They asked me not to write about them directly, so I won’t mention their name or offer details that might identify them.

Its members live together in large communities of several dozen families in the same location, make lifelong commitments, share all their resources (nobody has their own money), and submit themselves to the directives of leadership for where they live and what job they do.

Leaders do not volunteer or apply, but are nominated by others and chosen through consensus. “Charisma” is not considered a desirable quality in a leader. In fact, leadership is not a sought-after role at all, as it involves a lot of work and frustration with no measurable benefits.

They do expect compliance with some formal and informal gender roles, but less than most mainstream Christian churches and certainly less than most other high-tension religious groups.

Many things surprised me about the experience.

For one, people that grew up in this tradition (adult converts had more trouble with this) are profoundly non-individualistic. Their goals are communal goals. When I asked about the future, nobody said anything like “I hope to become a writer” or “I want to live in France.” They all responded with some version of “I want what’s best for our community and I trust our leadership to decide what’s needed” or “I’d like for us to be more involved in homeless ministry and I hope they’ll give me a chance to participate in that.”

But what surprised me even more is that they’re attracting (relative to their size) large numbers of South Koreans.

I asked several church members for their take on this phenomenon, including South Koreans themselves as well as non South-Koreans. All gave similar responses. They all agreed that South Korea’s culture is obsessed with status: in order to go about your day, you must constantly measure yourself against everyone else. This measurement includes age, income, job title, number of social media “friends” and many other tangible and intangible metrics. This results in a persistent and often debilitating anxiety about whether you’re “measuring up.”

Years ago, my friend Carl shared his experience of studying economics at the University of Wisconsin with many South Korean students who became his friends. According to those friends, the language itself (how you address another person) requires you to know who holds higher status. When Carl asked how they’d handle a conversation where both participants had exactly the same status, they responded “We wouldn’t talk to each-other. It would be too awkward.”

I’ve written in greater detail about this phenomenon with South Korea in this post, explaining why South Korea is the least hopeful country on Earth.

According to church members, the reason South Koreans join their high-tension church is to escape from this status-centric lifestyle. Because the church’s rule of life completely removes the concept of status from their life experience, a South Korean convert can set down this heavy weight they’ve carried all their lives.

Through the centuries, the Christian Church has demonstrated a remarkable ability to thrive amidst persecution and suffering. But it has also demonstrated a similarly remarkable inability to handle wealth, power, and comfort without becoming decadent, corrupted, and hungry for power and status.

As we read in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, wealth, power, and comfort offer the greatest danger to the spiritual health of a Christian, far worse than suffering. Wealth, power, and status are all measurable objectives, unlike spiritual growth. In The Technological Society—his masterwork of sociology—Jacques Ellul attributes our danger specifically to the temptation to focus our lives on measurable objectives, like status.

While monks and nuns have always followed a different path, we have precious few Christian historical examples for how to resist this effectively as families and communities.

But now we have one.

For now, let us note that South Koreans—the people furthest along the path of obsessing about measurable outcomes—are joining this anti-individualistic, anti-status, high-tension religious tradition in droves.

We are in the coal mine, and they are the canary.

Keep watching.

Things are looking up!

At least they are for the countries shown below, whose rates of hopefulness are improving.

Strikingly, seven of the ten are in Europe, including five in Eastern Europe and both the top #1 and #2. Let’s look at these more closely.

Suicides

As I noted earlier, there’s a “male suicide belt” that stretches from central Europe through Russia to Japan, where male suicides are much higher than the rest of the developed world, and that one factor in this is proximity to Russia.

Is that related to improving hopefulness in Eastern Europe? Let’s see.

We can see here that male suicide rates in all Eastern European countries have (more-or-less) consistently declined over the past 20 years, resulting in a total decline of about 50% for most countries.

Interestingly, female suicide rates have declined at about the same rate and in the same countries. But this has much less affect on our overall result because female suicide rates in Eastern Europe are a small fraction (10-20%) as high as male rates. In most developed countries, male suicide rates are about double female rates.

I’ll have more to say about this later since it’s the primary contributor to increases in Eastern European hopefulness. But first birth rates.

Birth Rates

The following chart shows change in Total Fertility Rate amongst Eastern European nations since 1990 (or whenever they started tracking this)

Except for Bulgaria, all nations which tracked this pre-2000 had declining birthrates. Then between 2000-2003 they were mostly flat, at which point all the nations started increasing.

The obvious first place to look for the cause of this change is the fall of the Berlin Wall, which signified the end of Soviet Imperialism in Europe. One would not expect an immediate increase in birthrates after this kind of event (“they’re gone, make babies!”), but one would expect the subsequent generation who grew up outside the Soviet shadow to have a different perspective than their parents.

Interestingly, Russia shows the most dramatic change, rising from a TFR of 1.3 in 2005 to 1.8 in 2015 and then dropping again, making them net-negative on birthrate change for the past 10 years. I don’t know the reason for this.

In any case, while increases over the past 10 years on birthrates are significant, as a whole they still only average about 12% across Eastern Europe. So much less significant than male suicide reductions.

Why the Male Suicide Drop?

First, as you can see from this image from maps-russia.com, all of the countries in our top-10 fastest-improving Eastern European countries were part of the Eastern Bloc (Soviet-dominated communist countries) for forty years mid-last-century.

Consider any of the accounts you’ve read of people living in actively-communist countries (as opposed to nominally-but-not-really Communist ones like China) where most aspects of daily life are significantly affected by the government. Those governments are inherently suppressive, as a necessity to prevent some people from rising above others economically.

The theme from those accounts that stands out over and over again is the impersonal nature of the government suppression. People are suppressed by “the system” or “the party” rather than any particular individual. In fact, the bureaucratic nature of those kinds of systems require that one individual can be substituted for another at any time, attempting to ensure that the suppression can never become personal.

It’s hard to exaggerate the extend to which male suicide rates—and still are—were elevated in these countries which fell under Russian or Soviet rule. Despite the rapid (50%) decline over the past 20 years, male suicide rates in these countries are still four times higher than the average for other developed nations, and were eight times higher at the turn of the century.

This makes these countries an astounding outlier!

Because the effect of Russian/Soviet suppression was so much more severe on males, I’ll refer to the force at play here as “Impersonal Emasculation.”

