We Don’t Need a Savior. We Need a Sangha.

On Rebecca Solnit, implicit religion, and the theology hiding inside progressive politics

You can listen to the full interview here or read an edited print version here.

One of the earliest thrills of starting this newsletter was the day Rebecca Solnit shared one of my pieces on Facebook. If you know her work, you know why that meant something. And when I listened to her interview with the NYT over weekend I was pretty sure it would be thought-provoking. And it was, but maybe in a way different from most listeners.

For me, Solnit’s interview is one of the most theologically rich political conversations I’ve heard in years. I don’t know if she’d describe it that way. But I’ve been following her work long enough to suspect she’d at least find the framing interesting rather than objectionable. At least that is my hope. Because what I’m about to argue isn’t a critique. It’s the opposite.

Solnit was doing theology. Even if not every listener knew it.

Looking back to move forward

Here’s where it started. Early in the interview, Marchese asks why it’s so hard to hold onto a positive picture of the world when the news keeps battering you. And Solnit’s answer is about our oldest stories, including the religious ones:

“I think that there are some really deep cultural traditions that are worth keeping, some of which are older than Christianity. And one of the really magnificent things I see happening in the United States right now is the recovery of some of the really old stories. And so I feel like part of the future, the best future we aim for is built by going back to the oldest stories, back to recognizing that patriarchy is not inevitable or natural or the only way people have ever done things. That there are in indigenous cultures, the Americas, in Asian and African cultures, there are matriarchal traditions. A lot of hunter-gatherers just seem to have a lot more gender equality. So I think you can move forward with anchors in a deeper past and hope for a kind of stability and a deeper relationship to the old stories and the past.”

This is at the heart of her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End. Move forward with anchors in a deeper past.

I want to sit with that phrase for a second, because I love it AND it’s not merely a political argument. It’s a theology of tradition, the kind of argument that religious reformers have been making for centuries when they want to recover something the dominant culture has buried. It’s the logic of liberation theology. It’s the logic of every Indigenous rights movement that has insisted on the authority of ancestral knowledge against the claims of colonial modernity. It’s the argument that the oldest sources are not the obstacle to a more equal future. They’re part of the path toward it.

This is not where most secular progressives land. The usual assumption on the left is that tradition is what you’re fighting against. Solnit is saying the opposite. And she’s saying it as if it’s obvious.

That, right there, is the thing I want to track through this whole interview. Because she did it over and over.

The next Buddha will be the Sangha

The moment of the interview that I hear a lot of people talking about, and that made it into the edited print version of the interview, comes when Marchese asks who is going to be the person to counter Trump? Is it Zohran Mamdani? Gavin Newsom? Where is the leader we’ve been waiting for?

Solnit’s answer:

“I often think one of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies over and over that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex whose superpower is the ability to inflict and endure extraordinary violence. When actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. It brings up something really beautiful that Thich Nhat Hanh said at some point before he died a few years ago, which is: the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha in Buddhist terminology is the community of practitioners.”

She continues:

“It’s the idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an ubermensch. Maybe the community is the next hero. And it’s exactly what Minneapolis is. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society.”

A progressive intellectual was asked a political question about electoral strategy. And she reaches, without hesitation, without translation, without apology, for the teaching of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk.

This is what scholars of religion call implicit religion. When people reach for their deepest convictions about how the world works and how it gets better, they often reach for religion.

Marchese’s question itself is worth pausing on, because it wasn’t really a political question either. “The public is hungry for an individual to be a counterweight.” That is a messianic expectation. We are waiting for the anointed one. The prophet who arrives at the moment of crisis and sets things right. This structure is so encoded in American civic mythology, in how we talk about founding fathers, wartime presidents, civil rights heroes, that most people experience it as just common sense. Of course we need a leader. Of course history turns on individuals.

The left is not immune. The left has its own messianic traditions. The revolutionary vanguard. The charismatic organizer who crystallizes a movement in a single speech. The senator from Vermont, the mayor from NYC, and the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, who were going to change everything. We do the same thing, and we keep ending up in the same place. The hero turns out to be human. The movement fractures. The search begins again.

Solnit’s Buddhist corrective (“the community is the next hero”) has deep echoes across religious traditions. In Latin American liberation theology, the community is the site of revelation; God is encountered not through hierarchy but through the gathered poor reading scripture together. In Jewish thought, Am Yisrael (the people as a whole) bears the covenant, not any single leader, which is why the tradition survived the destruction of the Temple, the loss of the priesthood, exile after exile. In Islam, the concept of ummah (the global community of believers) carries its own theological authority. There’s a hadith that gets regularly cited: the community as a whole cannot agree on an error. And in the Ubuntu tradition of southern Africa, theologians like Desmond Tutu grounded an entire ethics of collective life in the phrase “I am because we are,” the self is not prior to community, it emerges from it. Four traditions, wildly different in content, all arriving at the same place: the community is not the means to an end. The community is the point.

What the work looks like

Then Solnit says something striking about who actually does the work:

“A huge amount of the important work—I was thinking about this when I woke up in the middle of the night—is done by nice ladies. And I think a lot of people with platforms, and a lot of the left, wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara or something like that. And so the fact that nice ladies actually change the world, maybe it’s about the fact that changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.”

