On July 10th, 2023, we released the second episode of the Unsettled podcast – “Is Everyone Religious?”. The climate of the American spiritual terrain is such that most people frown on the word religion. In 2017, Pew Research found that 27% of Americans say they are spiritual but not religious.

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America’s religious landscape shows a growing trend of those who identify as spiritual but not religious, primarily Generation Z. Gen Z refers to those born between 1999 and 2013. Their sense of community and perception of reality is shaped and colored by out-of-context reels and social media soundbites that are sometimes misleading. They are often suspicious of parents and leaders of traditional religious categories and classify them as those who teach one thing and practice another. They are the ones who mostly go to college and do not return to the traditional church setting. Where do they go? They are highly spiritual, but their spirituality is unaffiliated with the traditional church setting. They are swamped at the religious buffet doing what Tara Burton calls the “remixing of religion” in her book Strange Rites.

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This category of generation practices selective religious spirituality, meaning if they go to church, they would not mind practicing yoga and mindfulness – religious practices attached to Hinduism and Buddhism, respectively. They would not mind being members of the local church and SoulCycle concurrently. SoulCycle is a fitness brand offering more than weight loss or exercise. It is a community that does not only believe in biking to burn calories but also to improve people’s lives. Its instructors share a lot of motivational words with their participants, who also look up to them for guidance and counsel related to other areas of their lives. Candles are lit in SoulCycle sessions, with members taught to believe a shared energy exists between them and other cyclers. Images and messages from SoulCycle’s website show that it is not just about the ride but also the soul and the spirit. SoulCycle has over 90 locations across the United States, with over 300K followers on Instagram.

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Currently, there are numerous “socio-spiritual” communities and tribes online, similar to SoulCycle, that offer a form of spirituality devoid of traditional religious regulations and bureaucracies. What fascinates most young people about these groups is that hypocrisy is not a thing to worry about in such spaces; it is all about self-care and communal support. Communities like these are thriving because they are built around a cause. The young are not simply leaving the local church across all denominations; they have become religiously fluid – this is the order of the day.

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Scholars believe that religion is not only belief in a higher power or simply espousing truth claims about the divine but also belief in certain principles or rituals that bind people together, bringing them into a social community. People join groups to find meaning and live by certain principles or rituals that affect their conduct. By this logic, Gen Zers find meaning in communities that offer them certain rituals leading to a so-called fulfilled life. These communities are abundant on college campuses and in the mainstream culture. Because all humans are meaning-making creatures with an innate setup to self-transcend, it is impossible not to be religious. Being religious has nothing to do with church; it has everything to do with searching for meaning and realizing our shared human weakness, which drives us to seek community. It is within these communities that we perform our rituals. Every human being does this, whether within or outside the church. Therefore, all are religious.

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Americans are not so secular as some think; they have not so much kicked God out of town. They are becoming gods or creating new pathways to finding meaning. While some are seeking meaning through their sexuality, others are seeking to live a pleasurable life without an end by hoping to become a cybernetic organism (the fusion of artificial intelligence with the human body). There is a “church” community for this new religion of artificial intelligence called the Way of the Future, located in Silicon Valley of California. Those abandoning traditional religious categories have a personal declaration of independence, “it is my life, my liberty and my pursuit of happiness,” as Hugh McLeod puts it in his book The Religious Crisis of the 1960s.

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