when I was a teenager, my father—an academic who studied Friedrich Nietzsche—used to insist that, during my lifetime, the world, and America in particular, would turn back toward more conservative, moralistic forms of religion. His conviction felt unsettling, in part because there seemed to be little evidence for it. In the past half-century, every generation of Americans has attended religious services less than the previous one.

This trend felt at once inevitable—the more we were all forced into proximity with other people, the less we could be so sure of our individual creeds—and somehow proper. The feeling among many people who considered themselves enlightened was that religion was a crutch people needed if they weren’t strong enough to face the real world on their own terms. That it was, in Barack Obama’s words, something people cling to out of weakness. When Sister Cristina Scuccia, a 30-year-old habited Italian nun, competed on Italy’s version of “The Voice” in 2014—she won—a baffled judge questioned her decision to become a nun: “To be able to sing like this—I’m at a total loss, you know?” The implication was that anyone who had the opportunity to do something remotely cool with her life would never become a nun.

But my father’s comment also unsettled me because I periodically suspected he was on to something. In one of my earliest diary entries, at age 8, I confessed a desire to become an Orthodox Jew. I had cousins who were Orthodox. Their dress and rituals were strange to me, but part of me also envied them.

During my teens, I worried a lot about whether what I was doing was right. I liked the idea of saying the shema, a simple Jewish prayer you chanted at meaningful moments. It seemed to give life anchor points. I mocked but also envied Christian friends of mine who wore those What Would Jesus Do bracelets; the thought of having a single question you could ask yourself to resolve all of life’s myriad dilemmas felt clarifying. For all our technological utopianism, my high-school friends and I were obsessed with quotes by ancient sages, poets and songwriters. We posted them as our AIM away messages. We decoupaged them onto our school notebooks. I even had a pair of cargo pants onto which I’d written, in permanent marker, about 20 beautiful quotes about how to live life. I thought they were artsy. In retrospect, I think I was walking around with the equivalent of a Bible on my trousers, proclaiming indelibly what I stood for and how I should live, so I and nobody else would forget it.

When I moved to Kenya for work, later, I noticed an equivalent. Taxicabs there are plastered, outside and inside, with stickers with scriptural sayings or affirmations, like “This Business Is Protected by the Blood of Jesus Christ.” They are white and shiny with red text. They look like bandages covering things that are wounded.

We are a thing that is wounded, American society. People raised for the new millennium were to be a kind of final proof that democracy and American society was, indeed, the greatest that ever could be made, now that primitive superstitions had been cleared, tech and science and finance reigned, major political threats had fallen and our hegemony seemed complete. We were, and shakily remain, utopian in ways I would laugh at if I hadn’t bought into them, too. More than half of millennials still tell pollsters they believe they’re going to be millionaires. Most of us expected to achieve idyllic marriages, even though so many of our parents had divorced. We were taught that anything you hoped for could be achieved with the right planning, that life is a series of hacks: fabulous tricks, but ones that have a reliable code for how to repeat them.

Of course, none of this was true. The tech bubble burst. There was 9/11 and the financial crisis and the surprise election of a reality-TV tycoon as president—all things that loosened our faith in the world’s goodness and in our comprehension of and control over things.

I used to think I was the only one whose outwardly awesome-seeming life—I was following my “passion” in a rocky economy, maintaining my friendships, looking good on Facebook—bore almost no relationship to her roiling inner monologue, until a friend of mine showed me her diary. It was shocking because the sentiments sounded so much like my own and also so little like anything most of us are courageous enough to reveal: ceaselessly self-scrutinizing, ceaselessly self-punishing. “Am I less interesting at 24 than I was at 17? Where has all my discipline, all those self-imposed exercises gotten me?” She spoke of trying to recover some potential life and world that had, in her early 20s, already been lost. Contemplating her desire for securities like money and a nice husband, she wrote, “I’m realizing I’m much more conservative than I thought.”

“I have heard over and over again from older sisters that celibacy is the easy vow to follow,” said Mary Gautier. “The hard one is obedience.”

