Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex Okona, and you're about to hear a conversation

between me and Andrew Mark Henry. Dr Henry is a scholar of religion, specializing in

early Christianity and the religions of the late Roman Empire, but also the founder

and host of Religion for Breakfast, a YouTube channel with over 600,000 subscribers, which

offers introductory material on a variety of topics related to religion.

In this conversation, you can expect to hear us ask, what is religion? What counts as religion?

Can political ideologies, like nationalism, at least sometimes be considered religious?

We also talk about the concept of atheist churches, why they exist, and whether or not

they can provide the same thing that religion does for people who don't believe in God.

I also bring up the connection between this and Slavojicex theory of Diet Coke. Finally,

the origin of religion. Theories about why religion is so ubiquitous across all human

societies, and where it might come from, evolutionarily and psychologically speaking. I hope

you enjoy it. Andrew Mark Henry, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me.

We're going to start quite broad here. What is religion?

So you're starting with like the ultimate annoyance for religious study scholars, which

is we just can't seem to define it, which seems to be self-defeating that you go and

get a PhD in this field that people can't even decide on what to define. I always like

to define it as, first of all, something that people do, especially in cultures that

are so influenced by Protestantism, where we think of religion as something that people

think about. It's like the conversion experience that happens deep inside your psyche. Religion

is ultimately human behavior, and in some respects, it's up to the scholar to categorize

what sorts of human behaviors under that category. For me, I try to define it as a mode of

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