The fact that you even know the word “emasculation,” which has no well-known female counterpart (“efemination?”) is likely because males react much more negatively to their perceived lack of ability to affect the outside world, on average, than females do. Without this ability—especially in a country without a widespread warrior culture as a fallback—it’s hard for many males to form a secure identity.

One theory for why this seems to affect females less is that—when other sources of identity are unavailable—most females can fall back on the always-socially-sanctioned identity of a mother, which offers an inherent ability to affect both the outside world and the future.

One interesting counter-claim is that birthrates were very low in Soviet-influenced countries and increased afterwards. If motherhood serves as an important backup identity for females, one would expect increases in birthrates in communist societies. I don’t know why this doesn’t happen. Perhaps the effect I describe below is a factor for females as well, with the effects felt more strongly in birthrates than suicide rates.

Anyone with a different theory on the role of gender in any of this, please share in comments.

Impersonal Emasculation

If the kind of suppression present in the Soviet-Era Eastern Bloc—which caused males suicide rates to skyrocket—is impersonal, it’s worth looking at the effects of “personal suppression,” or constraints put on the male ability to effect the outside world and the future by someone they have a personal relationship with.

Over the past several decades, it’s become basically indisputable that the two easily-measurable factors which correlate most strongly with self-reported human happiness are marriage and religiosity.

Marriage improves happiness for both males and females, but the effect on males is multiple times higher than for females. Anyone who’s married will readily admin to it introduces dozens (hundreds?) of daily constraints—things you can’t do or have to do—which you could avoid if you weren’t married. And this is in the context of a culture in which marriage is, from a historical perspective, unusually constraining.

As we read in The WEIRDEST People in the World by Joe Heinrich, when the Catholic Church outlawed polygamy in the middle ages, it resulted in arguably the greatest reduction in male violence in world history. Why would an increase in male suppression result in a decrease in male violence? We’ll get to that in a second.

Religion improves happiness roughly equally for males and females, with differences depending on whether you’re talking about “religiosity” vs. “religious membership.” Notably, the benefits of religiosity are more-strongly felt for females, while the benefits of religious membership are more-strongly felt for males. This is notable, because the portion of religion that introduces constraints is membership. So why would an increase in males suppression result in an increase in male happiness?

Conspiracy Theories

My answer to these questions also explains why males are so prone to developing and promoting conspiracy theories.

Unless this is the first website you’ve ever visited—outside perhaps Pinterest—I’m assuming that you’ll readily accept the fact that males are overwhelmingly more likely to promote conspiracy theories, at least online, than females are.

The reason I think this is is that males are respond specifically to the impersonal nature of suppression rather than to the suppression itself.

In my family, I men I grew up with gave me ready access to a wide variety of conspiracy theories from Satanism to the Illuminati, or Obama-birtherism to vaccine-based mind control.

The one thing that all of them had in common was the personalizing of an external constraint:

• Satanism: our culture isn’t just sliding into secularism because of impersonal social forces, but because Satan is making it so through specific easily-identifiable products.

• Illuminati: the overly-complex and sometimes-seemingly-arbitrary decisions made by politicians aren’t the result of compromise between diverse groups, but are the result of a secret cabal pulling the strings.

• Obama-Birtherism: the reason I don’t like Obama isn’t because the large-scale shifting of our culture and ethnic mix makes me uncomfortable; it’s because he’s a liar and a cheater who isn’t an American at all.

• Vaccine-Based Mind Control: the reason we have challenging children with ADHD and autism isn’t because of impersonal factors like genetic differences or even the widespread use of poorly-understood toxins, it’s because the deep state cooked up a vaccine to control us.

If males can personalize a source of constraint and suppression, it gives us a sense of understanding about it and an ability to relate to it. We don’t want suppression removed. We just want to have a personal relationship with the one who’s the source of it.

Authoritarianism

The Impersonal Emasculation theory also helps to explain both the rise in megachurches and authoritarian leaders.

With regard to megachurches, Ryan Burge has suggested a similar theory. In a megachurch “We can handle everything at the local level, where we see where the money is going and the leaders are more easily held accountable to the rank and file.” In other words, the “one” constraining your lifestyle is a human you can see and shake hands with rather than an impersonal denomination who is not person-centric but whose leadership rotates periodically. This also explains why megachurches frequently collapse when the founder leaves, and why the sons of founders frequently take the reigns even when they lack the necessary skills: “I know who you are and where you came from.”

To bring this back to Eastern Europe, you may have noted that several of the Eastern European countries—including the top 2—have flirted in recent years with democratic backsliding and authoritarian leaders. One could imagine how a desire to personalize your suppression would make an authoritarian leader appealing to a male who feels that his identity is fading away, and whose only recourse is to try and influence an impersonal democratic system.

Much better to have no influence, but at least to know that your suppression comes from a personal autocratic leader.

This isn’t a very hopeful conclusion if you’re a believer—like me—in democracy. One additional consideration is what I mentioned earlier, that birthrates in Russia are back on the decline, while the rest of Eastern Europe’s are increasing. This may stem from the fact that—in the recent era—Russia has had authoritarian leadership longer than any of the other countries. If so, it may imply that—while males don’t necessarily tire of authoritarian leaders quickly—women get sick of them eventually.

Given the current trends on the world stage, we’ll definitely get a chance to see if that happens in other places and what the implications are.

Conclusion

I see a compelling case that Eastern European increases in hopefulness stem mostly from decreases in male suicide rates. These in turn stem from a transition away from impersonal suppression to personal suppression.

This theory—which I call Impersonal Emasculation—can also help to explain a variety of other mostly-male-driven forces in modern society such as conspiracy theories, the decline in protestant denominations, and the rise in authoritarianism.

It’s like the old agage, “if you’re going to screw me up the ass, at least take me out to dinner first.”

Men really want to be taken out to dinner first.

On Good Friday, Christians “celebrate” the death of hope. Two thousand years ago, a few thousand people had placed their hope in one human being to rescue them from the destructive powers of this world. But those very powers annihilated their hero.

Evil won. Good lost.

It’s true that Jesus had given (what seems to us now obvious) hints about his plans to resurrect, but the disciples clearly failed to understand this like they failed to understand many of his teachings. At best, they had a vague promise that there might be something to hope for.

But was it a metaphor or was it literal?

