The Secular Experiment Is Cracking

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Happy Sunday, everyone. Hope you're all doing great. Welcome to another Sunday Musing, this one about the rise of secularism.

[00:00:06]Now, I will just pose the question to you outright. Has secularism increased?

[00:00:11]And if so, what does that mean for those of us who practice a religion, particularly members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

[00:00:19]How is secularism impacting people in our own midst, people who have once had the faith and perhaps are abandoning it or believing fewer of its doctrines and its teachings?

[00:00:30]To begin, I'm going to share a portion, a fairly decent-sized portion, of a New York Times op-ed that came out last April.

[00:00:40]It's titled, Americans Haven't Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion.

[00:00:46]And it's about this topic, but it's authored by a former Latter-day Saint.

[00:00:52]Here's what it says.

[00:01:14]For my family and for my ancestors, who had left lives in Britain, in the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Norway, to pull wagons across America and build a Zion on the plains.

[00:01:23]When I had finished, I'd bask in the affirmation of the congregation's amen.

[00:01:27]In that small chapel by a freeway in Arkansas, I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos.

[00:01:36]That I was eternally loved, that life made sense, or that it would one day for sure.

[00:01:40]I had that, and I left it all.

[00:01:43]I never really wanted to leave my faith, this woman says.

[00:01:47]I wasn't interested in exile, familial, cultural, or spiritual.

[00:01:50]But my curiosity pulled me away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and toward a secular university.

[00:01:55]There, I tried to be both religious and cool, believing but discerning.

[00:02:00]I didn't see any incompatibility between those things.

[00:02:03]But America's intense ideological polarity made me feel as if I had to pick.

[00:02:09]My story maps onto America's relationship to religion over the last 30 years.

[00:02:13]I was born in the mid-1990s, the moment that researchers say the country began a mass exodus from Christianity.

[00:02:19]Around 40 million Americans have left churches over the last few decades, and 30% of the population now identifies as having no religion.

[00:02:28]We're going to talk about that in just a moment.

[00:02:30]She continues, People worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.

[00:02:35]That's what I did too.

[00:02:37]I spent my 20s worshipping at the altar of work, and in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well.

[00:02:42]I built a community.

[00:02:44]I volunteered.

[00:02:44]I cared for my nieces and nephews.

[00:02:46]I pursued wellness.

[00:02:47]I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas, and subscribed to meditation apps.

[00:02:54]I tried book clubs and running clubs.

[00:02:57]I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram.

[00:03:02]Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansas.

[00:03:07]America's secularization was an immense social transformation.

[00:03:10]Has it left us better off?

[00:03:13]People are unhappier than they've ever been, and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness.

[00:03:19]It's not just secularism that's to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being.

[00:03:28]They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace, and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.

[00:03:34]Last paragraph that I will share.

[00:03:36]Now, the country seems to be revisiting the role of religion.

[00:03:40]Secularization is on pause in America.

[00:03:44]A study from Pew found this year.

[00:03:46]This is a major generational shift.

[00:03:49]People are no longer leaving Christianity.

[00:03:52]Other major religions are growing.

[00:03:54]Almost all Americans, 92% of adults, both inside and outside of religion, say they hold some form of spiritual belief in a god, human souls, or spirits, an afterlife, or something, quote, beyond the natural world.

[00:04:07]The future, of course, is still uncertain.

[00:04:10]The number of non-religious Americans will probably continue to rise as today's young people enter adulthood and have their own children.

[00:04:17]But for now, secularism has not yet triumphed over religion.

[00:04:21]Instead, its limits in America may be exposed.

[00:04:25]I thought that was a very thoughtful piece.

[00:04:29]It continues.

[00:04:29]I read just a large chunk, but there's more to it.

[00:04:32]And it reminded me of a BYU devotional that Elder Holland gave in 2016 on this topic of secularism.

[00:04:41]Here's what he said.

[00:04:42]Will and Ariel Durant put the issue squarely as they reflected on what they called the lessons of history.

[00:04:51]They wrote, There is no significant example in history of any society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

[00:05:09]If that is true, and surely we feel it is, then we should be genuinely concerned over the assertion that the single most distinguishing feature of modern life is the rise of secularism, with its attendant dismissal of, cynicism toward, or marked disenchantment with religion.

