Deseret Magazine April 2025

T H E FA I T H I S S U E

THE GREAT

AWAKENING

WHY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE

REDISCOVERING FAITH

BETWEEN HEAVEN

AND HURRICANE HELENE

THE RELIGION OF AI

HOW BELIEF INFORMS

THE NEW AGE OF INTELLIGENCE INSIDE THE GLOBAL GENEALOGY BOOM

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CONTENTS

32 THE GREAT AWAKENING WHY YOUNGER GENERATIONS ARE GIVING FAITH A CHANCE. by mariya manzhos

“They’re figuring out there must be something more to life than what I see and I feel. I think that’s drawing people back to spirituality.”

56 EVERY FAMILY IS A MYSTERY SEARCHING FOR THE PAST AT THE LARGEST GENEALOGY CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD. by michael j . mooney

T H E FA I T H I S S U E

44

THE GREAT

AWAKENING

WHY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE

REDISCOVERING FAITH

BETWEEN HEAVEN

AND HURRICANE HELENE

THE RELIGION OF AI

HOW BELIEF INFORMS

THE NEW AGE OF INTELLIGENCE INSIDE THE GLOBAL GENEALOGY BOOM

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O N THE COVER I L LUSTR ATIO N BY J ON KR AUSE

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HURRICANE HELENE HOW A PASTOR SURVIVED THE DEADLIEST MAINLAND STORM IN A GENERATION. by ethan bauer

APRIL 2025

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CONTENTS

“My father taught me that ministering, ... means showing up again and again.”

LEADERSHIP

28 SEEDS OF CHANGE The preacher moving beyond the pulpit for healthier communities. by heber brown , as told to ethan bauer

COMMENTARY

UNDERSTANDING THE ‘NONES’

CULTURE

15

A LONG, LONG WAY TO RUN

What to learn from the religiously unaffiliated.

Why America still loves “The Sound of Music.”

by andrew teal

by natalia galicza

BREAKDOWN

HARD WIRED

IDEAS

MODERN FAMILY

16

THE THIEF OF JOY

74

20

THE RELIGION OF AI

The physical structures connecting our global society.

My toxic trait is comparing my kid to others.

Faith and the new age of intelligence.

by kevin lind

by ethan bauer

by johnnie moore

66

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

BEHIND THE CURVE

24

Overdoses are declining across the nation, but not in every state. by maia szalavitz

ODE

78

FRESH START An ode to a well-made bed. by kevin lind

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

CLEAN BREAK

18

THE WORTH OF A SOUL

70

POETRY

Do we still need the EPA?

How one prison chaplain created a space for dignity.

FOUR KINDS OF EMPTINESS

by natalia galicza

by jenna carson

by chengru he

81

APRIL 2025

5

CONTRIBUTORS

JENNA CARSON

ANDREW TEAL

ERIN ADAMS

Carson is an active-duty chaplain in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. She is the co-host of the spiritual podcast “Guiding Light” and is writing a memoir about her experience as the first and only female chaplain at a high-security penitentiary. An essay adapted from her pending book is on page 70.

The Rev. Teal is chaplain, fellow and lecturer in theology at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, where he is on the faculty of theology and religion. An ordained priest in the Church of England, the reverend is a past visiting scholar at Brigham Young University and committed to interfaith dialogue. His commentary on understanding the religiously unaffiliated is on page 15.

Adams is a photographer based in Asheville, North Carolina. Her clients include The Wall Street Journal, Monocle, Kiplinger and a host of food and lifestyle publications including Southern Living, Plate Magazine, Pasadena Magazine, The South and Savannah Magazine.

Her work illustrating a story about a family that survived Hurricane Helene is on page 44.

JOHNNIE MOORE

MAIA SZALAVITZ

TIBOR KÁRPÁTI

Moore is an influential evangelical leader and president of JDA Worldwide, a marketing and public relations agency. He is a past commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and author of seven books, including “Defying ISIS: Preserving Christianity in the Place of Its Birth.” His essay on religion employing artificial intelligence is on page 66.

Szalavitz is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has written for numerous other major publications. She is the author of “Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids” and her latest book is “Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction.” Szalavitz’s article on drug overdose deaths is on page 24.

An illustrator based in Budapest, Hungary, Kárpáti works with children’s book publishers and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, MIT Technology Review, Golf Digest, Wired, Barron’s, Bon Appétit and The Boston Globe.

His illustrations can be seen on page 16.

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

THE NEW BELIEVERS

L

ast month, the noted public intellectual Jonathan Rauch stood before an audience at BYU’s Wheatley Institute and made a confession. He pulled up a 2003 article from The Atlantic, titled “The greatest development in modern religion is not religion at all — it’s an attitude called apatheism.”

The article made the case for secularism as a social achievement worthy of celebration. Rauch then declared, in deadpan, that this article was “the dumbest thing I ever wrote.”

As secularism has increased, Rauch went on to explain, America has witnessed a number of troubling social trends: the rise of social isolation, extreme polarization and an overall decline in mental health and human flourishing.

The founders, he said, warned the nation about the perils of a democratic republic devoid of religious underpinnings.

George Washington wrote in his famous farewell address: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. … Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Recently released data from Pew Research Center, then, should come as welcomed news. Pew’s latest Religious Landscape study shows a leveling off of what had become a rise of both religiously unaffiliated Americans and those distancing themselves from Christianity (the so-called “nones”). The robust survey of close to 37,000 people attributes this plateau in secularization to the youngest group surveyed, 18 to 24 years old,

whose share of the nonreligious has declined from 34 percent in 2014 to 28 percent today.

This special Faith Issue of Deseret Magazine explores this striking change in trend. Mariya Manzhos, a contributing writer at the magazine, looks at why young adults are turning toward faith and how churches are responding (page 32). The Rev. Andrew Teal, meanwhile, encourages the faithful to reach out and listen to those who have discarded religion (page 15), pointing out that many believers were once in fact “nones” themselves.

In his essay titled “The Religion of AI” (page 66), evangelical Christian leader Johnnie Moore points out the many advantages and opportunities the burgeoning technology offers religious institutions in meeting the needs of their community members and society at large. And the Rev. Heber Brown III explains how his calling inspired the creation of the Black Church Food Security Network to address hunger and disease in vulnerable communities (page 28).

It wasn’t just Rauch and Washington who observed the need for strong religious threads woven within the American fabric.

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” John Adams said, “revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Or put in the positive by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “I doubt if there is a problem — political or economic — that will not melt before the fire of a spiritual awakening.”

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THE BUZZ

The cover story for our JANUARY/FEBRUARY issue was a package of essays on the promise and perils of artificial intelligence for American democracy. Former Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt explored how AI could enhance all three branches of government to operate more efficiently and better meet the needs of the governed (“Democracy 2.0”). Lyric Kaplan, an attorney and board member at the AI League for Good, argued for a regulatory framework that would keep AI in check to protect privacy and free speech rights (“Big Brother is Watching”). Readers of both essays expressed a general distrust in government protecting the public’s interest when employing AI, and worried about the misuse of the new technology. “I am more concerned about democracy surviving the lack of human intelligence. The ability to think, reason and discern truth from fiction is very necessary for the survival of freedom,” wrote Kay Shean. “We are in perilous times when we can no longer tell what is real, what is fake and what is specifically designed to mislead.” Nathan Tyler reminded us that the future is now, when it comes to AI impacting each individual’s life. “You may ‘refuse’ to implement AI in things you create/use. However, you ‘use’ AI pretty much every time you interact with any business (and) most any kind of computing device.”

An excerpt from Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch’s new book “Cross Purposes” generated debate on the role religion, specifically Christianity, can play in healing a divided country (“A Civic Theology”). “This is a wonderful article. However, it presupposes that most of us have a religious theology that supersedes and guides our political theology,” wrote Kerry Soelberg. “Unfortunately, many of us have been making our religious theology subservient to our political theology. We have stronger testimonies of candidate X than we do of our prophet or pope.” Reader Todd R. Hepworth also pointed to politics as the problem, citing research showing past and recent humanitarian crises were primarily political conflicts and natural disasters. His conclusion: “Politics are far more deadly than religions.” Michael Whiting highlighted Rauch’s focus on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ willingness to compromise in support of civil rights while still opposing same-sex marriage. “There will undoubtedly be people saying some form of ‘I’m just not willing to compromise on my values.’ But the Constitution absolutely compromised on values … and that is how just about anything is done in our system of government. Moderate and unify is the best option and it’s what church leaders are counseling.”

GREG M AB LY

OUR READERS RESPOND

“We are in perilous times when we can no longer tell what is real, what is fake and what is specifically designed to mislead.”

APRIL 2025

11

OPENING SHOT

INVERSION AT ANTELOPE FLATS, WYOMING. PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN

12

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APRIL 2025

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It will get brighter.

OPTIMISM

COMMENTARY

UNDERSTANDING THE ‘NONES’ DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN CULTURAL IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY

BY A N D R EW T EA L

I

n the U.K. and Europe, the rise of the religiously nonaffiliated, or “nones,” in surveys and censuses has caused fears that the era of faith is fading fast, if not already past.

Some details from the 2018 British Social Attitudes survey on religion in the U.K. placed “nones” as 52 percent of the British population, those who identify as Christian at 38 percent and as members of non-Christian faiths at 10 percent. The 2021 Official U.K. Census (compiled during the Covid-19 pandemic) was more nuanced, but shows the sharp decline in religious identity from the first decade to the second decade of the 21st century: While Christians dropped by nearly 10 million and other faiths increased slightly, those who identified as “no religion” grew more than 8 million over 10 years.

This also shows a significant change in affiliation being merely a cultural marker, among younger people particularly. More than a third (35 percent) of those over 75 self-identify with the Church of England, whereas only 1 percent of those ages 18-24 do so. In other words, the “Church of England” — which used to be the default religious category for nonpracticing or none-identifiers — has been simply replaced with “none.” Moreover, self-identification does not correlate with attendance. In the U.K., for example, less than 1 percent of the entire population worships in the network of Anglican parish churches.

The rise of “nones,” then, is a strong cultural shift — though there are exceptions to the trend. For example, since the visit of Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, who is now president of the Quorum of ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE H I LTO N

the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Sister Patricia Holland to Pembroke College Chapel in 2018, attendance at worship where I serve in Oxford, England, has grown significantly.

It is helpful to know about “nones”: It reminds us always to find out where people are and start there. I admit that there is sadness for many of us in this: Rejecting religious affiliation can ignore streams of wisdom rooted in the Spirit. It also contributes to conformity to “none-ness” (“Everyone else is a ‘none,’ then I must be”).

Furthermore, cutting ourselves off from the religious core lays us open to the tyranny of eccentric opinion. For example, the manipulated imagery after the fires in Los Angeles showing devastation surrounding a pasted image of an untouched church or chapel. The faithful are not being offensive or disloyal to call out such practices as propagandist rather than missionary. Such populist, dishonest portrayals of our attitudes, words or works are cited as reasons why “nones” don’t want to belong to institutional religion.

Let’s continue to connect lovingly with “nones,” and listen hard, without any embarrassment about our convictions. For without the center holding, there is a lack of cohesion.

A commanding and profound challenge to reach across vested interests was issued by President Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in October 2024, to collaborate and build trust with groups where there seems little common ground. It sounds simple, but we need to work together. No one group can do everything alone; we need dialogue, and to build trust by showing that our institutions can promote broader understanding. This means deeply engaging with “nones.”

I have to admit that I very much look forward to people who identify as “nones” asking what faith tradition they might join and how. I can offer practical guidance on the “how” part, but I do not have the authority to steer anyone else’s agency. Our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ responded to one such soul who did seek understanding and counsel to grow. When only 14 years old, Joseph Smith Jr. asked which church to join among the competing denominations of his day. At the instruction of divine personages, he became a “none.”

“I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong,” Smith wrote of his experience. The founding prophet of the church of which Presidents Holland and Oaks are leaders started as a “none” for good reason — but he did not stay there. He demonstrated an honest and honorable tradition of not claiming affiliation without having a personal, committed testimony.

The “none” phenomenon offers something honest and graceful to believers: helping differentiate cultural identity from the task of nurturing an enduring, authentic relationship with God in our “none” brothers and sisters.

T H E R E V. D R . A N D R E W T E A L I S C H A P L A I N , F E L L OW A N D L E C T U R E R I N T H E O L O GY AT P E M B RO K E C O L L E G E , U N I V E R S I T Y O F O X F O R D, E N G L A N D.

APRIL 2025

15

THE BREAKDOWN

HARD WIRED THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURES THAT CONNECT OUR GLOBAL SOCIETY

T H E M AG I C O F wireless living is all smoke and mirrors. We may imagine our phone calls and text messages soaring into orbit to ping off the kind of satellites we see in the movies, but 99 percent of digital information travels within an earthbound and tactile system. This global network of cables spanning the oceans and intersecting at key junctures around the world forms a massive foundation of metal, plastic, rubber and optical fiber, all built the old-fashioned way. No wonder it makes news when an undersea cable gets broken or even sabotaged. Here’s the breakdown. —K EV IN L I N D

16

DESERET MAGAZINE

LENGTH OF THE FIRST TRANSOCEANIC CABLE

1,910 miles LENGTH OF THE EXISTING SUBMARINE CABLES STRETCHED END TO END

919,629 miles FROM 10 DAYS TO 16 HOURS

The first transatlantic telegram from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan in 1858 slashed the wait by 95 percent compared to a letter sent via steamliner. That first transoceanic cable — 1,500 tons of copper wrapped in latex, 1,910 miles long — was laid along the seabed from Newfoundland to Ireland, vastly outdoing its humble predecessors across New York Harbor and the British Channel. Some called it “the eighth wonder of the world.”

DATA TRAVELS ALONG FIBER OPTIC CABLES AT

2/3

THE SPEED OF LIGHT

206,856,796 MILES PER SECOND

36 LAPS AROUND THE EARTH

Today, data travels at roughly two-thirds the speed of light along the fiber optics that form the core of our modern cables, wrapped in layers of copper, woven steel and polyethylene. Each cable is only about as thick as a garden hose.

These “information superhighways” are buried at the shoreline for security, but lay freely on the ocean floor for most of their reach, sufficiently armored against nature’s worst. Most of the time!

That’s how far the 565 existing submarine cables would reach, stretched end to end: 919,629 miles. Almost four trips to the moon.

Eighty-three more cable projects are planned or under construction, per Telegeography, including Meta’s own $10 billion project, nicknamed the “W” for the pattern it will form to link continents along its 31,068-mile journey.

Nearly all are privately owned by consortiums of telecom companies, but Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are also getting in the game.

FOUR CABLES A WEEK

Russia and China are prime suspects in recent sabotage attacks on cables in the Baltic Sea and Taiwanese waters, but accidents and natural causes break two to four cables each week. Data is quickly rerouted in most cases, causing little more than a simple refresh for end users. That was not the case off the coast of Africa in 2022, when a cable sabotage near Egypt cut off connectivity for 90 percent of Ethiopia.

ILLU STR ATION BY T I BO R KÁ R PÁT I

FIVE WEEKS IN TONGA

14 COUNTRIES OFFLINE

The Polynesian nation was digitally isolated for more than a month after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted under the Pacific Ocean three years ago. A team of 57 people had to install over 56 miles of new undersea cable to get Tonga’s internet back online. It’s one of 25 islands and countries that still depend on a solitary undersea connection, along with the Marshall Islands, Cook Islands, and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

That’s how many still lack any mainline cable connections. About 40 percent of the global population still has no internet access, according to research by Edward John Oughton, a geography professor at George Mason University. It would cost nearly half a trillion dollars to connect parts of China, India, Indonesia, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with $133 billion for cables and towers alone.

NUMBER OF ISLANDS AND COUNTRIES THAT DEPEND ON ONE UNDERSEA CABLE

25

“IF THE WO R L D ’ S UNDERSEA CABLE SYS T E M S W E R E TO S U D D E N LY DISAPPEAR, O N LY A MINISCULE AMOUNT OF THIS TRAFFIC WO U L D B E B AC K E D U P

BY S AT E L L I T E , AND THE INTERNET WO U L D E F F E C T I V E LY BE SPLIT BETWEEN CO N T I N E N T S .”

NICOLE S TA R O S I E L S K I , UC BERKELEY PROFESSOR A N D AU T H O R O F “THE UNDERSEA N E T WO R K ”

40%

OF HUMANS HAVE NO INTERNET ACCESS

6,998 ON-RAMPS — IN SPACE

Roughly 63 percent of the 11,180 active satellites in orbit belong to Starlink, the global internet provider owned

by SpaceX and Elon Musk. The company’s high profile in geopolitics has reshaped how people picture internet infrastructure. But its satellites are more like impermanent access points for the transoceanic information highway — 120 fell out of the sky this January, and it wasn’t the first time.

APRIL 2025

17

POINT / COUNTERPOINT

CLEAN BREAK DO WE STILL NEED THE EPA?

T H E A M E R I C A N L A N D S C A P E has changed dramatically since the Environmental Protec-

tion Agency was established in 1970. In some regions, the air is visibly cleaner, the water safe to swim in, the beaches and woods free of industrial waste. But for some, especially in the realms of manufacturing and construction, the EPA has become a nuisance, an impediment to commerce and a symbol of federal bureaucracy. By the time you read this, the agency could be a shell of its former self, as its Republican roots are unlikely to protect it from the current administration’s efforts to slash spending and regulation.

Which raises the question: Is the EPA worth saving? — N ATA LIA GA LICZ A

18

DESERET MAGAZINE

KEEP AMERICA CLEAN W E N E E D T H E EPA like the skies are blue, the rivers clear and the soil safe for growing food.

That broadly describes the country we inhabit today, but only about a fourth of Americans were born before 1965, old enough to remember our dingiest days.

The agency’s own archive of “before” photos, captured during its early days in the 1970s, offers a stark warning of unchecked oil spills, discarded chemicals and burning waterways. That was before the EPA became a fierce regulator, requiring companies and governments to manage their impact on natural resources.

Public health should be reason enough to maintain a strong EPA. Each year, the agency keeps more than 700 billion pounds of toxic pollutants out of public waters and prevents hundreds of thousands of premature deaths by enforcing the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act (though a Supreme Court decision curtailed water regulations in March). The EPA also works to identify unsafe products like cancer-causing pesticides and other hazardous substances, and bar them from interstate commerce.

Only the federal government can address threats that don’t respect lines on a map. More than 40 states share rivers — and water quality concerns — with their neighbors.

At least half of all air pollution crosses state lines. States would be relatively powerless to handle such challenges on their own, assuming they were willing to do so. One reason the EPA was created “was the recognition that without a set of federal standards to protect public health from environmental pollution, states would continue to compete for industrial development by taking short cuts on environmental protection,” writes William D. Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator under President Richard Nixon and President Ronald Reagan, in The New York Times.

The EPA is an efficient investment in the environment, centralizing and streamlining research into the impacts of new products. Two-thirds want the government to do more to reduce the effects of climate change. The EPA advances climate science, measures emissions, negotiates climate initiatives with the private sector, partners with states and foreign governments and advocates for robust but workable regulations. All this with a relatively modest 2025 fiscal year budget of $11 billion, about 0.7 percent of federal spending.

ILLU STR ATION BY C I N TA FOS C H

CUT THE GREEN TAPE THE EPA IS is a paragon of federal overreach, an

all-too-visible hand that interferes with the free market and places uncomfortable limits on the American people and their business. The agency determines everything from what cars we can buy to whether families can build homes on their own property. Its meddling makes energy more costly, increasing prices from food to electronics and construction. Meanwhile, news headlines often reflect the agency’s failures to protect us from threats like dangerous pesticides and microplastics.

