Point of View September 23, 2026 – Hour 2 : Death of Religion

[00:00:04] Across America Live, this is Point of View. And now, Kerby Anderson.

[00:00:20] Has the death of religion been greatly exaggerated? That's what we're going to talk about for the next little bit with my guest, Dr. Byron Johnson, co-author of the book, The Death of Religion, with a question mark, Nuns, Others and the Flourishing of Faith. He co-authored this book with Thomas Kidd, again, just published this month. Dr. Byron Johnson serves as Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University and is the founding director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.

[00:00:50] He is the author of more than 200 articles and essays and recognized as a leading authority on the scientific study of religion and has done extensive research on the impact of religious education on maximum security prisoners and the role of faith-based programs on reducing recidivism. And some of that research is in the book as well, which is very interesting as you look at how religious faith impacts one's personal flourishing.

[00:01:17] And so we're going to get into that and many more questions and topics. But Dr. Johnson, thanks so much for joining us on Point of View today. Hey, it's good to be with you. So first of all, just talk about your goals with this book. When you and Thomas Kidd were writing this, why did you feel the need to question this narrative that we have been hearing for a long time, which is that religion is in decline?

[00:01:43] Well, it came about because so many people would reach out to me to say, I just read this fantastic article and it describes how religion is going away, how churches are closing, how people are turning away from God and becoming more secular every day. And I just need to know, is this true? And so I would explain to people, no, it's not true at all. The data do not suggest that.

[00:02:11] And after a number of years, it was time to write a book that basically said, here's what's wrong with the narrative that we're hearing constantly about religion's decline and even prediction of religion's death. So we just thought it's time to respond to it in one book.

[00:02:31] And talk about kind of the different academic backgrounds and perspectives that you bring, because you kind of tackle it from different angles in the book, which is really interesting. Yeah. Well, Thomas Kidd is a world-class historian and I'm a social scientist and I do a lot of empirical analyses. When people hear that I founded something called the Institute for Studies of Religion, they assume that I'm a theologian.

[00:02:59] I'm not a theologian, but I do love to study religion. So I collect data on religion. I do a lot of surveys with the Gallup organization. And so I think the two of us, because we're colleagues, have had so many conversations about this. And Thomas Kidd writes about the role of religion historically in the U.S. So we just thought, you know, let's do a project that brings history to bear on this subject as well as contemporary social science.

[00:03:27] So that's the reason why the two perspectives gel so well. And I do a lot of work in the field of criminology, as at the top of the hour you were saying, that I do a lot of work in prisons. And so we bring diverse backgrounds to this study. And I think that's so interesting. And I do want to talk about some of those historical questions a little bit later, because that's kind of in the middle section of the book.

[00:03:54] But I was really intrigued and excited to see a lot of focus on the global flourishing study. That's something that I actually talked about on the Know Why podcast, which is one of our podcasts here at Point of View a little while ago. And it was very different than the World Happiness Report, which people might be a little more familiar with. So talk about your work with that and specifically, you know, coinciding with religion. What does the global flourishing study tell us?

[00:04:23] Well, the global flourishing study is the largest longitudinal study ever conducted. And by that, I mean we're following the same people over a significant period of time. Not every year, but the same group of people. And these kinds of studies are just very difficult to do. They're labor intensive. They're very costly. So that's why you see precious few of these longitudinal studies.

[00:04:52] And when you do see them on rare occasions, it's typically maybe 100, 200, or 1,000 people that are being followed. But we're following over 200,000 people all around the world in about 40 different languages on all six populated continents. So nothing like this has been done before.

[00:05:13] We wanted to see what are the factors that contribute to human well-being, what we call human flourishing, and what are the factors that lead to languishing? Because there are a lot of people that are not doing well in the world. So that was the question that we set out to answer when we launched the project back in 2021. And what is the difference when you talk about flourishing versus happiness?

[00:05:39] Because if I remember correctly, you look at something like the World Happiness Report. Every year it's like some Nordic country. And then the Global Flourishing Study was way different. So how do you measure that? Sure. Well, the World Happiness Report emphasizes a particular question that asks people to rank, with zero being very unhappy and 10 being very happy, where would they put their lives today? And so this is a great question.

