Rather than sheltering beneath a single canopy, many individuals today insist on holding their own umbrellas — personalized spiritual practices, curated sets of beliefs, idiosyncratic rituals. These umbrellas are both a rejection of institutional religion and a recognition of the same underlying need for shelter from chaos.

I keep coming back to an uncomfortable thought that pluralism, and not religion, might be the opiate of the masses.

For some, pluralism provides a joyful hallucination; a vision of the "melting pot" country that feels real enough to live inside. For others, it is the root of cultural decline, the thing that has "ruined" the country. Either way, pluralism becomes myth before it becomes practice.

Western spiritual communities have a problem — and it's one we don't talk about enough.

The practices many of us love — meditation, plant medicine, energy healing, sacred ceremony — are increasingly being consumed in ways that harm the very traditions they come from. We appropriate rituals outside of our ancestry, extract resources from developing countries, and when someone points this out, the community often lacks the tools to step outside of what feels right and consider the larger picture.