[00:05:37]The single most distinguishing feature of modern life, the rise of secularism.

[00:05:43]Now, according to the author of that New York Times article and citing the Pew study, that rise of secularism has plateaued.

[00:05:52]It has stalled.

[00:05:53]It is no longer rising.

[00:05:54]Let's dig into some of the data around this.

[00:05:57]I owe much of what I'm about to share to Ryan Burge.

[00:06:00]He is a political science professor who is in the process of conducting the largest study ever, about 12,000 people, of those who are not religiously affiliated.

[00:06:11]He, I believe, branded these, or maybe somebody else branded these as the nuns.

[00:06:16]N-O-N-E, not Catholic nuns, but the people who subscribe to no religion.

[00:06:21]The nuns.

[00:06:21]And so I'm going to be sharing several charts that he's shared online about this precise topic to address and analyze what does secularism look like more broadly within the kind of the faith community overall.

[00:06:33]But, and then we're going to get into the Latter-day Saint community towards the end.

[00:06:37]If you're listening to this just on audio, you might want to go pull this up over on YouTube where you can look at some of these charts, but I'll do my best to describe them.

[00:06:44]Here's the first one.

[00:06:45]This one is the share of Americans with no religious affiliation.

[00:06:49]And as you can see, the nuns rose from 5% to about 30% in just 30 years.

[00:06:59]I mean, that's crazy, right?

[00:07:02]In the late 80s, early 90s, we've got this dip.

[00:07:06]We're down around 5%, 6%, 7%, and then this massive surge from the early 90s.

[00:07:13]This predates social media.

[00:07:15]This, you know, predates the internet.

[00:07:17]We wouldn't have AOL and, you know, all the like really be the rage until the very late 90s.

[00:07:23]But you've got this massive increase up to 30%.

[00:07:27]6x, a 6x rise in just about 30 years.

[00:07:31]Here is the next chart.

[00:07:33]This shows the religious affiliation of 18 to 35-year-olds.

[00:07:37]And what you see during the 90s is that the share of young adults who identified as Christians dropped 14 points.

[00:07:46]Whereas for the nuns, as you can see in orange, they rose 12 points, 12%.

[00:07:53]Interestingly, it was in the middle of this in 1995 when President Hinckley warned about the slow stain and its spread.

[00:08:00]I, of course, talk about that in my recent book, Buy That Title, which you can find at socialharmony.org or on Amazon.

[00:08:07]It was in 1995 when President Hinckley talked about this slow stain in the midst of this increase of people with no religious affiliation.

[00:08:15]This next poll is the share of people with no religious affiliation.

[00:08:21]This next poll is the share of people with no religious affiliation.

[00:08:28]This next poll is the share of people with no religious affiliation.

[00:08:30]You can see people with no religious affiliation.

[00:08:37]And so, you know, very significant spans of different amounts of people in each of these surveys.

[00:08:53]And yet, what the data clearly shows, what the graph clearly demonstrates, is the same trend.

[00:08:59]So pick whichever poll you want.

[00:09:01]It doesn't really matter.

[00:09:02]If we're looking at trend analysis, the point is that, you know, over the past several decades, there has been a substantial increase in people who decide to no longer affiliate with Christianity.

[00:09:16]Now, I'll pause here just to share, you know, a brief thought as someone who believes in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and a lot of the kind of scriptural contradictions and doctrinal problems of other faiths.

[00:09:26]You know, I, and in one sense, I don't really fault people for kind of seeing through the, you know, the prosperity gospel people and the mega churches and the whatever, you know, I don't fault people who look at that and be like, I want nothing to do with that.

[00:09:40]And look, most people, I think when they leave their church of family origin, what they were raised with or what they see in their community, they kind of often extrapolate and just leave it all, right?

[00:09:51]Just kind of abandon their faith entirely.

[00:09:52]They brand all of, say, Christianity with the limited experience that they had at, you know, one church or a few churches.

[00:09:59]And so, on the one hand, I'm kind of sympathetic to people who resist Christianity if, you know, the teachings and the lifestyles and the, you know, whatever of many of these other pastors and people all over are demonstrable or indicative of what Christianity is.

