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Where the Church Has Historically Failed, Burning Man Continues to Succeed
I grew up gay in a Christian cult, survived cancer three times, and spent years being told who needed saving. Then I went to Burning Man.
What if the people you were taught needed saving turned out to be the people who helped save you? And what if some of the people who promised to save you were the reason you needed saving in the first place?
Some places you visit; others welcome you home before you even understand how badly you needed one. Sometimes home is where you are finally given permission to be exactly who you are, and almost immediately you can feel it in the people around you: they know something about freedom you haven’t learned yet, something that feels like the answer to a question you didn’t know you were asking.
You may think you know what Burning Man is. Maybe you’ve seen the headlines. The drugs. The nudity. The billionaires in RVs. The mud. The fire. The absurdity. None of that is entirely wrong. It’s just nowhere close to the whole story. Because the thing that keeps tens of thousands of people dragging themselves back across the desert year after year is much harder to photograph.
So let me take you there. Not to the Burning Man you’ve heard about, to the one that changed my life.
Imagine an empty Nevada horizon stretching so far it barely looks real. And then, impossibly, a city rises out of it. Thousands of bicycles move through clouds of white dust. Monumental art appears where there was nothing. A dragon breathes fire into the night. Music travels across miles of open desert. Strangers offer you food, water, a drink, a hug, directions, help, sometimes before you even realize you need any of them.
And almost immediately, you notice something else. The people who have been there before carry an energy you can feel before you understand it. They seem freer. Not happier in some shallow, everything-is-perfect way.
Freer.
More willing to be ridiculous. More willing to be vulnerable. More comfortable being seen. Less interested in whether you approve. You start wondering what they know that you don’t. And then one of them looks at you, dusty, overwhelmed, standing in a city you have never seen before, and says:
Welcome home.
Something about those words lands harder than it should. That is where this story begins. Because what happened to me in that desert did not simply change the way I saw Burning Man. It changed the way I saw almost everything.
Five years ago, I was the new guy. I remember sitting in the seemingly endless line into Black Rock City, watching volunteers stand in the blazing Nevada sun welcoming car after car of dusty strangers. For free. I remember thinking: Who does this? Who voluntarily stands in the middle of the desert doing this for people they don’t even know?
Then someone told me Burning Man was going to change my life. I smiled politely. Sure it was.
I had gone for all the wrong reasons, following an insignificant fling with a guy I had somehow convinced myself I loved. He showed me his version of Burning Man: take what you want, enjoy the spectacle, move on. And it would take me years to understand that the version that changed my life asked almost the exact opposite of me.
I liked air conditioning, comfortable beds and knowing where my next shower was coming from. I was not looking for spiritual transformation in the Nevada desert. Then Burning Man started working on me anyway. Not all at once, not through some single lightning-bolt revelation: through people, through moments, through strangers who had absolutely no reason to care about me. And did.
By the time I returned for my fifth Burn, I had lost 70 pounds. I had cut my drinking by roughly 80 percent. I had confronted things I spent decades avoiding. I had changed the way I thought, loved, connected and understood myself. But the most important changes could not be measured on a scale or calculated as a percentage.
I had learned what it felt like to be loved without being corrected; to belong without first being approved; to be vulnerable without being ashamed; to have someone see the messiest parts of me and move closer instead of farther away.
And five years after wondering who on earth would voluntarily stand in that desert welcoming strangers, I became one of them. A Greeter. I stood at the entrance to Black Rock City covered in dust, hugging people who had just completed the same impossible journey I once had. Some were exhausted, some were overwhelmed, some were already crying.
And now I was the one looking at first-time Burners and saying:
Welcome home.
I was the one telling them to ring the bell: to leave behind whatever version of themselves they were ready to let go of, to be open, to be curious, to let the place surprise them. And then I told them the same ridiculous thing someone had once told me:
Your life is about to change.
Except now I wasn’t being ridiculous. I meant every word, because mine had.
And standing there, I suddenly understood something that had taken me five years to learn: Those people I once thought were crazy for standing in the desert greeting strangers weren’t working for Burning Man. They were giving back something Burning Man had given them. Someone had welcomed them. Someone had helped them. Someone had made them feel that they belonged. And eventually gratitude demanded a response:
Now it was their turn.
