 Oh, you might. So, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Would you describe overall your approach to coitus? Would you describe it as more relational or generative? So, when I look back over the course of my life, I would say that my relationship with coitus has been more relational than generative. In fact, I haven't done any generating whatsoever as far as I'm aware. But, oh, mate, this is a special time. This is a special year. You may be wondering, like, what's so special about 2021? And I will now tell you, 2021 is the 55th anniversary. Wow, I've already got a dislike. Wow, it's the 55th anniversary of Brian Wilson's classic religion in secular society. All right, this book was first released 55 years ago this year. Is that not amazing? And did you know that Brian Wilson's religion in secular society is a seminal work? I would say maybe it's both relational and generative. I like to think of myself as a seminal blogger. Well, this book, it's a seminal book, all right? It was first published in 1966, and then it was regularly republished until the late 1970s. And it's probably the primary statement 55 years later of this particular secularization thesis that there is a connection between modernization and modernity and the decline in the power, popularity, and prestige of religion. So the author, Brian Wilson, he grew up working class in Leeds. His home had no running hot water. There was a communal toilet that was emptied once a week and was up the street in 30 yards around the corner. Oi, that's where he grew up. He did not know the identity of his biological father. He went to Methodist Sunday School to give his parents some privacy in their tiny crowded house. His former schooling ended at age 13, but then a grant allowed him to go to university and he eventually got a doctoral thesis and he got a job at Oxford, right? And not just at any college at Oxford, but he was reader in sociology at the University of Oxford and he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford. This is like the poshest of the posh colleges at Oxford. It was so posh, it did not need to teach undergraduate students, right? It was old fashioned. Women were not allowed to dine in the college until like the 1980s. And Brian Wilson, he thoroughly approved of this, got a disavow, because he thought if you allowed women to dine at the college, one might find oneself having to discuss washing machines over dessert. Oi, we don't wanna, I don't know about you, mate. I certainly don't wanna discuss washing machines over dessert. All right, so this working class lad took out residence, the stuffiest of Oxford's colleges, but he completely immersed himself in the culture of All Souls. To the extent he eventually became responsible for its renowned wine cellars. When you say 40, no, you're blowing my mind. I can't believe this. So he also traveled widely. He spent an academic year, 1957, 58 at the University of California, Berkeley. And he published Religion in Secular Society in 1966. So the result is a refreshingly confident tone. I'm reading the introduction to the new edition. And some of the language now seems almost too clear. Do you notice that today, like using clear language is frequently frowned on? It's just not on. It's just not done. Let's not be too clear with our language the better sorts we obfuscate with our language. All right, we're all gentlemen here. We're not gonna get too clear with our language. That's some kind of working class thing, right? So he described the new industrial working class as less emotionally mature than the ruling classes and the established commercial classes. You wouldn't say that today, would you, mate? Oi! And his thesis is the religion of Methodism, which Seventh-day Adventism emerged out of in the 1840s. So I was raised in Seventh-day Adventism. Seventh-day Adventism, so Methodism was a discipline. It was a way of life. It was an ethic that people had previously had a little need of such an agency of voluntary social and self-control because they'd been controlled by community regulations, by country values, by the subtle patterns of land to society. Now, the modern writer would be more circumspect and circumlocutory, right? But this book, Brian Wilson, little, not Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, by the way, Brian Wilson of All Souls College, Sociologists of Religion, quite a different character. So when you read this, you can imagine him delivering some of these lines with just the slightest smile at the corners of his mouth, such as when he dismisses the idea that people are fundamentally or essentially religious with the assertion that one should not posit a hypothetical constant, the means of measuring which have not yet been discovered. Oh, isn't that like classic British understatement? So this is his thesis in this classic work, Religion in Secular Society. Religious thinking, religious practices or religious institutions were once at the very center of the life of Western society, as indeed all societies, that there were even in the 17th, certainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, many unchurched people to whom religious practices and places were alien and whose religious thinking was a mixture of odd piety, good intentions, rationalizations and superstitions does not gain, say, the dominance of