“Nones” and “Dones”: the Shifting Realities of Religious Identities - Susan Pizor Yoder

In today’s conversation, we talk with Susan Pizor Yoder, a researcher and faith leader who wants to understand how and why recent generations are less likely to identify with traditional religious communities. As the lead author of the recent book, Hear Us Out, Dr. Pizor Yoder talks about the process of interviewing over 200 18-40 year olds about how they find meaning, whether that be in a community or not.

Show notes:

• Hear Us Out (https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9781506489193/Hear-Us-Out)

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:04

Today's conversation on ReligionWise features Sue Pizor Yoder, who, with a group of like minded individuals, many of which who are faith leaders, wrote a book called Hear Us Out. It's actually a really interesting research study based on over 200 interviews with people who are ages between 18 and 40, so roughly millennial and Gen Z individuals about questions of belonging and practice and belief, all getting at the issue of religious identity and the those generations proclivity to stray away from or not be associated with traditional religious communities or denominations, groups, however you want to phrase that, being a college educator myself, I'm surrounded it is the occupational hazard of being around 18 to 22 year olds a lot. And so this is a really interesting conversation for me, because we both notice a very similar kind of a trend, although Dr Pizor Yoder, from the perspective of a faith leader, someone who's really interested in guiding, shepherding a community and making that as healthy as she can. And my perspective as an educator, where I don't deal with students vis a vis their own religious or spiritual identities, but the way that they present in in classrooms, and the way that they think about religious identity religious community is something certainly that impacts my work. I encourage you, if you're interested in this conversation, to follow up by getting the book and thinking about some of these individual's interviews and conversations that they had with the team that produced the book. There are a lot of fruitful conversations, some of which we begin to have here, but there are others certainly we could have. And one, for example, that we start to talk about here, that I think we can delve into more, is the distinction between the issue of church attendance, community involvement from a religious or spiritual landscape and the issue of joining and membership writ large, I really try again, because I deal with young adults so often, I really try to be empathetic and try to discourage myself from, you know, being The grumpy old man on these sorts of questions. But you look at the social media landscape, for example, and the idea that one posts status updates and pictures of where one is and what one's doing, it can really lead to a sense of individual confidence and importance on one side, but maybe even self absorption a little bit on the other. I joke with my students sometimes that, you know, 25, 30 years ago, when I was their age, it would never have occurred to me to post what I was having for dinner to anyone, that anyone would ever be interested in that. But thinking about that sort of as a microcosm of something larger, the way that one thinks about oneself as an individual actor, that one's choices are important and determinative of one's future, it stands to reason that group dynamics membership In things larger than yourself, and that could be social clubs, political parties, organizations of any kind, not just religious organizations, but that those things might take a hit if the headwinds continued insistence of our culture that the individual is the most important sort of building block, or that individualism is the most important goal, right? That that is what freedom is about. Let us know if you have any comments questions, or, for example, if you feel like this does or doesn't apply to the communities that you're familiar with, either in the United States or abroad, right? That's another issue that we could get into is how much of this is a global issue, how much of this is technology that is around the world, is in cultural, culturally different places, and how much of this is about 21st century American youth identities, you know, or ones that are similar to it. One more thing before we get started, you'll notice in the title for today's episode and a couple of terms that you'll hear used in the conversation today are quote, unquote nones and dones, just because that sounds differently to our ear, particularly when we're thinking about religion than it is spelled. I thought maybe just glossing that really quickly might be useful. So nones, N, O, N, E, S, not n, u, n, s, not somebody who is a part of religious order, but someone who would respond to the question of religious identity as having none. So that could be a number of different things, right? That could be atheist or agnostic or uncommitted or between communities, as opposed to dones, D, O, N, E, S, which would refer to people who have historically or traditionally some kind of religious identity they grew up within a church or a synagogue or temple, what have you, and are no longer committed. No longer see themselves as associated with that group. So we might imagine that an older generation, a boomer generation, for example, would have been religiously affiliated. They have millennial children, for example, and they might have been raised in a religious community, but have chosen not to affiliate anymore. So keep that in mind when you hear the nones and dones that these are people that do not claim religious affiliation, whether they had one in the past or not being the only distinction. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr Pizer Yoder. I enjoyed it a lot. And like I say, I think that there's a lot here to think about. Sue Pizor Yoder, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

Susan Pizor Yoder: 6:37

It is delightful to be here Chip. Thanks for inviting me.

Chip Gruen: 6:41

So before we start the conversation about the project outlined in your book, how did you come to this work? I always when I'm interviewing people realize that vocational narratives have lots of unexpected twists and turns. What's your story?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 6:53

Sure, I became a pastor 41 years ago. I did not come from a family of pastors. I think I had an very early encounter with God, and really went into pastoral ministry because I felt somewhat called to the people that were on the outside looking in, and I spent years on the inside looking out, and I think that really prepared me for the work that I've ultimately been doing. When I started my doctoral work back in the 90s, I was overwhelmed. I mean, this is back in the 90s, two thirds of people in America, as in USA, were not attending a place of worship and and not having it didn't mean they didn't have a faith commitment, but they weren't connecting into an organized expression of that. And so I really began exploring. I began trying to understand why. I began looking at people who are on the outside looking in and and kind of left the traditional institutional expression of my faith, and really went out and have started two faith communities and lots of research and lots of conversations and trying to engage the people on the outside looking in.