This year, it was mine.
And that realization would eventually force me to confront a much bigger question: How did a place I had been taught represented so much of what was wrong with the world become the place where I experienced some of the best of humanity?
This is not a story about Christians versus Burning Man. Even the recent missionary-camp controversy, quickly turned into a story about Christians being expelled for their faith, while Burning Man says the group was removed only after repeated warnings over privacy, consent and other rule violations, matters here for a different reason: it shows how easily the loudest version of a story can become the accepted one before anyone stops to ask what actually happened.
I Know Christianity. I Survived It.
The answer begins long before Burning Man. I grew up inside a version of Christianity so consuming that, as a child, I didn’t understand it was one way of seeing the world. I thought it was the world.
I grew up at what I now recognize as a Christian cult camp. At the time, I didn’t know it was a cult. I didn’t know what happened there was abuse. It was simply normal.
Grown adults openly laughed about stripping their children and beating them with paddles and belts, telling the stories in public with a kind of sick pride, as if cruelty were proof of good parenting and obedience were the highest form of love.
Women and girls were taught something just as damaging: be quiet, be submissive, don’t challenge men, don’t make trouble, don’t expose the things that might embarrass the family or the church. Looking back, what haunts me most is not just what was openly taught. It is what a culture built on silence, male authority and unquestioned obedience made possible behind closed doors.
And church was not something we attended once a week. It was seven nights a week, twice on Sundays. After breakfast came Bible study. In the afternoon, we memorized Bible verses. In between, we sang songs about Jesus. There was no real break from it. No quiet space to think, question or simply be a child.
It was not just church attendance. It was twenty-four-hour brainwashing.
We were children, some barely old enough to understand death, listening to graphic descriptions of hell, eternal torment and crucifixion delivered with enough intensity that I remember elementary-school-aged kids crying in terror. Some became physically sick from fear. Then came the solution: Say the prayer. Accept Jesus. Be saved.
To a terrified child who has just been taught that eternal torture is the alternative, that does not feel like a free spiritual choice. It feels like survival. And that was how many of us were first taught to understand God: fear first, salvation second. Then we were told this was love.
Decades later, I would stand in the Nevada desert surrounded by many of the people I had been taught were furthest from God and experience something completely different. No threat first, no terror first, no requirement that I become someone else first. Just:
Welcome home.
That contrast is the reason the childhood matters to this story.
I didn’t know who Queen was until I was 19. I couldn’t name a Michael Jackson song. I knew Madonna was the devil. And I was basically allowed to watch Christian movies only. For the record, the Christian version of The Goonies was not nearly as good.
But underneath all the rules, the fear and the constant religious conditioning was something even more powerful: I was being taught how to divide the world.
These are the good people. Those are the dangerous people. These people know truth. Those people are lost. These people belong to God. Those people need saving.
Gay people. Atheists. Drug users. Hippies. People having sex outside marriage. People experimenting with psychedelics. People who questioned the church. People who rejected God entirely.
In other words, a fairly decent cross-section of the people I would one day meet in Black Rock City.
I was handed a map of the moral universe before I was old enough to understand that someone had drawn it for me. And when you are a child, you don’t know you’ve been given a map. You think you’ve been given reality. That distinction would take me decades to understand. Because eventually I started meeting the people on the other side of that map. And they did not behave the way I had been promised they would.
Then the Map Stopped Matching the World
As an adult, I kept returning to Christianity: not casually, desperately. I tried to leave my homosexuality behind and “take up my cross” for Jesus. I tried to become the person I had been taught God required me to become.
I knew all the language. “Come as you are.” “Everyone is welcome.” “God loves you.” “We’re all sinners.” “You’ll find community here.” “You’ll never walk alone.”
The problem was what came after come as you are. Come as you are, but eventually we need to talk about that part of you. Come as you are, but loving another man cannot look the same for you as loving a woman looks for us. Come as you are, but belonging here will eventually require you to agree that something fundamental inside you must never be fully lived.
Which eventually made me ask a much more important question:
Welcome to what?
Welcome exactly as I am? Or welcome until I am emotionally invested, surrounded by community, and then slowly taught which parts of myself I have to surrender in order to truly belong? Those are two very different kinds of welcome.
