"The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian..."

"... driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end? Andrew Sullivan, the writer and podcaster, suggested this might not be easy to answer. 'The feeling'—of believing—'will vary,' Sullivan, a Catholic, told me. 'Sometimes, there’s no feeling. Sometimes, you’re overwhelmed. The point really is to escape feeling as such—our emotions are not what prove anything. The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings... It allows us to express our faith through an act.'"

From "How Intellectuals Found God/Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion. Peter Savodnik meets the new theists" (Free Press).