Taxpayers bear the cost. The agency’s 2025 budget is large enough to build 10 Hoover Dams. Its inflated bureaucracy increases the likelihood of government waste and error.

“Many large bureaucratic organizations are inefficient, but the EPA is in a class by itself,” writes Henry Miller of the Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank, for The New York Times. “The EPA also misuses taxpayer money, sometimes diverting funds meant for research to things like public relations consultants to burnish its image instead.”

The EPA also contributes to a regulatory burden that is stifling American industry. An average U.S. company pays about $10,000 per employee every year to comply with federal regulations. That number bumps up to almost $20,000 for manufacturers and $35,000 for small manufacturers. Every dollar they can save in this regard could boost the economy and drive innovation. Instead, EPA policies impede private enterprise from developing environmental solutions of their own.

Environmental oversight should go back to the states, where it belongs. They saw to such laws and regulations before the EPA was signed into existence, and even now, most day-to-day environmental decisions impacting communities tend to be localized. We don’t need an additional federal arm to step in the way. “Today, as environmental concerns butt up against other values, state and local governments have generally shown themselves to be more innovative, and more respectful of private property rights, than their federal counterparts,” Jonathan H. Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor, writes for Reason magazine.

A Pew Research Center survey last year found that about half of Americans prefer a smaller government that offers fewer resources, and 56 percent believe the government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient.”

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MODERN FAMILY

THE THIEF OF JOY I KNOW I SHOULDN’T COMPARE MY SON TO OTHER KIDS — BUT I CAN’T STOP

BY E TH A N B AU E R

E

ver since my Instagram algorithm first sensed my impending fatherhood and bombarded me with its baby propaganda, I had felt the compulsion to make sure that everything my child had — and would become — not only measured up, but exceeded expectations. Imaginings of a newborn baby genius that swayed in a motorized rocking chair in a nursery that featured handy organizational infrastructure were new to me, but I soon knew enough to want the best.

In an online world, comparison starts at conception — that is, the moment when “the best” is conceived by one’s social media feed. The feeling intensified after my son was born — at a healthy nine pounds, one ounce and with a full head of hair, no less.

In his earliest days, my need to compare surfaced most noticeably around his tendency to cry. A lot. Did normal babies 20

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cry this much? I had never heard the term “colic” before, but after several desperate 3 a.m. search results, my wife and I were convinced it had to be the reason for our sleepless nights. We bought “anti-colic bottles”

FROM THE MOMENT EACH OF US IS BORN, COMPARISON IS EVERYTHING. IT’S HOW WE LEARN ABOUT MEASURING UP — LITERALLY.

before realizing that he didn’t have colic at all. Turns out, babies do, indeed, cry a lot.

As he approaches his first birthday, our panic about him not being a perfectly quiet baby seems laughable. But the same

phenomenon continues to manifest in other ways. Like when I’m suddenly aware that he can’t talk yet (even though he’s only 10 months old as of this writing), or when we feed him certain foods, or when we take him out dressed in his PJs. Is he doing all the things he’s supposed to? Are we doing all the things we’re supposed to?

These questions rely on some standard of comparison — against other kids, or other parents. It’s a phenomenon with deep biological roots, exacerbated by the digital age to a new extreme that can make it feel like parents are always doing too much, and also not enough. I know it’s a trap, but I keep falling in.

In part because, half-consciously, I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing.

A 2023 PAPER in the journal Cognitive, Af-

fective and Behavioral Neuroscience used

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MODERN FAMILY

OUR COMPARATIVE INSTINCTS CAN BE VERY USEFUL IN SOME WAYS — AND POTENTIALLY DETRIMENTAL IN OTHERS.

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a meta-analysis to identify the parts of our brains that activate when we compare ourselves to others. When these areas are lit up, we experience “an adaptive and relatively efficient means for self-judgment under uncertainty” — which is a good thing. Comparison helps us make sense of situations that would otherwise leave us rudderless, offering examples to aspire toward. But this research also found that these same brain functions can be responsible for “bias and bad decision-making.”

In other words, our comparative instincts can be very useful in some ways — and potentially detrimental in others. The distinction rests in the thin line between comparison as a tool used to measure — or a weapon used to degrade.

From the moment each of us is born, comparison is everything. It’s how we understand how we measure up — literally.

Length and weight measurements plotted on a graph against average length and weight measurements tell parents whether their kid is a normal size — or not. Then a questionnaire asks about developmental milestones. If your kid is hitting the milestones, he’s “developing normally.” If not, he isn’t, which might require intervention to get him back on track. None of this is wrong, exactly. In many ways, it’s helpful.

But it can also set a troubling tone in the information age, when the means to compare are so readily available.

There’s “this inherent need to evaluate ourselves and understand where we fit in the social hierarchy and social domain,” says Alexander Jensen, a professor at BYU’s School of Family Life. He researches social comparison and has found that all comparison is rooted in similarity. When we see someone we share similarities with — whether it’s physically (being young, being old, being tall, being short), economically (a common manifestation of this is “keeping up with the Joneses”), or because of what we’re interested in or the stage of life we’re living (having kids, enjoying recreational basketball) — there’s something inside of us that demands we take note of how we differ, too.

When you break it down, pretty much all babies are similar. But since my son isn’t at the age where he can compare himself to others, it seems that I’ve taken up the mantle on that. They’re small, they don’t talk, they’re helpless, and they can’t tell you what’s wrong or how they feel. For all the things I don’t yet know about my son, I use comparison to fill in the gaps: Do I let him watch too much TV relative to my friends’ kids? Do I feed him healthy enough food?

Does he seem put together enough for me to seem put together, too? Comparing my son was a helpful touchpoint for me to learn about having a kid, but it also spun out at times into a manifestation of my own insecurities as a dad.

Amy Webb, author of a blog called “The Thoughtful Parent,” experienced the very same urge when her first child was born.

She joined local mom networks and quickly noticed her nagging need to compare. She noticed it in other parents, too. It felt natural, but she suspects modern concepts of parenting also have an influence. She cites developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, who discovered that the verb “parenting” only emerged in the 1950s. “An act of spontaneous and loving care became, instead, a management plan,” Gopnik writes in her bestselling book, “The Gardener and the Carpenter.” In these pages, she encourages parents to be gardeners rather than carpenters. The metaphorical wisdom is to offer kids soil and sun for nurturing so they may grow on their own, rather than being shaped and sanded and screwed together.

“The way our culture has come to define parenting leads to the tendency to compare our children with other children,” Webb adds. “If we see our children as products to be perfectly produced, then it’s natural to want to compare our ‘product’ with someone else’s.”

Many parents who fall into the comparison trap tell themselves they do it because they want what’s best for their kids. This attitude was memorably celebrated in Yale professor Amy Chua’s polarizing memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which

I’VE FOUND THAT TO THE EXTENT I MIGHT TRY TO SHAPE MY SON, MY DESIRE TO DO SO HAS VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH HIM.

implies that it is, in fact, desirable to compare one’s children to other children — say, in how one’s own children better be at least two years ahead in math relative to their peers. Her philosophy isn’t based exclusively on comparison; more broadly, it promotes the belief that aiming high, working hard and internalizing rigorous discipline will serve children best in the long run. And if that means using comparison as a motivational tool, well, that’s fine. I’ve found, however, that to the extent I might try to shape my son in the way Chua describes — an extent, to be clear, far less than what she recommends — my desire to do so has very little to do with him.

T WO T H I N G S C A N be true at once: I want

what’s best for my son, and I want to be perceived as a “good parent.”

In theory, these things can work in tandem. By pushing my son in particular directions and into particular structures, he can be the happiest version of himself as an adult, or so the thinking goes. But do I really have his best interests in mind if I choose that path? Am I really trying to help him when I wonder aloud why he can’t talk yet? Or if, later on, I criticize him for not speaking Spanish as well as his friends — as my own grandmother often did to me? These comparisons aren’t really about wanting something better for him; they’re about me. Do this enough, and emerging research suggests a range of potential negative outcomes — from relationship issues

to worsening mental health — which are exacerbated in digital spaces.

A 2016 study led by BYU researcher Sarah Coyne found that moms who make comparisons while using social media are more likely to suffer from parental role overload and lower levels of parental competence; relationship issues with their partners; and an increased risk of maternal depression. If you’re online, there’s really no escaping. “Social comparison is almost inherently part of social media,” Webb adds. “Very rarely do you see real moments of struggle or disappointment.

In this way, we tend to feel our parenting or our children are inferior to those we see on social media.”

I sometimes feel that way when I see my old college roommate, Joe, online. Although I’ve seen him house an entire order of Domino’s cheesy bread at 2 a.m. and smear his body with acrylic paint that refused to wash off — which, arguably, means I’ve seen him at his worst — roomie Joe is transcended by online Joe, who has three kids whom his wife regularly posts about on social media.

They’re always doing something delightful, like playing outside or helping in the kitchen. The nice thing about Joe, though, is that because we’re close friends, he’s willing to pierce the illusion. He regales me with hard-knock tales of the fingernail that got chopped a little too far. The peeing on the floor. “I think it’s just being content and raising the child you have, not raising the child you want,” he told me. “I feel like our

brains really understand this. It’s just hard in practice sometimes.”

I suspect the desire to be “the best” parent possible is the root of this practical difficulty, and it can be a hard tendency to let go of. But there are other ways to define successful parenting that don’t involve comparison. One is to worry less about being a “successful parent” in the first place and to let kids grow at their own pace, to return to the gardening metaphor. To appreciate their growth when it happens. To celebrate it. And to focus on them rather than ourselves, however difficult it may sometimes be to tell the difference.

Jensen, the BYU researcher, suggests the first step is simply paying attention. “Maybe just being aware is enough,” he says.

“But I think with that awareness, people can work on avoiding it. And when you find yourself falling into or doing it, don’t ruminate on it.” Just take note, he says, and move on.

I’ve tried to practice that advice. Some days are better than others. But we’ve come a long way. My wife no longer compares daily bathroom schedules to friends with young kids, nor does she try to calibrate his sleep schedule down to the minute. I no longer beat myself up when I opt for a can of Gerber instead of freshly boiled and liquified carrots and broccoli. For the most part, it feels good to simply acknowledge that I have comparative thoughts. It leaves more brain space to appreciate my son for who he is rather than who he could be.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

BEHIND THE CURVE A HISTORIC DECLINE IN OVERDOSE DEATHS REVEALS WHERE — AND WHO — IS STILL AT RISK

BY M A I A SZ A L AV I TZ

L

isa Lee remembers when fentanyl first hit Reno. Lee, a founding member of the Northern Nevada Harm Reduction Alliance, was distributing the overdose antidote naloxone out of the back of her silver SUV to the street encampments near downtown, which she visits regularly. Just a day or two after she’d provided 30 kits of naloxone, someone called desperate for more, which was unusual. She then realized just how unprepared anyone was for an opioid drug roughly 50 times stronger than anything else on the streets — and the spike in overdoses about to hit the Mountain West.

It was during the pandemic, in early 2021. Overdose rates were already worryingly high: Sometimes she’d hear of a few a week, sometimes a few a day. But suddenly there were 10 in a single encampment — and people were reporting that it sometimes took more than one dose of naloxone to restart the victim’s breathing.

Lee, who is in recovery from heroin addiction herself, described the scene as “sheer panic.” A man she knew ran up to her, just minutes after being revived. “He’s hugging me and he’s like, ‘I’m back. I almost died 24

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today,’” she says. As fentanyl continued to flood the state, she says she’s lost count of the number of friends she’s lost to it.

In 2018, a Nevada law went into effect limiting the prescriptions of opioids. Lee saw the ripple effects firsthand: She was the program director for a methadone program at the time — the same program where she had once been a patient.

OVERDOSE DEATHS ARE FALLING AT THE FASTEST RATE EVER SEEN IN THE U.S. BUT ZOOM IN, AND THE PICTURE LOOKS A LITTLE DIFFERENT.

Pain patients who didn’t use illegal drugs — not just people with addiction — began calling for help. “They’d had a safe supply.

Now they’re getting pills from their grandkids’ friends that are, of course, not covered by insurance,” she says. Many lost their cars or housing.

Since neither pain management nor

addiction treatment was provided for people who were dropped by their doctors or faced rising prices for pills as the supply shrank, many began turning to street heroin. As these new markets grew in places where the drug was formerly rare, suppliers began supplementing it with fentanyl, which can be lethal at a dose equivalent to just 10 or 15 grains of table salt. The drug began wreaking havoc across America.

Recently, however, for the first time since the late 1990s, what seemed like an unstoppable rise in drug overdose fatalities has begun to slow. Between 2023 and 2024, overdose deaths in the U.S. dropped by nearly 24 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Headlines declared overdose deaths falling at the fastest rate ever seen, calling the decrease “historic.” Even now, CDC data analysis suggests the downward trend is continuing for the country.

But zoom in, and the picture looks a little different.

Unfortunately, fatalities are not falling everywhere — in some states and certain populations, they are still climbing. This is

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most marked in the West, which is the only region in the U.S. reporting increased fatalities. Montana, Utah, Nevada and Alaska all saw a rise, with Nevada’s and Alaska’s death rates reportedly climbing into double digits. The recent decrease in overdose deaths also varies sharply by race. Recognizing why these disparities persist can shed light on what matters most in turning the tide.

“It’s still really important to recognize that this is an extraordinary amount of death,” says Karla Wagner, professor of public health at the University of Nevada in Reno, emphasizing that even states seeing declines should not pull back from their efforts. “We’re still looking at 90,000 dead friends and family members a year across the country.”

ONE OF THE most overlooked aspects of the

FENTANYL SPREAD FROM THE EAST TO THE WEST. THE DECLINE IN DEATHS IS NOW FOLLOWING ROUGHLY THE SAME PATTERN.

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fentanyl crisis is its geography. Drug trafficking has historically been distinctively regional, with different networks supplying different places with varying products.

On the East Coast, heroin was historically supplied as a white or beige powder — whereas in California and nearby Western states, it was typically dark and sticky “black tar.”

Perhaps because it is easier to mix fentanyl with powdered heroin — or simply because of cartel supply networks — fentanyl spread first in the East. The drug rapidly gained a foothold because making and importing it costs a fraction of what it does to supply heroin, in part because its extreme potency makes it lighter and easier to smuggle.

Even as late as 2018, some 88 percent of deaths caused by fentanyl and similar synthetic opioids — which are now by far the most common type of overdose fatalities — occurred east of the Mississippi. “It just seems like with novel substances, it goes from east to west,” says Brandon Delise, senior epidemiologist for the Southern Nevada Health District. “That may be because the established networks for trafficking and consumption have just historically favored the East Coast as a starting point.”

The decline in deaths is now following roughly the same pattern. West Virginia, for example, which has led the nation in overdose deaths per capita for most of the crisis, saw these fatalities decline by nearly 40 percent between 2023 and 2024.

“The places that — literally to the month, almost — started with rising fentanyl overdoses, were also the first places to show, if you look at monthly data, declines,” says Dan Ciccarone, professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “A first approximation of what’s going on is that the West got fentanyl later, and we’re still learning to cope with it.”

States with policies that ranged from progressive to conservative saw overdoses skyrocket when fentanyl arrived, simply because it was so much stronger than anything else. In 2021, for example, Oregon was in the process of implementing a ballot initiative to decriminalize the possession — but not the sale — of all drugs, while expanding access to treatment for those struggling with addiction. Fentanyl hit the state around the same time, leading to increases in visible public drug use and overdose. Although nearby states that did not decriminalize saw the same negative trends, politicians in Oregon blamed the new policy, recriminalizing possession in 2024.

But states with tough drug policies — like Texas and Idaho — had essentially the same rise in overdose associated with fentanyl that Oregon and California did. And, around three or four years later, those same states are now seeing overdoses fall.

So, what is responsible for this decline?

One distressing part of the answer is likely that fentanyl has already killed most of the local residents at the highest risk, shrinking the vulnerable population and therefore the new death numbers. At the same time — and far more hearteningly — fewer young people are using opioids.

National statistics from surveys on youth drug use support this idea. For example, in 2002, over 9 percent of high school seniors

reported having misused a prescription opioid in the past year; in 2024, that proportion was 0.6 percent. In terms of street opioids like heroin, 1 percent of 12th graders reported past-year use in 2002; in 2024, just 0.2 percent did, an 80 percent decline.

“The most obvious thing is that drug cycles come to an end,” says Ciccarone. Crack cocaine, for example, showed a similar rise and fall when young people who saw the drug devastating their older siblings and parents began to steer clear of it.

But experts say that this is not the whole story. Decisions made by people who use drugs, the suppliers and policymakers also seem to matter.

One factor may be changes in the drug supply itself. The Drug Enforcement Administration has noted a recent decline in the potency of fentanyl. It argues that this shows that their crackdown has started to work. It is also plausible that traffickers have changed their formulas, recognizing that killing so many customers is not good for business.

Policy changes to increase access to overdose antidotes like naloxone and treatment could also be making a difference. Harm reduction groups — which invented the strategy of distributing naloxone directly to people at risk — reported providing around 702,000 doses in 2019.

In its first year, 2022, Remedy Alliance/ For the People, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company that makes cheap naloxone, had distributed over 1.6 million units.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of naloxone prescriptions filled at pharmacies rose over 25 percent — and the drug became available over the counter in 2023, which should further improve accessibility.

At the same time, the percentage of people with opioid addiction who received gold-standard treatment — which involves long-term use of either methadone or buprenorphine — more than doubled in recent years. Since these are the only treatments that cut the death rate by 50 percent or more, improving access to these medications can have a significant impact.

Unfortunately, as late as 2022, 75 percent of those who needed such treatment did not receive it. And access to these more effective treatments is even more limited for those at the highest risk of overdose.

T H E E N CO U R AG I N G D E C L I N E S in national

overdose mortality statistics hide variations by both geography and race. Black and Native American communities are still seeing sharp increases in overdose deaths, while deaths in white populations are falling. These differences may offer insight into which policies are helping, and which are harming.

For one, Black people have long faced far higher arrest and incarceration rates compared to white people, despite equal levels of drug use and sales. If, as many believe, criminal justice crackdowns aid access to

“WE’RE STILL LOOKING AT 90,000 DEAD FRIENDS AND FAMILY MEMBERS A YEAR ACROSS THE COUNTRY.”

treatment, Black people should have higher treatment rates and lower overdose deaths.

But the disparities run in the opposite direction, with less treatment received and greater overdose risk. Native people experience similar results, with more incarceration and less treatment completion.

“I think there needs to be more research to figure that out,” says Chelsi Cheatom, chief operating officer for the PACT Coalition for Safe & Drug-Free Communities in Las Vegas, noting that she has seen the racial disparities in overdose deaths in her work in the state.

Research conducted in large urban areas finds that Black people are less likely to receive overdose reversal training and have less access to naloxone. Cheatom advocates for messaging and distribution to change this.

Another issue in large Western states is helping people who live far from big cities. Many parts of Montana, Utah, Nevada and Alaska are so unpopulated that they don’t even qualify as “rural” for those who study these issues. These areas have six or fewer people per square mile and are known as “frontier” regions. Lisa Lee is aiming to reach these more isolated groups who live in these regions, particularly Black and Native communities.

“We’re really trying to branch out into places that aren’t served and build trust,” she says.

This often involves connecting with people who are respected in these areas and helping them help each other, as well as providing accurate health information and supplies like naloxone, clean needles, test strips that can detect the presence of fentanyl in the drug supply and other tools that can protect residents.