Chip Gruen: 8:24

So that, you know, more traditional, you know, calling you had in the beginning, if you don't mind me asking denominational home that you grew up in and and how do you think that affected the work that you did?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 8:35

I've kind of been a cradle Presbyterian, but I would say as well that I've never been strongly Presbyterian, if I'm honest, I I'm very eclectic, I'm very ecumenical. Have great respect for people of different faiths than my own. I am in a journey. I welcome people who are at different parts of that journey, heading in different directions in that journey. I think that makes my journey more rich as I engage people, so it is. Presbyterianism is my home. They've offered me things like the freedom of my conscience to you know, speak my my truth, even if you know I don't agree with other people. I think they've nurtured me in some beautiful ways, but I am not a strong anything in that regard, right? I am a person of faith who loves God and has spent my life serving God and trying to keep broadening my view of who God is. I think we've made God way too small. I'd like God to be a little bigger.

Chip Gruen: 9:42

So from reading Hear Us Out, I understood very quickly that, you know, while you're the lead author on this, that this was very much a group collaboration, and that seems really important to you, not only for the work itself, but almost as a as a faith community in itself through the work that you were doing. Can you talk a little bit about how that collaboration came about? You know, what were some of the characteristics of those you worked with? What were some of the gifts and challenges that that presented for you guys?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 10:12

Absolutely, I think it would be honest to say that people have been telling me I should write for years and years, and when I wrote my doctoral thesis, I'm like, This is the hardest thing I've ever done, because I'm an extrovert by nature. I come to conclusions in community. I like to hear all different perspectives on things. And so when I decided to apply for this grant through Louisville Institute, which is the grant that started this whole process. We I really looked at it, and I said, I want to surround myself with a group of people who don't think like me. And so I asked people of different denominations, I asked people of of different ages, stages. You know, I wanted this variety of people, and I wanted to work, collect, collaboratively and collegially as we researched and did this, work for a number of reasons. Number one, that's the preferred style of the people that we were researching. I mean, they love collaboration. They work better together than previous generations in a lot of ways. They don't like hierarchical kinds of anything. They really prefer, you know, collaboration and so that style of leadership works for me. I think it makes a richer process when you have a lot of different perspectives. And what was fascinating was, when we were going to write this book, we didn't the Fortress came to us and said, we hear you're doing this research. We want your book. So we did not pursue other publishing companies, because it's a pain in the tush, and it was just easier. They wanted our book and but when she said, how many authors, I said, eight, she says, Oh my, we've not done that before, she said, and she she had just retired in the middle of our writing, so she'd been doing this a long time. She said, we have a hard time when two writers try to write a book together. She said, let alone eight. And I said, Well, we like each other. Not only do we like each other, we're all open, we're all curious, we're all committed. None of us is money the driving force behind this, but we want to write this to serve faith communities. They are all people who listen well, and I figured that those all would be attributes that would help us in the writing of this book. And in fact, they did. I don't think there was ever a sharp word anything. We just worked together like hand in glove. We collaborated beautifully together. We did not agree often, but we that was the beauty of it, like we would bring in all these different perspectives and and different viewpoints and and different ways of thinking about this, because people were representing a variety of traditions of a variety of many things. And so it really became, in my opinion, a strength of the book, I think maybe the maybe profound for some people, it was a weakness in that every chapter was written by different people. So you get, you know, this constant kind of shift of writing style, right, which might have been a little confusing to the reader. I don't know. We haven't gotten that feedback yet, but, but certainly in terms of the richness of collaboration, I think that was a benefit overall.

Chip Gruen: 13:26

So the problem that you're trying to tackle is is maybe most easily expressed as a shift in generational priorities. Maybe we could say between Millennials and Gen Z, and we'll talk about each of those groups a little bit later in turn. But the basic premise that these younger generations are less satisfied with institutional religion or or organized religious community, you know, seems to be what you're really after. Can you talk about that premise? I mean, how did your group come to this? So on the one hand, I think it's a common place. It's something that that you and I, you know, you know, have talked about in the past, it's something that comes up on, on the media right? Is this, but is this something that is sort of born out of, you know, born out of your personal experiences, you know, something that religious institutions are dealing with in a more public way? Like, how did you come to the premise, and how do you define it?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 14:21

