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. 

But as Trammell also pointed out, revival is best seen in hindsight. When it’s happening, it’s a whole lot of private prayer and faltering questions—groanings, you might call them, legible only to the Holy Spirit. There are always false starts, well-meaning people who hear the Word, whether at a tent gathering or cocktail hour, come up close, and then pull away, no heart or society the wiser. Seeds skittering on rocks, plucked by birds, and, yes, landing in soil, some taking years, or a lifetime, to germinate. God is God. Who says his mysterious ways can’t involve bespoke cocktails, sick beats, and Antichrist musings? 

I’ve lived in Palo Alto for five years, always as a Christian, never as a techie. The coffee shop I used to frequent for almond croissants is apparently a hub for high-profile meetings, but I go to a different place now, one where grouchy neighbours play chess and professors with pencils read paper books. I don’t have a smart watch, I’m off social media, and I tend to lose my phone between the couch cushions. 

My Luddism comes from conviction. It also has much to do with temperament, and trace amounts of incompetence and disorganization. But fundamentally the tech world—with its buzzwords, pitch decks, and perennial hype, everything always “amazing” and “awesome” and “unprecedented”—creeps me out. All this talk of changing the world, rendered in the same market-tested fonts and colour schemes, always makes me ask: Is there any there there? 

Put another way, I am skeptical of hype, not only in my tech, but in my religion. I enjoy parties and wine and snappy aesthetics as much as the next person. But when it comes to branding campaigns for Jesus, carefully coordinated church Instagrams, hip merchandise, the pastoral pitch from a megachurch mainstage, I worry that it all looks a little too much like any other marketing scheme. 

Thus, I worship in a small liturgical church—an incarnate antithesis of hype, unless you count the silent lighting of chubby Advent candles or a Good Friday cross covered in black cloth. Here there are no corporate fonts and muted colours (we go for bright purple and green and red), no fog machines, and no swag. On Sundays we read Scripture, say the creed, and receive the Eucharist. The service is long and sometimes boring; the “work of the people” is occasionally tedious. We have one acoustic guitar and eat snacks from Costco in a shabby multi-purpose room. For Easter, I made a bowl of rhubarb punch. That’s as close as we get to cranberry-apple cosmos. 

Our church is a blessing—prayerful and service-minded and committed. When a congregant is sick or sad or in need, we show up. There is a there there. But maybe I’m getting self-righteous. We’re not performing dozens of baptisms. We’re not drawing crowds of San Franciscans who will hear the name of Jesus perhaps for the very first time, even if it is over sophisticated small plates. 

Whenever my preferences run up against the flash and energy and brazen confidence of start-up culture—particularly when it’s combined with evangelical Christianity—I find myself thinking about a favourite essay, one I’ve been rereading for years. In “Upon This Rock,” journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan reports, humorously and generously, from a Christian rock festival in Pennsylvania. Sullivan has left his teenage faith behind, but as he spends time with pilgrims, sitting on coolers around a campfire, he finds his own surety shaken: 

The Bay Area is still one of the least religious regions in the country. Recent Pew Research data found that only 46 percent of adults in the San Francisco metro area identify as Christian, slightly down from 48 percent about a decade ago. Affiliation with other religions has declined too, from 15 percent to 11 percent. About half of the adults who live here—45 percent—say religion is not very, or not at all, important in their lives. 

So the revival isn’t bearing out in the big-picture data—at least, not yet. Data, as I’ve said, has its limitations. But neither is the vibe shift so pronounced as to be obvious anecdotally—not in my church, at least, nor in my network of largely secular friends and their secular workplaces. 

Envisioning a Silicon Valley revival isn’t straightforward. This place may be “godless,” but living here doesn’t feel so different from living elsewhere. People aren’t evil; they’re just so busy, with jobs and kids and bills to pay. An in-breaking of the Spirit won’t mean tamping down overt Satan worship or stopping child sacrifices. In a way, it’ll mean doing something more complicated, more impossible—showing us all another way to live, convincing us that it’s the only Way, that we’ll lose a lot and gain everything. That convincing, I’m inclined to think, happens the slow way—through individual relationships, talks, walks, books, and lots of visits to a local church that isn’t trying to sell you something. Not because an event is cool or a billboard is smart. 