religion. It was entrenched, if not always strictly by law than by some of the institutions of society in the customs of the people and by the precepts of the ruling classes, that there were other countervailing forces, economic or political necessity, which frequently overrode God's will or churchman's apprehensions of it, does not contradict that religious motives, religious sanctions and religious professionals were all of them socially a very great influence. In the 20th century, that situation has manifestly changed. So why is life now so secular compared to 140 years ago? So there's never been a time in human history when life has been so secular. One answer is that we're so mobile now. So when you get up and move, you rid yourself of a lot of traditional constraints that would abide with you if you stayed in the place where you grew up. So when people up and move, they start steadily leaking out of the church and out of the synagogue. So people up and move to California to get away from the pools of tradition. And so California and the West Coast generally the most secular parts of the United States. So he has this analysis that the various sects of Christianity meet social needs of the changing class structure. So he says the diversity of Christian Protestant denominations may be seen as the successive stages in the accommodation of life practice and ethos of new social classes as they emerge into national life. So he says there's essentially a pretty good correlation between social class and religion. So Calvinism, it had this narrow notion of who will be saved. And so it was well suited to the merchant class. So the whole ethic of Calvinism was justified and promoted disposition to work in the merchant class in 16th century Europe. But then we got industrialization which required a puritanical religion to speak to the masses of working men not simply to an elect of the merchant class. So Methodism was better suited to the industrial working class than Calvinism because Methodism held that all men had the chance to choose Christ and to choose salvation. So Wilson refers to the secularizing effects of science and of technology but he emphasizes two related changes in modernity increasing social diversity and increasing individual liberty. So in our modern society, men are highly individuated by diverse patterns of social experience by increasing specialization in profession. And people now have increasing choices over the influences to which they expose themselves. Like we all can turn into a hundred different TV channels and infinite number of YouTube channels and blogs and podcasts. So there's no longer that widespread community of feeling that the churches used to minister to. So now we've got all these new channels for man's emotional expression. So it used to be that the primary way to feel emotionally comforted was by turning to the church. But now we've got all these new channels. You can turn to 40 show for emotional comfort. You can watch sports. You can have your most tender emotions titillated by entertainment, by movies and TV and by songs. We've got all these new channels for emotional expression for the realization of our emotional desires. And so these agencies used to be pretty much the monopoly of religion. The rise of democratic politics has had many negative consequences for religion. So social arrangements, the distribution of resources, the distribution of power, distribution of wealth, the distribution of prestige, the distribution of opportunities, general patterns of life can be affected by our actions in politics and by mass democratic political decision-making. And so this has altered our recourse to demands of supernatural intervention in our affairs. So the old religious stand-by is that we should either be content with our lot or we can hope that God will enter the human scene. These are two orientations which diminish in strength as realistic political possibilities are increasingly understood. So religious organizations initially reacted to the more egalitarian image of humanity that came with industrialization offering a whole wide range of leadership and activity positions for the laity. So non-conformist religions in Christianity such as Methodism and self-adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and as well as the Church of England. So most people in England are not religious but if you ask them what religion are you, they'll say, C of E, I'm not religious, I'm C of E, meaning Church of England. So Church of England used to be known as the conservative party at prayer. That was a long time ago, that's like 100 years ago. So you had both Catholic Church but more in Protestantism, that this explosion of roles for the laity. But people started, instead of devoting their spare time to volunteer roles with the church, they start volunteering with the local soccer club or the poetry club or the surf club or whatever club it is. So people have moved through devoting their spare time to religion to devoting their time to political and social and cultural and recreational associations. And the entertainment industry from the very beginning has posed a major challenge to religion. One, entertainment competes with religion for our time, for our attention and for our money. Entertainment offers an alternative set of norms and values. And