[An Invitation] Are people returning to religion?: Two conversations on faith, religion, and where you find yourself

tl;dr: I’m hosting two public conversations about faith, spirituality and religion. One is broad, the other one is narrow. Both are open-hearted. Join us!

Hola Friends,

I hope you are enjoying your summer.

I’m writing to invite you to Two Public Conversations on Faith and Religion.

The talks are related but not the same. You might want to come to one but be less interested in the other. Read on to learn more about each.

Why are people returning to religion?

Wednesday, July 1, 2026

3PM to 4:30PM East

What about Christianity?

Wednesday, July 8, 2026

3PM to 4:30PM East

The first conversation, Why are people returning to religion? is about the phenomenon of people going back to organized religion. And how it connects or not to the way you relate to spirituality.

While this is a conversation about people returning to religion, I want to make sure you feel invited if you are someone who never left. And I would also love to have you in the conversation if you are someone who would never consider experiencing your spirituality through organized religion.

I’m asking you to listen to this episode of The Daily so that we can start our conversation from a shared baseline and the same set of provocations: Why More Americans Are Seeking Religion?

The second conversation is narrower, What about Christianity? is a conversation for people who have a relationship with Christianity. You don’t have to be a churchgoer (though churchgoers are wanted and welcome!) nor do you have to call yourself a Christian.

There are Two Parts to this Newsletter

I will first share some reflections about our first conversation, the broader one, the one about people returning to religion.

Next I will share some reflections on the conversation about Christianity, you can skip ahead to that section if that’s the one that calls your attention.

Why are people returning to religion?

This one is the broader conversation. People are returning to different established religions. To all sorts of congregations. Some are returning. Many are converting.

It seems like the decades-long process of secularization has come to an end.

How do you make sense of what is happening?

As we learn in the podcast, young people, and especially young men, are reporting that religion is a “very important” part of their lives. And they are doing so at dramatically higher rates than we’ve seen in a generation. And it’s not just young people.

What the episode is really tracking is a widespread sense that the secular substitutes for faith are failing to deliver.

Lauren Jackson names these substitutes, and I bet you are personally familiar with at least a few of them:

Work stopped being a calling. Younger people, especially, describe jobs as just jobs. The post-war myth that labor equals meaning is collapsing really fast.
Wellness Culture - SoulCycle, CrossFit, expensive fitness classes that “promise not just a healthier body but a better life” offer ecstasy without deep community. They offer a kind of self-improvement that lacks either immanence or transcendence.
Astrology is cool, and definitely on the rise. I like that there is something that offers a cosmic narrative. It is good to have the sense that there’s an order to the chaos. But are there demands? Is there accountability? Is there a sense that there is something for you to offer up or give back?
Activism and social movements have the fervor and the righteousness. You all have heard me talk plenty about the Church of Social Justice and the binds of its fundamentalisms. But I like what Jackson says about a Greta Thunberg climate rally or campus justice movements. These can borrow religion’s emotional architecture without its staying power or most importantly, its mercy.
The Eras Tour - Jackson chose Taylor Swift. I took my son to see Bad Bunny’s Residencia in Puerto Rico, and it definitely felt like a pilgrimage. Music. Feeling. Spectacle. Singing TOGETHER. Collective Effervescence! These are mass ecstatic communal gatherings. We are made for these! But something about the mega concert model seems to work… right up until it doesn’t.

There is something in us that longs for:

Accountability to something outside yourself

Ritual that marks time and life defining passages

Community that shows up with a meal when things fall apart

A moral framework that is about the wisdom of the ages, rather than ideology.

The fact is that we have a primal human tendency to reduce our politics to “solidarity with people who look like us.” And the religious frameworks of the Axial Age aspired to get us out from under the grip of that primal instinct. They offer something that is universalizing. Something that gathers much larger segments of humanity.

Let me be clear. I am in no way saying that this was all a good thing!

The big religions of the Axial Age were followed by secularism. And by the scientific-materialism religion that pretends not to be a religion.

What is true is that when we built this secular world, we made something that is very good at deconstructing inherited meaning. Tearing it apart but failing terribly at constructing new sources of meaning in their stead.

Now we find ourselves in this moment. In the midst of the metacrisis. And some people, from across the political spectrum, are looking back at what they left behind. And they are wondering if there was a baby there that got thrown out with the bathwater.

