It is hard to know where to begin.

Why every crisis is spiritual, what our movements keep getting wrong and why I’m building a media lab and collective to address the most urgent and overlooked cultural crisis of our time.

It is hard to know where to begin.

We are living through a moment of profound upheaval. Political. Cultural. Environmental. Financial. Institutional. And every day, I sit in disbelief watching religion take center stage as the star of the terrifying drama unfolding all around us.

Books arguing that empathy is a sin. Lawmakers invoking God’s blessing over policies that punish the poor and assault the stranger. Prosperity gospel dressing up greed in the language of divine favor. The mere naming of racism being labeled from the pulpit as a form of idolatry. War defended as holy obligation.

At the same time, I see my peers coming untethered. The stories they built their lives on are not holding. The institutions they trusted have failed them. They are not all rushing back to church or mosque or synagogue, of course. But they are not fine, either. And while they petition and protest, while they parent and grieve and somehow keep showing up, they are looking for something. Most of them wouldn’t call it God. But it is the same hunger.

Most days, I find hope, not just in my own spiritual practice, but in the most surprising of places: On my phone, in the same feeds that serve us outrage and corporate manipulation, I see something powerful emerging. Generations processing it all —the chaos, the collapsing of things, the questions—together in public, in real time. Theological conversations on Threads, YouTube and TikTok about religious identity, ethics, and the soul. Sometimes explicit. Sometimes cloaked in the language of pop culture and self-help or just talk of everyday life. People of all ages trying to find their footing, reaching for others with the same big questions. And unlike most online conversations that live and die on a screen, these are spilling out meaningfully in the physical world. Small groups and gatherings, book clubs and house churches and deconstruction classes, all focused on spirituality meant to, as James Baldwin said, “make us larger, freer, more loving.”

But when I find myself in movement strategy meetings and funding conversations about fighting authoritarianism and building a better world, there is no engagement with any of this. And that puzzles me because I know that some of these same leaders were up late the night before saving an Instagram clip from a spiritual teacher they probably wouldn’t talk about at work, or dusting off old religious texts they rejected long ago, or trying to “manifest” more resources, praying to something for the health of a sick loved one or searching for a community that might help them figure out what to give their children to hold on to in a world that keeps shifting under their feet. They feel the same hunger. But somewhere between their personal lives and the “serious work” of democracy and organizing, they have learned to turn that part of themselves off — to treat the work of saving the world and the work of saving their soul as two separate projects. They are not. And that separation is costing us everything.

So yes. It is hard to know where to begin. But I believe that naming the spiritual crisis underneath every other crisis is where we must start. And that addressing it is the most urgent work of our time.

My son Omari is almost four. To him, the division between the sacred and the secular doesn’t exist. Everything is mystical. Everything is an opportunity to see something that others can’t see. Everything is a chance to find meaning and be good. And that gap — between the world he still moves through and the world we are holding together with protest, prayer and duct tape — is why I started Soul Story. And it is why, after months of building, I am finally writing to you.

The Crisis Is Spiritual

Let me say plainly, again, what I believe and what I see confirmed all around me: the problems we face are not primarily political. We are living in a crisis of spiritual imagination and formation.

Spiritual imagination is the capacity that shapes what a society believes is possible, sacred, and worth fighting for and spiritual formation is the slow process by which that capacity is built and transmitted. Together, they determine the stories people reach for when they are when they are afraid, when they are suffering, when they are deciding what to sacrifice, and when they are trying to understand whether their life and their neighbor’s life matter equally. It is the foundation beneath every tangible thing we pour our energy into changing.

I have spent my entire career sitting with this idea — in youth advocacy and field work in social movements, media training clergy at Auburn Seminary, in learning how stories spread at Upworthy, building creator infrastructure at Snapchat, and now in my own theological studies at Princeton Seminary — and I am more convinced than ever: the stories a society tells about what is sacred are the root of everything else. They are the architecture of culture. And right now, that architecture is being built by the wrong hands.