the entertainment industry has undermined the near monopoly over information that had once been possessed by the church. So Jim Bowden says, Australia's gone mad, Luke, please send the Taliban to liberate us in Sydney, 89 days of living in lockdown hell. I don't know, it seems to me the lockdown was a reasonable response to an unprecedented situation. So as long as you have access to the internet and you have access to good books, as long as you have friends and family, I mean, what's the big deal with four months of lockdown, mate? I mean, you're a smart dude, you can work virtually, you can work from home, you should be having the time of your life in lockdown. So we've also had the massive growth of science, which for most people, science provides explanations about the way the world works in a more satisfactory way. Yeah, lockdowns are the revenge of the introvert. And science also provides confirmation of its explanations in far more practical results than religion according to the average bloke. So science has answers, science has positive and tangible fruits, it's increasingly combining respect and approval. So with the advance of professional specialization with the advance of science, with the advance of entertainment, now that we can get our entertainment in 4K, people aren't going to church as much. And now that we've got the steady application of science to many different occupations, the clergyman now looks like a much more amateur practitioner. So Brian Wilson said that while Europeans became secular by leaving the churches, Americans secularized by reducing the specifically religious content of their churches. So Americans go to church a lot more than Europeans, though that number's probably vastly exaggerated. But the content of what goes on in church in America is much more secular than it used to be. So it appears that the US is, you know, not as secular as European societies, but here's one thing that my father told me that religion in America is a mile wide and an inch deep. So when my father transferred from a Seventh-day Adventist college in Australia to America, he had to cut the amount of homework he gave his students by half. So not many people practice religion in Europe and Australia, but when they do, they take it much more seriously than in America. So this book is so much fun to read. I mean, it's really well-written, religion in secular society. I mean, it begins by saying religious thinking, religious practices, religious institutions were once at the center of Western life, but that's changed. So the change does not occur evenly and not in the same ways. So religious practice has atrophied in Scandinavian countries. It has persisted in traditional forms and even become more extensive in the United States, but it's social and cultural meaning changes. So it used to be, I knew someone went to church in England or Australia. I knew that they were a serious Christian, but in America, going to church does not mean almost anything. There's almost nothing that then follows from going to church in America. So religious institutions show tremendous resilience in America as opposed to Europe, but they've done so by transforming themselves from being religious organizations to being other less religious organizations in advanced society. And it's religious thinking that probably shows the most evidence of conspicuous change between now and say 140 years ago. So people by and large act less and less in response to religious motivations. They assess the world more and more in empirical and rational terms. They find themselves involved in rational organizations and rationally determined roles, which then allow smaller scope for religious predilections that they might privately entertain. So we certainly have non-logical behavior in the West, but the terms of non-rationality has changed. It's no longer the dogmas of the Christian church, which dictate behavior, but it's other irrational and arbitrary assumptions about life society and the laws, which govern our universe. Now there is a religious response to the changing social order. So secularization is advanced far more in Protestant societies than Catholic societies because Protestants have always been more secular than Catholics. The church has always had less influence and less authority over Protestants than it's had over Catholics. So to understand the decline in the importance of religion, you can't just look at statistics about how many people go to church because the whole meaning of going to church can change. Like going to church can become a social thing. It can be a business thing. It can be a networking thing. It can be a way to get laid. I'll have to admit that in my early years in Los Angeles, most of the ways I got laid were by going to synagogue. Now it's true that there are individuals for whom religion plays a powerful role, but that's not true of most people in the West anymore. Blessings. So theological meanings are socially evolved and socially determined. So churches are social institutions and conceptions of God are socially prescribed and protests against those conceptions are also socially developed. So a secular perspective on religion is that it is people trying to interact with supernatural beings. So the world's first secular societies were protestant societies. But outside of