[00:06:08] We use the same question. But we also ask 109 other questions in addition to that question. And when you do, you get a different picture than that presented by the World Happiness Report, where you have Finland as the, quote, unquote, happiest country in the world eight years in a row. In the Global Flourishing Study, we're interested in knowing what's your physical health, what's your mental health. Do you have meaning and purpose in your life?

[00:06:38] What about character and virtue and close relationships? So these are all the domains of what it means to flourish, to live the good life, to what a lot of your listeners would call the abundant life. You have to look at more than just one aspect of your life. You have to look in all of these areas. So how are you doing overall? And when we do that, we find that countries like Israel and Indonesia do really well.

[00:07:08] They come out at the top. And Scandinavian countries like Sweden are in the middle of the path, not at the top. And neither is the U.S. And so there's just so much that we're learning from the Global Flourishing Study about how people flourish and why some of them don't flourish. And then you're always surprised to find that something like GDP, which a lot of economists think,

[00:07:33] that's the measure of how you determine whether or not a society is doing well. We found that GDP is not the predictor of human flourishing for countries because in the U.S., we have a lot of financial material stability, which is also a domain of flourishing. But in Tanzania, for example, where the poverty level is extremely high,

[00:07:56] they do much better than the U.S. in terms of meaning, purpose, character, virtue, close relationships. So that's why I think it's important to be able to compare how these countries do on the different domains of flourishing. Well, we're about to go to a break. But when we come back, now that we have defined flourishing and understand what that is, I do want to talk about how religion intersects with that. And then we can zoom in on the United States because, as our listeners know,

[00:08:24] because I think the majority of our listeners are in the United States, you know, they might resonate when you say, OK, a lot of people in the United States aren't flourishing. But the decline of religion may not be as bad as we have been told either. So we're going to get into some more of that information when we get back after this short break.

[00:09:00] This is Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson. On several occasions, I've talked about the fact that a significant percentage of young men are not in the workforce, and many of them aren't even looking for work. Caroline Downey argues in a recent column that their exit from the workforce really wasn't voluntary. The Wall Street Journal reports that American women now hold 176,000 more payroll jobs than American men. Why is that? First, she points to the DEI policies in many companies.

[00:09:30] Many firms had either an official policy or an unofficial gender and or race requirement. For example, NASDAQ requires companies to publicly disclose whether they have at least two directors who are minorities, including one self-identified as female. No wonder many young men in college are frustrated that banks and other financial institutions have been clamoring to fill spots with females, even though they had less impressive applications. These virtual signals were visible to men still in college or ready to graduate.

[00:10:00] Lifting enrollment caps was another issue. The Washington Post explains that girls are twice as likely as boys to get into Caltech or MIT to make up for the fact that they are half as likely to apply. Today, females make up nearly 60% of all college students nationwide. A third issue is attitude. She laments that colleges are increasingly adopting an ideological tone that treats maleness as problematic. Perhaps that is what is chasing men out of college or even telling them to stay away.

[00:10:30] Unfortunately, not many of them are being traded for the more than a million trade jobs that the country needs. It's time to change our policies and attitudes that keep young men from the workforce. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view. Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net.

[00:11:00] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Back with Dr. Byron Johnson, co-author of the book, The Death of Religion, Nuns, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith. And we just talked about the definition of flourishing and this wonderful study, the Global Flourishing Study, that I think you said is tracking over 200,000 individuals from around the world

[00:11:26] over a long period of time to look at different domains of flourishing. But when you are looking at some of these countries, that might surprise listeners to hear that Tanzania has a higher flourishing score than the United States, for instance. How does religion intersect with flourishing and impact that score? Well, religion is perhaps the one variable in our study that you could argue has a universal effect.

[00:11:57] A lot of these countries, they're so different than the United States, for example. A lot of them are, of course, smaller, rural, and geographically so different and economically so different. But the one common denominator across the world is that religion is important. And religion helps to undergird each of the domains of flourishing.

[00:12:26] And so I think to your listeners, they may not be surprised to hear that. But the secular media has been very surprised to hear that religion is so important for people to have meaning and purpose and close relationships and character and virtue and, in fact, better physical health and mental health. So religion is extremely important.

