In Asia I encountered, with incredible regularity, a number of Westerners who were looking for new ways to live out their faith. The stereo-typical “backpacker” haunted the used bookshops in Busan, South Korea, in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, and in Penang, Malaysia – pilfering through copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Hesse’s Siddhartha, the “Eastern Mysticism” sections, and anything in English on Buddhism and meditation. I ran into them there. I wasn’t looking for a different way of living out my faith; I was looking for words to describe my rediscovered relationship with God.
When I came back to Canada from Asia, I tried to attend the church of my youth. They had always been a loving support in my youth and had supported me when I had sinned and brought me back into loving relationship. However, when I returned as a middle-aged man (married with children, nonetheless), the older members of the congregation wondered why I couldn’t find myself at home there. It turns out, they were really interested in the form of church, rather than its daily exercise. It wasn’t that they were a pastor-less church, or that the music wasn’t to my taste. I couldn’t put words on it 10 years ago – but it is starting to dawn on me why. I couldn’t bear living through the ideological litmus tests that would have to be undergone to rejoin community there. It would have been like wading through a forest of bullrushes in order to get to the nice spot on the lakeside. It just wouldn’t be worth the effort.
At one point, I wrote about the loss of the loving temperament of conservative Christianity. As I have come to understand progressive Christians, I have come to see that they, too, tend toward dogmatism, and away from disposition. They tend to sort out whether or not a person is interested in social justice the way they are. Progressive Christians have doctrinal checklists that include the environment, LGBTQ identities, treatment of minorities, and of women. It turns out both progressives and conservatives have these concerns, but with a range of opinions. Some tend to focus on choice, while others tend to focus on nurturing factors like the surround environment.
You see, the old left/right – conservative/liberal – spectrum does not serve the pedagogic purpose that would actually help us comprehend the depth at which people experience life. The conservative/liberal spectrum helped us map doctrinal positions – but it certainly does little to unpack how we inhabit our lives.
After living in Asia, and specifically Thailand and Saudi Arabia, I had encountered faith was best understood as a living relationship. Saudis wanted to see forgiveness to escape cultures of violence, and Thais looked for acceptance for who they were. These cultures modelled the relational structure of faith.
In recent explorations about why young people are returning to religious organizations, it has been overwhelmingly demonstrated that young people are returning to more traditional churches – churches like Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglicans. Where evangelical Christians were considered to be seeker-sensitive, the younger generation of seekers are looking for spiritual fulfillment in places with more elaborate liturgies, and more historically entrenched traditions. It turns out, explorers are not looking for better entertainment; instead, they are looking for more authentic practice. That is, they are looking for a lived faith that is best modelled in the temperament of its practitioners and the relationships they maintain; they are not looking for more modern worship with more pervasive technological integration. They are not looking for a doctrinal checklist which is laid out like a menu at a restaurant. The problem is that we are not permitted to choose only some of the doctrinal items off the menu; we have to consume everything.
This, of course, is the type of religion we want to exclude from public life, and has led to a secularism in which people, rightly, want to bracket off these dominating religious institutions from hurting others.
But this tension is quite unique to societies we might call Western. By way of contrast, my experience in South Korea (which was allowing free exercise of Confucian, Buddhist, and Catholic / Protestant Christianity), and Saudi Arabia (which allowed private Christianity and Jewish practice, as well as a broad range of Muslim traditions from Wahibi-ism, to minority Shia and Sufi sects publicly), and Thailand (which constitutionally protected the practice of all religions) was precisely that awareness that practice of religion contributed to public life rather than posed a threat to it.
As it turns out, religious faith hasn’t been subtracted out of the worldviews in the secular West, it just went into exile for a while before it is now returning with a surprising fervor. When my son attended a church college-and-career group which was watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, he observed the completely out-of-touch observations that the Joker was sinful. According to my son, the Joker was sinful, but this was not the least-bit important to his character-arch. Institutionalized Christianity that sees the world primarily through sin and the judgment of it miss the whole point of what it means to be in relationship with God.
I couldn’t agree more.
So, what can we say about the slowly emerging faith-journeys that are appearing in the Western world?
Exploring Beyond Certainty
In many parts of the Western world, the way people understand religious faith is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. For centuries, the dominant model was what Charles Taylor calls the “Christendom” paradigm: a world where religion—particularly Christianity—was taken for granted as the cultural default. In that framework, to have faith meant to assent to doctrinal truths. Belief was primarily cognitive; spiritual maturity meant learning, accepting, and defending the correct set of propositions passed down through tradition.
But Taylor argues that we are now living in what he calls an “age of seekers.” Belief has become a matter of exploration rather than inheritance, openness rather than certainty. Faith is increasingly experienced as a personal path marked by questioning, cross-cultural curiosity, and relational depth—not simply doctrinal adherence. There are four major features of this type of spiritual explorer. When juxtaposed with the older doctrinal model, these features reveal not only a shift in religious thinking, but a shift in imaginary concerning how people understand themselves in a pluralistic world.
By outlining these features, the reader should have a portrait of religious life that is far more fluid, relational, and dynamic than the world Christendom imagined.
1. From Defending the Truth to Living the Faith
In the doctrinal model, truth is something fragile—something that must be protected. Religious leaders saw themselves as guardians of orthodoxy, defending the faith from cultural threats. We can understand the pro-life movement in the United States as a clear example of this. Taylor frequently uses the example of Pope Benedict XVI as emblematic of this posture: intellectually brilliant but motivated by a sense that Christian truth must be shielded from distortion or decline.
