69: Believing with Lauren Jackson

Hosts: Brandon Nappi, Misty Krasawski 

Guest: Lauren Jackson

Brandon:   Misty, it’s so great to have you back in the studio. 

Misty:       Yay, I’m so glad to be here.

B:            We’ve missed you. 

M:           It’s really a treat. I’ve been busy. Tell my teachers to lay off a little bit. No, I’m just kidding. It’s perfectly fine. 

B:            We’ve missed you. Oh my gosh, that pun just happened without me even trying. I’m sorry, the bad puns. 

M:           You and the word things, it’s such a, it’s a gift. 

B:            So how is the semester? I presume it’s dense? 

M:           It’s very dense, it’s very busy. I have four full classes. 

B:            What are your classes? Tell the people they want to know. 

M:           The people want to know. So I’m taking Hebrew Bible, Principles and Practices of Preaching,  and Anglican Way 2. So more recent history, although we’re still early 1900s, I guess right now. And then let me see, I have one more. Oh, Foundations of Christian worship, which is fascinating. Did you know that some of the prayers we say in an Episcopal service, which means in a lot of different services around the world really, are directly related to things that were written down in like the mid second century. I just think that is so amazing and beautiful. 

B:            What’s new is old and old is new. And yes, I love all the commingling of years and times. It’s so good. 

M:           So as you’re saying something about things new and I’m noticing over your shoulder that we have a new guest in the studio besides me. 

B:            We welcome our beloved mascot at Berkeley Divinity School, Lucas, the winged ox. 

M:           We’re very glad. 

B:            Which from ancient times has been a symbol of Saint Luke, the gospel writer. And of course at the Berkeley Center, Saint Luke’s Chapel is where our community gathers every day for prayer. And so we thought that the podcast wouldn’t feel really super official unless…

 

M:           Unless Lucas was overseeing the process. 

B:            That’s right. We have Lucas dedicated here. There’s several, Lucoi.

M:           Several … Oh wow, Lucoi, okay.

B:            Around campus. 

M:           When you’re winged, you get to be Lucoi if you were more than one. 

B:            But this one is dedicated to the studio. 

M:           I love it, he’s darling. 

B:            He is darling. What else are you doing these days other than studying? Is there space for anything else? 

M:           Oh goodness gracious. I mean, very little except I did sneak to Disney last weekend. 

B:            What?

M:           And that was fantastic. I have a daughter who turned 21. 

B:            California or Florida? 

M:           No, alas, I am a lover at this point only of Florida. I haven’t been to the one in California yet. 

B:            Okay, so you’re not claiming that Florida is better. I heard a little judgment in your voice. 

M:           Subtext.

B:            Okay, shout out to Dr. Hannah Black. 

M:           Judging … I know, Dr. Hannah Black! I would never go against anything that Dr. Hannah Black would say. But yeah, I mean, Disney World is a world. It’s a whole world. So we did that this weekend and I’m very tired and my feet are still yelling at me a little, but it was a great time. 

B:            Are you gonna write about this in your new sub-stack? 

M:           See, here’s the thing. I should write about something on my sub-stack, but I’ve been so busy doing all the work I’m supposed to do. Do you know what’s so interesting? Because I really, I love to communicate with people through writing and essay writing and I’ve been doing that since I was little. And so Substack is so great because I have an opportunity to do that. Except for that, these ideas go through my head during the week and I think, I should write about that. And then it’s like, no, you should do the reading for your class tomorrow morning and then I don’t get around to it. But I am really gonna make an effort to get out there and do that. You’ve been doing a lot of writing too. 

B:            I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I have a finished manuscript for a book. 

M:           It’s finished–did you say finished? 

B:            The manuscript, the first draft is finished.

M:           That’s so exciting! Hurrah!

B”            So we’re in full editing mode. We are seeking book agents. So agents, if you’re out there listening, it’s a book of daily meditation to help keep us grounded in a world that is going off the rails. It feels like day by day, but there are so many brand new expressions of religiosity and new ways that believers can express themselves on social media. Substack feels like it’s having a moment. Everyone has a substack these days, except me, but maybe that’s something I need to do. 

M:           Maybe you’ll have to join. No, it’s so true. I think when people, because we know that so many people aren’t attending church services, aren’t part of a community like that, it seems like they’re getting their information elsewhere. And one of the things that I felt like was, well, people are saying all kinds of things out there. I’d like to say something nice. I’d like to say something true. I’d like to say something welcoming. So that’s kind of my goal there. 

B:            You know, many are talking about the mixed ecology, I love this ecological metaphor that we need many different contexts. We need many different pipelines. We need many different ways of connecting people. And right, the traditional worship space will be one of them. Social media will be another. Substack will be yet another. I mean, so we need a plurality of ways to talk about the divine. And someone who’s doing a really beautiful job these days of mirroring back to America, the various ways of expressing belief is Lauren Jackson in the New York Times. 

M:           Mmmm hmm. So excellent. 

B:            She has a wonderful new weekly newsletter entitled “Believing” as she looks at the many ways Americans are expressing belief. Expressing belief in traditional ways, in novel ways, in innovative ways, and sometimes scary ways, right? The whole spectrum. So we’re so thankful to have Lauren Jackson with us. 

M:           We are, she’s amazing. 

B:            Let me tell you a little bit about her. She is the esteemed religious columnist for the New York Times. She is currently an associate editor and writer for “The Morning,” the Times flagship daily newsletter. And over the past year, she’s been deeply involved in reporting on belief.  “Believing” has become a weekly newsletter recently. She’s based in London. She’s worked on major world events for “The Morning.” She’s published photography from Britain, Germany, Mongolia. Before joining the Times, Lauren worked at the United Nations Reuters, CNN. She studied at Oxford. She was a Rhodes Scholar. I think you’ll find in her a really diligent observer, a curious human and a person who herself is on a seeking journey like all of us.

