themselves Catholic went to Mass Weekly or more and only 20% of those in 2002. So to say that you were raised Catholic, you might have been in that 20% or that 34% or you might’ve not, might’ve been in the 80% who called themselves Catholic but didn’t regularly go to Mass.
In other words, just as you now as an adult might say Catholic, even though you don’t really do much of anything Catholic wise to say you were raised Catholic, you might have been doing the exact same things then that you were doing. Now, here’s the problem. The data they’re wanting, what percentage of people who were raised practicing Catholics going to Mass every Sunday continue to do that as adults? That’s just not something that this survey is asking. This is what’s called the GSS, the General Statistical Survey. And the question in here is just in what religion were you raised? People can say Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Islam, Sufi, Sunni, Shia, some other religion, no religion don’t know or they could refuse to answer. That’s it. There’s no part of that question that they have to meet any criteria to say, well, you had to have gone to mass regularly as a kid if you were baptized as a child and never entered church again, you might say you were raised Catholic or you might not.
And you’re going in one of those two boxes based only on what you say in response to that question. That’s it. So when we’re looking at that weekly mass attendance, it’s true only 11% of people who call themselves raised Catholic go to Mass weekly. Well, actually that number might be a little too low and we’ll get into that in a little bit. It might be slightly higher than that, like 14, 15%, but okay, so you’ve got 11% we’ll say, but you’re not going from a hundred to 11%, you’re going from a much lower number like 20 or 34 to 11%. And in fact, we have good reason to believe that you’re going much lower than that because as we’re going to see the people most likely to not go to mass as adults, were the ones who didn’t go to mass as kids. That’s kind of a no-brainer, but it means that there’s just not anything like a 90% decline. There is a decline of some kind and we’re seeing something of that in the data, but it’s nowhere near a 90% decline. Now, this was something that again, I can understand Ben and Miles simply misunderstanding. They’re reading a headline and not really digging into the data at all, but this is something people have tried to point out to them and you can see them kind of reacting in real time to Pope Defender on Twitter explaining, yeah, this study doesn’t actually say what the headline says, says something very different than that.
CLIP:
Why is the headline fake? Because it completely misrepresents what the actual studies show. The headline implies either nine out of 10 kids identifying as Catholic or no longer Catholics or nine out of 10 kids raised attending mass or no longer attend mass. Neither of these are what the study shows. Instead, the study shows a decline but not an apocalyptic decline and people raise Catholic still identifying as Catholic with a recent uptick to somewhere around 62%. So if you raise your kids identifying as Catholic, six out of 10 of them still will. So let’s look at attendance. So he is kind of like he’s bypassing. The actual issue here is that nine out of 10 cradle Catholics are leaving
JOE:
And
CLIP:
Deflecting it well, and Cradle Catholic doesn’t mean that they’re still kids, right?
JOE:
They’re just misunderstanding what the objection here is. The objection is not that we think cradle Catholics are still in the cradle or that they’re still kids. The objection is it sounds like you’re saying nine out of 10 leave the church as in they were practicing and then stopped practicing. And that’s simply untrue. That is simply not what the data actually says at all. We can see this really clearly. Let’s say you’ve got somebody who grows up nominally Catholic. They come from maybe a Catholic ethnic background, historically Catholic people, and so their family calls themselves Catholic, but they haven’t practiced a faith devoutly in generations. They don’t believe what the church believes. They’ve got wildly different politics. They maybe baptized their kids. They might have at least tried for a church wedding if it wasn’t too inconvenient, but they have never gone to mass regularly. And that family, those kids, they grow up, they become adults, they can continue the exact same thing that they did their whole life.
Just take them as a case study. Did we lose them? Well, they’re doing the exact same thing they were doing before. What does it mean to say we lost them? If you say, well, they’re not really Catholic unless they’re going to mass every week, well then they were never really Catholic. If you say a more ambiguous relationship, a more lukewarm Catholicism still counts as Catholicism. Well, they still have that. They grew up lukewarm Catholics. They’re still lukewarm Catholics. And so you either count that or don’t, but it makes no sense to count it when they’re kids and then not count it when they’re adults and count that as us losing someone who stayed in the exact same spot they were religiously the entire time. That’s just not in any meaningful sense losing that person Now only in maybe a sense of a metaphorical, oh, we lost them, we failed to reach them in the first place.
But by that standard you could say we’ve lost most of the world who’s not Catholic. So it’s just not true that we’re losing nine out of 10. So hopefully you can understand why mathematically that’s simply not true. But we can get even deeper in the data, and I’m going to turn back to this GSS data in a minute, but there’s some data from the same time period that Pew Research Center did with its religious landscape study in 2023 and 2024, and it found the good news. I’ve mentioned this in an earlier episode and I’ll link to that at the very end, but it found the good news that the decline of Christianity seems to have floated or even leveled off, that you have this period of marked decline of Christianity really from the mid 20th century. You have of course the sexual revolution. You have a lot of people becoming disenchanted with traditional religion.
You have another kind of real steep decline both in the Catholic church after the sex abuse scandals in the early two thousands, but also just with the rise of new atheism and everything else in the early two thousands and sort of a reaction, we’ll get into this to the Iraq war and a view that religion is scary and dangerous. So you see all of this stuff in the data and that doesn’t seem to be happening still. That doesn’t mean we’ve immediately recovered all the ground. There’s still a lot of lost ground, and you’ll see it if you look generation by generation, but the hemorrhaging seems to have slowed or even stopped, and that is really good news. And one of the things that they found in that study is that 74% of people who were raised in a religion and grew up attending weekly religious services in a family in which religion was very important, still identify with their childhood religion today.
