We’ve all heard a lot over the years about Burning Man, but if we look closely, we can learn something about ourselves. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be ensouled beings?
I don’t mean simply the nudity, the excess, the alternative spiritualities, or the other things Christians might find objectionable. Those things are there, and there are reasons to be critical of them. But they can also distract us from a more interesting question: Why do so many people want something like Burning Man in the first place?
Every year people travel into the Nevada desert and build a temporary city around art, community, ritual, imagination, and shared experience. It would be easy to call it a social experiment, or a peculiar kind of socialism, radical communalism, or artistic self-expression. But I don’t think any of those descriptions quite gets at it.
There is a yearning there, and it is a yearning for something more.
The 2026 Burning Man theme makes this unusually explicit. It is called “Axis Mundi,” after the ancient idea of a point where heaven and earth, or different planes of reality, meet. Burning Man’s own description speaks of connecting with realities greater than ourselves and even invokes Jacob’s Ladder. That is striking language for a supposedly post-Christian age.
Apparently, we are still looking for ladders to heaven.
Perhaps that should not surprise us.
Dramatic fire and fireworks display at Burning Man festival with glowing effigy silhouette.
I have spent much of my academic life thinking and writing about the soul, including in my forthcoming book Why Souls? One of my basic claims is fairly simple: the soul is not an antiquated religious idea added to an otherwise sufficient account of the human being. The soul helps us make sense of the living subject—the someone who thinks, loves, remembers, imagines, suffers, worships, hopes, and experiences the world.
This is part of the argument I make in Why Souls?: the human hunger for transcendence is not incidental to who we are. We are ensouled creatures whose consciousness, imagination, loves, and hopes continually reach beyond the merely material world, ultimately because we were made for communion with God.
Consciousness itself should make us wonder. There is something it is like to be you. You don’t simply process information about your children, your spouse, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, or God. You experience them. You love. You grieve. You imagine. You hope. That rich phenomenal life is part of what I mean when I speak about the soul.
And the soul seems remarkably resistant to the thin world modern materialism has given us.
We want meaning. We create stories. We gather in communities. We make art. We engage in rituals. We contemplate death. We wonder whether there is something beyond what we can presently see. And when the dominant culture tells us that we are sophisticated biological machines inhabiting an accidental universe, we have a difficult time actually living as though that were true.
This is where Burning Man becomes interesting.
At least the longing underneath it is not just about this life. Something about it reaches beyond the ordinary. People leave their ordinary spaces and routines, enter a desert, construct another kind of community, create symbols and enormous works of art, participate rather than merely observe, and then watch the whole thing disappear.
There is something deeply human about that. There is also something deeply religious about it.
That doesn’t make Burning Man Christian. It certainly isn’t. But Christians should be able to recognize a spiritual longing even when we disagree with the form it takes.
The danger is that Christians sometimes respond by offering an even thinner world. We become suspicious of mystery. We are uncomfortable talking about the soul. We reduce worship to information, discipleship to moral instruction, and Christianity to a set of propositions one accepts. Then we are surprised when people go looking elsewhere for wonder, transcendence, community, ritual, and spiritual experience.
Why wouldn’t they? If we don’t give people categories for understanding the deeper dimensions of their lives, somebody else will.
Plato understood something of this. The philosophical life involves turning away from appearances and toward what is ultimately real. But Christianity takes that inward and upward movement somewhere Plato could not finally take it.
Augustine is helpful here. He turns inward, but he does not remain there. In the Confessions, his inward journey leads him beyond himself. He discovers that the soul is not its own explanation: above the mutable self stands the immutable Creator.
That is the crucial Christian move.
Turn inward, yes. Pay attention to consciousness. Attend to desire. Cultivate imagination. Ask why beauty moves you, why love seems to carry a significance far greater than chemistry, why death feels like an offense against something that ought to continue.
But don’t stop with yourself. The soul points beyond itself.
C. S. Lewis put this memorably when he suggested that if we discover within ourselves a desire nothing in this world can satisfy, we should at least consider whether we were made for another world. That is worth taking seriously.
Dante can help us here, too. The Divine Comedy is one enormous exercise of the Christian imagination. It takes us through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the point is not simply to give us an imaginative geography of the afterlife. Dante is cultivating the soul. He is teaching us how to see. Hell shows us what disordered love does to us. Purgatory shows desire being healed and reordered. Paradise stretches the imagination toward the vision of God.
In that sense, Dante’s imagination has a destination. And that is one of the important differences between Christian imagination and the spiritual experimentation increasingly characteristic of our age. Christianity doesn’t simply tell us that there is “more.” It tells us what the more is for.
We were made for God.
That doesn’t diminish art, community, embodiment, imagination, or even our fascination with this world. It gives those things their proper depth. The Christian hope is not a final escape from creation. It is resurrection, new creation, and communion with the God who made us.
Burning Man makes the point unintentionally every year. The city rises. People gather. They create. They celebrate. They burn. And then the city disappears.
There is something almost painfully human about that rhythm, because everything we create in this life eventually passes away. Our accomplishments pass away. Our communities change. Our bodies age. People we love die. Eventually we die.
And yet the soul keeps reaching beyond all of it.
Perhaps that reaching is a clue. These are not merely abstract truths about human nature; they are concrete yearnings that show up as actions, motivations, impulses, and longings for transcendence. Perhaps the hunger is not an evolutionary accident after all.
While people at Burning Man are wondering beyond themselves, the wider culture is asking about consciousness again. There is fresh interest in near-death experiences, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, ancient spiritualities, paganism, and the possibility that reality is stranger than modernity told us. Christians should not be afraid of that.
But neither should we simply join the latest search for “enchantment.” Christianity already gives us a remarkably rich world: souls and bodies, heaven and earth, angels and saints, sacrament and resurrection, visible and invisible realities, and ultimately the promise that the pure in heart “shall see God.”
So what does Burning Man offer us? It doesn’t teach us what enchantment is, or what it means to be “re-enchanted” alongside our favorite gurus, though it does put those recent fads on display. It offers an opportunity: to consider our consciousness and our Creator, and to recognize that these deep, concrete, publicly visible longings are pointers to the soul—the center of what it means to be human—and to the Creator and Redeemer of our souls. We were made for more than this life, and Burning Man reminds us of that once again.
Rev. Dr. Joshua Farris, Anglican priest and Kairos University professor, directs Soul Science Ministries and founded Spiritually Driven Leadership. His forthcoming book is Why Souls? He speaks globally on human identity and theology. A former Humboldt Fellow, Farris publishes widely on Christian theism, dualism, and theological anthropology.