However, I have never seen collective effervescence as intense as when a bunch of evangelical adolescents, fired up on hormones, get together. Here, the adolescent’s most extreme emotions are called forth time and time again. In 1923, the theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto said that there is a kind of heat in religion—“vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, excitement, energy, activity, impetus,” all coming together to create a “consuming fire.”4 Still today, I yearn for it. There are few places in this world that we can go to feel like this.I