In my own congregation, we host a service in which we start with a bunch of candles, and over the course of a series of readings we gradually put out all the candles one by one, until only one remains. Then a wild dissonant drum solo signals Jesus’ death and “the curtains of the temple being ripped in two.”

We remember how it felt to lose hope.

How We Feel

In ARF the past couple months, we’ve been reviewing the data about hopefulness around the world, and gradually winding our way toward some conclusions about the causes of declining hopefulness worldwide. The U.S. in particular is declining in hopefulness on a variety of metrics, despite our already being one of the ten least hopeful countries on Earth.

Both surveys leading up to and exit interviews after this past autumn’s Presidential election revealed the U.S. as a country seeking radical change and institutional deconstruction. The most-fired-up groups in the U.S. right now continue to be the anti-institutional, those who seek to tear down existing systems.

Ignoring the wealthy and educated elite (the audience of this blog) for a moment, this collective desire for change and tearing down is the closest thing I’ve seen in my adult life to an American consensus.

This spring I’ll be leading a series for my congregation’s men’s group on the book of Ecclesiastes, a book largely devoted to hopelessness and meaninglessness. In chapter three, we see this familiar passage.

3 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

I’ve bolded the portions which reflect the recent American survey data. This isn’t what I think we should do (or even what the survey respondents necessarily think we should do) but how most Americans feel.

But this isn’t just a feeling. As a country, we’re actually putting this into practice.

What’s Actually Happening

We’re at the very beginning of a new Presidential administration ideally suited—and arguably specifically elected—to tear down. In the first Trump administration we all witnessed a basic incompetence at building things. But now we’re witnessing a virtuoso effort at tearing down.

Let me list here some of the things that we’ve chosen to start (or accelerate) tearing down in the past few months:

• The post-WWII global order of alliances.

• Free trade.

• Economic predictability.

• The widespread illusion that we’re a hopeful destination for immigrants (represented by the Statute of Liberty).

• Stated (event if inconsistently lived) shared national values like honesty, respect, thoughtfulness, mercy, and faithfulness.

• Tech monopolies (see recent anti-trust cases).

• The balance of powers.

• Most Federal agencies.

• Elite universities.

• Many regulations.

• Judicial due process.

This list could go on.

Like me, it’s likely that all of you (perhaps gleefully) support some of these tearings-down and (perhaps despairingly) oppose others. But it’s hard to argue against this being a moment of tearing-down.

Trump might have just squeaked through the election due to his flaws, but the change and anti-institutionalism he resents are very popular.

“We” asked for it, and we’re getting it.

Theological Implications

Jesus taught that his crucifixion was God’s plan. I have no particular theology which can tell me whether this current political moment is some kind of broader plan. The rapid increase in deaths from AIDS and tuberculosis due to USAID cuts in particular seem hard to reconcile with my reading of scripture. But I certainly believe that God frequently uses what humans do—good and evil—in the long run.

I can certainly imagine a moment fifty years from now when we find ourselves having spent our destructive energy, and ready to build up again. As many writers (e.g. Robert Putnam, William Strauss and Neil Howe, Peter Turchin, etc…) suggest, some things run in cycles. This may be one of those things.

But some things also end and don’t come back, which any Native American will tell you. It’s entirely possible that the Barbarian A.I. hordes are soon to descend upon us and destroy or remaking everything, leading not to a return of something earlier but an entirely new era.

We just don’t know.

While the crucifixion might have been a plan, Jesus also taught that those who carried it out were misguided, most to be pitied. In other words, if I followed Jesus in the first century and worked for Rome or held a seat on the Jerusalem Council, I should have tried to stop it.

This implies that people of good will should not participate in the immoral aspects of the current deconstructive moment and should oppose them, even if the long-term outcome of this current period is part of some kind of divine plan.

Which factors are immoral is a theological and ethical question I won’t try and tackle, at least not today.

What Hope Remains

Like those first-century disciples of Jesus whose only hope took the form of esoteric promises they didn’t understand, we live in a world where hope seems to be departing, leaving us with nothing but esoteric and metaphorical promises.

They killed Jesus. We don’t exactly know what comes next.

Revelation describes the destruction of the “city of Babylon” and all its technological, militaristic, and sexual hubris, and its replacement by the resplendent “city of God.”

The “Revelation in one hand and the newspaper in the other” crowd might think that they understand the promises offered there. But the rest of us should have some humility, recognizing that first-century people also thought they understood their prophecies. If we’re as wrong as they were, then we’re in for some surprises.

In any case, as people of faith we have hope. While I haven’t described this current tearing-down moment as an apocalypse—because I don’t think it is—we have hope even in apocalypse.

It’s Good Friday. Jesus is dead. We live in a dystopia. But “unlike those who have no hope” (1 Thes. 4:13)—and whether or not you think this tearing-down period is good (or God’s will) or not—it won’t last forever. God promises that something will come after.

For anyone needing spiritual hope in this moment, I’d suggest reading this article from Comment Magazine.

To briefly summarize it, while a secular dystopia can represent the permanent end of all that is good and Holy, it is not so for us. Our dystopia is temporary.

Happy Good Friday.

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When researching the reasons for hopefulness rates (measured as births per suicide) amongst the 10 least hopeful countries, I noticed a curious trend. More than half of them are in the north-east Europe or north Asia.

Looking more deeply, while some have very low birthrates, they all have exceptionally high suicide rates. If we look at 2019 data, we see that more than half of the countries with suicide rates above 10 per 1000 are in a contiguous belt from eastern Europe through east Asia.

Finding this, I ran across an academic paper which included the chart below.

This is older data, so you’ll notice it doesn’t exactly match my table above, but it does make clear how unusual the north-east portion of the global map is, and why Russia is the second-least-hopeful country on Earth.

Even more strikingly, when that same paper just looked at women the trend mostly disappeared, with that portion of the map showing just-above average.

And then here it is, just showing men. The rates in what I’m calling the “Male Suicide Belt” are so high that they had to adjust the legend to accommodate it.

In the previous post, we discussed the rates for South Korea, the country with the second-highest suicide rates, which are likely driven by a success- and shame-driven culture in which suicide is considered an appropriate response when you fail to live up to the extremely high social standards for measurable success.

But it’s a huge region with a variety of cultures present. So what accounts for the widespread suicide rates across it?

