Religion After Religion: Millennials in a Post-Religious Age | Paul Robertson | TEDxCSC

my talk today is about one fact and three ideas first the fact Millennials that's you most of you you're the least religious generation in American history or so I'm told and the data at least seem clear according to Pew Research as of 2014 over a third of Millennials about 35% described themselves as non religiously affiliated and not only that but this percentage is increasing in other words not only are you the most irreligious generation ever but you're becoming increasingly irreligious if you look at other generations the further back you get in time the more religious you get so you're at 35 percent Generation X is about 23 the boomers are at 17 in the Silent Generation they're at 11% so this isn't something new this is a culmination rather in something like a century long shift and I find this shift fascinating I find it fascinating because religion is one of the most enduring things really in the human species it seems to go as far back as human culture itself and it's not only present but it's deeply important regardless of things like culture time geography social organization race class education sex everything that we can categorize the human race with religion is there across the board so Millennials increasing abandonment of religion seems to tell us something profound right to reflect something profound maybe about the history of humanity the very meaning of life itself you're not even my answer is or not you know I'm a theorist of religion I ask questions like what is religion what does it mean to be religious what does it mean when someone says they believe in god or gods and I teach an introductory course in religion and one of the first things we do and I see several of you out there so shout out to you for being here today one of the first things I have students do is without looking anything else define religion for me question for the audience in a class of twenty how many definitions do I get twenty sometimes more because there's always a couple students to give me more than one right so if everyone is defining religion differently how is this a useful survey question everyone is answering it differently it means something to different people so when I saw this survey when I saw the Pew survey in 2014 and there was an updated piece that just got released I had a lot more questions than answers right what did people think of when they answer that question religiously affiliated is it the same thing as religion or religious Nisour religiosity what is all this stuff so today we're trying to answer these questions and I'm going to speak a bit as a theorist of religion about how you can think about these questions in maybe a useful way and if I'm successful you're going to understand Millennials attitudes and beliefs about religion a little better and hopefully you'll also have a more sophisticated understanding of religion itself and to do so I'm going to provide three ideas this is the three ideas about the one fact three ideas about religion and these three ideas are three ways that scholars of religion have studied the subject itself so these are not my original inventive brilliant ideas these are ways that that people in my field that scholars in my field have used to study these questions and I think that they can usefully apply to you as Millennials and thinking about your own religiosity and I encourage you again don't think of these as mutually exclusive pick and choose what you want this is a giant choose-your-own-adventure type book okay so you've chosen to listen to Professor Robertson turn to page 42 the first conceptual framework is the ontology of religion and this is basically a fancy professor way of saying what is religion ontology is a things essence or it's being and so we're kind of asking the question of what does religion consist what's religions essence what's religions being and this is a very difficult question it's more difficult than it seems right from the get-go and so instead of beating around the bush I want to give you a definition that you can modify reject accept as you as you wish and this comes to me from my old adviser and the summary of the religion or the religion definition goes something like this religion is a set of beliefs and practices related to non-obvious beings I'll repeat that because definitions are important religion is a set of beliefs and practices related to non-obvious beings I like this definition for a few reasons number one it captures all the things that happen in between the ears of people there Lots their feelings their emotions their hopes their dreams right all the beliefs that's what that belief category is and it also captures all the things that happen in the world the stuff people say and the things people do scholars call these things practices what this definition does not do is try and figure out whether or not God or gods exist what it does not do is try and decide whether or not religion is true in a sense God our gods may exist outside this world religion may or may not be true but the things that we as scholars can study are in this world it's people's beliefs and people's practices secondly I like the category of non obvious beans because I feel like this encompasses everything in a really useful way it can be a transcendent God who created the world in seven days and who listens to your prayers especially on Sunday this can be a group of angels and demons and move in and out of this world this can be the ghost of your ancestors these can be the invisible spirits that are attached to a particular geographic feature such as a lake god or a tree spirit this encompasses all the monotheistic religions view of God this transcendent single God in Judaism Islam and Christianity and it also has all the other polytheistic religions the great pantheon of Hinduism right more gods than we can count then the native traditions say the Native Americans they have a very what we would call an animist view of religion where particular spirits are part of the know the sky spirit and the mountain spirit and also all the many spirits attended to in Buddhism right there can many many Buddhist spirits that can be you know sort of malignant or benevolent so forth so what happens what's the payoff if we define religion in this way and we actually find something quite interesting so we're focusing on beliefs and practices well Millennials do not purport to have a religious affiliation many of their beliefs and practices actually map very closely onto other generations for example Millennials are just as likely as previous generations to believe in life after death they're also just as likely to believe in the existence of heaven and hell they're also