Like a Prayer:
Searching for Spirit in 2022

For decades, organized religion was on the decline in the U.S. with millennials identifying as Christians far less than their older counterparts. I remember documentaries like Jesus Camp (2006) and the Bill Mahar-helmed Religulous (2008) that made believers the butt of the joke, establishing an enlightened atheist-liberal zeitgeist in stark opposition to Fox-News-watching home-schooled creationists preparing for supposedly soon-to-come end times. Abortion rights and prayer in schools were wedge issues shaping a culture war; meanwhile, the Catholic Church was rocked by child abuse scandals and biggoted evangelicals like Ted Haggard were outed as having gay sex behind closed doors. While the white media I grew up with sometimes treated the Black Church and Latinx Catholicism as exceptions, for the most part, godless liberals always seemed to be affirming religion’s reputation for hypocrisy, and I’m sure many would blame their campaign against Christianity for the reason that, in a 2019 Pew Research study, 30 million more Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated than a decade before.

But then COVID hit. Across the globe, online searches for the word “prayer” soared. A quarter of U.S. adults, according to Pew, alleged that during the pandemic, their faith became stronger. People turn to religion in times of crisis. Grief inspires the desire to talk with a higher power even if it’s to tell them you’re angry or that it doesn’t feel fair. We suffered loss during COVID. But lockdown also upended our daily routines. For the first time in a while many of us had a moment to reflect on what gives life meaning. And this pandemic-fueled rumination came in concert with other cultural shifts. For a while we’d been collectively becoming more and more sick of capitalism and skeptical of science, these changes inspiring e-girls to turn to crystals and astrology. But with hyper-accelerated trend cycles, new-age aesthetics were already feeling passé. For edgelords and early-adopters nauseated by their peers’ proselytizing of empowerment and harm reduction, disillusioned by the growing acceptance of everything once subversive, religious devotion felt like the final taboo.

We’re not the first generation to flirt with reactionary orthodoxy. You could argue Andy Warhol was the original trad-Cath—his complex relationship to religion is the focus of Revelation, an exhibition currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, full of artworks of cherubs, crosses, the Last Supper, and Madonna and Child. Being “a good religious boy,” as Warhol’s mother praised him in a 1966 Esquire Magazine article, was antithetical to the superficiality and sleaze of the Factory. But Warhol always had an instinct for subversion, and knew when being self-consciously conservative would hit better for nonconformists than its opposite. In Holy Terror, Bob Colacello explains that for Warhol and his scene, “in the sixties, to be openly gay seemed daring and different, but in the seventies, when the masses rushed out of their closets in droves, the raised fist of the new liberation movement was uncool.” Warhol worshiped style over political correctness, and this certainly impacted every aspect of how he crafted his public persona. At the same time, the artist’s lifelong devotion to the Byzantine Catholic tradition was sincere. Warhol, according to curator José Carlos Diaz, evokes the immanence of God in a 33-minute static shot of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean, reel 77 in an unfinished film series. When I see a bleeding horizon crack open the world, I’m reminded of a line from Simone Weil’s Waiting For God (1973): “The beauty of this world is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter.”

I’ve posted Christian content on Instagram, understanding it would disrupt my followers’ expectations. I know the impulse to chase cool and to retreat from what seems exposed, but I also know my interest in faith is enduring. I felt that familiar reactionary fervor swell up in me when acquaintances, people I’d qualify in my meanest moments as scene hangers-on, started posting on Instagram those little purses branded “God’s Favorite.” Now that being cheekily Christian was proving popular I resisted appearing unoriginal in my imitation of Christ. But then it seemed absurd to let my love for God be influenced by wannabe influencers. I leaned into it a little and followed @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife — at the time of writing, the meme page, which exemplifies Internet culture’s collapse of irony and sincerity, has an audience of over 47 thousand (plus a line of merch). Praying, the cult brand behind those righteous bags and trinity bikinis, has over 76 thousand. Mary Magdalene, a bimbo icon who’s wearing a bedazzled “I heart Jesus” hat in her profile pic, has over 98 thousand. If religion is the opiate of the masses, I wonder what is being trad-Cath fulfilling for the ketamine set? Or maybe a better question is what are the consequences of their cosplay neo-conservatism?

