Can Religion Make You Happy?

As concerns mount about America’s “loneliness epidemic,” some religious leaders have sought to market themselves as a potential cure. An academic and a rabbi co-wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe last year saying as much. “While this epidemic of loneliness is unprecedented, our approach to solving it doesn’t have to be,” they write. The op-ed writers bristled at the notion that religious groups’ role in addressing the problem is no more important than secular institutions like fitness centers.

But how do we know? Religion as the fix for the loneliness epidemic strikes me as undertheorized.

My guest on today’s episode of Good on Paper is Arthur Brooks. Brooks is the former president of the American Enterprise Institute and is now a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches classes on leadership and happiness. He’s also a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where he has written that happiness comes, in part, through faith.

This conversation is centered on the “nones”—people who identify with no religion and who, according to Brooks, are unhappier (at least on average).

“People who do have a strong sense of religious practice in their life—they just tend to be happier,” he says.” They tend to be happier people. They have a greater sense of organization in their life. They have a better sense of community. They have an underlying physics to their life, and they’re not trying to figure things out in the same way. And life is complicated. There are things that are going to pull you in every direction all the time. And it’s nice to have something that you can actually count on, whether you agree with every single part of it or not.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: Religion’s influence is waning in America.

Today, roughly 28 percent of American adults identify as either atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” In 2007, just 15 percent of Americans identified with no religion. That’s all according to the Pew Research Center.

It’s taken as common sense that this is a problem. Just 16 percent of people in a September 2022 poll said that religion’s decline was good, while a plurality said the decline was a bad thing. These conversations have become bound up in larger concerns about the loneliness epidemic and the decline in Americans hanging out.

My colleague Derek Thompson wondered in a recent article if “in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it.”

The surgeon general put out a report last year on “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” Religious groups have sought to market themselves as a solution. One Boston Globe op-ed argued that “religion can play a critical role in alleviating the loneliness epidemic.”

Now, to lay my cards on the table, I’m a Christian. But I’m also skeptical about the broad narratives around the loneliness crisis, about the broad brushstrokes used to paint people who don’t consider themselves religious, and the treatment of church as a panacea for all our social ills. After all, it’s not like life was perfect before the declines in religiosity.

[Music]

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And today, I asked Arthur Brooks to come on the show to talk with me about whether religion can solve America’s loneliness epidemic.

Brooks was the former president of the American Enterprise Institute but now is a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches a class on leadership and happiness. He’s also a contributing writer for The Atlantic, where he has written that happiness comes, in part, through faith.

This is a less wonky conversation than the ones you’ll usually hear on this podcast. I press Brooks on what sorts of data he is resting many of his arguments on. And I also push him to try and weigh the harms of religion’s decline against its potential benefits. And he expresses a view I think is dominant in the American public, but—as you’ll hear in my questions—I’m not sure I’m convinced.

Listen for yourself. Let’s dive in.

All right, Arthur. Welcome to the show.

Arthur Brooks: Thank you. Great to be with you.

Demsas: So I’m interested in starting our conversation with an article that you wrote for The Atlantic. And I want you to answer because I think this is not usually the answer you would give to this question in a religious context, but who are the nones?

Brooks: The nones are not the women wearing habits. The nones are N-O-N-E-S, the people who are self-professed to have no religious faith at all. Whether or not they consider themselves to be spiritual or not—most of them actually aren’t spiritual either, but—they say, I have no religion.

Demsas: And so how many are there in the United States?

Brooks: Lots. There weren’t very many not that long ago. When I was a little kid, it would have been somewhere around 3 percent of the population. Now it’s more like 30 percent of the population. And it’s especially true among Millennials and Gen Z.

Demsas: So I was reading your article, and I was looking at the data—so you’re looking at the Pew survey. And I wanted to dig into who these nones really are. Because when I first read your piece, I think that, like many people, my perception is people who identify as not religiously affiliated, I assume that they’re either atheists or agnostics.

But what was interesting is that most of these folks do believe in God or another higher power, but they rarely go to religious services, and they don’t identify with their religion. Is that surprising to you?