Though some argue that providing such help “enables” continued addiction, the research clearly suggests these programs make it more likely that people will access treatment and recovery.

“The only way that someone can recover, the only way that someone can ever stop using drugs, is if they’re alive,” says Cheatom. To help drive overdose deaths down in every state in the U.S., she says, support for a continuum of care, including harm reduction, prevention and treatment for everyone, is needed.

Lisa Lee notes that the latest provisional figures from the state medical examiner suggest that Nevada may be beginning to see a drop in fentanyl deaths, and a recent analysis by the Opioid Data Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supports this view. They may be on the cusp of saving more people than they are losing.

She says she finds hope in her kids, and the young people whom she mentors in her harm reduction work, watching them catch on and recognize the power of love and kindness. Most people who overdose don’t want to die, she says. “People just want relief.”

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LEADERSHIP

SEEDS OF CHANGE THE CHURCH-LED MOVEMENT TO FIGHT FOOD INSECURITY

BY HEBER B R OW N , AS TO L D TO E TH A N B AU E R

T

he Rev. Heber Brown III served as senior pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore for nearly 15 years. Throughout his ministry career, the Rev. Brown has extended his role as a leader beyond the pulpit, advocating for vulnerable communities across the globe.

In 2015, he founded the Black Church Food Security Network to address the declining health of his congregants and the persistent lack of access to fresh produce in America’s Black communities. The network brings Black farmers and Black Christian congregations together to support one another. It grew so quickly that he now works full time to continue expanding it. In March, he was honored at the Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business’ “Do Good. Better. Conference” as the 2025 social innovator of the year for his “faith-based approach to food insecurity in his community.” Here, he shares what he’s learned with Deseret. His story has been edited for length and clarity.

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THE BLACK CHURCH Food Security Network

began with 1,500 square feet of space on the grounds of my home church. One day, I got the idea to start our own garden there. I was somewhat naive as to what that would take, but thankfully, our congregation proved incredibly resourceful. I had studied the Great

THESE PROGRAMS ARE NOT FOOD CHARITIES. MY INTEREST IS IN BUILDING SUSTAINABLE MODELS.

Migration, during which millions of African Americans moved from the rural South to Northern cities in the early and mid-20th century, but I hadn’t really understood its full consequences until the garden came along. Many members of our congregation,

it turned out, had grown up on farmland in the South before their families relocated to Baltimore. They had left the farm, but the farm hadn’t left them.

One woman, whom we call Aunt Maxine, took the lead. Under her guidance, our church garden yielded 1,200 pounds of produce, from broccoli and corn to collard and mustard greens. Later, we added apple and peach trees. We used the bounty in our church kitchen and distributed it to church members and neighbors in need.

Before starting the network, I regularly visited members of my congregation in the hospital. I offered what help I could in the form of prayer and presence, but after a while, I couldn’t help but notice a repetitive cycle. Members of my congregation were ending up in and out of medical facilities, again and again, in part because they lacked access to high-quality food.

Whether because of affordability or geography or systemic discrimination, there was

THE REV. HEBER BROWN, TH E F OU NDE R OF T H E B L AC K C H U RC H F OOD S E C U RIT Y NE T WORK , SEES HI S WORK AS AN OP P ORT U NIT Y TO B U IL D ST RONGE R COMMU NIT IE S .

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY M A RY F. C A LV E RT

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a cycle. I founded the Black Church Food Security Network to interrupt that cycle. I knew that if a garden at our average local church could help transform our health and create economic opportunity within our local community, it could happen at other churches, too. that garden in our church has since grown to encompass 230 congregations, each with a tailor-made food justice program. Some of them, like the garden programs, make fresh produce more accessible and affordable to church members. Others focus on investing in Black farmers.

Around two years ago, I met Musa and Micole Hasan, a husband-and-wife duo who’d found each other at Tuskegee University and later became the owners of Bread and Butter Farms. Their farm is a nine-acre sanctuary of sorts, where cabbage, radishes and sweet potatoes thrive.

It was summertime when we met, and W H AT B E G A N W I T H

BROWN SAYS HI S FATHER, BI SHOP HEBER M. BROWN I I , I NSPI RED HI M TO SERVE BEYOND THE PULPI T.

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it felt like a small miracle, of sorts. For several months I had been having conversations with the leadership team at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church about bringing our program to their congregation. This particular church, the very institution once pastored by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and today led by Sen. Raphael Warnock, was determined to bring better options and nutrition to its community. The church’s leadership team decided to invest in a system where church members could purchase produce in advance of the year’s growing season, which would then be delivered over 10 weeks during the harvest.

To make it happen, I just needed to find the right farmers. That’s where Musa and Micole came in.

Bread and Butter Farms is in Sparta, Georgia, about an hour and a half south of Atlanta. Musa and Micole started selling at local farmers markets and soon realized they could make a living doing the work they loved most — and they’ve been doing

it ever since. By the time I met them, they had their logistics figured out. That made them ideal candidates to pair with Ebenezer Church since its congregants tend to be, relatively speaking, economically well-off.

These church members are glad to support folks like Musa and Micole, even at prices slightly above market rate, because they see it as an investment in ensuring access to healthy food. But just as importantly, it’s an opportunity to build up a Black business.

WHAT WE DO at the Black Church Food Se-

curity Network isn’t just about food and health; it’s also about economic justice for Black farmers who have faced a century of overt and covert discrimination. It’s to set a good example by paying Black farmers for their labor. Many members of the Ebenezer congregation agreed; in the program’s first year at the church, 93 of them signed up.

On the first morning of distribution at Ebenezer Church last August, Musa and

T HE A IM O F THE C HURCH N E T WO R K IS TO B OTH E NCO UR AG E ACC E SS TO N UTR ITIO US F O O D AND S U PP O R T SMA LL FA MI LY FAR MS.

Micole arrived early and piled dozens of up for people doesn’t just mean meeting watermelons in varying shades of green be- their spiritual needs. It also means helping neath the church’s historic red-brick walls. address the social, political and economic More than watermelons, Musa and Mi- issues that impact them. It’s not enough cole delivered potatoes, vegetables and to worry on Sunday morning; responsible greens that church members, who’d placed shepherding happens Monday through orders and paid in advance, were able to Saturday, too. haul away after Sunday service. Before the I learned this early, as a child, by watching distribution, the Rev. Ethel Richards had my dad. One time, I remember riding in the taken the time to prepare a series of recipe back seat as my parents stopped the car at a video tutorials for church members, so they red light. There, standing on the side of the could learn to cook nutritious dishes using road, was a man who didn’t have housing. It the same produce they’d just gotten. Just was cold, and he looked cold. My dad took imagine: You show up on a given morning the gloves off his hands, rolled down his to church and have a great time at your reg- window and gave them to this man. Then ular service. Then you grab a box of fresh the light turned green, and we drove away, produce on your way out the door while while I looked back at this stranger wearhaving the chance to meet with the people ing my dad’s gloves. More than any other moment, that one has who grew it and learn been my North Star where your food realin ministry, including ly comes from. After, MANY MEMBERS OF with the network. It you go home with new OUR CONGREGATION recipe tutorials made isn’t just about preachHAD GROWN UP by someone you know ing in the pulpit, but ON FARMLAND IN THE SOUTH BEFORE from church. When I also about how you live RELOCATING TO talk about using food your life day to day. I BALTIMORE. THEY and church together saw that in my dad, and HAD LEFT THE FARM, to promote health and I thought, “I want to be BUT THE FARM HADN’T LEFT THEM. like him.” wealth, this is precisely the sort of situation I Because of that, we envision. embrace people across These programs are lines of race and relinot food charities. I’m grateful for the gion. We partner with many mosques and work food charities do, and certainly, that synagogues. In fact, Musa and Micole are work has its place. However, my interest is Muslim. Their farm was devastated by Hurin building sustainable models that con- ricane Helene last September, and their innect Black farmers and Black churches surance company rejected their claim. After in a mutually beneficial cycle, promoting they had grown produce for that church for 10 weeks and helped them to be as healthy health and wealth for both parties. as possible, I thought it was only right MY FATHER — WHO is coming up on his 40th that when the storm struck their farm, the year in ministry — taught me that min- church could help them rise and rebuild. istering, or shepherding a flock, means They didn’t have to go through this alone. showing up again and again and again, They had a community behind them. in whatever way your flock needs you. It It’s moments like that when we recogmeans being present even when you don’t nize that while many things make human have all the answers. It means sharing life beings distinct, food is one thing that reliwith people through the ups and downs ably brings us together. Sweet potatoes are and offering a stable, thoughtful, sup- sweet potatoes, whether you read the Quran portive presence through it all. Showing or the Bible.

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THE GREAT AWAKENING The rise of religious ‘nones’ is slowing, revealing an unexpected twist: Younger generations aren’t rejecting faith or spirituality — they’re reimagining it.

What this means for the future of religion in America

BY

Mariya Manzhos

ILLUSTRATION BY

Jon Krause

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Jodi Hilton

APRIL 2025

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ON A SUNDAY MORNING IN JANUARY, 20- and 30-somethings packed

“They’ve been the most marketed-to generation. They have access to everything.

But that access has not equated to satisfaction; it has not equated to more joy.”

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the chapel inside Temple Ohabei Shalom, a historic synagogue on the main thoroughfare of a quiet residential neighborhood near Boston. Stained-glass windows and stage lights cast a kaleidoscope of colors across the dimly lit space. The congregants were part of Grace City, a nondenominational church that began meeting in the synagogue last fall after outgrowing their previous meeting spot at a coworking space downtown. The church started in 2019 with just 50 people, but after Covid, attendance surged.

The service opened with a Christian worship song backed by drums and guitar, and people kept trickling in, scanning for open seats. Volunteers hurried to set up an extra row of folding chairs. At the entrance, attendees picked up small hourglass-shaped containers of grape juice and crackers for “bread and cup,” a contemporary take on communion.

Some sat cross-legged on the floor, notebooks and Bibles propped open; others stood, cradling coffee mugs. As the band got louder, a dad slipped noise-canceling headphones onto his baby’s head.

In Boston — “a secular wasteland,” as one service attendee put it — a 9:30 a.m. gathering of young Christians, who could otherwise be at brunch or at the gym, felt countercultural. “There is no social pathos in being a Christian,” says Pastor Brian Owen, a boyish 40-year-old with a mustache. He moved to Boston from Tennessee with his wife and two children to establish Grace City church. “You’re seen as a weirdo.

You’re actually seen as (culturally) dangerous,” he says. It’s partly why Owen saw Boston’s transient urban setting as fertile ground for his work as a church planter.

Now, over 300 people gather at one of two services offered every Sunday.

On the morning I visited, Owen preached about the “Christian ethic of love,” then announced the kickoff of a 40-day digital fast — a collective effort to cut screen time — and a potluck to be held after the service.

I asked him how he explained the growth of his church, especially in what’s considered to be one of the most godless parts of the country. “I think that this generation in particular — so Gen X and millennials — they’ve been the most marketed-to generation. They have access to everything.

But that access has not equated to satisfaction; it has not equated to more joy,” says Owen. “They’re figuring out there must be something more to life than what I see and I feel. I think that’s drawing people back to spirituality. They’re drawn to the unseen because they have experienced what the seen has to offer, and they still find it lacking.”

T H E V I B R A N CY AT Grace City is striking,

because so many Americans have stopped going to church. Congregations across the country have been dwindling for decades.

Research has found that nearly 86 churches close every week. A third of Americans attend religious services in person once a month. In 2021, U.S. church membership fell below 50 percent for the first time in

AT G R AC E C I T Y CHURCH NEAR B OSTO N , YO U N G CO N G R E G A N TS A R E FLI PPI N G TH E S C R I PT O N T H E D E C LI N E I N N O N R E LI G I O U S AMERICANS.

recorded history, according to Gallup, down from 70 percent in 1999. The share of Americans who identify as Christians dropped from 78 percent to 71 percent between 2007 and 2014, according to Pew Research Center.

As Christians shed their religious identity and practice, another religious group — the religiously unaffiliated “nones,” as they’ve come to be known — soared in growth. Between 1991 and 2020, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans skyrocketed from about 5 to nearly 30 percent, making this group the largest and the fastest-growing religious demographic in the country.

But since 2020, the rapid ascent has leveled off, signaling that the meteoric trajectory of secularization has hit a ceiling.

Today, the 29 percent of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated include 5 percent of self-described atheists, 6 percent of agnostics and 19 percent who say they’re “nothing in particular,” according to Pew’s new 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study.

Alongside the plateau among the nones, the drop in Christianity has leveled off at 62 percent. The study, the third of its kind following those in 2007 and 2014, surveyed close to 37,000 Americans.

The growth of the religiously unaffiliated and the decline of Christianity are “the flip sides of the same coin,” says Gregory Smith, senior associate director of research at Pew, who worked on the study. “It’s very striking that over the last five years, both of those trends have leveled off.”

Two possible reasons explain the plateau.

Unlike the long-term decline, religiousness across all ages — measured by factors such as prayer frequency and Christian identity — has remained relatively stable since 2020. Pew also found that the gap in religiosity between the youngest generation APRIL 2025

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“They’re figuring out there must be something more to life than what I see and I feel. I think that’s drawing people back to spirituality.

They’re drawn to the unseen because they have experienced what the seen has to offer and they still find it lacking.”

surveyed and those just ahead of them is much more narrow. That is to say, those between 18 to 24 are not significantly less religious or less Christian than adults ages 25 to 34. The youngest adults are just as likely to pray daily and identify as Christian than their slightly older counterparts, Pew found. In fact, the percentage of those young adults among all nones has declined from 34 percent in 2014 to 28 percent today.

Yet, the factors driving the long-term downward trajectory of religion still persist.

For instance, the younger generations are

still significantly less religious than their elders. They neither pray nor attend religious services as often and fewer identify as Christians than the oldest adults, who are in their 70s. Only 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 years old attend religious services at least monthly. Adults between 30 and 49 years old make up 41 percent of the nones, followed by the youngest adults (18-24) at 28 percent. This means that 7 in 10 of religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S. are under the age of 50.

The social scientists I spoke with are

% OF U.S. ADULTS WHO IDENTIFY AS …

78% CHRISTIAN

71% 62%

63%

29% 23% RELIGIOUSLY UNAFFILIATED OTHER RELIGIONS

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7%

6%

5%

2007 RLS

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28%

2012

6% 2016

2014 RLS

2018

2020

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2024

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cautious about interpreting this recent leveling off of the nones as a long-term reversal of growing secularization — let alone a religious revival. The nones are likely going to continue to rise, Pew predicts, just at a slower pace. Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, likened the 30-year surge of the nones to an early internet startup phase of explosive growth, now settling into a more “methodical” and “controlled” pace of long-term growth driven primarily by the demographic replacement: The more religious generations will gradually give way to younger, less religiously affiliated ones.

“The rise of the nones will be more based on generational replacement than people leaving religion,” Burge says.

But alongside these demographic shifts, the beliefs of Americans are evolving, too.

A large majority of Americans, 86 percent, believe they have a soul or spirit inhabiting the physical body and 83 percent believe in God or a universal spirit. Among the youngest adults, 63 percent say they feel a “deep sense of wonder about the universe at least monthly,” according to Pew. Weekly, 63 percent of Americans engage in activities like listening to music, meditating, visiting nature or “centering” themselves — for a spiritual purpose. Pew also found that religion and spirituality are not at odds with each other: Those who identify with a religion are more likely than those who are nonreligious to be spiritual.

While traditionally nonreligious, nones are still a believing group, the data show, just in a different way. Fifty-seven percent of religiously unaffiliated, across all age

P E W RE S E ARC H C E NT E R, F E B RUARY 2025 , R E LI G I O U S LA N DS C A PE ST U DY OF U. S . ADU LTS CONDU C T E D J U LY 1 7, 2 02 3 - M A R C H 4, 2 024.

PASTO R B R I A N OW E N SAYS A R E A LI ZATI O N T H AT “ T H E R E M U ST B E S O M E TH I N G M O R E TO LI FE ” I S D R AW I N G YO U N G PE O PLE TO S PI R I TUA LI TY A N D M O R E R E LI G I O U S LI FE STYLE S .

groups, believe in a spiritual dimension beyond the material world and 69 percent affirm the existence of a soul or spirit in the body.

And they’re not antagonistic toward religion: 19 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say religion is very or somewhat important to them, and among the “nothing in particular,” 69 percent believe in God or a universal spirit. Rather than rejecting belief and spirituality outright, many are reshaping those concepts on their own terms, crafting individualized frameworks in place of traditional religious structures. If religious identity was once seen as a binary — either religious or secular — a third category has emerged. “It’s neither hardcore secular nor traditionally religious,” says Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame. “It shares with religion; it believes in spiritual realities.”

The shift isn’t confined to America, either.

Globally, many are still clinging to belief of some sort. Eighty-two percent of people worldwide consider themselves religious

or spiritual, or they would describe themselves as a person of faith, according to a 2022 survey conducted by HarrisX and the Faith & Media Initiative. Also, 72 percent believe in God and other deities.

But for religion to take hold long term, something would have to change, the Pew report concluded: “ For example, today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.”

O N E O F A S H L E Y Fitzgerald’s most vivid memories of growing up in the Lutheran church was walking down the aisle as Santa Lucia, an Italian saint celebrated during Christmastime. She wore a flowing white dress with a red sash and a crown of candles on her head. Fitzgerald, who is now an environmental sociologist in Chicago, went on to attend a Catholic high school — while not a deeply religious experience, still one that was shaped by tradition.

But in college, on the liberal campus of the University of Chicago in the early 2000s, when the ideas of the New Atheism movement were taking hold, being religious was a sign of intellectual inferiority or, as Fitzgerald put it, it meant you were “dumb.” So she stopped going to church. It didn’t help that her Lutheran church on campus was poorly attended. “(Religion) just wasn’t part of my life. I didn’t think about it much,” she says. As she had kids, she “didn’t explicitly feel called to go to church.”

Smith describes a complex cluster of reasons that have accelerated the secularization of people like Fitzgerald since 1991 as “convergence of multiple perfect storms.” After the Cold War, Americans no longer felt compelled to embrace Christianity as a national identity in opposition to communist atheism. Mounting sexual abuse scandals and failures to address them in Catholic and evangelical churches eroded trust in organized religion, fueling broader disillusionment with American institutions. The religious APRIL 2025

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underpinnings of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the digital revolution’s widespread dissemination of information and postmodernist relativism led many to withdraw from institutional faith.

Religion also became entangled in the growing political divisions. More than ever before, particularly among white Americans, the more religious tend to align with the Republican Party and lean conservative, while those who are less religious more often lean liberal. This shift is especially pronounced on the left, Pew found. Among the liberals in the U.S., 37 percent consider themselves Christian, which is a 25-point drop from 62 percent in 2007, according to the survey. While conservatives for the most part identify as Christian, there are now more religious nones than Christians among the liberals, the study noted. “ The cultural status of religion has been put on 38

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the defensive. It’s characterized as authoritarian and it’s patriarchal,” says Smith, who is the author of the book “Why Religion Went Obsolete.” “These complaints have always been around, but now they’ve become much more dominant.”

As societal fragmentation deepened, political polarization, institutional distrust and the erosion of shared narratives left many feeling unmoored. Anxiety and depression have surged, and loneliness has been declared the epidemic of our time.

“It’s not just religion, there’s a growing individualization and distrust of anything involving power, money and authority,” says Smith.

Institutions have plenty of flaws, but “how does society instill morals in people without any kind of moral framework?”

