There is a paradox in public life: Religion is dominating American politics and culture, but many people struggle to talk about it — especially with those who might disagree with them.
Most Americans don’t discuss religion with others very frequently, a Pew study from 2019 found. Many Americans also say they avoid conversations with people who disagree with their religious views, another Pew study found last year. That number has risen in the last few years, which suggests growing discomfort with the topic.
This is a problem, according to some scholars: Understanding how religion is shaping our country and our culture “requires careful and thoughtful public debate and it requires attention,” Grace Davie, a sociologist of religion, said. “We’ve lost the language. We’re having an ill-mannered, ill-informed conversation.”
This topic is personal to me. I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas. Although I am no longer a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I remain curious about people’s experiences with religion and spirituality. So I spent the past year reporting on the landscape of contemporary belief. I heard from people around the country that they long to talk about their personal experiences with religion and spirituality — but struggle to start the conversation. I decided to speak with someone who is an expert at doing so.
Krista Tippett, the longtime host of the radio show and podcast “On Being,” made a career out of having conversations about belief and meaning. She speaks to people of different faiths, disciplines and politics about life’s hardest questions. Her conversations illuminate corners of the human experience that aren’t often spoken about publicly.
I talked with her recently about what she has learned from her work — and what she can tell us all about how to have conversations about belief now.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
There is such an extraordinary hunger to discuss belief — a “hunger for holiness,” as you said in a conversation with Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest. But sometimes people struggle to put their experiences into words. Why is it so hard?
When I started my show almost 25 years ago, I was confronted by the old maxim: There are things you can’t talk about in public — sex, politics, money and religion. In reality, we talk about sex, politics and money all the time. But the truth is that religion is an excruciatingly intimate thing to talk about.
We are ultimately speaking of a part of the human experience that will defy our words. That is the core difficulty we’re working with. There is such an energy to speak about these topics, and that appears in public life and politics. But we struggle to do justice to the seriousness, heft and gravity of these topics.
Somebody said to Saint Augustine, and I paraphrase: How can we speak about God when God is ineffable? And he replied: We speak that “we might not be altogether silent.” In some ways, that has been a mission statement to me, knowing that this is imperfect.
Many people have told me they want to talk about their experiences with religion and spirituality, but they worry the conversation will be uncomfortable or politically charged. Why is that?
These topics are so hard to speak about, to begin with, but now it is even harder for people to discuss spirituality with complexity and nuance. People have misconceptions about religion: They say it is a violent force in human life. Or it’s stupid. Or it’s just so soft that it’s beside the point. They say people can do it in private, but we don’t have to talk about it in public. I understand these fears; they are reasonable. But it’s too important not to try.
You’ve developed a method for drawing those conversations out of people. It involves exploding the big topic of spirituality into many component parts — longing, curiosity, hope, searching — and speaking about those instead. Tell me about that approach.
When I was just starting this work, I spoke with the director of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a primary place in the world of Christian, Muslim and Jewish dialogue. He works with something he calls “the slant subject.” Emily Dickinson wrote about it. She said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”
This means they would try to ask a question from an angle. Instead of just saying, “Who is God?” They would say, “Who is God in the story of your life?” People would then tell their life stories, but they would braid the fullness of their faith traditions into their answers.
I’ve asked people to tell me about a moment that has shaped their beliefs. In response, people almost always tell me about how they were raised. That’s exactly where you started your show for years. Why?
I really do believe that asking somebody straight on, “Do you have a religious life?” — that’s threatening. I’ve found it helps to frame the question in terms of someone’s childhood. I begin my shows by asking: “Was there a religious or spiritual background to your childhood or your earliest life? How do you define that now?” Even the most atheist philosopher or physicist is completely uninhibited in response. It takes people to places that they are kind of curious to go to.
We both do this, too. We circle back again and again to our upbringings in conversation. I speak about being raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas, you speak about being a frontier Protestant in Oklahoma. Why are origin stories so hard to shake?