[00:12:54] And I think the study has turned a spotlight on something that's gone missed by so many people. And, of course, we find that people of faith just generally flourish more than people that report no faith. Well, what about in the United States? And this was really interesting, particularly when you looked at younger Americans. And we know from other studies that Gen Z and even Gen Alpha, what we know so far,

[00:13:22] like there are a lot of problems, loneliness, mental health struggles. So how does religion impact the flourishing of young Americans? It's huge. And as you rightly point out, there is kind of a global crisis with young people in terms of the variables of anxiety and stress and loneliness and depression. It's not just the U.S. trend. That's true around the world.

[00:13:51] But it hasn't always been true. Typically, the young and the old do much better on flourishing measures, with middle-aged people being kind of at the bottom of a U-shaped curve. But now that's changed significantly in the last two decades. But if you just focus on the U.S., it really is quite amazing how important religion is here in the U.S.

[00:14:18] So we follow about 38,000 people just in the United States alone, which is, for survey studies, that's a huge number of people to be tracking. And in every age category, people who are regularly involved in the practice of their religion, they regularly attend religious services,

[00:14:40] they do better on every single domain than people that don't have that kind of an affiliation. And so religion is a very powerful predictor. I think for a lot of your viewers and listeners, that will make perfect sense because they realize that faith gives people meaning and purpose and hope and, you know, protect them from some of these harmful things like despair and loneliness.

[00:15:09] So, like you said, that's not necessarily surprising, especially for somebody who does experience that personally or was raised in a faith community. But we keep hearing that there is a rise in nones, N-O-N-E-S, people who aren't affiliated and that secularism is on the rise.

[00:15:30] And I will admit that a lot of times, like looking around at things in the culture, I'm like, okay, that tracks because just certain things that I'm seeing. And yet you are kind of telling a different story through the data here. So are we seeing a rise in nones or not? We technically are seeing a rise in the nones, but it's a very complicated picture.

[00:15:54] And I think what we hear in the news is very, how can I say, it's treated simplistically, but it's not. So the number of people on a survey who put down I'm not affiliated, that has increased over the years. There's no question. It's increased. But if you ask people who say on a survey, and there's a long list, you know, Presbyterian, Baptist, Assemblies of God, Catholic, Lutheran.

[00:16:24] So you can imagine a list with about 30 different denominations that you could check if you're affiliated with. And then down at the bottom it says none. And a lot of people on a list will just check none. And that's all the survey asks. And so that has increased over time. But in a survey that we did, a few questions after that, we said, do you attend religious services anywhere?

[00:16:52] And for a significant number of them, they put yes. And then if you ask them to give you the name of the congregation, they can give you the name of the congregation and even an address. But a lot of these congregations, as you well know, don't necessarily identify with an affiliation, with a denomination, even if they have one. And so for years, people went to Saddleback, which is a famous church led by Rick Warren.

[00:17:19] But people in the pews at Saddleback didn't necessarily know that it was affiliated with the Baptist denomination. And so there are plenty of churches that, A, don't advertise their denominational ties. And then there are other churches that are non-denominational. And these just tend to be overlooked. And because they're overlooked, they don't get reported in a lot of the official data that we try to capture on congregations.

[00:17:46] So we estimate, based on research that we've done, anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of the congregations are literally being missed. And so there are a lot more people attending church than we probably know. And the ones that are being missed tend to be Pentecostal, charismatic, minority churches, storefronts. These are legitimate houses of worship that oftentimes go unrecognized.

[00:18:15] And yet what you hear is the rise of the nuns, which oftentimes include atheists and agnostics. So the nuns are not just people that report no religion on a survey. They may collapse into that category, people that would identify as an agnostic or an atheist. And so if you do that, that becomes a much larger group.

[00:18:42] And so the narrative that's out there is that the nuns are, you know, growing wildly. And then they're overlooking these other ones that I talked about earlier, the Latino congregations that are growing quickly across the country as well as other congregations. And we call these the others, the rise of the others. But you'll never hear any discussion about the rise of the others.

[00:19:10] All you will hear is about the rise of the nuns. And we think that the others is a huge group of people that don't fit nicely into some kind of a standard category. And we think that's really unfortunate because it's giving an inaccurate picture of what's actually happening. And so we would say that religion is alive and well in the U.S. It's quite stable.