I would say that was multi fold. There's many answers to that question. One is, I think all you have to do is look at most congregations. They're shrinking, shrinking and wrinkling. That's pretty obvious to most of us. I think the work of Phyllis Tickle, who talks about, every 500 years, there's a need for a grand rummage sale, right? We have the birth of Jesus, and then 500 years later, the fall of Rome, and 500 years later, the great schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. And then 500 years later, the Reformation. And 500 years later, we find ourselves in a technological whirlwind. I mean, technology has shaped not unlike the printing press shaped the Reformation. You know that worldwide web, the different methods of communicating today, and which my doctoral project was about, that has had huge, huge effect on us as a culture change is the only thing that we have constant anymore, and and so this rummage sale has been happening for a while. I think it was solidified for me in the work I did back in the 90s for my doctor. Work really solidified by forming two communities that were meant to reach people who weren't going to organize, you know, institutional expressions of religion. And then my own kids. I have three kids, 37, 35, 33 all of them brought up in the church. None of them attending church. And the conversations that I've had with them and recognizing how very different emerging generations even approach this, I had a group of they were 20, late 20s, early 30s, early on in this process around my dining room table, and I said to them, I said, okay, so none of you go to church, none of you go to synagogue, none of you go to mosque. You all grew up in a faith tradition, and yet you don't do that. Where do you get when you want you know when you have questions about faith and higher power and all kinds, where you go? We go to Google. That was fascinating, right? Like Google, what is God Google? What is the purpose of life? And what was fascinating to me about that was that they go to Google because they think of religion as something that answers questions, which is fascinating to me because I never thought of the church as a place to go to have my questions answered. I thought of church as the place to go, to explore mystery, to explore community, to explore the unknown, to raise my questions and my doubts, where they see it as and I understand why, because lots of churches, it's right, like you ask the question, they give you the answer. I've got a question. Here's what you do, right? And it's a, it's a, it's not really a conversation or a dialog for many and so that was fascinating to me. And so I think these, you know, a lot of these things, are the things that influenced my decision to really delve deep.

Chip Gruen: 17:13

So you mentioned some of those informants, and this, you know, when, when people read this book, they will realize that this is the backbone of the project, right? Are these conversations and you relied on the voices of dozens and dozens, if not more than that, of interviews. Can you talk a little bit about that, about that process, about who you selected to talk to, what that group looked like, what the standard interview format looked like, all of those sorts of nuts and bolts issues.

Susan Pizor Yoder: 17:43

Sure. So there were eight of us doing this, doing the interviewing. I will say I did over half of the interviews, so I have a pretty good handle on them. But what really happened was all of us put kind of on our social media posts. We're looking for people under age 40, who are nones and dones who and and we're interviewing them in a short interview process. If you'd be willing to be interviewed, contact us. And so that's where it began. And each of us, you know, got some people. Then what would happen if, if I was interviewing you, at the end of the interview, I would say we are continuing to look for people we want to interview a minimum of 200 we interviewed 225, people who are nones and dones under age 40. I think at the time it was under age 38 but now be under age 40, under age 40 and over 18, because we didn't want to deal with the legal liability of people under 18. And if you know somebody, but we don't want to interview more people like you, because we already have your perspective. Think of your friends, and think of friends of yours who are nones and dones but who don't have your same cultural heritage or experience, or, you know, sexual preference orientation, whatever. Think of people different. And then they referred people to us. So the people that I started interviewing with were people I knew they were Facebook friends or friends of my kids, a lot of them, etc, but then it went deeper and deeper. So we own in the book that the majority of them, not all, but certainly over 50% were Lehigh Valley people. And we talk about in the book Lehigh Valley as kind of anywhere USA it we talk about the commonalities that Lehigh Valley has. It's split politically. It split religiously. It's split in a lot of ways. And so it represents a very kind of average city. It's not on the extremes, it's kind of in the center. And so we talk about that in the book. But yeah, it was a representative grouping of people that were beyond exciting to interview in the interview process, we did not want to ask our questions through religious language. So we worked really hard to create language that was invitational to our interview. We call them our conversation partners, the people that we interviewed. And those questions were getting at the things that oftentimes faith takes people to, but we ask them in non churchie so to speak ways. So they were questions of inspiration, belonging, values, adversity, legacy, beliefs and practices. Our Questions were five in number. The sixth question came after each person I interviewed. I say to them, you know, thanks. And also, wait a minute. Wait a minute. This can't be done. I want to tell you why I'm a none are done. They brought it up. So then we added the question of belief and practice, and we told every interviewee that this was their question that they wanted to answer. Now, what was fascinating about this was we were going to do these in groupings and hang out at coffee shops and, well, the pandemic hit. So we did all of this on Zoom. And what was really good about that, in retrospect, as I look back, we had everything printed out, and I would, if it was you that I was interviewing, you would come on, and I would talk with you and get to know you a little bit, and thank you for coming. Everything I said at the moment that I push the record button, I'm going to ask you the exact questions in the exact format that I've asked everybody else. I will give you no feedback. I will not get curious until the record button goes off. Then I can ask away my questions, because we didn't want to influence anybody. We wanted their answers that were their answers not influenced by us, if they didn't understand the question or were confused by the question, we had a secondary question that we asked that just framed it in a different light. But I maybe was asked for the secondary question maybe 5% of the time. So they were asked that, you know, we were asking these questions in non religious language, for instance, tell us about a place where you belong, right? It's pretty neutral. It Right, it's, it's, it's not tell us what church you belong to or what you right, very different. And so these questions were really carefully developed by our team. We were really excited to ask these questions. We were fascinated by the answer. And then we had somebody take all their answers and word by word, transcribe them into a special program that could, like we could literally say how many times was the word belief used. They could tell us, you know, how many times it was. It was an amazing program that we, this dear woman agreed. I mean, can you imagine 225 interviews, transcribing them all word by word, and then all the team reviewed all of that, all 225 and then we started to form conclusions. And anyways, it was a wonderful process, very lengthy process, very intense process, but certainly the backbone of the book was after doing the research, which we did for two years and read over 75 books. After doing that research, we said, what are things that the research agrees on repeatedly. Now we want to test that out against real people. Not just study, real people. We want to hear what real people have to say, and that was the reason for the one on one interviews.