M:           Truly. She knows a few things.

B:            She knows a few things. So we’re really thankful that she’s joined us. 

M:           We are, we hope you’ll enjoy the podcast.

B:            Welcome to the “Leaders Way” podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world.

We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world.

               I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, Lecturer at Yale Divinity School and Executive Director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.

               Lauren Jackson, welcome to the “Leaders Way” podcast. We’re so thankful that you’re here. 

Lauren:     Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. 

B:            I have so appreciated your reporting over these months believing has been an incredible way for me and for us, my colleagues here at Yale Divinity School, to have our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the religious and spiritual landscape of the United States. So thank you for this incredible work and I’d love to hear the Genesis story. How did this come about?

L:            Well, I’m so glad you’re a reader, thank you. I always say thanks because our readers pay my salary. So thank you. How did this work start? Gosh, it really has to go way back. I mean, the earliest evidence I have of knowing I wanted to do this actually comes from about a decade ago I met a stranger on a plane and we became fast friends. And a couple of months ago, he reminded me that in the middle of this 12 hour flight to Tokyo, he was like, “What do you wanna do with your life?” We were about the same age. So it was like one of those, you’re young and you’re like, “Who are you gonna be when you grow up?” And I said, “Well, there’s really only one thing I really wanna do. And it’s, I really want to be a journalist, hopefully at the New York Times” is what he said I said. So I’m going with his sourcing. And I really want to write about modern belief, how people live and experience spirituality now, because I think I have so many amazing colleagues who cover it and cover it really well. But often when you think about news, it kind of skews towards the institutional. 

               So we think about what the Southern Baptist Convention is saying or doing, what’s happening at the Vatican. But I’m really interested in the complexities of how people live religion. And so I wanted to really focus on that. And so that was the very beginning a long time ago. And then I just pestered my bosses until they let me do this. That’s probably the right answer. (Laughs) And they finally said yes. And I’m so grateful. I need to give them a big shout out, Sam Dolnick and Jody Redoran specifically.

               So I was raised a devout Mormon. I still personally identify as Mormon. The name of the church has changed, but it was my identification for a long time. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the home, spiritual and religious home that I was raised in. I was raised in Arkansas and I was raised in a particularly devout family and it’s a very high demand religion. So I was really all in. I really believed it. It was my whole world. It was my family. It was my friends. It was my community. It was my spiritual language. It was how I explained the world around me. It infused my very ordinary, very small suburban life with a lot of astonishing possibility with, you know, it suffused my life with the supernatural. And I loved it. I loved being a part of the faith. 

               As I grew up, I attended secular universities. That was a big choice for me. And I found myself drifting from that community, but I always retained just an extraordinary fascination. And really, you know, that was my first language. I retained a fluency with wanting to speak in that language and tried to bring that into the new spaces I found myself in, whether that was at school or now at work. It was hard to leave behind. So that’s the genesis. 

M:           That’s amazing. I think having a story like that where religion is such an important part of your life and faith and your lifestyle and your community is just such a fascinating thing. And it’s interesting that that caused you to be curious, I think, about other people and their own experiences. And so I wonder since you’ve been doing this for a while now, if you might share what’s a really profound or maybe a really inspiring story that you’ve heard over the years.

L:            Oh my goodness, profound or inspiring. I feel like the beauty and the joy of this work and the responsibility, it feels hard, it feels heavy sometimes, is being the recipient of these extraordinary stories. And, you know, in that pestering process I was mentioning when I was pitching, pitching, pitching, like we’ve got to do this, I always use the line that everyone has a belief story. So no matter if you’re religious or not religious, if you’re raised in a religious or spiritual tradition or you weren’t, everyone at a certain point is brought to these questions and to these topics. And so they have to find some sort of answer or they go through the process of wrestling with the questions themselves, as Rilke said. And so, gosh, that is a big prelude to not answering your question about what stories to answer. 

               A couple, a couple. I mean, I know someone through mutual friends who actually was, this was in the news, so it’s public, he was shipwrecked at sea in the Pacific Northwest and he was lost at sea for 13 days. 

B:            Oh gosh. That’s a nightmare by the way. 

M:           Oh my gosh, just no. 

B:            Boats and oceans and all. 

L:            No, I know. And he survived on a few rations that were in this lifeboat that he found himself in and had a couple of near misses with ships. And along the way, you know, we had this really beautiful conversation after he survived–the plot is given away. We had the conversation after he survived. He was picked up by a Canadian fishing vessel on the 13th night. So the day that the Coast Guard had stopped searching for him off the coast of Washington, he was–they spotted him in the distance and they were like, “Is that a boat?” And picked him up. And, you know, we talked about the big questions he had to encounter as he was laying there alone, facing his own death for days on end. And he’s not someone who would identify as particularly religious, but he spoke of finding an extraordinary peace and developing a set of beliefs about deity, about the possibilities of a beyond and finding extraordinary comfort in them. 

               And so I think I cite that example for you because there’s something about extremity that can be revealing. And to me, he’s not someone, he was a young guy, he’s about my age. You know, he’s not someone who was particularly religious but a difficult moment brought him to confront these questions about who we are, how we inhabit the world, what the world around us or this life means and where we might be going. And he turned to spiritual traditions that he had learned about growing up for answers. 

               And so I think that’s an extreme example but I encounter people every day in the mundanity of their lives who ask and answer these questions or try to answer these questions. I don’t know if anyone–lots of people think they have answers and maybe they do, but lots of people have different answers. 

M:           My goodness, thank you. 