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Women

Looking specifically at male vs. female rates makes me think that Japan and South Korea are different than the rest of the countries in the Male Suicide Belt.

Adding to the table above the ratio of male/female suicides, we see that the high-ratio countries are all in eastern/northern Europe (including Russia).

Including the fact that these countries have higher birthrates than Japan and South Korea, this implies to me that something else is going on here. As discussed in the previous post, South Korea has factors that are distinctive and associated with an honor/shame culture where measurable success is a high social value. Japan shares this culture to a large extent. And in both countries, female suicide is also high.

Note that China (a neighbor to both) is the only country where the female suicide rate is higher than the male rate.

Alcoholism

A potential pathway (though an unlikely original cause) is alcohol addiction. If you’ve ever read travel memoirs or journalistic accounts of Russia or Finland, you’re likely to read about widespread excessive consumption of various addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol (especially homemade liquors), and antifreeze. In this case, the stereotype does appear to fit, as we can see here based on data from the world population review, which shows a nearly 1:1 correlation between suicide rates and alcoholism, with India, Iceland, and Japan (high suicides, low alcoholism) the obvious exceptions.

But as I said, this is likely another symptom of a different malady.

One obvious potential cause is the weather. All the countries which show up dark blue in this chart have significant portions which experience cold winters. One can imagine a reasonable cause being the desire to medicate the depression and boredom. In some places (like my home state of Wisconsin) this can result in excessive deaths from high-speed drunken nighttime snowmobiling (a form of suicide?).

Canada and Iceland make notable exceptions, both with low alcoholism rates.

Within the United States, which I’ll show in a later post, this trend does not hold. The more-southern states do not have lower suicide rates than more-northern states.

We can also see (from the same source) that in the Suicide Belt the rates of male alcoholism (which as we saw earlier drives the suicide rates for this region) far exceed female alcoholism. For example, compare the United States (M/F ratio 3:2) to Hungary (M/F ratio 5:1). This roughly 5:1 ratio between male and female alcoholism fits all the high-male-suicide countries from the Male Suicide Belt.

This gets us closer. But it doesn’t tell us why males from many cold climate countries are so much more prone to alcoholism than women from those same countries, or males from other countries?

Religiosity

We do see a moderate correlation with low religiosity, as we see here in this research from Pew.

But of course there are exceptions here. China (which may not report suicide accurately), Canada, and Australia show low religiosity but also have low alcoholism rates (Australia’s suicide rate is on the high end). The United States has a high religiosity, but also high suicide rates. And many western European countries show very low religiosity but also alcoholism and suicide rates. Uruguay is an interesting case study, with high suicide rates, low alcoholism, and low religiosity.

If you combine lack of religiosity and cold winter temperatures, you end up with a moderately strong correlation for suicide rates (especially among males).

Things It’s Not

One reader (thanks Steven!) mentioned how in the United States suicide rates seem to correlate with elevation above sea level. I’ll share later how that correlation isn’t very strong, but obviously we don’t see it worldwide as Nepal, Switzerland, and Peru have very low (especially male) suicide rates.

It does not appear to stem from gender inequality or income inequality. The countries in question currently also have a variety of forms of government.

Russian Imperialism?

All the countries in the Male Suicide Belt besides South Korea and Japan (discussed as likely following a somewhat different pattern) are touching Russia, which holds the world’s highest suicide rates and has a long history of imperialistic tendencies. In fact, all of these countries on our list were part of the Russian Empire in 1914.

So it’s possible that this is somehow a cause or contributing factor, perhaps by virtue of adopting Russian alcohol consumption practices or being stripped of their religious leanings by Russian communism under the USSR.

Birth Rates

To say just a little bit about birth rates, besides Japan and South Korea the countries in the Male Suicide Belt don’t appear to have birthrates out of line with the normal range for countries in our sample. Russia in particular, despite being the second-least-hopeful country in our sample, has a total fertility rate about 1.5, which is historically low but about average for our sample. It’s place in the hopefulness ranking is entirely driven by its extremely high suicide rates (the highest in the world).

I do find it interesting that in for most of this region male behavior (suicide) seems to drive the low hopefulness scores, while for east and south Asia female-associated behavior (birthrates) seem to drive it.

Conclusion

The strongest conclusion here seems to me that participation in Russian imperialism seems to be a very strong driver of male suicide, distinct from female suicide and birthrates. This is worthy of further research, and I hope to do some more at some point. But this is already a long post.

If you can think of anything you think motivates Russian-area male suicide, please share below in the comments.

Alcoholism is clearly a pathway and/or correlate with male suicide rates in the Male Suicide Belt (besides Japan). Cold winters and lack of religiosity also seem like strong correlates.

Overall, though, the most interesting result here is how ironic the current male-driven admiration for Russia is, since Russia (and the states historically influenced by it) are the place where men experience the most hopelessness.

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This photo below (and my new email banner image) was taken from a Korean grocery near my house.

Birthrates

Few ARF (America’s Religious Future) readers will find it surprising to learn that South Korea boasts the world’s lowest birthrates, despite spending billions of dollars to reverse that trend.

South Korea has been in the 10 lowest-birthrate countries for decades, but up until the year 2000 they hovered around the middle of that pack. Their remarkable decline follows an odd pattern. First, they dropped from about 1.5 to 1.2 in a single year, then stabilized for the next 14. After that, they dropped down to about 0.8 in a 5-year span and then stabilized again (while not shown in my dataset, their fertility rates have been increasing slightly the past three years).

Shown here with the other bottom-10 East Asian countries, they are the only one to show this pattern. Japan is low but relatively stable. Singapore has dropped in an almost-linear fashion.

I don’t have a good explanation for this odd trend. I don’t know enough about South Korean history to know what might have happened in 2000 and 2015. Economic trends don’t seem to explain it. If you have any ideas, please share in comments.

The standard explanations for the low birthrates of Korea are poor work-life balance and poor gender relations.

On the work-life balance front—and similar to Japan an Singapore—South Korea has been periodically in the news for decades now for their success-oriented culture where parents push kids relentlessly to get good grades and adults work long hours. For example, the South Korean government instituted family day, where the ministry of health turned off the lights and encouraged employees to go home and make babies, but famously many employees continued to work in the dark. They also pay cash to families who have more than two children, and run matchmaking services. But nothing seems to work. Living in the most expensive country on Earth to raise a child, it seems that South Koreans (on average) would rather invest in their careers than in future generations.