Chip Gruen: 23:31

So while we're talking about your interview subjects, I've got a couple a couple questions about them. One, one is about religious diversity, so it sounds like your group, you know, in one way, shape or form, is sort of rooted in the Christian tradition, right? Is sort of predominantly rooted in that Christian tradition. And then, just by the way that networks work, you know that that's where you would have started, I would assume. And then, of course, you hope to, and it sounds like you did. You were able to branch out. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the scope of your study and how much you think it's it is thinking about sort of liberal Protestantism or a certain kind of progressive, educated middle or upper middle class, or is this wider and one of the reasons I asked. I was at a Sikh gurdwara a few weeks ago, and was talking to somebody who was second, no, she was first generation, actually, and her kids then were second generation in the she was talking about, yeah, they never come here, right? So, you know. So it's interesting to think about how the dynamics of a, you know, an immigrant community, for example, a recent, more recent immigrant community would be different, but then, on the other hand, that some of those generational challenges are going to be really similar as well. So how do you think religious diversity plays in this study and the data you collected?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 24:59

Well a great question. I think we were hoping for a little more diversity than we got. We did interview at agnostics, atheists, Jews, Muslims. I mean, there were people in there. We had a fairly accurate to our population in general, across the United States, representation of the LGBTQIA community. We had people from the military. We had people who were immigrants. We had so we did have a smathering of a lot of groups of people that were represented. I don't think if you took it to the down to the bare bones of like the United States of America is this much Christian this, I don't think we would, no, we did not mix that. Because one of the things we're looking at doing going forward is engaging some religious communities, because we've been doing that in the research, etc, and we're finding that they are addressing many of the same issues that we are addressing. This is not unique to the Christian community by far, nor is it as many people think, Oh, it's just the liberal, progressive denomination that's dying. No, no. Look at Willow Creek, evangelical, conservative Christian 24,000 now 7000 I mean, and they were kind of the the start of a lot of the boomer congregations and everything else, right? So we're seeing this kind of across the board, the two things that we learned that aren't decreasing are immigration, immigrant congregations, people who are immigrating into the country. And again, mirror that's in the book, mirror the United States. I mean, what used to happen, head of steel would come and say, Pastor, I can take 30 families. I have jobs for them. And so pastor would write back to the homeland. 30 families would come over, and the first thing they did was establish a faith community, because that was their one place where everybody knew the same language, everyone had the same traditions, they had the same customs, and it was a match hatch dispatch kind of place, right? It's where people found each other married, had their babies buried one another. I mean, they were, they were doing the work of life together in a community that kind of understood them and knew them. Okay. What happens over time? Now this community is seated beside this community, and this person falls in love with this person, and now we have this intermixing. And what we see, as we did the research, was that kind of tribal way of being when you first come over as an immigrant over generations gets less and less strong because there's more intermixing, intermarrying, inter understanding, the whole nine yards. And I think we certainly found this to be true. The people who were were questioning their faith, certainly and considering themselves nones and dones were still in immigrant communities, the ones that were still connected, because that's where they had community. But what's also fascinating about that, in our opinion, is that, because of the pandemic, and then the work we did after that, we got a new category, nones done, and ums. And the ums are the people who are like, I'm not sure if I'm going back. Um that mattered to me, but boy, in the pandemic, it didn't matter to me as much as I thought it mattered to me. And so there was this big shrinkage, right of people going back. And then we started having conversations with a lot of people that are in faith communities to discover that a lot of them have a lot of questions about their faith tradition. They are there more for the community often than the theology, which we found fascinating, right? So I think you have emerging generations coming up saying, I don't need that. It's not really important to me. I don't even think about it. Is what we heard a lot. I don't even think about faith. I don't even think about these issues. But yet, at the same time, we had so many people say, Thank you for these questions. I haven't thought about these things, and these things matter, and I should think about these things, which is again, fascinating, right? But at the same time, where many of us found community in our faith tradition and in our faith community, right? They are not finding it there. But what was really sad to us is they're not finding it anywhere. Some of them are finding it in their family of origin. A few of them find it like in college or maybe in their office. But 10% said they had they belong nowhere. 10% nowhere where they belong, and most of them didn't have many places where they feel like they belong, which is okay, let's hold that intention with suicide, depression and anxiety rates are the highest they've ever been among these two generations, way higher than previous generations. So where many of us, when things go bad, when life gets tough, when difficult chapter, when we're having problems with this person, our community of faith was a place that could help us, instruct us, support us, encourage us, right? Well, when you don't have that, a big temptation is to become more self isolated, right? That like, don't hurt me. I'm just not going to engage. And then we had people, a large part of the people, the number one answer was that their primary place of belonging was their family of origin, until the family finds out they're in the LGBTQIA community, and they don't accept that, and they push them out. For instance, some are very welcoming, but others were just completely pushed out, and they had to create a community, and that was hard for them. And so I think, yeah, yeah, there's a lot going on there, right?