Now that’s not just looking at Catholicism, that’s looking at all religions, but this is the kind of data that Bolvan and Rhoda are wanting. Like, okay, if you raise your family going to church regularly and you make this the center of your life, how likely is it that your children, these cradle Catholics are going to grow up to continue to identify as faithful Catholics or continue to identify as Catholics at all? And the number seems to be somewhere around 70 to 75% and we’ll see more stuff that kind of points in that direction. So the 62%, that’s the low end of that, but that’s again, remember that’s 62% is not people who religion was very important and attended weekly religious services. That’s a much broader category of just I was raised Catholic. Maybe it was important to my family, maybe it wasn’t. And so if it was important, if you were going to mass all the time, at least every week, then the number’s much better than 62%, 74%.
On the flip side, if it wasn’t important to you, fewer than half of the children brought up in that context, they were raised in a religion, but groups seldom are never attending religious services and the family in which religion was not too important or not at all important. Then fewer than half of those kids continue to identify with their childhood religion, they’re much more likely at 40% to now say that they have no religion or they have a different religion, 56%, it gives you 16%. So cumulatively 56% of those kids are leaving the kind of lukewarm religious households. Again, that’s not specific to Catholicism, but it does immediately flag that this alleged 90% decline isn’t a 90% decline, and in fact, it’s not even as if you have a decline. So okay, go back to the weekly mass attendance numbers. You got 34% and then 20 and 11%.
That can sound like, okay, well we’re losing two thirds of weekly mass goers, and even that’s not what the numbers are actually saying. The numbers are much better among mass goers and people who take the faith seriously. So what do the numbers actually say? So here I want to turn now to the GSS data. This is the 2022 general social survey. I may have called it the wrong thing earlier, the general social survey, the GSS and I had to dig into the data to try to find this to double check what it was saying, and I wanted to see how the Catholic numbers compared to Protestant numbers, because I had this suspicion that raised Protestant or raised Catholic was too broad of a category to be particularly meaningful. That is going to include both people who were raised in devout homes and people who were raised in really lukewarm homes.
And sure enough, if I’m doing this data right, that’s exactly what we found. So I’m actually putting up the very boring slide showing the tabulation summary for a multilevel tabulation in the GSS data explorer because I am not a sociologist, so I’m using, this is all open source data and they have a tutorial about how to find out answers to things from the data. But because I’m new at it, I just want to make sure I’m not screwing things up because my numbers were slightly different, only slightly but slightly different than the numbers Rodda and Olivan have. And frankly, those guys deal with this kind of stuff a lot, but if the numbers that I’ve got are right or nearly so the Protestant and Catholic numbers are actually much more similar than one might expect, which makes sense if we realize there’s not a 90% decline.
The other thing to note here is I looked at only people who answered the question about still attending. There were plenty of people who skipped the question or didn’t answer, and maybe that indicates that they don’t attend or maybe they just missed the question or I don’t want to read into a non-answer. So I’m excluding the non-answers, which might bump up the percentage slightly, but I think it’s how to best handle excluded data. If somebody doesn’t answer a question, you don’t want to guess what their answer is. So with all of those very boring caveats, what do we find in the data among people raised either Protestant or Catholic, again, which is a very broad category that could be lukewarm, could be devout 30% of Protestants and 31% of Catholics no longer attend religious services at all, or maybe I shouldn’t even say no longer, maybe they never did, but 30% are completely not attending church.
31% of Catholics, that’s almost identical. On the flip side, about 22% of Protestants and 14% of Catholics attend either weekly or more often than weekly. So here I’ve found what seems to be a difference between the Rodan Boulevard data, but this again might be me just missing something in the data that it is true. 11% of Catholics, 11% of those raised Catholic say they go to mass every week, but another 3% say they go several times a week. That’s obviously we should include that in the number if that’s all right. So that should be 14%, but either way, you’ll notice that this is not 90% of people leaving in the same way. You wouldn’t look at the Protestant data and say 78% of Protestants leave Protestantism. It’s just not true. In either case of number of people who call themselves raised Protestant or raised Catholic, don’t attend church about 30%.
Another huge chunk depending on which group we’re talking about 45 to what is that? 55% attend church sometimes and then anywhere from 14 to 22% attend church weekly or more often. So again, not a 90% decline. And again, remember that’s from people who just say they were raised that way. That doesn’t mean a hundred percent of them were doing it devoutly and now only 14% of them are or 22% of them are. This is every, if you grew up in a not very devout family and you continue to be not very devout, you haven’t lost the faith, you’re maintaining the same level you had. Hopefully that’s really clear, but people have been getting this wrong online very consistently. Just going off of that one line in the Bevan and Rhoda data that the essay I should say about we’re losing 90% or we’re losing nine out of 10 cradle Catholics, we are not if by losing you mean they had a devout faith and then lost it, or they had regular practice of the faith and then lost it.
That’s simply not true. That’s simply not in the data at all. Well, we actually have, and Olivan I know knows this because he’s actually one of the best articulators of this is a multi-generational problem. And so there is a real problem here. It does deserve to be addressed, but it’s nothing like we’re losing 90% generation over generation. It isn’t as if whatever generation raised you, 90% of those raised in the faith left. That’s simply not true. You might know a lot of people who grew up devout and then left. That may be your anecdotal experience. It’s nowhere like 90% when you actually look at the data. What we actually have is, as I say, and as Olivan says very well to Eric Simmons, a multi-generational problem where what we’re seeing is not even so much people leaving the faith as people changing which box they checked because maybe their parents or grandparents disaffiliated or left the faith in practical terms many, many years ago.
CLIP:
Would it be fair to categorize it like this from the mid 1960s or so, maybe even a little bit earlier until the mid 1990s, late 1990s, what we see is a weakening where people are still identifying as I am Catholic, I am a Methodist, or whatever the case may be, but there’s a weakening in actual practice and maybe even belief.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then from the late nineties till today, both them and their kids are starting to say, I don’t really even need to say I’m part of this religion anymore because I really don’t believe it. Is that kind of a fair, very general, very broad way to describe it.