Brooks: Not really. Most people are religious. Most people have a sense of something beyond what they see. They have a very strong sense of the metaphysical. Most people believe in life after death.

What they don’t always believe in is the human institutions around which we coalesce to figure out what those metaphysical things are and how we’re supposed to worship. And so what people have is the same kind of sense of faith; what they don’t have faith in is the institutions where they could go and worship.

Demsas: And part of why I like putting numbers on things is because often when we’re talking about increasing phenomena or something like that, people can begin to think, Oh, everyone’s irreligious. But 28 percent are religiously unaffiliated; 40 percent of people still identify as Protestant, 20 percent as Catholic. I mean, the majority of Americans are identifying, still, with a religion. I think that’s important baseline setting to do.

Brooks: Sure. Absolutely. Most people still have a relatively traditional religious affiliation, whether they practice a lot or not. And that’s an important thing to keep in mind. Sure, nones are on the rise but, you know, we Catholics—we’re not dead yet.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Yeah, the nones are on the rise. Of course. Of course. The next question I have for you is: Why are nones nones, right? Why is it that you’re seeing this increase in people who, when they’re asked what their religion is, they kind of just shrug?

Brooks: Well, there’s three things. Number one is that they don’t like traditional religious practice. They don’t like it. They don’t like the way it’s done, or they don’t trust churches or synagogues or houses of worship. And so it’s the commitment part, it’s the practice part that they don’t like.

The second group of people say that they’re nones because they actually just don’t believe what these traditional religious organizations say they have to believe: If you want to be one of us, you’ve got to believe these things. There’s a creed. Everybody’s got a creed. You can’t join a church and then not believe what the church thinks, if you’re going to have any sort of integrity, they figure.

So the first part is the practice. The second part is actually the belief. And the last part is they just don’t feel it. They don’t feel it: I don’t feel like going to church. I don’t feel like what they’re saying I have to believe. I don’t feel it.

So in other words, it’s practice, it’s belief, and it’s feeling.

Demsas: With practice—I think this is interesting, right—because I can imagine someone goes to church, and then they’re just like, Well, I’m just going to go to a nondenominational Protestant service, or, I’m a reformed Jew, so I’m going to go to a more secular religious institution environment. And maybe I’ll participate, but I won’t really engage in the practice that I find either distasteful or I find boring or unnecessary. Why is that such a reason for people to not go to church at all?

Brooks: People want to live with integrity. They want to live true to themselves, and they don’t want to be part of something and feel hypocritical. It’s really important for most people not to feel hypocritical, and there’s even pretty interesting psychological research that shows that when you induce a cognitive dissonance into your lifestyle, it’s incredibly uncomfortable, and it makes you unhappy.

You don’t want to do something where it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t really believe that. It’s not great. You want to join something where you can do it full blast. You don’t want to join a club and think that the club is kind of lame. That’s sort of what it comes down to, and that’s the big problem that we typically see with people, and I argue in my work as a social scientist that that’s actually a mistake.

Demsas: Why?

Brooks: It’s a mistake because you can’t agree with all of anything. I don’t know people who have the happiest marriages who agree with all of the views and values of their spouse. I don’t know anybody who’s a super-serious Catholic or Jew or Muslim who agrees with everything that comes out of the mouth of every imam, priest, or rabbi. It’s just not reasonable to think that.

And this hyper-focus on being hypocritical or not and having this perfect integrity, this is making the perfect the enemy of the good. And it makes it impossible for people to figure out how to become part of institutions that can become a huge source of meaning in their lives.

Demsas: I think what’s different, though, about a relationship—whether it’s a friendship or a marriage, where you’re like, I don’t agree with everything someone says—people have other reasons to engage with their spouse or to have a spouse or to have a friend. But religion is part of the search for the truth.

So to me, I could ask, why does it matter if people are becoming less religious? To me, the reason you put up with the fact that, you know, maybe my partner doesn’t put away the dishes the way I would like is because I have other things that are really valuable that I find in that relationship. But why do you need to be religious?

