Rainn Wilson’s “Soul Boom” as a Metamodern New Religious Movement

For the better part of two decades, actor and comedian Rainn Wilson (aka Dwight Schrute on TV’s The Office) has publicly pursued his passion for community-based, universalist spiritual inquiry. Society writ large, he feels, would do well to nurture the fruits of individual and collective spiritual maturation. Spirituality for Wilson is an “eternal/divine aspect of ourselves that longs for higher truth and journeys toward heart-centered enlightenment and, dare I say it, God.” His 2023 book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, promotes engagement with literally “anything concerning the divine” as long as it contributes to the social renewal that, in his view, could save humanity from its self-destruction. He also promotes traditional religious belonging (with clear preferences for pluralist paths like his own Baha’i faith over more doctrinal faiths he sees as anti-science) and contemplative practices of prayer and meditation as tools for talking to and listening for God, respectively. His homogenized view of spirituality is neither new nor surprising, given the popularity of affiliations like Spiritual but not Religious and “the Nones.” Wilson’s broad universalism echoes (and gives credit to) the expected cadre of New Age/SBNR go-to figures, such as Teilhard de Chardin, Eckhart Tolle, James Hillman, and Joseph Campbell. Soul Boom also updates spirituality-related media consumption by discussing how wisdom can be garnered from television products such as Kung Fu and the Star Trek franchise. This multi-modal approach gathers many under one tent.

Soul Boom synthesizes an array of Wilson’s secular-spiritual projects, each intended for public consumption. In 2009, Wilson founded the media company SoulPancake, which produced performances and projects from the tiny to the grand in pursuit of twin missions: “to chew on life’s biggest questions” and to bring “more joy!” Several storytelling video series, including “My Last Days” (2012-2019), featured frank conversations with the terminally ill about death, the afterlife, and the human longing to be seen. More modestly, the SoulPancake team drove around LA in 1970s vans giving out “street compliments” and “random hugs.” His current Substack newsletter, “Soul Boom Dispatch,” offers a secular-friendly “space for deeper conversation …. Never precious, sometimes silly, yet always unafraid to touch on the profound.”

Noteworthy for students of new religious movements is that the presentation of Wilson’s projects leans heavily on an aesthetic sensibility characterized as metamodern. Metamodernism began as a cultural studies rubric that observes contemporary manifestations of post-postmodernism. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s influential 2010 essay “Notes on Metamodernism” has spawned a subfield of interdisciplinary scholarship. Their theorization, along with my own extensions of it for the field of religious studies, will serve as this paper’s central theoretical apparatus.

Wilson’s confessional life stories purposely paint him as a flawed messenger. Regarding the launch of his own spiritual journey, he is disarmingly modest: “I was no saint being visited by some Holy Spirit. Nor was I some bodhisattva finding enlightenment through intensive contemplation and revelatory insight.” Though brought up by ecumenical, spiritually curious parents, he writes, “I needed to seek spirituality because I was really frigging unhappy.” Other examples of self-reflexive transparency include his awareness of the hubris at taking on such a broad scope of material: “Basically I’ll be throwing a lot of spiritual spaghetti against the wall, and hopefully some of it will stick.”

Particularly for millennial and Gen Z culture consumers, this emphasis on honesty and fealty to personal, felt experience reads as more authentic than would narratives asserting a celebrity’s sage infallibility. An earnest desire to advance positive social outcomes meets humorous, self-conscious jadedness. Irony meets sincerity. A phenomenon that I have referred to elsewhere as “the metamodernization of spiritual figures” explains why this manner of affective approach is increasingly seen in 21st-century spirituality movements. 

“Soul Boom”—as a concept, as opposed to Wilson’s book title—is an aspirational movement. It appears to aim to catch people where they are, that is, on a variety of social media platforms. Popular culture and internet-based media are regarded as relevant resources, not at all antithetical to paths of awakening. Prioritizing humor and goofiness over modernist grand narratives of perfection, and promoting both religious and secular realization, nets a both/and rather than an either/or, palatable by SBNRs who gravitate toward the nonsectarian, egalitarian, and multi-pronged spiritual modalities.

Wilson’s 2021-2023 video podcast with religious studies scholar/public figure Reza Aslan, “Metaphysical Milkshake with Rainn & Reza” (“the show where we go deep, we get weird, and we search for the meaning of life along the way”), is another platform for interviews that expressly broach spiritual topics with celebrities and artists. Wilson notes that his zeal to discuss “deep, big, gooey meaningful spiritual questions” in secular contexts involves forgoing the safety of the postmodern relativistic position: “Many people don’t talk about faith … because it can be off-putting to some and it’s a little bit scary; you’re afraid you’re being judged.” Wilson therefore relies on his success playing awkward and quirky characters. In his Peacock series Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss (2023), he plays a disarming, lightly self-indulgent, minimally informed but nevertheless earnestly concerned average guy. Admitting that he possesses only modest understanding as to the human role in climate change, he then shares relatable doubts about what a person can hope to contribute, and whether he himself is a climate hypocrite—increasing his own carbon footprint by flying around the world pursuing do-gooder projects. Rather than posing as a wise figure delivering a moral imperative, then, his character communicates, “Look, I feel as hapless as you probably do; and maybe I’m an even bigger dork about it!” which tacitly validates the average person’s insecurities about having big-hearted, and also possibly naïve, intentions.

Wilson’s “Soul Boom” will interest scholars who track contemporary iterations of secular-spiritual identities. This paper contextualizes his public projects as consonant with other metamodern cultural products that combine celebrity and fan cultures, “anthropocenic” awareness, and an embrace of our collective humanity via—rather than in spite of—our individual flaws and foibles.