I think that’s basically it. And also you’ve got this generational thing. So for those people, and those people are the ones who aren’t getting their kids baptized after 2000. Now what they don’t have but their parents had was religiously practicing parents kind of breathing down their neck. Of course you’re getting them baptized. That’s now what, two generations if not three generations back. So they might’ve been baptized because of the grandma would’ve, it would’ve been a thing, but for their parents, who cares? I mean, you do you kind of thing. So absolutely, it’s that kind of, I say it is the fruits of two, three generations of this kind of hollowing out, if you like, of American Christianity.
JOE:
And in Rhoda and Boulevard’s essay, they actually acknowledge this. They say the parents are less devout than the grandparents. So those parents have less faith to hand on, so to speak. But then the children of those parents will tend to be less religious still, so they will have less to hand on to the fourth generation. The pattern is self-reinforcing. So if you’re hearing that 90% number as devout parents are losing 90% of their kids, it’s simply not true. It would be something the four generational cycle looks something more like this. I mean this isn’t perfect, but just kind of sketch this out as an illustration. You’ve got grandparents who are very devout, they identify as Catholic, they practice the faith, and then maybe that’s your silent generation or whatever. And then they have kids, baby boomers who identify as Catholic, but they don’t really practice the faith.
Maybe they go sometimes, but they’re not weekly mass goers. They then have kids, millennials or whatever who they’re raised Catholic because they went to church sometimes maybe it meant a lot to grandma and grandpa that they go to Catholic school or that they get baptized or that they have a first communion. So there was enough of a connection with the grandparents that they still consider themselves raised Catholic, but they were never deeply formed. They didn’t go to any kind of religious instruction. They didn’t go to mass regularly. Maybe they didn’t go to Catholic school at all, whatever, it’s, they have some connection enough where they would feel comfortable saying, raised Catholic on a survey. But if you ask them for deep theological knowledge of what does the church even believe or even shallow theological knowledge, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t know. And nowadays, grandma and grandpa aren’t around.
There’s no social pressure to continue to identify with Catholicism, so they don’t practice and they probably don’t even identify as Catholic anymore. They’re going to show up as having left the faith and then their grandkids, their kids, the great grandkids of the devout, they wouldn’t even be baptized. There’s no longer a social pressure to get them baptized because the boomer parents don’t care. And the grandparents who would’ve cared or great grandparents who would’ve cared are out of the picture. So the millennial mom and dad are just like, we’re not even going to bother getting them baptized. So when they enter adulthood, they don’t even call themselves Catholic in the first place. They have no connection to Catholicism whatsoever. And so sure enough, we see that in declining infant baptism numbers, all of this stuff appears as a pretty basic pattern. And the problem is the way the survey data is often presented makes it sound like the problem is in that third generation because they say they were raised Catholic, but now they don’t practice the faith anymore.
But in reality, the problem was a generation prior that, and I don’t want to pick on the boomers because actually Bevan argues that in many ways they are a generation sort of sinned against in this regard, but it’s the parents of those who show up in the data as having left, who are actually the ones who didn’t really pass on the faith because they had stopped believing in it themselves or they stopped kind of living it out. And there is a wealth of data to support what Avante is saying here that this is not a case of losing 90% of a generation. This is a case of an already existing atrophy showing up in the numbers. So Rowan and Littlefield talk about this in the handbook of contemporary Christianity in the United States, and I’ve mentioned this particular quote before, but I find it helpful that when boomers dropped out of the church, they continue to identify as Christians.
Now that’s again Catholics and Protestants alike, but that those after them don’t really do the same thing. So if you are someone who you were raised to believe Christianity was kind of important or really important, whatever, and you don’t really practice it anymore, there was enough of a social pressure on earlier generations to continue to call themselves Christian, even if they didn’t really believe deeply in it, and that social pressure is just gone, so they’re no longer checking that box, but that is not showing you where the faith was lost. That’s showing you where the box checking was lost. Hopefully that’s clear. Christian Smith in young Catholic America makes the same argument, and this is actually one of the sources Rodan Olivan site to if you look at the footnotes and they point out that what we’re really looking at here is US reckoning with this mid 20th century sort of crisis in the faith.
And as Bevan points out in that interview I quoted from earlier, you find the same basic pattern in Protestantism as well, that in the mid 20th century there is a mass loss of faith in Christianity and many of the people who stop going to church and stop living in accordance with Christian teaching or trying to live in accordance with Christian teaching, there’s a lingering effect where they continue to identify themselves as Christian for a while and they might baptize their kids for the sake of their grandparents and so on. But that we’re seeing that lingering sort of gone. And in fact, what Smith points out is that with the one huge exception of mass attendance, young people, and this is now 10-year-old data, but young people in the two thousands look very similar to young people of that same age cohort in the 1970s, like the 18 to 25 year olds.
And so we aren’t seeing a mass decline. Hopefully that makes sense. We’re not seeing, oh, everyone was evangelizing really well until this most recent generation and now things have suddenly gotten really bad that rather it’s very much kind of keeping the same sort of results. And as we’re seeing actually things getting a little bit better, the hemorrhaging slowing, stopping leveling off and maybe the first seeds of a genuine revival. But as Smith points out whatever major changes in beliefs and attitudes happen among Catholic emerging adults, that’s 18 to 25 on these measures of their religious participation, et cetera. For the most part, those are things that had already happened by the 1970s. So this is not some new problem. The major exception again, is mass attendance, but there’s several reasons that you could postulate for that, one of which is just that there’s less social pressure to go to mass if you don’t believe.