Brooks: Well, one of the things that you find is that people who do have a strong sense of religious practice in their life, they just tend to be happier. They tend to be happier people. They have a greater sense of organization in their life. They have a better sense of community. They have an underlying physics to their life, and they’re not trying to figure things out in the same way.

And life is complicated. There are things that are going to pull you in every direction all the time. And it’s nice to have something that you can actually count on, whether you agree with every single part of it or not.

And so in this way, it’s much like any other relationship. You find that the happiest people—they have a sense of their faith or life philosophy. It doesn’t have, necessarily, to be faith, but a philosophy around which they can actually organize their sense of right and wrong, good and bad.

They have family life that’s reliable. They have close friendships. And the apex of both friendships and family life is spousal life. And, last but not least, they have a sense of love in their work. Those are the things that the happiest people have in common. And when you take one of those things away, people just tend to feel rootless and aimless.

Not everybody. Look, I know a lot of people—they seem to be doing just fine with this. But these are the empirical regularities I see as a social scientist, people who have a sense of: How I’m going to practice what I believe, even if I believe every single bit of it or not, is going to give me a better, more organized life.

Demsas: Well, let’s dig into the social science here a little bit then. Because I think that a lot of times, there is an implicit feeling that religion plays something unique in people’s lives. But at the same time, when I press people on this, it often goes towards, Well, what actually is happening is that religion facilitates other things that are really important, like religion facilitates community or friendship, or helps you find your spouses. So is it religion? Or is it these other things that are actually at the root of what we’re talking about?

Brooks: Well, obviously, there’s a lot of research on that, and people disagree. I think that the best evidence points to the fact that happiness comes when we can transcend ourselves. And that’s a hard thing to do. Mother Nature, of course, doesn’t care if you’re happy. Mother Nature wants you to pass on your genes and to survive.

And so the result is that we’re always doing what Mother Nature tells us to do, which is to focus on ourselves. The psychodrama where I’m the star. You know, My job, my work, my money, my sandwich, my commute—me, me, me, me. And it’s just unbelievably tedious, scary, and boring. And I need relief. And the only relief I can get is by zooming out. And the only way I can zoom out is to get little and to make the universe big and stand in awe of it. That’s transcendence. And one of the things that almost nobody contests is that that kind of transcendence will improve your life. But it’s hard to get.

You have to focus on something intensely that’s not you. Now, there’s a lot of ways to do that. You can study the Stoic philosophers with great seriousness and try to live according to their dictates. Or walk in nature in the Brahma Muhurta, which is the Sanskrit word for the creator’s time—that’s just an hour and a half before the sun comes up—and walk without devices for an hour. Or study the fugues of Bach. Or start a Vipassana meditation practice. Or—very conveniently—practice the faith of your youth.

But you have to do something. This is one of the practices of the happiest people because you need to transcend yourself, otherwise you’ll just go mad. And that’s what a lot of people find, and that’s what a lot of people find is missing from their lives when they do walk away from their faith and become a none for reasons of integrity, but that they really, really want.

Demsas: So can you tell us a little about the data you’re using to determine this? Because I hear a lot of that, and that sounds really great, but someone could say, I find a lot of transcendence in running an ultramarathon. And I just know, personally, for myself, that that’s not going to provide a lot of benefit, even though that sounds great for them. So how do we know that this sort of thing makes people happier?

Brooks: We know the transcendence—and by the way, there are people who can run an ultramarathon who do tend to find a sense of super-transcendence or self-transcendence. And that’s not my thing, either, but the whole point is finding your thing, and one of the most convenient things is religion. That works really, really well, where the physics has been worked out across the generations.

So the data that you get from that are, you know, data sources such as the World Values Survey or the General Social Survey, where you’re asking people about what they do and why they do it. And when they talk about the fact that they’re—in all sorts of surveys—that they’re losing themselves in something, they’re happier.

