Shermer Says: Why Secularists Are Turning to Religion, The Substitution Hypothesis, Sleep Paralysis

Hello everyone, it's Michael Sirmer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. This one, uh, a solo commentary. This is Shermer says, number two. This one's on, um, I guess what I'm calling it is Are We in the Fifth Great Awakening?

Um, I first started thinking about this when the number of books piling up on my desk here at the office uh about this subject of religion and relig religiosity making a comeback just as we were processing books from last year about the decline of religion and the rise of the nuns. Here, I'll just give you I'll go through these individually, but just let me g give you the uh visceral impression here of, you know, this this is the pile of books that's come in just in the last um well this year I guess 2025 the last few months um and here's a bunch of the books that have come in uh just before that about the decline of religiosity just just to kind of give you an impressionistic view here I'll go through some of these in a minute um but I was just thinking about this in the context of the of uh the history of religiosity and Christianity in America roughly broken down into four great awakenings as they're called Historians track them as the first one in the 1730s and 40s, so let's just say mid-eighteenth century. These are figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, where preachers stopped reading their dense sermons and congregations became more evangelical, more actively involved in the church.

And this form of evangelical Christianity also spread through the uh African American slave communities in in America. The second Great Awakening was roughly 1790s to 1840, affiliated with Charles Finney and the rise of camp meetings and hellfire and damnation preaching. And uh this involved, appropriately enough, uh the abolition of slave of the slave trade. and of slavery movement, uh, the temperance movement to get Americans to quit drinking so much, and women's rights movements. The third Great Awakening is roughly mid nineteenth century into the early twentieth century.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (43 minutes, 7,469 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.