The problem is particularly acute around Seoul with its high cost of living, where most of the population live and the total fertility rate is 0.55.

With regard to gender relations, this topic came to my awareness when dating a woman who’d spent several years teaching English in Seoul. She described for me how (in her experience) women are expected to live under the “protection” of a man at all times, either their father or husband. When a woman without a protector is abused (physically or sexually) a common response from the police is to chide them for leaving their father’s house without a husband. The Economist ranks South Korea last amongst OCED countries in their Glass Ceiling Index, indicating that women face much discrimination in the workplace. Perhaps the most practical way in which this plays out is that—in a career-success-oriented culture—many women try to avoid taking maternity leave.

These are compelling explanations, but they come with a caveat. Scandinavian countries famously boast some of the best work-life balance and sexual discrimination numbers, but their birthrate numbers are all below replacement and still falling. Still, South Korea’s birthrates are so low that even Scandinavia’s low birthrate is roughly double South Korea’s.

Suicides

Like birthrates, suicides in South Korea show irregular patterns, with major jumps in 2001 and 2008, and then a major decline from 2011-2017. Again comparing to other bottom-10 East Asian countries, we do not see similar patterns.

One possible explanation for the irregularity of both birthrates and suicides is odd reporting patterns where data for past years is reported late. I have no evidence to support this, though.

The most common explanation for South Korea’s high suicide rate (which is also applied to other East Asian countries) is the same as the first argument above for birthrates: work-life balance.

I first learned about this from my mother, who spent almost 20 years teaching English at various universities in China. She describes how it’s common for college students to take their own lives when they do something that would cause them to “lose face” in the eyes of their family, such as getting pregnant or failing at school. This fits with the East Asian movie stereotypes of Japanese Samurai warriors taking their lives for honor.

The summary on Wikipedia for this topic is excellent, and describes how suicides are the leading cause of death for ages 10-39, as well as for older rural South Koreans. Per the summary, the cause for both groups is the same: a desire not to be a burden to their families if they cannot support themselves economically to the expected standard of living. For older South Koreans, workplace age discrimination is a major factor.

World Suicide Rates.

As shown above, South Korea is part of what might be called the world’s “suicide belt” in Northern Asia, stretching from Hungary to Japan.

For my part, I don’t have any good reason to doubt this explanation. I would expect pressure to succeed to correlate with suicide rates at least to some degree.

Alternative Analyses

I did explore several other data sources to try and find correlations with hopefulness. These are as follows:

• Screen Time

• Hours Worked per Worker

• Advertising Spend per GDP

However, after comparing hopefulness with each these metrics I see no meaningful pattern. I suspect that most of the reason is because of inconsistencies in cross-country reporting. That’s the same reason that I abandoned other kinds of hopefulness metrics such as mental health. Inconsistent definitions and reporting are a widespread problem in international reporting, with births and suicides being (mostly) exceptions as simple universally-understood and concepts.

I may someday post more about these analysis, but for now I’ll stop by saying that I couldn’t find anything there.

One other item that I hope to explore further is religiosity. South Korea is notable for Asian countries with its high rate of Christianity (31%), also containing 51% non-religious and 20% Buddhist. I was unable to find any sources breaking up suicide rates by religious identity in South Korea, nor any articles (which would be widely publicized if they existed) that growth in Christianity has helped. Here’s one article which laments the implication that it hasn’t.

Conclusion

Not yet having spent much time exploring the reasons for hopelessness amongst the rest of the bottom-10, my tentative conclusion is that the standard explanation of an emphasis on financial success above all else holds a lot of explanatory power.

Before we firmly conclude anything, let’s explore the rest of our bottom 10.

This is the last post about the top 10 most hopeful (defined as births/suicide) countries in our sample. This post will be about how seven of the top 10 are from Latin America, and how five of those are now declining in hopefulness.

Being a data person, my first inclination when seeing this kind of over-representation from Latin America was skepticism. Perhaps Latin American countries under-report suicides (like Muslim countries are known to do). Or perhaps their infant mortality rates are still too high to show the modern pattern. Let’s explore these possibilities.

Scepticism

First I pulled together a variety of stats about the Latin countries and Non-Latin countries shown above from the top 10, as well as the Latin countries not in the top 10, and color coded them.

First of all, suicides don’t stand out in this visual. The suicide rates of the Latin countries from the top 10 don’t seem much different from the non-Latin countries, though they are mostly lower than the rates for Latin countries outside the top 10. I don’t see evidence that their suicide rates are systematically out of whack, although there could be some effect of under-reporting.

Second, however, infant mortality does stand out. See all the red in the top table. The Latin countries in the top 10 do have higher infant mortality rates than most of the non-Latin countries in the top 10, and higher than Latin countries from outside the top 10.

Looking at suicides in more detail, here are all the non-excluded (see original post for methodology) countries by subregion and suicide rate over time.

Here I don’t see evidence of systematic under-reporting from Latin countries compared to other areas. Western and South-Eastern Asia are well below Central and South America. The shocking story here (to be covered in a later post) is the decline in suicides in Eastern Europe. “Blank” refers in this chart to North America (no sub-region).

Looking at infant mortality and births (see Hans Rosling for why this matters), we see below that Central and South America do appear slightly higher than the rest of the top 10 when it comes to infant mortality, but they’re still in the same order of magnitude and have basically reached the flat part of the curve where countries end up after they’ve achieved sufficient levels of health care and female education.

Looking more directly at Total Fertility Rate, we see that the trendlines of Central and South American countries are on the same basic slope as most of the rest of the top 10, further reinforcing the concept that they’re basically modern countries from a birth rates / infant morality point of view.

Thus ends my skepticism. I do not think that Latin American countries are primarily (there could still be some effect) over-represented in the hopefulness metrics because of data issues or an overly-high infant mortality.

They’re Less WEIRD

For those who’ve read Joe Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World (highly recommended), you may note that Latin America was neither affected by the middle-ages Catholic Church birth policies nor the East-Asian rice farming culture, the birthplaces of WEIRD psychology.

