Jennifer Bauer has heartbreaking reasons for distancing herself from the church. Her mother had been acutely unhappy in her second marriage. When she lamented to the women at her nondenominational church, Bauer remembers they told her, “She just needs to read the Bible more. She just needs to pray harder.” The formerly vibrant, outgoing woman became smaller as she tried to defer to her husband. She made multiple suicide attempts.
Bauer was heading off to college around the time her mother decided she was getting a divorce. Her only friends, those from church, cut her mother off. In the split, her assets were frozen and she lost custody of her children. She died with a final suicide attempt in 1999.
Her funeral was “the straw that broke my back as far as saying, I want nothing to do with religion,” Bauer says. At the funeral, the pastor blamed the devil—claimed her mother had let evil forces take over her life. He couldn’t see the pain she had carried nor how the church had contributed. He implied her mother was in hell. Her grandmother, a Catholic, said so outright.
At first, Bauer struggled with guilt over leaving for college, feeling like she’d abandoned her mom. She read two years of her mother’s journals, reading how she’d pleaded with God to allow her to feel loved.
Bauer attended a United Church of Christ for a few years, but real healing only came when she started studying energy modalities (Reiki is one popular example).
It was at that point that breakthrough finally arrived. She started having personal experiences connecting with higher powers—what she describes as “ascended masters,” an idea with roots in theosophy that describes figures like Jesus and Buddha as historic people who became enlightened.
For Bauer, that change was transformative.
“I actually sat right here on my little meditation pillow,” she told me, and with her eyes closed and third eye open, she said she saw Jesus in front of her. He held her, and she cried. She felt the places in her body where she had been holding anger and resentment against Christianity and Catholicism dissolve, and she felt herself merge with Jesus. Once she felt entirely clear of that trauma, she says, Jesus stepped back out of her body and stood before her.
Today, Bauer works as a certified coach and energy worker and healer. During those healings, she calls in spirit guides and light beings: various archangels, or one called the Overlighting Deva of All Healing. About half of the people she works with are healing from trauma related to their Christian upbringings. A few suffered abuse; most witnessed Christian patriarchal control, unchecked misogyny, or prejudice against LGBTQ+ people or people of color.
“I don’t believe any religion should be teaching people to hate themselves or that they’re unworthy of love. That’s not God,” Bauer says. “In my lived experiences now, I feel God within myself and within everything around me. It’s pure love and peace.”
While the circumstances of her break with the church may be unique, Bauer is among millions of people who have disaffiliated with Christian churches in the United States in recent years. According to Pew Research Center, Christian self-identification dropped from 78 percent to 62 percent between 2007 and 2024. Today, religious “nones” (those identifying themselves as atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular) are now more prevalent, at 28 percent, than Catholics (23 percent) or evangelical Protestants (24 percent).
Until recent decades, the U.S. had remained uniquely religious among Western nations. Now, however, the country may finally be doing what many nations did generations ago—secularizing.
Sociologists of religion have numerous theories about how and why cultures secularize, but the granddaddy of these theses came from sociologist Max Weber, who used modern, post-Enlightenment, Protestant Europe as a paradigm for how with increasing rationalization and intellectualization, people will quit allowing themselves to be motivated by religious or magical thinking. (Scientific explanations win out over superstition.) As these disenchanted people’s institutions became more entangled with capitalism, Weber thought, they would instead get stuck in an “iron cage,” like efficient cogs in the machinery of modern bureaucracy and economic systems.
But in the U.S., a lot of people are peeling off from traditional religious denominations and following a different path—rediscovering ancestral faith or rewriting Christian religion or becoming pagan witches. Many demystifying Americans, like Bauer, are leaving the church but, rather than becoming strictly secular, are embracing a sort of choose-your-own-adventure spirituality.
A recent longitudinal study in Socius, the American Sociological Association’s journal, followed a cohort of 1,348 people born in the late 1980s and found that while institutional involvement in religion is declining, many people still reported praying. Their belief in God remained fairly steady. Their practice of meditation actually increased.
People with more liberal views and those who believe in same-sex marriage and that abortion should be legal tended to withdraw from the church in higher numbers (though there was a decline in church attendance and affiliation across the political spectrum). In qualitative interviews, respondents explained their choice to leave religion was motivated by deeply held values—such as LGBTQ rights. The study subjects also came of age during the rise of the Christian right, a dubious alignment that helped funnel votes and dollars for Republican political causes even as megachurch pastor after pastor fell to sex and abuse scandals. Talk about disenchantment.