And years later, that question would follow me all the way to a dusty city in Nevada where people kept saying those same two words:
Welcome home.
Except nobody followed them with a list of the parts of myself I would eventually have to abandon.
If I had a nickel for every straight married Christian man who enthusiastically explained to me how fulfilling a lifetime of “singleness for Jesus” could be, I would be a very rich man. Funny how often God’s plan for gay people requires sacrifices the person explaining God’s plan never has to make himself.
I kept trying anyway. At Reality LA, I went looking for exactly what Christianity had promised me: love, community, belonging, healing and God. Instead, the teachings I encountered there contributed to a level of self-hatred that brought me to the brink of suicide.
And those beliefs did not stay inside church walls. I have survived cancer three times. When I was diagnosed with testicular cancer for the first time, terrified and facing something no one should have to face, my own brother told me God was clearly punishing me for being gay.
Think about what has to happen inside a family for that sentence to become possible.
I had grown up gay inside a Christian cult. I had spent years being taught that something fundamental about me could separate me from God. Those teachings had already helped drive me to the brink of suicide. Then cancer came, and instead of simply being allowed to be scared, sick and human, I was handed the same theology again, this time as an explanation for why I deserved what was happening to me.
That is why I refuse to treat this as an abstract disagreement about doctrine. Words become beliefs. Beliefs become behavior. Ideas have consequences.
Tell a gay man that the person he falls in love with represents temptation rather than love, and there are consequences. Tell him that accepting himself may separate him from God forever, and there are consequences. Teach women that virtue means submission, purity and fulfilling a role someone else decided God designed for them, and there are consequences.
Shame has consequences. Self-hatred has consequences. Teaching a human being to distrust something fundamental inside themselves has consequences. I know. I lived them.
Sometimes the voice you hear in the middle of your most vulnerable moment is still carrying a sermon someone preached years earlier.
And this is where Burning Man becomes more than scenery in this story. Because years later, in the middle of a supposedly immoral city in the Nevada desert, a stranger would hold my hand while I sobbed and tell me I deserved to be loved. No theological debate, no correction, no condition. Just love.
That experience did not make every church evil or every Burner good. It did something much more unsettling. It made me question the map.
And this is why I struggle when Christianity continues positioning itself as the moral authority for everyone else. Christian leaders have spent generations telling us which sex is acceptable, which relationships are acceptable, which families are acceptable, which substances are acceptable, what women should do with their bodies, who is living in sin, who needs repentance, who is saved and who is damned.
All while scandal after scandal involving sexual abuse, financial misconduct, institutional cover-ups and abuses of power has emerged from inside religious institutions themselves.
You don’t get to spend Sunday morning telling consenting adults what they do in their bedrooms makes them morally corrupt while spending Monday protecting an institution that failed to protect a child. You don’t get to obsess over gay people, drag queens, drugs, festivals and everybody else’s supposed depravity while refusing to clean up your own house. And you certainly don’t get to point toward Burning Man and ask, “What has happened to morality?” while pretending the rot inside your own institutions doesn’t count.
Before climbing onto the moral high ground, perhaps make sure you are standing on solid ground, because some of the people I was taught were immoral have shown me extraordinary compassion. And some of the people I was taught were moral nearly destroyed me.
Before You Say “Not All Christians”
I know what some people are preparing to say. Not all Christians are like that. My church isn’t like that. Christianity helped me. Those weren’t real Christians.
Of course every Christian isn’t cruel. Of course churches have fed people, housed people, comforted people and done enormous good. I know Christians who are extraordinary human beings. That does not erase the harm.
And when someone tells you that teachings from your religion contributed to their shame, estrangement from family, depression, trauma or desire to die, perhaps the first response should not be defending Christianity’s Yelp rating.
Listen.
If your faith is strong, it can survive hearing from the people it hurt. Maybe Christianity doesn’t need another defense in that moment. Maybe the wounded person deserves the microphone.
And then, when that person tells you he found some of what he had spent his life searching for among a bunch of dusty strangers at Burning Man, perhaps resist the urge to dismiss that too. Get curious. Because that is what this essay is asking you to do.