When I read this passage to Satya Doyle Byock, an Oregon-based psychotherapist who focuses on counseling young adults, she laughed grimly. “That’s the essence of what I hear over and over again,” she said. “We’re raised in a quantitative culture with quantitative goals.” She works with young people who believe society has given them all of the tools and the technology and the science to construct an ideal life. But they still feel like failures. And they feel shame for feeling it, and thus they are trapped in an ironclad double bind. Declaring everything achievable tends to dig a well of grief in people because it implies that any problem we encounter is a result of our miscalculation. “It causes suffering,” she said, “by denying the necessity of suffering.”

Nietzsche proposed that Western society had killed God, replacing Him with ourselves. But underneath that, he perceived, there still simmered a yearning for religion. For invisible beings who set standards for us and whose perfection—and whose interest in us despite our flaws—massively relieves our need to be in control all the time.

America started with a religious narrative—the city on a hill—and once you conceive of it, still, as a society grasping for religion, you see it everywhere. The free-floating moral rage, which affixes itself to targets like cucks or Aziz Ansari or libtards or MAGA bigots. The conviction, in the way we now talk about the climate or the loss of our “values,” that the world will inevitably be ruined because of our sins. Things like Goop and the gluten-free movement are basically straight-up religions, promising spiritual renewal and healing from all sickness, only with a jade yoni egg as the Eucharist. We’re fixated on minimalism and self-purification, be it by the methods of Marie Kondo or “inbox zero” or Jordan Peterson, whose popularity rests less on his insights about Carl Jung or lobster biology than on his idea that life can be boiled down to 12 rules—commandments.

Overall, organized religions in America are still leaching members. But it appears that young people who do seek religion are drawn to a stricter, more old-fashioned form of it. Orthodox Judaism is becoming more popular with young Americans today than other, more liberal Jewish sects. The majority of Jewish Americans who are reform or conservative are over 50, while the majority of Orthodox Jews here are under 40. This isn’t only because Orthodox Jewish families have more children. Orthodox Judaism’s retention and conversion rates are much higher than they were two decades ago. The memberships of “liberal” Protestant sects like Lutheranism are rapidly aging while more doctrinaire Christian denominations—Baptists, Orthodox Christians—have younger adherents. A fascinating study showed that millennials—even Protestants and atheists—are attracted to churches with old-fashioned gilded altars and “classic” worship styles over modern ones. Young Americans are often more likely than their elders to believe in core elements of traditional religious belief like heaven and hell, miracles, and angels, and young religious people are more likely than older ones to assert that their faith is the “one true path to eternal life.”

Pollsters have also observed that young people in America seem more open than their parents or grandparents were to authoritarianism, as if we possess a hidden desire to be ruled—that it would be a relief. In 2016, nearly one-quarter of young Americans told Harvard researchers that democracy was “bad” for the country—in 1995, only around 10 percent of young people said that—and they are consistently more likely than their elders to say technocrats or a strong leader should run America, even if that means doing away with elections. My friend Josh, a convert to Catholicism, told me he was drawn to the church specifically because it “doesn’t hold a vote to determine the truth.”

Several people to whom I suggested, recently, that Americans might become more religious said that couldn’t be true. They pointed to surveys saying Generation Z is the most undogmatic and atheist generation ever. But the truth is that it’s incredibly hard to read American young people. You can find surveys and news stories indicating they’re more genderfluid, more committed to traditional gender roles, more rebellious, more uptight and moralistic about drugs and sex, better with money, lazier. This may reflect internal contradictions, the kind that compelled some of the young women I met to seek a much more streamlined answer.

“Have you ever been on a ‘wild mouse’ roller coaster?” Rachael asked me. It’s a particular kind of roller coaster, she explained, one that’s designed to accelerate riders rapidly along a straight track, faster and faster, and then whip them around a turn they couldn’t see. “You get to like going straight,” she said, “but then you can’t anymore.”

That’s what her life had felt like: She’d make a series of decisions, oftentimes encouraged by elders or friends, and as soon as she grew comfortable, some eventuality would whip her around a 90-degree corner, nauseating her, and she’d have to start the whole project of figuring herself out again.

History right now is like the “wild mouse.” We know that we can’t keep going straight in the way we’re going, in terms of consuming the Earth’s resources, in terms of the deepening of inequality and the specter of automation, in terms of proposing a complete mastery over the world and over the courses of our lives. We’re fucking things up, but the turn remains hidden.