Christianity, Japan is an outstanding example where you see similar processes of secularization going on. So secularization means that religious thinking, religious practice and religious institutions lose social significance. And you also can see the decline of the influence of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and in Tibet. So this book is so much fun to read, Religion in Secular Society. Now he's not applauding the growth of secularization and the decline in the importance of religion. So he notes that modern people seem to suffer acutely from a loss of emotional reassurance. People used to get emotional reassurance from being religious. But religion appears no longer capable, generally speaking, of providing this reassurance. So people now increasingly turn for satisfaction of their emotional needs to YouTube live streams, to social media, to entertainment, to music, to therapy, to drugs, to practicing yoga. So clergy most fully represent religion. And clergy have less power and less influence now than they've ever had before in human history. So even in Orthodox Judaism, rabbis have less power and control now in the West than it pretty much any other time in Jewish history. Yeah, some people turn for emotional reassurance to cold water swimming. So our society is increasingly professionalized and we no longer expect to discover amateur saints any more than we expect to discover amateur scientists. So the role of clergy has become more and more circumscribed to a particular professional profession. So the role of clergy has been just increasingly limited to their place in churches. So lawyers control courts, doctors control hospitals and clergy equal the church. But even their tenure in the church is now circumscribed by the growing power of administrators. So that's the new increasingly powerful professional class in all organizations. All right, let's move past that thrilling introduction to part one, the pattern of secularization chapter one. Okay, now you can claim that statistical evidence is not relevant to the matter and churchmen have taken this view for thousands of years ever since the Lord's wrath fell on King David for numbering the children of Israel. So you can't ascertain the clear meaning of religion completely by numerical means. And there are no adequate ways of testing the strength of religious commitment or testing one's religious motivation. But religious responses are in all developed societies predominantly institutionalized responses. Institutions persist. They have specialist personnel such as priests, rabbis, ministers and religious institutions continue to command prestige and to enjoy traditional status and influence but much less than they did 120 years ago, 200 years ago. So many people behave in ways that are religiously informed. Now they carry the mark of moral training acquired through early exposure to religious influences. So there is often a widespread tacit approval of what churches preach without any personal commitment to religious belief and without any attendance at church. So churches are definitely losing direct influence over the ideas and activities of people. So average Sunday church attendance is just say 3% of the population in Norway, about five to 10% in England. And that English percentage is swollen by the increasing proportion of Roman Catholics. And why do we have an increasing proportion of Roman Catholics in England because they reproduce more than the Protestants. So the decline in church attendance is most apparent in the case of the non-conformist churches because it correlates with the decline in real allegiance and self-description. So for those who cease attending the Anglican church, they may well go on thinking of themselves as a CIV Church of England. But this is not true for the non-conformists because non-conformity is a much more distinctive commitment. So the Church of England rests part of its claim to allegiance not on voluntary disposition but on national and ethnic differences. It has a residual claim to loyalty. It is the religious expression of the English. It is the norm to which people nominally conform. Half Galician, you'd love this book, Religion in Secular Society. So self-description to the Church of England saying, I'm CIV is going to rise as even as actual attendance in Anglican churches diminishes because purely nominally self-styled Anglicans, those without any particular religious commitment can claim to belong just as they belong to the country itself. So many people just find themselves as Protestant, but you'll never find them actually inside a church. Look, there's a pagan-like mound of recollers. Yes, welcome to recoller nationalism. So it's pretty obvious that religion exercises less influence over people's lives than it used to. So for example, let's take the matter of moral character. So it used to be, to get a job, you needed some kind of letter of recommendation or people who would attest to your moral character. Employers don't really care about that anymore. They only care that you can do particular tasks for them during the hours that they pay you to do those tasks. They don't generally care about your moral character and they don't need people attesting to your moral character as much now as they used to say in the 19th century. Religious publications are steadily given