What the growing interest in reincarnation says about our culture

In a recent article for the New York Times, Saskia Solomon profiled the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a parapsychology research unit that is part of the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine. DOPS was started in 1967 by Dr. Ian Stevenson and has spent the better part of sixty years investigating the stories of children who claim to remember a past life. The team has logged hundreds of cases from “all continents except Antarctica,” and Dr. Jim Tucker, who led DOPS until his retirement in 2015, said the frozen locale’s exclusion is “only because we haven’t looked for cases there.”

The eight-person team at DOPS is one of a few labs around the world investigating such phenomena, with the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh the most notable of their peers. Yet despite its affiliation with the University of Virginia’s medical school, DOPS’s research has been something of a behind-the-scenes pursuit since its inception, and that’s largely to the benefit of both the school and DOPS.

When Dr. Stevenson started the group, he was wary of their work becoming more of a carnival show than science. As such, they meet a couple of miles away from the school in a series of would-be condominiums inside a residential building. But while their work was—and, to an extent, still is—largely maligned within the scientific community, the notion of reincarnation and the remembrance of past lives is having something of a revival in the larger culture.

“This is not just a pointless existence”

A 2023 Pew Research Study found that “About one-quarter of adults say it is definitely or probably true that the dead can be reincarnated (i.e., reborn again and again in this world).” So while Solomon reports that the most frequently reported cases of a remembered past life come from South Asia, where the belief in reincarnation is more culturally and religiously prevalent, the notion is growing here as well.

Every year, parents send the group more than 100 emails asking about strange or troubling things their child has said that they believe could be tied to a past life. Dr. Tucker says that “very few” of these reports yield enough evidence to think the child’s statements could really point to reincarnation and, to their credit, they try to maintain a fairly high bar for legitimizing such claims.

The team at DOPS also understands that there’s probably not “going to be one finding or one study that suddenly convinces everyone that we need to change how we understand reality.” Yet they hope that “a greater acceptance of life being a continuous cycle could have a positive effect on the way we live” by helping people to value the lives of those around them to a greater degree.

As Dr. Tucker put it, “There would be a stronger sense that we’re all kind of in this together, this is not just a pointless existence.”

Our hope for a better life

While the Bible does not leave room for the idea of reincarnation—the author of Hebrews, among others, is clear that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27)—the sentiment that life is not “just a pointless existence” should be a truth Christians can get behind. However, the differences in how we view that existence say a lot about the kind of hope sought by proponents of reincarnation.

In both systems, people persist long after death. However, reincarnation offers more of this life, whereas the Christian version of eternity offers the prospect of a better life—one in which we experience the kind of existence God intended for us to have before sin got in the way. That so many in our culture would rather entertain the idea of another shot at this life is telling and speaks to the fundamental flaw in our fallen nature.

The desire to live life on our terms rather than God’s drove Adam and Eve to sin in the Garden and continues to drive people to sin today. Most recognize that this world is flawed and that there are problems woven into the fabric of our existence this side of heaven. But the idea that we can do better, be better, and overcome those mistakes if we can just get another chance is among the most human beliefs we find in religion.

By contrast, Christian teaching is that it doesn’t matter how many lives we get. The problem of sin will always be a problem.

Only one being was ever able to live a sinless existence, and, by the grace of God, that’s enough if we’re simply willing to put our faith in him rather than in ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be better, kinder, and pursue a sinless life. The Bible is clear that God’s call is to be perfect as he is perfect (Matthew 5:48), and Jesus offers us the best example of what that looks like. But failure to live up to that standard is inevitable, and if our hope for a better eternity was contingent upon being the exception to that fact, we would be truly hopeless.

Praise God that doesn’t have to be the case.

Denison Forum