Lauren Jackson

My parents, they were just like, religion is dumb.

Like, why would you believe that?

Like, I remember I was really little and I was like, oh, like what happens after you die?

And they were like, nothing.

You die.

So Lauren, what did people tell you about what they were looking for and why it led them to religion or back to religion?

Everyone has their own story, and it's tough to make generalizations.

But as I talked to hundreds of people across the country, a few themes did start to emerge.

So I started college in my freshman years when the pandemic happened.

And suddenly we were like inside all the time.

And like I wasn't interacting with that many people.

And I just like became isolated.

very depressed, which was like a big change for me.

Like, that was never something.

I think the biggest one that came up again and again is that the pandemic was a moment of extraordinary rupture in American life.

When we look at the Pew data, the moment that we start to see secularization level off or pause is just about the exact same moment that the pandemic started.

I'm looking at this and I'm like, life is full of so much uncertainty.

And I wish I had like some way like mentally to like deal with that.

People were forced to contend with their own mortality and look hard at the questions that they had about how they were living and if it was working for them.

And a lot of people decided that it wasn't working for them.