If you kill the one true God, the Many will rise again. We all have that sensus divinitatis, as Calvin put it—we’re hardwired to sense our need for something beyond us and to give it worship, even if we suppress and distort it. Bavinck was right: Leaving God for “no god” is spiritually impossible. Religious nature abhors a vacuum. Eternity has been set in our hearts.

In trying to map out our religious landscape today, it’s natural to reach for the data. Michael Graham, Jim Davis, and Ryan Burge will tell you that in the last 25 years, we’ve lived through the “great dechurching,” where 40 million Americans stopped attending church. Similarly, Christian Smith will argue that religion has become “obsolete,” much like how the automobile replaced the horse and buggy.

But these surveys only give a partial answer. Burge notes that “None” doesn’t always equal “atheist.” Moreover, when Smith talks about obsolescence, he’s not pointing to a dramatic growth in atheistic secularity. He’s pointing to its replacement with varieties of “spiritual but not religious” options.

God hasn’t been removed from the picture; he’s been relocated. Where did God go? There are as many answers as there are people. Consider some conversations I’ve had recently:

• At the start of the semester, I met a young man of Indian descent and Hindu religion. He approached me because he’d watched The Chosen and wanted to discuss Jesus and the Bible. We discussed faith for a few weeks, but I haven’t seen him since.
• A young woman at my gym’s front desk was reading a book on neuroscience, and when I asked her about it, she shared that her interest stemmed from experiencing radical healing of her uterine pain. She credited her healing to the practices of mindfulness, meditation, and manifestation.
• During an airport layover, a woman saw me reading a Bible commentary and wanted to talk about religion. She quoted an orthodox saying from her Baptist upbringing that “God has a purpose for whatever you’re going through.” Yet by the end of the conversation, I learned that, alongside believing in God’s providence, she engages in rituals involving crystals. She said they help her feel grounded and connected to her ancestors.
• When I shared with a young man from my gym that I’m a pastor, he told me he was a believer, too, but he came to faith without ever going to church or opening a Bible. He came to faith simply through conversations with friends and YouTube videos.

These stories are a microcosm of the broader spiritual landscape before us in America and the West.

I want to offer my survey of this landscape and suggest that to understand our current moment, we need to see it not as irreligious but as deeply pagan. After mapping the terrain, we’ll consider the stories we’ve told that have brought us to this place. Finally, we’ll explore how our current moment is rooted in a pagan mindset, one whose religious hunger cries out for more than what merely localized religions offer.

Mapping the Terrain

One of the best topographers of our spiritual landscape is Tara Isabella Burton. In her book Strange Rites, Burton lays out a bewildering array of our culture’s “spiritual but not religious” options. These can be organized into three “tribes” (and to them I’ll add a fourth):

Blue tribe. This group includes spiritualities centered around wellness cultures, from spiritual yogic practices, ayahuasca retreats, and microdosing mushrooms to the massive comeback of astrology on TikTok. It features the use of healing crystals and the return of New Thought through the metaphysics of manifestation.

There’s been a rise in Wicca (which apparently has more adherents in the United States than Presbyterianism does). We also see sexual religion, where kinks, chosen families, and sexual identities are elevated into spiritualities. Add an intense growth of interest in the occult and left-wing social justice cultures that can include political satanism or a postcolonial retrieval of allegedly more ancient traditions.

Red tribe. “Spiritual but not religious” isn’t just a left-wing phenomenon. For years, millions have tuned in to the Jungian spiritual meditations of Jordan Peterson, who recently penned another bestseller, We Who Wrestle with God, that consists mostly in reflections on Old Testament narratives. Going further right, we see postcolonial retrievals of Norse gods, often merged with a post-Nietzschean vitalism––a return to the glorification of strength and tribe.

Gray tribe. Interspersed between the blue and red tribes is the rise of spiritually infused techno-futurism, focused on AI and transhumanism. Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder highlights the creepy way Silicon Valley is banking on creating a techno-utopia filled with immortals by using longevity technology or uploading our souls into the cloud. These dreams depend on summoning a benevolent AGI (artificial general intelligence) that functions as a deity.

It gets weirder: Some in Silicon Valley have dedicated their AIs to ancient gods, believing they’re spiritually communing with interdimensional alien beings who download technological insights. C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength wasn’t fiction; it was prophecy.

Surprising reborn. Alongside these groups, we’re seeing a public revival of openness toward traditional Christian belief. Justin Brierley has chronicled a “surprising rebirth of belief in God.” Major intellectuals like Niall Ferguson and his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have turned to Christianity, citing an increasing sense that Western culture without Christianity is becoming morally exhausted. The United Kingdom is even speaking of a “quiet revival” of traditional religion, which, on both sides of the pond, seems to be increasingly male.

This is all part of what’s being called the “vibe shift.” A good amount of it is political—a pushback on the “Great Awokening.” But a big part of it is a new openness to talk about metaphysically charged realities. Joe Rogan’s massive podcast, for example, will have episodes on conspiracy theories and aliens and then have a Christian apologist talking seriously about documentary evidence for the Bible.

When you think about your average non-Christian today, you’re not likely dealing with an old-school secular humanist of the Bertrand Russell sort, or even a New Atheist from the early 2000s. It’s far more likely to be someone who never went to church, checks her astrology chart, likes nature, takes an interest in breathwork because it connects her to reality, and maybe believes in the simulation theory.

Stories That Brought Us Here

If that’s the terrain, it’s useful to ask how we got here.

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