Shermer Says: Why Secularists Are Turning to Religion, The Substitution Hypothesis, Sleep Paralysis
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are we entering a Fifth Great Awakening—a cultural swing back toward religion?
An increasing number of books and articles are calling for a religious revival.
"We need religion to keep our society functioning."
"People need meaning."
Michael Shermer responds to and revisits the historical waves of religious fervor that shaped American life. He also asks what today's renewed interest in faith, spirituality, and meaning says about our culture.
Featuring commentary on new books by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray, and a preview of Helen Pluckrose's new article for Skeptic.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. This one, a solo commentary. This is Shermer says number two. This one's on, I guess what I'm calling it is, are we in the fifth Great Awakening? I first started thinking about this when the number of books piling up on my desk here at the office |
| 0:24.8 | about this subject of religion and religiosity, making a comeback, just as we were processing |
| 0:33.2 | books from last year about the decline of religion and the rise of the nuns. |
| 0:37.6 | Here, I'll just give you, I'll go through these individually, but just let me give you |
| 0:41.2 | the visceral impression here of, you know, this is the pile of books that's come in just in |
| 0:46.3 | the last, well, this year, I guess, 2025, the last few months. |
| 0:51.0 | And here's a bunch of the books that have come in just before that about the decline of religiosity. |
| 0:58.0 | Just to kind of give you an impressionistic view here, I'll go through some of these in a minute. |
| 1:04.0 | But I was just thinking about this in the context of the history of religiosity and Christianity in America, |
| 1:10.9 | roughly broken down into four great awakenings, as they're called. |
| 1:15.4 | Historians track them as the first one in the 1730s and 40s, |
| 1:19.7 | so let's just say mid-18th century. |
| 1:22.3 | These are figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, |
| 1:26.5 | where preachers stopped reading their dense sermons and congregations became more evangelical, more actively involved in the church. |
| 1:35.7 | And this form of evangelical Christianity also spread through the African-American slave communities in America. |
| 1:43.0 | The second great awakening was roughly 1790s to 1840, |
| 1:48.7 | affiliated with Charles Finney in the rise of camp meetings and hell, fire, and damnation |
| 1:54.6 | preaching. |
| 1:55.7 | And this involved, appropriately enough, the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery movement, |
| 2:04.1 | the temperance movement to get Americans to quit drinking so much, and women's rights movements. |
| 2:09.7 | The third great awakening is roughly mid-19th century into the early 20th century. |
| 2:16.4 | It started with a tent revival meeting in New York City and then spread |
... |
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