Chip Gruen: 30:54

So we have this conversation. And as I would say to my students, the discursive strand we tend to have here is about religion. But you know, I think back back to my own family history a few generations back. And you know, there were proud members of the Lions Club or rotary or bowling leagues even, or which I'll bring up a little later too, you know. So I'm wondering, is this a religious question, or is this a belonging question more generally? Like, you know, the turn of phrase we use is, I'm a card carrying member of x, and I think your generation and my generation probably are more card carrying members than these millennials and Z, whether that be political party, even right that there's so many things that this group doesn't want to doesn't want to belong to or commit to. I mean, how does that, you know? How is this a religious issue, and how is this just a larger issue of sort of institutional forms of all kinds?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 31:58

I think it's both and not either or certainly they're not joiners. Certainly they have given up on our political situation by and large. They are, if we heard it once, we heard 100 times. They are very, very tired of religion and political party being connected. They think the two should be, you know, extremely separated. They are, I think, generations that aren't joiners. So that includes membership in a church, as much as lions or Masons or, you know, whatever. They are not. They're just not joiners, and their commitments are, you know, it's interesting, like we have generations of people who have in the church, say, tithed or given greatly. Here in these generations, you know, they might give like it's a once and done on a Go Fund Me page, right? It's not like they're not committing. Oh, I'm going to give you 100 bucks a month. It's just not going to happen for most of them. And then churches, synagogues, mosques, don't help that in large part, because, you know, they pass a a plate down. They don't carry cash. Give me the Venmo number, give me the code. So that's a whole different way of communicating. For one thing and joining the other thing is they don't have a lot of time. In some ways, they often, they're both working, if it's a couple, and trying to raise a family, and trying to work multiple jobs, because their student loan debt is so out of control that they, you know, they're paying what we paid in a mortgage, in student loan debt, and then a mortgage, you know, so they've got those kinds of issues on top of it. And I think in reality, they perceive life differently. We talk about this a bit in the book, but I think there was a generation for ever, generations. It was kind of like the first thing you do is provide for your family or yourself. Like that's the first thing you do, provision, provision, provision, not for them. That's last on the list. They are much more into their passion. So I want to travel. So I get a job for six months, I save up, I live at home, and then I go backpack Europe for three months, and when the money runs out, I come back and get another job. They also don't have any kind of loyalty to an institution, if it is a for profit institution that is making money on their backs. So unlike my grandfather, who worked for US Steel all his life and believe that he would support the company. The company would support him. They have witnessed and seen the company is only using me to get money for their stockholders, and I am using the company to get income to live. And so if you're paying me 60 grand, and I just started for you, and my friend tells me. I come over here, they're going to pay me 65 grand. I have no problem quitting you and coming over to here because you're using me for your profit. I'm using you for income. And that is not the case with them. With like not for profits, where they're deeply engaged in the the philosophy or the vision or whatever, they'll work harder and for less statistically and more more hours, but in terms of a job that they when they're working for corporate America, they're going to do the bare minimum, generally that they have to to get the job done, to get the income so that they can live out their passion. Does that make sense? That's a big shift.

Chip Gruen: 35:37

Yeah, sure. So um, let's, let's break apart a little bit the two generations that you're primarily dealing with, the millennials and the Gen z's. And I want to do this by actually going back to sort of another common place. I mentioned bowling earlier, but in 2000 there was a publication of Bowling Alone that was talking about the demise of bowling leagues and and people you know the that it is not unusual now to go to a bowling alley and see somebody you know bowling alone, right? And I heard a cultural commentator recently talk about, well, the problem with the Gen Z's is that they're not bowling at all. And I think if you'd alluded this earlier, but I'd like to think about it a little bit more. If we use that as a metaphor, an analogy to religious and spiritual practice, right? We could talk about the difference between being a part of institutionalized religion, saying that you're doing kind of an a la carte religious and spiritual search for yourself, and then compare that to, you know, some in this generation who maybe aren't asking those questions at all right, or who aren't as concerned, or maybe are more concerned with other things. I mean, like you said, I mean, travel can be a deeply meaningful experience, but it's not exactly the same thing as what might one get from asking the big questions of faith and spirituality. So, I mean, do you see those kinds of differences in these generations you you dealt with? Or is that too simple?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 37:06

