Rainn Wilson, who we know as Dwight Schrute on “The Office,” discussed the need for a spiritual revolution on a recent podcast. The actor spoke about his religious journey and navigating modern culture and Hollywood as a person of faith on the “No Small Endeavor” podcast with professor and theologian Lee C. Camp.
Wilson noted that he’s been talking about faith for a “good 12 years,” saying, “Frankly, I think it freaks people out. I think that most of Hollywood, especially comedians in Hollywood, talking about God is the uncoolest thing you can ever possibly do.” He added, “Comedians will call themselves nerds and say, ‘Oh, I’m so uncool, I’m so uncool.’ But it’s this weird thing. It’s like Hollywood is about who’s sitting at the cool kids’ lunch table.”
Regarding discussing faith and Hollywood, the actor explained, “So do I, do I have any smoking guns? Do I have any kind of, like, emails? No, not really. I can just kind of sense a collective eye roll about it. It certainly doesn’t help my career. I’m not doing any, any of this for any self-promotion or, or career.”
Wilson recently published a book called “Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution,” which warns that “existing political and economic systems” aren’t sufficient to address the “societal tensions that threaten to overwhelm us.” The actor is a follower of the Baha’i faith, a deistic religion founded in 19th-century Iraq.
He noted that society has increasingly abandoned religion, seeking other means of filling that void. Wilson stated, “Again, we’ve thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater, collectively rejecting religion and getting our spirituality sometimes in quite superficial ways, like from a yoga class or just a meditation app or an Instagram with Rumi quotes. And I don’t mean to, I don’t mean to denigrate, you know, New Age folk or people that are looking outside of a religious system for spiritual inspiration, but there are universals in art, and there are universals in spirituality that humanity desperately needs right now.”
Wilson claimed, “We’re in the midst of a number of crippling pandemics that I outline in the book. We have a pandemic of climate change — that’s a pandemic, besides COVID. We have many other pandemics. Racism is one. Income inequality is really a pandemic.” Earlier this year, Wilson made headlines when he called out “anti-Christian bias” in Hollywood.
He tweeted, “I do think there is an anti-Christian bias in Hollywood. As soon as the David character in ‘The Last of Us’ started reading from the Bible, I knew that he was going to be a horrific villain. Could there be a Bible-reading preacher on a show who is actually loving and kind?”