Because Sub-Saharan Africa and most of the Middle East must be excluded for methodological reasons, that leaves Latin America as our least WEIRD group. This means that, psychologically speaking, they are on average less individualistic and more tribal than most of the rest of our countries.

That’s about all I can say psychologically (hope is basically a psychological phenomenon) as a generalization about the entire continent of Latin America. But it fits with the likely causes of the hopefulness of Peru and Israel, discussed in previous posts.

If there’s a phenomenon (which I think there is, and will eventually describe it) that’s causing a decline in hopefulness in more-individualistic places, then you would expect less-individualistic places to be resistant to it. That’s exactly what I think we’re seeing here.

Latin America may be more hopeful because they’re less WEIRD.

So then Why the Decrease?

If Latin America is less individualistic, and so more hopeful, then what does it mean that their hopefulness is mostly declining?

One argument one could make is the psychological adaptation argument, which Jonathan Haidt talked about in The Happiness Hypothesis and many others have discussed elsewhere, which the following chart supports. It’s basically the idea that what goes up (psychologically) must come down, and vice-versa. Europe has the lowest hopefulness and it’s rising, and Latin America has the highest and it’s rapidly falling.

This next chart is similar but with a bit more detail, and shows the same basic pattern except that Eastern Europe takes the low spot and South-Eastern and Western (Israel and Cyprus) Asia show up on top as sub regions.

It sure does seem that there’s some amount of adaptation, with a few exceptions such as North Americans (“blank” in this chart).

There are other explanations that one could make.

Henrich does suggest to a limited extent in WEIRD that Latin America is becoming more individualistic, and one would expect rising social media use to accelerate this. This could partially explain why it’s dropping in hopefulness.

Looking below at individual Latin countries, we see that Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia show the most notable declines in the last decade, while others don’t show obvious patterns. I don’t know of anything which these countries share that the others don’t. If you do I’d love to hear in comments.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the high levels of hopefulness shown by Latin American countries are most likely mostly real. However, with the striking exception of Peru and the lesser exception of Ecuador, their hopefulness is declining at a moderate rate.

One potential explanation is that (for better and worse) Latin America has been less individualistic and more tribal than the rest of the modern world, which (as we have seen other places) seems to correlate somewhat with hopefulness.

Their growing individualism could then be a partial explanation for why they may be becoming less hopeful, particularly if someone can explain why Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil are becoming individualistic faster while Peru and Ecuador become individualistic slower. But psychological adaptation (on the national level) could also be an explanation.

On to our second most hopeful country, Israel. Note that the data presented here was entirely collected before the violence of the past couple of years, though I don’t expect this period to fundamentally change this trend.

Also, please note that this post is not attempting to make any kind of moral judgement about Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians or on any other issue. This is about measured hopefulness, not current politics.

Here you can see the list of the top 10 host hopeful countries defined by the metric of births per suicide, presented first here.

While it’s worlds away from Peru who’s in a class by itself, Israel is notable for having the highest ongoing rate of positive change in hopefulness and the highest fertility rate of any of the top 10.

So why would Israel be so hopeful?

Religion

As discussed in this post by Ryan Burge, Israel is one of the more-religious countries on Earth. While they’re not an entirely-religious country, a larger-than-normal percentage of citizens are devout. Excluding countries with high infant mortality (as any study on birthrates needs to do) it’s one of the most religious. Further, its religious commitments are unbelievably stable. For 4,000 years the Jewish ethnic group has:

1. remained distinctive (not ever completely assimilating),

2. been (mostly) worshipping the same God, and

3. been focused on (or at least interested in) the same piece of land.

I’ll have a lot more to say about high-tension religious groups in future posts. Israel is particularly distinctive in the relatively high percentage of its citizens who participate in high-tension religious communities. The Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox, make up about 10% of Israeli society. They tend to be the most-energetic and most-enthusiastic elements of any religion. They also tend to grow the fastest, both through birth-and-retention as well as through conversion.

The Haredim have large families, which certainly contributes to Israel’s high birthrate. They also hold the distinction of being one of the half-dozen or so major religious traditions who have specific restrictions around the use of technology. What the exact restrictions are and how they’re enforced varies by Synagogue, but if you want a sense for how widespread they are, just do an internet search for “kosher phones.”

I mention technology specifically because the fastest-growing religious groups in the U.S. since the 1990s all have specific strategies around the use of technology, either fully engaging (like non-denominational churches) or strongly resisting (like the Amish or the Haredim).

Tradition

My first exposure to Jewish traditionalism came when performing fieldwork in Queens, NY. I visited a Kosher grocery store, and the owner proudly told me how that little store had been in his family for five generations. At the local Synagogue, I noticed a whole wall of tiny lights, each light representing a deceased member. Each light was lit on that person’s birthday, to remember them. The experience reminded me of my visit to Quebec and their license plates which say “je me souviens” or “I remember.” Loyalty, memory, and tradition were key values for these New York Jewish communities. They remember who they are.

(Spoiler alert) We’ll learn more about the distinctiveness of New York when we explore hopefulness in the US context.

Shared Struggle

On first glance, one might think that wartime or persecution might weaken the strength of communal bonds. While true genocide can actually wipe out an entire population (this has occurred regularly throughout history), almost anything short of that seems to strengthen groups. People in England during the WWII German Blitzkrieg describe the incredible feeling of solidarity with their fellow English. Citizens of Beirut following their brutal war in the 1990s describe a sadness—despite the relief of suffering—at the loss of that sense of deep personal connection engendered by the war.

In religious traditions, two of the fastest growing religious traditions in history—the early Christian church in Rome and LDS (Mormons) in the U.S.—grew in large part because of the sense of communal solidarity caused by persecution.

While in our current decade Israel is frequently and justifiably seen as a persecutor, in the long history few (if any) other groups in world history have been more-reliably subjected to distrust and persecution than Jews (the idea that a persecuted people would know better than to persecute others is, historically, completely naïve). The reliability of this history suggests that this will continue. The memory of past and certainty of future persecutions is certainly a strong source of ongoing communal identity.

Conclusion

Because of the ability of Jewish culture to weather an unbelievable variety of challenges over the millennia—all-the-while resisting certain kinds of change (such as religious assimilation)—there’s good reason for them to think that they’ll continue to exist as a coherent group many decades (and centuries) from now. In a sense, that’s a good definition of hope: “the ability to see and trust in a positive future for your people.”