When you’re not thinking about yourself, you’re happier. Even in the experiments that say, When you’re thinking about other people, are you happier? The answer is yes. When you’re doing something for somebody else, are you happier? Yeah. When you just think virtuous thoughts about other people, are you happier? Yeah. When you’re thinking about yourself, are you happier? No. No, you’re not. But you need something that makes you good at that. That’s, you know, how that comes about.

So I hang out with a couple of ultra-endurance athletes and—man, I mean, It’s not my religion, is the way that this works out. I’m a practicing Catholic—that’s my thing. As a social scientist, I understand actually how the mechanism works of self-transcendence for my greater happiness. Now, again, this is not a conversation about the metaphysics—you know, What is cosmically true? What is the essence of God? Does God exist? That’s entirely separate from the happiness discussion.

Demsas: Well, it sounds, again then, like your religion is—in this space, at least—a sort of instrument for other things. And sometimes when I hear conversations around this, there’s obviously significant social-science research around the thickness of our social, our civic life.

So you have Robert Putnam, or you have Theda Skocpol and other political scientists who look into these questions about associations that people join, and whether or not that kind of life is declining and how that interacts with people’s well-being in society. And so I wonder, is church better than a bowling league?

Brooks: I don’t know. It depends on for what. For bowling? No. For happiness? Maybe. For truth? That’s really what I care about, too. Look, it is true that people who are nones and not doing anything and socially disconnected are a lot less happy, on average, than people who are practicing a religion. But that’s the happiness metric, and that’s a very utilitarian metric that we’re talking about.

Most people who are religious are happier. But they also find that they believe that they’re finding truth, which is a really important thing for them, notwithstanding their happiness. For me, that’s an incredibly important thing, as well. I think that even if it didn’t make me happier, I would continue to practice my faith, because I think that this gives me a glimpse of some metaphysical truth that I couldn’t get otherwise. And that’s really, really different than how I feel from day to day.

Demsas: All right. Time for a quick break. More with Arthur when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: Part of why I was really interested in having this conversation is because there’s increased discussion from a lot of different people about the decline in associational life, the decline in happiness, what they see as a loneliness epidemic. And I find that there’s a lot of murky data on both sides, right? So some of the data people have pointed to is often time-use survey data, which finds that there are hundreds of minutes more spent alone now than in previous years.

But then, other social scientists have pushed back and said that just because people are spending more time alone—because they’re living alone, increasingly—that doesn’t mean they’re actually lonely. There’s a 2017 paper of high school seniors that looks at nearly half a million people that really doesn’t find evidence of this loneliness epidemic. There’s research by some University of Chicago political scientists that look at this in older age groups. And there’s just a bunch of competing data here. I don’t think there’s something completely definitive.

What are you looking at to say that you think that there’s this increased concern around loneliness and unhappiness? How are you seeing that?

Brooks: Well, I look at the big databases on how happy people are and how they think about their relationships. And so one of the biggest questions that I want to know is the answer to: How many people know you well? That’s a really big one for me. And so not just how lonely are you—because compared to what? It’s a very relative thing, and you’re going to get answers all over the board.

But how many people know you well? That’s something compared to your past, compared to how you perceive other people, and that’s been going down for a couple of generations at this point. And you find that about half of people in their 20s today say that nobody knows them well.

It almost certainly has to do with the advent of social media, where we’re more disconnected from each other. We are living more single life. People are half as likely to get married. And the truth is that when you’re not around people, people are less likely to know you well—that’s just a fact. And if your friends are on social media, they’re less likely to get to know you well under those circumstances, as well. So it makes perfect sense.

And I think that while you can’t prove anything with data, you can fail to disprove a lot of hypotheses. And at some point, you have to decide whether or not you believe what these things are telling you. As an empirical social scientist, I’ve decided that I think that’s the most logical explanation. People are lonelier, as measured in terms of how many people know you, and the reason is because we are becoming more and more separated.

The human brain wants to know other people in two dimensions, which is to say eye contact and touch—real-life eye contact and real-life touch. And there’s just a lot less of that going on, so there’s less of the neuropeptide oxytocin flowing. And that’s what makes us feel like no one knows us well.

