Why American Christianity has stopped declining

Hi all,

Please have a wonderful week.

Trevor

The man who wants to know everything (article)

Fantastic profile on Tyler Cowen. Part of me feels like he’s missing out on some of the joys of life, but that could just be a jealousy part of my brain (“he says he never feels depressed yeah right”)

Personality traits and gender gaps (article)

“Higher conscientiousness and emotional stability and lower agreeableness levels enhance earnings and job stability for both genders. Differences in the distributions of personality characteristics between men and women account for as much of the gender wage gap as do the large differences in labor market experience.”

American Christianity has stopped declining (article)

“After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults”

This is a big, big deal. We need some level of religion and it felt like we were going to lose it entirely.

My hypothesis for the change is very specific to Mormonism but that could be potentially true more broadly:

1) An entire generation was exposed to facts about their religion via the Internet that had historically been much, much harder to find. Not even that they were hidden (thought sometimes they were), it’s just a lot different to have to figure out that Joseph Smith had a ton of wives by physically going into a library and looking for a book you don’t know exists vs having your spouse or friend text you a link, plus

2) Those kinds of facts can be very scary to suddenly learn in early to mid adulthood, and

3) Yet those facts are not any more strange than the set of beliefs one already believes in. E.g. is it weirder to believe that Joseph Smith had many wives or it is that he translated the Book of Mormon with a seer stone or that he found the golden plates @ the hill Cumorah? Which of those is the “weird” idea? I propose they’re all equally “weird” - if you’re choosing to belief something spiritual or on faith, you are almost by definition also choosing to believe things that on the surface appear irrational or weird. I think many (most?) of my same-aged Mormon friends would agree with this description: they are okay with the “weird” things and are actively choosing to opt in to them/embrace them. And finally:

4) The latest, youngest generation has always been exposed to the Internet, meaning they’ve also always been exposed to all the facts to all relevant religions. There was never any surprise moment where they found out the rest of the facts, so there was no set of facts that ever seemed “weird” relative to the facts they’d already grown up with.

Hence the stopped decline “fueled in part by young adults”

Deloitte links office attendance to bonuses (article)
“Deloitte has told staff in its US tax practice that it will now consider office attendance figures as part of their performance reviews, which are used by the Big Four firm to help determine bonuses.”

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