Over decades, regressive movements made a deliberate, well-funded strategic investment in culture, media, and spiritual voices. But they didn’t start with the media. They started with the theology — constructing and codifying frameworks about what is holy, what is owed, who belongs and who doesn’t. They have crafted a story that says that power, dominance, whiteness as an ideal, faux exceptionalism, guns, a particular version of Christianity, money and the freedom to amass and hoard an ungodly amount of it are all holy. And the people whose identity depends on those things being holy have built platforms, funded creators, and populated the new gathering spaces of American life with their vision of the world.

They invested in the voices and institutions to spread those frameworks until they escaped the pews entirely and became part of the broader culture, absorbed by millions of people who would never identify as religious. While progressives were looking at declining rates of religious affiliation as a signal that faith wasn’t worth investing in, the other side understood something different: you do not win by having better arguments. you win by shaping what people believe is sacred. And if you build the media to amplify it, it doesn’t need to live inside formal religious institutions to reshape a culture.

The strategy worked. Because underneath all of it was a theological foundation that answered the most primal human questions: Why do I exist, what does it mean to be human, and what does my relationship with something larger than myself demand of me?

But all is not lost. Because people, of all ages, races, genders, political affiliations still have those same questions. And the untethering has made those questions even more acute. History — and a growing body of research — tells us that in moments like this, when institutions fail and the ground shifts, people don’t become less spiritual. They become more desperate for meaning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly a third of Americans reported that their personal faith had grown stronger as a direct result of the crisis. Studies on war, economic shock, and social upheaval across cultures consistently find the same pattern: the greater the instability, the deeper the hunger for a story about who we are and what holds us together. The U.S. Surgeon General’s declaration of a loneliness epidemic (roughly half of American adults reporting measurable disconnection even before the pandemic) is not a separate crisis from the spiritual one. People are empty. And what gets poured into that emptiness will shape our collective destiny.

We Have Been Here Before

To be clear, none of this is new territory.

The greatest progressive social movements in American history were not spiritually adjacent. They were spiritually powered. The civil rights movement rose from the songs, the sermons, the prayers, and the moral vision that Black churches had been cultivating and protecting for generations. As John Lewis said plainly: “The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith.” The spiritual infrastructure came first. The tactics and the legislation were the fruit.

In Latin America, liberation theology gave birth to tens of thousands of grassroots comunidades de base — small gatherings of ordinary people who read scripture together, named the injustice around them as sin, and organized to change it. In the Arab world, Princeton scholars studying the 2011 uprisings found that personal religious devotion was one of the strongest predictors of who showed up to protest. Piety deepened people’s sense of their own capacity and their conviction that justice was owed to them.

People who believe they were created with a purpose will always out-organize people who have been given no story about who or what they are beyond flesh and bones. Meaning is not optional. Take it away and everything else starts to crack. Strip it away and people become easier to manipulate, easier to frighten, and much harder to move toward something good.

Progressives inherited the fruit of these movements. They marched. They passed legislation. They organized coalitions. But too often they adopted the tactics and the aesthetics of movements powered by spiritual conviction without the conviction itself.

The Category Error

When I talk to leaders about spirituality and social change (many the same ones who have been cultured to separate their own spirituality from their work), I encounter two kinds of responses. The first is polite dismissal — an awkward silence, a change of subject, a nervous clearing of the throat. Faith is treated as a private matter: interesting, perhaps, but not serious. Not strategic. Too tangential and risky to center.

The second response is worse, because it thinks it’s better. It is the leader who knows that spirituality matters and then proceeds to treat it exactly like any other identity category. A demographic to label. A constituency to mobilize. A voting bloc to court.

I cannot count the number of times I have sat in a room and heard some version of this: “The Black church has so much power!” I spent a decade helping progressive faith leaders find and use their public voice and watched brilliant, wise, prophetic people be reduced to this framing over and over again. As if the only thing that mattered was whether they could sing emotional songs and deliver votes, not whether their theology was shaping the moral imagination of their communities.

