In a divided country, Americans still have one thing in common: They believe.

Almost all Americans — 92 percent of adults — say they experience some form of spiritual belief, whether in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife, or something “beyond the natural world,” according to a major report published recently by the Pew Research Center.

“I can’t think of anything else this many Americans agree on,” Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

But what does this widespread spirituality actually look like in practice? Experts have tried to answer the question in surveys and studies. By necessity, they have sorted millions of people into fixed identity categories, like Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist and “nothing in particular.” What these labels can sometimes miss, however, is the rich complexity of our inner worlds.

In reality, believing is a messy, evolving process. The Times wanted to capture how belief takes many forms, both inside and outside of religion. We spent the last year working on a project intended to capture the landscape of contemporary religion and spirituality. We spoke with dozens of high-profile figures, religious leaders and writers. We also asked Times readers to tell us about a moment that shaped their beliefs. More than 4,000 responded.

Below, an edited selection of their stories.

Do you have a story to share about searching for belief? Tell us here.

With the wind whipping my hair in every direction, I blasted out of Los Angeles International Airport. On my way northward and speeding in my white Mustang convertible, I careened wildly through the city and then the canyons. My heart pounded; my thoughts raced. I could only think about Nick’s eyes, his lips, what he would smell like.

Other drivers glanced at my sleek rental car, their envy fueling my confidence. I had never had an affair before, and these fantasy wheels seemed like the perfect grace note for my Hollywood love story. Sunglasses on, I was on a mission to put a body to the voice.

Falling for this handsome, very recent widower was beyond reckless. I was a suburban lacrosse mom and I was jeopardizing my 20-year marriage, two children, two hypoallergenic dogs, meticulously designed houses, swimming pools, gardeners and gutters. My ticket out of suburbia came at a steep price, but I was on autopilot, spellbound and fueled by lust.

I didn’t know a lot about Nick, but what I knew ignited me. The fact that he was from L.A. didn’t hurt. Had he hailed from Chicago, I never would have responded to his initial tweet. Nick went to Princeton and graduated with all of the Ivy League haughtiness, if not the GPA or success, associated with such a diploma. A simple IMDb search would have highlighted a failed career and the worst New York Times movie review I had ever read. I regularly did more research on what type of mascara to buy than I did any online probing about this man for whom I was about to detonate my life.

My L.A. affair started in the bedroom of my Long Island house. I was one of a handful of patient zeros, the first cohort of Americans to test positive for the novel coronavirus in March 2020. I was well enough to recover at home and quickly became the only good news story in America. I invited the world to join me in my convalescence while news stations around the world carried footage of my self-documented isolation. Holed up, I started an organization in my bedroom, Survivor Corps. My goal was to inspire people previously infected with COVID-19 to donate plasma so their antibodies could be transferred to less fortunate patients fighting for their lives. My husband at the time was not patient with my new hobby of saving lives.

“A CNN Heroes profile by Sanjay Gupta is nice. Know what would also be nice? Cooking dinner for your kids,” he said to me in a sneer masquerading as a smile.

Nick’s first wife was one of my quarter million members (no, I didn’t know her). Suffering from a debilitating case of long COVID, she took her own life. Nick, grief-stricken, took to the airwaves to tell the world about the insidious long tail of COVID while anchors cried and women swooned. Within weeks, Nick and I were texting and talking for hours, and I booked a flight to California.

Having been married over 20 years, my dating skills were thin, the red flags inoperative. I had never heard the term “love bombing”; I was too busy experiencing it. As I drove, my mind swirled while my foot got heavier on the gas pedal. I looked down at the speedometer: 79 mph. I pushed the pedal to 85. Finally, I pulled into the Ventura motel where we had arranged to meet. Nick finally arrived in a decidedly unsexy Suburban and swaggered toward me; I lost my breath and teetered against the hot metal of my car.

“Hey, I’m Nick,” he said with a drawl as if he were John Wayne or an airline pilot. Maybe both.

He was shorter than the movie star I had imagined, but I was from the East Coast and was not yet in on the Hollywood secret that most movie stars are, in real life, shorter than everyone’s imagination. He was closer to my eye level but just as good-looking. He came straight for me and took me in his arms. We inhaled each other deeply. Nick smelled like Southern California, as promised. His aroma was earthy, sun-kissed, balanced with tennis and golf.

A year and a half after meeting, Nick and I exchanged vows in Marina del Rey, and I adopted his unpronounceable last name. The Nick I married, the one I fell for, vanished almost overnight. After Week 2, nothing I did was right, and his once-gentle nature fractured into an uncontrollable and constant rage. He constantly accused me of trying to control him. He also accused me of stealing keys to a car I didn’t drive and drafting words written in his handwriting.

“I told you I was feral,” he said, seething.

“No, you definitely did not,” I said, heaving while cowering from my Ivy League prince.

He made it crystal clear that apologies were not in his repertoire; my tears only fueled his emotional withdrawal.

I kept faith by remembering our perfect first year together until Nick, almost three years later, let me in on the joke. He had been cheating on me since our first days together, using his dead wife’s cellphone as his burner. He was splitting his time pretending to grieve her, being secretly committed to me and dating anyone who worked it in a dress and heels. He went on dates with 10 different women within the first year.

Nick was living a double — make that triple — life.

Failing with the higher caliber dating apps, he met and had an affair with a South American woman he met via Tinder. He had sex with her in our bed — without a condom because he “trusted her” — in the middle of the afternoon. He manipulated this woman, telling her that he loved her, while they fantasized together about a shared future. She wanted to move to Los Angeles to live with him — ostensibly to live her own California dream, that of snagging a green card.

Our vows that we wrote and rewrote obsessively were meaningless. We had boastfully told our story to People magazine for its Real-Life Love series; his quotes were nothing but wildly creative fiction. Nick was as good a liar as an actor, and he was much better at both of those skills than he was at screenwriting.

My Hollywood ending was far from glamorous: me, catatonic on Nick’s couch, realizing I had given it all up for an honest-to-God psychopath. Within months of our wedding, I would end up in solitary confinement, based on Nick’s charges of domestic abuse, in the most frightening lockup in downtown L.A., while he hung up on my jailhouse pleas for help. A year after that, I would end up in inpatient trauma therapy while Nick apparently told people that I was a drug addict and mentally unstable. All the while, I kept wondering how far I needed to sacrifice myself, my pride and my dignity to prove loyalty to the same vows that, for him, were nothing more than script practice.

I should have listened to my mother: “Don’t get fooled by Los Angeles; nothing there is ever what it seems.”

The author is the founder of Survivor Corps. She splits her time between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and is co-authoring a memoir with her husband Nick Güthe. She is on X (formerly Twitter): @dianaberrent

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Michael B. Jordan in Sinners.

Warner Bros Studios

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Warner Bros Studios

Michael B. Jordan in Sinners.

Warner Bros Studios

The very scary movie Sinners finds Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers who open a 1930s juke joint. And opening night does not go as planned. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, (Black Panther), the film mixes blues music with classic horror in a standoff between the brothers and their friends on the inside and the bloodthirsty – and growing – menace outside.

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