So there’s some bad news there for sure. And we do have a multi-generational problem, and we do have a situation where 85 to 90% of people who say they were raised Catholic don’t go to mass every single week. Many of them go sometimes, but they don’t go to mass every week like they should. So let’s diagnose what’s gone wrong and try to see if we can figure out where to go from there. And this is, I think the stronger part of Roto BVAs essay that they or I know essay study, I never know what to call these things. It’s in Church Life Journal. I usually call things in journals, essays or articles, but it’s also compiling survey results. So whatever, they’re not doing a different survey. They’re taking the GSS data and they’re telling us what to make of it. And one of the things that they’re arguing is, well, number one, almost all religious groups in the US have declined since the 1950s.
Again, this is not a new problem in this generation losing 90%, we’re seeing an overall decline in Christianity and in religion more broadly since the mid 20th century. So you can’t just blame something Catholics are doing specifically. You can’t blame Vatican ii. It doesn’t really make sense to say, oh, here’s the one thing we specifically are doing that’s making everything go off the rails. Because while there are some areas where we’re lagging behind Protestants in terms of retention, the picture is much more similar than you might be led to believe. But people saying Catholic apologists are scrambling like We’ve got this unique 90% problem. No, it’s just not true. Catholic apologists hopefully just know how to read survey data better. So why have religious groups in the US almost universally declined since the 1950s? Well, they argue that we need to start with how is something like religion passed on in the first place?
Or in fact, how were any kind of systems of beliefs passed on, even if it’s something like germs, so belief in germs, things that you can’t see. How is this passed on? Well, primarily you get your religious beliefs and we’re going to see this applies to other things as well from number one testimony, number two, example, and then number three, by participating in this case in the religious activities that you see it preached, you see it lived out, and then you live it out yourself. That’s from an early stage as a kid, you should be going to church with mom and dad. It’s not good to make a habit of leaving your kids home on Sunday, even if you find them exhausting at mass, even when you feel like you can pray better without them, they need it. Even if they’re not praying, they’re being exposed to this and they’re being taught by word and deed.
This is important. Similarly, pray in front of your kids, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. That’s early childhood. Once they intern to young adulthood and adolescents, they start to care not just about what mom and dad think, but about their broader personal relationships and peers, but then also the wider culture becomes a lot more relevant. So all of this is just basic what we know about human anthropology and how we learn things. It’s not just true of religion. This is also as they point out how we come to believe in things like viruses or ultraviolet light that we don’t see directly. So in the early stages, they’re looking to mom and dad, but even then they’re wanting to see that your deeds match your words. So Rodan Olivan, cite three Cs, I’m going to add a fourth one, three Cs that matter. Consensus, certainty and credibility and consensus is going to be first consensus at home are mom and dad on the same page and what they’re teaching, and then as they get older, as they enter into the teenage years, it’s going to be important to have a broader consensus.
Well, here’s the problem. So again, we’re still looking at where things kind of go wrong in the transmission of religion. And this is not just a Catholic problem, this is not even just an American problem. There’s plenty of data to suggest. This is a pretty widespread problem that needs to be addressed on the issue of consensus. If you have consensus where you are more likely to accept with a high level of confidence, things that both of your parents are teaching as opposed to things that mom says one thing and dad says something else, that’s pretty obvious, right? Anytime my kids get a different opinion from me and my wife, or even, I’ll give you an example. I told my five-year-old that fairies didn’t exist. My five-year-old’s cousin told her fairies did exist. My daughter the next day came to me and asked if her uncle Sean was older than me.
I said, yes, he was by three years. And she said, ah, okay, he probably knows more than you do, and she assumed her cousin must have gotten this information from her dad and therefore fairies must exist. So even at that age five, she is looking at not just what does my father tell me, but does this match what other trusted adults in my life have to say, mom and dad, particularly teachers as well, but also beloved family members. And in this case, there might’ve been some motivated reasoning, but there it is. That kind of reasoning is something that is happening at a much earlier age than we sometimes give it credit for. So the one problem we have here is you have Catholics and non-Catholics married to each other. You have Christians and non-Christians married to each other, and that creates already a crisis of credibility in teaching your kids about the faith because this just becomes, well, that’s just what dad does or that’s just what mom does.
Similarly, if everyone in your area, in your extended family, your friends and their parents, teachers, coaches and neighbors, et cetera believes the same thing, they’re obviously more likely to believe that thing to be true. But of course, as we become a more pluralistic society as not only do we have more non-Christian religions in America, but you also have the breakdown of the traditional ethnic ghettos. My grandma was born in 1918. She used to tell a story as a haggerty of how she lived in the Irish Catholic ghetto in Kansas City, and it was mildly shocking that they had a German priest. It didn’t seem that weird because she went on to marry a German and she married a Hess Meyer, but at the time it was notable like, here’s a non-air guy in our neighborhood and he’s a priest. I mean, it was like a different world, and that’s just not the world we live in at all.
It’s become much more diverse and pluralistic and everything else. And one of the dangers in having a society where a bunch of different religions and creeds and belief systems and everything else are being presented to your kids and to your teenagers is that it again undermines the kind of consensus that gives rise to confidence. If everyone around your kids said, germs don’t really exist, that’s just like a medieval myth or UV rays just like superstition, they would probably start to question, well, how do I really know germs exist? How do I really know UV rays exist and so on?
And so of course you have all of that happening at the local level, but you also have this much broader level, and this is going to become relevant with things like the internet that we went from being a culture that had strong motives to emphasize religion because we were the holy religious Americans against the godless, atheist, communists, and that was the cult war narrative. So there was a strong push to encourage religion socially you have under God being added to the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, as a way of standing up to the USSR in response, and this is a story I don’t think it’s told enough, the early two thousands, there is this concern in response to nine 11 and the Iraq war that is actually dangerous because of people having too much religion, namely Muslim extremists. Now, this is my, if you want to call it conspiracy theory, go for it that a lot of new atheism should be understood as socially convenient ways of demonizing Islam in support of things like US foreign policy.