B:            Yeah, God is persistent in our quest to find God and find meaning and find something transcendent and grounding. And I wonder, Misty’s a student here, training for ministry and at Yale Divinity School, we have people who are training for ministry but also folks who are training for academic work and PhDs in religion and theology.

We’re not in the curriculum reading the New York Times every day, I’ll confess, or maybe that’s not a surprise for you. What is it that you want us to know about the landscape of belief in America that would be important for aspiring faith leaders, future academics who are giving their entire professional lives and their deepest curiosity to religion? What is it that you’re seeing? I mean, you’re getting up close and personal in communities. What are you noticing that’s really curious to you? 

L:            Yeah, I mean, when you say that, gosh, it’s about like fields of aperture, right? And I think you’re in this position at Yale, the beautiful position, the envious position at Yale Divinity School. And sometimes I’m deep last night, as we were talking about, I was doing breaking news on a really harrowing story and I’m like, maybe I should just go become an academic. I would just get to read and write and think all day. And gosh, wouldn’t that talk about amazing ideas? Wouldn’t that be incredible?

               So, it’s fields of aperture. You’re at a level where you get to really open it wide, wide, wide for the photography enthusiasts, like 2.0, right? Like 1.8, like as wide as possible. And yet I was talking yesterday to a really, really wonderful congregation. So, only –to my understanding, the only Jewish congregation in Jackson, Mississippi, and they have a monthly meeting called Doubt and Discovery where they come together and ask spiritual questions together. And we talked about the hyper, hyper-local field of aperture, so like the smallest field of aperture, and how there’s entire universes within both. One is not preferential, one is not better than the other. And so, I similarly sit in a position where I have to kind of think pretty broad, zero in on certain things at different times, but I think the beauty of anyone preparing for ministry is, for the most part, you’re gonna be focused on the hyper-local and there are entire universes that sit within that. 

               And it makes me think of, I don’t know if you know the photographer, really on a photography kick right now, Abelardo Morell, who, he actually studied theology as well in college, and he has a series called “The Universe Next Door.” And so, he goes, he focuses on like the smallest possible image. He’s looking at water droplets, or he’s looking at the pages of a book, and he fills the entire frame with that, right? And so, this is all an introduction to say,

gosh, I think all of the big, big, big themes that we’re talking about, every question that I’ve identified in the questions they were asking on the ship, or he was asking in the shipwreck, all the big questions that Pascal, or any theorist, or any writer who you would read at Yale Divinity School is thinking about, they’re meted out and their ideas are enacted in the hyper-local, in the very mundane and immediate lives of the people that they’re confronting.  

               So, I guess what would I tell them? I mean, your work is so important, and especially in this moment of extraordinary loneliness and extraordinary polarization, finding bridges within communities, attending to the sickness, the suffering, the needs, the grief, the longing of communities has never been more important work. I really don’t think so, and that includes secular communities, it also includes religious communities. So, I guess my message would be one of encouragement. Your work is urgent and keep going. 

B:            We need the encouragement. I think maybe if you think about one of the things that journalists and folks in ministry have in common, it’s the conscious choice to run towards suffering. Evolutionarily, we carry within us this instinct to run away from the pain, and run away from the suffering, right? It’s safer to run away. And yet, what we’re actually disciplining ourselves to do is to go toward the darkness, toward the pain, and walk with others there. And you have to do that same thing as you tell stories and share with the world the important experiences there locally. Have you always had that impulse? And how do you carry that? Because it’s a heavy burden, I imagine, at times. 

L:            I mean, I don’t know if I’ve always had that impulse, but I always had that instruction because I was raised in a really close-knit, really high-demand religious community. And I’m a professional seeker, as my boss once put it. My work is the space in which I ask and answer these questions, which is a complicated thing. I mean, when people talk about work-life balance, I’m like, “Where did I draw that line?” 

M:           What does that mean? 

B:            We understand.

L:            But you, you know, growing up, you don’t get to choose in a religious tradition. If you’re really showing up in a community, kind of who’s included or who’s not included, you need to find a way to live together. You need to find a way to work together. And I think that developed a muscle for disagreement, for curiosity, and saying, “Wow, this person is a really complex character. There’s a lot going on here. How can I ask more questions? How can I understand more about their life that will help me make sense of the ways in which we’re interacting?” So I think that’s where the curiosity came from. I also think in terms of why journalism, I just think, I’ve always been creative, and I think it’s just such a joy to be able to create in a public forum. So yeah, those are the two things. I mean, you were saying the run towards, you know, running towards the dumpster fire, there’s a mural, I don’t know if you’d call it a mural. It’s on a fire station in East London by Old Street, which is like a big famous intersection roundabout. On the fire station, it says, “Love is the running towards.” They’ve painted it on top. I used to live over there, and I would bike by it to go to work. Every time I bike by, I’d start crying. I get really weepy recently. But yeah, I think that is part of this work, is to run towards. And that’s hard to do sometimes, because the fire really is burning, but that resonates. 

M:           That’s really beautiful. I can relate to the like crying at phrases that just jump out at you.

B:            We’re cryers here at the Leaders’ Way podcast. 

M:           Yeah, sorry to say. It’s true. It’s not not true. 

               I’m curious for people who maybe aren’t as familiar with your work about how much you talk about this, but in all your interactions with so many different people from different walks of life, and who are having different spiritual experiences, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you find your own spiritual life having changed or grown or transforming in the process of talking with these other people.

