It’s a January evening in London, the temperature several degrees below freezing. Nine hundred people have gathered at a Westminster venue to hear Nick Cave in conversation with Tom Holland. The sell-out event is titled In Search of Wild Gods, a reference to the Australian musician’s latest album, of songs exploring the possibility of death, the divine and joyful rebirth.

Cave formed an unlikely pairing with the English historian and podcaster, whose bestselling book Dominion argues for the Christian blueprint behind the foundational assumptions of our increasingly secular society. Holland accepts the description ‘Christian’, but struggles with the idea of life after death, while Cave rejects the label altogether. Yet both men feel sceptical about atheism and attend church fairly frequently. Both men came to the hall to discuss their beliefs, an event that – as Cave pointed out – no venue would have hosted a decade ago.

But who were the people in the audience? In many ways it was a typical London crowd: a mix of ages and careers, weighted towards young professionals. There was no poll asking beforehand whether they believed, yet some of their dating profiles probably read ‘spiritual but not religious’. Others might use phrases like ‘cultural Christian’ or ‘spiritually curious’, with a few ‘doubting agnostics’ and ‘recovering atheists’ thrown in. The kind of people who would happily open the door of a church and sit in silence for a few minutes – provided no service was taking place. Who go to therapy, take culture seriously, care about social justice, and wonder whether some deeper meaning might bind these concerns together.

The American author Paul Elie has a word for such people: he calls them crypto-religious. This term was coined by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz in correspondence with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Miłosz described how, despite his deliberate distance from the Church, his opposition to communism was rooted in the faith of his ancestors, and in particular a Catholic suspicion towards the spirit-denying ideologies of the far left. As Elie observes, the term also ‘evokes the lives of the early Christians in the Roman Empire, who kept the faith in secret in crypts and catacombs beneath Rome’.

In his new book, The Last Supper, Elie refashions this phrase for artists whose work incorporates religious words, images and motifs, but expresses something other than conventional belief. For Elie, we are living through a crypto-religious period of history, with mainstream faith in retreat, yet the culture still haunted by symbols of lost sanctity. His book argues that this period began in the 1980s, or rather began in 1979 with Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming, its spiritually freighted songs marking the folk musician’s conversion to born-again Christianity. Over the next decade, a growing number of secular and counter-cultural figures began to engage with faith in passionate, provocative and often confusing ways.

Nick Cave is a perfect example of Elie’s crypto-religious, but this word could equally describe the crowd gathering to hear him at the start of the year. They were not traditional believers listening to a pair of Christian apologists delivering an orthodox discussion of the Gospels. Rather, they were people attracted to religious ideas but struggling to find a practice, an institution, or a set of teachings that would articulate this longing. It’s difficult to judge what percentage of Britain’s population is crypto-religious, but surveys suggest that the number of those who believe in God is much larger than the number who regularly attend church. In a time when Sunday services were busy, they might have sat quietly at the back of their local congregation, but these days they are more likely to search the internet for moral guidance or spiritual succour.

Over the past decade, there has been a steady stream of books and documentaries catering to this demographic, exploring rituals such as pilgrimage and retreat, or concepts like silence and solitude. But crypto-religion really entered public consciousness thanks to alternative media, via a network of religiously receptive podcasters, social media personalities and online publications. The most famous figure in this ecosystem is Jordan Peterson, yet there are many others producing Christian-adjacent content for the spiritually inquiring, from the sympathetic atheist Alex O’Connor to the Orthodox icon-carver Jonathan Pageau, as well as the conversations touching on numinous subjects hosted by Krista Tippett and Elizabeth Oldfield.

Much of this curiosity exists on the fringes of the culture. There are still large parts of British media and academia that treat religion with disdain, and even larger parts of society that struggle to summon much interest. However, as Lamorna Ash argues in her new book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, Millennials and Gen Z ‘are leagues away from the New Atheist movement of the 1990s… Our feelings about faith are distinct too from the broad strokes of apathy or indifference towards belief which often characterised the 2000s’.

