Ritual Is Trending Again. The Church Should Be Glad — and a Little Careful.

Christianity Today’s May 19 review “The Rise of the Ritualistic but Not Religious” lands on one of the most revealing spiritual developments of the moment: people are increasingly drawn to ritual even when they are not ready to submit to religion. The piece, reviewing Bruce Feiler’s work on “bespoke rituals,” argues that many modern people want ceremony, symbolism, and form — but often without God, covenant, or ecclesial authority.

That is not surprising.

Human beings do not thrive on information alone. We need repeated actions that give shape to grief, joy, beginnings, endings, meals, loss, reconciliation, and hope. When institutional religion weakens, the need for ritual does not disappear. It simply gets improvised. People build private ceremonies, create personal liturgies, design meaningful habits, and try to give sacred weight to ordinary transitions. Christianity Today’s point is not that such longing is fake. It is that without God in the center, ritual can become expressive without becoming transformative.

That distinction matters for modern Christianity.

Because the church should be one of the few communities not confused by this trend. Christians should understand better than most that human beings are liturgical creatures. We are shaped by repeated actions, spoken words, bodily habits, meals, seasons, songs, and prayers. The question has never been whether we will have rituals. The question is which rituals will form us, toward what vision of reality, and under whose authority.

This is where the “ritualistic but not religious” impulse becomes both understandable and fragile.

Understandable, because modern life is painfully disenchanted. People are tired of flatness. They want to mark things that matter. They want transitions to feel real. They want the ordinary to open into meaning. In that sense, the return of ritual may reflect not superstition but hunger. It may be one more sign that secular modernity’s promise of purely self-authored life leaves people emotionally and spiritually under-formed.

Fragile, because ritual without transcendence can become a mirror instead of a window.

It can circle endlessly back to the self. It can help people feel meaning without asking them to receive it. It can produce emotional texture without moral surrender. It can soothe, but not necessarily sanctify.

That is why the church should not mock this trend. It should interpret it.

The rise of bespoke ritual may be one of the clearest signs that people still long for forms strong enough to carry their lives. They want rites of passage, rhythms of attention, symbols of consolation, and embodied ways to inhabit joy and grief. Christianity already has these things — not as lifestyle enhancements, but as gifts rooted in reality: baptism, Eucharist, confession, Sabbath, prayer, liturgical time, mourning, feasting, blessing.

The problem is that many churches have become so casual, so flattened, or so suspicious of embodied faith that they no longer present Christian ritual as spiritually potent. In trying to avoid dead formalism, they have sometimes ended up offering people very little form at all. That leaves many modern seekers with an odd impression: that the world outside the church is experimenting more seriously with ritual than the church itself is.

That should trouble Christians.

Because Christianity does not merely preserve ritual for tradition’s sake. It offers forms through which God meets people, reorders loves, and joins communities to a story larger than themselves. If the wider culture is waking up to its need for ritual, the church should hear that not as competition, but as invitation.

An invitation to recover beauty. Gravity. Pattern. Sacred repetition. The truth that some things are learned not only by explanation, but by faithful practice over time.