The wall nobody can find
Both sides are fighting over a line that already dissolved. The question is religion coming back?
assumes a clean border between the religious and the secular — and that border was always a story the modern West told about itself.
Charles Taylor named our condition the immanent frame: we live as buffered selves,
sealed off from transcendence by default, believers included. That is why this revival doesn’t look like 1906. The Asbury students reach for God through the same nervous systems shaped by therapy, psychedelics, and the feed. Spiritual and religious is no longer a contradiction; it is the median position. People are assembling practice — silence, fasting, contemplative prayer, breathwork, psychedelic ritual — across traditions that used to be walls.
The evangelicals see a return to the one true thing, and we honor the seriousness, but the kids are syncretists whether they say so or not. The secular analysts see a blip because they’re using a binary instrument to measure a spectrum. What’s being born is neither the old religion nor the old secularism. It is a culture trying to re-enchant a world it can’t stop being scientific about.
Where we concede ground: Spiritual but not religious
often curdles into the consumerist — a soothing playlist, not a discipline that can hold a life.
What would change our mind: If the new seekers mostly re-enter orthodox, demanding traditions instead of building hybrid practice, our thesis is wrong.
Read the full synthesis: What would a religious revival actually look like?