You Told Me Who the Dangerous People Were
This may be the part I have the hardest time getting over. You told me who the dangerous people were. Then I met them.
I met gay people, atheists, drug users, hippies, Burners, people who rejected organized religion and people whose lives violated almost every rule I had been taught was necessary for goodness.
Some of the people you taught me to fear were the ones who held me while I cried. And some of the people you taught me to trust were the ones who made me hate myself.
That is a hell of a thing to reconcile.
I watched Christians obsess over consensual sex between two adult men while sexual-abuse scandal after sexual-abuse scandal, including the abuse of children, emerged from religious institutions.
Meanwhile, the “heathens” I had been warned about weren’t asking me for much of anything. They weren’t asking for ten percent of my income. They weren’t asking me to join their organization. They weren’t asking me to deny my sexuality. They weren’t asking me to vote for their candidate. They weren’t asking me to surrender my judgment to their pastor. Sometimes they were just asking:
Do you need a hug?
So tell me again: Who exactly were the dangerous people? Maybe the Burners were not the villains in this story. Maybe Jesus wasn’t either.
Maybe the betrayal was how many people had built institutions in his name while behaving nothing like the man they claimed to follow. Because when I finally encountered people practicing some of the things Jesus supposedly cared about, feeding people, helping strangers, sitting with the broken, welcoming the rejected, giving without expecting repayment, I found an awful lot of them outside the church. And increasingly, I found them in the desert.
Then I Went to Burning Man
If you know Burning Man only through headlines, the caricature practically writes itself. Drugs. Nudity. Sex. Wealthy people in RVs. Hippies. DJs. Debauchery.
And yes, all of that exists. So do completely sober people who don’t touch drugs or alcohol. So do scientists, teachers, parents, artists, engineers, doctors, recovering addicts, CEOs, bartenders, retirees and 19-year-olds who saved all year to get there.
Burning Man is too many things to be one thing. That is exactly what outsiders, and honestly, some Burners, get wrong. Anyone who confidently announces, “THIS is what Burning Man is,” is probably describing their Burning Man.
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Mine was different. Mine included dancing until sunrise and sitting silently with a stranger who was grieving. It included ridiculous art, terrible weather and conversations I still think about years later. It included whiteouts where the world disappeared a few feet in front of my bicycle. It included getting my ass kicked by nature and somehow waking up the next morning thrilled to still be there. It included laughter, grief, absurdity, generosity and a level of human vulnerability rarely allowed in normal life.
The playa gets into everything. Your shoes. Your bags. Your mouth. Your skin. Tears cut clean tracks through the dust on people’s faces. Nobody looks polished for long. Maybe that is part of the magic. It becomes very difficult to maintain the fiction that you have your shit completely together when everyone is equally filthy and the desert does not care who you are.
I Needed a Dad. Burning Man Gave Me One.
At my first Burn, I was looking through the enormous directory of events. And yes, there are hundreds upon hundreds of events, because contrary to what some people apparently believe, Burning Man is not seven straight days of sex, drugs and DJs.
I found something called a Surrogate Playa Parent. The description was essentially: Do you need a parent for a little while? I stopped. Yes. Yes, I did.
To say I had a terrible father is an understatement. My father ran our home like a self-appointed king. He joked that his children were slaves God had given him to do his will and his work. And if we didn’t? We were beaten.
Sometimes the offense was the look on your face. Sometimes it was the way you were sitting in church. Sit still. Fold your hands. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Or there would be consequences.
So when I saw an opportunity at Burning Man to have a dad for a little while, something inside me immediately said: Go.
I showed up. They handed me a little intake form. Dad or mom? Dad. Serious or jovial? Serious. Private or public? Private.
A few minutes later, around the corner walked the most quintessential granola, hiking, rock-climbing Canadian dad imaginable. He absolutely oozed warmth. “Are you Cal?” Yes. “Come with me.”
We sat down. He hugged me. And I completely fell apart. I began sobbing uncontrollably. I hadn’t cried like that in years. I was embarrassed, nervous and completely exposed.
This stranger held my hand and helped calm me down. For the next thirty minutes, I told him my story. He listened. He didn’t tell me everything happened for a reason. He didn’t tell me to forgive my abuser. He didn’t tell me God was testing me. He didn’t tell me my sexuality was another wound that needed healing. He just loved me.
