Strange Rites

1. The Rise of the Remixed: Beyond the "Nones"

But the story of the rise of the religious Nones in America, it turns out, isn’t really about Nones at all. Rather, it’s about three distinct and complicated groups of people, people whose spiritual lives, sense of meaning, community, and rituals are a blend of what you might call traditional religious practices and personal, intuitional spirituality: privileging feelings and experiences over institutions and creeds.

Beyond the "Nones". While statistics show a rise in religiously unaffiliated Americans (the "Nones"), this doesn't mean a rise in secularism. Instead, it reflects a shift towards personalized spirituality. Many Nones still believe in a higher power and engage in spiritual practices.

Three groups. The author identifies three key groups driving this trend:

• Spiritual but not religious (SBNRs): Identify as spiritual but not necessarily tied to organized religion (27% of Americans).
• Faithful Nones: Unaffiliated but believe in a higher power (18% of Americans).
• Religious Hybrids: Identify with a religion but mix practices/beliefs from others (e.g., Christians believing in reincarnation).

A new landscape. This blending of traditions, prioritizing intuition and experience over doctrine, defines the "Religiously Remixed." They are not rejecting faith entirely but are actively curating their spiritual lives, reflecting a dynamic and changing American religious landscape.

2. Seeking Meaning, Purpose, Community, and Ritual

The Remixed hunger for the same things human beings have always longed for: a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life.

Fundamental human needs. Regardless of belief in God, people still seek the core functions traditionally provided by religion. These include understanding the world's meaning, finding personal purpose within that meaning, belonging to a community, and engaging in rituals that reinforce these connections.

Intuitional approach. The Remixed fulfill these needs by prioritizing personal feeling and experience over institutional authority or fixed creeds. They value intuition and self-creation, demanding the freedom to mix and match spiritual and aesthetic traditions that feel authentic to them.

Decoupled from institutions. This new approach is often disconnected from traditional religious structures. Meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are sought in diverse places, from yoga studios and online fandoms to political movements and intentional communities, reflecting a shift away from centralized religious authority.

3. America's Intuitional Pulse: A History of Personal Faith

The idea that religion should be personal, not social, is encoded in our nation’s DNA.

Protestant roots. The American emphasis on personal, individual faith traces back to the Protestant Reformation and the concept of separating church and state. This wasn't just anti-religious; it was a theological stance prioritizing individual conscience over institutional control.

Pendulum swings. American religious history is marked by a constant tension between institutional and intuitional faith. Periods of settled, organized religion (like post-WWII mainline Protestantism) have been punctuated by "Great Awakenings" and movements (like Spiritualism, New Thought) emphasizing personal piety, experience, and DIY spirituality.

Early remixing. Even in colonial times, Americans blended traditional practices with folk magic, astrology, and divination. This historical context shows that religious remixing isn't exclusively a modern phenomenon, though its scale and drivers have changed.

4. The Internet & Capitalism: Catalysts for Remixing

The Remixed religions we’re about to explore are the religions of the Internet.

New drivers. Today's scale of religious remixing is unprecedented due to three factors:

• Absence of demographic pressure: Being unaffiliated is now common, especially among youth.
• Consumer capitalism: Spirituality is a marketable commodity, offering bespoke identities.
• The Internet: Enables location-independent communities and user-generated content.

Bespoke identities. The Internet fosters "unbundling," allowing individuals to curate their spiritual paths like a Facebook feed. This encourages mixing and matching ideas and practices from diverse sources, leading to highly personalized religious identities.

Tribalization. The Internet facilitates finding niche communities based on shared interests or identities, rather than geography or traditional affiliation. This "retribalization" creates strong, often more intense, digital tribes, from fandoms to political groups, that serve as new forms of community.

5. Wellness Culture: The New Thought Revival

“Identify each of your limitations… and defy them”; “Focus on the things you can control”; “Don’t shy from it. Reckon with it. Harness it.”

Sacralized self-improvement. Wellness culture transforms physical fitness and self-care into a quasi-religious pursuit. Brands like SoulCycle market exercise as spiritual transcendence, promising not just physical change but becoming a "better person."

New Thought echoes. This focus on personal optimization and the power of positive thinking directly mirrors 19th-century New Thought or "mind-cure" movements. Both promise that inner psychological states and "energy" can yield concrete material results, from health to wealth.

The "wellness command". Wellness has become a moral obligation, a relentless pursuit of self-optimization. It promotes a theology of division between the authentic self and societal "toxins," framing self-care as a necessary act of self-love and discipline, often commodified through expensive products and services.

6. Magic Resistance: Occultism as Political Act

For Grossman, personal and political spirituality are intertwined: “I’m a witch when I’m celebrating the change of the seasons with my coven sisters,” she writes, “as well as when I stand against the destruction of the environment.”

Witchcraft resurgence. Modern occultism, particularly witchcraft, is growing, appealing to those seeking spiritual practices outside traditional religion. It offers a flexible, intuitional system easily blended with other beliefs and aesthetics.

Anti-institutional stance. Contemporary witchcraft is often explicitly anti-establishment, blending progressive politics (feminism, queer rights, anti-racism) with opposition to traditional Christianity, seen as patriarchal and oppressive. It embraces transgression and subversion.

Political ritual. Practices like hexing political figures or using magic in activism (the "#MagicResistance") transform spiritual acts into political statements. This movement provides a clear narrative of resistance, a sense of purpose in dismantling perceived oppressive structures, and a community united by shared symbols and goals.

