The Paradox of Our ‘Secular Age'

The Atlantic

02-06-2025

In Durham, North Carolina, just a few miles from major universities, teaching hospitals, and other temples of science, the Holy Spirit remains formidable. When I attended a gathering at Catch the Fire Church one Friday evening last year, a petite blond woman made her way down the aisle, laying her hand on heads and shoulders, calling on the Holy Spirit. Her magenta tunic glowed under the can lights. She breathed hard into her microphone. Here and there, the woman, a Toronto-based evangelist named Carol Arnott, paused to point a finger down a row of worshippers and shout, 'Fire on them, Lord!' Knees buckled; people collapsed back into their seats.
As Arnott continued her circuit, a man in a hoodie—the 'catcher'—followed closely behind, ready to help any person 'slain in the Spirit.' One touch from her hand sent more supplicants falling to the floor. 'Don't get up too soon,' Arnott urged one dazed individual lying on the carpet. 'You're like a steak, marinating.' She preached as she walked, describing a vision in which Jesus gave her a bouquet of lilies of the valley and adorned her with a flowered crown and wedding veil. 'The bridegroom is coming. Are you ready?' Arnott asked. It was hard to hear her over the moans and guffaws, the bursts of holy laughter.
Catch the Fire belongs to the fastest-growing group of Christians on the planet—charismatic Christians, who believe that the Holy Spirit empowers them to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy, just as Jesus's first apostles did 2,000 years ago. By some measures, they represent more than half of the roughly 60 million U.S. adults who call themselves 'born-again.' This flourishing and vigorously supernatural faith points to the paradox of the secular age: The modern era of declining church attendance has nurtured some of religion's most dramatic manifestations. Instead of killing off religion, secularism has supercharged its extraordinary elements.
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Charismatic Christians aren't the only ones embracing a spirituality that might seem out of place in our modern, rationalist age. Eighty-seven percent of Americans subscribe to at least one New Age belief, such as karma, reincarnation, or telepathy. During my time researching charismatic Christianity for my new book, Spellbound, I also interviewed podcast bros who hawk ayahuasca in Silicon Valley and self-described spiritual coaches who offer treatments ranging from Reiki to reviewing their clients' past lives.
At a New Age congregation outside Denver, I attended a healing workshop on harnessing the invisible energies of the universe to treat cancer and arthritis, as well as a shamanic drum circle where a former software engineer named Greg led participants on a journey to the spirit world to meet their power animals. If this is a 'secular age,' then perhaps we need to rethink what secularization means.
These thriving subcultures are, in part, proof that channeling the Holy Spirit or seeking an animal spirit guide doesn't carry the same stigma in America that such otherworldly adventuring once did. While I was visiting Catch the Fire, one pastor surveyed the auditorium full of chuckling, sprawling worshippers and declared that 'we choose to look silly.' But he no longer has to worry—as Christians who spoke in tongues did a century ago—about police shutting down the worship service or local doctors asking a judge to declare the worshippers legally insane. Nowadays, Americans are more inclined to shrug off other people's theological eccentricities and save their purity tests for politics.
Charismatic Christians preach a message that is as much about letting go of inhibitions as submitting to the strictures of the Bible. Early in his ministry, Randy Clark, a pastor with long-standing connections to Catch the Fire Church, confessed to a friend that when he watched others get slain in the Spirit, he didn't feel anything special himself. The friend told him: 'You just resist it. Next time, don't fake it, but don't fight it either. Just become a sail in the wind.' Clark followed the instructions, and the next time someone prayed for him, 'I had a physical manifestation,' he told me. 'It started in my right thumb. I saw it moving, and thought, That is weird. I could stop that. But I made a decision. I'm going to use my will to be open, to not stop anything, not work up anything.'
Openness to the Holy Spirit does not preclude adherence to orthodox religious teaching. Indeed, most charismatic churches subscribe to a traditional interpretation of the Bible, and plenty of Catholics—a distinctly doctrinal group—call themselves charismatic. Alpha, one of the most successful evangelistic enterprises in the world today, emphasizes the tangible experience of God's presence alongside classical arguments for the truth of Christianity. Founded in 1977 by a charismatic Anglican parish in London, Alpha evolved into an 11-week course on the basics of Christianity that is now available in 112 languages worldwide and culminates in a prayer-filled 'Holy Spirit weekend.'
'People who have been quite skeptical often experience something powerful, and then they try to figure out what happened,' Graham Tomlin, an Anglican priest who has been involved with Alpha for many years, told me. 'As a means of evangelism, this is not primarily a set of programs, or the explanation of doctrines—although it does that—but at its heart, an invitation to encounter God.'
From a certain angle, these groups are merely taking mainstream aspirations to their supernatural conclusion. The rising popularity of Spirit-filled worship and emphasis on personal contact with God has paralleled secular society's exaltation of private experience over tradition or reasoned argument. Charismatic worship began surging across Protestant and Catholic churches in the 1960s, in tandem with pop psychology's increasing stress on 'self-actualization' and authenticity as the primary conditions of happiness. Growing interest in individualistic, experiential religion also dovetails with the erosion of Americans' trust in established institutions and expertise over the past half century.
