Sixty Films, Many Gods: The Spirituality of Race Around the World
Somewhere in a Vietnamese village, a young Australian filmmaker sits down opposite a fortune teller and asks her to read his future in a deck of cards. Somewhere else, another is being taught how to curse her rivals by a New Orleans witch, mostly in jest, but not entirely. Somewhere else again, a young woman kneels in a Lithuanian forest taking part in a pagan ceremony that predates Christianity by a very long way, because the internet had started to make her feel unwell and she wanted, for a few hours, to touch grass in the most literal sense available.
None of this was the plan. Race Around the World sent six young filmmakers to ten destinations each, gave them ten days per stop, and told them to find a story. They could choose any subject they like, and so often they turned their camera and creative energy towards different forms of exotic spirituality. Why are these young Australians so interested?
Religion is not Fading
The Western secular move was never a simple story of religion being replaced by reason. It is not Christianity, then rationality, then atheism, in a tidy line. Once Christianity became the dominant religion, and then unbelief became a liveable option, something stranger happened. The whole field of religions and spiritualities exploded. Christianity stayed, atheism arrived, and in the space between and around them, a huge range of new options rushed in: reconstructed traditions, invented spiritualities, borrowed rituals, personal blends of belief that no denomination would recognise as its own. Charles Taylor calls this the proliferation the “nova effect”, after the astronomical event where a star suddenly, spectacularly multiplies its light. Race Around the World put this on display.
Look at what the filmmakers actually found. Mikaela Zuiderduyn spent ten days inside a New Age community in regional Brazil, and later went looking for witches, tarot readers and voodoo practitioners in New Orleans, mostly to see if any of it could change her luck. In northern Argentina she encountered Pachamama, not as a theological idea but as something lived through mountains, family ritual and traditional art. Lucinda Price followed young Taiwanese singles to a temple dedicated to a matchmaking deity, because even in a hyper-modern, hyper-online society, some problems still send people looking for divine help. She then turned up in Lithuania for that pagan ceremony in the woods. Kate McGuinness travelled to Tanna Island in Vanuatu and found Chief Moly and the John Frum movement, a religious world where Christianity, traditional Kastom, visions and ritual music all sit together without apparent contradiction. Jayden O'Neill met Grandfather Crocodile in Timor-Leste and the ancestral belief that still shapes how people there think about death and land. William He finished his season with a tarot reading from a rural Vietnamese fortune teller, having already investigated a haunted Welsh castle and interviewed a Chilean man who claims contact with beings from what he calls Friendship Island.
Line all of that up and you get a picture of young Australian creatives fascinated with faith: Christianity, new religious movements, folk religion, paganism, earth spirituality, witchcraft, voodoo, divination, ancestral cosmology, ghost stories and extraterrestrial encounters, all operating at once, often within the same few weeks of travel. That is the nova.
A young Australian from a century ago, would likely have expected to encounter religion in a building: a church, a temple, a mosque, a priest, a congregation, a set of doctrines you were handed at birth. Almost none of what these filmmakers found looks like that. They found tarot cards, Earth rituals, a god who specialises in matchmaking, witches, a ceremony revived from before Christianity arrived, an unusual community that built its own theology from scratch.
Taylor argues that the attraction to these niche expressions of faith is emblematic of the Age of Authenticity. Increasingly people feel they are meant to find their own path to “fullness” - meaning and purpose. In the secular age we don’t necessarily inherit a religious identity from our family or society. We look for what actually speaks to us. As a result, religion is now less of a shared inheritance and more of a personal soundtrack.
The Haunting
There is a second, more subtle layer here, and it might be the most human part of the whole series. These young filmmakers Australians. Taylor would call them “buffered selves”: people who generally experience meaning as something generated inside their own heads, rather than as a force pressing in on them from outside. The buffered self does not expect the world to be haunted, and yet they are.