This framing fundamentally misunderstands what faith is and what it does. It treats theology as decoration — a cultural wrapper around political content that already exists — rather than as the source of the content itself. It has no theory of how a person’s theological worldview shapes everything downstream: how they understand poverty, how they vote, how they see their future, what they believe they deserve, what they are willing to sacrifice and for whom. And it has no theory of formation — no understanding of how repeated encounters with a deep identity story and a practice slowly reshapes what a person believes. You cannot change someone’s politics without offering them a different story about their life, all the way down to the roots.

The infrastructure gap is real. But the deeper problem is the imagination gap. We have not built the ecosystem to support and amplify voices who are offering people a different story about who they are, rooted not in fear or grievance, but in belonging and purpose and the ancient, radical idea that every human life is sacred and that we are responsible for each other.

The Intervention Has to Happen Here

Soul Story is my attempt to close that gap.

I want to be precise about what we are and are not building. Soul Story is not a faith-based organizing shop. It is not a platform for any single religious or political agenda, although the voices we support are committed to moving people toward more love, justice, and care for each other.

Soul Story is a media lab and collective reigniting spiritual voices in a rapidly changing media landscape towards human flourishing. Creative content is our playground because I believe that the moral imagination of a society is formed primarily through culture and media. Through the stories people encounter, the voices they trust, the creators they return to day after day. Where people’s souls get formed is not only in the sanctuary. It is in the media that people consume. And the intervention, if it is going to work, has to happen there.

The voices already exist. Some identify as Christian — a label that I refuse to let others define for me — or Muslim, or Jewish, or Indigenous. Others are spiritual but don't claim any label at all. What they share is this: they are offering different theologies, most of which are not new. The frameworks are ancient. They have simply been underinvested in, pushed to the margins, and starved of the infrastructure that would allow them to travel. They are prophets and podcasters, poets and chefs, writers and illustrators, short-form video creators and immersive storytellers, filmmakers and elders livestreaming from living rooms. And here is what I know about what those voices carry that a political podcast or a generic culture commentary show does not: embodied spirituality moves people differently. A theology rooted in the conviction that we were made for each other, that your liberation is bound up in mine, that we need each other to survive and to flourish, produces people who show up offline, not just passive consumers. Who create and gather and care for each other. Who organize and build. The difference between a creator who entertains and a creator who forms is the difference between a mirror and a door: one reflects and the other invites people to walk into something new.

Soul Story finds the voices that are already doing this work and gives them what they need to sustain and reach further. We nurture them holistically, build their craft — both online and off — strengthen their infrastructure, connect them to each other, help them pioneer new formats and platforms, and amplify their work into the mainstream conversations that shape what this country and this world believes is possible.

Finding Sacred

There is a phrase that has become central to everything we are building: Finding Sacred. It is the name of our flagship show. But it is also, I have come to believe, where we begin.

The sacred is not lost. It has not disappeared from the world, no matter how many days the news makes it feel that way. It has simply been misfound, located in the wrong places, channeled toward the wrong ends, and claimed by voices that have used it to make us smaller and more afraid.

The work of Soul Story and of every spiritually rooted creator, leader, media maker and voice we are here to support, is to help people find it again. To find ancient wisdom in the unexpected places where a generation is already looking: in a podcast, a comment section, a book, a song. And to help that finding reshape what people believe is possible for our shared humanity.

My little Omari doesn’t know yet that the world is divided. That some things are sacred and some things are just Tuesday. That faith and culture and politics are supposed to live in separate rooms. He looks at everything with the same wide-open eyes and finds it all divine and worthy of wonder.

That is the world I am building toward. That is why I started Soul Story. And that is what I am inviting you into.

With love and urgency,
Erica

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Soul Story is a media lab and collective dedicated to elevating spiritually rooted voices to heal culture in a new media landscape.