He told me I deserved better than the monster of a father I had randomly been assigned when I entered this world. Thirty minutes. That was it. And I walked away changed.
No altar call. No tithe. No membership card. No conversion. No “but first you need to…” No ulterior motive.
Just another human being saying, in effect: You deserved a dad who loved you. You didn’t get one. For the next half hour, let me be one.
This is Burning Man. Not all of it. But this is Burning Man too. And somehow this supposedly godless city in the desert understood something about love that the churches of my childhood never did.
Someone Helped Me. So I Help You.
Another year, I met a man at Burning Man who changed my life. He listened to my story. Really listened. Eventually, I asked him something I genuinely could not understand. Why do you care about me? Why would a stranger care about my pain? Why spend your time helping me?
His answer was extraordinarily simple. Because someone had done it for him. When he had been in the depths of despair, another human being showed up. That was it.
Someone helped me. So I help you.
No doctrine required. No promise of heaven. No threat of hell. No audience. No applause. Someone reached into the hole for me. So when I see someone else in a hole, I reach down.
I remember sitting with that idea. Because wasn’t that what church was supposed to teach us?
60,000 People and Two Strangers
When the Man burns, tens of thousands of people gather in an enormous circle. Fire in the center. Art cars glowing around it like creatures from another planet. Music moving across the desert. Thousands and thousands of people gathered together, and where you happen to sit can feel completely random.
One year, two people sat behind me. We started talking. Immediately, something clicked. I had experienced sexual abuse and religious trauma. So had they. We talked for more than an hour after the Burn. They saw me in a way very few people ever had.
When I returned to camp, I found the friend who originally brought me into my first Burning Man camp and told him: “I just met two people who saved my life.” I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. I just knew.
Those strangers became friends. We talked practically every day until the next Burn, when we were reunited. We listened to one another. We challenged one another. We loved one another. We saw one another.
Call that God. Call it the universe. Call it coincidence. Call it whatever the hell you want. I know what it meant to me.
Maybe goodness doesn’t require the correct label. Maybe love doesn’t check your theology before sitting down beside you. And maybe sometimes the thing you have spent your whole life searching for in the same place simply is not there. If something has failed you over and over again, perhaps you are allowed to look somewhere else.
The Temple
The Temple may be the hardest part of Burning Man to explain to someone who has never experienced it. People bring photographs of the dead. Letters. Names. Regrets. Memories. Goodbyes. They mourn parents, children, marriages, friendships and former versions of themselves.
You can leave deafening music and complete absurdity behind and suddenly find yourself in a place filled with people whispering, crying and holding one another. Nobody needs your résumé. Nobody needs your theology. Grief is enough.
Last year, I went there to write a letter to my father. A goodbye to him. A goodbye to the pain. A goodbye to what he had done. I wrote the first sentence and broke. Completely. I could barely breathe.
And then, without knowing anything about me, a stranger wrapped their arms around me. They did not ask what political party I belonged to. They did not ask whether I believed in God. They did not ask whether I was gay. They did not ask whether I had been saved. They saw another human being in agony and held him. I felt safe.
Eventually, I hung my letter alongside pictures of the “family” that was once supposed to represent everything Christianity could produce. We haven’t all been together in the same room for a holiday or family celebration in more than fifteen years.
There it was in front of me. The wreckage of the thing that was supposedly going to save us.
Radical Inclusion Actually Means Radical Inclusion
While I was at the Temple, a man who looked like a youth pastor began playing guitar. At first, I thought it was beautiful. Then I heard the message. Brokenness. Sin. Jesus. Every nerve in my body lit up.
Some of the people sitting in that Temple were grieving wounds inflicted by the very theology he was singing about, and there is something deeply troubling to me about seeing someone’s most vulnerable moment as an opportunity for conversion.
Part of me wanted him to stop. Then I remembered: Radical Inclusion.
If it only applies to people I agree with, it isn’t radical inclusion. He belonged there too. Christians belong. Conservatives belong. Atheists belong. Queer people belong. People whose beliefs make me profoundly uncomfortable belong.