The horrific scale of the Catholic and Southern Baptist sex abuse scandals and cover-up gave ample just cause for many believers to question church leaders.
But as researchers found, leaving the institutional church doesn’t necessarily mean quitting faith. In fact, as the Socius article notes, “for some, it takes losing religion to find themselves spiritually.” People are breaking free from the iron cage of institutional religion, as the Socius piece suggests, “not with bolt cutters but with deeply personal acts of spiritual rebellion.”
Bee Smith, a community organizer based in Galveston, Texas, was largely guarded from religion as a kid, due to her parents’ earlier experience in a Christian cult. Her most lasting spiritual event was what she considers a near-death experience at age 12, in which her great-grandmother and other “light beings”—whom she understood to be her female ancestors—showed her a staircase. It was not fully constructed, and her great-grandmother told her it was important she not give up in this life because what she built would help the women in their family who came after her.
She woke up screaming, hearing her great-grandmother insist she tell her mother that her stomach hurt. It took weeks to find, but it turned out she had a cyst the size of a cantaloupe “hemorrhaging and full of blood clots” on her right ovary.
Rather than an eerie miracle story, the memory became a way to survive. Smith says she became a sexual abuse victim of the doctor who treated her. She held on because of the memory of her ancestors telling her she should not give up.
Her family moved to Kentucky when she was 14, and though she attended a Southern Baptist church, she read the Bible with an interest in Jesus’s social justice convictions. As she read the Bible, she found herself always “trying to fill in the gaps.” She imagined how the narrative might fill out if the perspectives of the women in the stories were not ignored.
Through creative writing, she has reimagined the figures of Lilith, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, mother of Jesus. She considers Lilith, recalled in Jewish mythology as Adam’s disobedient first wife, instead a goddess; Mary Magdalene is a Christ-like figure, a female counterpart and divine in her own right. She lets Lilith, for example, “be her full divine self in the stories that I write about other women who are overcoming abuse.” She creates little rituals. She’ll put on “wild music and dance alone.” Maybe she’ll smoke a little weed and get herself into a trance state, light candles, stare at the flame, “and try to open up a space in my mind where I can see beyond the veil.”
Before she quit the church, Smith told her former pastor that “the church needs to lose its walls if it wants to find its soul.” She had been inspired by the idea of the church being the body of God, which seeks out those in need.
“I would just rather be a free agent and try to be the church,” she says, than attend one that doesn’t care for those who need it. As a community organizer, Smith works mostly with atheists, agnostics, and people who have been abused by the church, “but we’re literally doing the work of God.”
Certainly, there are theologians who would balk at the idea of treating Mary Magdalene as coequal with Jesus or seeing divinity in Jewish folklore’s Lilith (sometimes described as a demoness). The defining characteristics of religious institutions and denominations often come down to shared creeds, interpretations, and beliefs. If adoption of doctrine makes you belong, there’s nothing barring those who leave from cutting away the old rules but hanging onto whatever symbols bring personal meaning (at least, now that we no longer live in a time when such people are regularly burned as heretics).
Such spiritual borrowing is nothing new; in fact, it’s part of how cultures and religions spread their message. In Bath, England, the old Celtic goddess Sulis was strategically associated with the Roman goddess Minerva, which helped transfer Roman religious ideas. Ask any pagan about the history of Easter and you’ll get an earful about the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, bunny rabbits, and eggs as pagan symbols of fertility and rebirth. Fourth-century Romans already celebrated the rebirth of Sol Invictus (the sun god) on December 25, and there’s reasonable evidence that under the Emperor Constantine, who himself converted to Christianity and spread the faith, December 25 was chosen as the date for celebrating Christmas in order to help eclipse the pagan holiday.
The more Christianity organized and systematized over generations, “the more it tried to get rid of some of these pagan or syncretistic or indigenous or localized practices,” notes the Socius study’s lead researcher, Landon Schnabel, sociologist at Cornell University. “It never really succeeded,” particularly, for example, in Latin America, which “has localized and indigenous practices that still make it in and get combined with Catholicism.”
Instead of replacing them, those folk religions often exist as an undercurrent, and many Americans are now interested in rediscovering them, peeling off the Christian or institutional layer.
