Hi, everyone. This is Curtis, and I am excited to tell you about a new feature of the GoodFaith podcast, and it's called Campfire Stories.

Now, in a great campfire, everyone has the opportunity to share their stories. And so, in Campfire Stories, we want to hear from you.

We want to hear a story about what you are doing along the themes of the GoodFaith podcast, perhaps it's something about how you're living out your relationships with political polarization, how you are trying to reflect the image of God in your institution and organization, or what you're doing with your money, or your vocation, anything that has been sparked by the themes that we've covered here in the GoodFaith podcast is fear game.

It doesn't matter if it's a big story, a small story, or something in between, as long as it's a story about what you are doing in your life.

We're not so much interested in hearing just thoughts. We want to hear stories of doing.

So, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can just click on it and then supply us the basic outlines of your story of doing, of living out the themes of GoodFaith podcast.

And we'll look at it and we may invite you to share that story on a GoodFaith blog, a social media, or perhaps even invite you to come on the GoodFaith show yourself and talk to me and share your story.

Like, how cool would that be? I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to talk with you. So, please consider joining the campfire by actually joining actively and sharing your story with others gathered around the campfire.

Thanks.

Welcome to the GoodFaith podcast. I'm David French with Curtis Chang. And welcome to a Christmas season edition of The GoodFaith Podcast.

We're going to have two in a row that are going to hit upon some Christmas themes and some interesting ways next week. We're going to be talking about Christmas and empathy and using the concept of Christmas and empathy to introduce a larger discussion of empathy.

But today, we're going to talk about hope, Christmas and hope and specifically, well, let me just say, we're going to take a turn towards hope, lessness before we take a turn towards hope because one of the things Curtis that has become particularly

that is particularly poignant to me about this moment and time and this moment in time, specifically this Christmas season, during this year, is it's becoming increasingly clear that we live in a nation where there is an extraordinary amount of hopelessness, an extraordinary amount of pain.

We're going to put in the show notes, this article that came out some years ago, this is pre-pandemic. So this is not something that's just pandemic specific where we had seen this incredible rise and deaths of despair in the United States of America premature mortality connected to things like drug overdoses connected to things like alcohol abuse to suicide.

And there's this Brookings story called premature mortality in the long decline of hope in the United States of America. In this decline of hope isn't something that is, yes, it's elements of it are broad based, but if you're going to talk about sort of the community in the United States that is most vulnerable to it and most stricken by it, it would be the American working class, blue collar Americans.

And specifically blue collar guys will also put this in the show notes, but one of the most distressing graphics that I have ever seen was one that came from Senator Mike Lee's social capital project and a look at the opioid epidemic again pre-pandemic that just showed the incredible disproportionate number of overdoses on the part of single men specifically single men who

had a high school degree or a GED only. And then also there's some real evidence that this decline in hope in the United States of America is extending beyond measures like drug overdoses and suicides and into other measures other measures that are less dramatic, but also quite traumatic.

For example, a new result just came out this week of from the American survey center 37% of Americans with no college education now say they have two or fewer close friends double the number who said this in 1990.

So that's almost 410 Americans so they have two or fewer close friends and this correlates also with a decline in community and religious engagement will put this in the show notes. So what I want to do first Curtis before we turn to hope.

I want to talk about this real crisis that we have of hopelessness in the United States of America and it's a crisis of hopelessness that seems to be disproportionately impacting one particular subset of Americans.

And I just wanted to get your thoughts as somebody who as a former pastor as somebody who has been in ministry for much of your life.

Is this something that you've seen build over time? Is this something that you've seen really skyrocketing a skyrocketing of late and what do you attribute it to? What do you think is going on here?

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