[00:10:20]So, like, I kind of get, like, I don't see this data that I'm sharing as, like, this cataclysmic problem.

[00:10:25]If anything, I think it's all the more reason why those very people need to learn the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and be able to get resolution on some of these doctrinal issues and realize some of the problems in, you know, other branches of Christianity that I think don't have access to these greater truths and fall into the traditions of their fathers and Babylonian contamination and all the rest.

[00:10:47]Which, again, I could go down that rabbit hole for a while.

[00:10:49]Point is, I'm not sharing these charts to be like, look at how horrible this is and all these people are leading Christianity.

[00:10:54]But it's instructive to see the influence of secularism and the number of people who are increasingly abandoning religion altogether for whatever the reason.

[00:11:02]Now, to this question of have we plateaued?

[00:11:06]Has the rise of secularization, you know, been tempered a little bit as that op-ed author said?

[00:11:12]Well, here's a chart of the non-religious by generation from 2016 through 2024.

[00:11:18]As you can see along the bottom, we're starting in 2016, then 2018, 2021, 2, and 4.

[00:11:25]And so it's not perfect like every two years.

[00:11:27]It's kind of in a little bit different.

[00:11:29]Nonetheless, you can see broken out by different age groups where, like, you know, the silent generation.

[00:11:36]Again, these are non-religious people.

[00:11:38]So pretty stable and steady when you average it out.

[00:11:41]You know, same with boomers, same with Gen Xers.

[00:11:44]But when you look at Gen Z, like, there's been this significant increase in the number of people opting out of religion.

[00:11:53]And then a little bit of a plateau.

[00:11:55]So, like, across age brackets, it's, you know, somewhat stable, if not slightly declining in some cases.

[00:12:01]You always want to look towards the younger generation in a lot of this.

[00:12:05]So you look at Gen Z and, like, okay, yeah, it's a plateau from 2021.

[00:12:08]There could be any number of factors going on here, right?

[00:12:13]So what's interesting is that older generations, fewer than 20% of them are non-religious.

[00:12:18]But when you look at younger, it's 40% plus.

[00:12:21]So these trends are going to increase as the older generations die off because it's the older generations who are much more religious.

[00:12:27]But if you've currently got Gen Z already in the 40th percentile of non-religious, and if that trend continues or increases or even slightly decreases, then when they become the older generation, you're going to have a much more percentage of people who are irreligious.

[00:12:42]And then, of course, you're going to have young people, I think, who are even less religious than they.

[00:12:46]And you're going to turn into, say, you know, Sweden or one of the Nordic countries where, you know, broadly speaking, culturally, they just look at religious people as, you know, as ignorant rubes that are believing fairy tales.

[00:12:59]Here's another one looking at this question of religious affiliation by the decade of birth.

[00:13:06]And so, as you can see, the yellow is the percentage of no religion.

[00:13:10]So this just very clearly shows that the younger you are, then the more likely you are to be affiliating with no religion.

[00:13:18]So 13% of those who were born in the 1940s are nuns, whereas 44% of those born in the 2000s are.

[00:13:28]This is more than triple the amount across generations.

[00:13:32]Now, to this, you might say, well, we're just talking about institutionalized religions, right?

[00:13:37]A lot of the people who abandon, you know, religion are still spiritual.

[00:13:41]And so here is Ryan's data on that.

[00:13:44]So this is asking people, to what extent do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

[00:13:48]This is looking just at the non-religious folks.

[00:13:52]And so the idea that nuns are still spiritual is not true.

[00:13:56]Only 12% said that they were very spiritual back in 1998.

[00:14:00]And it was still 12% in 2022.

[00:14:04]The nuns are almost three times more likely to say that they are not at all spiritual.

[00:14:11]So it's not like you have this abandonment of religion in favor of spirituality or anything.

[00:14:17]It's just across the board kind of a carte blanche rejection of all such notions.

[00:14:23]You might look at all this and say, well, wait a minute.

[00:14:27]I've been hearing headlines that are painting a very different picture about all these young people coming back now to church.