[00:19:33] There are denominations that are shrinking, and some are shrinking rapidly like the mainline denominations. There's no denying that. But to draw the narrative that religion is in decline in the U.S. and around the world is not true, we argue quite the opposite, that the world is more religious today than it's ever been. Wow. That is so fascinating.

[00:19:59] And another thing that we can talk about a little later when we can come back from the break is something that you note. We often see this on survey questions or these polls that are reporting that people are abandoning faith, and actually they're abandoning or leaving the faith that they were raised in or maybe the tradition or denomination.

[00:20:19] But you note that a lot of times they are just switching to a different church or religion and that this is actually a sign of religious vibrance because it means people are taking it seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they're shopping around and so they maybe were raised Presbyterian and then they go to a charismatic church or raised Catholic and then they end up going to, you know, a Pentecostal church or something like that or vice versa.

[00:20:45] And it doesn't mean that they're not believers anymore, that they've just switched their traditions. But we're going to a break. I do want to get into a little bit of the history because it turns out that we are not the first generation of Americans to look around and then worry about the perceived decline of religion in our nation. That this is actually goes back to even before the official founding of our nation in terms of people worried about the decline of religion in America. So I want to get some of that historical perspective as well.

[00:21:14] And then talk about some of the statistics showing the massive impact that religion has not just on the lives of people who are actually professing and believing, but for the good of society as a whole. So we'll talk about that when we get back from this break. In 19th century London, two towering historical figures did battle, not with guns and bombs, but words and ideas.

[00:21:42] London was home to Karl Marx, the father of communism and legendary Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. London was in many ways the center of the world economically, militarily and intellectually. Marx sought to destroy religion, the family and everything the Bible supports. Spurgeon stood against him, warning of socialism's dangers. Spurgeon understood Christianity is not just religious truth.

[00:22:11] It is truth for all of life. Where do you find men with that kind of wisdom to stand against darkness today? Get the light you need on today's most pressing issues delivered to your inbox when you sign up for the Viewpoints commentary at pointofview.net slash signup. Every weekday in less than two minutes, you'll learn how to be a person of light to stand against darkness in our time.

[00:22:37] It's free, so visit pointofview.net slash signup right now. Pointofview.net slash signup. Point of View will continue after this. You are listening to Point of View.

[00:23:04] The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again is Liberty McCartney. Back for a few more minutes with Dr. Byron Johnson, co-author of the book, The Death of Religion, Nuns, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith.

[00:23:24] And again, it's The Death of Religion with the question mark because he was just explaining how actually reports of the decline of religion in America are over-exaggerated. And you said something a minute ago, Dr. Byron or Dr. Johnson, that you actually believe that religion is stronger worldwide than it has been before.

[00:23:46] So, we are talking, we kind of been talking specifically about the U.S. for the last few minutes, but talk a little bit about whether or not religion and Christianity in particular is flourishing around the world. Well, thank you. And, you know, if you look at Africa, just as an example, but it's not the only place. The growth in Christianity has been utterly spectacular.

[00:24:13] And when you look at the global south in general, what you see is that the growth of Christianity has been so significant that the headquarters, if you will, of the Christian faith have moved from the global north to the global south. So, there's just been this unprecedented growth that continues in parts of the global south and other parts of the world, too. But you rarely hear about this.

[00:24:42] And so, these are, you know, huge trends that will have an effect on the world. And it used to be, of course, that missionaries largely came out of the U.S. or let's say came out of England. And how you have missionaries coming out of these other countries that are actually coming back to the United States. And so, and Islam is growing around the world as well, not at the pace of Christianity.

[00:25:11] But, so there is this significant growth. You know, people in the U.S., you could argue that atheism has remained flat, even though there's no denying that secularism affects our culture. You can't watch, read newspapers or watch the news and not see that. But at the same time, that doesn't mean people don't believe in God.