Demsas: You’ve spent a lot of your career as an economist and also defending a lot of free-market ideas. And I read one comment of yours I thought was really interesting, which was that you said the U.S. has a free market for souls. And part of my perception about a lot of this is just that most people are probably picking what’s, on net, better for them in their lives.

Obviously, there’s failures. People can make mistakes in that direction. But en masse, I don’t usually think that I can look at a data set and say, I think that people are making these massive categorical errors when they’re looking at their options, whether it’s their religious options or their associational life options. And they’re just not choosing something that’s obviously available to them.

So when you said there’s a U.S. free market for souls, I think it was a bit pejorative. I don’t know if it was an entirely positive description. But why don’t you trust that the nones are just voting with their souls?

Brooks: No, I think, to a certain extent, they are. They’ve decided that they don’t want that, whereas, in past times, there was a less-free market for it because there was more social pressure for people to conform. I think in many other countries around the world, there would be a lot of social pressure to not say that you’re a none, or not to explore the idea of walking away from the traditional moral and religious traditions of your forebears.

And part of the reason that we do that in the United States is because we do have a tradition of religious conversion. People convert a lot in the United States, and that’s what I meant. Actually, it was provocative but not pejorative to say there’s a free market for souls.

You find that there’s a lot of religious entrepreneurship in the United States. People come door to door: Hey, have you heard the good news? They’re selling you their thing, is the way that that works out, which is a weird thing in many places around the world because there would be no market for it, or it might even be prohibited to behave in that way. And that’s because the United States has this tradition of: I don’t like it here. I’m going there. If it’s not good enough, I’m going to move.

As much as I want people to have happiness, association, a sense of security—I want them to think for themselves. And frankly, I’m a convert. I’m one of those people that used spiritual capitalism. I was raised a Protestant. When I was a teenager, I became a Catholic, and I found my home. I found my spiritual home. And I’m so glad I did, and I’m so glad I live in a place that that’s not even controversial.

Demsas: I think that, in many ways, the explanations we’ve been talking about, though, are pretty individual, right? So when someone says, The reason why I no longer believe in—whether it’s Christianity or Islam or whatever it is—is because I no longer like the practices, or I just don’t feel like it, that’s a very individualized explanation of what I think is probably a macro trend that is affecting a lot of people differently.

So what is your sense of why it is that, all of a sudden, all these people stopped believing or stopped liking the practice? What actually changed to instigate that generational shift?

Brooks: I think that this is actually part of a larger pattern that goes in waves. And what we have is great periods of spiritual enlightenment in the United States. When you look at history—and data are scant; it’s hard to figure out exactly what was going on around the time of the American Revolution, but—the most likely data suggests that about 20 percent of Americans went to church regularly around the time of the American Revolution.

And then a lot more did, and then fewer did, and then more did. And we had a real high point in church attendance and affiliation in the 1950s, and we’ve come down off of that. Now, historical patterns would suggest that it’s going to go back up, but it requires that individual houses of worship and sects and religions, that they do the entrepreneurial work, that they actually make the case.

And frankly, I think that religion should have to make the case to a freethinking people. They should have to go to the nones and say, I got something that’s going to make you not only happier but show you truth. It’s going to give you a sense of purpose and meaning. But that’s going to take some work. That’s the kind of work that I think they should do.

Demsas: I find, often, when people are talking about this in the political context, they’re largely concerned that people who are identifying as a none might become less civically engaged.

So the same Pew poll we talked about at the top has that religious nones are less civically engaged and socially connected than people who identify with a religion. On average, they’re less likely to vote, less likely to have volunteered, less satisfied with their local communities and their social lives. But that’s driven by people in that cohort who described their religion as “nothing in particular.” Atheists and agnostics actually rival religiously affiliated adults in their participation.

So I guess my question to you is: If you were able to resolve these concerns around civic engagement, via different mechanisms, would you still be concerned about the rise of the nones?

Brooks: Yeah, for sure. Because the nones are going to be less happy. Because the nones are going to have less of a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, and I want people to have a strong sense of purpose and meaning. And as a religious person myself, I want people to be on a path toward what they believe is finding the truth. And I don’t want people to be lukewarm and hanging around and wondering.