L:            Yeah, wow. It’s a journey. I mean, it’s a process I’m on, right? I left the faith I was raised in. I never identified as atheist. So I think I always maintained even after I left, and I write about this publicly, so I guess I’m not really disclosing anything, but I always maintained a prayer practice or prayer habit. I would pray. I didn’t know what I was praying to, or whom I was praying to, or what concept I was praying. I didn’t know. I just kept that habit that I developed as a child of being constantly prayerful, as we would say within Christian tradition. And I still have that, you know? And I don’t know where that is going. I don’t know where those missives are going, but I believe there’s something at the other end of the line.

               And I think for me, the reason, I guess one answer to your question is in the name believing. So I really wrestled for a long time, my colleagues and I wrestled as well with what to name this, initially this series, and now this newsletter. But there was something about believing, which as a transitive verb is the process, right? I’m not all that interested in where people arrive at the end of their journey, if anyone arrives anywhere, or the place they stop and think they’ve arrived, right? Like, I believe the sky is blue. I believe I’m sitting here talking to you. Those are statements that are born of the evidence that I’ve collected. I’m not actually interested in what people, I mean, I am, I guess, interested in what people believe. I’m much more interested in the process of how they got there. And so the process of believing.

               So I guess you could say I’m in that journey, and I’m not sure where it’s gonna take me, but I really take so much heart from the wisdom of these ancient traditions that contain so much. I also take so much inspiration from the extraordinary innovation we’re seeing from people who are disrupting really old institutions and taking that wisdom and finding new ways forward. I think, you know, what is religious history if not that? Extraordinary instances of innovation. So I’m grateful to be a voyeur and a connoisseur of them all, and I don’t know where that will take me. 

M:           That’s great. 

B:            I think your work first came to my attention in the article you wrote, Americans haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion. I wonder if you can unpack this a little bit, right? Because on the one hand, you know, lots of statistics are demonstrating that Americans are not in traditional communities, though maybe that’s starting to shift. Maybe we’ve seen the decline level off of it. I don’t know, who knows? And it’s a time of incredible, as you say, innovation, creativity, seeking, creation. And I wonder if you could help us sort of glimpse to the best of your ability, what’s going on at the moment? It’s a fascinating moment to be alive. 

M:           Yes, please explain it all to us. What is going on? 

L:            It’s a good question; it’s a really good topic. Yeah, gosh, I mean, wow, that piece, you know, they tell you, and I’ve never been in journalism school, but as you’re, when you’re coming up as journalists, they say, like, you really shouldn’t have in mind when you set out to report something what you’re gonna write, you know, you should really arrive there as you write it, as you collect all the facts, and then you look at them. I think if that is the case, I think this is probably the purest form of true journalism I’ve ever done, because I never set out to write this, right? Like, I’ve had my whole own process of leaving the faith community I was raised in, and my own personal feelings about that, but I never, you know, I never set out to say, like, it just wasn’t the argument I set out to write when I started doing this, it really wasn’t. There were so many other drafts that were not that, actually.

               And finally, I just sat down, I felt like I looked at all my drafts, I looked at all of the reporting I’d done, and I said, and then also the data, I mean, that was the really big thing, we were actually started working on all of this, this whole series, and thinking about it, and trying to commission for it and figure it out about a year before Pew released its religious landscape study, which was really informative for, you know, might have taken things to my bosses, and they say, okay, with like nice idea, where’s the data as a journalist, and you’re like, this really matters, it is very qualitative, but here’s the quantitative data. It just came out. Finally. I actually emailed them when my bosses were like, where’s more data? And I emailed them, I was like, do you have anything coming out soon? And they were like, you’ll never believe that, we have our biggest survey ever coming out. That’s great.

               So, and that just kind of showed us that we were in this inflection, this really interesting inflection point, and who knows how long it’s gonna last if I had to place a bet, and journalists should not be in the business of prediction, but just in terms of demographic trends. You know, secularism, I think, will continue to spread, and the country will continue to secularize, and especially as young people grow up. That being said, we are seeing, as you all know, and I think I’m saying for the purposes of the podcast, we’re seeing this extraordinary moment where for the first time in decades, we are seeing the number of people leaving religious institutions in the United States stagnate. So that’s, you know, used to be, it was this precipitous exponential decline. A lot was made over the last decade in particular of the rise of the NONES or people with no religious affiliation. And for the first time, we’re seeing the number of people leaving stop or stagnate. We don’t know how long that will hold, we don’t know what that means. 

               What I found in my reporting is quite simply in this moment, a lot of people have left, and a lot of people have spent the last 15 years in particular really searching for the same moral direction or moral instruction, so beliefs, belonging, community, and behaviors, or guidance on how they should live outside of faith, and they haven’t found it in the ways that maybe they felt were slightly more satisfying within religion, at least that’s what I’m hearing. And the pandemic was really an accelerant of people starting to reckon with that and question it. And then, you know, the final and contributing factor I would say is in this era of, the Trump era, which spans from 2016, I don’t know if we ever really left it, we are seeing the emergence and increasing politicization of religiosity in America and its presence in our discourse in a way that I think also creates more permissibility for people to consider the role of religion in their own life. 

B:            As we’ve witnessed the experimentation of spirituality, it seems to me, what’s happened is we’ve kind of gathered in silos with other like-minded folks in homogeneous groups. And so as beautiful as it is to find other like-minded souls and have various spiritual practices that y’all resonate with, what potentially gets lost in that mix is religion as a place to gather us together across political beliefs, right? For example, like Brene Brown had this great line when she describes her own Episcopal Christian faith. And she would say, like, I wanna get together, stand next to someone and sing a song with a person who I wanna punch in the face for the rest of the week. And I think it’s really great. Like we need places, religious places, other places that we can gather with people who are not like us across various categories. And I wonder if that’s a piece of what’s felt missing, amid the spiritual creativity of these last generations, as beautiful as it is and as needed as it has been. If we’re just creating spaces where we can meet with other people who are just like us, I think that kind of homogeneity is gonna hurt us in the long run. 