When I started writing this essay, the stakes felt different. The Supreme Court’s opinion on Roe v. Wade hadn’t yet been leaked. Now the vibes have undeniably shifted and I feel more alarmed by Red Scare wannabes parroting on their post-Left podcasts basic Westboro Baptist bigotry: anti-gay and anti-abortion sentiments. Even if you mean something ironically, there are still repercussions to putting any message out into the world. Remember how meme magick on 4chan allegedly buttressed Trump’s election back in 2016? Belief is powerful, and while a lack of it can be dangerous, maybe it doesn’t have to be. The same vacuum that’s birthed these new edgelord extremists arguably also created their foil—tender queer spirituralists, who have been refashioning religion in a different way, discarding what doesn’t serve them and cultivating what does.

As we’ve moved away from organized religion, we’ve been recreating much of what church has offered in gay art and nightlife spaces. I feel closest to God when I’m wholly present and a part of something larger than myself: Pulsating in a mass of sweaty bodies. Losing my single voice in a chorus. Having the kind of sex that feels transcendent of the physical plane. The increasing rationalization of technocratic society, what sociologist Max Weber named the iron cage and described as a kind of disenchanting, feels most readily resisted when we encounter sublime overwhelming immersion, something pretty much every major religion has historically had practices for realizing by praying, dancing, singing, and breathing.

I lived with artist Colin Self when they were hosting a community choir at our Brooklyn loft (an ongoing project called XOIR) and which at the time grew into The Fool, an experimental opera that Self authored with Raul de Nieves (staged at Issue Project Room in 2014 and the Kitchen in 2017). Back then de Nieves described the intention of their opera rehearsals, meetings at the loft where everyone would sing together and share food, as “trying to build a sacred space.” (Their efforts to create hallowed ground were enmeshed with other projects; for example, de Nieves’s art studio was in the basement of a nocturnal sanctuary known as the Spectrum/Dreamhouse where enlightenment came via dancing, drugs, and deep techno.) Self and de Nieves’s opera production gave its audience and performers a sublime connected experience while making a spiritual community without the conservatism and denominational dogma that pushes many away from the church. Their only “belief system,” according to Self, was “just acknowledging you are a body with a voice.”

According to the tech-evangelists, social media has given everyone a voice. We can proselytize the good news that we’re living in an era of unprecedented democratization if we gloss over who owns the communications infrastructure. Maybe it’s at the very least an era shaped by new levels of performativity. A fundamental part of Christianity is sharing the gospel, but with all the PR relationships and viral stunts, we’ve grown suspicious of the alleged sincerity in attention-seeking behavior. And there’s just so much noise. In the onslaught of tweets and TikToks, podcasts critiquing celebrity cookbooks and scammer stories stretched into multi-episode streaming series, sometimes only the most chaotically salacious breaks through. And then everyone needs to have a hot take about what’s going on, case in point: me right now over-analyzing some white people being ironically religious online.

Vocalizing desire is powerful. When I was little my mom taught me how to kneel at the foot of my bed and pray, asking angels to watch over and protect us. Later I became one of those people who observes full moons and sets intentions. We speak our reality into existence. But recently I’ve become especially interested in silence. In theologian Dorothee Sölle’s book The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (2001) she explains its title refers to a name for God, one that’s inherent paradox expresses eternally desiring an impossible thing—a “darkness that outshines resplendence” (Dionysus), “to become all poem” (Martin Buber). In her examination of silence, Sölle distinguishes a poverty of words between people who have nothing to say to one another from a silence that arises out of an abundance that transcends language. Sometimes we make a practice of being quiet hoping to hear a voice other than one’s own. Other times, or even at the same time, our silence is simply an expression of the living light.