[00:14:32]And I've seen those too across social media.

[00:14:34]You know, one of them read, young adults lead a resurgence in church attendance.

[00:14:38]Here's this chart that someone shared online, looking at Gen Z and millennial churchgoers, looking at their monthly weekend church attendance, saying that it's nearly doubled since 2020.

[00:14:51]Amongst the youth, you look at that and okay, wow, that's pretty impressive.

[00:14:56]And that seems to push back on this notion that, you know, Gen Z and the younger people, millennials are increasingly abandoning their faith.

[00:15:05]What about this data?

[00:15:06]Clearly it's showing this rise.

[00:15:08]You know, Burge's data, this guy Ryan, his data shows that religious attendance is actually increasing amongst young men in particular.

[00:15:16]Here is his chart showing religious attendance by gender and birth year.

[00:15:22]So you can clearly see a difference for those who are attending weekly.

[00:15:26]You've got this uptick, particularly for young men.

[00:15:31]And then by contrast, the number of people who never attend is declining.

[00:15:37]But the key thing to understand about this data, which might appear contradictory, is that everything that I just shared with you in the past few minutes is all based on existing churchgoers.

[00:15:46]The people who classify themselves as being Christian or going to church.

[00:15:51]This isn't the number of people who are atheist or agnostic or whatever now moving to Christianity or rejecting this none label.

[00:16:00]No, these are people who are already adopting the Christian label, for example, and who are just going to church a little bit more.

[00:16:05]So it's great that the existing Christian religious type people are attending church more frequently, which is all that this data shows.

[00:16:17]This data is not showing nuns who are now deciding to go to church.

[00:16:21]So the headlines, I think, kind of have misled a lot of people.

[00:16:23]And, oh, you know, what once was lost has now been found.

[00:16:27]All these people who had rejected church are coming back.

[00:16:29]I just see in this that people are just going to church a little bit more than before, which is good.

[00:16:35]I'm not saying it's a bad trend.

[00:16:36]It's just different than thinking that the nuns are, you know, decreasing.

[00:16:41]So what about in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

[00:16:45]The LDS Church.

[00:16:47]I did a musing last year titled Four Worrisome Trends Troubling Church Growth.

[00:16:52]I'll link to that in the YouTube show notes.

[00:16:55]You can go to sundaymusings.org and look it up there.

[00:16:59]And what I shared, among other things, was this graph where the numbers are up, the total membership of the church.

[00:17:07]Those are the blue, big, long rectangles increasing.

[00:17:11]This is what we share every year and people get excited and cute little social media graphics are made about it to show the growth of the church.

[00:17:17]And we pat ourselves on the back.

[00:17:19]But the percentages are way down.

[00:17:22]The green shows kind of the trend line where the percentage of membership growth has declined.

[00:17:28]In other words, as the church gets bigger, if we were to grow 5% year over year consistently, you understand like compound interest and so forth, right?

[00:17:38]The more the more the people there are, then 5% of that larger number is next year an even bigger number.

[00:17:44]And then 5% of that bigger number is an even bigger number.

[00:17:46]And then you'd have kind of the compounding effect.

[00:17:48]So we have nominally more church members.

[00:17:53]The number keeps going up.

[00:17:54]But the percentage of church membership has dramatically decreased.

[00:17:59]You know, 1989, growth hit nearly 9%.

[00:18:04]And this kind of blip in the radar back then.

[00:18:07]And, you know, you had Elder President Benson.

[00:18:10]There was a lot of, you know, strictness.

[00:18:12]There was a lot of resistance of kind of the progressive trends of culture.

[00:18:17]I mean, growth was very high, you know, flooding the earth with the Book of Mormon, all these things, right?

[00:18:21]And then you look at like COVID.

[00:18:23]I mean, it's an anomaly here in a way.

[00:18:25]But like COVID in 2020 was 0.6%.

[00:18:28]It was a far cry from the 9%, right?

[00:18:31]2021 was 0.85%.

[00:18:35]And so the numbers have been relatively in the tank.

[00:18:39]Yes, there's a percentage and we're growing.

[00:18:42]But like if those members are not going to church very much or not believing, as we're about to get into, some of these ideas, then, yay, on paper we look like we're growing.