I think one of the things we talk about in the book, which it's fascinating, because I've been speaking in the book now for a while, and whenever Millennials or iGen show up, they really resonate with this. So so it was coined over at Princeton, moralistic therapeutic deism, which is kind of their kind of way of organizing the universe, let's say, and if I it's in the book, but if I break it down, there's like this sense that there's a God who exists, Who created and orders the world, watches over human God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most religions. This is this is them speaking. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. God doesn't need to be much of life, except when God's needed to resolve a problem, and good people go to heaven when they die. That was moralistic therapeutic deism, kind of a Millennials now, over time, that and again, everything is shifting so much faster because the pace of change is so much faster in moralistic therapeutic deism 2.0 right? They discovered over a very short period of time that that shifted to seven other core tenets, karma is real. Everybody goes to heaven. It's all good. Religion is easy. Just do good morals or so, when you think about that, they shared their faith region, which was generally institutionalized, you know, forms of of religion that had certain dogmas, certain practices, certain memberships, etcetera, and it shifted hugely to a very eclectic way of what I believe. So I have, I have a Hindu roommate, so I learn about their practice, and I go to yoga with my friend, and I learn about yoga and that practice. And then I have my tradition of my upbringing, and then I have a religion course, and I learn about and what they do is they take a little bit from this and a little bit from this and a little bit this, and they basically kind of create their own faith structure, right? I think Rob Bell is the one that said we all, we all have a belief system, even if you don't believe in anything, that's what you believe, like, we all believe in something, right? And so their belief system, even if it's not really expressed, is, they're kind of open, right? Oh, my friend invited me to blank. I'll go with them, you know? Oh, that was cool. They're just very open and very eclectic, and taking these little pieces of all these different things and putting it together. And I think in many ways, it's very humanist. You know, there's this commonality of being human, and we sort of know what's right and good. I don't know if that's all true, by the way, but they believe it and and we can discover in our community of friends, kind of what it is that we believe and we can kind of support each other in that it was fascinating. One of the people that I interviewed was a pretty strong atheist, and I was asking him the questions, and then at the end, we continued on with the conversation, because I dug a little bit deeper. And what was fascinating was what he said to me. He said, you know, Sue My parents brought me up in the church, and he said, I was a curious kid, like no joke, like all the all that we were talking about is clearly a curious kid. So I was really just a curious kid. And he said, and I had so many questions, and I was always pushing my Sunday school teachers, and I was always pushing, but I got a very clear message, don't ask questions. We're telling you what to believe. You know, believe it. And he said, If I had had somebody as an instructor as open as you have been in this conversation with me, I would be at a very different place in my life. And I think that's a very interesting statement, because I think there were generations when I did my doctoral work in generational study. You know, the builders who built this nation very loyal to institutions. Trusted the institution to have their back, whether it was government agency, they trusted the institution. And then, of course, they started getting burned by the institution, and Boomers watched that right and and then we began not to trust this. But they were people who really trusted the institution. And so when the pastor said something, the priest said something, the rabbi said something, it was a generation of people who really respected authorities, right? And that has all shifted hugely. That has shifted because a lot of those authorities were found doing really inappropriate again, which they have watched abscond with funds as sexual impropriety. I mean, you know, the list is long, and so these generations, they're not You're not going to be given trust. You're going to earn trust, right? So if I'm a religious leader, I'm not automatically afforded that authority, that trust, that right. I have to earn it, and I have to be be perceived by the person that I'm talking with is genuine and honest and trustworthy and real. And if that doesn't happen, you're kind of written off, and they're not going to give you the time of day. Think of how different that is from the builders who built this nation. So there, right there, you're seeing just a huge divide. And so this kid, that's the atheist, right? He's coming and saying, Man, if people had let me wonder and be curious and and and deal with the very real and good and healthy questions that he had as a kid, he would be at a very different place in considering a higher power, a God, you know, whatever we're going to call that, versus somebody who said, no, no, no, no, this is, it's like, it's like putting God in a box, right? This is what God looks like. This is how God acts. This is who God is, believe it, or get out like that is. And I'm being very unkind to some people who were the exact opposite of that. But I think there was enough in the church, enough in the synagogue, that said, this is what we right, this is our dogma. These are the things that we hold true. Do not veer from them. There was enough of that that for some generations who have been like now the World Wide Web, right there. It's not a parochial view of life anymore. It's a global view of life. Not everybody thinks like me, not everybody acts like me. Not everybody has a family like mine. Not everybody has a name that sounds like mine, right? Not everybody's skin color very different than those of us who grew up in a very parochial way, where we often grew up pretty cookie cutter, looking the same, acting the same, thinking, very different world. So you put all these things together, and you can begin to understand how they landed, where they've landed, if that makes sense.