I grew up in a system that said: believe like us, behave like us, or you don’t belong. I have no interest in rebuilding that system in the desert with different commandments.
But inclusion is not the absence of boundaries. You are free to practice your faith. You are not free to impose it on someone else. You can believe homosexuality is sinful. You cannot decide a grieving gay man’s vulnerability gives you permission to convert him.
That distinction became especially important this year when a Christian missionary camp was removed from Burning Man and the story quickly became: Christians were kicked out for being Christian.
Burning Man says the group was removed after repeated warnings involving privacy, consent and other rule violations; the group says it was targeted because of its faith.
But imagine I walked into your church during communion, rolled a sound system into the center aisle, turned the sanctuary into a gay rave, started filming congregants who had explicitly asked me not to, ignored repeated warnings from church leadership to stop. And then, when I was finally escorted out, went online and announced: “Christians kicked me out because I’m gay.”
You would be furious. And you would immediately say: That is not why you were kicked out. Exactly. You didn’t reject my identity. You rejected my behavior.
Being told to stop violating someone else’s space is not persecution simply because your behavior is motivated by something you deeply believe. And when every consequence becomes persecution, eventually the word stops meaning anything at all.
Burning Man Isn’t Something You Consume
I also hear former Burners say Burning Man has “lost its way.” Sometimes they are the same people who will tell you that Burning Man once changed their life.
There are legitimate criticisms of Burning Man. We should talk about wealth and access. Plug-and-play camps. Environmental impact. Policing. Commercialization. Whether the culture always lives up to its principles. Any community that becomes immune to criticism becomes dangerous. I certainly learned that from church.
But Burning Man taught me something else: It is not a product. You are not purchasing a completed experience. You are helping create one.
Maybe somebody fed you, built something for you, fixed your bicycle, held you while you cried, danced with you, listened to your story, showed you a version of yourself you hadn’t met yet. Great.
But maybe Burning Man was never supposed to serve you forever. Maybe eventually you were supposed to become the person doing the serving. That is the part I had missed during my first Burn.
You receive. You grow. And then you return and give.
This year, I finally understood it. I became a Greeter. I became one of the people I once thought were insane. I stood in the dust welcoming strangers into Black Rock City.
When first-time Burners arrived, I told them some version of what people had once told me: When I first came here, people said Burning Man was going to change my life. I didn’t believe them. Here I am five Burns later, a completely different person. Ring the bell. Leave something behind. Be open to whatever happens next. Your journey starts here. Your life is about to change.
And I watched people cry. I watched grown adults ring that bell with everything they had. I finally understood why those lunatics had stood in the blazing sun welcoming me years earlier. They weren’t working for Burning Man. They were giving something back. Now it was my turn.
Why the Hell Do We Keep Coming Back?
Burning Man is a nightmare to attend. It is dusty; it is uncomfortable. It can be expensive, though there are definitely ways to do it cheaply. There can be brutal heat, freezing nights, windstorms, whiteouts, mud, fire, traffic and very limited resources. You bring your own water. You take responsibility for yourself.
Sometimes you ride miles into a headwind, turn around to come home and discover the wind has somehow changed direction purely to make your life miserable. Nature can absolutely kick your ass.
And tens of thousands of people voluntarily return. Year after year after year. Doesn’t that make you at least a little curious? What are all those idiots getting out there?
I have been there for the mud. I have been there for the heat. I have been there for the fires. Then I have gone home and watched people who weren’t there explain what supposedly happened to us.
A death becomes proof Burning Man is dangerous. Drug use becomes proof Burning Man is depraved. A rich person in an RV becomes proof everyone at Burning Man is rich. Someone has sex and suddenly sixty thousand people attended an orgy.
Imagine applying that standard to Christianity. Imagine judging Christianity entirely by every pastor arrested, every abuse scandal, every televangelist mansion, every financial scandal, every war waged with religious justification and every person harmed by someone claiming divine authority.
Christians would immediately, and correctly, tell you that is an absurd way to evaluate hundreds of millions of individual people. Interesting. Maybe Burning Man deserves the same intellectual courtesy.
Maybe We’ve Been Listening to the Wrong People
I am not arguing that Burning Man is perfect. Dear God, no. There are assholes at Burning Man because there are assholes everywhere. There are selfish Burners, predatory Burners, hypocritical Burners, people who completely miss the point.