It’s so true. Religion is also often a matter of elemental identity. It can even be genetic. It’s in our blood. It’s the people you come from. So you can technically leave a religion or have a very different approach to it than the family you were raised in. But it is part of you. However you struggle with it, that struggle defines you.
For most people, organized religion is how they access and express their spirituality — even if only in childhood. But you rarely talk about religion or even God. Why did you take God out of the conversation?
I’ve had conversations with theologians and with people who were very directly and profoundly articulate about God and religion in a straight on, linear way. I’m thinking of Eugene Peterson, Mary Oliver, Desmond Tutu or even Thich Nhat Hanh, nontheistically.
But I think what you’re talking about is something that evolved. There are people in every discipline who are creatively and with great richness bringing their spiritual lives into conversation with whatever their discipline is in the world. I’ve found scientists have a much more robust and apologetic reverence for mystery than even a lot of religious people do. They often live in awe. Physicists, evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists and social psychologists are asking and answering existential questions. They are illuminating in fascinating ways these things that religious people have always pursued and wondered about.
Poetry is another discipline that does this. Religious traditions have always understood that we must use poetry at times to convey truth that is hard to convey. Often, when we’re talking about this, sometimes the best we can do is point.
Language is so important in how we speak about religion and spirituality. I like “believing” because I think it captures that universal sense of searching — inside and outside religion — for meaning. You chose the word “being” for your show. Tell me why?
My show started as “Speaking of Faith.” But the title didn’t work. All of these words for this aspect of life — religion, faith, spirituality — and they are all really fraught and fragile. And they are loaded for different people in different ways.
Often, when you hear religious people speak in public, it sounds like they have the answers for everybody, not just for themselves. I was interested in the questions that animate the heart of religious traditions. Those are not just questions about God. They are questions about what it means to be human, how we will live, what matters in our life, what matters in a death and who we are to each other. And no other part of the human enterprise pursues those questions specifically, and has pursued them for thousands and thousands of years with text, ritual, prayer and art. That’s why I changed it to “On Being,” which I think captures our ongoing state of questioning.
In preparing for this conversation, I went back and listened to your oldest work. It was so interesting to hear your urgency discussing these topics right after Sept. 11 and feel that same urgency now, nearly a quarter century later. Is there something distinct about this moment?
We live in an extraordinary moment. It is one of seismic change. That can be beautiful and fascinating but also so difficult. We are redefining basic things like marriage, family and gender. That is huge. On top of that, we have an ecological crisis, a political fracture, a racial reckoning. We have broken health care systems and economies. We had a pandemic that threw our nervous systems into distress for three years. We have a lot of energy that masquerades as something else that is really human beings in despair.
This is a human condition crisis. And that is actually what religious traditions are intelligent about. Religion is a place that has spent a long time working with despair. It’s a place that humans across history turned to where they could acknowledge their brokenness. But in less than a beat of cosmic time, we have become the first era to have many, many people growing up without that. Still, I am hearing from many young people that they are interested in these topics.
Pew found that, too. The country’s youngest adults are as likely as the cohort above them to say religion is very important in their lives. Why do you think that is?
Young people are growing up in a world where they expect things to go badly. They look at the future as a very fraught prospect. They know that we are in crisis and that whatever they do with their lives, it’s going to be what is the work of their lifetimes. There’s no quick fixes for anything. In my experience, a lot of them are asking commensurately serious questions — theological questions. They want to talk about lamentation, repentance, confession and redemption.
Those are words that have practices attached. They have gravity. Their answers aren’t found in the political realm or in the world of secularized education or in culture.
Yes, there is an intellectual disdain within academia regarding these theological questions. Tell me why you think it is important to talk publicly about this.
These are serious, rigorous ways of thinking and analyzing. They are possibly existentially relevant to whether we actually flourish as a species in this century, or merely survive. Because all of our great challenges as a species have a huge moral dimension. And people don’t stop having spiritual lives and moral lives in the absence of a belief in God or in the absence of religious affiliation.
If I had 20 or 30 years ahead of me working on this, I’d ask: How do we unlock the richness these traditions have, the intelligence these traditions have? How do we use our capacity for moral imagination in the service of the world?