just as likely to believe in miracles Millennials do notably attend church or formal services less often they read holy texts less often the Bible or the Quran and they pray in a formal setting less often but when we start to analyze their beliefs and practices outside of formal public settings it seems that Millennials are just as religious as previous generations in certain core beliefs and practices and it's an interesting note about two of these the belief in God and the frequency of Prayer are probably the most important belief in practice respectively right believe in God praying to god or gods and indeed Millennials believe in God in God's and pray to God or God's less often than previous generations but the data show that the belief in God or God's and prayer are the two things that actually increase over time so you know 18 is 65 age-wise all these things are going to increase in particularly in these two key metrics and if you look at Millennials belief in God are God's in prayer it's right where Generation X was a generation before right right at your age so by defining religion in terms not of institution not in terms of tradition but rather in terms of belief in practices you can see that Millennials are actually still hugely religious and indeed just as religious as previous generations in several key metrics their beliefs and practices have simply moved away from formal religious institutions such as churches and mosques and toward private practice an internal belief religion it seems has become more individualized and more internal but no less powerful or prevalent that's idea number one ID number two and this is a conceptual framework my second idea and it's called functionalism and functionalism is one of those isms that describe how the world works and how we can understand how the world works according to functionalism the most important part about religion is not the internal beliefs and practices but it's the function that religion plays in society as a whole so you're looking more broad than just what do you believe where do you go on Saturday and so forth right what's religions broader function in society what's its purpose and functionalism is traditionally explained by talking about society as an organism every organism and I'm an example of this I'm an organism I'm a human organism and I have all these component parts I have eyes and hands and they have specific functions my eye does eye stuff like look in my hand does handy stuff like Abin point but they have a broader function no and that's to keep me as an organism alive and functioning smoothly and keeping my body in equilibrium the point of my hand is to grab but the broader function of my hand is to help me survive and in this analogy religions function it does religion ease stuff on a micro level but on a broader social functional level it keeps society running smoothly now religion has been critiqued a lot okay and it's been critiqued in tons of different ways holy wars enabling dictatorships claiming divine authority controlling all people think and act and I don't deny that religion like any set of ideas ideologies or movements can be used for bad things there's no question historical record is clear but we often overlook all the good things that religion does for society we often overlook religions positive functions I'm just going to take one example of Catholicism partly because it's familiar to many and partly because Catholicism is much maligned now the Catholic Church is actually historically responsible for a few important broader social functions I'm just going to look at three one is directing charity to the poor the second is the establishment of public educational systems and a third is founding hospitals hospitals charity and education these all function to help society run smoothly they keep the population healthy they keep the poor fed they improve upward mobility and innovation but we live in a different world now right we don't live in sort of the late medieval period where the Catholic Church governs your life right thankfully hospitals are now funded through private and/or public funds some do but most don't have a connection to religion governments across the Western world now have built-in charity programs Social Security Medicare Medicaid right these are not religious things but they do what religion did colleges and universities like the one we're standing in today some still have religious affiliations but most do not right they're funded through tuition federal funds and so forth in other words that the three valuable functions that I just targeted we could list many many more healing the sick helping the poor and elderly and educating people have now basically been replaced secular institutions as a society our doctors might no longer be shamans or priests our educators might no longer be Imams or nuns and a caretakers of the poor might no longer be bishops or rabbis again exceptions across the board granted but the core functions that religion has occupied continue to live on and if we understand religion is something that performs valuable social functions in the interest of both the greater social good and a higher moral calling then religion hasn't gone anywhere and in fact it's only increased in scope right think of all the political discourse about the size of government spending on Medicare and Medicaid right this is the functional hand of religion at work so in other words the NGOs private institutions governmental programs are the new religion and they've never been stronger third idea is another conceptual framework and it's another ISM it is called structuralism and structuralism tries to explain that all of our institutions beliefs in practices provide us with a framework of understanding the universe and our place in it our institutions our beliefs and our practices in other word have a sort of meta function and this function is to figure out how we as humans fit into what the scholar William James called the blooming buzzing confusion of the universe right the universe is huge and confusing and full of chaos and insanity in religion situates us and it grounds us and it teaches us and we understand the confusion and chaos of the world through religion in religion you know in this line of thought gives us a lot of these binaries good bad heaven hell up down pure impure you can even go on and on and on and on and so when we have a set of religious beliefs and practices what we have are an entire structure this is the structure of structuralism that governs how we think and act and this structure is not only clear to us but it's unspoken and it's authoritative you don't ask why is heaven up there and hell down there it's self-evident and therein lies its power so Millennials today are