E8: E8: Comedian Andrew Heaton says church is dead, America found new gods

What does a post-God country look like? Look around, Q-Anon and Critical Race Theory didn’t come from nowhere.

This week on “Right Now with Stephen Kent,” Stephen is joined by guest political comedian Andrew Heaton and co-host Shoshana Weissmann to discuss the decline in participation in religion over the generations, how politics are reshaping the religion definition, why we look at Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden with such reverence, and why the Conservative, Democrat, and Libertarian parties are serving as new spiritual homes for the formerly faithful.

---- Content of This Episode ----

00:00​​ Episode Start
00:07 Losing our religion, finding another outlet
02:39 Meet Andrew Heaton, funny person who likes to think
03:56 Shifting religious impulses
09:14 Rejecting dogma in religion but not politics
13:20 Faith in Q-Anon
16:35 The last straw for Stephen & Andrew
19:52 Political worship
22:38 We separated church & state – or did we?
24:00 The rise of determinism
29:45 Losing faith in institutions
34:07 Resurgence of civil society

---- Reading List ----

U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time (Gallup)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx

America Without God (The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america-politics-religion/618072/

America Is Losing Its Religion (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/americans-less-religious-gallup-poll-3a7fa738-a431-45a9-8185-44267c49d19d.html

The Political Orphanage: Politics As the New Religion with Caleb O. Brown
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/politics-as-the-new-religion-with-caleb-o-brown

The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will
https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/george-f-will/the-conservative-sensibility/9780316480932/

How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything? by Yuval Levin (The New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/opinion/sunday/institutions-trust.html

---- Plugs for our Guest ----

Follow Andrew Heaton on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MightyHeaton