If there is not yet a true religious revival in the Western world, there is clearly a desire for one. The recent wave of secularization has reached its limit in the last few years, and in particularly dechristianized countries like the United Kingdom, the rising generation appears more religious than its predecessors. Among the intelligentsia there have been high-profile conversions, as Peter Savodnik has written in these pages, and a larger sense of regret or anxiety over the decline of institutional faith. And there is a newfound fascination with supernaturalism, from the traditional to the New Age, Christian mysticism to telepathy.
But with the impulse toward religion there is also a new anxiety: What if people become religious for the wrong reasons?