America’s Relig-ish Revival
By Will McKelvey, Investor at Lerer Hippeau
Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about religion and spirituality. This might sound strange coming from a technology investor, but it happened pretty organically. As an early stage VC, my job is to consider not where the world is now, but where it will be in 5 or 10 years. As I worked through that mental framework, I couldn’t shake religion from my mind. It’s become clear that society is struggling with a deficit of meaning, precipitated by a culture-wide decline of religion in the modern age. I want to put forward a few ideas I’ve been considering about how, under the right circumstances, technology platforms could be positioned to pick up where religious movements have left off. In considering the intersection between religion and technology, I don’t mean to suggest that technology can replace religion. The “Big Four” as I call them — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism — will always be around. What I’d like to consider instead is the possibility of a “Relig-ish” revival, where “Relig-ish” is understood as a system of meaning developed for a secular, tech-empowered world, one that can also sit parallel to existing religions. As with any thought experiment or thesis development, iteration, conversation, and the exchange of ideas is key. What follows is an attempt at further fleshing out some of these ideas. I’m eager to hear what people think. If you are someone who is thinking about these issues too or is actively working to tackle them, I’d love to hear from you.
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For as long as humans have written they have also prayed. Organized religion has been a foundational layer of civilization, providing community, ritual, and guidance for all of recorded history. Until now. Over the last 65 years, Western society has rapidly secularized. Religious identification has plummeted and weekly service attendance has fallen off of a cliff. In its stead, we have tried to fill this yawning societal gap with a number of half-measures and point solutions. But something’s missing.
In an era of well-documented, tech-driven isolation and AI’s potentially existential ramifications, I believe there is an enormous opportunity for something new to rise and fill our need for meaning. However, before we dive into what a relig-ish movement could look like, it’s important to understand how it would work.
The three legs of the relig-ish stool
Despite their obvious differences, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism–“The Big 4”–have persisted for millennia by following a pretty similar playbook. The universal religious infrastructure is best illustrated by the metaphor of the three-legged stool. Each leg of the seat is equally critical to its functionality. If just one leg falters or is removed, the stool topples over, sending its occupant to the ground. Many relig-ish movements that bubbled up in recent decades attempted but failed to successfully reconstruct the precise, sturdy balance mastered by The Big 4.
(Leg 1) In-person ritual: “same people, same time, same place”
The first leg of organized religion is in-person ritual. For simplicity, I call this “same people, same time, same place.” Humans are naturally social and habit-driven creatures. We crave community and routine. In order to feel connected both emotionally and spiritually, we must interact in the physical realm. Ritual catalyzes in-person connection. Going to the same place every week with the same people establishes a bond with little effort from the attendees. Think of the trope of being a “regular.” Your daily trip to the coffeeshop is the foundation of your affinity for your barista. You may not exchange much beyond your order, your names, and perhaps a few niceties, but that’s all you need. You’re comfortable. In a crowded commodity market like coffee, that familiar relationship keeps you coming back just as much as the product does. A movement only succeeds in the long-run due to the commitment of its followers to return week after week and bring others into the fold. Same people, same time, same place.
(Leg 2) Spiritual guidance: “big answers to big questions”
The second leg of organized religion is spiritual guidance and solace. I call this “big answers to big questions.” Religion explains the unexplainable; it gives meaning to life; it comforts the afflicted. The promise of an afterlife or resting place for one’s soul helps us grapple with the universal experience of mortality. Religion helps us make sense of why bad things happen to good people. Solace can be found in the release of control. Whether the pain is part of a plan or punishment, religion answers when reason fails. While we don’t need religion to teach us values, it gives us a shared language by which to communicate them.
(Leg 3) Identity: “bigger than you”
The third leg of organized religion is identity. Identity allows us to take our beliefs into the world and wear them on our sleeve. An identity also allows one to spot other members of the “in-group” and immediately establish common ground, reinforcing the religion’s value. If this connection evolves into a romantic relationship, then a shared identity among parents is more likely to be passed along to their children.
Identity also helps members feel they’re part of something bigger than themselves. An externally facing identity empowers members and builds excitement to evangelize, and bringing others into the fold is what allows the religion to grow. With identity comes community, which helps religion escape the bounds of ritual. When someone makes friends or dates through someone’s group, it helps the religion expand beyond the bounds of occasional ritual into its members’ everyday lives. They are now fully enveloped in something bigger than themselves.
How we tried and failed to replace religion
Religion’s influence in the US peaked in 1960 before entering an era of decline that coincided with a rising countercultural tide. The hippie generation, for example, rejected establishment belief systems, but the innate desire for ritual, guidance, and community remained. This gap was the first opening for alternatives. To borrow a simile from the tech world, if “The Big 4” achieved fully bundled religion, then nearly every subsequent replacement has been an unbundled point solution. Enter spiritual yoga, pernicious cults, and every quasi-religious movement, including certain tech-based ones, in between.
I’ve laid out below a handful of the buckets that these quasi-religions can be categorized under along with a few examples. While you’ve likely heard of most, I think that nearly all have failed at recreating the alchemy that has allowed the biggest religions to sustain their global presence for millennia. Even if these quasi-religious replacements have captured some part of the power of organized religion, each is missing at least one of the legs of the stool, leaving them unstable and unsatisfying.
What’s coming next, and why is this on a VC blog?
There is an opening for a new relig-ish movement that captures the desire for meaning, and I believe a startup can build it.
While intuition might have us believe that culture moves in a linear fashion, I find it’s better illustrated in three dimensions. Yes, we are constantly moving forward, building on the learnings of the generations that come before us, but contained within that progressive motion is a pendulum that swings side to side. Viewed laterally, it’s easy to miss, but when you rotate the box on its axes, you see that we’re constantly swinging from one pole to the other as we march forward. Fashion, politics, and culture all swing on a pendulum. Consider, for example, the drift from baggy pants to skinny jeans and back to baggy. There are early indications that we’ve reached the apex of our swing away from religiosity.
There have been quite a few startups that have recently jumped out to varying degrees of success by explicitly building for The Big 4 (Hallow, Glorify, BibleChat, and BibleGPT to name a few in the Christianity space alone), or for existing relig-ish communities (Co-Star, The Pattern, and Nebula in astrological circles). There’s no doubt a big opportunity exists to draft off of existing movements, but a truly world-changing company will build something entirely new.
A word of advice to any founder who takes on the herculean task of building a relig-ish movement: study Alcoholics Anonymous.
AA is arguably the most successful relig-ish organization of the last century, and it checks all three boxes of the three-legged stool. Its members meet in-person consistently in a decentralized fashion. Check. It borrows principles from a number of religious practices, giving its members spiritual guidance. Check. Despite the anonymity stated in its name, AA members carry their identity beyond the meetings, often finding partners within the community, and carrying their recovery chips every day. Check.
It’s likely that the next relig-ish movement will have much in common with its Big 4 predecessors. While a growing proportion of Americans are no longer affiliated with any religion, the recency of this shift means people are still familiar with many religious tenets and often view individual principles positively (for example, the oft-cited “love thy neighbor”). The next relig-ish movement will shed the brand baggage of the Big 4 while borrowing bits and pieces of their teachings.
It’s unclear exactly what such a relig-ish movement would look like, but I believe there is an incredible opportunity to create something that will have an outsized impact, deriving meaning for millions of people. This is the massive, difficult problem that venture capital was created for. If you’re tackling it, I’d love to meet you.