Chip Gruen: 44:12

Yeah, I want to go back to your original premise for a second and and play the devil's advocate a little bit around, you know, the idea of, of the sort of wholesale is a too big of a word, but, but this rejection of these institutional groups, and, you know, because I think there are people, people out there who are going to think, Well, wait a minute, there's that church down the street, And they're packing them in. You know, every every Sunday or, you know, I'm a part of a thriving religious community, and maybe I want to add just a little bit of color to this from an anecdote from some of the field trips I do to local Christian congregations, and see what you think about this. So we go to the local Presbyterian Church, big old, thriving Presbyterian Church, but not as thriving as it once was. And I always make sure to ask in front of the students, right, what's your membership? And they'll say, Oh, our membership is 2000 or something like that. And I'll say, Well, what is your average attendance on Sundays? And they'll say, Oh, we do well, we get about 400 you go down to the local evangelical community, and you say, you know, big, sort of mega church. And you say, oh, what's your membership? And they say, oh, you know, we don't have a big membership. I mean, we maybe have 800 members. And you say, Well, what's your average Sunday attendance? And we say, Oh, we do five or 6000 right? So that that dynamic between membership and attendance is sort of inverted. And you know, thinking about that like statistically, and thinking about the data of that right, like on the whole, you end up with a more thriving community that has smaller membership, but maybe is packing them in more is meeting the religious and spiritual needs of more people. And I wonder how that kind of thing, you know, a how that kind of would show up in in what you're hearing, you know, that people might be, you know, getting getting something, even though it's not, maybe not as regular, or not as committed. And then, on the other hand, you know, just the idea that there are communities that are like, what are the is there some magic that the communities that are thriving are doing right, right? Or because, as it turns out, some of the thriving communities are the ones that are sort of more restrictive, theologically, doctrinally, practically, than some of the ones that are graying and dying.

Susan Pizor Yoder: 46:41

Some people might not like this answer that I would give to this, but I'll be a little controversial here. Brian McLaren did some work and demonstrated that 40% of any given population will follow an authoritarian leader. 40% and evangelical conservative congregations tend to have very authoritarian leaders. And so if there is a part of a population that needs an authoritarian leader, in other words, the kind of Pastor kind of replaces the parents, right? If parents were authoritarian leaders, the pastor kind of replaces that authoritarian leadership. I think the real challenge for people is that authoritarianism is basically built on guilt, fear and shame, and so, you know, if you don't come, you're going to hell. You don't show up to worship, right? If you, if you don't participate, you know, there's a lot of shaming statements that are made and everything else. If you are brought up in that and not and haven't dealt with that, it seems very normal to you. Seems very average to you. It seems very acceptable. I think what we have in emerging generations is we have generations who are more willing and open to dealing with mental health issues than any previous generation. And so they are learning a lot about their families of origin, oriented families, addictive family systems, all this kind of stuff, and they are running from that stuff. And what's fascinating is the people in the ministries that I'm working in right now that are appealing to these folks, they they actually will name it as I was in an evangelical congregate and I'm in recovery. They actually name it as a recovery process because they feel as though it was, it's in that whole family of addictive patterns of shame and blame and guilt and fear and and and they want free of it, and they're having a hard time finding faith communities that are thriving, that are free of it. And so I think part of the reason for the work that I've been doing and the listening that I've been doing is, how do we shape faith communities that are healthy, that aren't based on authoritarian leadership when they're looking for collaborative leadership, where they want their voices to be heard, not fund or, if you're a woman put in its place, you know men are allowed authority. How do we begin to form those how do we begin to engage those conversations? How do we begin to empower them in a process of faith exploration? And so from my perspective, yeah, they are. Some of them are doing well. Some of them certainly not, as I gave you the example, well, Greek, some of them certainly are not, and they are too, very much struggling with younger adults. Now. Some of them are. Manage to bring in a young adult population, because, again, it becomes a place to hatch and match, like there are people who are going there because they don't want to pick up somebody at a bar. They'd rather pick somebody up at a church or a synagogue or what, right? And that's that's kind of a different deal. And they put them in small groups, where the small groups can kind of do their own thing, which is very invitation. So I think there's some ways that they're managing around that, but it it is certainly not all that it's cracked up to be, because I deal with a lot of the people who've been there and are really angry, are really in a process of recovery, are really in a place where that was abusive. So again, I realize that's controversial, and there are some people who would clearly take me on, on that that's okay.

Chip Gruen: 50:53

Hey, you're the author. It's okay. You can be controversial. So I'm going to ask you now, you know, to go maybe a little more on the limb, I want to ask you for your diagnosis and prognosis, for one thing in particular that, you know you, when I was first picked up your book and started reading it, there was, there was something that that sort of struck me and, and I think is really important that you were talking about, where are people seeking these, you know, these big answers, right, the community, right? The meaning of life, right? What happens after all those sorts of things? And then you modified it by saying it in community. How are these things being done in group? Right? And you and a lot of your collaborators on this project, are, you know, in one way, shape or form, leaders in groups where this kind of work happens in community. And you know, from my perspective, you know somebody who hangs around 18 to 22 year olds all the time, right? This seems like a real uphill battle, right? This seems like very, very difficult to get people involved or interested in those institutional structures, however they're formed. So what is your diagnosis and prognosis for the kinds of religious communities that you are you know that you and your group kind of represent or are connected to. I mean, do you see, you know? Do you see in half a generation? Do you see a world reborn where religious community starts to be more attractive to these generations again, or, I don't know, it's very hard for me to see around the corner on this one.