Ash’s book developed from a Guardian article she wrote about two university friends: a pair of stand-up comedians, who, much to their own surprise, converted to Christianity and began training to become priests. The two friends inspired Ash’s curiosity about the contemporary state of faith: over the following years she visited churches, retreat centres and religious festivals, meeting with young believers and asking what brought them here. All this was done for the purpose of research, yet Ash was no disinterested observer and the book charts her own spiritual journey too, her ‘personal match with Christianity’.

The book’s opening passage is a bravura account of Jacob wrestling with an angel. What Ash admires most are those Christians who keep struggling with their faith, resisting both doubt and certainty. She’s also moved by Harold Bloom’s description of divine blessings as the gift of ‘more life’: not an everlasting heaven on the far side of death, but the infinite enrichment of the mortal world. For anyone who assumes believers must be dogmatic fanatics and religion a set of antiquated rules that sap the pleasure from life, Ash offers a powerful reframing. ‘It is to our detriment to be naïve or dismissive of faith, to consider any religion a homogenous structure that can be rationalised out of existence.’

She also realises that religious doctrine makes most sense in the context of worship. Hours sitting in church are the best – perhaps only – way to understand the larger claims of Christianity. Her commitment to this project is impressive: she spends much of the book driving round Britain to attend Quaker meetings and Bible-study classes, or stay with religious communities in lonely corners of Scotland, Norfolk and Wales, as well as the half-hidden suburbs of modern Britain. She also talks to believers across the Christian spectrum, from a trans academic coming back to Catholicism to a former Pentecostalist couple trying to assemble a ‘deconstructed’ non-denominational church.

Like many of the book’s interview subjects, Ash is put off by the literalist Bible readings found in evangelical congregations. During this period, she is exploring her own sexual identity and struggles with the denominations that offer traditional teaching on moral questions out of step with contemporary society. But she is moved by the quiet conviction of less dogmatic Christians, and ends up praying at a local Anglican Church with an informal liturgy and a strong sense of community. In fact, the book’s last pages offer a passionate defence of prayer, as powerful as any from a mainstream believer: ‘Prayer disintoxicates… it requires you to sift out what cannot or should not be prayed for because you are imagining yourself to be speaking towards something outside of the human realm.’

Ash starts to pray because her mother is showing the early effects of dementia: ‘prayer found me when I was suffering’. Elsewhere she suggests that her pull towards religion was in response to a chaotic personal life and a history of mental health issues. The same pattern recurs in several of her subjects, seeking God during times of despair: ‘churches continue to function as stopgaps, as refuges, places where people go to try and become whole again.’ In the same way that the hospitals of medieval Christendom were run by holy orders and the pilgrim shrines promised miracle cures, so modern religion attracts new followers among young people suffering from the sicknesses of contemporary existence: depression and burnout, anxiety and despair.

This impression is echoed in Abi Miller’s recent book, The Spirituality Gap, which describes a science journalist’s tour through modern spirituality, from Tarot cards to energy healers, via meditation, shamanism, and the psychoactive drink ayahuasca. Though Miller is wary of the bogus medical boasts made by some gurus, she recognises how many people have benefitted from their therapeutic rituals and rites. Having grown up in an evangelical Church before becoming a convinced atheist, Miller now describes herself as a ‘None’, rejecting both ‘organised religion and the unsavoury melting pot of conspirituality’ (that bewildering blend of New Age and conspiracist thinking that festers online). So, she approaches alternative religion in a sympathetic fashion – ‘a lot of our spiritual practice necessarily involves suspending our need for control and certainty’ – while remaining critical of the woo-woo claims and pseudo-scientific justifications.

The author writes well about the quirks of contemporary spirituality, from Instagram influencers peddling the gospel of manifesting to a ‘sixth-generation’ shaman engaged to a member of the Danish royal family. She enjoys the pick-and-mix approach towards religion taken by these spiritual seekers, while admitting its cultural and theological incoherence, even quoting the author Robin Sylvan’s critique of the ‘hybrid, cut-and-paste nature of contemporary spirituality’. However, like most Millennials and members of Gen Z, Miller is uncomfortable with losing her independence to a single religious tradition and shares the secular distrust of religious leaders telling their followers how to behave. She does not want to live a life ‘devoid of meaning and purpose’; rather, she and other Nones ‘want to define that purpose on our own terms’. As a result, belief becomes another kind of consumer product, with young people sampling a menu of possible faiths until they find an option that authentically expresses their identity, like the right job, or outfit, or romantic partner.

