Traditional religion is in decline. But figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson are transforming faith for the 21st century. With over a quarter of Americans now claiming to be ‘spiritual but not religious’, what does this new era of belief look like? George Adams argues the new face of religion is predicated on a move away from dogmatic belief and an anthropomorphised God, and towards a more expansive, experiential, spirituality.

Churches closing at an alarming rate, reputable polls showing a dramatic decline in the percentage of the population identifying as believers, a chronic shortage of pastors and priests, seminaries struggling to find students, and popular culture that is increasingly detached from any connection to the traditional religious beliefs and values of Western society: clearly religion as we know it in much of America and Europe is in a state of dramatic decline. While some believers (in decreasing numbers) continue to follow traditional religions and other more adventurous seekers (in similarly small numbers) embrace the many variants of New Age spirituality, where does that leave the vast, “silent spiritual majority” who find the old religions to be obsolete and the new religions to not yet be credible? For the 21st century citizen who feels the pull to believe but is unwilling to sacrifice their intellectual and moral integrity, what alternative is there?

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How to Think About Religion in the 21st Century: A New Guide for the Perplexed is intended for this population of thoughtful, well-meaning men and women who, fully informed by the intellectual, historical, and cultural elements of modernity in the early 21st century, find that while they are not atheist materialists, neither can they believe in the religious traditions of the past, nor are they prepared to accept the sometimes dubious claims of newer alternatives. For this population of 21st century citizens who want to believe, but not at the price of sacrificing their intellectual and moral dignity, we argue that there is another way to look at religion, fully informed by 21st century sensibilities, that requires no sacrifice of the intellect or abandonment of moral sensibilities.

The position that we advocate is grounded in acceptance of a fundamental proposition about religion: it changes, and it changes all the time. Finding a spiritual path in the 21st century does not mean looking back over 2000 years ago to traditions that functioned successfully given the nature of human consciousness and its related culture at that time. But human consciousness has evolved, as have the various components of human culture that contribute to our capacity to sense the Sacred and articulate that sense through the components of the phenomenon of religion. Humans in the 21st century are in a transitional stage in which the symbols, myths, and doctrines of the traditional religions, rooted in a pre-modern mythic consciousness, no longer are credible, but a successor to those ancient religious traditions which is grounded in contemporary, science-informed post-mythic consciousness and all of the various elements of contemporary human culture that have emerged from post-mythic consciousness, has not yet emerged in any sort of definitive manner. The old religions are dying away, but the basic elements of the religions of the future are only beginning to develop, leaving today’s would-be believers in a state of confusion and doubt.

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We are suggesting that, once the biases of scientism, materialism, and dogmatic religious fundamentalism are set aside, the possibility of recognizing the presence of a spiritual dimension opens up.

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