Whether we are talking about the great religious traditions or not, we know that there is a hunger, a need, for ritual, for community, for a cohesive moral framework.

We know that we respond well before a demand that dares to ask something of us. A path that nurtures our growth, our maturation, our connection and our inherent sense of wholeness.

Why are some people finding these in religion?

And is there a way to have these without getting caught in the same traps that always come with this terrain? As they always have, throughout the ages.

Let’s talk.

What about Christianity?

There are many conversations to be had about Christianity.

This one is not a conversation for those who have animosity towards the Christian faith.

There are LOTS of reasons to have such animosity. There is plenty of church trauma to go around. The hurt of the colonized and the enslaved. The hurt done to those who are not Christian but live under its hegemony. The hurt of those who were forced into churches who did not welcome the fullness of themselves. The horrific patterns of sexual abuse systematically hidden by religious institutions. The contemporary political power and violence of Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism.

This, however, is not that conversation.

This is a conversation for those who feel some curious or open hearted connection to Christianity, regardless of how unorthodox this connection is.

I myself am more of a neo-animist. This means that like all of our ancestors I know myself to live in relationship with a truly enchanted earth. A planet where everything is teeming with aliveness. (You can learn more about this from Josh Schrei: Animism is Normative Consciousness).

I am also someone who 22 years ago was miraculously and unexpectedly graced by a life changing initiation in the tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism.

One of my sisters best described it. She was joking about me at a family gathering, under the roof of my parent’s very religious household:

“Gibrán worships all the Gods!”
She said.
And in some ways it felt true.

I grew up in a rather unique corner of Christian fundamentalism. A Catholic “Covenant Community” within the “Charismatic Renewal.” (Justice Amy Coney Barrett belongs to something like this.)

What the heck does that mean?

The “covenant” part means that families who were members of our community went above and beyond what the church itself asked of them. They made a “next level” commitment to how they wanted to practice their faith. This commitment was sealed as a covenant that was renewed year after year. And some people could eventually take the leap and make a lifetime vow to live under this covenant.

The “charismatic” part means that we worshipped more like Pentecostals. Meaning, we prayed loudly, together, speaking different words, but all at the same time. We prayed in tongues, we placed our hands in prayer over each other and people fell down “slain in the spirit.” The best part was the vibrant singing with arms in the air and even dancing in ecstatic worship. Our was a Puerto Rican community, so you already know it had the fire and the flavor.

We were way more “biblical” than your average Catholic. On Sundays we gathered in an “asamblea” that felt more like an evangelical service. We did this for a couple of hours before heading to a more traditional Catholic Mass. We had men’s pastoral groups, and women’s pastoral groups, and youth groups, and prayer circles, and definitely a hierarchy!

There is no question that there was something beautiful about it.

But I’ve also had to do a whole lot of healing from the fundamentalism. Especially around the fear that they had of our adolescent sexuality. The homophobia. The focus on gender roles. And their fear of the broader culture, the culture of “the world” and “the flesh.”

The covenant was a call to keep us separate, a project to keep us apart from those who were not like us.

It is fair to say that I grew up in what is now understood as a “high control group.” Kind of cultish. But not really a cult.

In this long journey, with its many turns, and a lifetime of spiritual longing (Piscean ftw!) today I consider myself more of a Christian than I’ve ever been. But it is very clear to me that the vast majority of religious Christians would say that I’m definitely not a Christian. And it is true that I definitely don’t meet the qualifications outlined by their theologies and formal structures.

This is why I’m inviting you into the conversation.

Your story must be different from mine. But you might feel some connection to Christianity. Whether you grew up in church or not. And you might be curious about how others are making sense of this connection. Especially those of us who are not traditionalists. Those of us who do not meet “the qualifications.”

There is something missing in the ways most liberal reformers turn towards Christianity. You are often left with a blandness that lacks the faith in what is both unbelievable and miraculous about Christianity’s claims. Other theologies reduce the Christ to a Leftist radical, which is not untrue, but it does not invite the numinous either.

The numinous is that sense of encountering something that is both overwhelming and holy, something that exceeds all explanation.

I want to share how I turn towards the mystery of the incarnation, and to this archetypal story of redemption.
And I want us to have a conversation about where you find yourself in relationship with the creed that shapes Western Culture, whether we like it or not.

I’m looking forward to being together.

Gibran RiveraJune 16, 2026Comment