[00:25:38] In fact, we find in our surveys that atheists, a lot of atheists even express, you know, a belief in a supernatural power that they pray to God. And so, you know, you think, well, if you're an atheist, why would you pray? Or why would you, you know, believe in heaven? So, but the percentage of atheists in the U.S. has remained around 4%. So, you know, if the death of religion is accurate,

[00:26:06] why is it that the vast majority of people say they actually do believe in God? And we find that among atheists, when we ask crazy questions like, do you believe in Bigfoot? They're much more likely to say yes that they do or extraterrestrial beings. So, it's the age old saying, if you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything. And the data kind of bear that out. Yeah, interesting.

[00:26:34] But I want to talk about the historical aspect for a minute as well. And when you look at history, and there are a few chapters in the book devoted to this, you see that there's nothing new under the sun, of course, including the nuns, like we were talking about. But there's actually an interesting historical name. I did not know this before. The Nothing Arians. So, can you tell us a little bit about just the historical trend of Americans worrying about the decline of religion?

[00:27:04] Yeah. As you said, you know, as soon as people stepped off the Mayflower, there was this concern that religion might go away, that God might be replaced. So, this has been around long before the Pilgrims came to the U.S. And the reality has always been that religion is important. And then, you know, the Great American Experiment saw the growth of the United States coinciding with the growth of the church.

[00:27:36] And the spread of faith in the U.S. was an unprecedented development. And, you know, when people came to the United States to study the U.S., they saw how important faith was and how it impacted them. But yet you had these people that were what we're now calling the nuns, had this other name that was used 200 years ago or more,

[00:28:02] and they've just been replaced by this more current terminology of the nuns, people thinking that they don't believe in God, they don't believe in anything, and so it's an age-old kind of a debate, not a new debate, as most people think. That is so fascinating, and I think that context is so important. There's so much we don't know, and so I'm thankful for definitely Thomas Kidd's contribution as the historian as well

[00:28:31] in giving us a lot of that perspective. But I want to know, too, kind of back to today, did you see anything regarding young people in America? And I know we talked about the difference that participation in religious faith makes and the flourishing of young adults, but we also, there's been a big debate in the last year or so about are more young people converting to Christianity or going to church or not?

[00:28:58] Does any of your research cover that specifically, or do you have any insight on that for us? Yes. First of all, our study looks at people 18 and over, and so we can't talk about, you know, the very young because the young didn't respond. Now, what we did do in our survey is we asked people, can you think back to the age of 12? And tell us about your life at the age of 12.

[00:29:27] So we asked them questions about their home, their parents, their siblings, and about their faith. And one of the most critical variables that we've found is how active people were in their faith at the age of 12. And it's an incredible predictor of how faithful people are and how they practice their religion as adults. Now, that, too, sounds like, well, that makes sense.

[00:29:57] But it is really powerful. If people were walking away from the faith, why is it that faith is such a good predictor from age 12 to adulthood? And so, again, the data consistently point out the fact that faith plays. And one of the things that we were going to talk about is how does that play out in everyday life? Well, what it means is that people of faith tend to be more generous.

[00:30:26] They tend to have more gratitude. They tend to be able to forgive easier than other people. They volunteer their time significantly more than other people. And on and on it goes. So the role that faith plays across the spectrum is really quite remarkable. If you were going to, and I know it's probably impossible to do this exactly,

[00:30:53] but I know that you try to estimate it in your research, the impact of services that help others affiliated with religion or not, that faith-based organizations provide in the United States, can you quantify that or get close to it and help us understand that impact? It's really hard because if you look, just let's talk about philanthropy and charity.

[00:31:20] How much money do people give to charitable causes in the U.S.? Believe it or not, it's over a billion dollars a day that people give to charity. Well, who's giving all that money? Well, pound for pound, people of faith are giving much more than other people to charity. This is just one example. But if you look at who responds to disaster relief,

[00:31:48] who responds to the homelessness crisis, who responds to addictions, these are faith-based organizations that are out there every day, not relying on the government, but relying on private gifts from charitable people to support these ministries,

[00:32:12] it is astronomical the amount of economic advantage that's realized in this country because of the work of groups that ask for nothing in return. You see these commercials sometimes like Mercy Ships and other ministries like this, the Salvation Army, World Vision, Compassion International, and the list goes on and on.

