Welcome to the Good Faith Podcast. I am not Curtis Chang. I'm founding friend David

French Curtis. Couldn't join us this week, but I was going to be with y'all talking to

our guest anyway. So it's just going to be the two of us. It's me and Michael Graham, co-author

of a book with a really relevant and vivid title, The Great Deturching, who's leaving,

why are they going, and what will it take to bring them back? And Michael, you were co-authored

this with Jim Davis, and it also says, with Ryan Burge. So it's you and Jim, with Ryan, and Ryan,

I know, good faith listeners, loyal good faith listeners, we'll remember him because we've talked

about him a million times in his research a million times. So Michael, welcome to the podcast. I'm

really looking forward to this conversation. It's so good to be here. I've been really looking

forward to this one. All right. So The Great Deturching, you are taking a look at something that I

think when historians look back at this time period, we'll say this is one of the single most

significant and rapid cultural changes in the country and really kind of in the nation's

history, this extraordinary decrease in church affiliation. So first, sort of talk about

what you did. There's an obvious reason for the book to take a look at it. What's going on?

So how did you do this? What all did you look at? Well, before I answer that, I don't want to

bury the lead. The lead is this. We're talking about 40 million adult Americans who have left

houses of worship that's all religious traditions in the last 25 to 30 years. And so that's

the largest and fastest religious shift in our country's history. It's larger than the first and

second grade awakening, plus the entirety of the Billy Graham Crusades combined. So we got here,

so Jim and I are both pastors in Orlando, Florida. I guess recently now I'm the program director

for the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. I guess my pastor heads a little bit on the

sidelines right now. But Jim and I were, we'd run across some data that 43% of our city had,

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