L:            Yeah, I mean, I think I really wanna write a piece. I don’t know the way into it. It’s been on my mind for a while, but I really wanna write a piece about duty and obligation. And I think it’s one, it’s the great double-edged sword within religious traditions, right? I was raised in a very dutiful context where I was very obligated. My time was very obligated. My emotional obligations were high. My attention was very obligated. And there was an extraordinary liberation that came of my time, my attention, my freedom of choice. I studied surveillance in graduate school. I like, was obsessed with it because I found linkages between the duty and obligation I felt within religious tradition and the sense of surveillance that I felt, right? So I drew linkages there. So there’s a, I mean, I could, I’m just touching the surface, but there’s so much within that that can be so harmful for so many people, especially when we think about rights and autonomy. And we think about this in non-Western contexts or in contexts where people don’t experience religious pluralism and they feel obligated to practice or profess affiliation to religion. So that’s there. And yet the flip side of it is I think in hyper-individualistic, hyper-pluralistic society, what we experience is, and this, you know, so many have written about this, is the infinite choice of the context that we live in now. And there is something, I could speak personally here, right? Not even just structurally. I think there is something that has been lost in, as I’ve lost that sense of obligation, it’s hard for me to want to sit in an uncomfortable context when I think, oh, I could just go to brunch. I could just pull my – around myself, the people who feel really comfortable to me. 

               And I think, you know, my colleague Emma Goldberg actually wrote a really good piece about this in totally secular context about … is the spread of hyper-therapized language. So like, you know, set your boundaries. You make everyone a jerk. And I don’t know, that’s probably too far, but I’m interested in how we introduce duty and obligation socially, civically, communally. It doesn’t have to be religious. We don’t really have institutions that facilitate that, right? Like, we just don’t have that. And religions have been such a vehicle for that. You think about even like unions or social organizations, think about the Elks Clubs. Like they don’t exist anymore, right? And I mean, unions obviously exist, but we don’t have secular contexts where that exists. 

               And finally, the final point I’ll make on this is thinking about these hyper, these very creative institutions that have emerged or groups that have emerged that have tried to replicate some of the success and wisdom of religious traditions in a non-religious context. Sunday Assembly being one that I think was so creative and has been so creative in doing so. You know, I think I attended Sunday Assembly as a seeker, not as a journalist. So I was going personally because I was like, man, it was actually the pandemic. It was the same thing. I was like, I want community and I want to talk to someone who I just, I want to talk to an old person. I only talk to people who are about my age. I want to talk to someone who’s like 80. And I just want to hang out with little kids. Can I, like, where can I go for that? What communities can I find? So I went to Sunday Assembly, which for listeners is, I think I just said, you know, you sing pop songs instead of hymns and there’s no God present.             

               It’s uncomfortable, you know? I remember pouring milk in for like cookies, milk and cookies after the service and this actually older man came up to me and said something mildly uncomfortable or inappropriate as people of different generations are wont to do. And I remember this feeling of being like, I was coming fresh off of a college campus and I was like, oh, I’m gonna not talk to this guy. I’m gonna, I’m gonna … and then I realized like, no, you know, like actually, I should try to ask more questions. I should try to lean, turn in and be more present. And it was that tension. I didn’t end up going back a bunch of times, not because of this lovely gentleman, but just because it didn’t feel quite like the right fit. But I don’t know. I think we need to redevelop that muscle and I don’t know how we do it, but that’s the big urgent question.

B:            No, it’s a question–thank you for it–we sit with a lot around here and, you know, I think, you know, you’re referencing the kind ofubiquitous therapeutic language that’s around. And I’m here for it. I love it. I use it. I default to it and you use the word duty. And for me, the word accountability comes up as well. Like who are we accountable to? What does it mean to be accountable to this community? However you draw that circle, this local community, this country. And if we’re going to dedicate ourselves to love, what does that concretely look like? And it seems to me that the inside of the Christian tradition is to say that there’s always a cost to loving. That it’s not just getting what you want all the time. It’s not just hanging out with your peeps all the time. It’s not, you know, getting constant affirmation from your therapist as lovely as that would be, right? It’s not a warm bath. And we have to be willing to give a bit and to do some amount of work and to pay a price and to experience a cost. And it’s just something I’ve been thinking a lot about because we want it all. We want belonging and love and, you know, my own unique thriving in the world, but we don’t want to give anything for it. We don’t want to do any work in order to get it. And I don’t know that you can have it all like that. I don’t know. 

L:            Yeah, I mean, I think obviously a bell hooks work. And what was the quote? Like “love really costs the earth.” Who said that? I’m totally blank. I don’t know … Yeah, the language of costing the earth, I think you know what it costs is something that we, I don’t know. I don’t want to sound like a million years old being like, we’ve lost it in society, but I think it’s there. I think we just need to, we’re finding it in new forms, but it’s a muscle that we just continue. Like, I think as a society, we always return to these eternal virtues. And I think we’re finding in this moment, a new way to return. And yes, it is a truism. And it is something that we constantly need to be reminded– especially in an era of endless swipes that love does cost the earth. And it’s really hard. It’s really challenging actually.