[00:18:52]But we're growing more slowly than ever before.

[00:18:55]Perhaps in part because of this secularization.

[00:18:59]So what does secularization of the Mormons look like?

[00:19:03]For this, I'm going to rely on a 2016 study that Jana Reese did called the Next Mormons Survey.

[00:19:09]This included responses from 1,156 self-identified current members of the church and from 540 former members of the church.

[00:19:21]Now, this isn't a perfect survey.

[00:19:23]This is kind of a self-sample, self, you know, selection bias.

[00:19:27]You know, it's not necessarily fully representative.

[00:19:32]There's some demographic distortions.

[00:19:33]Some people have been critical about it.

[00:19:35]You know, the risk of bias because she was just recruiting people online to fill it out.

[00:19:38]So this isn't like a perfect scientific type of thing.

[00:19:43]But it's still insightful and I think instructive nonetheless.

[00:19:45]Because amongst her findings are the following.

[00:19:48]86% I'll pull that up here so that I get it right.

[00:19:53]86% of older Mormons know that God is real, but only 68% of millennial Mormons share such a conviction.

[00:20:01]86 to 68.

[00:20:03]83% of older Mormons.

[00:20:06]I don't remember how she defines that.

[00:20:08]What age?

[00:20:09]I didn't look that up.

[00:20:10]But 83% of older Mormons confidently know that Jesus was literally resurrected, but only 57% of millennial Mormons hold this belief.

[00:20:18]83 to 57.

[00:20:19]For the idea about God creating Adam and Eve sometime in the last 10,000 years, you've got 61% of older Mormons believing that.

[00:20:28]47% of millennial Mormons sharing this belief.

[00:20:32]The idea that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.

[00:20:35]67% of older Mormons said that they believe that.

[00:20:39]Only 51% of millennial Mormons.

[00:20:40]I'm sure for this she's, you know, I'm not sure.

[00:20:43]I didn't go back and read, but I can't help but think looking at that data that she's including in this sample, not just current church members, but former ones as well.

[00:20:50]Those who identify themselves as Mormons, not just whether they go to church or not.

[00:20:54]So obviously you have to account for, you know, the fact that you've got people responding here who are former members of the church and perhaps have abandoned most or all of their faith, but still call themselves Mormons.

[00:21:06]So it's, it's a weird data set, right?

[00:21:09]Nonetheless, there's still a lot of people in her sample that have self-identified as being current members of the church.

[00:21:15]And so, uh, the 67% of older Mormons believing Joseph Smith was a prophet of God is interesting.

[00:21:21]51% of millennial Mormons believing that God is an exalted person of bone and flesh.

[00:21:26]You've got 68% of older Mormons believing that 55% of the young.

[00:21:30]I've got a bunch here.

[00:21:31]Let me just pick one more.

[00:21:33]Um, let's do, uh, the book of Mormon.

[00:21:37]62% of older Mormons believe that it's a literal historical account, but only 50% of millennial Mormons do.

[00:21:44]So clearly you can see, despite her data set and sample and all the stuff being a little bit wonky and, and whatever weird, uh, or not ideal for really assessing some data like that.

[00:21:58]You can at least see again, the trends.

[00:22:00]It's like Ryan Burgess data on all the different poles, placing the numbers at different levels.

[00:22:05]But when you look at all the, the poles together, they're all trending in the same direction.

[00:22:09]And so to me, I look at this and I say, okay, the data set isn't perfect, but to me, it shows generationally you've got this, the secularization amongst Mormons who are increasingly disbelieving, you know, key tenants of their faith.

[00:22:25]And so I would answer yes, that secularization is affecting the church as well.

[00:22:30]So a few, a few ideas to wrap up, you know, the story of, of secularization itself, I think is not simply that people stop believing.

[00:22:40]I think it's, I think it's that they still want to believe.

[00:22:43]I mean, I think the human soul hungers for meaning, for covenant, for belonging, you know, we can try to numb that with careers or causes or comforts.

[00:22:55]But it never really goes away.

[00:22:56]It's like the op-ed of the author.

[00:22:58]I tried to do meditation and workout and reading self-help books or whatever, right?

