NPR interviewed a number of young adults who are drifting from organized religion. A 26-year-old participant named Kyle Simpson grew up with Christian roots, but like many young adults, he's neglected his faith—although he can't quite get over it. Simpson said:

When I turned 26, I had my mini-existential crisis when I realized, oh my gosh, what's going to happen when I die? Am I just going to end up in the ground and like everything I've worked for, all my memories, are for naught? I still have that feeling every once in a while in the stereotypical moments when you're like sitting alone in the dark and you can't go to bed and you start thinking about that. But I don't know if that's emptiness. That's more just a fear that I hope others have.

When the interviewer asked, "Do you pray?" Simpson replied,

Yeah, I do and I don't know what to make of it, because I feel like a hypocrite. And—but I only do when I'm at my most scared or my most fearful, and … my most vulnerable. And like I said, I don't know what to do with that because it really does not align with anything that I've said all day today, yet I still find myself doing that.

At the age of 18, Simpson got a tattoo on his arm that reads "a cruce salus"—Latin for salvation by the cross. When the interviewer asked, "Do you regret [your tattoo]?" Simpson replied, "No. The irony is when I first got the tattoo, I remember thinking, oh, this will be great because when I'm having troubles in my faith, I will be able to look at it, and I can't run away from it. And that is exactly what is happening."