Through a touchscreen darkly
Musings on the metaphysical vibe shift
We are alleged to be in a moment of spiritual renewal. Manifestation and astrology are mainstream phenomena. Metropolitan sophisticates are being received into millennia old religions while others find mycological salvation. It is as they say, a whole thing.
I’ve been predicting this for about three years now. At the beginning, when it was just me talking to my friends I was less sure, but now it seems that something is real, albeit on a smaller scale perhaps than anticipated. As is often the case the details weren’t exactly correct-I was at the time enthralled in a kind of Neoplatonism that would shortly send me however uneasily back to Church, and I remember calling it “the New Religiousity” I think based on the uptick of kinda-ironic-kinda-not online Catholicism which was already starting to percolate in 2018-19.1 Based on that I assumed we’d be experiencing an upsurge in conversions to orthodox religion, which hasn’t quite been the case, although it also hasn’t not been the case.
Heterodox and hyper individualist, this new spirituality cuts across the political spectrum: although its current manifestation leans right, this could easily change. Only four years ago Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions in a Godless World described a version of this tendency that tilted much more to the left than seems to be the case today.
By and large, today's new cults of and for the Remixed are what I will call "intuitional religions." By this, I mean that their sense of meaning is based in narratives that simultaneously reject clear-cut creedal metaphysical doctrines and institutional hierarchies and place the locus of authority on people's experiential emotions, what you might call gut instinct. Society, institutions, credited authorities, experts, expectations, rules of conduct-all these are generally treated not just as irrelevant, but as sources of active evil. Wellness culture, modern occultism, social justice activism, techno-utopianism, and the modern sexual revolution all share a fundamental distrust, if not outright contempt, for institutions and scripts. Most of these new religions share, too, the grand narrative that oppressive societies and unfairly narrow expectations stymie natural —and sometimes even divine —human potential.
Released in 2020, in almost 2025 Burton’s book feels both timely and a bit too early. Timely, because the dynamic she describes is still here, it’s still with us today, untimely, because the world it describes, of a mostly defined inside and outside, of new spirituality defining itself against the vestigial institutions of a Christian America feels so distant now. While certainly in continuum with earlier veins in American life going back to the beginning of this nation, I tend to read the contemporary spiritual turn as largely a product of the pandemic management and its oppositional responses as a crucial moment in the development of 21st century culture.
Covid-19 plucked us momentarily out of our anaesthetising late modern comforts and made us once again afraid to die. New York City ran out of space for the dead at the height of the pandemic, and all throughout nobody was sure how bad it would be. I do sometimes think, perhaps condescendingly, that some of the people who perceived the lockdowns as an unjust tyranny or became strongly invested in a manmade origin for the virus were trying in part to return to that earlier, more innocent world of 2019, when death was still unreal. Or perhaps having returned to that world, they now sought a face and a name, some personage to blame for this violent interruption of our lives, this reminder of our essential finitude.
Setting aside the debates about policy and safety I think it’s clear that a lot of creative people experienced the Covid lockdowns as an extremely dystopian and traumatizing series of events.2 Moreover this was a trauma predicated in this view on a purely materialistic, reductive, understanding of society as a mass of bodies and meat: human beings as unfortunately autonomous vectors for the transmission of disease and nothing more. The banning of religious events and the curtailing of social life X Covid restrictions thus became a failure that indicted and rendered bankrupt the entire edifice of the rational liberal reformist society that produced them, which now seemed to end not in liberation but in machinic tyranny under the camera eye of the administrative state. In this way while it may sometimes be aligned with the more religious components of Silicon Valley/California ideology and tech-right mysticism, post-pandemic spirituality seems opposed to them, if only philosophically. Likewise while sharing certain characteristics with the right wing “atavism” Burton describes using Bronze Age Pervert as a synecdoche, there appears to be a genuine belief in the transcendent beyond the merely biological at play in the shift one sometimes perceives.
While the creative avant-garde post-covid fears authoritarianism, paradoxically they also crave structure: there is a turn toward more-or-less orthodox religion and traditional gender roles, essentialism gendered and sometimes racial and skepticism toward modern life and society at the same time that other aspects of hypermodernity are embraced. This seems to partly express a yearning for order in a world in the midst of epistemic chaos, a desire to have some ground to stand on in what often feels like a postmodern morass, and partly reflects the breakdown of a proper counterculture over the course of the 2010s. When the outside becomes the hegemon, does the old hegemony become the counterculture? And where does that leave those in the forgotten hinterlands where the old hegemony never ended?