[00:23:02]You know, we can, you can try and numb that, that desire, that hunger for meaning with all these things, but it never really goes away and it doesn't have a substitute.

[00:23:09]I think the modern heart is still restless, still searching for connection to God, even if it doesn't know his name, even if you don't understand, or, you know, many there be who have not found the gospel and whatever that says in section 121, because they know not where to find it, right?

[00:23:25]Many are kept from these things just because they don't know where to find it.

[00:23:27]But I think the human heart, being a child of God, the light of Christ, you know, you're, you're still yearning for these things.

[00:23:33]That's why when missionaries finally connect with some people, there's these stories of like, I've been waiting for this for so long, you know, both stories in the early church days and more recently as well.

[00:23:45]Another thing I thought of is that, you know, we built a world where we can have everything except a reason to live.

[00:23:51]You know, the modern self is more autonomous than ever and yet more anxious and lonely and lost.

[00:24:00]You know, the, the, the promise of the secular world was liberation, liberation from the, the control and the tradition and the deceit and the myth of religion, right?

[00:24:16]That's how the secular promise was sold.

[00:24:17]We will liberate you.

[00:24:18]But I think the result has been isolation.

[00:24:20]You know, I think the gospel is, is the gospel of Jesus Christ is a story, story so big, so impactful that it can like knit the human experience together.

[00:24:35]It is this unifying narrative.

[00:24:37]Even if you just want to look at it as a narrative only and not like literally true, it still has this potent power.

[00:24:44]I think because it's true.

[00:24:46]I think because of the light of Christ resonating with that.

[00:24:49]And yet even those who just believe more in the mythical narrative aspects of it and the positive ideas that it teaches and the good lessons for our kids and the community it fosters and the ethical framework it gives us, like, even if you look at it from kind of a secularish kind of approach, going along with the narrative, embracing the story still has benefits.

[00:25:08]Again, I think because it is true, but nonetheless, I think also that for all of our talk of progress, the data clearly shows that we are, broadly speaking, a people adrift, you know, lonely, medicated, numbed, unsure what life means.

[00:25:30]And I think that pain isn't proof of failure.

[00:25:34]I think it's a signal.

[00:25:35]It's like a divine nudge reminding us that a life with God cannot satisfy.

[00:25:42]So I don't think the nuns are the enemy.

[00:25:44]I think they're evidence that the world's substitutes for faith don't work.

[00:25:48]And I don't think that all faith is equal.

[00:25:51]As I said, like, I don't look at this data and be like, oh, people are leaving Christianity.

[00:25:55]I think there is the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.

[00:25:57]There is truth from our heavenly father.

[00:26:00]There is uncontaminated, exalted, amazing doctrines to understand who is God, understand our connection to him, understand who we are, our purpose, our mission, the meaning of our life, our connection to one another.

[00:26:16]There are amazing doctrines in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ that give us context and a framework and meaning and purpose and community and all of that.

[00:26:28]So I don't think the nuns are the enemy.

[00:26:31]I don't think we need to bemoan the fact that there are so many of them.

[00:26:34]I think, again, they are a demonstration of the fact that this secular substitute does not work.

[00:26:40]Removing God from the equation, thinking yourself so enlightened, you know, pursuing hollow alternatives.

[00:26:50]As the op-ed author herself admitted, nothing held a candle to what she had experienced.

[00:26:57]It's not to say that everything she experienced in the church was perfect and Zion-like and everything, right?

[00:27:02]Much of my podcast, I devote to things that I think could be improved or corrected and aspects of our culture that have contaminated or encumbered the gospel.

[00:27:12]You know, and yet it's the narrative, the story, the meaning, the ideals, the ideas that offer so much power and benefit to our lives.

[00:27:24]So I think there has been a rise of secularism.

[00:27:26]Maybe it's plateaued a little bit, but it's still high.

[00:27:29]And it's encouraging to see more young people going back to, not going back to church, but going to church more who were already going to church.

[00:27:38]I would love to see the trend shift over into people who were not at all going to church, now going to church.

[00:27:43]I don't know that that's what the data is showing.

[00:27:47]How do you see this playing out in your life?

