The Seven New Religions in America: Where Faith Goes When Religion Leaves
Source: No Nonsense Spirituality | Britt Hartley
Date: 2025-08-19
Based on: Tara Isabella Burton's "Strange Rites: Seven New Religions in America"
Core Thesis
"If human nature is basically the same as it's been for centuries... and people are leaving religion, then where are they going? Where are they going for community? Where are they going for identity? Where are they going for story?"
The fundamental insight: Religion is how you orient yourself in the cosmos (definition from religious scholar Mircea Eliade). When traditional religion declines, humans don't stop being religious - they find new ways to satisfy the eternal needs for community, identity, story, and meaning.
Religion #1: Wellness Culture
The New Sacred Narrative
Wellness has become a complete worldview that mirrors traditional religious mythology:
- The Fall: Your body is contaminated by processed food and chemicals
- Contamination: You've been poisoned by modern life
- Redemption: You can reclaim purity and "cheat death itself" through products and diets
"It almost sounds like you're trying to cheat death itself by having like the most pure kind of body."
The Infrastructure of Faith
- Churches: Yoga studios and meditation apps
- Priests: Influencers and wellness gurus
- Sin/Repentance: Detox and cleanse your body
- Pilgrimage: Goop summits and biohacking conferences
- Prayer/Confession: Breath work and sound baths
- Tithing: Supplement subscriptions
The Extreme Example: Brian Johnson
"He's a tech millionaire... who spends millions of dollars every year to biologically stop aging. So he eats 70 pills a day, an insanely regimented routine. He has his like teenage son's blood plasma infused into his own body... It's so structured. It's like he's a monk of his own monastic tradition."
The Fatal Flaw
"The problem with this religion is that no matter what you do, even if you are Brian Johnson or you are Gwyneth Paltrow, you are still going to die."
When wellness inevitably fails, followers are blamed: "You didn't cleanse enough, you weren't aligned, your frequencies were not aligned."
Religion #2: Digital Conspiracies & "Conspirituality"
The New Revelation
"These communities build these shared narratives... And it's wrapped in like Instagram aesthetics and spiritual jargon like energy sovereignty or true seeker."
Religious Structure
- Sacred Texts: Hidden truths and suppressed information
- Missionaries: "You need to wake up to this reality. You need to wake up to the truth"
- Eschatology: The impending "great awakening"
- Sectarianism: Exclusive groups sealed off from mainstream reality
The Pipeline Problem
"You're just watching a video about sourdough and you don't know that you've entered the pipeline of an actual functioning religion essentially."
The Deeper Crisis: Secularism's Failure
What We've Lost
"We have so much individualism that we lose community. We no longer have a place where you have to sit down with people who voted differently than you church used to do... We don't have authority, which is great in many ways, but it also means that there's no checks and balances."
The Accountability Problem
Traditional religions, despite their flaws, provided:
- Structure and elders
- Accountability systems
- Humility from being part of a long tradition
- Forced community across difference
New religions operate "without structure, without elders, without accountability, without the humility that comes from being part of a long tradition."
Political Religion: The Soulless Faith
"Political religions are like all the dogma of religion, but it has no soul. You're never wrong... Your side is the good guy. The other side is fundamentally stupid or evil or being controlled. And I just see no growth in that."
Why Theological > Political Religion
"If I had to raise kids in a political religion or a theological religion, I would rather raise them in a theological religion... because at least you'll get some stories from Jesus or Buddha or something."
The Universal Truth
"Everyone is religious about something. It might be fitness or your political identity or your fandom... but something is giving you some sense of what's real and what's good and what's true and what's worth sacrificing for."
Personal Religion: A Model
The author's own cobbled-together faith system includes:
- Horizontal moral system
- Mysticism from Sufi teacher
- Ancient texts for wrestling
- The rebellion of Jesus from seminary study
- Love of service and family from Mormonism
- Lord of the Rings: "There's things worth fighting for in this world, Mr. Frodo"
- Saints: Bill Murray and "the best lesson on existentialism in Groundhog Day"
- Temple: The "She Shed" for daily connection and learning
The Challenge for Secularism
"This is a place where secularism is struggling. We failed to produce the community and ritual and story and moral education and place where elders can share their wisdom in the same way that religion has."
The Essential Question
"If we were to accept for a moment that humans are religious by nature and in need of orienting, could you describe your orientation? What are the rituals, people, stories and values that dictate your life?"
Key Insights for Movement Building
- Human nature is fundamentally religious - people will always seek community, identity, story, and meaning
- New religions emerge in predictable patterns - they provide the same psychological functions as traditional religion
- The danger isn't that new religions exist - it's that they often lack the accountability structures of traditional faiths
- Secularism must evolve to provide community, ritual, story, and intergenerational wisdom transfer
- Everyone has a religion - the question is whether it's conscious, healthy, and growth-oriented
The analysis reveals that successful movements must understand they're competing not just with other ideas, but with entire meaning-making systems that provide identity, community, and cosmic orientation.