That was the question Fitzgerald, 39, began wrestling with the past three years, as

her three children got older. “At the same time, these are the institutions that have evolved over centuries to develop a moral framework, and that moral framework can’t really just be plucked out of individual families’ brains,” she says. “ I think it’s a little bit unfair in some ways that my parents and my husband’s parents took the time to get us acquainted with our ancestral religions, and I’m not giving that same gift to my kids,” says Fitzgerald. She tells me she’s watched her friends cycle through attempts at finding purpose and belonging — Buddhism, yoga, psychedelics. “It’s just a really painful process if you don’t have any guidance at all,” she says. “It’s a huge cultural barrier to get baptized as an adult and to get started again and you don’t even know where to start.”

As more people enter adulthood without religious affiliation, the question looms:

W H ILE A C HA R ISM ATI C PASTO R W ITH A L AR G E SO C IA L ME DI A F O L LOWIN G USE D TO AT T R AC T WO R SHIP PERS, YO UN G E R GE N E R ATI ONS VA LUE CO M MUN ITY, AU THE N TIC ITY A N D HO N E STY F R O M THEI R C H UR C H E X P E R IE N CE.

A large majority of Americans, 86 percent, believe they have a soul or spirit inhabiting the physical body and 83 percent believe in God or a universal spirit. Among the youngest adults, 63 percent say they feel a “deep sense of wonder about the universe at least monthly.”

What, if anything, can replace the communal structure and moral frameworks that religious institutions used to provide? “There is a definite lostness — and I don’t mean that in theological terms, but I mean who are we as a people? Where are we going?

What is life about? What do I want my life to be? What can you rely on? What’s true?” says Smith, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism 15 years ago. “There is this smoldering resentment and not feeling attached to the standard mainstream American way of life in which they’ve always understood religion to be part of.”

Research suggests that religion could benefit from better representation in the media and entertainment to help people sort out those questions. The Faith & Media Initiative’s Global Faith and Entertainment Study in 2023 found that 63 percent believe that the entertainment industry reinforces religious stereotypes and 80 percent say it’s important to make portrayals of faith on screen more accurate.

As I’ve talked to believers, and skeptics, about what’s driving people to — and away — from religion, a recurring theme emerged: In a fluid world of impersonal connections, where few things are unmediated by technology, people are seeking a solid footing, an honest and genuine connection. People are “toying with new ways of wrestling with the language surrounding these spiritual beliefs,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociologist of religion at the University of Tampa. In reassessing their relationship with the broader sources of meaning, belonging and transcendence, for many, religious belief is emerging as a viable option.

“There is this narrative that the institution of religion is dying, but I think that the desire for Jesus is more prevalent than ever,” says 23-year-old Tucker Thomas, a Grace City worshipper, who grew up nonreligious in Colorado, but converted to Christianity after a friend invited him to take an introductory course on the basics of Christian belief.

“Both at the individual level and at the cultural level, people had to go through an

experience of separation from religion before they were ready to consider some of its arguments afresh,” says Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, whose latest book, “Believe,” makes a case for why religious belief makes rational sense. “And now I think we’re in a different moment.”

WHEN CHOOSING A church to join with her

family, it ultimately came down to community for Fitzgerald. The family tried the Lutheran church, but much like her congregation in college, it was small and lacked energy. But the parish in Fitzgerald’s Irish Catholic neighborhood — where her husband grew up — felt vibrant, filled with boisterous singing and young families.

Mainline Protestant denominations, including the Lutheran church, have been in decline for decades, losing over half of their members since the 1960s. Today, Lutherans make up 3 percent of the population in the U.S., according to the Pew Research survey.

Fitzgerald’s experiences sync with Pew’s finding that the religiosity of Americans is closely tied to their upbringing — about 74 percent of people who grew up attending religious services have stuck with their childhood faith, while 15 percent, despite growing up observant, reported having no religion. The “stickiness” of religious upbringing is lower among the youngest generation — only 28 percent of those raised religious are still religious, according to Pew. Fitzgerald is also among 35 percent of Americans who have switched from the religion they grew up in to another one, although Pew showed that for every new convert to Christianity, the tradition loses six.

“Kind of dead” is how Bri Pedersen, a Grace City attendee, describes the more traditional churches she checked out with her husband when they first moved to Boston. “No one was really talking, no one was excited that you were there,” says Pedersen, 27, as she bounced her three-month-old, strapped to her chest, after the service at Grace City. Pedersen, who grew up in the APRIL 2025

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evangelical church, ended up staying at Grace City, where she and her husband felt embraced — people helped them move and set up a meal train when Pedersen had a baby. “That’s rare these days for the culture to have a community and people that would sacrifice to help you.”

The nondenominational Protestant churches are a unique exception to the trend of shrinking congregations across the country. Since 2007, the share of nondenominational Protestants grew 58 percent, according to Pew. Today, 7 percent of Americans identify as nondenominational — an uptick from 6.2 percent in 2014.

There are other signs of vitality across other faith communities. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has one of the highest portions of younger people among its congregants: The share of adults between ages 18 and 29 make up 25 percent of the church’s members, while that age cohort represents 14 percent of evangelical Protestants and Catholics. Large families, robust youth programs and mission service may be part of the explanation, according to David Dollahite, social scientist and professor of family life at Brigham Young University. “The fact that the family tends to be involved in home-based worship means that youth are able to see the faith alive in their own homes,” he says.

The Latter-day Saints, along with members of historically Black Protestant churches and evangelical Protestants, score high levels of observance in practice and belief. For instance, Latter-day Saints attend church at higher numbers: 69 percent compared to 25 percent of other Americans; and 72 percent say that religion is very important to them, which is significantly higher than 53 percent of religiously affiliated Americans overall.

Across the river from Grace City is St. Paul’s Parish, a Catholic congregation that meets in a red brick Romanesque building with a rose window framed in the center of the facade, and it too has recently seen a new wave of vibrancy with an influx of converts. I’ve gotten to know the community 40

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because my son attends the parish school and sings in the church’s choir. Located next to Harvard University, St. Paul’s has long attracted students and young professionals who sought a more intellectual approach to faith and were eager to reason through their doubts and questions, the Rev. William Kelly, the priest of the parish, tells me.

In the aftermath of the sex abuse scandals revealed in Boston in 2002, the church lost about half of its members. But in the past three years, the number of converts at St. Paul’s doubled each year from about 15 to 30 — many of them men.

Although women still report to be more religious than men, the religious gender gap has been shrinking, Pew found. And the gap is narrowing, especially among the youngest generation — in the 18 to 24 age group, 30 percent of women and 26 percent of men pray daily. That gap is much wider among older adults: About 20 percent of women pray more than men. “We’ve known forever since social science existed that women tend to be slightly more religious

than men — and that’s not true anymore,” Burge says. “Young men and young women are as religious as each other.”

Among the Latter-day Saints, the gender gap has reversed: 52 percent are men and 47 percent are women, compared with 46 percent men and 54 percent women in 2014, according to Pew. The men also outnumber women in Orthodox Christianity, comprising 61 percent of its adherents, according to the latest survey.

The Rev. Kelly partly attributes this gender shift to the absence of a blueprint for what it means to be a man today. “If you hear the word ‘masculinity,’ the word you’d automatically put with it is ‘toxic,’” he says.

“And that has been drilled into men on the secular side.”

It’s perhaps why, for many, the church has become a refuge from the progressive left. In a so-called “vibe shift,” many have turned away from what they see as the excesses of progressive politics toward more conservative and traditional expressions.

Traditional Catholic churches have seen

HOW RELIGIOUS UPBRINGING INFLUENCES CHURCH ATTENDANCE Among those who were raised religiously affiliated and grew up

% WHO CURRENTLY IDENTIFY WITH ...

SAME RELIGION IN WHICH THEY WERE RAISED

A DIFFERENT RELIGION

NO RELIGION

NO ANSWER

Attending services weekly in a family in which religion was ‘very important’

74%

10%

15%

1%

Seldom/never attending religious services in a family in which religion was not too/not at all important

42%

16%

40%

2%

All others

59%

12%

27%

1%

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C H U RC H IS WHE R E E LV I S MO R A R A F IN DS A R EP R IE VE F R O M T HE STR E SS O F WO R K A N D A HOSTIL ITY TOWAR D FA ITH.

more women wearing veils, an interest in Gregorian chant and in classical church architecture. “The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete,” wrote venture capitalist and Christian writer Santiago Pliego.

Nathanael Ginn, a 31-year-old account manager at a tech company from Indianapolis, Indiana, tells me he discovered a more rigorous and “masculine” form of worship in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. “There is this element of the call to action, of going and living a holy life and participating in the energies of God that really draws men in — that you can impact things,” says Ginn.

After growing up in Baptist and evangelical churches, he went through a period of “wandering years,” when he was introduced to neo-paganism and the occult by friends and began diving into the literature about those alternatives. But over time, he found that it was “just new ageism with what I would call an edgy veneer,” a way to “cling to the old ways of our ancestors” for people who were angry at Christians, he says. Ginn describes his first Eastern Orthodox service over Christmas in Fishers, Indiana, as “the most transcendental experience” he’s had at church. He’s not alone. In 2022, a study of Orthodox Christian converts showed a surge in adult converts, with the largest increase seen among single men.

The decline of stable jobs, rising costs of living and the crumbling of traditional pathways to success have left some men questioning the systems they once believed they could rely on. Ginn continues: “The economic uncertainty and the broken promises of the social contract that Americans believed in are causing men, in particular, to look for something different.”

AS YO U N G P E O P L E drift away from orga-

nized religion, albeit at a slowing rate, churches are up against a critical challenge — and an opportunity: how to stay relevant and attract young believers who appear to be open to a religious experience. “ We’re not merely in an era of decline and decay, 42

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but of reimagining and renewal,” says Raymond Chang, executive director of the Tenx10 Collaboration, an initiative focused on bringing young people to faith.

Spiritual openness among young people demands soul-searching from religious institutions, Smith at Notre Dame tells me, taking an honest assessment of which traditions and beliefs are essential and which ones are merely cultural artifacts. For instance, as more people delay or forgo marriage and children, churches might rethink how they frame family values without compromising core beliefs. “At some point, religion shouldn’t just mimic the culture — they have to be themselves; they have to have some integrity with their traditions,” Smith says. “But do we think certain things are essential that are not essential?”

What once attracted seekers — a massive social media following, a charismatic pastor, a podcast — is no longer sufficient, Grace City’s Owen tells me. Young believers crave something deeper and more substantial: a blend of more expressive, energetic and “charismatic” worship with “contemplative” elements like prayer, scripture reading and liturgy. “We don’t just want loud music with lights and fog. It’s not what’s attractive to this younger generation,” he says. “They want authentic. But we also don’t just want smoke and bells. We want both.”

For Elvis Morara, a 24-year-old from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the worshippers at Grace City are “real people” bonded by their shared faith and challenges in a city that can be cutthroat professionally and hostile to religious viewpoints. “A lot of people here made a very conscious decision to leave where they came from, where it was comfortable, to come to an environment...where they want to grow in their faith,” he says.

What young people want isn’t a “country club Christianity,” Chang says, but a bold, mission-driven faith that’s engaged in “healing” the world rather than just serving its own members. And one that also mirrors the diversity of the younger

HAVE YOU BECOME MORE OR LESS SPIRITUAL OVER YOUR LIFETIME?

ALL U.S. ADULTS

MORE

LESS

NO CLEAR CHANGE

43%

11%

46%

BIRTH COHORT

AGE TODAY

1940s OR EARLIER

74+

45%

8%

47%

1950s

64-74

48%

8%

43%

1960s

54-64

48%

9%

44%

1970s

44-54

46%

10%

44%

1980s

34-44

41%

14%

45%

1990s

24-34

39%

14%

47%

2000-06

18-24

35%

population. “ Young people expect this diversity because they’re experiencing it in almost every other setting within their life outside of the church.”

Douthat describes his vision for a path forward as “traditionalism/orthodoxy without litmus tests.” He believes churches should embrace theological and liturgical distinctiveness while remaining open to those who aren’t fully on board with every doctrine. “Having a kind of zone of uncertainty and agnosticism as you enter into religion is an inevitable part of the human condition and something that churches should welcome and respect,” he says. In a malleable world, young people are ready to be shaped by something, even maybe the demands of a religious tradition.

Progressive churches, particularly mainline Protestant denominations, have struggled to retain members, while conservative churches retain members more effectively — by offering a distinct, countercultural identity. While the progressive churches may provide a community, “ you’re not going to get a lot of validation for who you are in a progressive church that you wouldn’t get from outside that,” said Cragun.

12%

“We’ve known since social science existed that women tend to be slightly more religious than men — and that’s not true anymore.

Young men and young women are as religious as each other.”

53%

Outside of the walls of a church, there is a lot that family can do, too. Dollahite urged older generations within families to recognize that disaffiliation is often tied to broader distrust in institutions, not necessarily a rejection of faith. “(Parents and siblings) need to show understanding and compassion and not make snap judgments and be dismissive or patronizing toward a person who decides to disaffiliate for a time,” he says. Youth are eager for meaningful intergenerational connections and the wisdom, advice and mentorship that comes with them. “They also want to know that older people … aren’t simply trying to tell them what to do, but walk and journey with them,” Chang says.

This erosion of shared religious language and identity poses a serious challenge to American democracy. Burge predicts the decline of what he calls “polite religion” — a middle-of-the-road, pluralistic approach that once held broad appeal. In its place, he foresees a growing divide: Conservative churches will become more doctrinally rigid, particularly on tenets around sexual morality, while the non-religious and atheists will also grow more ideologically orthodox,

but in the opposite direction. “We’re going to have a harder time functioning as a democracy when we don’t have these spaces where people interact with each other from different political and economic backgrounds,” Burge says. “And that makes it really hard to make a democracy function.” Or, as Jonathan Rauch put it in his recent book, “Cross Purposes,” “the crisis for Christianity has turned out to be a crisis for democracy.”

But the question of what happens to society without religion is even more existential, Douthat argues. With birth and marriage rates declining and artificial intelligence reshaping industries and daily life, an unsettling question hangs over the future: How will human societies sustain themselves in the face of these transformative forces? While religion may not be a cure-all, Douthat says, it’s part of the solution. “I think clearly religion and religious perspective on the world has to be part of whatever answer there is to this challenge,” he says. But ultimately, to revive religion, its social benefits may not be enough: “The only thing that can revive religion is actual belief that it’s true.”

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BETWEEN

HEAVEN AND

HURRICANE HELENE

BY

ETHAN BAUER

CAUGHT IN THE PATH OF THE DEADLIEST MAINLAND STORM SINCE KATRINA, A PASTOR FACED A CHOICE: WAIT FOR RESCUE, OR BRAVE THE SURGE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

ERIN ADAMS APRIL 2025

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THE WATER THUNDERED IN AND DOUSED THE LAND

WITHOUT MERCY. I T M U D D I E D E V E RY lawn, and it blunted

the tree bark, and it drizzled off the shingles and into the driveways and gathered speed into the streets, where the currents found the drains and cascaded away. Nothing new in these mountains surrounding Asheville, North Carolina. Nothing worth noticing. Not until the early hours of Friday, September 27, 2024, in the dim light of the waning crescent moon, when a new kind of storm cloud arrived. It stirred Matthew Templeton in the night, its winds stretching and snapping branches of hemlock and oak. He watched the trunks sway and the limbs creak in the shadows outside his bedroom window, stuck somewhere between a typical nightmare and something more real.

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He awoke again sometime between 6 and 7 a.m. The wind still howled, and now the water pelted the family’s five living room windows at a perpendicular angle. His wife, Heather, was already up, chatting on the phone with their oldest daughter in South Carolina. Now Matthew joined her marveling at the storm outside. Their younger daughter Jocelyn, a high school freshman, had planned to watch a Hallmark movie — a weather advisory had closed schools — but instead she, too, watched the windows. The pelting rain hosed the glass like a carwash jet. Meanwhile Titus, a redheaded high school senior, slept down the hall.

A hunting rifle and a signed photograph of actor Mark Hamill decorated the walls around his bed.

GALLO IMAGE S / OR B ITAL H OR IZON / COP E R NICU S S E NTINE L DATA 2024

Jocelyn and Titus’s father was many things. He worked in construction during the day, and as a Baptist pastor at night. But Matthew Templeton also had a hobby: an autograph collection that held thousands of pieces valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. It had become something he and Titus worked on together — something lighthearted and fun that doubled as a source of secondary income. Matthew kept the artifacts in a rented storage unit two minutes down the mountain, near the banks of the swollen Swannanoa River.

He’d been down to check on the storage unit just the day before. The building manager was in the parking lot, working to fortify the drain. Forecasts had warned about the approach of Hurricane Helene. No forecast, however, could have conveyed the scale of devastation that would come with it, with over 200 killed throughout the South and over 1,000 homes destroyed in western North Carolina alone. Helene swept 30-foot walls of moisture into mountain valleys far from the coasts where hurricanes tend to do their worst damage. It would leave Asheville without running water, working electricity and cell service for weeks and caused an estimated $53 billion in damage to key infrastructure. Its aftermath was downright apocalyptic, on a scale and of a severity rarely seen in the modern United States. Yet at the time, watching the storage unit building manager prepare the parking lot for the worst, Matthew didn’t think much of it. The next morning, still watching rain pelt the windows, an emergency alert flashed on his phone. It warned residents throughout the community of a nearby dam at capacity. It warned of catastrophic flooding. Matthew decided to make one more trip to the storage unit, to move what he could to higher shelves. Most of the collection was paper — posters and photographs and cards. Water would destroy it. If he acted quickly, he thought, a small flood wouldn’t mean the end of a 30-year project.

As he pulled on a pair of blue jeans, work boots and a white Carhartt jacket, Heather protested. “Do you really want to go out

there now?” she asked. “Let it go.” But she also figured the storm wouldn’t be a huge deal because, frankly, most storms aren’t.

Matthew would most likely go down there, move some boxes around and, should a small flood come through, their investment would be protected. In and out, he assured her. Ten minutes.

“Just be careful,” she told him as he smacked a ball cap onto his thinning gray buzzcut, sounding sincere but less than truly afraid. He would be careful, Matthew promised, and he meant it. He believed it.

He stepped outside, past a “God bless America” sigil affixed to the front door, and jogged to his F-250 pickup, an elbow held out to shield his face from the rain and gusts. Then he drove away, into the wet static and the unknown. He’d be back, he believed, in no time at all.

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H E LE N E M A D E LA N D FA LL I N FLO R I DA AS A C AT E G O RY 4 HURRICANE, THOUGH I T W E A K E N E D TO A TR O PI C A L STO R M BY TH E TI M E I T R E AC H E D N O R TH C A R O LI N A O N S E PT E M B E R 27, 2024 .

E COULDN’T REACH the end of the

block. Fallen trees clogged the way.

He steered down the side streets until finally he found a clear path that took him toward the clubhouse of the Asheville Municipal Golf Course, adjacent to the storage unit building. Normally he might listen to 106.9 The Light, a Christian station founded decades ago by Billy Graham.

Or to old-timey radio dramas. He loved the inflections in the voices, the emotions they APRIL 2025

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THE HURRICANE DUMPED 40 TRILLION GALLONS OF WATER — ENOUGH TO FILL A COMPLETELY EMPTY GREAT SALT LAKE FOUR TIMES OVER.

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could convey through sound alone. But today, the rain ricocheting off his window was the only sound in his cab. That and the frantic swiping of wiper blades, flapping away at their highest setting.

The river water had already begun to rise.

He could see that now. But the banks of the Swannanoa were known to burst and sleek the grass on the course from time to time.