Now, that might sound crazy, but let me just lay out a basic timeline for you. I’m diverging, but I think it’s worth pointing out that whereas once we had a society saying religion is really good because it was socially useful to fight Russia, it became a case where we started to say, well, maybe religion’s not that good or too much religion’s not that good because we were fighting Muslim extremists in the Middle East. So 2003 March, the US invades Iraq that same year, Christopher Hitchens writes an excited book called A Long Short War, the Postponed Liberation of Iraq in which she lauds how we’re going to have this great short war to bring freedom and democracy and all that stuff to Iraq. The next year, Sam Harris begins what’s really the dawn of new atheism with his book, the End of Faith Religion, terror In the Future of Reason.
And if you read the book, the first lengthy story he gives is about a suicide bomber and the family of the suicide bomber being really happy that this guy blew himself up on a bus and all this other stuff. And he’s like, I don’t even have to tell you what religion he is. You already know he’s very much playing upon Americans and Westerners more broadly being afraid of Muslims at the time, and he has to have a footnote acknowledging statistically the people most likely to suicide bomb at that time were not extremist Muslims. They were Marxist Tamil Tigers. And so it was not just a stereotype, it was a stereotype that was actually false. A non-religious group motivated by Marxism was doing more suicide bombings and deadlier, suicide bombings, then Muslim extremists. But he puts that in an end note at the end of the book.
He doesn’t acknowledge, but you can see how he’s tapping into fears about the Iraq war. And then you have 2006 Richard Dawkins, God delusion, 2007, Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great, how religion poisons everything, and they keep tying Christianity together in with this boogeyman of radical Islam. And so I don’t think you can understand the rise or subsequent fall of new atheism without understanding that it served as really helpful purpose from a US foreign policy perspective and British foreign policy perspective as well. It was socially useful to demonize religion, to gen people up, to want to go fight in the Middle East. That’s my conspiracy theory. Take it for what it’s worth. But I think you see it in just looking at the timeline and things, people who are saying and everything else, the fact that it’s probably not a coincidence that people like Hitch were supporters of the Iraq war is a way of standing up for Western values vis-a-vis these overly religious people in the Middle East.
Fine. Either way, the result is the same that we no longer live in a culture that has external reasons for bolstering religion, and we now live in a culture that in many ways things, religion is a problem that needs to be solved, not maybe as pronounced as during the height of new atheism, but now you still have things like the aftermath of the sexual revolution. You have these fights about abortion, sex outside of marriage, divorce, some sexuality, gay marriage, transgenderism, et cetera, where the church and Christianity more broadly are markedly countercultural and are viewed as a problem in that sense. And then from this continued looking at this consensus problem, you got the internet. So even if you happen to live in a very Catholic neighborhood, even if you live in a very Catholic city or a very Catholic country, your kids are going to go online at some point and they’re going to be exposed for better and for worse to a world that has very different ideas.
And so you can’t really create a little Catholic ghetto in a pure sense of the term. There’s going to be some exposure to people outside. And so what we find in the research is that people who use the internet become more religiously unaffiliated and they believe less in religious exclusivism because it becomes harder and harder to think My way is right and your way is wrong. As I’m exposed to more and more different perspectives I’ve never even considered before, that’s just a fact we have to grapple with. This is true I think in many ways. Now there’s some positives that we’re not looking at there for the internet, but that’s just speaking broadly. That’s the first problem. We’ve got this problem with consensus that you can’t just create a sort of Catholic monoculture in the way you could in the past. The second problem is with certainty, and I think this flows from the first problem, and as Rhoda and Olivan point out, kids pick up these subtle cues about how strongly parents believe in the things that they’re communicating.
And so I give the example when you’re talking about science, you don’t say, Sarah, in this family, we believe that viruses can cause illness. You just say Viruses exist. Go wash your hands. And so think about that kind of language. I think there’s two ways that we’re going to fall into this problem of undermining confidence in how we present. Because as Rodan Olivo said, when parents are less confident in their religious beliefs, they tend to hedge their religious assertions with qualifications. I think we believe, et cetera. Kids pick up on that and adjust their confidence level accordingly. I think there’s actually two ways of doing that. One is you get the extreme where parents say like, oh, I don’t want to force my beliefs on my kids. Look, your job as a parent is literally to indoctrinate your kid. Doctrine is teaching. Your job is to teach your kids.
That is what indoctrination is. And so you should teach them Christian doctrine just as you teach them the teachings, doctrines of everything else science. You wouldn’t be like, I’m going to wait until they’re 18 to expose them to Helio centrism because I want them to be able to decide for themselves. That would be a strange form of parental neglect that you should actually teach your kids about the world, and that includes at the most fundamental level, teaching them the theological truths about the world. So that’s one way that we can kind of fail on that. But the other way is I think they don’t talk about this, this is my own take on that, that you can present religion in an oppositional sort of way that actually serves to undermine, to constantly tell your kids like, oh, the world out there is crazy and dangerous and wrong and bad, but in this house we believe Christianity.
One thing that’s doing is it’s turning Christianity, so it’s no longer just the truth about reality and more like your family’s antidote to the insanity of modernity. And look, by all means, Christianity is a great antidote to the insanity of modernity, but it’s so much more than that, and if it’s presented as just like your family’s thing, you can end up in the, I think we believe thing quite unintentionally in ways that I think can undermine notice. I’m doing it, I guess I think can undermine that confidence, and there’s plenty of data to support this. They cite to two important studies. One is about parents talking to their five to 7-year-old kids about germs and about angels, and the parents were less confident in their belief about angels than they were about germs, and their five to 7-year-old kids picked that up with subtle linguistic cues that they didn’t have to say, I’m only 70% sure angels exist, and I’m 99% sure germs exist.