way to secular publications. So religious books are a tiny proportion of the total volume of books sold. The church until what the late 19th century had dominant control of the means of communication, both from the pulpit, the church door and from church presses. By the middle of the 19th century, this dominance was broken. So today the voice of religion is small. Now the services of the mass media are often open to the primary denominations of religion. But to the extent that religions participate in mass media, they then sharing this media with all these other would-be persuaders, commercial, political, recreational, by sharing this forum, they severely compromise that preeminence of prestige, which information pertaining to the supernatural they enjoyed in the past. So we've got large numbers who claim to listen to religious broadcasts, but maybe their level of attention is not the same as it used to be when they were in church. Half Galatians says, I was at library today began reading the Michael Lewis book on fatherhood. He is a great writer, yes. He's a much safer writer than Tom Wolf, but definitely a great writer. What's wrong with warm water in the shower? Warm water makes you weak. Soft times make for soft people. Hard times make for hard people. Yeah, reading religious texts in Latin used to be the thing prior to the Reformation. Is there any scientific evidence to support that? Like, I don't know. I just, I just, I'm sure you can research their benefits to cold showers and is there harm to extended warm showers? So we've had a steady reduction in religious participation in the 20th century into the 21st century. Now, as people age, well, there's a tiny percentage of people who return to religion, but generally speaking, only about 5% of people are open, 5% of people who are race secular become religious according to this book. Now, there is a high demand for ritual, such as baptism, but it doesn't seem to lead to anything in most cases. So baptism has become something which is every child's right. And if we cannot do it enough for the children, then baptism is a part of the welfare state. So for the lower classes, baptism is done for superstitious reasons because a child who's unbaptised will always be unlucky. This is not exactly a hearty Christian commitment to baptism. It's not a reason the church itself would find laudable and then being confirmed in the Anglican church or in reformed Judaism. There's some generalized superstition that this is a good idea. It doesn't actually lead to anything. So it used to be that Sunday school was an educational and a custodial agent. It had social control. It had power to socialize people. It had a protective and a formative influence. But our whole ethos today is one where personal moral integrity is much less emphasised today than previously. And religious knowledge is less highly regarded now because our society is much more pragmatic than it was say 200 years ago. So the widespread conception is, hey, religious knowledge, it doesn't make you any money, it gets you nowhere. So Sunday is moved from a day where the family goes to church to a day in which families take part in recreation. So families get into the car and don't necessarily drive to church. They just go to the beach or go to the park. So we have this increasing demand for more recreational facilities on Sunday and these commercial facilities compete with church on Sunday school. If you begin by making Sunday into fun day, you end by making it into sin day. That's a saying by the fundamentalists. If you begin by making Sunday into fun day, you end by making it into sin day. So the very connection between church and participant has shifted. So it now represents what the individual wants from church rather than what it once implied the individual's obligations to church. So when Jews go to synagogue, it's on the basis of what they want from synagogue. It's not on the basis of what they owe to God or what they owe to the community. So there is a widespread popular demand for rights of passage, but there's much less demand for moral teaching, for exhortation, for prayer, for worship and even for pastoral help. So the church and the synagogue are something of a small welfare state, but these are voluntary states. They're used when the individual seeks its services. People don't feel much obligation to a church or to a synagogue anymore. I was watching on JBS last night, David Brooks interviewing Rabbi Sacks of 92nd Street Y. What I want at synagogue, a decent cookies, pastries, a kiddish, maybe a bit of single malt. There seems to be an increase in news stories on Hollywood actors and actresses who don't pay. Yes, I'm not a sat too. So I'm sharing with you the sexy bits from Religion in Secular Society. This book came out 50 years ago. People no longer need to have a religious wedding, so civil marriage has been enjoying steady growth over the past 100 years. So all the rituals in an individual's life, marriage is the occasion of the greatest social celebration. There's the binding nature of the commitment itself, the social reorganization, which it signifies as the anxiety which surrounds such a contract. There's the implied development of an association. There's the importance of its consequences in the establishment of a home, the production, socialization of children. So