Susan Pizor Yoder: 52:26

Yeah, I don't know how prophetic I'm going to be in this, but I will say this. I think parts of the church, fairly large parts of the church, are going to need to die and be reborn. That is pretty crystal clear to me. I when I talk to aging congregation and kind of share kind of where these emerging generations are, so many of them will say, I wish I had the energy that it's going to take to do this, but I don't, and that's kind of the bottom line for them. So their their doors are going to be shutting and, and many have already shut, right? And I think where like for boomers, bigger was better, you know, we built these huge churches, these mega churches, you know, I worked in them. I mean, huge churches with tons of programming and tons of the best and the best of everything, and blah, blah, blah. Well, these generations aren't really there. They would prefer to have, you know, half dozen dozen people in a living room sitting around talking, so it's going to look very different and and more than any other generation on record, they are open to be mentored by older generations, and I think we really have to hear that. But what they mean by mentoring isn't like the old apprenticeship, where I know I'm here to pass on my rich knowledge to you who are a sponge and take it all in the kind of mentorship they want is, again, it's very consistent with who they are, a mutual relationship, where, if I'm which I do, a lot of people, I'm learning from them, and they're learning from me. We are both giving to the relationship. We are both investing in the relationship. We are both we both have something to offer. It's not I'm up here as the older mentor, and they're down here, right? It's on an equal playing field. And so I think if there's ever been a time in history where, if we want to pass on fate, it's going out to not expecting them to come in, you know, the old methods of, okay, we're just going to tweak this and tweak that, and everybody's going to come. They're gone. They're done. You know, putting up a screen and bringing guitars into the sanctuary is not going to do it. It's a matter of going out and engaging engaging young adults and having conversations with them and getting to know them and finding out what it is they're looking for. And how can we support them in that, which is a very different model than in the United. States we have in many recent decades, because people have always come so we haven't had to go right and and again, it's not going for the purpose of conversion, which is about the biggest turn off possible to emerging generations. It's about going and hanging out and life presents theology in every aspect, right? I don't know how to do this anymore. I don't know what I should I don't know how to forgive this person. They really hurt me. I mean, it presents itself in relationship and and certainly in the ministry that I do now. I bring people together around a common interest, and then we start gathering around that common interest, and that common interest turns into many theological conversation. But it's, it's grassroots. It comes about in a much different way than a formal organization and a with lots of formal rules and lots of formal dogma and lots of right? It's it's much more natural, organic, so to speak. The interesting thing for me about emerging generations is how comfortable they are with mystery, how curious they are as learners, in many ways, but not in the ways that people have traditionally done that, which is fascinating to me. I'm fascinated by these emerging generations, because you get them to your house for pizza and a beer, they'll stay all night, like literally getting them there. Now that's a challenge. That's a challenge because they say they'll show up until they don't their very last minute, they're very you know, better offer doesn't come whatever. Yes, that part of it is tough, but I do believe that parts of the church are going to need deny in order for the new to be

Chip Gruen: 56:56

So where I always like to end these conversations being cognizant of my own myopia here is, what have I not asked you about that you think is really important? Like, what is there some angle, some aspect of either your work or the results or the work to come, you know that we've been neglecting that you think needs to be given a special shout out to?

Susan Pizor Yoder: 57:19

You know, I think the greatest deterrent to being creative in looking at what's actually happening is the level of denial. And I don't know that I've said I think denial is, as they say in recovery groups, it's not a river. In Egypt, there's heavy, heavy levels of denial to do, oh, it's going to get better. We're just going to do this and they're going to come out. It's not going to and so there is this sense in which I think we need more pioneers. There was a book written canoeing the mountain by Tod Bolsinger, and he talks about leadership styles going forward, you know. And it's a book on Lewis and Clark going across nation, and they think they're going to hit the water and they hit the mountain and and what do they do? Do they go back? Do they go forward? Do they get rid of the canoes and start to get hiking gear? Who do they now partner with? Because they don't have do mountain climbing, you know? So they get Sacagawea. Anyways, it's a story of leadership strategy and how our leadership strategies right now have to shift, and we have to address what really is, instead of what we want to be. If that makes sense, where are we really? Where are emerging generations, really? And the statistics are very clear. In the graduating class, I think it was 2000 don't quote me on this. I think was 2023 or 22 when asked what was their religious preference, the number one overwhelming answer was agnostic. So we have generations emerging that they're just not sure it's not something some of them have even thought about because they weren't brought up in families where you practiced a religious tradition, so they don't practice it. They have curiosity. They have questions. They but again, we gotta engage those and not be threatened by those so if you're looking at the future, you know you have to come to it with some curiosity and and excitement and possibility and really listen well, because they're saying some things that are really important and they need to be heard and and and expanded upon. And when they feel heard and those things are expanded upon, then they're more open to the conversations that to those of us who have had a rich experience of something greater than us, something bigger than us, they have this openness to have that conversation with us, as long as we don't start shaming them or guilting them, or, you know, all these kinds of things. So I think learning how to have those conversations, learning to not be afraid of of their belief systems that are still being formed and maybe not even thought about, that doesn't have to threaten us that can be like a wonderful opportunity for engagement and community building, right? So that's what I would say.

Chip Gruen: 1:00:27

Well, I think that seems like a good place to leave off then for today. Sue Pizor Yoder, thank you so much for the conversation today. I really enjoyed it.

Susan Pizor Yoder: 1:00:35

You are most welcome.

Chip Gruen: 1:00:38

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website, at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise, wherever you get your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you next time.