Miller argues that the appeal of religion lies in the sense of security it offers to those who have grown up during periods of financial uncertainty and planetary collapse. She thinks we are living through a ‘polycrisis’ characterised by economic inequality, environmental decline, and collapsing birth rates. Western society is ‘ideologically exhausted’, confronting the limits of its dominant secular narratives and seeking new stories to tell itself. But the dominant secular narrative of our age is surely the sovereignty of the individual: the liberty to think, do and say whatever we want, rather than submit to rules dating from the distant past. The reason spirituality appeals to many Nones is the promise of beauty, community, and even a sense of meaning, without having to sacrifice that sovereignty.

A similar tension exists in Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever. Ash yearns for a more improvised version of Christianity, asking: ‘Why have we let our holy texts grow so antique and untouchable, instead of allowing them to expand like a divine Wikipedia, updated in perpetuity?’ She recognises, however, that much of what she values in religion comes from its permanence: the same stories told, the same rituals performed, one century after another. This all-paths-are-equally-valid approach towards faith fits more comfortably with a progressive worldview, but it cannot provide the kind of stability or rootedness Ash is seeking when she steps through the door of a church. ‘If everyone deconstructed’, she asks a group who have deliberately broken with their conservative, charismatic denominations, ‘would there be any Christianity left for the next generations to inherit?’

These are both rich and reflective books, with a deep appreciation of belief as therapy or community, as a sense of enchantment or a still point in the turning world. Nonetheless, the authors seem wary of that idea that religion might have any valuable ethical insights. For those growing up with the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal on the news, or the conflicts caused by violent versions of Islam, it might be hard to believe that religious institutions can also provide moral guidance. In recent times, the role of ethical education has been adopted by schools, universities, museums and arts organisations, which increasingly offer their own ideological instruction. Meanwhile, popular psychology has moved in the opposite direction, validating negative behaviours under the creed of self-acceptance. However, take away the ethical teaching from religion – in particular the radical moral message of Christianity, which asks every believer to seek forgiveness for their failings – and it turns faith into a branch of the wellness industry, offering little more than a vague feeling of connection when you close your eyes. It’s easy to see why this version of religion would appeal to Millennials and members of Gen Z, bringing more wonder into their worlds without questioning any of their life choices. At the same time, it dodges the radical challenge of religion: not believing new stories or adopting new practices, but becoming a different person. Because the mystical stuff is easy, the moral stuff much harder.

Towards the end of her book, Miller concludes that what spirituality lacks is a ‘collective element’, with more ‘well-trodden paths’ and more avenues for charity or activism – which suggests that she was looking for a church all along. Of course, your average church lacks the glamour of psychedelic rituals, ecstatic ceremonies and even the transporting wonder of the natural world. Nonetheless, these places provide a tangible benefit that few New Age communities can match: as voluntary organisations filling gaps in the welfare state. For all that churches worry about becoming another arm of the public sector, they continue to perform vital work among the most disadvantaged members of society. This work is not as emotionally charged or theologically knotty as Christianity’s outdated attitudes towards homosexuality, but when ignored if gives a lopsided impression of religion, turning faith into something you are, not something you do.

For those interested in finding a version of belief that expresses their conflicting desires for the divine, this side of religion has little to offer. It’s not an exercise in identity formation, nor the kind of popular moral campaign that fills the participant with a sense of righteousness. In fact, the work often goes unnoticed, taking place in soup kitchens, homeless shelters and draughty church halls. But, for those interested in an anachronistic idea like virtue, joining a church gives them many more chances to help, shifting the focus of religion from how it makes you feel to how you make other people feel. Certainly, the lost souls that populate both these books discover more of the meaning they seek from looking outwards rather than in. They may not have found a faith that perfectly expresses their identity, but they have surrendered to something much greater than themselves.