                I don’t know, this like, I have this Doubt and Discovery group in Jackson, Mississippi, who I spoke to last night, this lovely synagogue congregation. You know, we were talking about, we were talking about actually this idea and talking, because we kind of been talking really broad, like really all these big concepts. And then, you know, we just kind of slowed down and just said like, life is really, really challenging for almost everyone. And the things that will make the most difference congregationally in terms of building community are actually in the smallest moments of showing up in, I think I wrote this, when grief arrives, when the baby comes, when the moving truck is there, you know, like those are really the moments that matter. And I don’t know. I just know for myself, I spend a lot of time in this room in my house, like careening between New Haven and New York City and Jackson, Mississippi. And that is a beautiful privilege. But I know that for me, the truest joy comes when I’m really face to face with someone meting out the complexity of what it means to live together. And I think that’s, it’s hard as the flip side of the pandemics to push towards a lot of remoteness as we miss that.

M:           Wow. You mentioned having grown up in a very high demand religion, which we hear about people talking about that. And it seems like there’s such a sense of kind of breaking away from that really heavy sort of authoritarian, really moralistic, legalistic religion that a lot of people were raised with. But I was talking with my daughters and a friend this weekend actually about that. And it almost seems to me because we also talked about duty and responsibility. And I feel like we, one of the backlashes of the really important move away from that authoritarianism and legalism has been this sense that like, there are no shoulds anymore and there is no such thing as duty or responsibility or any of that. And I’m wondering if that’s where the cost is. And I don’t know what, how you bring back the idea, no, there are some things that we really should do. And part of that is responsibility to other people. Where is the impetus for that gonna come from? Will it have to just be that we start noticing everyone else’s need? Like, how does that get encouraged amongst all of us, I guess, and across all the boundaries that we have? What do you think about that? 

L:            Yeah, I think in an era where there’s been just such an assault from the very top down, and they say this politically, neutrally, but it more just factually assault on our institutions. These opportunities for nuanced seeking, consensus building, wrestling together, feel fewer and further between. And this is what excites me. I feel like I don’t have the answers, but if I can contribute in one very small way through “Believing” to starting the conversation about what that looks like, that’s really all I’m hoping to do. Because I do think it is some of the most urgent work and one of the most potent antidotes that we could find to this moment of extraordinary polarization. And that’s never going to surmount some of the extraordinary structural problems, gun violence being one of them, that I just simply do not have an answer to, but I’ve been so heartened, and I say this again, not from a personal, not stating a political opinion, but more just …  I’ve been compelled by the language that has been used by Zohran Mamdani in his campaign for, in the primary for New York’s mayoral race. I’ve been following politics, covering politics for a long time now, and the right and conservatives, the Christian conservatives specifically, have gotten so good at using the language of belief to mobilize voters, to build coalitions, and also to create an other, to create an antagonist to work against, to fight against. We’ve seen that escalate, we’ve seen that escalate in terms of the language of spiritual warfare in particular that has started. Peter Wagner in hyper-charismatic evangelical spaces, and then over the last decade or so, few decades has now entered really the highest echelon of Republican politics. J.D. Vance is invoking the armor of God. Carolyn Levitt is talking about spiritual warfare. Jenny Corn as well. So it’s really present in our politics, and it’s very, very effective. We can talk about, I can’t impute a strategy here, but we know it’s really effective. Matthew Taylor, quite a few other scholars have done a really amazing work on this topic. That’s been really absent from the language of democrats.

               And so Zohran Mamdani is the first person I’ve seen in a very long time. Obviously lots of politicians have spoken about their faith personally. Biden obviously was a man of faith and referenced it frequently, or somewhat frequently. Zohran Mamdani is using the language of belief, of hope, and it’s invoking the Obama era, hope and change, right? But he’s obviously not just reaching out to interfaith groups, but he’s also really invoking the language of belief in his stump speeches and in his rhetoric. And that’s energizing a very, very cynical base in New York City, right? Like where the young Democrats in particular are very, very disillusioned with our politics, especially in urban spaces. And so it’s really working for him. And I do think that’s something to take note of. And I think we need to infuse our politics with the politics of hope. What is Trumpism if not the promise of deliverance? And we don’t have many other politicians. I think that’s a key source of his efficacy. We don’t have many other politicians who are promising deliverance in the same way, who are offering a message of hope. I don’t know if I would say he’s offering a message of hope, but in a way make America great again, right? That is a promise.

               So anyways, I think that’s also from a leadership perspective, it’s very demoralizing if people are mainlining the idea that America is going to fail, right? Like they need to believe that they can create change. And that’s also where it starts. So I think those are, I don’t have answers, but that’s maybe a part of, if not in the right direction. That’s great.

B:            I wonder as you look out at the landscape of religion reporting, I’m wondering what you’re seeing right now. I know a lot of local news desks have been decimated. They’re half the size, they’re a quarter of the size. The religion reporting was often the first thing to go. And I think—

L:            Religious studies departments on college campuses are also really struggling, but you guys are doing great. 

B:            Yeah, we’re really thankful. And I think this is connected to your previous observations about the absence of belief language, for example, in progressive circles. That somehow we could talk about what it means to be human without talking about what it means to believe and what it means to hope, right? And so your work is so important because it mirrors back to us something that I believe we’re hardwired for, right? I believe we’re hardwired for belief. And what are you noticing? I mean, you have this beautiful job in religion reporting, so I’m very thankful for your voice, but what are you seeing from your perspective? 

L:            Gosh, yeah, I mean, I think there’s almost two thoughts in there. One, yes, I mean, I don’t know if I can say hardwired is above my pay grade in terms of being able to answer that piece of what you just so beautifully said. But I often get really grandiose and I’ll point to to our understanding the earliest written text that we know of is the Epic of Gilgamesh. And part of it really deals with one man’s search for im– there’s a lot in it, obviously, but it deals with one man’s search for immortality. And so the earliest written text that we have wrestles with this. And I don’t know if that means we’re hardwired, but it does mean that we’ve been wrestling for a very long time. And it’s a really extraordinary lineage that I don’t think is going away anytime soon. So that’s that piece.