Burning Man does not need to be perfect for my argument to stand. My argument is much simpler.
Christianity spent decades promising me love, acceptance, belonging, transformation, community and healing. In my life, it repeatedly failed to deliver them. Burning Man never promised to save me.
And yet, in the dust, I found strangers willing to sit with my pain. I found a surrogate father who held my hand while I sobbed. I found people who listened without trying to convert me. I found strangers who held me in the Temple without asking what I believed. I found two people sitting randomly behind me at the Man Burn who became part of my life. I found people who had once been rescued themselves and believed the appropriate response was to rescue the next person.
I found community; I found belonging; I found accountability; I found generosity; I found service; I found transformation; I found love.
Aren’t those the things church promised me?
Where Is the Fruit?
Christianity has had roughly two thousand years. Burning Man has had about forty.
I’m not suggesting we replace churches with art cars or baptisms with rolling naked through the dust. Although Sunday morning attendance might improve.
What I am suggesting is that perhaps we spend less time listening to what institutions claim to produce and more time looking at what they actually produce.
If your system claims to produce love, show me love. If it claims to create community, show me community. If it claims to heal people, show me healing. If it claims to welcome everyone, show me the people you welcomed when welcoming them cost you something. If it claims to protect children, show me the children you protected when protecting them threatened the reputation of your institution.
If we are supposed to know people “by their fruits,” perhaps we should take that instruction seriously. Because I spent years hearing beautiful words inside churches. Then I went into the desert and watched strangers live them. That is the part I cannot unsee.
A temporary city filled with atheists, Christians, Buddhists, queer people, straight people, sober people, people on drugs, millionaires, broke 19-year-olds, naked people, introverts, weirdos, artists, executives and every imaginable human contradiction should collapse under its own absurdity.
Instead, tens of thousands of people build it. Then they give things away: they build art they know will disappear, they cook food they will never be paid for, they repair bicycles belonging to strangers, they hand out water. They create entire experiences for people whose names they will never know; they listen to stories; they hold grieving strangers; they become somebody’s dad for thirty minutes. Then they tear the entire city down and go home.
And somehow people still ask why I keep going back.
The Church Wanted to Save Me. Burning Man Let Me Be Me.
I think this is ultimately the difference that changed me. The Christianity I experienced looked at me and saw a problem to solve. Burning Man looked at me and said: Come as you are.
And for once, those words didn’t seem to contain an asterisk. Not come as you are so we can eventually change you; not come as you are provided you never fully live the part of yourself we find objectionable; not come as you are but first agree that we are right.
Just come. Participate, contribute, respect people’s boundaries, take care of yourself, take care of other people, create something, give something, receive something, maybe become something.
That first year, when strangers said “welcome home,” I thought it was ridiculous. Home? I had never been there. Five years later, I was saying it to somebody else. Now I understand why people cry.
Sometimes home is not where you were born. It is not necessarily where you grew up. It may not even be where the people who share your blood live. Sometimes home is simply the first place where you realize you do not have to become someone else in order to belong.
And once you experience that kind of freedom, it becomes very difficult to go back to pretending you never knew it existed. Maybe that is why the older Burners seemed to know something I didn’t. They did. They knew what it felt like to stop asking permission to become themselves. And eventually, I learned it too.
I went to Burning Man thinking I knew who the good people were. I thought I knew who was lost. I thought I knew who needed saving. Then some of the people I had been taught were lost found me. Some of the people I had been warned about held me together.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether people believed the right things and started paying much closer attention to what their beliefs produced.
Five years ago, somebody stood in the dust and welcomed me home. This year, I stood in that same dust and welcomed the next person.
Because someone was there for me. Now I want to be there for them. Someone helped me. So I help you.
Funny. I could swear somebody once told me that’s what Christianity was supposed to be about.
A note from the author: These experiences, opinions and words are mine. I wrote this essay from my own life and perspective. I used AI as an editing and proofreading tool, the modern equivalent of having another set of eyes help organize, tighten and challenge a draft. So if your response to everything above is “AI wrote this,” congratulations: you’ve found another convenient way to avoid engaging with what I actually said.