During colonial times, various syncretic spiritualities had to “hide their practices behind the mirror of Catholicism,” notes Odalis Garcia Gorra, a writer and doctoral student at University of Texas, Austin. “If you think about Santeria,” an Afro-Caribbean faith that blends Yoruba (West African) and Catholic beliefs, “the saints were syncretized with the Orishas,” a pantheon of Yoruban deities, Garcia Gorra notes.
Garcia Gorra studies the rise of Latinx digital communities, especially brujapreneurs—witches carving out sacred space on Instagram. Representative among them is Bri Luna, The Hoodwitch and author of Blood, Sex, Magic; she has 481,000 followers and blends Tarot, the Virgin Mary, astrology, and recently, the pagan holiday Beltane. The content is feminine, gothic, luxurious.
Garcia Gorra notes how often followers of this sort of witchy aesthetic include young women and gender-nonconforming people, queer people. Often, they are second- or third-generation children of immigrants, reaching for connection with the beliefs of their ancestors. They seem to want to get away from a colonizing form of faith they grew up with and dig for the history underneath that was pushed down by the church.
For descendants of diasporic communities, “enslaved peoples or colonized peoples, there’s a point where the family tree ends, right? There’s no record.” Better understanding brujeria or hoodoo, for example, could offer a connection to the spiritual life of one’s ancestors and bring with it a rootedness in time and spirit when a connection to the modern church has been severed.
“It’s both very new but also very old that people are looking back to these things that religion tried to stamp out,” says Schnabel. Sometimes their new practice is “actually more spiritual or more supernatural.”
“How would I articulate what it means to me to be a witch?” Sara Moslener, a professor of American evangelicalism, religion, and sexuality at Central Michigan University, ponders. She has spent much of her adult life intellectualizing faith and holds a master’s degree in feminist theology and a doctorate in Christian history. For Moslener, an “exvangelical” who was raised in Calvinist purity culture, dismantling the harmful parts of her faith didn’t leave much behind. She knows she’s not alone. For her forthcoming book, After Purity: Race, Sex, and Religion in White Christian America, she interviewed 65 exvangelicals. Some told her about dismantling their childhood faith and today becoming “witchy,” or “Christian but witchy,” or “Buddhist and also kind of witchy,” which for people raised with a conservative, inerrantist interpretation of the Bible is both a jump and a sign of liberation. The capacity to integrate and accept a variety of spiritual ideas is in direct contrast to the absolutism of their faith of birth.
For Moslener herself, deconstruction—and depression—started one year when she was working at church camp during college. She’d grown up “so certain, to the point of arrogance, that I knew what the truth was,” Moslener says. It was a jolt to realize she was not and could not flourish in the form of Christianity in which she’d been raised.
It took years to grapple with the spiritual shift; by 2012, Moslener was really struggling. At the end of the semester, as the days grew shorter, she began to associate winter and darkness with death. At that point, death seemed like a viable option. “I just did not see a future.”
In 2019, Moslener went on a folklore tour of Ireland, the land of some of her ancestors. Her group traipsed across western Ireland looking at sacred geography, hearing about its connection to feminine figures in Celtic spirituality. This is where she learned about the Cailleach—a Gaelic, divine crone figure associated with winter. Once home, she created an altar to Cailleach; spent time contemplating her stories.
Over time, Moslener started to see “darkness as a place to do important work, be able to go to those deep places, which for me feels like a beautiful piece of permission.” She began to see winter as a time to do “shadow work,” an exploration that she says for some people “is very Jungian.” Winter has become for her the time to “sink into a place where you can receive those messages from those deeper parts of yourself.”
The Cailleach gave her a framework for exploring the nature of the darkness within, the depression that has vexed her for years. On the other side, “the change to my nervous system was palpable.”
She rotates other feminine figures through her altar for the seasons. Around Halloween and All Saints’ Day, she also creates an altar that includes her grandmother and a dear friend, both of whom have passed away. She doesn’t do spells or really have a definition of “magic,” other than the wonder of seeing things grow in her yard this time of year.
Tarot, which she considers intuitive prompts, has given her an outlet for ways of thinking that differ from her academic role and the rigidity of her childhood faith, where, to her view, Christianity “is about suppressing your intuition and having an obedience to an outside source.”
At some point, she realized she wasn’t merely interested in or curious about this form of spirituality. It wasn’t just an academic lark. “There was an actual transformation.” She was a pagan. And like the fresh fronds in her yard, she was growing, thriving, healing.