That’s usually where it ended. On this day, though, Matthew’s truck bobbed into a dip in the road and the water there was deep enough to make him nervous. With another branch up ahead anyway, he decided to park at the clubhouse and walk the several hundred yards to the storage unit, right down the cart path of a par-4 fairway.

The wind was nearly enough to knock him over. It pushed him around on the asphalt like it was slicked with ice. Just enough to make his boots lose their grip on the ground and slide. Matthew was facing the very beginning of a tempest that would lead to scores of deaths and incalculable destruction. Yet approaching 8 a.m. that morning, the event still wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. Western North Carolina is notoriously prone to flooding. The big one — until Helene redefined the term — came in 1916. Another hit in 1940. Then again in 2004. But none had ever quite done what Helene was about to do.

The grass surrounding the cart path, and the rest of the ground around Asheville, was already saturated from seasonal storms earlier in the week when Helene came ashore. The extra water the hurricane brought had nowhere to go, and as Matthew labored to get closer to the storage facility, a combination of factors was beginning to coalesce around him.

Scientists point to climate change as one accelerant. Warmer temperatures mean more evaporation and an atmosphere capable of holding more moisture, which makes storms more powerful and more capable of dumping massive rainfall. Combined with Helene crashing directly into the Blue Ridge Mountains, which forced the system to rise, cool and morph from vapor to liquid

water even more quickly than it otherwise would — a process known as “orographic lift” — the conditions were ideal for something biblical. In the end, Helene dumped 40 trillion gallons of water — enough to fill a completely empty Great Salt Lake four times over. None of which Matthew knew, of course, when he finally reached the glass-door entrance to the storage facility, got inside and went to work.

The drain in the parking lot, he’d noticed, was working as intended. The water wasn’t even an inch deep. But as he began to move his memorabilia to higher ground, he heard something. He glanced at the glass entrance doors and saw the water was now a foot high on the other side. Only a few minutes had passed. He started working faster.

The water kept rising. Now he could hear it pushing through the tiny gap between the two glass doors, spraying onto the concrete floor inside. He threw his treasures with abandon, heaving them toward higher ground. The last one was a poster signed by Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and other baseball legends.

Just as the poster landed atop the growing pile, one of the door’s glass panels blew out, shattering and echoing across the facility. He looked outside once more. The water was two, maybe three feet deep and rushing. It flowed straight into the storage facility, the door frame funneling its fury like a river rapid. Matthew knew his time was running out.

In the rush, he left his cellphone behind.

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looked out the windows and watched the trees tumble all around. It became a little game, wondering which one would next submit to the wind. They could hear the creaking and the cracking, and they’d run from window to window, trying to find the culprit.

They watched as their neighbors’ timber just barely missed their own house. “Just 10 minutes,” Matthew had said. Now 10 minutes became 20 became 40, each ticking second making her sicker with dread. Heather tried calling. She tried texting.

E AT H E R A N D J O C E LY N

SEAN RAY FO RD / GET T Y IM AGES

H U RR IC A N E H E LE N E C AUSE D AN E STIM ATE D $ 53 B IL LIO N IN DAM AG E TO N O R TH C A R O L IN A’ S I NF R ASTR UC TUR E , M A K IN G IT THE COSTLIE ST N ATUR A L D I SASTE R IN STATE H I STO RY.

H E ATHE R TE MP LE TON C A L LE D A N D TE X TE D H E R HUSB A N D F O R H O UR S, K N OWIN G HE WAS LIK E LY C AUGHT I N THE STO R M, B UT U N AWA R E O F HOW D I RE THE SITUATIO N H A D B E CO ME .

“Where are you?”

“Call me back.”

“What’s taking so long?”

She fired off messages one after another in between paces across the living room.

“Come sit down,” her daughter pleaded.

But Heather kept moving. She needed the distraction. Her brain was taking her to uncomfortable places. Something just didn’t feel right. She could sense it just as surely as she could sense Matthew’s sincerity many years ago.

His maternal and paternal grandfathers had both been pastors in the Nazarene and Baptist traditions, while two of his uncles and three cousins also became preachers.

He had wanted to be a biologist and had spent three semesters studying marine life in the Bahamas, but eventually he followed his father’s lead into construction. But he’d also worked in the ministry as a young man, through a program that brought kids from housing projects to church on Sunday. He’d driven buses and vans and helped build the

program until it was 300 kids strong, attending the same church, Trinity Baptist, he attended all his life.

Heather wasn’t quite as rooted. She was born in Greenville, South Carolina, to a father who was in military special forces.

After he retired, he became a Christian missionary in Berlin, where Heather lived both before and after the wall fell. She started going to Trinity Baptist sometime in high school, where she met Matthew. Only gradually did Matthew start to take notice of her wavy hair and her striking, bright eyes. He started to chat with her more after church.

Then one night after a ball game in the early ’90s, they ended up at a Pizza Hut at the same time with their friends. Heather and Matthew talked the entire night. That encounter became a formal date, a marriage, a mortgage, three kids, a minivan. Now she was desperately trying to reach Matthew on his cellphone, as the winds worsened and the rains raged.

Heather’s pace quickened. She looked out the door and wondered if she should go after him on foot. Then another branch snapped. She believed in divine intervention and the power of prayer. She knew her husband did, too, as co-pastor of a church called Aaron Baptist, where he’d become an interim pastor in 2020 when the church’s leader had to take a lengthy medical leave.

Matthew, now 52, had been there ever since, splitting the duties with his predecessor.

Heather knew that wherever he was, whatever danger he was facing, he would turn to prayer for strength.

She tried to do the same.

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ATTHEW RUSHED TO the back of

the building, hoping the exit there would be less overrun with water. But the river had already enveloped the structure and the water was already three, four feet high back there. He looked for weak spots in the roof. Places he could climb and kick his way to freedom. He found some — or so he figured — but they were more of a backup plan.

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get home right now. He tried not to panic, to move with purpose. He went back to the storage unit one last time in a futile search for his phone.

Seconds had become his only currency, and so, finally, he locked up the unit, placed the keys in his pocket and approached the main entrance. Just as he did, the glass from the second door blew out, and now a waist-high river rushed with full force down the hallway. He moved toward the right side of the door and tried to step through into the parking lot, but the current pushed him back in. He tried again.

Again, he failed. He retreated down the hallway, toward the back of the building where the current was less strong, then scrambled back to the doorway, this time on the left side, and found a nook where the current’s power was diminished. Again he tried to walk into the river. Again the 50

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current threw him back inside. Still moving against the flow, still trying to figure a way out, he started to pray.

Matthew was a prayerful man in general, but this prayer wasn’t like the prayers he said out loud in church. It wasn’t lofty or polished or even frantic. He spoke straight from his soul. “Whatever I need in this moment — strength, wisdom, speed, insight — whatever it is, I’ll be grateful,” he said aloud. “I don’t want to die in this warehouse today.”

While the glass had been shattered, the building’s door frames remained locked and in place, and he noticed a thin metal bar running across the middle of them. He grabbed onto that bar and slowly swung himself over until he was sitting on the outside of the building, butt-to-bar, like a bird perched on a ledge. All around him the water still raged. It lapped at his boots

A RESCUED ITEM I N M AT T H E W TE M PLE TO N ’ S O N C E VAST AU TO G R A PH A N D M E M O R A B I LI A CO LLE C TI O N .

TE M PLE TO N N E A R LY D R OW N E D D U R I N G TH E STO R M A N D, LI K E M OST N O R TH C A R O LI N I A N S , R E M A I N S STU N N E D

BY TH E DA M AG E I T W R E A K E D U PO N TH E STATE .

AGAIN HE TRIED TO WALK INTO THE RIVER. AGAIN THE CURRENT THREW HIM BACK INSIDE. STILL MOVING AGAINST THE FLOW, STILL TRYING TO FIGURE A WAY OUT, HE STARTED TO PRAY.

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THE CHURCHES PLAYED A VITAL ROLE IN DISTRIBUTING FOOD AND OTHER RESOURCES: “LONG BEFORE ANY MILITARY ADVANCEMENT, ANY GOVERNMENT ENTITY, ANY FEDERAL, STATE, LOCAL … THE LOCAL CHURCH WAS 100 MILES AHEAD.” 52

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and tried to pull him under, but he steadied himself. If he didn’t, he’d get tossed right back inside. Then he noticed a keypad to his left — the very same keypad he’d used earlier to enter the building. He grabbed on and used it as leverage to pull himself into another little corner nook where the current wasn’t as strong, this time just outside the building’s entrance. All the while, he continued to pray. “Whatever I need,” he said, “so I can get out of this place.”

Using the mortar between the bricks on the building’s outer wall as makeshift fingerholds, he slowly worked his way toward higher ground. Behind him, he could hear the flow shredding the metal doors of the storage units, tearing them slowly, methodically, mercilessly apart. Moments ago, he had been there.

The water deepened, now reaching his chest. He could see nothing below the surface, murky and brown and carrying shrubs and trash and debris. His legs burned. His back ached. He kept moving anyway until his feet hit a small wall that felt about knee-high. He maneuvered over it and landed in water up to his chin. Without knowing what lurked below, without being able to see beneath his own neck, he noticed an elevated road 5, maybe 6 feet ahead.

With all his remaining strength, he lurched forward, grasping at something he could hardly see.

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IS PALMS FOUND tangles of brush and weeds and grass. He clung to them. He pulled himself slowly, then more quickly, until finally he was out of the flow and onto the asphalt just above it. He dropped to his hands and knees and looked down below him, from where he’d come. What had been a golf course and a network of streets and a collection of buildings was now a river that swallowed absolutely everything. “Thank you, Lord,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

He walked up the road back to the clubhouse, to his truck on higher ground. He realized right away that he couldn’t go back the same way he came. Even after clearing

a small tree and finding a new route, he soon hit one dead end after another. Eventually he pulled off into the rough of the golf course and four-wheel-drived his way to a toppled elm tree four houses down. He knocked on his neighbor’s door, asking to park the truck there for now. “I can’t guarantee no trees are going to fall,” the neighbor said. “It’s fine,” Matthew said. All that mattered was getting home.

Ronon, the family’s black labradoodle, was the first to hear Matthew’s footsteps.

He stood waiting at the door. Heather was confused. She could see there was no truck in the driveway. But then he appeared.

Finally. Wet and cold and exhausted, but there. “Where have you been?” she asked, anger and relief merging into one emotion.

“What did you do?”

Matthew dropped once more to his hands and knees, this time on the hardwood living room floor. “It’s gone,” he said.

“It’s all gone.”

Titus emerged from his bedroom.

Heather handed her husband a blue Gatorade from the kitchen. Between gulps and breaths, he clarified that what was “gone” was the collection. For Titus, that was a gut punch. The collection was supposed to pay for a new car to replace the family minivan Titus had totaled.

Those things mattered so much then.

They seem so trivial now. A lot more than the collection, it turned out, was gone.

The area Matthew had fled was ultimately buried under 31 feet of water, the storage unit included. Its steel support frames had been tipped over like dominos. There was no building left. Immediately, questions of “what if?” started to bubble.

What if Heather had gone with him to the storage facility? They both doubt they would have made it. What if he had decided to wait out the storm on the roof?

He would have been swept away and lost forever. What if he’d managed to park his truck outside the entrance to the storage facility like he’d planned — would the water have pushed it into the door and blocked his exit? The questions kept coming, as

Matthew and his family began to unpack what he’d endured — and what they were about to endure.

I

M ATTHE W T E MP LE TO N R E MA INS A CO - PASTO R AT AAR O N B A P TIST C H UR C H, W HIC H HO USE D PA LLE TS O F WATE R , C A N N E D G O O DS A N D OTHE R CO MMUN ITY N E E DS I N THE STO R M ’ S I M ME DIATE A F TE R M ATH.

N J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 5 , three-and-a-half months after the storm, the area around the building Matthew fled looked like a blast zone. Cars smashed and dented and marked with spray paint to denote them free of dead bodies. A sedan mangled beyond make and brand recognition rested atop a sideways trailer, its tires dangling loose on either side. A loveseat 20 feet high in a tree. A garage stripped bare to the beams, where Matthew heard several men had perished in the rafters as the water rose and they ran out of room. The only

clue as to what actually caused the mayhem, all this destruction, were the layers of mud and silt that covered everything, still shaped by the lapping of waves.

In the first days, when Heather slept in their bed and Matthew slept on the couch cradling a shotgun aimed at potential looters, his mind would wander. It often wandered back, specifically, to what had been lost. Every once in a while he’d remember another item, and he’d stew. He’s not proud to admit that, when so many others lost so much more. And he did salvage a few things, at least, like a ringside bell signed by boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. But between the sirens of passing ambulances and the silence of a complete blackout and

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the shock of the destruction, he had little else to keep his mind occupied.

As the weeks passed, and the situation worsened, his thoughts shifted. He started considering more deeply the magnitude of what’d happened. Like those guys who’d drowned in the rafters within view of where he narrowly evaded death. He started avoiding driving down that way.

He just didn’t want to deal with the memories, the adrenaline, any of it. He believed in the promises of heaven and eternity, even if he still sometimes lacked answers to certain questions.

He started to get answers as the weeks became months. As the water came back on, he didn’t need to haul buckets to flush the family’s toilets. In little miracles, like the friend who reached out, unprompted, offering a free water storage tank. Or in bigger miracles, like the stacked food pantries and the community support.

MATTHEW AND CONGREGANTS WERE GRATEFUL THE HURRI CANE DI DN’T DO MUCH DAMAGE TO THEI R HOUSE OF WORSHI P, WHI CH HAD UNDERGONE EXTENSI VE RENOVATI ONS TWO YEARS EARLI ER.

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M ATT H E W W I TH H I S DAU G H TE R J O C E LYN , W I FE H E ATH E R , A N D SON TITUS.

“WHEN WE LOOK AT THE YEAR AHEAD, ESPECIALLY FROM WHAT WE CAME OUT OF, PRAYER TIME MEANS A LITTLE BIT MORE. JUST KNOWING THAT I’M SITTING AT THE TABLE PRAYING WITH MY FAMILY AROUND ME, MEANS A LOT MORE TO ME THESE DAYS.”

Those first days were hard — people reduced to their primal selves, to base survival instincts. Rumors swirled of active shooters at gas stations, of people fighting over gasoline and resources. True or not, the result was a pervasive sense of fear and foreboding. “Nobody talked to each other,” Titus said. “Nobody wanted to talk to each other.”

Just a few days after the storm had hit, the family visited a local mall in search of Wi-Fi. They found the parking lot completely full, wrapped by a circle of running cars, and overrun with cops. They weren’t even sure why; maybe, like them, the other folks had heard rumors of Wi-Fi access. Or maybe they’d heard other rumblings that the mall had diapers and wipes and water stations.

Nobody really knew anything at the time.

Yet curiously, “nobody was fighting for a place in line,” Heather said. And when she looked at their faces, what she saw makes her want to cry to this day. “It was just blank fear,” she said. “We were so desperate, just desperate. And I wanted to help everybody, but I didn’t even know how to help myself.

We were just seeing this desperate situation getting worse and worse.”

But it didn’t last. And that’s what they hold onto.

The churches, especially, played a vital role in distributing food and other resources. Matthew marveled at the donations that flowed. His own church had to remove several rows of seating to accommodate the excess. “I would debate anybody, any day of the week, that the face of this storm was the local church,” he says. “Long before any military advancement, any government entity, any federal, state, local — before anybody put a fingerprint on any of this, the local church was 100 miles ahead.” That helped him heal. It helped him appreciate the little things, the most important things.

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N A 20-DEGREE Wednesday evening

in January, Matthew and his family visited Aaron Baptist for a weekly Bible study. Because of the frigid weather, only two other members joined them.

Matthew began by leading a hymn — a matter-of-fact rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” which celebrates the virtues of prayer. “When we look at the year ahead, especially from what we came out of, prayer time means a little bit more,” he said later. “Just knowing that I’m sitting at the table praying with my family around me, means a lot more to me these days.”

He certainly had much to be grateful for.

Survival aside, Hurricane Helene didn’t do much damage to the church itself. A lucky break, since just two years ago it underwent massive renovations. What had been rows of 12-foot oak pews had already been donated to two sister churches, replaced by cushioned, individual gray seats that were easier to move around — which came in handy when they needed to make space for pallets of water and canned goods. Matthew and his team had made other adjustments prior to the storm. They widened the pulpit, opened the entranceway wider. Most of all, though, they tore down the steeple.

Steeples, Matthew says, are almost impossible to maintain. Their shape — jutting up into the air, defiant — leaves them vulnerable to cracks and ice and water damage. The one at Aaron Baptist leaked constantly. “I guess that’s just the plight of steeples,” he said. It would have cost $18,000 to repair the one they had, or $26,000 to replace it with a new one. So Matthew and his co-pastor decided to scrap it instead.

Many in the congregation — especially some of the older members — were dumbfounded. What was a proper Southern church, after all, without a steeple? It felt like something essential had changed. Like something had been lost that could not be put back again. But over time, their anguish gave way to hope, especially after Hurricane Helene. Their church still stood. It was more comfortable and more complete than ever, in fact. And steeple or not, they could still gather like they did now, Matthew Templeton standing before them as a living reminder that belief finds its meaning not in what reaches skyward, but in what anchors us through the storm.

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WHEN YOUR FAMILY TREE HAS QUESTION MARKS, ROOTSTECH, THE LARGEST GENEALOGY CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD, CAN HELP FIND ANSWERS

BY MICHAEL J. MOONEY

ILLUSTRATION BY NATE SWEITZER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAURA SEITZ

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VERY FAMILY HAS AT LEAST ONE MYSTERY.

Some of those mysteries — why a grandfather disappeared one day, why a baby was put up for adoption six decades ago, why a woman might hide part of her identity all her adult life — can never be solved.

But thanks to advancing technology and a massive industry dedicated to learning about our genealogy, some questions, like our direct lineage, now have answers. As my family learned recently, though, some of those answers present new, more complicated mysteries.

This particular family mystery started with a late-afternoon phone call from a cousin. Growing up, this cousin and I were more like brothers, but these days we don’t talk nearly as often as we should, so when I saw his name on my phone I was excited to chat. As soon as I answered he got right to it: His teenage daughter had taken one of those spit-in-a-tube DNA ancestry tests and the results were pretty surprising.

He knew my wife and I had been researching family history recently. My mom applied for Irish citizenship a few years ago, before she died, and in the process of documenting our Irish heritage, my wife managed to trace my grandfather’s family back to County Clare. As a Christmas gift, my wife made a scrapbook chronicling the Mooney family roots back six generations,

replete with birth certificates, death certificates, marriage records, census reports and ship manifests going back more than 150 years. All together, it’s a remarkable digest of dozens of lives lived in the clouded plume of history.

My grandparents had all passed before I was born, but I have memories of the stories my mom told me about our family growing up: like how her father’s mother died after falling from a fourth-story window when my grandfather was only 4, and how he and his siblings went to live with an aunt in a different part of New York City. My mom told me about her maternal grandmother, from Lithuania. I remember sitting on my mom’s bed as she’d pull out old black-and-white photos and point and tell me who each person was and how they were related to us.

At 7 or 10 or even 15 years old, though, these pictures just looked like blurry images from the distant past, strangers wearing strange clothing, leaning on old cars or sitting on funny-looking couches next to tinsel-laden Christmas trees. It made my mom happy to talk about all this so I indulged her, but at the time I would’ve rather been playing video games or knocking around a soccer ball. For so much of my life, stories about our family history were just … boring. Now that I’m older, I’d do

anything to go back in time, to listen more attentively, to record her stories and the names of the people in those old photos.