They spoke in a way that their kids understood the nuances of language well enough to realize that, and this is not just a US problem, even though that study was looking at Americans. This is also something we find everywhere from secular societies like China to very religious societies like Iran, and so this is just a problem we have to grapple with. We want to speak in a way that’s respectful of people who aren’t Christian, but we don’t want to speak in such a way that we’re sharing this as just our own personal kind of views. What makes that particularly challenging now is related to that loss of consensus that you’re more likely to have people that you know and love personally who don’t share that worldview. So it’s a harder road to navigate to say, aunt Susan’s objectively wrong, God exists and he does not approve of the lifestyle, maybe the Aunt Susan’s living.
That’s a hard conversation to have with your kids. Having that in a loving way where you’re not speaking as if this is just your own personal view is nevertheless very important. Okay, what about the third criterion? Credibility? This is pretty straightforward. Basically, it doesn’t matter how confidently you assert that God exists catholicism’s true if you’re not also living that out, that you have to back up everything that you’re saying with your deeds. These are these credibility enhancing behaviors, and one of the problems Rodan Olivan point out is that a lot of the historic credibility enhancing behaviors are gone now. It’s things like rosaries, pilgrimages, novina, eucharistic processions, absence from meat on Fridays, these kind of devotions that once were just taken for granted, of course, your parents are going to do these kinds of things are now less widespread the past. You have to be a lot more intentional if you’re going to live out your faith, and I think we see this very clearly with people who don’t go to mass on Sunday, they’re failing at that credibility marker.
But we also see this, if you’re not living out your faith outside of mass, that the more important the faith is in your family, the more likely your kids are to continue to believe in it. That should be very obvious. But the good news there is a lot of what you need to have good and holy kids is to focus on becoming a saint yourself, and you were already supposed to be doing that, so that’s not even extra work. That’s good, right? You’ve got those three consensus, credibility and certainty, sorry, consensus, certainty and credibility. I want to add a fourth, which is culture. I think this is extremely related to what they’re saying so far and extremely related to what they’re going to say about community, but this is maybe worth addressing just head on. There’s a lot of debate about how to understand religion as culture or as a subculture or as sometimes an anti-culture of pushing against the broader culture, but in a basic level, I think it’s important to realize that for everything else, Christianity is for everything else.
Catholicism is it is amongst other things a culture. Now, what is a culture that’s a little hard to define? Clifford Geets has, or Gertz has a kind of famous definition where he calls it a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop, their knowledge is about and attitudes towards life. Now, that maybe strikes you as profound, maybe strikes you as meaningless, but it basically means this culture is the way in which life is presented. It is a way of life that is presented through all manner of symbolic forms, and symbolic doesn’t mean non-existent as he points out things like the number six are symbolic. We communicate reality through a series of symbols and the collection of that, one of the ways that we talk about that is that is this meaning transmission through symbols.
That’s what culture is, that if you say, what does it mean to be American? If you try to define that, if you try to describe that as something more than just living within a certain geographical boundaries, but actually talk about American culture, you’re going to be talking about certain things that have this deeper meaning, deeper connotation than just the thing itself, whether it’s the Nathan’s hotdog eating contest or the 4th of July or whatever that is. Both of my examples were from the 4th of July, I apologize, but you get the idea, those kind of things. That’s all culture and understood in this way. Then religion certainly serves as a culture because religion has all of these symbols, and again, symbol here doesn’t mean non-existent thing, but it’s ways of expressing ultimate reality in these ways that can be grasped. That’s going to be on the one level things like teaching, but on the other level, just things like the way you live out the culture.
You dress in a certain way, you act in a certain way. This helps to paint a picture of the world, and so as GE says in religious belief and practice, a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs. The worldview describes that is here’s a way to live in the world and this way actually works and it actually produces good results. So you’ve painted a picture of the world and then you’ve painted a picture of the ideal life to live, and you’ve pointed people in that direction, but you’ve also got this emotionally convicting part where you describe these things that strike the heart, that you’re not just saying there’s a difference between saying diet and exercise. That’s not a religion, but if you talk about things like temperance and all of that in the context of this striving for sanctity, you can tug on the soul and tug on the heart in a deeper way.
I mention all this just to say, once you think of religion as a culture, then it starts to become clear why things more than just the intellectual aspects matter, because culture is so much more than just being American is much more than just the Declaration of Independence, and being a Christian is much more than just the Bible. It is much more profound and is a whole way of living your life. It’s based on those things. Sure, but it’s richer than those things, and if you understand that, you understand a lot of what the Bible is doing, think about how Judaism is all of these cultural markers that make the Jewish people, that make Israel weird compared to their neighbors, and from a logical level you might be saying, what is the point of this? They can’t eat these kinds of meats. They can’t blend these fabrics.
What’s that all about? The priest has to wear all these fancy, strange garments. This is showing you something rather than just telling you something and it’s showing you something in such a way that you’re creating very strong cultural bonds. There’s a reason that Jewish people continue to be a recognizable ethnicity 2000 years after their neighbors disappeared in many cases, several thousand years after their neighbors disappeared, and the creation of strong cultural and ethnic markers is part of that and strong religious markers. This is just what it is to have a strong culture, but that also means that a lot of things that might seem arbitrary in Catholicism. Why does a priest dress like that? Why do we not have meat on Fridays? You can give the kind of intellectual answer for that. You can explain the origins of each tradition, but you should also just recognize zoom out and say, Hey, look, this is really important for the creation of a distinct Catholic culture.