               Death of journalism, oh my goodness. This is an urgent problem for our country. It’s completely untenable for a democracy to rely on the limited sources of solid, high quality information that are not baked in conspiracy and laced with misinformation that are flowing around on the internet. It’s not a good thing that the New York Times is, well, it’s a good thing that it’s so successful, but it’s not a good thing that we don’t have a really, really robust ecosystem of competitors nationally and locally. And we shouldn’t …  it’s not possible for one or a few great news organizations to be covering the entire country in a way that local communities need. And so the landscape of religion reporting, I mean, there are so many people, I think Substack is like the counterpoint to this. We just see extraordinary sources of really enterprising journalists who are writing just exceptional work on their own. They need support, right? Like they need support and that’s the support of a newsroom. Everyone needs an editor. And I think specifically on this topic, the first time I ever wrote anything about religion, I was at CNN and I was an intern and my editor, Daniel Burke at the time, it was wonderful. He said, you need to know that religion is a technical beat and people are going to come out after you with technical expertise. 

               And I think that’s something that’s missed. If we don’t have technical specialists in local newsrooms and national newsrooms, and we thankfully do at the New York Times, I’m one small part of a much larger ecosystem of really exceptional religion correspondents and reporters and thinkers. If we don’t have that, you miss extraordinary nuance that really matters, not only to local communities, but also to paying attention to the tradition. So it’s a huge problem. And I’m grateful to Hamish McKenzie and everyone at Substack thinking about how to shift our media ecosystem, but also we really need, we need editors and we need high quality sources of information. So it’s a big problem. That’s all I can say.

B:            I mean, I’m cheering to hear you name that religion requires technical expertise, right? 

M:           Well, please, louder for the people in the back. 

B:            We’ve invested many years in this very specific technical expertise and sometimes I think our expertise is misunderstood or cast aside. And so I thank you for honoring that. And of course, the reality is we need lots of different sorts of expertise in the world. That’s essentially what you’re naming, and many voices. You did a beautiful piece– I’m changing gears here, but on awe, was it over the weekend or in the last month or so that I found

L:            That was actually a colleague who I actually already just mentioned, Emma. Yeah, so we wrote that, she wrote that. She wrote that in as part of this work on Believing. I’ve been tapping and working with some of my amazing colleagues and also people externally, writers who I just really admire, to share their thoughts, share their experience, share their perspective on their own wrestling with Bolivian. So Emma wrote this really great piece. She called me, she found out I was doing Believing and we were talking about it and she was like, “I have a pitch, I have an idea, I really wanna do.” She called it the wonder experiment.

               And so she just said, “You know, I was raised more observant than I am now, she was raised Jewish.” And she said, “I really miss that sense of stupefying awe that I would experience in the divine and synagogue.” And so she set out, as she was turning 30, she set out to, I think it was on her … trying to remember exactly what it was. She created a council, basically. And I don’t know if it was fully 30 people, but I think that was the ambition of people, of experts who she wanted to get their perspective on how she could cultivate wisdom–or sorry, cultivate wonder and awe in her life as she approached this new decade. And she wrote, yeah, just a really beautiful guide to how to do that based on the experiment that she conducted. She went to Vegas and went to the Sphere and she called all these amazing people. She read the book, “Awe,” which I would really recommend. 

               So yeah, sorry, I jumped in, but what was your question? 

B:            Yeah, no, I was curious how you decide which topics to explore and what stories to tell. And how do you discern, well, this is just my own sort of private curiosity and maybe not something we should launch out into the whole world. And take us behind the scenes of how you move from curiosity to story that I’m reading in my pajamas on Sunday morning.

L:            Gosh, I mean, I think because of my background, I’ve had a sixth sense for people who, I think have a belief story, or their life was informed in some way by, I call it a belief story, because I think belief is the most neutral, but maybe a religion story or a story of wrestling, or have a spiritual, have a sense of spirituality that’s really present in their life. I mean, I think I’ve like picked them up almost along the way. And so the beauty of this commission, of this role is I get to call them, or hopefully try to call them and say, like, do you wanna talk about this? 

               So I think I already had talked about Abelardo Morell. I remember I stood in front of his work at the Getty, and I just, I didn’t know that he had studied religion. I didn’t know anything about him as a artist and photographer. I was just like, I felt it. I felt the sense of spirituality and the work that he was doing, right? And there was not, I didn’t have religious themes. Dua Lipa, someone I have not spoken to, would love to do a, if you wanna come on. 

B:            Because Dua is listening to this podcast, right? 

 M:           We know she is.

L:            Yeah, you know, she was raised religious. My understanding is she was raised Muslim, and she, I don’t know to what extent that still plays a role in her life. She had this moment with Colbert where she was sitting, and I’m sure you’ve seen it. Yeah, she was sitting, and he was there just having a nice conversation. He was like, well, you turn the tables. Like, you’re such a good interviewer. Ask me a question, because she has a podcast. And she turned, I mean, it was so artful. It was like, Oh, we’re on the Colbert show. And she just went, it was like really beautiful questioning. Went straight in with this amazing question about how his faith informs his comedy. And in that moment, I was like, that woman has a background that really understands. 

               So I’m citing all these examples, but I think I have a list. Like, I literally have lists on my computer, binders full of women to invoke myth. And I call them, and, you know, or I get to, if I get through to them or get to call them, I often just say, you know, like, I’m doing this work. And sometimes I have a more specific question for them. Sometimes I just say, do you have a story you want to share? And then that’s where the hard part begins, you know, because everyone has these really, I mean, I think everyone has a story within them, right? Everyone has these beautiful stories of experiencing and journeying and believing or wrestling, as I’ve said about seven times today. And then it’s the heart, that’s the work of editing, right? Like, this is the hard work I was mentioning earlier. Everyone needs an editor.

