As soon as Lyman Stone’s report was published earlier this year, several friends sent me the link. They know what we like to discuss on Gospelbound!

Stone is an expert on both the decline of American religiosity and also the spread of COVID-19. And even before the coronavirus pandemic, American religiosity had been in steady decline. When American religiosity peaked in 1960, one in two American adults attended some religious service in a given week. Now it’s a little more than one in three. Membership in religious bodies has declined from more than 75 percent to 62 percent. And the number that gets all the attention is the “nones,” the Americans who claim no religion. That’s now 25 percent, compared to just 5 percent in 1960.

Stone is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a former international economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. All that and he’s also served as a Lutheran missionary in Hong Kong. In the interview we debated whether or not the First Great Awakening actually happened, the relationship between religiosity and political power, the practice of parents whose children endure in faith, and the two trends above all correlated with declining religiosity in America. Before you listen I’d love to hear your guesses, and after you listen I’m interested to know whether you agree.