7. Sexual Utopias: Rewriting Relationships and Community

“We have no culturally approved scripts for open sexual lifestyles; we need to write our own.”

Beyond monogamy. Changes in American sexual and romantic mores are deeply linked to Remixed culture. Practices like polyamory and kink are moving mainstream, offering alternative models for relationships and family units outside traditional heterosexual marriage.

Intuitional sex. This movement is rooted in the belief that sexual desire is fundamentally good and its consensual expression is empowering. It rejects traditional sexual mores as societal repression, advocating for relationships based on personal negotiation and authenticity rather than pre-written scripts.

Chosen tribes. Sexual utopianism fosters new forms of community and "chosen family," particularly for those marginalized by traditional institutions. These groups create their own rituals and social codes, reflecting the broader Remixed trend of building affinity-based tribes independent of geography or traditional structures.

8. Fan Culture: New Myths and Digital Tribes

When it comes to Remixed religion, at least, we all come out from under Severus Snape’s robes.

New sacred texts. Pop culture properties like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer function as new cultural myths. They provide shared narratives about good vs. evil and meaning, often more widely known than traditional religious stories, shaping a generation's moral framework.

Digital community. The Internet transformed fandom from analog clubs to massive, location-independent digital tribes. Platforms like LiveJournal, Tumblr, and Reddit allowed fans to find like-minded individuals, build intimate communities, and create a sense of belonging outside their physical locations.

Participatory culture. Fan culture fostered a shift from passive consumption to active creation (fan fiction, memes, fan art). This "participatory culture" empowers individuals to rewrite narratives and demand that stories and communities reflect their values, influencing creators and contributing to a broader expectation of personalized content and identity.

9. Social Justice: A Progressive Civil Religion

To its proponents, this vision of history was a necessary corrective to centuries of whitewashing the worst of America’s legacy. To critics on the right, it was a traitorous decrial of the American founding ideal. Yet, at its core, the social justice movement’s rendering of America isn’t merely a history. It’s also a profound and powerful theodicy capable of explaining the evils of 2016 with recourse to a still wickeder past.

A new moral framework. Social justice culture has become a powerful civil religion, offering a comprehensive worldview without a transcendent God. It provides a compelling narrative of history as a struggle against systemic injustice (racism, sexism, etc.).

Meaning and purpose. It locates original sin in societal structures and offers purpose through self-examination (checking privilege) and collective action (activism). Lived experience is prioritized as the authoritative source of moral knowledge, validating subjective truth.

Community and ritual. Social justice fosters strong communities, often online, united by shared values and goals. Rituals like "call-out culture" function as collective catharsis and boundary maintenance, reinforcing group identity and moral solidarity through the shaming of perceived offenders.

10. Techno-Utopianism: Hacking the Self and World

“Artificial Intelligence: Silicon Valley’s New Deity.”

Optimization as faith. Silicon Valley's techno-utopianism is another emerging civil religion. It worships human potential and technology, envisioning a future of optimization through "biohacking," AI, and transcending biological limits like aging and death.

Disdain for institutions. This ideology is deeply libertarian and anti-authoritarian, viewing traditional institutions (government, education) as inefficient obstacles to innovation and individual freedom. It favors "opt-in" societies and rules determined by personal contract.

Commodified self. Techno-utopianism merges with wellness culture, framing self-improvement as a capitalist drive for efficiency. It encourages monetizing the self (gig economy, personal branding) and treating the body as a resource to be optimized, often by handing over personal data as currency.

11. Atavism: The Reactionary Counter-Religion

“I’m bored by ideology and by wordchopping,” he writes. “The images I post [of half-naked men] speak for themselves and point to a primal order that is felt by all, in a physical sense.”

Nostalgia for primal order. Atavism, particularly on the online right, is a reactionary faith yearning for an imagined past of clear biological and social hierarchies. It rejects modern "feminized" civilization and intuitionalism, finding meaning in primal, often masculine, imagery and biological determinism.

Rejection of blank slate. Unlike progressive views, atavism insists on innate, immutable differences between genders and races. It sees modern society as having fallen from a natural order, blaming feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness for this decline.

Submission and violence. This ideology values submission to perceived natural hierarchies and strongmen. For some, it manifests as self-discipline (weight lifting, strict diets). For others, particularly in extreme online spaces (manosphere, alt-right), it fuels nihilism and violence against perceived enemies (women, minorities, SJWs) as a way to reclaim power or simply revel in chaos.

12. Clash of the Paganisms: The New Culture War

By this definition, the modern atavistic right, the progressive left, and the more centrist techno-utopians all can be considered pagan ideologies, which see the sacred within the world itself.

Beyond secularism. The decline of traditional religion hasn't led to a secular age but to a rise in new, often anti-institutional, spiritualities. These "Remixed" faiths are fundamentally "pagan" in that they locate the sacred within the world, not outside it.

Competing visions. Three major contenders for America's civil religion have emerged from this Remixed landscape:

• Social Justice: Sacred in lived experience and collective liberation.
• Techno-Utopianism: Sacred in human intellect and technological optimization.
• Atavism: Sacred in biological reality and primal hierarchy.

A new culture war. The traditional culture war between religious orthodoxy and secularism is being replaced by a clash between these new paganisms. Fueled by the Internet and consumerism, they offer competing visions of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual, vying for the soul of a post-institutional America.

Last updated: May 10, 2025