Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine, and today we are going to be discussing changes in religious practices, specifically

among millennials. My guest is Tara Isabella Burton. She is the author of Strange Rights,

new religions for a godless world, available now from Public Affairs Press and soon to be

released in paperback. Tara, hello. It is nice to be with you. Oh, thank you so much for having me on.

I'm a long-time reader, and it's a delight to finally talk. Well, this book is completely fascinating.

It's very provocative at times, and let's start with the fact that I think a lot of people know

that religious belief, institutional religious

practice among millennials and among the zoomers, is on the decline. This is a point that has been

raised both by the religious right, by the Jerry Falwells of the world, and triumphantly by the Sam Harris's and the secularists of the world.

And so we all kind of have a sense that, ah, yes, the young people, they're not that into Christianity anymore.

But what you point out in this book is that it's easy to assume

that because that is the case, we have a generation of purely secular people

rising up and that religion is on the decline.

But the interesting point that your book begins with is that that is not necessarily so, because we shouldn't confuse the decline

in institutionalized formal religion for a decline in religion as a whole, because when you look at it

closely, and when you actually start talking to people, it turns out that there are some,

well, as the title indicates, some strange rights on the rise.

Yeah, so I think that there's this stereotype that I came across often, particularly when

I was working as a religion reporter a few years ago for Vox, which is this idea that

where America is getting less religious, that young people in particular are less religious.

And often the statistics that are used to support that are the 24% give or take of

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