It’s not clear when exactly this switch happened. Maybe it was turning 40, or having a kid of my own, or my mom dying a year ago, but now I crave this knowledge. I want to know everything I can about the people who came before me, and the people who came before them. What were their lives like? How did their voices sound? What did they dream of doing as adults — and did they accomplish what they hoped before their time on this planet ended?

We’re all walking, talking amalgamations of all the ancestors who came together to create us. We know we carry bits of those people: the way we raise an eyebrow, perhaps, or the color of our eyes and hair. We know our genetic code contains some of their illnesses, some of their predispositions, maybe even some of their mannerisms. But for the most part, we’ll never know which trait tracks back to which relative.

It’s not too hard to find historical documents about your not-too-distant ancestors.

Thanks to meticulously collected census data, you can see when someone got on a boat and left their homeland or when your great-grandparents moved or what language was spoken in the home. Sometimes, on birth certificates and wedding records, you

can even see a relative’s signature, often a beautiful, looping piece of evidence further confirming this person’s existence. But with each tiny scrap of detail, there are more unanswerable questions.

As more people are taking these tests and researching their families, more of us are facing even larger, potentially life-altering questions. Some people have discovered half siblings they never knew about, adoptions that had been secret, unknown second cousins living a block away. Some people are stunned by their ancestral breakdowns, learning that they might not even be the ethnicity they thought they were.

That’s sort of what happened when my cousin called me that afternoon and asked: “Do we have any Jewish relatives on our side of the family?”

P L E N T Y O F FA M I L I E S are like mine: exploring their roots. Genealogy is one of the most popular hobbies in America. It’s also a

“WE WANT PEOPLE TO DISCOVER THEIR ROOTS AND CONNECT WITH THEIR FAMILY THAT THEY DON’T KNOW THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.”

massive business, expected to be an $8 billion industry globally by 2026, according to the Harvard Business Review. There are plenty of companies that promise to give you an ancestral breakdown by percentage or cast an extended genetic net for distant cousins.

Some screen your DNA for prominent health risks associated with your relatives.

A lot of people put together scrapbooks that track the family back a century or two. Some push it even further, digging into all manner of public records and microfilm and land deeds, relentlessly pursuing family histories back centuries. My wife has a relative who tracked their lineage back to the 1100s. Like most families, their story is a saga that includes wars, inexplicable violence and mass migrations.

Is this gigantic trend yet another manifestation of our shallow, self-obsessed culture? Sure, maybe. I think of it more like putting together a large puzzle or playing a classic video game. Every website that allows you to track your family history can give you hints, APRIL 2025

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clues, a short list of people you might be related to for a variety of reasons. You can then look into each one — turning and trying your puzzle piece — and either discard them back to the heap of possibilities or add them to your family tree. Every breakthrough or found family member feels like advancing to a new level.

Genealogy is so popular that large swaths of society tune in to watch other people learn their family histories. The PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” in its 11th season, is all about celebrities learning the details of their extended genetic families.

In each episode, professional genealogists research the ancestral histories and familial connections of an entertainer or politician and then, with subtle dramatic flair, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents someone like Ben Affleck or Viola Davis or Bernie Sanders with a compendium of the most intriguing elements of their family history — on camera.

Neil Patrick Harris learned he had an ancestor who was tried as a witch. Larry David learned that his mother was born with a name he’d never heard of. Julia Roberts and Edward Norton learned they’re distant cousins. Author George R.R. Martin learned that his grandmother likely had a secret affair that broke up her marriage, a plotline that could’ve come straight out of one of his fantasy novels.

The genealogy industry even has a trade show every year in Salt Lake City, a conference dedicated to highlighting the biggest technological trends and innovations.

It started a decade and a half ago, and it’s grown as the industry has grown. RootsTech is a little like the Consumer Expo, but for family history. Dozens of vendors show up to display the newest advances in the coolest ways. Thousands of attendees roam the halls, ducking into ballrooms to watch a variety of talks on every aspect of the industry.

Millions more watch the discussions online — for free. Last year, more than four million people tuned in from 232 countries.

This year they expect 10 million, Paul Nauta, the senior marketing and 60

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communications manager for FamilySearch International, the nonprofit that hosts RootsTech, told me.

“In this world of chaos and dissension, where people just seem to be drawn further and further away from each other, we’re trying to be a positive light,” Nauta said. “We want people to discover their roots and connect with their family that they don’t know throughout the world.”

The way Nauta describes it, the mission of FamilySearch International, which is funded by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is connecting everyone worldwide, in some larger way. The more we connect with our ancestors, the more we find mutual ancestors and end up connecting with each other.

These grander connections — the realization that if you expand the net wide enough, we’re all just distant cousins — could be the solution to so many of society’s ills, like war and prejudice.

When you look at it like that, genealogy is a giant reminder that we all have more in common than we think.

“We want the world to have access to these connections and the heart-turning experiences for their family,” Nauta said. “The more you know about yourself and the more you know about your family, it changes how you see yourself and it gives you a legacy to live up to. That has a ripple effect and strengthens society as a whole.”

Nauta reiterated a point that connected with me and my family’s little mystery: “Knowing who you are,” he told me, “is so critical to having a healthy personal narrative and a healthy family narrative.”

The more I learned about RootsTech, the more I wanted to attend so I could see some of this for myself.

REMEMBER LEARNING ABOUT the

“THE MORE YOU KNOW ABOUT YOURSELF AND THE MORE YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR FAMILY, IT CHANGES HOW YOU SEE YOURSELF AND IT GIVES YOU A LEGACY TO LIVE UP TO.”

Holocaust and wondering why some people didn’t just say they weren’t Jewish? Well, plenty of people did exactly that. A lot of Jewish families fled Europe, not just in the lead-up to World War II, but in the decades preceding, too. Pogroms, organized violent attacks against Jewish people in Russia and Eastern Europe, sent a lot of families westward, often to the United States. Some of those families changed their names, and some decided to hide their Jewish roots, never telling anyone about their heritage or lives in the old country.

My family is about as Irish Catholic as it gets. My mom and her brothers went to Catholic school. My cousin and I were born in a Catholic hospital. Our extended family includes at least one cardinal and a few priests and nuns. Crucifixes and rosaries were a regular part of everyday life. But when my cousin asked about Jewish relatives, someone immediately came to mind.

I remembered my mom telling me stories about her maternal grandmother, who came to America from Lithuania during World War I. She lived with my mother and her parents for a few years when my mom was a kid.

My great-grandmother’s maiden name was Helena Zukowska, which isn’t particularly Jewish, but now I wondered if maybe she’d hidden part of her identity once she got to the U.S. I know

my mother didn’t think she had any Jewish heritage. She wouldn’t have been able to keep a secret like that — at least not from me. But maybe her grandmother could?

As I rolled all of this around in my mind, I felt a little like a TV detective, piecing together clues. My mom did have a family recipe for latkes, potato pancakes served with applesauce, traditionally prepared around Hanukkah. But she also had a recipe for corned beef and cabbage, a very Irish meal she’d sometimes make around St. Patrick’s Day. She also spoke some Yiddish, saying things like “Oy vey!” to express her mild dismay. But growing up, I assumed everyone in New York spoke some Yiddish.

I decided I needed to talk to someone who knew my great grandmother.

I reached out to my only living aunt on that side of the family. She’s in her late 70s now and met my great-grandmother a few times when she was first dating my

uncle. In fact, my great-grandmother died on their wedding day. (I can only imagine the drama and mixed emotions.) As soon as my aunt answered the phone, I felt the warm feeling of familiarity. I asked her about my great-grandmother.

My aunt told me that my greatgrandmother had a strong Eastern European accent that made her hard to understand, and that she lived with my mom’s family for a few years before moving in with other relatives near Syracuse, New York.

There was never any mention of anyone being Jewish. My aunt was stunned at the prospect, actually. She suggested I call one of my mom’s cousins, likely the only other person in our family who spent time with my great-grandmother.

My mom and her cousin Eleanor used to call each other every year on their grandmother’s birthday. When my greatgrandmother moved to Syracuse, she

R O OTST E C H I S T H E WO R LD ’ S LA R G E ST T R A D E S H OW D E D I C AT E D TO FA M I LY H I STO RY. D OZE N S O F V E N D O R S S H OW U P TO D I S PLAY TH E N E W E ST A DVA N C E S I N G E N E A LO G I C A L RESEARCH. T H O U SA N DS ATT E N D E AC H YE A R A N D M I LLI O N S M O R E WATC H O N LI N E .

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moved in with Eleanor’s family. So I called her to see what she thought about all of this.

As soon as she answered the phone, I got that warm feeling again. Her voice was soft and gentle and she called me “Sweetie.” She’s 76 and her memories of my great-grandmother were similar to my aunt’s.

“She had a bit of a drinking problem,” Eleanor told me. She remembers her ordering Congress, a New York lager, by the case.

“She would open a beer in the morning, and she would pour it into this glass, and she would drink beer all day long.”

I wondered if maybe she drank so much because she was holding in a secret.

Eleanor told me she didn’t talk much about her life in Europe or coming to America. Sometimes she’d type letters to relatives

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there and then get typed or handwritten letters in return.

“I know the letters used to make her cry,” Eleanor told me. “She would read them over and over and over.”

I asked if she ever mentioned anything about being Jewish, or if anything about her seemed Jewish. Eleanor kind of laughed.

“No, no,” she said. “She was a devout Catholic. She went to ministry every Sunday. Her children were all baptized.”

While I didn’t get much further on the family mystery, it was nice talking with my mom’s cousin. We caught up on family stories and she told me about what life was like in New York in the 1950s. She reminded me of another time we’d talked, at a cousin’s wedding near Albany when I was about 15.

Eleanor also did a pitch-perfect impression

of my mom that made me smile — and then tear up. We made plans to meet up sometime soon, so she can meet my son.

WALKING INTO ROOTSTECH this March felt a

little like walking into Disney World, but instead of Disney characters and rides, all the thrills were genealogy-related. Thousands of lanyard-clad attendees from all over the country — and several other countries around the world — roamed the convention center hallways with backpacks and notepads. Many were professional genealogists who help customers research their own family histories for money. Plenty were dedicated amateur genealogists enamored with their own family mysteries.

Inside the expo hall, a bluegrass band belted out some delightful tunes. Behind them, there were gigantic interactive displays from all the biggest companies in the genealogy field: Ancestry built a model home replete with a fireplace; 23 and Me had a neon sign advertising their “Spit Bar”; and FamilySearch set up a two-story wooden tree with branches and glowing green loops that doubled as swings, symbolizing the family trees everyone was there to clarify.

There were dozens of booths in every direction. Some advertised useful tools for genealogists trying to unravel historical stories, including Newspapers.com, which has news stories and obituaries from hundreds of papers going back two centuries. Next to that one was Find a Grave, which has millions of cemetery records from all over the world. Some booths displayed products genealogists or their customers might want to purchase, including custom-made books full of family photos and documents, and dishes with prints of your family tree. Several of the booths were interactive, including one that allows visitors to put on a headset and take a virtual reality tour of their own family tree. The Relatives at Rootstech booth enabled both live and virtual attendees to upload their trees to see how they were connected with the other participants watching on every continent except Antarctica.

Branching off the main hallway were a constant rotation of informational sessions covering everything from specific search techniques for finding Danish roots to a panel discussing the ethics of genealogical searches. Because I’m fascinated by

THESE GRANDER CONNECTIONS — THE REALIZATION THAT IF YOU EXPAND THE NET WIDE ENOUGH, WE’RE ALL JUST DISTANT COUSINS — COULD BE THE SOLUTION TO SO MANY OF SOCIETY’S ILLS, LIKE WAR AND PREJUDICE.

criminal justice, I went to one talk all about using old court cases to flesh out family stories where I learned about legal databases I’d never heard of. I went to another all about finding and analyzing old obituaries, which doubled as a brief lesson on the history of the American newspaper business as literacy rates went up.

The subtle theme of many of these sessions was the proliferation of AI in wrangling and digitizing historical documents. Thousands of books, including old yearbooks and small-circulation journals from ethnic groups all over the world, have been digitized in just the last year alone, creating new databases that allow genealogists to joyously dig like kids at a sandbox.

Many of the sessions had live translators broadcasting in at least a dozen languages, including Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Korean and Japanese. It didn’t take long to realize that I wasn’t just at a trade show, I was at the fulcrum of a quickly changing international phenomenon. FamilySearch CEO Steve Rockwood probably put it best in a keynote address on the first morning.

“Rootstech isn’t just a conference,” he told a live audience of thousands and a virtual audience of millions. “It’s a global movement.”

My favorite presentation was probably one I attended on the second afternoon of the conference. CeCe Moore, one of the genealogical researchers on “Finding Your Roots,” walked the audience through her own journey trying to solve an old mystery in the family tree of

THERE ARE MORE TO O LS TH A N E V E R B E FO R E TO CO N N E C T PE O PLE TO T H E I R A N C E STO R S A N D LE A R N T H E I R FA M I LY STO R I E S .

T H E AU TH O R M E E TS TO D D K N OW LE S , LE FT, D E PU T Y C H I E F G E N E A LO G I C A L O FFI C E R FO R FA M I LY S E A R C H , AT R O OTST E C H TO FI N D H I S FA M I LY H I STO RY.

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the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates’ family has long identified as African American, but a genetic test showed a substantial amount of white European ancestry, so Moore used just about every tool available to discover the identity of Gates’ great-great-great-grandfather — and a whole swath of ancestors he didn’t know he had. Moore, an absolute rock star in this world, ended the session with a sneak preview of an upcoming episode where she unravels this mystery for Gates on camera. The entire ordeal was incredibly dramatic.

Between sessions, I also talked with a lot of other attendees about what drew them to Rootstech. Plenty of people come every year, giving the event a bit of a family-reunion feel. Some come to get an early glimpse at the newest tools and technology in the industry. One man in his 40s told me he was adopted as a baby and over the last few years he’s pieced together two separate family histories. “It’s nice to see that I have a place in two different family trees,” he told me. A woman from New York told me she came because she’d hit a roadblock tracing her family roots back to Africa and needed help — and maybe some brainstorming — from people with more experience.

In the end, most of the people I spoke with came for one big reason: They simply enjoy connecting with other people who are interested in the ways we’re all connected to one another.

THROUGH ROOTSTECH, I met Todd

Knowles, one of the world’s foremost experts in Eastern European 64

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“KNOWING WHO YOU ARE IS SO CRITICAL TO HAVING A HEALTHY PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND A HEALTHY FAMILY NARRATIVE.”

Jewish genealogy. He agreed to help me in my search to understand who in my family was Jewish. It didn’t take him long to build a family tree for that side of my family and suddenly he could show me the names and birthdays and death dates for several generations. There was my mom and her brothers, then my grandparents, then my great-grandparents, then their parents.

“There’s a lot of Polish and Russian,” he told me. “Maybe a little German.” He said he couldn’t immediately identify who might have been Jewish, but he had some ideas. “As you’re doing a family tree, it’s not always cut and dried, going in a straight line. Sometimes you’ve got to go with a side route.”

I’d heard the same thing at RootsTech.

When you can’t find documents for the person you’re researching, you might try that person’s siblings. You might search multiple addresses.

He pulled up an image of a passenger list for the ship SS Pretoria, a German transatlantic liner that arrived in New York on June 27, 1908. On that ship was my 17-year-old great-great-grandfather, Helena Zukowska’s father. Like almost every other male on that side of the family, his name was Francis and he went by Frank.

“This is a return trip from Europe,” Knowles told me. “He was born in New York and at some point went back to Europe, then came back to the U.S.” The document has him listed as Russian, but then that’s crossed out. “Because he was born in the U.S.” He was five-foot-seven, with a fair complexion, light brown hair and

T HO USA N DS O F P E OP LE CO ME TO SA LT LA K E C ITY E ACH Y E A R TO AT T E N D R O OTSTE C H. M I LLIO N S MO R E WATC H O N L IN E .

brown eyes. It also says he paid for his own passage. The ticket cost $25. He told immigration agents he was going to Brooklyn, to live with his brother Louis.

While some of the passengers on the ship listed their race as Hebrew, he didn’t list a race. Some passengers specifically say they’re Lithuanian, but not him. So why did he go back to Europe, and then why did he return to America? His family’s name was Fischer, which could very well be Jewish, but at some points the family uses the last name Miller — though it’s not clear why. It was just mysteries inside mysteries inside mysteries, like a Russian doll of family secrets.

“Every time I step around a corner,” Todd told me, “it seems to raise new questions.”

There’s no record of Frank’s mother coming to the U.S., but in a 1930 census, she was living with Louis in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn — just a few blocks from where a friend of mine lives now. On this census, the family says they’re from Germany and Poland, not Russia. The census also lists how much money each family had at the time. While several of their neighbors had in excess of $10,000, Louis’ family had a total of $35. Several of their neighbors reported their primary language as Yiddish, but my family listed their predominant language as Polish.

We discussed these clues like detectives chewing over a big case.

“That sounds like somebody who decided they’re not Jewish, right?” I said.

“It’s like they’re at least going out of their way to hide it,” Knowles said.

In the very least, it looks like my mom’s cousin Eleanor was right: Despite her family living in a mostly Jewish neighborhood, my great-grandmother almost certainly grew up Catholic and likely didn’t know about her own Jewish heritage. My grandmother and mom wouldn’t have known either.

Knowles explained that the question of Jewishness is further complicated by the fact that for years, even Jewish marriage and birth certificates in Poland were recorded in Catholic churches, because that was the national religion of Poland at the time.

This part of Europe also changed hands many times throughout the last two centuries. Parts of Poland became Lithuania.

Then Russia. Some areas were considered Ukrainian. And some of these national boundaries are still changing today. I took a class in Eastern European history in college and I still struggle to keep it all straight.

As Knowles explained to me what he’d found, it felt a little like I was on an episode of “Finding Your Roots.” In between revelations about my own family, I was also learning about the neighbors they had in Brooklyn. While most of the people were Jewish, there were also families from Ireland, Sweden, Italy and Canada.

“What a great place it would’ve been to grow up,” he noted.

After a few days of research, we had some answers, but even more questions. That’s part of the joy — and occasional misery — of learning your family history. Genealogy allows us to escape into an incredibly personal mystery. But unlike the mysteries we see on TV, the answers might mean new insights into long gone relatives or new family you didn’t know you had. It can also mean more time spent talking with the family you do know, whether that’s a cousin who’s more like a brother, an aunt you’ll always remember fondly, or an extended cousin whose stories are warm and sweet and remind you of your mother. The resolutions aren’t always as clear as we’d hope, but that’s partly what keeps drawing us back.

Understanding my past has helped me understand myself. And now that I have a child of my own, it’s taken on even more resonance, and urgency. We all are part of a story, one that connects past generations, and I’m hoping that the more I piece together my family history, the more my son will understand where he came from, and the broader story to which he belongs.

As for my own family mystery? After talking with my relatives and going to RootsTech and going back through time looking at all the documents Knowles discovered, I came to a simple conclusion: I have a lot more research to do.

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THE RELIGION OF AI HOW FAITH INFORMS THE NEW AGE OF INTELLIGENCE

BY JO H N N I E MO O R E

E

arlier this year, hundreds of chief executives and civil society leaders joined over 60 heads of state who gathered in the Swiss enclave of Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.

This year the theme was “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age,” and while the speeches of anti-globalist figures like Argentinian President Javier Milei and President Donald Trump might have been the most watched aspects of the meeting, there was something far more unexpected that took place. The Davos leadership convened an unusual group for the first time. They invited a handful of global religious leaders as full participants in the annual meeting, and among the three urgent issues they were asked to focus on was rebuilding trust in the age of artificial intelligence.