[00:32:39] These are ministries doing great work here in the U.S. and around the world that often go unrecognized. So Thomas Kidd and I point out in the book, for all the people that really would like to see religion go away, do they even understand what that would mean for the country, what it would mean for the world? It would be devastating. Wow. Well, we've been talking with Dr. Byron Johnson, co-author of the book The Death of Religion,

[00:33:07] and as he has explained, there's actually more encouragement than what we see in the mainstream media reports. So, Dr. Johnson, thank you so much for being with us on Point of View today, and if you want to get a copy of this book and look at the research yourself, and I recommend that you do so, it's fascinating and encouraging. Again, you can look up The Death of Religion with a question mark or go to pointofview.net, click on the show notes for today, learn more, and then you can click on his picture right there

[00:33:36] and get a copy of the book for yourself. When we come back, a little more news of the day. We'll be right back here on Point of View. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Well, I just think that this has been such an encouraging show today,

[00:34:06] and thank you for listening. I did want to announce again, in case you missed the very first segment of the show, that if you were listening to Truth Team week last week or Kirby over the last couple of days, talk about some remaining match dollars. We have met the match, and so thank you for funding Point of View. It is listener-funded, and to all who donated and supported and contributed and prayed for Point of View, we appreciate you so much. It has been an encouraging show. As I said earlier,

[00:34:34] we talked about symbolic recognition of Christianity's impact throughout history in France and Europe at large. We talked about the power of the gospel in war-torn regions of Europe, including places where Christians are under intense persecution, with Eric Mock of SGA. That was a really inspiring and encouraging interview. And then just talked with Dr. Byron Johnson about how religion is actually not in decline in the United States or in the world

[00:35:04] according to how it is often reported. And so much of the data actually overlooks important details, including who is actually identifying as quote-unquote none, meaning no affiliation. Many of them, when they asked a few more questions, they found actually were attending regular church services, but they just didn't necessarily affiliate with any of the options given on the survey. So little things like that really do change our understanding

[00:35:33] of the state of religion in the United States. But one of the things that has just been in my mind since he said it earlier in the show was Eric Mock. Again, he's the VP of ministry with the Slavic Gospel Association saying that many of the pastors that they work with in those regions that are torn by war or where Christians are being persecuted, places like Russia and Ukraine and even Israel and other areas, that they pray for us in America,

[00:36:02] that they believe it is harder to live out your faith in the United States because we are often lulled into comfort and complacency. And I think one of the things that lulls us into that complacency and sense of comfort are the many devices that we talk about so often and the technology and just see the access that we have to so many advanced tools, but they can be really harmful. So I did want to spend just a couple minutes

[00:36:31] at the end of the show today talking about a few of these particular risks, especially for young people. I talked about marriage a little bit earlier. You can find the link to the Marriage Map, which is a cool resource at pointofview.net that I talked about today, but different ways that modern technology is impacting young men and young women. And so if you are a parent or grandparent or youth group leader, you really need to be aware of this. And so there are a couple articles you can read that we've posted for you. One is from Institute for Family Studies.

[00:37:00] It's written by Emily Harrison, who I have interviewed a couple of times. So I trust her take on this, but she talks about boys at risk, online gaming, sports betting, and addiction. We've talked about sports betting. We haven't talked about gaming as much and video games on their own. People may not think that there's a whole lot of harm there. In fact, I've seen some people actually argue with the fact that when you are looking at young male addictions, video games get lumped in. But here's what a lot of people

[00:37:30] don't know. If you're thinking about the video games of, you know, the 90s, it's different today because there's a lot of gambling elements being put into games that target minors. And so when you are looking at the number of hours that many young men and even adolescent boys are spending on these platforms, parents might not be aware of how harmful it is. And so last week, Pena had a great commentary on, you know, how different, you know,

[00:38:00] movements and feminism have negatively impacted males, how the cultural conversations about masculinity being toxic have negatively impacted males. But there's no particular, like no one cause that has contributed to the problems that we're seeing with a lot of young men today. But one that tends to be overlooked, according to Harrison here, is the proliferation of addicted, addictive screen media. And again, what a lot of parents don't know is that you have