And so if you got rid of all of those things, you wouldn’t be getting rid of any principle of the faith. You could believe everything that the church teaches, and you could imagine a world tomorrow where Pope Leo just wears a t-shirt and shorts when he comes out and he gives a Wednesday audience in St. Peter’s, or maybe he just decides, actually, I’m going to do it in Boca Raton. Has anything in the faith been lost? Not strictly has a move like that. Utterly decimated cultural markers. Certainly. So the reason we often care about these seemingly meaningless things is because they mean more than they might seem to. So I would suggest that there are all of these ways that cultures exist. You wear pink shirts on Wednesdays, whatever it is, that’s the creation of a culture, and there’s this inherent tension in cultural creation.
The creation of cultural markers represents the ingroup and ties the ingroup together, but it also separates the ingroup from the outgroup it’s meant to in a certain way, and Judaism was an extreme example of that because the surrounding cultures were pagan cultures doing evil things, and they wanted to be separated from that. Christians are in a more complicated relationship because on the one hand, we want a distinct Catholic identity. We want a distinct Christian identity. On the other hand, we still want a way to be inviting to those who are outside of the ingroup. We want people who aren’t part of us to feel like they can come in and join at any time. That’s a tricky balance to strike, but that is an area where I think we’ve maybe swung so far in the trying to be accommodating direction, that we’ve torn down a lot of the traditional things that create culture, and inadvertently, I think torn down many of those things that Rhoda and Olivan called creds, the kind of credibility enhancing things like devotional practices and such.
So with that, what can we do better? Well, I’m going to start with Rhoda Olivan and build off this because there’s a basic thing that they argue for, and then I’m going to end with some good news about where I think we’re seeing some growth already, so okay. First they start with the obvious. Parents have to parent, well, they got to practice faith individually and with their families and to talk with their kids about religious topics. Can’t even if you’re sending your kids to Catholic school, even if you’re sending your kids to CCD or whatever, you can’t get rid of the fact that it is your duty, first and foremost to pass the faith on your kids, not the priests, not the schools yours, and they are wired to listen to you in a way. They’re not wired to listen to anybody else, so they are your duty for evangelization.
Both children and parents need to avoid getting meshed in secular culture. That’s the next bit of advice that if you look at your media diet, does it say, I care about the faith, even if the stuff isn’t just out and out, wicked and antithetical, am I just filling my time with things that are non-Christian? Because if I am, I’m signaling something to myself and to my kids about what really matters. And then related to that third, that particularly means handling social media and smartphones. Well, I would suggest very, very strongly, don’t give your kids smartphones if you want. I know a practice that people are starting to turn to is having a dumb phone that’s just like the house phone. So that if your kids are going somewhere and they need a phone, they can just have a nons smartphone that isn’t their personal phone, that they’re not taking to their room, but that they have for emergency purposes.
If they need call home, that’s a good kind of healthy boundary and there’s no reason they need certainly unfiltered access to the internet, particularly at a young age. The amount of danger you’re putting them in dwarfs the amount of danger you think you’re saving them from. And so that’s an obvious area where parents can kind of step up more than they sometimes do. Alright. But then they also say children also need to form deep friendships with other practicing Catholics. And for those called the marriage, marrying a fellow Catholic would certainly help promote the future children’s relationship with Jesus and the church that he founded. Of course, parents need social support for their faith too. So we need to promote relationships with other Catholics for adults as well as for children to do all of these things at once. There may be a single key community, so that’s going to be the heart of the answer that you need to create communities within your home, but then you also need to be connected to a broader community that can support you in living this out.
And that might be easier or harder depending on the context in which you find yourself living. But why does community matter? Some of it I think is obvious based on everything we’ve said so far, but earlier they gave an example that I skipped over and I wanted to circle back to because I think it illustrates this very nicely. They say wavering Catholics of say 1925, so you’re Catholic and maybe you’re having some crisis of faith. Maybe you’re feeling exhausted with religion, whatever. It’s, you’re going to still feel in 1925 a strong pull towards Catholic belief and practice because you’ve got a close group of Catholic extended family, Catholic friends, probably Catholic neighbors and coworkers. Nowadays that often not only doesn’t exist, you’re going to rather see that your religious beliefs are contested and that your religious practices are viewed as optional or even problematic. And so disaffiliation is no longer like a big burden.
We see this kind of stuff in all sorts of areas. It’s fascinating. So for instance, when women get divorced, their female friends are statistically more likely to get divorced as well. Divorce is no longer unthinkable, and if she’s getting divorced and her marriage seem better than my marriage, then why am I still here? It can have this kind of negative ripple effect. Well, similarly with people leaving the church, it can have this kind of negative ripple effect or positively if you create a culture in which divorce is unthinkable or in this case leaving the church is unthinkable, not because people are terrified of being shunned, but just because it’s so much not what it’s done. That’s actually a sign of a healthy community. And here I want to highlight something. Rhoda and Olivan don’t point out that I see in some ways this kind of stuff happening online. So I was actually struck by one of the things Miles said when he was talking about how we want to take this misunderstood nine out of 10 Catholics leaving study and compare it to the false picture that he thinks he’s seen online.
CLIP:
Yeah, I think it’s a perfect case. Study that online. While yes, it is the real world, it doesn’t always paint you the accurate picture of the real world. There’s been a lot of Byzantine LRP crusade type stuff online from various people, and by online I really mean in the X world, the Christian X world.
JOE:
So I get what Miles’s saying there. It is possible to exaggerate how great everything is going in Catholicism because of how things look online. But partly that’s because online you have these people who are passionate about religion, getting in conversation with other people, passionate about religion. And in those spaces Catholicism does very, very well. Where we don’t do well is in spaces where people are indifferent to religion, and that should be no surprise if you care deeply about religion, if you’re passionate about digging into the church fathers or doing a theological deep dive or talking with people who aren’t of your denominational background, Catholicism will win those fights. They will come out looking good. What we have a harder time answering is something like, I want to watch Game of Thrones and everything I know about Catholicism tells me I shouldn’t, but all my friends are watching it, so I’m going to go over there and do that and then I’m going to wander away.