One of the things that’s really interesting is you find that the people who have the least satisfying lives, the least life quality, are not those who are in opposition to each other—not that they believe the wrong thing; it’s that they don’t believe anything. That’s the biggest problem in life, not believing anything. The problem with “noneship” is it’s lukewarm. And lukewarm-ness—that’s not associated with a really high quality of life.

I mean, I have a lot of friends—look, I teach at Harvard, so I know a lot of atheists, and especially because I’m a social scientist. This is, like, an atheist profession, practically.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Brooks: They have very strong views, and they’re very humanist, and they have high integrity, and they’re really digging in on their lives, and they’re doing great. But the unhappiest people that I know, they’re like, I don’t know. And I’m not looking.

Demsas: Part of what I want to do is also engage in some of this trade-off thinking, too, because I think it’s probably true—even though I think I’m more skeptical than you about this correlation between religiosity and unhappiness and loneliness—I think it’s probably just that there are trade-offs going on here.

And so Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, they have a 2014 study where they look at the rise of the nones through 2012. And what they identify is that there’s a cohort shift in parenting values. So they have this question that is asked in other social-science research: If you had to choose, which thing on this list would you pick as the most important for a child to learn to prepare him or her for life? And that list includes things like to obey, to work hard, and to think for himself or herself, as well as other stuff like to be well-liked and [to be] popular or to help others.

And so they do a bunch of statistical analysis, and what they essentially identify is that there are these attitudes about personal liberties that differ between cohorts born and raised since World War II and before that. And they find that those value shifts are actually what predicts the cohort differences in religious preferences. So people who are more likely to say, I want my kid to think for himself or herself rather than to obey, are the kinds of people that end up raising children that have values around individual autonomy. That then will predict the values around sexual freedom and drugs and legalization of marijuana, things like that.

People often think that it’s like, Oh, you’re pro-premarital sex. That’s why you become irreligious. But what they find in this study is that it’s people who have these individualist values that they inculcate in their children, that they grow up, and they’re less likely to become religious, as a result.

So when you think about that trade-off, I would imagine that most people—I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong here—would think that having your kid think for himself or herself is more important than that kid learning to obey. But if that is the trade-off you’re making—that your kid won’t grow up to be religious because they have this anti-authority streak—how do you think about whether that trade-off is worth it?

Brooks: It’s hard to say. I mean, everybody has to decide that for her- or himself. But I think that there’s actually not an incompatibility with that. Most people, they don’t do the work. And so they think, Look, I’m going to think for myself and so, therefore, that means I have to reject institutions, as opposed to saying, I’m going to think for myself and evaluate the institutions around which I want to coalesce my life, you know?

And so for a lot of people—certainly that was the way that I grew up. You know, my parents said, Think for yourself. Make your own decisions. But decide. This is a very Kierkegaardian notion. The father of existentialist philosophy said, Think for yourself. Make a decision. But don’t sit there on the fence, which is the noneship. That’s how noneship works. It’s like, You got to decide. That’s what Either/Or—which is Kierkegaard’s master understanding of existentialist philosophy—that’s what he was basically saying. And that’s what we should be teaching people.

Look, there’s a lot of choices in life, but not choosing is a pretty bad choice. That’s a pretty bad use of personal liberty if you want to live the highest quality life. Because people who insist not just on not thinking for themselves but not choosing any sense of what’s better than anything else, not choosing any set of institutions to which to affiliate, not committing to any way of thinking to build a community—these are the people who have the highest levels of anxiety, the highest levels of depression.

Demsas: But at a population level—because, at an individual level, I can understand if you’re giving advice to someone, and you’re saying, You need to be the kind of person who’s going to be more decisive or not. But if, at a population level, a population valuing thinking for yourself results in the secularization of society, then how do you feel about that trade-off?

Brooks: Once again, I think that we need to have a more mature understanding of what that trade-off would be. Sure, freethinkers have always had a tendency to be less dogmatically attached to particular institutions. Most people actually aren’t freethinkers, is what we find. And they’re all different kinds of people.

