This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is your relationship with organized religion? How has it affected your life, and has its impact changed over time? I’m eager to hear anything about the varieties of your religious experiences.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

A Secular Lament About the Decline of Organized Religion

Brink Lindsey has never subscribed to an organized religion, but he shares with their adherents a sense that the decline in their ranks has been bad for the United States. At The Permanent Problem, he cautions those who regard that decline as a turn toward a more rational world:

Let’s be clear that the ebbing of traditional religious faith has far outpaced the advance of reason and scientific thinking. Yes, the number of people who have internalized the scientific worldview has grown steadily, especially with the surge in post-secondary education in the second half of the 20th century. And that worldview sits uneasily with a belief in the supernatural: as long ago as 1914, a survey of prominent American scientists found that 70 percent of them doubted the existence of God.  

But this kind of intellectual disenchantment remains a minority phenomenon. Most people who have fallen away from organized religious life remain exuberantly credulous: as G. K. Chesterton put it, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” More than four in ten Americans believe that ghosts and demons exist and that psychics are real; a third believe in reincarnation; nearly 30 percent believe in astrology. In Europe, the churches may be empty, but comfortable majorities continue to profess faith in God or some higher power.

So the sunny view of organized religion’s retreat as humanity’s intellectual advance really can’t be sustained. We are not seeing the decline of supernaturalism so much as its privatization or atomization. Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one’s personal search for meaning. What the sociologist Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy” has shattered and fallen to earth; we pick up shards here or there, on our own or in small groups, and whatever we manage to build with them is necessarily more fleeting and less inclusive than what we experienced before.

The Danger of a Bipolarized World

After President Joe Biden visited Ukraine this week and reassured its leaders of America’s support, Noah Millman surveyed recent geopolitical developments in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and more broadly. In Gideon’s Substack, Millman voices his fear of “unpredictable escalatory spirals” in a world where democracies are at odds with all major autocracies:

Iran has emerged as a major supplier of drones to Russia, which has not only significantly bolstered Russia’s war effort but no doubt enhanced the reputation of Iran’s own military capacity ... Now, in a much more significant development, China appears to be heading in the direction of supplying Russia with military assistance, including lethal assistance. China’s productive capacity is unparalleled; if China does indeed step up to make sure Russia never runs out of ammunition, it’s hard to see how Russia could outright lose a war of attrition with Ukraine. The burden would fall on Kyiv to change the dynamic on the battlefield, which is a much taller order than letting the Russian army destroy itself.

That’s not the most worrisome thing to me about this development, though. What worries me most, rather, is the degree to which it implies a firming up of the lines of alliance. The United States is already wielding Iranian military support for Russia as a justification for keeping nuclear negotiations with that country on ice, even as the country edges closer to the nuclear threshold. The prospect of some kind of military conflict with Israel has surely increased. Meanwhile, if China does wind up supplying Russia with weapons, it would be a remarkable development not so much because of what it would do to U.S.-China relations—those continue on their downward spiral, which is precisely what one would expect after the United States all but declared war on China’s semiconductor industry—but because of what it might do to Sino-European relations.

I can’t think of anything better-calibrated to help the United States win Europe to its side in its confrontation with China than direct Chinese assistance for Russia’s war in Ukraine. If that hasn’t been an important consideration for the Chinese, it’s an indication of just how far down the road to globally polarized conflict we may already have gone. I worry about that development for many reasons. For one thing, it means that any regional or local conflict could potentially be polarized … But my biggest concern is that a bipolar system is fundamentally unstable, prone to unpredictable escalatory spirals.

On Jimmy Carter

James Fallows, who worked for Carter, argues in The Atlantic that the former president’s defining feature was his consistency:

… old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another. Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

Roald Dahl’s Sensitivity Readers

Commenting on intrusive edits made to new editions of books by the beloved children’s author, Helen Lewis argues in The Atlantic that the urge to profit is an important driver of the controversy:

A more honest stance would be that it’s time to take Roald Dahl’s work, put it on a Viking longboat, and sail it flaming into the sunset. Plenty of people are writing new children’s books; whatever we lose by discarding Dahl can be gained elsewhere. A form of Darwinism is rampant in the literary canon. Most authors who were best sellers in their day are now forgotten. Who reads Samuel Richardson’s Pamela now, except first-year literature students? Where are the Netflix adaptations of Hannah More’s pious-conduct books or the gratuitously blood-soaked plays of John Webster? The three best-selling books of 1922—the year when Ulysses was published—were If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson, The Sheik by Edith M. Hull, and Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington. Like most literature, those titles couldn’t escape the age in which they were written.

But Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more.

Provocation of the Week

Drawing on the free-speech rankings of colleges published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, David Zweig writes:

The colleges with the most stifling atmospheres for speech also have the most aggressive Covid vaccine policies. The colleges that most welcome and protect a free exchange of ideas, in turn, have the least intrusive vaccine requirements.

Number 1 ranked Chicago has no vaccine mandate at all. The university merely “strongly recommends” Covid vaccination. Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 on the list—Kansas State, Purdue, Mississippi State, and Oklahoma State—do not require any Covid vaccination either. They do each highly encourage vaccination, though.

At the bottom, Columbia not only requires the primary series for its students, but also requires the most recent bivalent booster. Ditto for second-to-last place Penn. For the many students who received an initial booster early on, this means a requirement of four doses. Rounding out the worst five colleges for free speech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgetown, and Skidmore also mandate all students be boosted. Though compared to Columbia and Penn they are relatively lax, only requiring “a booster,” meaning the third shot could have been from a long while ago, and not necessarily the bivalent.

… That there is an association between respect toward free speech and respect toward bodily autonomy—or a lack thereof for each—at academic institutions shouldn’t surprise anyone. Both reflect attitudes either in agreement with or against a libertarian ideal of individual freedom. But the degree of correlation is still disheartening.

There is no evidence that requiring boosters (or even the primary series) at many colleges made an iota of difference regarding the transmission of Covid on campus or, more importantly, the incidence of severe disease relative to colleges that simply encourage vaccination. (It is not a secret that the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission, a phenomenon that most people have experienced firsthand.) But the administrators at Columbia and the like, by being the most militant with their vaccine requirements, get to signal their progressive bona fides, which, it seems, is what their institutions care about most.

An authoritarian is (per academic literature in political psychology) a person who so values oneness and sameness that they would rather impose it coercively on others than tolerate diversity and difference. Once you grasp that, it’s no surprise that institutions and people who coerce in one domain tend to also do so in seemingly unrelated domains.

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That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Here’s a theory: Forget sex, forget nudity, forget the soft-focus jazzy humping of Red Shoe Diaries and the silhouetted saliva strings from Top Gun. The history of film and television suggests that, sometimes, the sexiest thing two people can do on-screen is simply look at each other—look, for a prolonged period of time, until the air around them seems to spark; desire and be desired, in the same breath. Never mind the fact that we are watching too, projecting all of our own intentions and experiences into the charged negative space between the characters.

When we talk about the “chemistry” shared by two actors on-screen, we usually mean their ability to look at each other and make us believe in what they’re seeing. But in the recent Netflix movie You People, what’s striking is how little the two stars seem to see each other at all. Early in the film, Ezra (played by Jonah Hill) and Amira (Lauren London) have a microaggression-tinged meet-cute when he jumps into the back of her Mini under the assumption that she’s his Uber driver. He charms her, for no discernible reason other than that it’s in the script—it’s not quite right to say that, throughout, Hill gives off the vibe of a man with a gun to his head, but it’s also not right to say that he doesn’t. Ezra and Amira go on a lunch date and a series of outings where they look at anything except each other—sneakers, an art exhibition, something funny on someone’s phone. Viewers infer that the two are going to have sex via a shot of his besocked feet touching hers; the next morning, Amira tells Ezra that they’re exclusively dating while flossing her teeth, potentially the single least sexy thing one person can do in the presence of another.

The two characters have almost negative chemistry, which made plausible the recent assertion by an actor in the film that the pair’s one kiss, right at the end of the movie, was computer generated in postproduction, supposedly because of COVID protocols. This might seem logical—we’re already living in a moment of deepfake porn, so why not deepfake make-out scenes, if all parties concerned give their consent? In fact, why not eliminate filmed love scenes altogether? The actor Penn Badgley, who stars in the Netflix series You, recently gave an interview to Variety in which he said that the fourth season of the show contains fewer sex scenes at his request, because they’d long made him uncomfortable. Actors typically dislike intimate scenes; directors have historically used them to abuse their power. If they went away, what would we actually lose?