This is because the age of artificial intelligence is emerging at a moment when religion itself is on the ascendancy on multiple fronts throughout the entire world.

According to Pew Research, by 2050 only 13 percent of the world will be religiously unaffiliated. This is happening at a time in which religious affiliation is growing the most in countries where the population is increasing, amid a prevailing global trend of declining fertility rates.

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Everywhere one looks, even in the United States, religious forces are rising. Take the decades-long trend of America’s young people identifying as “none” when asked about their religious affiliation. This was a trend so solidly entrenched by demographers that it was taken for granted, but in recent surveys we’ve seen a stabilization of the trend and then a decline in the so-called “none”

SCIENTISTS ARE PROFOUNDLY RELIGIOUS IN THEIR COMMITMENT TO IDEOLOGIES THAT GUIDE HOW THEY ENGAGE IN THIS AGE OF INTELLIGENCE.

affiliation. Another survey recently found that young men are now more religious than young women and Bible sales rose by 22 percent in a single year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Religiously charged political debates are transforming the European continent, religiously inflamed wars ravage the Middle East, and religiously infused politics animates India and Africa.

Religious persecution continues to be at

its highest in the world’s most authoritarian regimes, from North Korea to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Religion is on the rise amid the emergence of artificial intelligence, a phenomenon that some are calling the single most significant technological innovation since the printing press, but certainly since the industrial revolution — both of which were followed by terrible periods of conflict.

The age of artificial intelligence is causing a kind of convergence of religion and science that was once inconceivable. One might even say a “peace treaty between religion and science” is emerging. The peace between the two old nemeses has emerged because scientific advance has brought us to the place where questions once reserved for theologians and philosophers are now factors in equations that absolutely must be solved: What is intelligence? What is agency? What can be done versus what should be done? What is a human? Do the ends justify the means or should the greater good always prevail? What is appropriate for all humans versus some?

This moment has brought to the fore a simple fact, and an inconvenient one for many universities and tech entrepreneurs: One doesn’t have to be religious to

ILLU STR ATION BY R O BE RT N E U BE C K E R

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acknowledge religion’s values. In fact, a totally secular person can appreciate that religious ideas are a type of compounding wisdom over the centuries.

We have rarely needed wisdom more than we will need it now.

IT ISN’T THAT some of our scientists, and the

universities and companies they lead, aren’t religious. In fact, you might argue that while not being institutionally religious, they are profoundly religious when it comes to their commitment to ideologies that guide how they engage in this age of intelligence.

In “The Digitalist Papers” published

by Stanford University last year, I argued alongside co-authors E. Glen Weyl and Mona Hamdy that two ideological frameworks have emerged that are dominating the way most view this new age of intelligence: libertarianism and technocracy.

Each ideology, functioning like a secular religion, has its own clearly defined ideas — you might call it theology — that define rules of engagement for artificial intelligence. When popular venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen published his so-called “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” he ironically used the phrase “we believe” no less than 100 times as he strived to convince the world that artificial intelligence should be given the permission it needs to transform our world and the people who live in it.

The libertarians “believe” in maximal freedom for AI developers, and the technocrats “believe” they deserve deity-like powers that will be confined to a small regulatory class tasked with managing the outcomes for the rest of us. In either case, traditional religious concepts warn us these are dangerous ideas. For the libertarians, religious wisdom asks whether human beings are designed for absolute freedom or whether we need community to provide meaning and infrastructure for life. Similar religious ideas challenge the centralization sought by the technocrats because it risks exacerbating class divides that defy the equal dignity of all humans 68

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even as the technocrats brazenly confront ancient warnings about the implications of men who enjoy playing God. When the forces of technocracy demand the consolidation of authority over AI, to protect us from ourselves, religious wisdom warns against the corrupting power of those who aspire to God-like power, making idols of themselves. When libertarians or technocrats imagine a world where AI makes work, governance and suffering optional, religious wisdom warns against the lessons unlearned by those denied the opportunity to work or to struggle at some point in their lives.

The intelligent age is emerging at a time when our research universities, along with Silicon Valley, have little exposure to religious concepts. So, it seems they have made their own religions often built on the foundation alone of maximizing profit or power.

THE TOOLS THAT CAN EMERGE FROM THE AGE OF INTELLIGENCE SHOULD BE TRANSFORMATIVE FOR COMMUNITIES OF FAITH.

IT ISN’T JUST much-needed wisdom that reli-

gion brings to AI but also a vast multibillionperson market for tools that can contribute to community building. If one wants to build or strengthen communities worldwide, for example, then the best place to start is often a place of worship (or a school).

The tools that can emerge from the age of intelligence should be transformative for communities of faith and for the promotion of values that they share; values which aim alone to build healthy communities and bring compassion to a cruel, unforgiving world.

As a simple example, take the perfunctory challenges of clergy or laypeople who are tasked with ministering to large communities, often spanning multiple generations

with various, sometimes intermittent levels of commitment to their communities of faith.

Millions of Christians identify a particular congregation as their “home church” while only actually attending it on Christmas or Easter. Similarly, many Muslims have a local mosque that they attend mainly during festivals like Ramadan. Other communities of faith, like Buddhists or Hindus, may not be linked to individual places of worship at all, but they are connected to one another by theological or philosophical religious rituals that they can practice at any temple. Catholic bishops are often responsible for multiple congregations and schools, and sometimes across many different geographic regions.

Then there’s the post-pandemic trend of digital church, where millions of people who call a local congregation their home church also worship regularly online at another congregation, which can be anywhere in the world.

In all of these cases, the age of intelligence presents new opportunities to better connect communities of faith while also deepening those connections. Now, if a congregant loses a loved one, the ability of the congregation’s care team to know it happened at all is based largely upon chance, notification by the family or simply word of mouth. Pastoral care in the age of intelligence can involve a pastor or counselor or life coach arriving at their office every day to a dashboard that has curated relevant data about individual congregants based upon tools the congregants have opted into.

The counselor might discover that someone’s grandfather passed away in another state or that a college student studying abroad is posting unusually depressive or out-of-character language on social media.

They could see that a member of the congregation received a promotion at work on LinkedIn or lost their job or split from their partner or spouse. These life alerts might prompt the pastor to send an unsolicited note of encouragement or congratulations or to call someone who appears in need.

Imagine what it will mean to the cohesion of communities, when it’s far harder for individuals — especially those who need connection the most — to fall through the cracks. Imagine what it will mean for the health of a community when every member of a community is given the opportunity for equal care and attention or is given an individualized plan for their development based upon a custom analysis of their spiritual need. The same tools can be used by schools or clubs or other anchors of civil society, and those tools can also be curated on an enterprise level to provide an assessment of a community on a quarterly or annual basis.

This can help determine what programs or teachings are benefiting the congregation.

Artificial intelligence will not just be a tool for the care of religious congregations.

It is a veritable superpower to advance other concerns of virtually all religious communities to improve the world. There is no limit to what AI will mean for health care, for instance. We may finally find a cure for cancer and many other debilitating diseases. We will have tools to identify future life-altering diseases earlier than ever. AI can bring equity to health care quality, allowing those in the most far-flung places of the world to receive the same expert care as those living within a stone’s throw of a top research hospital.

The age of intelligence will also make one-size-fits-all approaches to all kinds of global humanitarian problems obsolete.

Currently, all developed nations provide a certain amount of humanitarian assistance to the world’s most desperate people, but volumes can be written about how such aid is wasted or has unintended consequences.

Some aid policies have flooded traditional communities with food that they might have otherwise grown. Other approaches have arbitrarily applied agricultural or other techniques hewn in different climates or cultures to environments where they were alien to begin with. With AI, volumes of data related to agriculture, climate or other unique economic factors can be analyzed in order to produce cost-effective solutions that maximize the return on investment of

a country or NGO’s efforts to provide humanitarian assistance.

Then, there’s the relevance of AI to conflict resolution and peacemaking.

At present, the world is inflicted with more active conflicts than at any time since World War II, according to the Global Peace Index. Resolution to these conflicts is often confined to the imagination of whomever is in charge at the moment. However, in the age of intelligence, our digital tools can provide to policymakers, heads of state or others a seemingly limitless array of possible solutions to the most intractable problems, drawing from a total command of all historical and other relevant knowledge. The system can also be made more immune to politics or the influence of ego or other personality factors. Leading up to the historic Abraham Accords, a document commissioned by His Majesty King Hamad bin CORPORATE BOARDS AND UNIVERSITIES NEED TO FIND FAITH AGAIN BEFORE THE AGE OF INTELLIGENCE LEAVES US ALL TO CONTEND WITH WHATEVER IT HAS DECIDED TO CREATE.

Isa al Khalifa of Bahrain began with these words: “Ignorance is the enemy of peace.”

The king was right.

Then, of course, most of the terrible, black swan events that have afflicted our world have often been similarly attributed to a “lack of imagination.” The age of intelligence will give us all the imagination we could possibly need to make peace or to prepare for the worst.

W H E N R E L I G I O N H AS entered the AI con-

versation, it has often come at the heels of almost conspiratorial warnings about the potential apocalyptic implications of this new technology.

There’s certainly a place for those types of warnings in the age of intelligence, and

we do not want AI technology to assume a God-like power over human agency. There is virtually no scenario where this would create anything but blinking red lights for the world.

The apocalyptic scenarios in this case are terrifying, especially since great technological revolutions have almost always brought new weapons of war. This is particularly perilous in a multipolar but interconnected world, where not all countries either enshrine or enforce laws that honor the equal dignity of all humans. The age of intelligence means an age where drone-first warfare could create millions of small weapons that can be fully autonomous and optimized only to kill. AI can give us rapidly produced, customized vaccines or antibiotics, but it can also allow nefarious actors to create customized biological weapons that can be tailor-made to kill whomever the designer determines is an enemy or undesirable (imagine a microscopic biological weapon flown on the tip of a fly-sized drone).

There are risks that require moral leaders to demand our political leaders protect us.

We want AI to give us new tools to improve the world, maximizing the potential of this technology, but we want those tools always under human control.

At the same time, these religious warnings mustn’t devolve into “the world is flat” pronouncements. No, they would provide a guiding hand, and sometimes a gut check, to those who are leading us into this profound new period of human history.

Simply put: Corporate boards and universities need to find faith again, for their own good, before the age of intelligence leaves us all to contend with whatever it has decided to create for us based upon how we designed it.

“Everything is permissible,” scripture wisely warns, “but not everything is beneficial.”

J O H N N I E M O O R E I S A C O N T R I B U T I N G AU T H O R O F T H E D I G I TA L I S T PA P E R S , A P RO J E C T O F S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y ’ S D I G I TA L E C O N O M Y L A B . H E ’ S T H E P R E S I D E N T O F J D A W O R L DW I D E A N D A M E M B E R O F T H E WO R L D ECONOMIC FORUM’S GLOBAL FUTURE COUNCIL FOR FA I T H I N A C T I O N .

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THE WORTH OF A SOUL FINDING REDEMPTION IN A PRISON

BY JE N N A C A R S O N

W

earing a protective vest, I stood on a prison compound, my utility belt weighed down with handcuffs, pepper spray and a radio equipped with a body alarm. This was my required uniform as a chaplain in a high security men’s federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Before me, a crowd of incarcerated men filed out of a housing unit toward the cafeteria. A correctional officer approached me, skepticism in his eyes.

“How many of these inmates do you think you are actually going to help here?” he asked. I paused to think about the question.

The officer went on. “I asked the last chaplain here. He’d been in for eight years.

Guess what he told me? One. Just one.” He leaned in, his voice low and firm.

“You can’t change these guys. It’s better not to care about them at all. You probably won’t come to hate the inmates — since you’re a chaplain — but try to get as close to hate as possible.”

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between staff and incarcerated often prevails. Animosity was fueled daily, but as a chaplain in the prison, I had been called to model something different. I had been called to share the message of God’s love.

While they donned a different outfit and were rarely women, the presence of chaplains in prisons goes back centuries.

IN PRISON, THE ROLE OF A CHAPLAIN IS NOT JUST ABOUT RELIGIOUS SERVICES. IT IS ABOUT PRESERVING HUMAN DIGNITY.

Religious leaders have long ministered to the incarcerated, offering solace, guidance and spiritual instruction. Recognizing the role of faith in moral rehabilitation, early American prisons institutionalized prison chaplaincy in the 19th century.

Chaplaincy today is a highly professionalized career, requiring rigorous academic and practical training. Aspiring chaplains typically complete a four-year undergraduate degree, followed by a three-year Master of Divinity. Additionally, they must complete at least one internship or a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education to gain hands-on experience in spiritual care.

We serve as spiritual counselors, teachers, worship leaders and advocates, tending to the souls of people overlooked by society, often in their worst moments.

By providing spiritual counseling, and by leading worship services, chaplains offer a bridge between the incarcerated and the divine, providing spaces that acknowledge the possibility of healing and redemption for all. In prison, the role of a chaplain is not just about religious services. It is about preserving human dignity. A skillful chaplain helps incarcerated individuals deepen their sense of purpose and value in the face of circumstances that often strip away human dignity.

MY JOURNEY TO prison chaplaincy spanned

several years. While a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, I felt “called” — spiritually guided by God — to pursue chaplaincy in the military. The first step in my process was to obtain ecclesiastical endorsement from my church, but when I sought endorsement, I learned it was not an option for Latter-day Saint women. At the time, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reserved military chaplaincy endorsement for men since women are not ordained. For several years, I ILLU STR ATION BY DAV I D H A BBE N

advocated for a church policy change that would allow women to serve as chaplains in the military. Meanwhile, the church endorsed me for other forms of chaplaincy: first in a hospital, then at a prison.

My calling to minister to those in prison included a deep-seated belief that no one is beyond redemption. Jesus spoke of visiting the imprisoned and emphasized the worth of every soul. Latter-day Saint theology focuses on repentance, redemption and eternal progression; these principles guide me to view incarcerated people not

as criminals but as God’s children in need of spiritual care.

I initially applied to a women’s prison but was instead offered a job at a men’s penitentiary. The prison held over 1,000 men, many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds and had joined gangs in their youth to find a sense of belonging. Even if violence had not been a way of life before incarceration, violence frequently became a means of survival once inside.

The men I met in prison often carried immense burdens — of past choices, of separation from family, of a society that had largely written them off. And now they had to endure the isolation of incarceration. As a chaplain, I tried to embody God’s love for each individual. I didn’t always do that, but sometimes I got it right.

In the chapel, I led a Christian worship service on Sundays. This was an austere space with tiled floors, white concrete walls, glaring fluorescent lights and large, metal doors. There were shabby plastic chairs for people to sit in and a portable pulpit. There were no adornments, but we had a grand piano — a thing of beauty in an unlikely place.

I envisioned the chapel as a place that we could set apart, a haven inside a harsh world. I wanted it to become a space of peace, a contrast to the noise and chaos throughout the rest of the institution. I realized that in this unique setting, dignity required a degree of discipline and structure. In the past, even the chapel had been a place where fights broke out, a common site to pass drugs and conduct gang business.

Keenly aware of this, I made one simple rule: no talking while I’m preaching, or I’ll ask you to leave. I needed the men to know I meant business. I was not going to tolerate them coordinating a drug deal under their breath while feigning interest in my preaching. Because I insisted that the men come to the chapel for the right reason, and because I enforced this, the chapel became a safer space for everyone. I was under no illusion that the men would drop out of their gangs, but I worked to create APRIL 2025

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I WORKED TO CREATE THE MOST SACRED SPACE POSSIBLE SO THAT THOSE WHO WANTED TO CONNECT WITH GOD IN FELLOWSHIP AT LEAST HAD ONE PEACEFUL PLACE TO DO SO IN THE PRISON.

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the most sacred space possible so that those who wanted to connect with God in fellowship at least had one peaceful place to do so in the prison.

Once basic safety was established, we could build connection. I frequently reminded my parishioners that we ought to set aside differences and come together in our identity as God’s beloved. Such an ideal could not be realized without a foundation of respect, which is why, when I saw men exchanging gang signs when they greeted each other, I called them out. “When you come to the chapel,” I said, “you leave your gang affiliation at the door.” In keeping with Latter-day Saint custom, I addressed the men as “brother,” and the men began to echo my language, adopting the term themselves. I used music in the service, seating myself at the grand piano with my elementary playing ability. Although I could barely make it through the hymns, and although neither myself nor the men could sing well, we started a choir. I knew nothing about leading a choir, and the men couldn’t read music, but I printed lyrics and I nodded at them when they should start singing. We were off-key and off-rhythm, but something more important than song began to take shape. In the midst of our ragged harmonies, a sense of community emerged. Within that fledgling unity, I found openings to invite the men to use their spiritual capacity to care for one another.

I began asking them to help with the service by offering prayers. My supervisor warned me to be careful; he was afraid the incarcerated might say something offensive or use the chance to pray as a power grab. I took the risk, because asking the men to pray publicly communicated that their voice mattered and could positively influence others. Valuing the inherent dignity of the incarcerated and trusting them to participate led to mutual respect. The men not only respected me; they looked to me as their spiritual leader. Along the way, whether establishing ground rules, preserving a respectful environment, or preparing

my sermons, I sought to model the fundamentally dignifying message of Christianity. I preached about suffering, compassion, repentance, forgiveness, redemption and Jesus’ unbounded love. I told the congregants that I did not know their suffering, but God knew. I invited them to reconcile themselves to those they harmed; to own their actions and take responsibility. I told them to cry out to God and that God would send help. I reminded them that Jesus loves them personally.

And I felt that love. When I looked over the faces of my congregation, I thought, “These men are precious to God.” As the weeks and months progressed, a bond forged between us. The men opened up about their concerns and some even allowed tears to roll down their cheeks — a surprising show of vulnerability in a place where men don’t cry. During a time set apart for sharing during each service, we unpacked their sorrows and fears, struggles and temptations.

I thought often about that officer who told me I should try to hate the incarcerated men. Other guards repeated similar sentiments. “You see them in the chapel,” said one guard. “I see them in the housing unit, and they are entirely different there than they are for you.” I believed those staff members; I believed the prisoners behaved differently in the housing units. Creating an ennobling, dignifying space in the chapel allowed something different to happen there, however small.

CHAPLAINCY IN PRISONS is not just about

salvation; it is about creating spaces that honor the inherent worth of souls. Studies have shown that faith-based programs can reduce recidivism rates, helping incarcerated individuals find purpose and a moral framework for change. Courts have long upheld the right of prisoners to practice their faith, recognizing its role in rehabilitation, and Congress has passed laws protecting that right.

Research suggests that incarcerated people who engage in religious activities

or participate in faith-based programs often experience greater well-being and are less likely to engage in misconduct while incarcerated. These findings indicate that religion can have positive effects on an individual’s thoughts, emotions and behavior.

Faith-based rehabilitation programs aim to foster personal transformation by influencing character, motivation and overall outlook on life.

Yet, despite this, access to chaplains, faith-based programs and religious services remains limited in many correctional facilities. For example, an audit by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General highlighted a shortage of chaplains within the federal prison system. This shortage impairs prisons’ ability to implement effective religious service programs and provide for the diverse religious needs of incarcerated individuals.

Funding cuts and staffing shortages often make it difficult for people in prison to engage in organized worship, receive spiritual care or even possess sacred texts. If we are to take rehabilitation seriously, our nation must invest in more faith-based resources within our federal, state and local prison system. We need to train more chaplains and equip them with resources to navigate difficult ministry settings. By providing these resources, we do not just help individuals — we strengthen our communities inside and outside of prison.