I will admit that outside of the literary-intellectual sphere I’m not sure how concrete this metaphysical vibe shift is-I hear anecdotal things about manifestation, astrology, and younger people going back to church, there was a revival in Kentucky last year significant enough that I heard about it through non Christian means, but I don’t know how real or lasting any of it is. Inside is another story. There something like a tangible shift has been perceptible over the course of the last several years, one reflected in the output of authors as different as Patricia Lockwood and Tao Lin. As Ross Barkan wrote at the beginning of 2024, there is reason to believe we are at the beginning of a new period of romanticism:
The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms – their true calculus still proprietary – that rule all of digital existence.
The famed mantra of the liberal left in the early months of the pandemic – trust the science – has faded from view, as hero worship ceases for the bureaucrat scientists (Anthony Fauci) and even for the pharmaceutical behemoths that developed, with federal assistance, the Covid vaccines.
Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.
We are dealing I think, with a spiritual need, a metaphysical void in the modern human condition. A certain kind of person filled this hole with art in the late 20th century, but art is for various reasons not enough. It may indeed be the only paradise we can create on this world, but art nonetheless fails in certain crucial and at times ineffable ways, and thus other solutions must be sought out. In this century we have tried in various formulations to plug the gap with mass movements, producing among other things the hyperpolitics that characterized the 2010s and may well be returning. As many reservations as may be had-and trust me, I have them-about the individual forms of expression, I suspect that spirituality and religion are a better and more enduring means of dealing with this thing we call life than mass politics or art, although I am willing to admit that I may be wrong here.
As a sort-of more-or-less Christian, I have found myself wondering what this might mean for that religion in America. I would caution that these predictions are primarily vibes based, predicated on the Poundian adage that artists and bohemians are the antennae of the race, but nonetheless the contours of a possible path(s) are apparent. The future of American christianity seems divided between an ever more dualist Evangelicalism, increasingly pagan in the sense that it rejects what Nietzsche called the “slave morality” of Christianity in favor of a classical ideal of vitalism and masculinity, and an increasingly syncretic and heterogenous Catholicism, by which I also include the Orthodox and the various Magisterial protestant traditions. Mormonism probably receives part of this inheritance as well, but I have less of a feel for where they are in the culture. Whether it will recover or continue to contract I am uncertain—again, much depends on how accurately the Bohemians are picking up the signals. We may all be sedevacantists thirty years hence!
I have occasionally gently poked fun at sedevacantists, and do so again at the end of this essay, but realistically as someone who began regularly attending Episcopalian services in the 2020s in part out of preference for a more structured and traditional liturgy, I am very aware of the log in my eye.
This is not a debate I want to have in this post. I had and to some extent continue to have very normie opinions on this topic, even if there are lingering questions. My concern here is their effect on the subject, and thus the opinion and perception of these events by various artists and intellectuals.
Have you weighed any parallels to the 1970s? I've been thinking on that period's spiritual reverberations in New Age-isms and environmentalism, taking place in an American society that had become existentially, societally, and epistemically hungover since the moral rectitude of the (failed?) 1960s. The distrust of government and the chance for reform preceded Nixon's resignation, along with Vietnam, the oil crisis, and the beginning of a years-long economic downturn. Religiously, the 1974 schism in the Presbyterian Church is one data point of the landscape which eventually became the Christian Right (many of the leaving churches were southern churches). In literary development, DeLillo and McCarthy, not Romantics but certainly a new species of writer, were slowly but surely moving into the fore.
COVID-19 isn't a direct comparison, given that the scale and technological system which enabled the lockdowns weren't in place 50 years ago. All this to say, I'm convinced this spiritual spent-ness happened in that period, as it's arguably happening now.
Very stimulating piece! Two complications:
"Covid-19 plucked us momentarily out of our anaesthetising late modern comforts and made us once again afraid to die." I agree that Covid represented some sort of inflection point. Without debating what was and what wasn't an appropriate response to the pandemic, I think part of the reason it solidified pre-existing rifts in society is that while the fear you describe was very real for many, many others (including me), did not experience Covid as personally life threatening. To link this to my current hobby horse, I think it may be useful to consider political responses to the crisis arising ultimately from our animal natures: the fear of death vs an aversion to being caged.
In terms of the future of American Christianity, at least in its online manifestation, many converts to Orthodox Christianity seem to be in the masculinist "Evangelical" camp - with Rod Dreher accusing Pope Francis of "queering the faith" being the paradigmatic example.