So to be tolerant—once again, there’s a real tendency in my profession (I’m an academic) to say people who aren’t freethinkers have something defective about them. That’s just as bad, that’s just as intolerant as people who are pretty dogmatic about their beliefs to say that freethinkers are heretics and defective on their face.

And that’s actually one of the great conceits of our society today, is to say, Because I’m not bigoted, I’m an anti-bigot. And I’m an anti-bigot bigot. And there’s just a complete lack of tolerance on either side of this particular debate. A lot of these institutions exist for people who don’t choose to actually be as freethinking as perhaps you and I might be. And fine for them. Fine for them. For me, I’m pretty libertarian about this whole thing, whether you’re a freethinker or not.

Demsas: And I guess the other trade-off that people often talk about is with other liberal values. So Ronald Inglehart—he’s a political scientist, and he wrote this book called, Religion’s Sudden Decline, and he talks particularly about sexual freedom and also feminist ideas. So he writes, “For many centuries, a coherent set of profertility norms evolved in most countries that assigns women the role of producing as many children as possible and discourages divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any other form of sexual behavior not linked with reproduction.”

So part of what’s going on then, in his story, is that, as you get these norms around women’s autonomy, you inexorably have this push against organized religion as a result. I think there are a lot of people—even people who are proreligion now and pro-getting more people into the church—who believe that it requires some level of return to socially conservative values.

Perry Bacon Jr.—he wrote a column in The Washington Post last year where he was asking for a church for the nones, and what he was looking for was a church that would basically be a liberal church that would eschew a lot of these socially conservative aspects.

And yet the response to him from a lot of people was that this sort of thing isn’t possible, that it’s bound up in it. The social-conservative stuff is bound up in church. So in many ways, do you see these two things as inextricable? And if so, what kind of answer is that, really, to people who may not want to give up on those liberal values?

Brooks: There are moral norms that exist in our society and people who disagree with them. And any group—if you belong to the Kiwanis, they have a certain set of norms; if you have a homeowners’ association, they have a set of norms. That’s just the way it is because organizations need rules such that you understand what it means to be a member or not to be a member of the organization.

I have seen a lot of religious organizations that try to get rid of many of the traditional and orthodox moral norms of Christianity or Judaism. They tend not to work as well. They tend not to be as popular, the way that it turns out. And one of the reasons, by the way, is as people get more religious, they become more attracted to those very moral norms as a good way to organize their own lives.

I’m not going to say what people should believe or people shouldn’t believe. It’s really, really up to them. But I will look at the notable empirical regularities that, as people actually find greater peace and perspective in their lives by adopting these religious views, they, not coincidentally, also start adopting more conservative—eh, more orthodox and traditional—moral norms around their lives, as well, regarding things like, I don’t know, marriage and children and fertility.

Demsas: And then, do you believe it’s possible to have a church for the nones?

Brooks: I don’t know. I think the Pope hopes so. I think there are a lot of people who are actually trying to do that, and I don’t know if that’s actually possible. I don’t know if it’s possible. Perhaps it is.

Demsas: So always our last question: What’s something in your life that was good on paper but, in the end, didn’t pan out the way you expected?

Brooks: When I was in my 20s, I was making my living as a professional classical musician. And what looked good on paper, for me, was complete freedom in every way. Looked great on paper—it really did. And I found that I was miserable. I didn’t like it.

Why? Because I felt like I was trying to write my own physics, and it wasn’t working out very well. So I committed myself to a set of norms of behavior that I didn’t know if I believed in them—I didn’t know if I felt them—just to see whether or not the commitment per se would be better. And it was better, and my life is better, and I have more peace, and I have more perspective. I’m happier than I used to be. Pure freedom looks good on paper; it doesn’t work.

Demsas: I feel like your life—it’s a lesson in job hopping. (Laughs.)

Brooks: I’ve had a lot of that, too. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for your time, Arthur.

Brooks: Thanks, Jerusalem.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.