Lauren Jackson

It helps explain the messiness of life.

It promises that there's some sort of cosmic alchemy to the chaos.

And who doesn't want that?

And the more I spoke to people, the more I traveled, I couldn't shake a really ingrained worldview that I had, which was one in which I saw belief and spirituality.

I saw it everywhere.

The people in power are obviously scared of the truth.

Yet no matter how hard they try, they cannot escape from it.

You know, standing at a climate rally with Greta Thunberg on stage at COP in Glasgow, there was a reverence in the crowd.

This is what leadership looks like.

A desire for deliverance in the crowd that felt distinctly religious to me.

I saw it in the intensity of how people gravitated to social justice and campus activism movements, where, like, you had a sense of what was right and wrong.

No man, no wall, sanctuary for all.

I felt it at the Eros tour.

What are people feeling if not an extraordinary ecstatic form of communal gathering rarely found outside of religious spaces?

So while we had all this data that millions of people had left American religion, it was still so clear to me that people were looking for an outlet for their beliefs.

And then came the Pew report.

And that data seemed to show that some people were reconsidering religion or houses of worship as a place they could turn to explore those beliefs.

And so I started to talk to them to try to figure out why.

Even though I did attend Catholic school all through elementary and middle school, I felt like I was going through the motions.

I didn't really have a strong faith of my own.