purportedly less religious then have we also lost this underlying structure that suss sort of make meaning of the universe and you can actually find data quite easily that indicate that this might be the case some combination of capitalist materialism dense but anonymous urban living you know these kind of high-rises and cities that are just packed full of people and technology and we've already heard about technology today they actually make people increasingly depressed and lonely people struggle in the modern world to find meaning and can we blame the lost religions structure how are we to find meaning if we're no longer the created product of God's image around which the whole cosmos revolves I'm going to suggest a couple things one that science and to certain secular institutions have taken religions place here from a structural perspective on a cosmic scale that science has replaced religion is basically without a doubt we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa and we know that our galaxy is not the one but one of many many many many galaxies and some physicists actually study the Higgs boson particle the god particle they postulate that our universe is actually part of some infinite number of universes the multiverse now the infinite number of universes you're a tiny insignificant speck in the grand cosmos of time and space right thumbs up thanks science and so we can find this idea existentially terrifying right it's it is scary that we're this tiny speck clinging to a rock and this vast void that might only be one of an infinite number of universes but the physicist and public intellectual Neil deGrasse Tyson sees this in a very different way and I'm going to read you one of his quotes so Tyson is a great thinker I recommend you look into him and he says quote when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes we are part of this universe we are in this universe but perhaps more important than both of these facts is that the religion you're sorry getting ahead of myself more important than both of these facts is that the universe is in us when I reflect on that fact I look up and many people feel small because they are small and the universe is big but I feel big because my atoms came from those stars and quote the same carbon and hydrogen atoms in you are the same atoms in a galaxies billions of light years away you are are part of something greater thanks science and what about religion structuring power in our daily lives our practical interactions that teach us what is good and bad proper and improper you know in place and out of place well much like the replacement of religions functions and medicine and charity and education I think that religions moral and social frameworks from a structural perspective has been replaced likewise by these other systems that aren't religious anymore and I'm going to give just a couple brief examples and one is silly but I think it's a very good one and it's American professional football right and we're in New England so we know we're a football living culture and if you're a football fan our culture sort of in a macro sense is it structures you're weak you're waiting forward to Sunday and on that Sunday you know what to do where to go what to wear who your people are who to root for and who to root against you know what football food is and what is definitely not football food right and all of this stuff is unspoken but it's real right and that is something that we get from a sort of structural understanding football right something a little more targeted toward Millennials participation in non-religious groups is actually hugely widespread amongst Millennials the vast majority Millennials attend high school and college something that was not true a century two centuries a thousand years ago and in your lives there's a lot of organizations that you join isn't there I mean teams clubs groups fraternities sororities all that have these traditions rituals ways to dress how to talk to each other shared language common bonds identity what we value what we don't value so where our lives were perhaps once divided between subsistence farming and religious ritual right if you're a subsistence farmer you'd farm six days a week and then you do go to church on Sunday or synagogue on Saturday or Friday Friday prayers and on Friday you know so you would have the rest of your life and you have that one religious part today Millennials lives are much dare I say richer they're sort of more robust in the associations you have socially they're populated by all sorts of these organizations that structure your lives we know our place in the cosmos however small and we choose to participate in society and innumerable social organizations in fulfilling ways living a moral life in service to our goals strengths and social relationships with an AI and our place in the cosmos may be religion lives on and I want to close with just one last thing in a couple final questions and I've been talking at you and now I want some participation so fewer and fewer people are religious fewer and fewer people are religiously affiliated so raise your hand if you've heard the following everything happens for a reason basically everybody keep your hand up if you believe it yeah pretty pretty robust right another question let's try this again raise your hand if you heard it I'm not religious I'm spiritual keep it up if you believe it again quite a few quite a few and if you've kept your hand up you're in fantastic company despite Millennials dwindling religiosity 72% agree with this statement I'm not religious but I'm spiritual and by this Millennials seem to mean that they have a belief in something bigger than themselves they believe that there's some sort of wider explanatory framework that situates their life in their place in the cosmos Millennials might not go to church mosques synagogue or temple they might not read their holy texts with any sort of regularity and they might not pray together in regular groups in a public setting and in fact the data show that you do not but Millennials at remarkably high rates do continue to believe that there's some explanation for our lives and our world beyond just a naturalistic churning of physics and biochemistry we continue in other words to seek explanation and meaning and things and if we think of religion not is about regular attendance at public forums of worship but rather about personal beliefs and being part of something greater that explains our place in the world and gives us meaning we are as religious as ever thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 147,034

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, God, Religion, Youth

Id: qmLbD3m6Z3w

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2016