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I had a particularly geriatric habit as a fourth grader: I set an analog alarm clock for 5:45 every morning. Without hitting snooze, I’d get up, pour myself a bowl of Special K cereal and sit down in front of the TV to watch the “Today” show.
As a Mormon kid in Arkansas, I found the show to be my portal to other worlds — my way of crossing the boundary between the religious and the secular.
For a moment in 2005, though, that boundary seemed to collapse. After the death of Pope John Paul II, the show relocated to Vatican City, where the pageantry of the broadcast (the anchors, their makeup, the outfits) mixed with the majesty of Catholicism (the cardinals, their crosses, the robes). For those weeks, religion wasn’t dismissed as peripheral. It was the whole story. That was when I first felt I could become a journalist.
I was raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I grew up and eventually left my faith, but I couldn’t shake my interest in stories about belief. The topic contains so much: people’s origins, their longing and their most intimate experiences. Their grief, despair and hope. I felt how potent the stories were in my own life. And I wanted to tell them.
Last year, I set out to report Believing, a project from The New York Times that explores how religion and spirituality shape people’s lives. I traveled to several countries, interviewed hundreds of people and heard from more than 5,000 Times readers — including those who identified as religious or nonreligious — about their experiences. I also commissioned essays from writers about a significant moment in their spiritual lives.
This was a particularly difficult reporting project. It was a big topic: I was attempting to capture the variety and complexity of belief. It was sensitive: I was asking people to tell me some of their most private thoughts and experiences. (For the last 30 years of rapid secularization in the West, most people have avoided sharing those stories publicly.) And it was personal: I have my own deep and complicated history with faith and family.
So, where did I start?
As journalists, we usually stay out of the story. But in this case, I decided to share my personal experiences with the people I was interviewing, to help create a sense of openness and trust. “I was raised a devout Mormon in Arkansas, but I no longer practice,” I’d say. “Still, I understand how significant religion and spirituality can be in shaping a life.”
In each conversation, I was clear that I was a reporter, and that I didn’t have any agenda. I was just curious; I wanted to understand.
Many religious people said they felt comfortable speaking with me because they knew I understood faith. I had lived inside the rituals, obligations and beliefs of a religion. Some nonreligious people, many of whom said they had painful exits from religious communities, said they felt they could share their stories because they knew I had done my own wrestling.
I searched for stories everywhere: I sat in silence at Quaker meetings; marveled at the intricacy of Hindu temples; heard calls to prayer at mosques; met with evangelicals in the American South; ate a meal at a Sikh gurdwara in Britain; witnessed an Orthodox Christian feast day in Greece; stumbled into churches in France, Italy and Mexico; observed Shabbat; attended a “death cafe”; heard soccer fans sing hymns during games; and asked women what drew them to astrology.
Above all, I listened.
The actor Orlando Bloom explained his conversion to Buddhism at 16. Mitt Romney, the former senator, said Bain Capital had shaped his beliefs. Tishani Doshi, the Indian poet, discussed her pilgrimages to the world’s holiest places. The singer and actress Kristin Chenoweth described mixing faith and fame. Colum McCann, the Irish writer, reflected on his bike ride across the American South, searching for a God.
The singer Andrea Bocelli played the piano and sang for me before he shared his story of embracing Catholicism. As a young man, he had read the works of Leo Tolstoy and Blaise Pascal and discovered faith. It carried him through his life.
In their stories and others, I discovered a powerful, common theme: In a moment of division and disagreement, partisanship and polarization, people long to believe in something.
As my reporting continued, that longing also appeared in the data. A few months ago, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that nearly the entire country, 92 percent of American adults, said they had some form of spiritual belief — in a God, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something “beyond” the material world.
“We’re meaning-making creatures,” the journalist and professor Michael Pollan told me. “That’s never gone away.”
Many people express that desire for meaning inside a faith. But many others look for it outside. Religions don’t have a monopoly on meaning, and dogmatism isn’t just expressed by the faithful. I’ve seen longing in the crowds of sobbing faces at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. I’ve watched it transform President Trump’s rallies into revivals. I feel it in people’s unyielding devotion to a sports team, to environmental activism, their country or their political party.
I discern, in all of these moments, a persistent hope for some form of salvation or transcendence. These are human desires and impulses, appearing in many forms.
In Believing, I’m offering a snapshot of how these desires manifest both inside and outside religion. Still, there are so many more stories to tell.
Lauren Jackson is an associate editor and writer for The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter.
The post People Long to Believe, Both Inside and Outside Religion appeared first on New York Times.