I think even this can be seen as a theological, not just a political, reframe.

The caregiving metaphor has religious roots, lots of them. In Jewish tradition, chesed is usually translated as loving-kindness but it’s really more like steadfast relational attentiveness, the quality that holds communities together not through conquest but through showing up, again and again, for the people in front of you. In Buddhism, karuna (compassion as active practice) is one of the four brahmaviharas, the “divine abodes,” which means it’s not a feeling you hope to have, it’s a discipline you train. In the early Christian church, diakonia (service, where we get the word deacon) was the radical distinguishing practice of the movement: caring for widows, orphans, and strangers at a time when the Roman world had no framework for that. And in Sikhism, seva (selfless service) is so inseparable from worship that it’s been made literal and institutional in the langar, the free community kitchen attached to every gurdwara, open to anyone who walks through the door, every single day. Of course these are four very different religious traditions, but all insist that tending to people is not a distraction from the real work. It is the real work.

Solnit didn’t need to read any of them to arrive at the same conclusion. She just had to watch who actually shows up.

Not optimism. Something harder.

Which brings me to hope.

Solnit describes herself, with some self-deprecating humor, as “the hope lady,” her friend Sam’s nickname for her. When Marchese asks why it’s so hard to stay hopeful right now, she says:

“I am, you know, I remain hopeful and partly as defiance. They would like us to surrender, to feel powerless, that there’s nothing we can do. But I think the evidence speaks to that.”

And then she reaches for this image:

“You walk through the jungle and the flowers are beautiful, but you better keep an eye on the tiger, because the flowers aren’t going to eat you, but the tiger will. You’ve got to keep an eye on what’s wrong. But also, I think a lot of the stories of what’s right are these stories of incremental change.”

This is not optimism and Solnit is actually pretty clear about this distinction elsewhere. In a Tricycle interview, she describes both optimism and pessimism as “forms of certainty about the future.” Pessimists assume it’s going to be terrible. Optimists assume it’ll be fine. Both claim to know what hasn’t happened yet, which lets them off the hook from actually doing anything.

Hope is something harder and more honest than either. You’re not claiming to know how it ends. You’re claiming that how it ends is not yet written, which means your actions still matter. What Solnit is describing with the jungle image is exactly that, hope maintained alongside a clear-eyed view of the tiger. You don’t pretend the danger isn’t real. You keep your eye on it. And you also keep walking, noticing the flowers, refusing to let the tiger be the only thing that’s real.

Theologians have a name for this. It’s the virtue of hope, which Aquinas formalized as one of three theological virtues in the Summa Theologica, alongside faith and love. Not a feeling you happen to have on good days. A disposition you train and deepen, especially when the immediate moment gives you every reason to abandon it. Solnit has a method for sustaining it: holding the longer arc of history, reading the backlash as evidence of how much ground has actually been won, and insisting we are more powerful than we feel. That’s a lot like how religious communities have carried hope across generations of suffering. They hold the longer story when the present moment is too dark to bear.

Solnit doesn’t call it faith. But that’s what it is. And a version of faith someone like me, with no religious affiliation, can get behind.

The bad Buddhist reimagines religion

I study how religious frameworks carry wisdom that secular culture keeps having to rediscover. Rebecca Solnit just made that case better than I ever could have.

This isn’t a gotcha. I’m not trying to claim Solnit for religion against her will. I’m pointing at something I think matters: these frameworks keep showing up in secular spaces because they’re pointing at something real. Something useful.

And I don’t think Solnit would necessarily argue she is “secular” or anti-religion. The daughter of a secular Jew and an Irish Catholic mother, Solnit has described herself as “a bad Buddhist, but a Buddhist.” She has also used the term “ambient Buddhism” to describe how Buddhist ideas about interconnection, uncertainty, and compassion run through everything she writes. She’s not accidentally reaching for these frameworks. She’s been living inside them for decades. And they have informed her books since at least Hope in the Dark.

What’s interesting, and what I think matters for how we understand the cultural moment we’re in, is that her audience doesn’t necessarily see this. My hunch is that some (maybe a lot) of her readers are people like me, and would not describe themselves as religious, have left religious traditions behind, or never had one. But we turn to Solnit’s writing for something that functions like religious guidance. Orientation in the world. A way of holding hope without naivety. A framework for understanding why the work matters even when it’s hard.

That’s a recognizable role. We used to call it clergy. Or teacher. Or guide. The credentials look different. The platform is a book or a newsletter or a podcast instead of a pulpit. But the function is the same: helping people find answers the oldest questions, in language they can actually hear.

So here is my controversial take: Rebecca Solnit is one of the most important religious thinkers in America right now. Her readers just don’t always see her that way. And that, to me, is the most interesting thing about this interview. And the most hopeful.

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My book Beyond Wellness (Penguin Random House, April 2026) is about exactly this, the hidden religious logic operating inside our most secular cultural spaces, from wellness culture to political movements to the way we talk about hope and healing and change. If this piece resonated, I think you’ll find a lot more to sit with there. You can pre-order here.