Last summer, a little while into dating a well-known comedian, he turned to me on the couch and announced that he was going to get baptized in Ohio. “Is everything, uh, OK?” I asked. It was more than OK, apparently—he’d been thinking about it for a while and decided, after the death of a close relative and the meteoric rise of his career, that baptism would be a nice way to inject “some meaning” into his life. At the time, it felt bizarre—I’d signed up for an irreverent heathen, not a man of Christ. Now I recognize it as a sign of our times.
My age cohort, Gen Z, wasn’t supposed to find religion. Boomers had already done much of the hard work of dismantling it, rejecting organized institutions for a “spiritual but not religious” outlook.