for many people, their wedding day is the most important day in their life. And so there is a widespread demand that such a day should be marked by the most dramatic, the most authentic, and the most elaborate ritual possible. So in modern society, the family has become increasingly an isolated unit. So the detachment from the family, so the detachment from the family of orientation enhances the significance of commitment to the family being founded. So people don't know who they are as clearly and securely as they used to. So that's the downside of all the freedom that we have now. So because people don't know who they are, I think the less secure people are in their identity, the more need they have for dramatic expression of their identity, right? So someone who doesn't know who he is, it's likely to be much more showy and affected. So a civil wedding lacks drama. So the tension, the idealism, the anxiety of the occasion are lost. So the civil ceremony fails entirely to enhance the meaning of what is being undertaken. So for intellectuals and for rationalists, a civil wedding may seem a sensible way of fulfilling the legal requirements of marriage, but it does not satisfy the demand for an elaborate external expression of emotional and public sentiment. So as long as the church can retain some sense of majesty and transcendence, it marks itself off from the mundane, the secular in the everyday, there may well be even increasing demand for the solemnization of weddings. And then there's burial, right? People usually want burial to take place, burial ceremony from a church. The one that needs an extraordinary presence of mind at death, if one is to avoid religious officiation at one's burial. But in general, individuals seek less and less from religion and they feel that religion makes fewer and fewer demands on them. So the church has steadily lost its authority, the synagogue has steadily lost its authority. All right, chapter two of this exciting book, Denominationalism and Secularization. So the way different religious groups have reacted and related to modernity has varied. So in Hinduism, the religious ethic has provided a complete social status system. In Christianity, Christianity was initially the religion of the outsider of the rebel, but Christianity is also infinitely flexible and can accommodate itself to changing political and social structures and times. So in feudal times, Christianity helped set the social mode and Christianity legitimated the reigning social order. And Christianity was on the side of the status quo in Europe as opposed to outsider groups. So in the Middle Ages, the church came closer than at any other time in its history to the functions of Hinduism, which essentially set out the social structure. So Christianity in medieval times was essentially organized, it was hierarchical, but because Christianity always had an ideological history of rebellion, it was always possible for groups which felt disinherited or disaffected to use their Christian faith as a justification for rebellion against the official church and the official ruling order. So there was always the kernel of revolutionary order in Christian texts and it could be invoked for transcendental legitimation of some political, social, and cultural revolution. So most of the insurrections from the ruling church were those of the rural, proletariat, or newly urbanized groups that adequate education leadership or organization. So you had changing economic processes of social development, creating new social classes who were increasingly literate, increasingly economically powerful, and they found new Christian denominations useful for what they wanted to accomplish. So they would create permanent organized religious alternatives to the universal Roman Catholic church, and they would use Christian teachings to reinterpret their social position and to claim sanction and sanctity for it. So initially Christianity was transformed by Mountain Luther and then the Calvinists. Calvinists promoted the mercantile merchant mindset. Then you had the growth of industrialization and the ethic of Puritanism was invoked. And then Methodism became the religion of the urban working class because now Methodism emphasized that all men had the opportunity to choose Christ and salvation. So Methodism suited the new mass society. It facilitated the socialization of a large workforce better than the aristocratic theology of Calvinism, which emphasized that only a few people would be saved. So Methodism gave a doctrine of assurance of salvation and this was a better blunter of psychological weapon for the working class than the subtle and anxiety creating teaching of John Calvin. So Christianity's genius was its infinite flexibility and adaptability to changing social and political situations. So as new social classes emerged, new Christian denominations offered new ways to organize people and to give them emotional reassurance. So the earliest Adventists and millennialist movements arose in expectation of a new dispensation when Christ would return. So these dispensations came about when people were undergoing great social and economic deprivation. And so their hopes for life in this world were shattered. And so then they would focus on the next world where things would get much, much better. Talk to you later.