And like Peruvians, they share an identity that’s much bigger than themselves.

As shown here, several things stand out.

1. Peru is the most hopeful country by a factor of two.

2. The two most hopeful countries are also improving rapidly.

3. Six of the ten most hopeful countries are majority-Latino.

Today I’ll focus on Peru.

To be clear, I’m not an expert on Peru. Because I’m exploring the seldom-measured topic of hopefulness across the entire range of potential causes (including cultural, demographic, spiritual, etc…) , I’m forced to speculate into so many topics it’s simply not practical for me to specialize in them all. The result is that many of my posts will conclude with a suggestion—“maybe this factor is important”—rather than a conclusion.

I can only hope that enough of these explorations will point in similar-enough directions to suggest some experiments for us to do in our own communities.

Demographics

Based on the demographics from Wikipedia, Peru is majority-multiethnic, meaning their hopefulness does not stem from ethnic homogeneity.1

Further, Peru’s multiethnic population is mostly mestizo, a mix of Spanish and Amerindian (mostly Quechua), colonial conquerors and exploited peoples (at times subjected to slavery). In other parts of the world—notably Haiti—this dynamic has led to a strikingly problematic racialized social stratification. But somehow in Peru this never resulted in civil war or widespread conflict.

This ends my knowledge of modern Peruvian demographics and history (I know a bit about the Incas, but don’t see direct relevance). If you have more knowledge, please share that in comments.

So I turn to anecdotal experiences.

Personal Experience

Two good friends have, in recent years, shared with me their experiences of visiting Peru.

First, about ten years ago my friend Elizabeth spent a year in Cuzco studying Spanish. While she talked a lot about the experience, she found the almost-daily parades especially striking. Sometime in the early-afternoon she’d begin to hear far-off drums, followed by singing. As the sounds drew closer she’d begin to see people dancing along the street in colorful clothing, leading one or more people holding poles with a large picture of a Catholic saint.

I grew up in Kenosha, WI a town that held a large parade once a year for the Fourth of July. They still do, but nowadays (especially post-Covid) many towns barely even do that much. Imagine the kind of sustained cultural enthusiasm required to host 100+ parades a year?

Second, another friend Robert spent three weeks hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, staying with local families and led by local guides. When I told him about my finding, he didn’t hesitate but responded definitively: “Their culture is intensely communal. That’s the reason.” According to Robert, the extent to which peoples’ lives overlapped in Peru was profound. He found their pride and identification with “their people”—meaning their region, their ethnic group, and their country—to be deeply felt.

A Narrative Account

In the book A Traveller Toward the Dawn, Milwaukee Jesuit priest John Eagan describes his multi-year assignment to Peru. The experience led him on a political journey to explore ways of opposing the oppressive practices of the local Fincas (basically plantations). But his description of the Quechua people was one of profound gratitude. Despite chronic malnourishment, short life expectancy, and a corrupt government, they were constantly expressing gratitude to God for every aspect of their lives. Their love for each-other was palpable, and the overwhelming enthusiasm they had for him (their sometime-priest) brought him frequently to tears.

He considered trying to remain there indefinitely, until it became apparent that his intestines were not up to the challenge of local parasites.

Peru is not an especially-poor country (their infant mortality is low, which allows their inclusion in this analysis), and living standards have improved since Eagan visited in the 70s. But this kind of intense cultural gratitude lives on.

Conclusion

Of course, I have only scratched the surface and so a conclusion is hardly warranted.

The three pieces of evidence I do have are mostly from the mountainous areas, so may be biased. But they all point to a communal culture of gratitude and celebration—oriented around Catholic religious faith—as a likely contributing factor to Peru’s exceptional hopefulness.

Further, as I first experienced at my cousin Rachel’s wedding, their food culture is second-to-none. Lomo Saltado and Pollo-con-Lomo are my personal favorites.

This post proposes a metric for the measurement of hopefulness that extends across many (but not all) countries: Births per Suicide. It’s an odd metric, combining something morbid and tragic with something pure and cuddly. It feels like watching a nature movie (which no-one will ever make) about disgusting diseases infecting adorable furry animals.

Speaking of furry animals, I chose this metric after going down several other rabbit holes, with depression and anxiety rates as one example. But all of those dead-ended with the same problem: inconsistent definitions and inconsistent reporting.

I’ll describe the methodology below, and ask for your theories around causation. But first the results.

Top 10 and Bottom 10

As you can see here, none of the countries with strong Births per Suicide rates have dramatic Total Fertility Rates. Many are below replacement. This is mostly because I’ve excluded countries with high infant mortality for reasons I’ll discuss under the methodology section. But it’s also because many countries with high fertility also have high suicide rates.

You’ll also note that several of these countries have declining Births per Suicide rates. This indicates that suicides are increasing (from a low baseline) or birth rates are declining (from a high baseline). Greece is notable because both are happening at the same time. Ten years ago it would have nearly topped the list.

I won’t offer any theories just yet, because I want to hear your theories first.

Why are these countries so hopeful?

In this chart, you can see that some countries have exceptionally low birth rates, though not all. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) is an interesting and sad case, with both the world’s lowest Total Fertility Rate, and one of the highest suicide rates, and it’s getting worse. The United States and Hungary have nearly-identical Births per Suicide rates, but Hungary is rapidly improving while the United States (as I explained in my previous post) is declining.

Why are these countries so hopeless?

Top 10 and Bottom 10 Change in Rates

Here you’ll notice a number of Eastern European countries with rapidly-improving Births per Suicide rates. Hungary tops the list, rapidly improving from a very low baseline.

You’ll also notice Japan, Russia, and Austria from the Bottom 10 list shared earlier. None of those listed here were on the Top 10 list above (though Israel almost made it with 19%). Does this suggest that it’s easier to improve from a bad position than from a good one?

In this list we see four Spanish-speaking countries but only one English-speaking one.

Similarly to the pattern we found with improving countries, we see that Greece, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, and Argentina were all on the Top 10 list but are declining quickly. However, we do see one country from the Bottom 10 list repeated here: the United States; though South Korea (-17%) and Singapore (-15%) almost do.

A kind of equilibrium-seeking force called “adaptation” exists within individual humans, resisting our becoming too happy or too sad and always returning to our genetic baseline. Could something like this exist at the national level, causing countries doing well to decline, and countries doing badly to improve?