[00:38:29] to get started early because many of these video games, phone games, things like Roblox, if you're a parent of young kids, you know immediately what I'm talking about. They are intertwined with gambling-like behaviors that develop those habits on forming, on brains that are still being formed. And again, these are things like they might not always actually be gambling with money, but a lot of times they are, or they are training to gamble with the currency of the game that sometimes bleeds over into actual money,

[00:38:59] but the habit is being formed. And what a lot of people may not know is that gambling is the most associated with suicide and anxiety and depression and substance use in terms of addictions. And many of these online platforms are also more and more often they're integrated with sports betting platforms. So this is a problem that is new and yet we are already in the middle of it. And oftentimes it takes like 17 years to collect that kind

[00:39:29] of longitudinal data that we were talking about a minute ago with Dr. Johnson in terms of, you know, understanding a problem and how it has impacted a generation. But if you talk about 17 years, that's an entire childhood. That's a young man raised and then graduated out into the world with potentially, you know, addictive behaviors that have been formed because of devices or platforms that were handed to him. And so a lot of parents are, I mean, if you talk about the tech exit, which we've talked about on Point of View before,

[00:39:58] I interviewed Claire Morrell who wrote the book of the same title. That includes limited screen time, no smartphones for kids, you know, up until a certain age, limited TV and no video games because, so it's not just a simple, you know, kind of playing Mario Kart or what you might imagine from your childhood if you played video games. The online gaming platforms and even a lot of the phone platforms that are targeted towards minors are actually including

[00:40:28] more and more kind of gambling habits and they are more and more linked. In fact, even the gaming-centric website Game Watcher is starting to call into question the quote, thin line between gaming and gambling for minors. So, something to be aware of if, like me, you have boys or you know you're a grandparent or you're working with students or working with other parents, this is something that you need to really be aware of because it can form harmful habits, harmful neural pathways

[00:40:57] in kids and we have to protect them against that. You can read more details about that at pointofview.net. Another one, and we don't have a lot of time so maybe I'll come back to it another day but it did just want to mention it. You know, we've talked a lot about big tech companies and AI companies and how the risk of AI and whether or not the government should get involved in regulating it but a lot of that is kind of out of our control. What is in our control is whether or not we choose to engage with these kinds of products, these artificial

[00:41:26] intelligence platforms and also be aware of whether or not kids are using it either. We have to ask the question and train our kids to ask the question how is this forming us? This is an article from the Gospel Coalition where a pastor's wife who leads a youth group for girls ages 13 to 15 realized that the majority of them said that they can't even text their friend without asking AI what to say first. And so many of these girls are afraid of in-person relationships

[00:41:54] and so they are literally asking AI for advice. They are looking up to their chatbot as their coach, their mentor, their older sister. And it's time for adults to step up and say and model this is what it means to have a human relationship. That's what we were created for. And so this is something that maybe if you're a youth pastor or a pastor, have you thought to ask this question of your youth? Are you using

[00:42:24] ChatGPT or Grok or any of these other AI chatbot platforms? And how is it impacting or interfering with your relationships? I encourage you to read that article. We'll try to come back and discuss it more another day, but we're almost out of time here on Point of View. Time flies when you're having fun and it has been a great show. If you missed any part of it, you can of course go to Noah or you can go to pointofview.net, excuse me, or get the Point of View radio talk show podcast afterward. But thank you so much, Megan, for producing the show. Thank you, Derek, for producing the show as well.

[00:42:54] And thank you for listening to the show. Kirby will be back with you tomorrow right here on Point of View. And we've got a great second half of the week ahead. So stay with us right here on Point of View tomorrow. The Bible tells us not to worry. And yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today. Thankfully, the Bible doesn't stop

[00:43:24] at telling us not to worry. God gives us a next step. He says we need to pray. But sometimes even knowing what to pray can be difficult. And that is why Point of View has relaunched our Pray for America movement, a series of weekly emails to guide you in prayer for our nation. Each week, you'll receive a brief update about a current issue affecting Americans, along with a written prayer

[00:43:53] that you can easily share with others. We'll also include a short free resource for you in each email so you can learn more about the issue at hand. Will you commit to Pray for America? Go to pointofview.net Click on the Pray for America banner at the top of the page to subscribe. Again, that's pointofview.net Click on the Pray for America banner.

[00:44:23] Let's pray together for God to make a difference in America. Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.