[00:27:49]You know, teenagers, young adults, the younger generation being bombarded with secular messages on social media and their friends and so forth, far more than at any point in the past.

[00:28:00]So clearly we've had an uptick for 30 years and a lot of that has been fueled by the internet and social media and the access to information.

[00:28:06]The inability of most people to interpret and analyze that information, but rather just believe regurgitated stories.

[00:28:13]It's like the CES letter and what's called Gish Gallop, where you're just bombarded with so much stuff that the average person's like, well, there must be truth here because look at so many things.

[00:28:23]They lack the intellectual foundation to challenge and check and explain or respond to many of those ideas.

[00:28:32]So they get overwhelmed in this tidal wave of information because they don't compartmentalize, put a firewall up, say, I'm keeping that at bay so that I can focus on this, lean into it, study it, try to understand the gospel.

[00:28:45]We have a lot of people surviving on milk and when they are confronted by the Gish Gallop of opposition arguments and secular ideas, many young people are overwhelmed.

[00:28:54]And our Sunday schools and our youth quorums and our support structures are very weak.

[00:28:59]And I think most families are very weak.

[00:29:02]You know, one of the reasons why the Tuttle Twins works so well and has become so popular is that it doesn't require the parents to have any prerequisite knowledge of the ideas.

[00:29:12]In fact, what we found with repeated surveys is that we have all these parents out there who believe in the ideas of freedom, right?

[00:29:18]And they believe in free markets or the Constitution or America or freedom or whatever.

[00:29:22]But, and I'm summarizing our survey data here when I say these parents, very broadly speaking, feel inadequate in their own understanding of those ideas.

[00:29:32]Therefore, they are unable to defend them, say, on a Facebook chat with some uncle who's critiquing them.

[00:29:39]Or they feel inadequate in being able to articulate them and teach them in a way that their child might understand.

[00:29:47]So what we found, what we've tapped into is for the past decade, this trend, and I don't think it's going away, of parents who believe these certain ideas, but they believe them so superficially without any intellectual grounding or foundation.

[00:30:02]That not only do they not engage in the world of ideas publicly on a social media post or with their friends at a book club or whatever.

[00:30:09]They don't engage because they don't really know how to articulate an intellectual defense or, you know, bear testimony, if you will, of these principles.

[00:30:17]But they're also not talking to their kids about it.

[00:30:19]Meanwhile, their kids are just being deluged with contrary information and ideas from people who are very good communicators and very well grounded in their own perspective to articulate these in very savvy ways.

[00:30:32]And so then you lose the kids and these parents say, oh, what happened to my kids?

[00:30:36]I thought I, it's like, no, you didn't talk to them.

[00:30:38]You didn't give them a foundation.

[00:30:39]Anyway, so that, that's the magic of the Tull Twins is we got, we were able to say, hey, mom and dad, you don't need to have any like deep PhD level analysis of economic theory.

[00:30:49]Just read these books with your kids and have this shared language in your home and your kids will reread them and they'll watch our cartoon and they'll get exposed and they'll develop this understanding that your family can over time continue to talk about and share different examples and stories as life goes on.

[00:31:05]And it's been magic.

[00:31:06]It's helped so many families.

[00:31:08]And so then I think about the gospel and I see a similar pattern where you get parents who aren't talking to their kids about this stuff.

[00:31:17]And, and they're not talking about the Gish Gallup CES letter garbage, for example.

[00:31:23]They're not empowering their kids to understand this stuff.

[00:31:25]Why?

[00:31:25]Because the parents themselves often have so shallow a foundation that they don't engage their kids.

[00:31:31]They don't fortify them with any kind of foundation because the parents often lack one of their own.

[00:31:36]It's why our Sunday school classes are so dull.

[00:31:38]It's why people are so heavily reliant on milk because they haven't put in the work.

[00:31:47]And they haven't really studied and they haven't embraced or engaged with these ideas in any significant way.

[00:31:53]And so we end up losing our kids in a noisy social media driven world where these secular ideas are just being shouted from digital rooftops.

[00:32:02]And they're constantly being, our kids are constantly being bombarded with them.