That’s a community problem. That’s a culture problem. That’s not an intellectual problem. So it’s actually good. I think that we’ve created these online spaces where people are finding online community of like-minded people that can help support them if they start to waver, if they start to feel weak, they can be inspired by people who are passionate. Now, that is all the more reason that we should keep those spaces in a healthy and sane way because I know that it can bring out craziness, especially with anonymity and everything online. But I think it’s good that you have these spaces where Protestants are saying, wow, it seems like everybody I know is discerning Catholicism because there’s a healthy subculture forming there.
Having said that though, that can’t replace interpersonal, incarnational, fleshly encounters one with another that we still need to actually be together. And so Rhoda and Olivan ask us to envision a practicing but not particularly active family in a typical Catholic parish. They go to mass on Sundays, but that’s about it for their level of involvement with the parish and the faith really, they don’t pray much, they’re not praying at home much, and they’re not talking about religion with their kids. Okay, so thing about that family think. First thing I’d say is I don’t see them. I mean according to Rodan Boulevard, they’ve been lost, but I think that they’re showing they’re actually in a much more complicated relationship with the church than just lost because they care enough that they’re going to mass, they’re caring enough that there’s some connection to Catholicism even if they’re not going every Sunday.
So in that kind of context, if we’re going to call them practicing Catholics here, what should happen? Well, they say, well, what if you invite those families to a recurring gathering with others in their parish? Now, I want to stress here when it says others in their parish, it doesn’t have to mean it happens in the parish basement or something. That can mean something like you go to a neighbor’s house and it’s your friends from the parish who live in your neighborhood. And so you have this recurring kind of gathering. You’re invited by others in the parish, preferably somebody you already know, and like a gathering where the kids are going to receive meaningful formation, have fun with other kids, and where the parents would have a chance away from the pressures of childcare to talk to other adults about religiously relevant topics they find interesting.
They can pray together, they can learn in very concrete ways how to practice the faith in the homes of their children and crucially where both parents and children can form strong bonds with other Catholics. Now, I want to actually expand on this because I think all of that is very good and true and beautiful and that there’s actually even more because a lot of what we know about how things like religious conversions happen is that they often happen when you find yourself in a network where most of the people around you are passionately in favor of a certain view or religion or whatever, you’re much more likely to become part of that view or that religion. So even if this gathering isn’t the kind that they’re describing, where it’s explicitly about religiously relevant, where you come to pray together and talk about the faith simply coming, not just to pray together, but even just to play together can be really good.
So here in Kansas City we have something called Catholic Challenge Sports, and it’s put on by the dust and sponsored group city on a hill, but it’s not religious catechesis. It’s a place where Catholic young adults, and they don’t have to be practicing, they don’t have to be anything, can come together to form leagues for dodgeball and kickball and one day cornhole tournament softball, soccer, et cetera. This is, I’m going to put this mildly. This is not my jam. This is not what I do for fun, but this is doing the Lord’s work because what this is doing is getting those people who are not very devout, who are lukewarm Catholics, who care enough about being Catholic, that if you tell ’em there’s a Catholic Sports League, they would at least feel like, oh yeah, that might be something I feel welcome at. I might feel invited to that, but they’re not maybe devout, but you’re connecting them with people who are devout and you’re not connecting them first, and let’s sit down and have a theological conversation.
You’re connecting them first and let’s play a game together. Let’s just get to know each other. And then as they’re growing in those personal relationships, you are building community in a pretty natural, pretty organic sort of way, and it’s a lot easier to then invite them to things like a men’s group or a women’s group or a more explicitly religious event and that kind of thing. If you imagine kind of the funnel, this is very broad outreach that then you get invited deeper and deeper into the relationships. This actually works. I mean, we’ve seen it work here in Kansas City. There are plenty of people who can attest to, I was out of college and I was getting a little more lukewarm in my faith because they didn’t have the normal social structures of college or whatever to support me. And then they get plugged in and they get connected, and maybe they get married to a nice Catholic person of the opposite sex and they’re off to the races.
That kind of thing doesn’t take theological brilliance. It just takes having a heart for greeting others for hospitality, for making people feel welcome for all those things. So I would just give that as a model of, there’s a lot of different things this can look like. I think there are people who are right now creating good online spaces that are going really deep intellectually, and I think there are people who are going out and playing soccer and are doing a real good work in doing that. And I think there are all of these ways that we are living out Catholic community in large and small ways, and I would just encourage more of that to say yes, everything we know suggests that that’s really important. So by all means, strive to be a saint. Talk to your family and friends about the faith. Strive to pray regularly with others as well as on your own.
Do all of those things and then build up a community where other people feel very comfortable being Catholic and maybe where people, if they’re struggling, feel like they have a real place to be supported. So that is all something that I think you can do in small ways or in large, and maybe it’s something you need. I’d actually love to hear in the comments if you’ve got either ideas or challenges, because I think this can be a very tricky thing and something we can sometimes overthink, and this is something where I know people’s differences, where you are geographically, where your family is, what your life circumstances are. If you’re married to somebody of the different religion or whatever, those things can complicate things. I think it’s worth, feel free to jump in the comments and troubleshoot with one another because this is something that I don’t think I have any particular monopoly on.
But this is a good, important kind of conversation I think we should be having. And now finally, I wanted to end you with some more good news. Now, this is just going to be me linking you to an episode I’ve done before, but we actually have good reason to believe not only that we’re not losing nine out of 10 cradle Catholics, but actually that there are signs of maybe the beginnings of an authentic Catholic revival on the horizon that when I said that hemorrhaging was slowing stopping, we might actually be seeing the ship slowly turn itself around. So please pray for that. Pray the Holy Spirit renews and rebuilds the church in America and around the world, but I think we have real reasons for authentic hopes. You can check that out right here for Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.