But I have doubts about my doubts. 

A few months after the revival reporting breaks, on a summer evening in Mountain View, five minutes from Google’s main campus, five minutes from my own congregation’s rented space, I drive past warehouses and car washes and pull into the full parking lot at VIVE Church. It’s the final night of its multi-day conference AMEN Experience: West Coast Revival, which draws attendees from across its campuses in cities like Milan, Honolulu, and Frankfurt. It’s a church that Buzzfeed once reported “sells spirituality like a software product,” a place with slick advertisements (“Not religious? Neither are we” read their billboards) and flat whites. 

Inside on stage, incandescent musicians in denim and whitewash sing raucous worship against a backdrop of teal and orange clouds. The darkened room crackles with energy; I’d wager most attendees are under thirty, definitely under fifty. Photographers and videographers slink through the crowd. A choir sings, tech folks with glitter strands in their hair click through graphics, the strong smell of perfume wafts through the aisle. 

“It feels like revival!” proclaims one lyric. The crowd goes wild. Hands slip into the air. Eyes drift shut. The man next to me starts speaking in tongues. Pastors from across the megachurch’s campuses ask the winds of Azusa to blow. They pray for governments and businesses and families, for single people to get married and new churches to get planted. 

There are two ways to experience an event like this. The cynic sees ploys to gain influence, power, and money. The lead pastor, Australian, with a stylish haircut and a thin gold chain, stands in the middle of the stage during worship, hand dramatically cupped over his mouth. Why is he on stage now, while the band is playing, drawing attention to himself? The appeals to sign up for next year’s conference (only $50 for early-bird registrants!) and to plant more churches sound like dog whistles for tithes. (As if anticipating this critique, the pastor quips: “One hundred churches in the next ten years. Stupid, yes; selfish, no.”) 

The believer sees something different. Young women who feel called to start churches are moved to tears at the gravity of their mission. The pastor gives a rigorous sermon on Moses and his father-in-law, Jethro, who told him, in so many words, to get help. He underlines passages of Scripture in bright pink and orange on a screen. Write this down, he insists: “Your calling cannot be carried alone.” “Revival,” he says, “is the result of anointed people coming together.” Then he calls down the “yoke-destroying, chain-breaking power of God.” 

These people are praising their Maker on a Friday night when they could be at a restaurant, at the club, watching TV at home. A child, sleepy, curls in the rows of chairs. I wonder how he’s making sense of this—the adults in his life, absolutely falling over themselves for the Lord. 

There’s energy here, but is there revival? It depends on what happens once the parking lot empties and the worshippers fly home. 

VIVE has been in the Bay Area for twelve years, a classic success story of a living-room small group expanded to multiple sites. But it wasn’t the church mentioned in all the revival reporting. That was Epic in San Francisco, a congregation that launched around the same time. They’ve also met with success—from a rented hotel space to their own building with a built-in baptismal font, towels stacked nearby, floors of polished concrete, and good coffee in the lobby. Prior to 2020, Epic averaged about 750 people per Sunday; as of last fall, their numbers were edging toward 1,000, with baptisms on the rise too. 

I went to Epic the same weekend as VIVE, wondering if I’d find more of the same. There were indeed many young people, also wearing neutrals—only one pink sundress visible from where I sat. And there was the same big worship: drums and belting and purple light in a room darkened with mechanical window shades. Upon filling out a connection card, visitors were given a Blue Bottle Coffee gift card. 

Epic is doing a sermon series on Acts called “The Making of a Movement,” in part a reaction to the year’s news. It opened a few weeks previous with a proclamation from the lead pastor: “God is on the move in a significant way—both around the world and right here at Epic Church in San Francisco. But what does a move of God look like? How can we prepare for one? How can we fully participate in one? And what are the ingredients when it comes to seeing a movement of God?” My questions exactly. 