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Some religious leaders are wary of taking this subjective impulse too far. 'The emphasis on feelings and emotions is a good one, but the danger is that it starts to counter objective truth. It becomes: 'I feel it, therefore it's my truth,'' says Nicky Gumbel, an Anglican priest who led the global expansion of the Alpha course and remains involved with the program. 'Lived experience becomes the arbiter of everything.'
Yet self-optimization is the riptide of American culture. It pulls hard against any traditional mandate to find and proclaim universal truth. At the New Age congregation I visited in Denver, the minister preached that all humans should claim their 'unique, authentic, God-expressed self.' On another occasion, a spiritual coach told me: 'I've done the new-moon and the full-moon ceremony. I've practiced with crystals quite a bit and sage, sweat lodges. I've done so many things, just trying to find my way, what feels right.'
Understanding this cultural landscape requires resisting the temptation to reduce these groups to their voting patterns. Of course, many New Age spiritual experimenters would clash with charismatic Christians on a range of moral questions and policy issues. But the default culture-war rubric disguises the deeper, pre-political impulses that these varieties of American religion have in common: a desire for tangible contact with divine power, and trust in personal experience over so-called experts. Together, these attitudes explain the country's politics better than any theory resting on blue-versus-red narratives.
This combination of spiritual hunger and distrust of elite authority invites a certain type of leader. Over the past decade, Donald Trump has drawn supporters into a story about America's breakdown and recovery that is more spiritual than political. He is the president of an anti-institutional, tradition-skeptical, experience-worshipping age, when fewer Americans go to church but plenty of them follow gurus on YouTube. The feelings of frustration and grievance that a candidate personifies are more important than his policy platform.
His message that institutions are weak, corrupt, and deserve no loyalty; his tacit promise that you can imagine prosperity into existence regardless of what the economists say; his personal domination of the Republican Party: All of this has succeeded because public confidence in every institution, not just traditional churches, has collapsed. That cynicism extends to the workplace—the institution that makes the greatest stamp on most people's daily life. Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly affirm trust in their organization's leaders. Meanwhile, the social habits that we associate with a more devout, less tolerant age—policing boundaries, banishing heretics, expecting divine retribution to rain down on your enemies—have migrated from churches to politics. Many Americans are ready to put their faith in a political savior who says he was 'saved by God.'
From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump
Even as partisan politics have come to display the dynamics of fundamentalist sects, there are signs that the 60-year slide of organized religion in the West has slowed. And it might be starting a quiet recovery. After steadily rising for 20 years, the number of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation seems to have leveled off. More young men are going to church, and many of them are joining Catholic or Orthodox congregations. In England and Wales, Gen Z is leading a spike in church attendance, which has risen from 8 to 12 percent of the population in just six years.
During my reporting, I kept meeting people who had grown tired of cynicism and DIY meaning-making and made their way into ancient institutions and supernatural faith—such as Christine Flynn, who lives with her family outside Milwaukee. She spent her young-adult years perusing the New Age sections at bookstores and seeking self-actualization through her own instincts. 'I figured I'd do the research, and wherever my thoughts landed, that was correct. I didn't need to talk to anyone,' she told me. But after becoming a mother, and watching her atheist husband explore Christianity, she 'got tired of being so cynical.' She began reading the books on Christianity that her husband left lying around. Now a mom of six who homeschools her kids, Flynn published a memoir last year about her path into the Catholic Church.
Conversions such as Flynn's are part of a global story. Both Christianity and Islam are exploding outside the West. Worldwide, the proportion of people who identify as atheists—about 7 percent, according to some studies —will likely decrease in coming years. Nicky Gumbel, the Anglican priest who works with Alpha, told me that the program has found some of its greatest success in Chinese-speaking communities that are reckoning with a history of communism. 'Pure secularism doesn't satisfy,' he says. In a globalized society such as the United States, prophecies of the long-term collapse of religious faith and practice seem premature.
Humans are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we yearn to impose order on the chaos of existence and worship some source of ultimate meaning. As the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his 1989 book, Sources of the Self, everyone aspires to a sense of fullness—a 'pattern of higher action' that connects their lives 'with some greater reality or story.' He warned that 'it would be a mistake to think that this kind of formulation has disappeared even for unbelievers in our world.' Secularization may reshape how we act on these instincts, but it has not eliminated them: Unbelievers will always have more in common with the Holy Rollers than they realize.