Last year, over the course of a couple of months, a series of articles—in the New York Times and Vanity Fair and local outlet The San Francisco Standard—covered a particular San Francisco party. Guests sipped cranberry-apple cosmos, ate Burmese curry, and pitched their start-ups. So far, so Silicon Valley. But they also nodded along to DJ-mixed worship beats and listened to a tech investor and a scientist talk about Jesus. The party took place inside a converted church.
Odd, right? Who would have thought, in secular SF? The articles attempted to offer an explanation—not just for the party but for the success of its sponsoring organization, ACTS 17 Collective, which, as another article in Wired put it, has gathered a “high-profile network of investors and founders” to promote a “new moral vision for the tech industry.” No more empty pursuits of wealth, power, and ayahuasca. Try Jesus instead.
After the stories came the talk about the stories. ACTS 17 has close connections with billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel; a birthday-party lecture he gave on miracles and forgiveness is part of the organization’s origin story. This fall, ACTS 17 sponsored his controversial four-part series on the Antichrist.
But what Vanity Fair has deemed the “new religion” isn’t just high-end parties with billionaires. Bay Area pastors are noticing something too. Their neighbours sprinted back into post-pandemic life burned out and screen-addicted, amassing wealth and yet riddled with precarity, wondering whether this was all there was. Eventually, they found themselves in a pew.
Pastor Phil Eubank at the multi-site Menlo Church credits this newfound spiritual curiosity to “the unique sense of the dissatisfaction of the secular promise that says more freedom and less restrictions equals greater contentment. We’ve been running that play for a while as a culture, and I think Silicon Valley has been running that play even harder. It’s not working.” Paul Taylor, a former long-time pastor at Peninsula Bible Church who’s now at Transforming the Bay for Christ and heading a regional faith-and-work centre, references Charles Taylor’s “malaise of immanence”: an emptiness, paradoxically, that’s too heavy to hold.
In speaking with other pastors around the region, Eubank has heard “near universal” consensus: “Churches that were growing before are growing faster.” Taylor has encountered the same stories. “There’s 100 people in a room with Peter Thiel, and that gets reported on,” he observes, “but that’s really part of something much bigger, a dynamic that’s happening in the Bay Area and in culture at large that makes that feasible. . . . The event is really more of a symbol of something—of openness.”
A recent report from the American Bible Society found that younger people in the Bay Area are just as likely to pick up a Bible as their peers elsewhere, and more likely than that broader group to report curiosity about Jesus.
And the Bay Area, influential as it may be in its own right, isn’t immune to being influenced by national and global trends—including shifts that we’re just beginning to make sense of, like the fact that more young men are finding themselves in more conservative churches. Smart phones and streaming and Amazon overnight delivery are everywhere now. It tracks that the “malaise of immanence,” and the countervailing response, might also not be just a California thing.
How genuine is a revival like this? Who’s to say all the churchgoing and Bible reading isn’t just a way to get close to industry power brokers? Maybe the piety is merely strategic and will fizzle once the funds are extracted. Or maybe Christianity is just another passing fad along the lines of biohacking and meditation. After all, there’s the insinuation, sometimes explicit, that the faith will be good for you and society alike, creating conditions for peace and prosperity. Writer Elizabeth Bruenig has her doubts about this utilitarian approach. “Christianity . . . is not a life hack: It’s a life-upending surrender to the fact of divine love,” she argues in The Atlantic. “Christianity at its core is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be.”
On the other hand, by what measure does one judge what “genuine” entails? Revival in this country has historically involved an innkeeper’s son galloping around, preaching open-air sermons so powerful they made listeners weep; businessmen praying in the wake of financial panic; and hippies founding communes and coffeehouses. These revivals bore fruit in the form of social movements—abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. They could be understood in terms not just of survey data, measurably fuller pews, and church coffers, but of undeniable reconciliation, liberty, and love. This is what genuine revival looks like: interconnected communities of believers praying and worshipping and reading the Bible and sharing meals, healed of sin and shame, and then bearing fruit—giving their money away, funding social movements to alleviate homelessness and addiction, the abolition and temperance of our day. Such revivals do these things quietly, left hands not knowing what right hands are doing. They are inward, then outward, measurable in numbers, yes, but also in change that transcends them.
For every big revival, there are a thousand smaller stories—individuals freed from addictions or illnesses on any random Thursday, souls saved outside of mass movements. Too small or particular to be recorded in history, but no less essential, no less beloved. And for every true revival, I’m sure, there are also a hundred scammers—shysters and hypocrites using the gospel for their own gain, claiming a movement of God in order to line their own pockets.
“Revival is not something you can typically demarcate in the moment,” says John Trammell, associate rector at Eucharist Church in San Francisco. His congregation is thriving, multi-generational—babies crawling in the back, wheelchair-bound parishioners in front. But is this vibrancy all that new? Trammell knows lots of Christians in the Bay Area, including tech workers, who’ve been worshipping faithfully for years—“not making a big deal out of it” and by no means persecuted for their beliefs in the halls of industry.
Revival in San Francisco? In some sense “we’re working on that every Sunday, every office we pray, every sacrament we administer,” he says. But “a deeper love for God, a greater love for others” is possible only by means of the Holy Spirit. Relying on our own efforts presents the danger of “an over-realized eschatology where we act as if the fullness of God’s Kingdom has arrived, now, collapsing the already and the not yet into a right now.” Then there’s the rather all-important matter of fruit: “I think that if a true revival were happening in San Francisco, the soup kitchens would be a lot fuller than the cocktail parties.”
Trammell’s hesitations are more than warranted. It’s worth a warning that this fledgling movement could become merely craven or functional. What’s more, all the data—on churchgoing, on Bible reading, on self-reported religious affiliation—has its limits, particularly when it comes to quantifying the work of God in individual human hearts, hearts with caprices and mixed motives and particular pains.