[00:32:07]And percentage wise, I mean, it's probably like 99.9% secular and 0.1% doctrinal.

[00:32:16]We have to compete for the hearts and minds of our own children.

[00:32:19]I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Mind Wars, where I talk about this, not in a gospel context, just in general, that like you will lose every battle that you don't know is being fought.

[00:32:30]And if your child, not if, your child's mind is ground zero for a psychological battle.

[00:32:38]And if you don't even realize that battle is being fought, if you don't realize who the enemy is, how the enemy operates, it's the enemy's weapons, rules and engagement strategies.

[00:32:48]Like if you don't understand these things, your child is already lost because you've seeded the battlefield.

[00:32:53]And I think it's even more true of the spiritual battles that our children are faced in.

[00:33:01]So it's no surprise to me to see these trends over the past 30 years, because I think by and by, you know, the, the gen Xers and whatever, right.

[00:33:12]Have grown up themselves on milk and superficial understanding.

[00:33:14]So they don't talk to their kids about it.

[00:33:16]And then those kids, meanwhile, all the kids are just, again, getting exposed to these ideas.

[00:33:21]We have to compete and we're doing a horrible job right now.

[00:33:24]Collectively.

[00:33:25]We are playing, not even playing defense.

[00:33:28]We're not even on the, you know, on the field.

[00:33:31]Many of us aren't even realizing the degree to which the psychological and spiritual battles are even happening.

[00:33:38]So the trends to me are not a shock.

[00:33:41]They are the spiritual equivalent of what I see on the political side with our Tuttle Twins work.

[00:33:46]All the time.

[00:33:46]It is, I think, the fruit of disengagement of parents largely because of their own insecurity stemming from their intellectual inadequacies that they feel that they possess.

[00:34:00]That they just don't understand.

[00:34:01]Therefore, they don't engage.

[00:34:02]They don't talk to their kids, but the kids are being talked to by everybody else.

[00:34:05]So to stem the tide, to reverse the trend, it's going to take far more critical engagement, far more intellectual understanding, far more discussion, far more tackling hard issues.

[00:34:21]Helping our children see through, as this op-ed author herself has seen through, just the hollow counterfeit nature of everything secular.

[00:34:28]And demonstrating, by your fruits you shall know them.

[00:34:31]Showing our children with real examples how people who pursue this type of lifestyle and worldview are, on the whole, far less happy.

[00:34:44]And that's not to say we should embrace a mythical narrative just because it will, you know, like a placebo effect, make us happier.

[00:34:50]No.

[00:34:51]Like, I believe the gospel is real.

[00:34:52]I believe Jesus Christ lived and died and was resurrected and has spoken to modern prophets and has given us additional scripture.

[00:34:59]Like, the gospel is not just a narrative.

[00:35:02]It is true.

[00:35:03]And its ideas are powerful.

[00:35:05]And they resonate deeply in our lives.

[00:35:07]Because I think we are not human creatures.

[00:35:10]We are spiritual creatures.

[00:35:11]What's that quote?

[00:35:14]I'm going to butcher this because I'm trying to think of this off the top of my head.

[00:35:16]I don't know who said it, but this idea that we are not mortal creatures going through a spiritual journey.

[00:35:22]We are spiritual creatures going through a mortal journey.

[00:35:28]That is why I think these messages resonate.

[00:35:30]That is why I think their secular counterfeit substitutions ring hollow.

[00:35:33]That is why I think we have to take this message of the gospel and its amazing life-enhancing ideas to the masses.

[00:35:44]We have to better communicate.

[00:35:45]But that also means we have to better understand these things and the arguments against them and the criticisms and the conspiracy theories and the anti-Mormon, whatever.

[00:35:55]Like, you have to understand these things so that you can counter them and engage for the hearts and minds of the young.

[00:36:00]So, we'll get off my soapbox now.

[00:36:04]We'll conclude the music.

[00:36:05]Tell me what you think in the comments.

[00:36:06]How are you seeing this play out in your life with the young people in your family, your community?

[00:36:11]Are you seeing this trend play out where you're at?

[00:36:14]And if so, what do you think we can do about it?

[00:36:16]I'll see you in the comments, and I'll see you next week.