This week, the text is Acts 2:22–40, Peter’s proclamation at Pentecost about salvation through Jesus. The sermon preached in response, fittingly enough, is an altar call. I’ve heard this kind of appeal many times before. It’s powerful. Conviction, the pastor says, leads to repentance and restoration and action. “Is the cross of Jesus personal to you?” he asks his listeners. “We can’t detach a move of God from Jesus.” He asks congregants to raise their hands if they hear the Spirit speaking to them—if they need to accept Christ’s forgiveness, for instance, or get baptized. He asks that the band stay quiet, so as not to manipulate the mood. 

If this is what Silicon Valley techies are drawn to—then, well, that seems good. All the coffee and fashion in the world can’t cover up what they got today: forty-five minutes of gospel conviction, in a message titled “Cut to the Heart.” Maybe the drinks and the music and the branding are just the twenty-first-century equivalent to George Whitefield’s emotional preaching, or the guitars of the Jesus People. 

What’s cringe or tacky to some will be revelatory to others. Such has it always been. A darkened room, the glint of a gold chain. A long exegesis. A party. A hand reaching out to theirs and saying come and see. 

Maybe a summer camp. 

Because that’s where I accepted Jesus—on the last night of a week-long stay, in a cabin, after a campfire. I was twelve years old, wired on a week of water balloon fights and capture the flag and mac ’n’ cheese and crushes on at least half of the male counsellors, running on little sleep and lots of emotion. You could call that the hype of hypes, manipulation of manipulations. I can see how the flickering light, the sugar of a s’more, the tears of everyone else, the sky full of stars, my own apprehensions about entering middle school all made me susceptible to the appeal; how it forced me to a decision point. 

And yet I can also see grace at work in it. Almost twenty years later, here I am. 

One has doubts about one’s doubts. 

On another evening this summer, a crowd of tech folks—and a few teachers, a few retirees—meet at a park in Sunnyvale to sing worship. Some of them still wear badges or carry backpacks. Men from Netflix and Facebook offer testimonies. Ten minutes down the road from LinkedIn, we sing public praise to the Lord amid choking campfire smoke and the crack of baseballs and barks of dogs. As the sunlight dims, white-collar workers roast marshmallows over the fire and make s’mores with Ghirardelli chocolate. 

It has been a long time since I’ve worshiped by a fire—college at least. Before that, camp. This event is being put on by Faith and Work Movement Global, an international network of resource groups at big companies initiated and run by employees. F&WM’s founder, Roy Tinklenberg, is in fact a former youth pastor who hopes sense memories brought up by these outdoor events will rekindle some participants’ faith. 

A campfire is bright—but not compared to strobe lights. Roy thinks that’s fine: “When spiritual awakening happens, there is no need for marketing.” 

Saying “God is God” doesn’t abdicate our responsibilities to discernment. Televangelists ripping off their viewers, promising miracles for cash? Not from God. Pastors abusing women and extorting their signatures for secrecy? Not from God. Not everything with Jesus’s name on it belongs to him. Not every teaching is true. And not every strategy is wise, whether platforming Peter Thiel or selling tickets for what feel like stadium shows. By temperament, I’ll stick with our understated church and my quiet conversations, some stretching over years. By conviction, I’ll stick there too. 

Even so, there’s no doubt that, as the old saying goes, God works in mysterious ways. At this worship night, some stand and some sit in camping chairs and some twirl colourful flags. People walk by with their dogs and tennis rackets. They think, Those weirdos. Or they don’t think about us at all. What will it matter, I wonder. Will one night of singing miraculously disperse the malaise of immanence? 

Probably not. And yet—we know that so many of our attempts to share the gospel do matter. The seeds planted, the seeds watered, the seeds that we think will never grow. Even the seeds planted in cynicism or hubris. Putting out roots, dampened by San Francisco fog, ready to bloom in the California sun.