January 15, 2026

Not long ago, I met some new neighbors at the park by my home. As we exchanged names and pleasantries, they asked what I did. When I told them I was a pastor, they responded with, “That’s great! I’m Hindu, my wife’s a practicing Pagan, and our kids go to the Catholic school downtown.” Needless to say, that was a disorienting statement! As we continued to talk, my mind raced as I thought about where I even begin to have a conversation with them about Jesus.

Maybe you’ve been in a similar place, grasping at straws trying to figure out how to share the gospel with people who hold wildly disparate (and seemingly incompatible) beliefs. If you’re working from the map of traditional apologetics, you likely won’t know where to start. But what if someone handed you a new map?

Fellow Derek Rishmawy has put one in your hand. In his latest essay for The Keller Center, Derek suggests that to make sense of the West’s spiritual landscape, we shouldn’t be looking for something new, but rather something very old. Derek maps the terrain of how the West is repaganizing and how Christians can thoughtfully enter into this diverse spiritual environment with the light of Christ.

In trying to map out our religious landscape today, it’s natural to reach for the data. Michael Graham, Jim Davis, and Ryan Burge will tell you that in the last 25 years, we’ve lived through the “great dechurching,” where 40 million Americans stopped attending church. Similarly, Christian Smith will argue that religion has become “obsolete,” much like how the automobile replaced the horse and buggy.

But these surveys only give a partial answer. Burge notes that “None” doesn’t always equal “atheist.” Moreover, when Smith talks about obsolescence, he’s not pointing to a dramatic growth in atheistic secularity. He’s pointing to its replacement with varieties of “spiritual but not religious” options.

God hasn’t been removed from the picture; he’s been relocated. Where did God go? There are as many answers as there are people. Consider some conversations I’ve had recently:

• At the start of the semester, I met a young man of Indian descent and Hindu religion. He approached me because he’d watched The Chosen and wanted to discuss Jesus and the Bible. We discussed faith for a few weeks, but I haven’t seen him since.
• A young woman at my gym’s front desk was reading a book on neuroscience, and when I asked her about it, she shared that her interest stemmed from experiencing radical healing of her uterine pain. She credited her healing to the practices of mindfulness, meditation, and manifestation.
• During an airport layover, a woman saw me reading a Bible commentary and wanted to talk about religion. She quoted an orthodox saying from her Baptist upbringing that “God has a purpose for whatever you’re going through.” Yet by the end of the conversation, I learned that, alongside believing in God’s providence, she engages in rituals involving crystals. She said they help her feel grounded and connected to her ancestors.
• When I shared with a young man from my gym that I’m a pastor, he told me he was a believer, too, but he came to faith without ever going to church or opening a Bible. He came to faith simply through conversations with friends and YouTube videos.

These stories are a microcosm of the broader spiritual landscape before us in America and the West.

I want to offer my survey of this landscape and suggest that to understand our current moment, we need to see it not as irreligious but as deeply pagan. After mapping the terrain, we’ll consider the stories we’ve told that have brought us to this place. Finally, we’ll explore how our current moment is rooted in a pagan mindset, one whose religious hunger cries out for more than what merely localized religions offer.

Mapping the Terrain

One of the best topographers of our spiritual landscape is Tara Isabella Burton. In her book Strange Rites, Burton lays out a bewildering array of our culture’s “spiritual but not religious” options. These can be organized into three “tribes” (and to them I’ll add a fourth).

READ ABOUT THE FOUR TRIBES AND THE WAY FORWARD