               You’ve got to figure out how to turn it into a story that has some sort of beginning, middle, and end, or has a takeaway. And I’ve found over the course of this work, that’s a particularly hard thing to do with this topic, because it’s so interior, you know? There’s not a lot of plot often. There’s not something that happens very much inside of yourself. So how do we turn that into a story? How do we turn that into something that someone else can consume? Also, how do we put these feelings, which are really intense, often life-defining, into language? Especially when we have a very impoverished discourse on this topic, and especially when we’ve almost lost the language to speak about it. So, and there’s been hostility towards speaking about it for a long time. So that’s the really hard part. And it really is a lot of work behind the scenes. It’s a lot of wrestling.

B:            Well, and without getting terribly political, I think it’s so important that progressives, and we’re not just a place to, that trains progressive leaders, but we are a place where many progressive spiritual leaders and religious leaders come to train for leadership and for ministry. But if we lose the language of belief as progressives, and if progressive religious leaders feel embarrassed to use that language in the public sphere, then we cede the conversation to fascism–to Christian nationalism, in a way. And so I think it’s really, really important that the progressives learn to talk about belief. And it’s probably, it may not be your intention, but your work helps, I think, encourage these kinds of conversations in maybe more traditionally liberal and progressive spaces.

M:           That’s so true. Thank you for that. 

B:            Will I get you in trouble by saying that? I can edit it out.

L:            No. I think I’m talking to– I mean, I’m nodding along. I’m not necessarily saying that I normatively agree. That’s what needs to happen or should happen. But I do think, I think we can talk about the facts, which are 80 plus percent. We don’t have a super fixed number. 82% is the estimate. Percent of the world is actively religious. So many billions of people. And to act as though culture is only created or ideas are only generated that matter in spaces where that ratio is shifted, where there are more people who might not identify as having a religious tradition or practicing a religious tradition or having a spiritual life. I think when we do the diagnostics– I think I may– I don’t know if I already mentioned this. When we do the diagnostics of what happened over the last– what happened in 2016, what’s happened in the period since, if religion and analyzing how we think about economic condescension or economic myopia or Hillbilly Elegy propelled into the– to the vice presidency, we think about so many other factors in this political era. 

               But we don’t think about this notion of religious condescension as playing a role in alienating parts of the country from each other. So I think that’s urgent that we look at that. And I don’t know where that takes us. And I don’t know where all of these institutions go. I don’t know where this conversation goes. But I’m trying to nudge it along in the ways that I can in the forum that I have. And it really is missing. It’s very, very, very– I think I would go as far to say– as to say ignorant and myopic to not recognize the broader landscape. 

               And you know what? I’ll go as far as to say it makes a lot of sense to me that people– there’s a lot of people who live in urban centers, who are in the center– in America specifically, they’re centers of cultural production– who grew up in places that were deeply religious and maybe were hurt by those communities. That’s right. And they’re working through those feelings and discussing those feelings in hypervisible spaces and forums. And that’s totally valid. It makes a lot of sense, speaking of validity, using the language of therapy. That makes sense, right? But it can obscure and obfuscate the reality of people’s lives in places that aren’t centers of high cultural production. And so we need to think about– when we think about diversity and representation, we need to think about that. We need to think about what that looks like. We need to think about what curiosity looks like, including a broader rate of perspectives.

               I’ll also just say, I just want to invoke one person. I just want to invoke Krista Tippett, who– I’ll tell a story about her. Once it’s out, if this is included, she really is the spiritual godmother, at least in the last few decades of this type of work, I would say. There’s so many people who work in this field and from so many different angles and bring such extraordinary– speaking of diversity, diversity, and complexity to one of the richest topics, I think we can speak about. Krista Tippett really has been so bold and courageous in pioneering this conversation over the last few decades. And I’ll just share a story. When I started the work on believing– and she was one of the first people I reached out to. So once I got the green light from all my pestering, I reached out to her. And I think she was traveling or writing at the time. And I got an away message from her assistant being like, she’s not available. But then they saw my message. And I think she stepped away from whatever she was doing and was willing to talk to me, which was so kind. And I was kind of nervous to call her because I was like, I don’t know. I have all my experience. I have all of my knowledge. I’ve covered religion for a while now. And I think I feel confident in what I’m doing. But she really knows her stuff. And how is she going to feel? It’s a very sharp elbowed industry. Is she going to feel like I’m trying to step on her turf? I don’t know this. I don’t know what she’s going to think. I don’t know this woman.

               I got on this call and with characteristic grace and generosity and care and kindness and compassion and just beauty. The first thing she said, it was in the vein of, I am so excited that you are giving me this call. And I’m so excited that you’re doing this work. I was like, wow. Meet your heroes. They say sometimes meet your heroes or don’t meet your heroes. But she really is such an extraordinary person. And I think if we’re talking about how we speak about these topics, it’s hard not to invoke her. So those are my, I’m giving her her roses. 

B:            Yeah, Krista. And Krista’s been on the podcast and she’s a graduate of our school. It’s remarkable. Can I even say we’re so proud of her. That feels disrespectful. Like we, oh my gosh. And she sat in this chair and I was not sure that I was worthy to sit in it. But, you know, she …  Krista’s work reminds us that that love looks a lot like curiosity.

And that’s at the heart of the work that we do is certainly the heart of the work you do. And so thank you, Lauren Jackson, for all you’re doing. Thank you. Tell all these stories. Truly.

L:            Thank you. I’m so happy to be in conversation with you. And I hope this is just the beginning. I hope to talk soon. 

B:            Come visit us soon. 

               Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast. A show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.