As a chaplain, I have seen the impact of faith firsthand, and have seen how faith dignifies people. I have watched men find peace in scripture, strength in prayer and joy in song. I have witnessed transformation not through punitive measures but through grace. For those who would ask, as that officer once did, how many incarcerated men I have truly helped, I would answer this: If even one person felt God’s love through my ministry as a chaplain, then answering my calling was worth it.

I know at least one person did. One hot summer evening, I stood on the prison compound, my body weary from the day’s

work, the vest on my torso heavy, my arms damp with sweat, feet swollen in my boots.

The sun’s golden hour rimmed the prison compound with a glow, the harsh heat of day giving way to sunset.

“Hey, Carson,” said an officer.

“Yeah?”

“See that inmate over there?”

He pointed to a thin figure walking across the compound. I squinted to see a man severely disfigured, as if someone dipped his body into a pool of boiling water, dissolving his skin.

“Just got here,” said the officer.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“Dunno, but I call him ‘Deadpool.’”

IF WE ARE TO TAKE REHABILITATION SERIOUSLY, OUR NATION MUST INVEST IN MORE FAITH-BASED RESOURCES WITHIN OUR FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL PRISON SYSTEM.

THE MAN CAME to the chapel the next Sun-

day. His body was a hairless patchwork of brown, pink, and white skin. His puffy lips turned downward, slightly frowned.

His hand, missing fingers, propped a Bible against his torso. The skin beneath his eyes drooped.

To look at him was to feel pain.

I redirected my attention, reflexively tightening my hands into fists and opening them wide. I looked at the congregation, trying not to look at the burned man, trying not to think of the officer calling him Deadpool, trying not to think of the cruelty of it all.

After the service, I approached him.

“It’s nice to have you here. Would you be willing to offer the closing prayer next Sunday?”

He looked up at me from his seat on the plastic chair.

“Yes,” he said.

The following Sunday, after the last hymn, his eyes darted toward me nervously from the back row. I nodded.

He stood up and slowly walked to the pulpit, his left hand holding a piece of notebook paper.

“May the Lord bless everyone in this room with peace, love, happiness, understanding and forgiveness.”

Quiet descended on us.

“For to reconcile with God,” he continued, “and go from being a sinner and enemy to being righteous before him, we must confess our sins and our wrongdoings, and ask for forgiveness, and then we will be reconciled with God. For our loving God is a forgiving God.” After the prayer, a few seconds of silence lingered, thick with something unspoken.

Then there was the scrape of plastic chairs against polished tile, the shuffle of bodies rising, the low hum of conversation — reverence giving way to routine. Everything seemed to return to normal, except for one thing: the man who prayed. The one who always wore a solemn expression was now beaming.

“I’ve never,” he told me, “done something like that before.”

He came to church every Sunday after that.

Men like him — men who have never prayed aloud, who have never been told their voice matters — deserve spaces in prison where they can. I don’t know where he is now, but I will never forget the weight of that moment. His voice mattered that day at the pulpit. It mattered to his brothers. It mattered to me. And it has always mattered to God. A I R F O R C E C A P T. J E N N A C A R S O N I S T H E F I R S T F E M A L E L AT T E R - D AY S A I N T C H A P L A I N I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S M I L I TA RY. T H I S E S S AY I S A D A P T E D F R O M A F O R T H COMING MEMOIR ABOUT CARSON’S WORK AS A FEMALE CHAPLAIN IN A MEN’S PRISON. HER OPINIONS A R E H E R OW N A N D D O N O T R E P R E S E N T T H E O P I N I O N S O F T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S A I R F O R C E , T H E D E PA R T M E N T O F D E F E N S E , T H E D E PA R T M E N T O F J U S T I C E , O R T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S G O V E R N M E N T.

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CULTURE

A LONG, LONG WAY TO RUN 60 YEARS LATER, AMERICA STILL LOVES ‘THE SOUND OF MUSIC’

BY N ATA L I A G A L I C Z A

T

he house lights dim and a packed crowd cheers before the movie even starts. On screen, a soaring camera carries us through windswept clouds, past snowcapped peaks, down slopes green with pines.

Birdsong gives way to a lush but whimsical score as we fly low over lakes and old-world villages, farms and stone chateaus. Everyone around me seems to hitch their breath in unison with a swelling instrumental as we drop toward a broad alpine meadow where a woman spins with her arms outstretched and a grin as big as a mountain.

The audience erupts in song. “The hills are alive,” they blare, nearly drowning out the actress, “with the sound of music.”

Some wear apron dresses, like Julie Andrews does on screen. Others sport dirndls and lederhosen or tweed suits, aping the fashions of Salzburg in the 1930s. All seem thrilled to sing that familiar tune in this arthouse theater in downtown Salt Lake City.

They make valiant but ultimately futile attempts at harmonizing, “with songs they have sung for a thousand years.”

Well, not quite that long. Released in 1965, “The Sound of Music” tells the true-ish story 74

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of an aspiring nun-turned-governess who joins an Austrian family amid the run-up to World War II. The original premiere was too wholesome for New York critics, who called it “goody-goody,” “icky sticky” and “romantic nonsense,” but ordinary folks made it one of the top-grossing films of all time, and kept it in theaters for a whopping four-and-a-half

I WATCH MY NEIGHBORS AS MUCH AS THE SCREEN.

BY THE TIME THE GOVERNESS SINGS “MY FAVORITE THINGS,” THEY’VE ALL BUT MERGED WITH THE FILM.

years. It won five Academy Awards, including best picture. The soundtrack sold more than 20 million copies. Still, nobody then could have predicted the movie would become a cult classic.

This spring marks the film’s 60th anniversary. All summer, like every year, fans will descend on sing-along screenings like this

one at theaters and outdoor venues all over the world. Many will do it again for the holidays, each time competing for best costume, hoarding prop bags with symbolic items to toss or wave during certain scenes, enjoying tea and cookies during the intermission and taking home mementos like themed buttons or stickers. Subtitles help us noobs to sing along. Other cues — like how you’re supposed to boo at Nazis — are more intuitive.

The resulting cacophony blurs the boundary between film and audience.

It’s a grand time, but that’s not why I’m here. There are other films whose loyal fans act out extravagant viewing rituals.

And this is not the only classic that people still watch with such frequency. But in our cynical age, it’s surprising that people connect this deeply to a feel-good musical with old-fashioned values. What is it about this sentimental story that keeps them so enthralled? I came here to find out.

HONESTLY, “THE SOUND of Music” was al-

ways a little retro — a simple, heartfelt tale first told in another time of great social upheaval. On the day it premiered in March,

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the United States Air Force started bombing North Vietnam, soon inspiring massive anti-war demonstrations in the nation’s capital. That same weekend in Alabama, peaceful protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery to guarantee Black people the right to vote were attacked at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday.”

That summer, Bob Dylan was getting booed for adopting the electric guitar; and hippies were saying, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”

Even then, the cinema could offer wholesome respite from an increasingly complex world. Hits that year included Walt Disney’s “That Darn Cat!,” a Jack Lemmon comedy called “The Great Race,” and “Doctor Zhivago,” an epic romance set largely in opposition to Russia’s communist revolution.

None were R-rated; the MPAA rating system didn’t exist and didn’t seem necessary. The golden age of musical films had waned, but “My Fair Lady,” “Mary Poppins” and “West Side Story” showed that the earnest genre was still a good commercial bet. No wonder 20th Century Fox snatched up the film rights to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit about a singing nun that won five Tony Awards in 1960.

The studio tabbed director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who had partnered on “West Side Story,” to helm the project. Wise didn’t expect to make an all-time classic; he just needed to keep his bosses happy while he worked on “The Sand Pebbles,” a challenging anti-war epic set during the Chinese revolution as an allegory for Vietnam. When he met with Maria von Trapp — the inspiration for the female lead who had sold the rights to her 1949 memoir years before — Wise told her to expect a moving film, rather than a realistic one.

Even so, the broad strokes would remain rather true to life, and that probably contributed to the movie’s early appeal. World War II was not a distant memory then; many recalled the uncertain events of 1938, when the story’s most dramatic events take place. Imperial Japan had invaded China.

Fascist-aligned Nationalists were throttling pro-democratic Republicans in the 76

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Spanish Civil War while cautious Western leaders refused to pick a side. The U.S. and United Kingdom would soon stop accepting Jewish refugees. And one day before Austrians were set to vote in a referendum on their country’s annexation into the Third Reich, Germany invaded, calling it the “Anschluss.”

The film is set in the months before that historic event. The fictitious Maria is an exuberant young novice at the Nonnberg Abbey. Concerned that Maria may not fit there, the abbess sends her to work for retired naval Captain Georg von Trapp, played by Christopher Plummer, as governess to his seven children. In his grief, the widowed father has become regimented and distant from his kids — Liesl, Friedrich, Louisa,

THE AUDIENCE, WEARING APRON DRESSES, DIRNDLS AND LEDERHOSEN, MAKES VALIANT BUT ULTIMATELY FUTILE ATTEMPTS AT HARMONIZING.

Kurt, Brigitta, Marta and Gretl. They’ve taken out their frustrations on Maria’s predecessors, scaring them off with mischievous pranks. Maria’s arrival sets off a chain of events that will eventually save them all, with kindness.

A T H U N D E R STO R M B R E A KS out while the captain is away. Frightened, the children gather in Maria’s room. From my seat at the back of the theater, I watch my neighbors as much as the screen. By the time the governess distracts the kids from their fears, singing instead about “My Favorite Things,” the audience has all but merged with the film.

At “doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles,” they ring little silver bells.

They toss fistfuls of white feathers in the air as “wild geese that fly with the moon on

their wings.” We can all benefit from a little positive thinking.

Costumes and silly props are common at screenings of certain cult classics, a term often used to describe films that perform poorly on initial release but later find a loyal repeat audience who engage beyond the simple act of viewing. Academics debate the definition of a cult film, but the list of qualifiers is probably longer than you think.

Wikipedia even identifies eight subgenres, from “so bad it’s good” to Japanese anime and nostalgia. Some are low-budget, like “Napoleon Dynamite” or the early “Godzilla” series. Others are just weird. “Any film is potentially a cult classic,” says Timothy Corrigan, emeritus professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “It depends to what extent it fires up or activates an audience to appropriate parts of it or all of it in terms of their own perception.”

But there is one common thread: repetition. “One cornerstone of the cult film is spending time with a film you’ve seen many times before,” says Ernest Mathijs, professor of cinema at the University of British Columbia. “You come together, and, in the case of ‘Sound of Music,’ you sing along.”

The film’s first sing-along screening was held in 1999 in London, then stateside in Boston, Austin and New York, where a few surviving cast members even attended the opening. Now, it’s a global phenomenon.

This is clearly not my cohort’s first time. As the children’s singing voices echo through the family’s extravagant palace, I notice one family bracing for the turning point. The captain is on the verge of firing Maria after learning that his children were out in public wearing the “play clothes” she made for them from discarded drapes and splashing around after their boat overturned in the lake by his villa. But the music draws him inside, where he finds the kids singing a choral number for his fiancée, a baroness. Instead of scolding them this time, he joins in. In the row in front me, a father and son wrap their arms around each other and hum in tune.

Without giving away any spoilers, the film’s most intimate storyline tells of a family divided by tragedy who find their way back to each other with patience, love and a little help from the father’s unlikely new romantic interest. “It’s about a fractured family healing,” says Tom Santopietro, author of “The Sound of Music Story,” “and people want to believe that can happen with their families as well.”

Even so, that plot becomes even more stirring in the context of larger world events.

THE CAPTAIN COMES home to find an un-

familiar banner draped above the entrance to the Von Trapp family villa. He has just returned from a long honeymoon abroad with his new bride to a country that no longer exists. While he was gone, German troops rolled in against little or no resistance, occupying Austria and incorporating it into the Third Reich. Now, from the center of a white circle against a red field, a black swastika glares back at him. Sternly, he yanks down the Nazi flag and rips it in half. Almost without emotion, like taking out the trash.

This is perhaps the film’s most iconic moment. It may also tell us something about its timeless appeal. For decades, since the Allies defeated Germany in 1945, Nazis have been seen as a common enemy, a historic aberration that embodied much of what we fear in humanity and a warning against our worst excesses. The swastika stood for an ideology of total government authority, favoring one race and embracing violence as a policy tool, systematically slaughtering six million Jews among more than 17 million total victims, outside of combat.

They were easy to cast as Hollywood’s go-to villains. From John Wayne in “The Longest Day” to Indiana Jones and Captain America, our heroes have made hay fighting fictitious but clearly uniformed Nazis on screen. Even Luke Skywalker rebels against an evil space empire arrayed in Nazi style and headed by his own father, who cajoles his son to join him so they can “restore order to the galaxy” through total domination;

instead, Skywalker eventually convinces his father to abandon the “dark side” and embrace the good in himself. This gets at the trouble with ideological conflict: The first battleground is the human heart.

In this sense, “The Sound of Music” may be more realistic. Signs of a creeping tolerance and even embrace of fascist ideas have surfaced subtly throughout the movie, and when Germany invades, it finds enough sympathy among the Austrian people to avoid shedding blood. The captain finds himself surrounded by enemies who were once his neighbors, like the mayor-turned-gauleiter, now a regional Nazi leader who demands to be greeted with what people today are calling a “Roman salute.” Others closer to the Von Trapps betray them in ways that I

THE VON TRAPPS’ COURAGE TO LIVE BY THEIR CONVICTIONS WHEN DOING SO IS NOT JUST UNPOPULAR BUT ALSO DANGEROUS REPRESENTS A DIFFERENT KIND OF HEROISM.

won’t spoil. The captain is heartbroken but unbending, and his family stands with him.

Their courage to live by their convictions in a time when doing so is not just unpopular but also dangerous represents a different kind of heroism, one that may be easier for us to see ourselves emulating.

It’s only more powerful when you consider the real-life family behind the story. “All of us who watch the movie would like to believe that we would have the integrity and character to stand up to the Nazis,” Santopietro says. “We would like to think that we would have that moral courage. It’s as if we idealize portraits of ourselves.”

CAPTAIN VON TRAPP carries his youngest daughter across a luxurious green field high in the Alps. Maria and the kids follow

single-file, adopting his military discipline.

I watch them escape Austria in secret, with a comical assist from Maria’s friends at the abbey, crossing the mountains on foot with the few possessions they can carry.

The same granite peaks from the opening scene now tower overhead, a reminder of how small the family must feel amid the geopolitical chaos that brought them to this bittersweet moment. They’ve lost their country, but they’ve got each other, and a path to freedom. I believe this radical hope is what keeps the film’s allure alive.

The real Von Trapps didn’t have to walk, but they did leave the country just in time, boarding a train to Italy the day before Austria sealed its borders on a musical tour they would never return from. And they didn’t leave behind a palace. In fact, they had lost their fortune during the Great Depression. After arriving in the United States in 1939 as humble immigrants, they settled in Stowe, Vermont. They formed a touring group called the Trapp Family Singers. Later, they converted their lodge into a ski resort that is still operational. Maria and Georg are both buried there, in the family cemetery. On screen, of course, none of that has happened yet.

Tears fall in the cinema as the family marches onward, serenaded by a distant choir of voices. “Climb ev’ry mountain / Ford every stream / Follow every rainbow / Till you find your dream.” These days, serious movies tend to feel dark, often ending in ambiguity and gloom. It’s striking how inspiring this one feels, considering such difficult subject matter. But they were able to survive, so perhaps this modern audience can do the same. Perhaps believing is enough. Perhaps any storm can be weathered if enough voices sing against it.

“Most films that deal, even tangentially, with the Holocaust or fascist Germany are pretty serious,” Corrigan says. But in this case, the film “signals that darkness, that seriousness, but it reperforms it as a kind of happy romance in a way. In the end, you can sing your way through fascism. That’s a nice thought these days.”

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ODE

FRESH START AN ODE TO A WELL-MADE BED

BY K E V I N L I N D

W

hen I wake up, I make the bed. I complete the task without too much thought. Straightening the sheets and squaring the edges helps me to focus through the morning fog.

It’s my first accomplishment, a kindness I give to myself and an offering I’ll always need: a clean slate. Even if it’s still dark, I shake out the duvet, then fluff and arrange the pillows, just so.

My mornings weren’t always like this. Growing up in Queens, I didn’t want to make my bed and I couldn’t see any need for daily routines. I preferred to leave that twin mattress in apartment 2D on 162nd Street just as I left it. After all, I’d spent all night making an arrangement ideal for the way I slept. I’d warmed my pillows, which now ran north-to-south, pinched at the middle like farfalle, rather than straight across the top. I’d sculpted the brown wool blanket and denim comforter — warmth enough for a perpetually cold kid — into a cavernous pocket with space for me and my one knee pulled to the side. Why would I undo work so well done? In the fuzzy logic of adolescence, I believed I could simply return at the end of the day and slip like a dream back into the space I’d formed the night before.

Much later, when I worked in high-end restaurants, I would fold 78

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hundreds of napkins each week, each one perfectly aligned. But I hadn’t made my bed in years. My personal life was in disarray. I was grasping for anything I could do to get it back under control, when someone suggested I try a simple routine. Making your bed, they said, can become a daily victory. Counting and collecting small wins through ordinary acts like this can give you something to like and respect about yourself.

Soon I made bed-making a serious habit, with the same attention to detail I brought to my work: sheets hand-smoothed and crisp; pillowcases pulled tight; pillows leaning against the headboard, stacked in pairs; duvet draped evenly, puffed just enough for left objects to leave indentations, the top edge folded to leave a six-inch demarcation, just enough handle to pull it back at bedtime. The bare minimum, to me, but it glows when I look at it.

It’s a painful truth that you can’t just return to the idylls of yesterday, as I once believed about my tousled sheets and rumpled pillows. But you can wake up and start fresh, giving yourself one less omission to regret, one more comfort to look forward to. After a few quick folds, and a few short fluffs, I have a made bed, a fresh place where I know I can return tonight and recover.

ILLU STR ATION BY K A I T LI N BR I TO

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POETRY

FOUR KINDS OF EMPTINESS

BY C H E N G R U H E

of which one is full, awaiting a virgin blossom to unbalance the abundance. the room is quiet, as if we are part of the plan, planted, pressed, bound, blessed. the empty receives attention. a leaf flutters, please, more light. in the shade of fear, Queen Anne’s Lace speaks, in time the roots will grow. the empty is accurately placed, carefully touched by its shadow. we happen to agree on going back to the first day of imagination, where each leaf is light, and empty is full.

C H E N G R U H E I S T H E AU T H O R O F " M O月 N ," A B O O K O F P O E M S , A N D " I W O U L D VA N I S H I N T O I T S S T RO N G E R E X I S T E N C E ," A H Y B R I D M E M O I R .

C U R ATED BY U TAH PO E T LAU R E AT E LI SA BI C KM O R E

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PARTING SHOT

EFFIE YAZZIE STANDS OUTSIDE HER HOME, A TRADITIONAL DINÉ HOGAN, IN MONUMENT VALLEY, ARIZONA. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELLIOT ROSS

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APRIL 2025 ISSUE 43

43

T H E FA I T H I S S U E

THE GREAT

AWAKENING

WHY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE

REDISCOVERING FAITH

BETWEEN HEAVEN

AND HURRICANE HELENE

THE RELIGION OF AI

HOW BELIEF INFORMS

THE NEW AGE OF INTELLIGENCE INSIDE THE GLOBAL GENEALOGY BOOM

APRIL 2025 VOL 05 | NO 43