This is why they can’t look away from that possibility. They do not convert to these new religions, but neither do they scoff. They walk into the temple, sit for the tarot reading, join the ceremony, and listen to the fortune teller. With one eye they wink to the camera, with the other they hold out hope: the way we sometimes check a horoscope we would never admit to believing in. This is what Taylor calls “cross-pressure”: the condition of living inside a world that has largely stopped assuming the supernatural, while still wondering whether there might be more to it after all.
Physical Spirituality
The spirituality of Race Around the world was strangely physical. The filmmakers didn’t engage in philosophical or theological debate over coffee. They travelled somewhere, performed an action, touched things, stood in landscapes, submitted to a ritual, joined a ceremony, and asked for blessings or luck or healing or connection. Pachamama showed up through mountains and family ritual, not through argument or explanation. In a similar way, Lucinda did not critique Lithuanian paganism, she knelt in the forest and took part. Where ethnographers might have simply recorded religious practice, on many occasions, these filmmakers joined in.
Taylor argues that modern Western Christianity has gradually drifted away from the physical, he says it has become “excarnated”: increasingly a matter of belief, propositions and private conviction, and less a matter of bodies doing things together in a meaningful cosmos. If that is true, then a lot of the nova is really a hunger pushing back the other direction, toward experience, ritual, place, mystery and touch. People do not just want to believe something. They want to feel something happen to them.
Not Revival
It would be tempting to see this as evidence that young Australians are becoming religious again. But that would be too neat and reductionistic. What Race Around the World actually shows is the collapse of the old religious-versus-secular scoreboard. The twentieth century liked to imagine two teams: the believer and the unbeliever. Charles Taylor's world, and the one these six filmmakers travelled through, looks far messier than that: Catholic, evangelical, atheist, agnostic, meditator, crystal collector, environmental mystic, tarot client, yoga practitioner, keeper of ancestral custom, and the person who insists on nothing in particular but suspects there is something more, all moving in and out of each other's orbit, sometimes within the same person over the course of a life.
The High Priest of Nova Filmmaking
I have to admit, it is curious that the main recurring judge on the panel is John Safran. If anyone in Australian television was built for a show fascinated with gods, spirits and the supernatural, it is him. In his popular television series, John Safran vs God, he travelled the world, dropping into cults, faiths, exorcisms and religious subcultures, and refusing to settle into either belief or dismissal. He also spent the 2000s co-hosting a Triple J radio show with the late Father Bob McGuire, an odd-couple pairing of a comedian with no fixed religious address and a Catholic priest who never met a stranger, arguing and laughing their way through religion week after week. Handing the judging reins to Safran is a bit like putting the high priest of the nova effect in charge of grading everyone else's pilgrimage. He has spent his whole career in exactly the field these young filmmakers keep wandering into.
What should we make of all this?
The supernatural has not gone away in the West, but what has gone is Christianity's status as the obvious, default language for interpreting it. People are hungry for transcendence, ritual, belonging, blessing, connection to the land, guidance and some kind of encounter with a reality bigger than themselves. That desire has not disappeared. What has multiplied is the number of places people now expect to find it.
Therefore, the challenge of our moment is “how does the gospel speak into a world where people are drawn to almost any and every kind of spirituality?”
Race Around the World was never trying to answer that question. It was not even trying to ask it. But when six young Australians went looking for whatever makes people interesting, they kept finding people reaching past the edges of the visible world. What lies beyond that edge, it turns out, is no longer one great religious sky. It is a field of separate constellations, scattered, competing, occasionally beautiful, and lit by Taylor's nova.
A note on the theory: Taylor's account of secularisation is built primarily around the modern North Atlantic world, so it would be a stretch to claim Brazilian, Taiwanese, Vanuatuan or Vietnamese religious life arose through the exact historical process he describes. What is unmistakably Taylorian, though, is the situation the filmmakers themselves inhabit: contemporary, globally mobile, largely secular Australians moving through a world where radically different accounts of reality all sit beside one another as live, liveable options. That condition, more than any single tradition on screen, is the nova effect in action.
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