Faith explorers approach faith very differently. They do not experience their religious identity as something under attack, nor do they feel the need to mount the battlements to defend it. Instead, they see faith as something to be lived, not guarded.
Taylor contrasts Benedict with Pope Francis, whose posture was outward-facing, invitational, and defiantly un-defensive. Seekers resonate with this approach because they no longer see the world as a battlefield between the church and its enemies. Instead, they view it as a shared space of exploration. In the doctrinal paradigm, faith is a treasure to protect. In the explorer paradigm, faith is a way of life to embody.
This shift has massive implications. Once faith is not something fragile, believers can engage the world without fear, without defensiveness, and without the need to impose their convictions on others. The terrain of faith moves from the fortress to the street—from fortified walls to open encounters.
2. From Possessing Truth to Embarking on a Journey
A second major shift involves the very shape of the spiritual life. In the doctrinal paradigm, the key moment is assent: one “comes to the truth,” accepts it, and then lives in accordance with it. Faith is stable, fixed, and essentially complete once the believer has been properly formed.
I want to argue that many contemporary believers experience faith not as something already secured, but as something continually unfolding. The ancient Christian metaphor of life as pilgrimage—a journey with twists, growth, and transformation—has re-emerged with new force.
For explorers, the spiritual life is never finished. It is an ongoing process of discovery or orientation), deepening (and sometimes disorientation), and sometimes dramatic reorientation. Simply put, explorers are people who know one important truth: they DON’T already have it all figured out. Truth is not a static possession but an ever-evolving horizon.
This shift reframes the role of doctrine. Rather than functioning as final answers, doctrines become signposts, i.e. orientations that help guide the journey, but that do not negate the need for continued searching, listening, and change. In the doctrinal model, faith begins at arrival. In the explorer model, faith begins at departure.
In a pluralistic age where people are free to explore, what matters most is not whether one has mastered the right concepts, but whether one is authentically moving toward what is good, true, and transformational.
3. From Suppressing Doubt to Making It a Companion
Traditional doctrinal frameworks typically view doubt as a deficiency. It signals a gap in belief, a sign of insufficient formation, or a danger that threatens to unravel faith. The task, then, is to overcome doubt as quickly as possible.
Explorers have a radically different relationship to doubt. In Taylor’s account, doubt is not a problem—it is part of the process. In a pluralistic world where multiple spiritual and philosophical possibilities coexist, doubt is unavoidable, and therefore must be integrated rather than suppressed.
For explorers, doubt can even function as a spiritual engine. It forces deeper reflection, encourages humility, and generates movement. Without doubt, the journey of faith would grind to a halt. Uncertainty is the mechanism by which explorers grow.
This doesn’t mean explorers glorify uncertainty for its own sake. What it means is that faith is something lived in tension, and that maturity involves learning to inhabit that tension with openness rather than fear. Whereas the doctrinal approach thinks of doubt as something that threatens faith, the explorer treats doubt as something that expands faith. (Perhaps one could see Kierkegaard’s jump from the ethical to the religious ways of life as outlined in Stages on Life’s Way.)
In the age of explorers, doubt becomes the place where faith breathes and evolves, not the place where it dies.
4. From Protecting Boundaries to the Ecumenism of Friendship
Perhaps the most striking difference between the doctrinal model and Taylor’s seeker model concerns interreligious relations. In the Christendom paradigm, the church guarded its boundaries carefully. Dialogue with other religions was often cautious, defensive, or primarily aimed at clarification of differences.
Explorers, by contrast, engage other spiritual paths through what Taylor calls the “ecumenism of friendship.” This is not simply formal dialogue or polite tolerance. It is the recognition that people in other traditions are also on a journey, also seeking truth, depth, and transformation.
From this recognition emerges curiosity, empathy, and genuine relational exchange. Explorers do not abandon their own tradition; they enrich it through encounters with others. The point of contact is not doctrinal comparison but shared experience—shared longing, shared practice, and often shared silence.
Such cross-boundary friendships are especially common in spaces of meditation and contemplative practice, where people find resonance not in identical beliefs but in parallel forms of searching. Rather than protecting identity against the corrupting influence of dialogue, the explorer understands dialogue as deepening identity through relationship.
Here, the spiritual life becomes not an exclusive possession but a shared human endeavor.
Conclusion: Faith After Certainty
The portrait of the explorer is not a rejection of doctrine but an acknowledgment that doctrine no longer functions as the central axis of religious life. We now inhabit a world in which faith is chosen, not imposed; in which truth is discovered, not inherited; and in which spiritual identity is formed through movement and encounter rather than through static conformity.
The four modes of exploration: non-defensiveness, journeying, embracing doubt, and ecumenical friendship, paint a picture of faith as fundamentally relational and dynamic. It is a vision suited to a world where people no longer assume a single religious framework but are surrounded by multiple possibilities for meaning.
In this new landscape, doctrine still matters, but it matters differently. It becomes a guide rather than a fortress, a resource rather than a weapon. And perhaps most importantly, it becomes one voice among many in the ongoing, collective human search for a deeper authenticity, a deeper truth. The explorer is not someone who has abandoned faith. It is someone who believes that faith is too alive, too deep, and too transformative to ever be reduced to mere certainty.
I am reminded of what it is like to travel. It has been said that travelling is like being in love; all your senses are turned to “on”. My hunch that our religious instinct is best realized when we are exploring, and when we occupy places that permit exploration.
For more on my own personal faith journey, check out: My Three Religious Conversions.
For more on the religious connections within Authenticity: The Moral Stakes in Authenticity.
On living abroad: Living Abroad and Our Sense of Self