Maybe everything. The thrilling intimacy of the reciprocated gaze used to be everywhere in film and television. It’s Cecilia and Robbie, in Atonement, getting caught in each other’s stare after she climbs, soaking wet, out of a fountain. It’s Monica finally meeting Quincy’s eyes and not being able to look away as he reaches for the strap of her dress in Love & Basketball. That interaction, by the way, is almost identical to one of the greatest televised sex scenes of all time: the moment when Connell and Marianne negotiate, in Normal People, how to make love for the first time, each looking at the other with the kind of curious erotic intensity that isn’t negated by laughter or even awkwardness. Virtually the entirety of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an experiment with the charged act of surveying, posing, and being seen. Even sitcoms can get it right—think Nick, staring at Jess with a distinctly uncomic desire after he unexpectedly kisses her for the first time on New Girl.

[Read: The irresistible intimacy of ]Normal People

Without filmed explorations of romantic love and erotic desire, modern sex becomes largely defined by porn, which is as alien to real human experience as the Mission: Impossible—Fallout London-rooftop scene is to my daily commute. Porn pretends that sex is just simple mechanics: choreographed displays of body parts arranged in rote order, joyless and algorithmic. Its influence has bled into virtually every aspect of human life, including television, which has spent more time recently with loudly sex-positive docuseries than with imaginative portraits of reciprocal desire. Sex on TV too often feels fake, abstract, or corrupted: giant prosthetic penises on The White Lotus and Pam & Tommy; a pornucopia of pleasureless, disassociated sexual experiences on Euphoria; the grasping sexual dysfunction of Succession and Industry. Love Life, one of the few shows retrograde enough to parse romantic relationships between adults, has been canceled; another, Modern Love, is currently in limbo. Only Heartstopper and Never Have I Ever, explorations of love and identity among teenagers coming of age, are left to do the serious grown-up work of figuring out what people can mean to each other.

The lovelessness of contemporary pop culture is particularly strange when you consider what’s happening on TikTok: endless, thirsty celebration of romance in all forms, but particularly in fiction. BookTok has helped elevate Colleen Hoover, an author of unabashedly explicit and sincere stories about love and relationships, to the top of the best-seller list. Gen Z, Hoover’s publicist told NPR, is “a huge audience for romance,” in part because “their youth has been marked by global and social upset and unrest” in ways that leave them “looking for a happy ever after.” But Hoover’s success isn’t just about escapism: In her most-discussed book to date, It Ends With Us, she slowly reveals that her stereotypically alpha-male hero is also an abuser.

This is precisely why, I’d argue, we need more explorations of love, sex, and desire in art—because they’re fundamental elements of what it means to be human, to understand intimacy, to accept vulnerability, to be put at risk. Television, at the moment, is more likely to present sex in much the same way that porn does: as something achieved, someone conquered, a new level unlocked. Romantic fiction, at its best, proposes instead that sex can be about connection and affirmation, while also acknowledging complication, messiness, and damage. It suggests that people can meet as equals and enrich each other’s lives, not just plague themselves with affairs they’d rather forget. And for young women in particular, who have grown up with pornography that can present female sexuality as submissive, degrading, or painful, romantic fiction offers a world in which their pleasure is paramount.

[Read: Don’t call them trash]

But the appetites being served in fiction are largely being neglected at the multiplex: According to the Black List’s Kate Hagen, less than 1 percent of movies released in 2022 feature a sex scene, and the standard-bearing Magic Mike’s Last Dance—which depicts an incendiary mutual seduction between Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum—has sputtered at the box office, although not as badly as the heavily promoted gay rom-com Bros. When audiences have been conditioned to want only sexless Marvel movies, fully clothed Christopher Nolan epics, chaste action thrillers, and possibly cocaine bears, why take a chance on love? (Not for nothing does the unscripted Bennifer saga currently stand alone as the most all-consuming love story of our time.)

And yet, we need love stories, love scenes, portrayals of how people can want and care for and change each other—not cynical, near-algorithmic pairings of couples without a modicum of chemistry, but explorations of profound intimacy and ineffable human connection. This isn’t necessarily the same thing as graphic, titillating sex scenes that require nipple shields and intimacy coordinators. (One moment in Atonement, despite featuring no nudity, has become so epochal over time that “Atonement library kiss scene”  has 5.1 million views on TikTok.) It’s about scenes with characters whose observed interest in each other is so intense, so elemental, that we can’t stop looking either, for fear of what we might miss.

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