Why would the U.S. be the only country on both lists?

Methodology

In crafting this metric and these charts, I had to exclude many countries. In the end, there were 41 remaining.

The primary reason for excluding countries is because of high infant mortality. In countries with high infant mortality, parents tend to have many more kids—not out of hopefulness, but so that someone will survive to take care of them in their old age. As maternal/infant health care improve in countries and infant mortality declines, Total Fertility Rates decline to 2-3 children per woman within a single generation. It’s a striking phenomenon, discussed at length by Hans Rosling in this TED Talk. If you’re someone interested in effective altruism, investing in maternal/infant health care is a great choice.

For this reason, I’ve chosen to exclude countries with infant mortality rates above 1.5%, as well as those whose infant mortality rates were above 3% in 2000 (one generation ago).

The second reason for excluding countries was because of well-known issues with suicide reporting. Countries lacking a widespread health care infrastructure tend to under-report suicide rates, which makes sense. Also—for reasons I don’t fully understand, but which have been noted by others—Muslim-majority countries tend to under-report suicide rates. This is frustrating, because many Muslim countries have low infant mortality, and it would be interesting to explore the influence of their religion on factors like this.

In order to exclude countries who under-report suicide, I excluded those who do not provide detailed data to the Penn World Table project. If this seems like a random way to exclude, it sort-of is. But I found it excludes all of the countries whose data I would have been skeptical of, and not many more.

What Do You Think?

So there you have it. What do you think of this metric and the things it reveals? Why are the rates of Births per Suicide what they are, and why are they changing?

If you can speculate on a reason why, do you know of a reliable cross-national source of data which we could test for correlation?

This will be an optimistic blog, I promise. But first the sad context.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (per Jesus you should be living on top of the rock) you already know Americans largely believe that our society is in decline. In surveys, large majorities respond consistently that life will be worse for their children than it was for them.

Pundits make terrible forecasters, but it’s worth noting that across the political spectrum they basically agree that we’re in a tough spot as a nation in the short term with regard to social positivity metrics. Few suggest a realistic rebound in the long-term.

Hypothesis: Americans have lost hope.

While “hope” (like happiness) is not directly and consistently measurable, we can point to several measurable proxies that correspond with hopefulness:

1. Suicide: hopeful people don’t take their own lives.

2. Depression: hopeful people don’t claim to have lost the will to live.

3. Birthrates: hopeful people want to bring children into the world.

4. Organization: hopeful people join community organizations.

Let’s walk through these one by one. Note that where available I’m using other peoples’ compilations of data rather than going back to original sources.

Suicide

We see about a 25% increase in deaths by suicide for both women and men over the past 20 years.

Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2002–2022, NCHS Data Brief No. 509, September 2024

Broken down by age group, we see that nearly all this increase is concentrated amongst the youngest age groups. The two youngest cohorts old had their suicide rates roughly double between 2009-2018.

Suicide Attempts by Age Group, Twenge, Joiner, Rogers, & Martin (2018)

While this chart ends in 2019, the same trend has continued over the past six years.

Suicide rates are up a lot, and they’re up the most amongst the youngest people.

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Depression

As you’d expect, depression increased significantly during the same period, also primarily for younger people.

As we can see here, rates of depression increased about 40% for groups under age 25 between 2005 and 2017. Like the charts for suicide, these increases have continued post-2017.

Major depressive episode in the last 12 months, by age group, 2005-2017, National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

While it is not our focus here, anxiety rates have tripled during the same time period for people under age 25.

Birth Rates

The following chart shows annualized total fertility rate in the U.S. You can see the dramatic end of the baby boom and the arrival of birth control here, along with the stagflation period of the 70s and early 80s.

However, despite the remarkable economic growth since 2007, we’ve seen a 22% drop in birthrates since 2007, or 1.4% fewer births each year.

Births Per 1000 Women in U.S. U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs -Population Division

Organizations

Robert Putnam wrote a popular book on organizational membership called Bowling Alone, which described the declining rates of membership in all kinds of social organizations in the past 50 years, which corresponds directly with both self-reported loneliness and school shootings.

The following two charts show average attendance per person for all forms of social membership organizations (churches, clubs, political parties, etc…) over time, and the percentage of people who’ve been in a leadership role in a social organization in the previous year. Both rates were been cut approximately in half between 1975 and 1995.

In another book called The Upswing, Putnam describes (amongst other things) how these trends continued post-1995 until the present day.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.

Conclusion

All the data described in this post has been described other places, and most readers will be familiar with the rough numbers.

The only real innovation of this post is to group them under the heading of hopelessness. All the compelling proxy variables for hope suggest that we are at a low ebb. While one could pull alternate proxy variables such as stock market participation, voting rates, etc… (and I’d love to hear suggestions in the comments) these four seem to me most-directly connected to hope.

They all tell the same story. Over roughly similar time periods leading up to the present day, our whole society has declined in hopefulness.

In future posts I’ll investigate data which explores the causes of this hopelessness, explain why I think all those causes are downstream of one primary cause, and describe what we can do about it.

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Like most Americans who pay close attention to trends, two years ago I called ours a society in decline. I watched many positive trends peak and start sliding backwards, and these trends continue to this day.

Recently, though, I ran across some data which upset this narrative.

In a nutshell, religious groups with certain specific features—features which allow them to resist the most-destructive trends of mainstream society—have been growing rapidly for many years now. They may seem weird or quaint at first glance, but what they do is working.

Trying to understand this data, I stumbled across the work of two sociologists of history named Jacques Ellul and Rodney Stark. The data fit their frameworks like a key, unlocking a hopeful new way of thinking about the future for me.

It’s time for us to start paying attention to these groups. They have a hope that the rest of us have lost.

The trendline below shows one high-level example.

And in logarithmic form:

I fully expect you to doubt this forecast at first—in fact I hope that you will—and I look forward to some good conversations about it.

Purpose

This blog represents my attempt to do the following:

1. Explore trends likely to influence the future of American religion, assessing their durability using sociology, history, and proven forecasting techniques.

2. Identify the core practices of growing high-tension faith communities.

3. Collaborate with others on experiments in our own congregations to determine which practices more-mainstream religious groups (like mine) can successfully adopt and maintain.

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