The Skin Deep team is experiencing a crisis of faith. We came to this realisation around six months ago – while brainstorming themes for a flagship “season”, which would make up the bulk of our editorial and programming output in 2026. After cycling through an eclectic mix of ideas, from “propaganda” to “violence”, we found ourselves repeatedly returning to the spiritual, the philosophical, the ethical and the divine. 

Some of us were getting religious. A number of us were interested in how concepts of moral purity and bad faith were showing up in organising spaces, in the arts world, and on the internet. One post-it note on our brainstorm simply read “cults”, another, “Fleabag hot priest”. Beyond their obvious religious and cultural connotations, questions of faith and doubt spoke to a feeling of increasing disillusionment with our institutions and practices – compounded by the political events of recent years.

One moment in the ideation phase for this season particularly stands out to me. During one early team meeting, we clocked that the majority of the Skin Deep team grew up either religious or spiritual. This wasn’t something that we had shared with one another, and had never made it into our work in any explicit way. Did this training have anything to do with our political militancy, our interest in art, our commitment to community, or our belief in taking a leap of faith on a creative project?

Hannah Azuonye, who leads on events, fundraising and organisational development at Skin Deep, had a mix of Catholicism and Methodism in her family – one of her uncles was a preacher and her grandmother was a lay preacher. While Hannah occasionally went to church growing up, there was a broader, non-denominational spiritualism peppered throughout her childhood. Her parents’ shelves were lined with books like The I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text; The Power of Now, a self-enlightenment book by the new age spiritualist Eckhart Tolle; books about Chakras and mystical practices; and Earth Wisdom, a spiritual nature book she still has in her own flat. Her parents meditated and got astrological readings.

“I also went to a school where we meditated,” she tells me. “So I think I’ve had a lot more buy-in there… I can trace, from my upbringing, why I’ve come to find things like ritual and community so powerful.” 

In myself, I noticed that my religious upbringing laid the foundations for some of my political beliefs. Growing up, all of my Caribbean family were Christian, but I seemed to be more porous to religious teachings than my siblings. I remember, into my teenage years, frequently consulting the bible or religious family members for moral guidance. This desire for a clear rule-bound morality is not dissimilar to how I related to politics in my young adulthood: it gave me some rules for life and living. The Marxist tradition in which I now locate myself is also quite prophetic in the way that it frames revolution as inevitable – we’re given no choice but to believe in it.

Skin Deep’s creative director Sylvia Suli was also raised with a blend of Christianity and spirituality. In her deeply religious, protestant upbringing, across countries including Spain and France, Sylvia would pray before meals, attend Sunday school and maintain an active presence in her church community. She tells me: “From the ages of around 10-16, I was really pious.” 

“During one early team meeting, we clocked that the majority of the Skin Deep team grew up either religious or spiritual. Did this training have anything to do with our political or cultural work?”

Sylvia’s parents were also deeply superstitious, which she attributes to Chinese culture. During the Chinese new year, Sylvia’s mum would tell her to avoid wearing certain colours (traditionally, black and white are considered bad luck, due to being mourning colours). 

But the instructions went further: “She’d be like, ‘you’re born in the year of the monkey – you have to find a husband from that year. He can’t be three years older than you, he has to be four years older than you’.” Sylvia recounts certain people being excluded from visiting her grandad’s body after his death, based on the year they were born. This was dictated by a Chinese spiritual practice rooted in Sheng Xiao belief – which understands the universe as being balanced by numbers. “It was really heartbreaking,” she tells me.

Despite moving away from organised religion in her adulthood, these experiences would still go on to shape her creative and political life. She says: “I had a lot of responsibilities in the church youth programme. One year, I even wrote a whole musical for Christmas…I was able to develop my production skills, and my organising skills, in a space like the church.”

In our current cultural and political moment, which is marked by multiple, global, overlapping crises, and widespread proclamations of the “end of the West”, it feels that both doubt, and faith, are increasingly important. Throughout the planning of this season, we’ve taken tongue-in-cheek guidance from Robert Harris’ book Conclave, in which protagonist Cardinal Lawrence says that faith “walks hand in hand with doubt”.

Sylvia makes clear that she is currently heavy in doubt. Over the course of a long voice note, she weaves between excitement about the season and the conversations that have surrounded it, and pessimism about the future. At moments, she expresses having lost faith in humanity, in love, and in community. If we’d had time for a synchronous conversation, I think I’d have gently pushed back. 

But maybe it’s better I’m forced to hear her out – she makes some points. She tells me: “I’ve become such a skeptic of everything. I’m losing faith in the arts because of how it’s become about entertainment and consumption… and the focus is on individual artists.”

My own work on the politics of mental health, which borrows heavily from Black feminist and abolitionist thought, hinges on the idea that we need to take leaps of faith to imagine better futures. In the conclusion to my book Mad World, I write: “It is this belief that we can, that we must strive towards things that others say are impossible, that we must hold on to.”

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Hannah echoes this idea of complete, unwavering faith. Continuing to explore a range of spiritualities into her adult life, she tells me about an analogy she encountered via Taoism about the strength contained within water. “There’s this idea that a little drop of water can, over a long period of time, make a hole in stone…There’s something in retaining faith in the notion that these things can take time – but on long, macro timescales, we can create openings.”

Skin Deep strategic director Jöelle Packer-Hall also aligns with this sentiment. Although she now nurtures an interest in tarot, astrology, and a general belief in a higher power, Jöelle grew up in what she describes as a “fiercely atheist” household – shaped by her mum’s own traumatic religious experiences. She tells me: “[We were] staunchly scientific: if something couldn’t be proved scientifically, then it just wasn’t worth thinking about.” 

“But this means I spent a lot of my life without understanding the mechanics of faith as hope…I think people need to have hope. People need to be able to imagine things they cannot see, political structures and worlds and works of art, because the only way we’ll get to see them is if we believe that they are possible first.” 

Some might say it’s the ultimate case for trusting the process – something Jöelle, who is our newest staff member, has noticed in our team. We’re often scrappy, we come up with ambitious ideas and trust that we’ll make them happen, often with extremely limited time and resource.

She adds: “Art and culture gives people the energy, the inspiration, and sometimes the blueprints for better worlds, and so I have faith always in arts and culture’s ability to do that. Whether I have faith that this crushing capitalist hellscape we’re living in really allows artists the mental and financial freedom to do this is another thing entirely. But I will always have faith in art and artists.”

Cardinal Lawrence was right, these questions of faith and doubt must walk hand in hand. In our current crisis of faith, actively confronting doubt might help us strengthen our conviction. 

Sylvia says: “I’ve been hearing a lot of people around me talking about regaining faith.” Drawing on the work of philosophers like Blaise Pascal, Sylvia sees this revival as a negotiated form of faith, which is not dogmatic, but acknowledges and incorporates doubt.

“In Taoism, there’s this idea that a little drop of water can, over a long period of time, make a hole in stone…we need faith in the notion that over long timescales, we can create openings.”

I very much chime with this idea – last year, I spoke to young millennials and Gen Zs who felt disillusioned with the narrow-minded, Richard Dawkins-style new atheism they were raised with. Lamorna Ash, writer of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion, told me: “In such an ambiguous, ambivalent and porous world moment, it feels foolish when someone says something so definitively.”

As Skin Deep, I feel we’re undoubtedly exercising faith by choosing a theme that feels somewhat left field. We see arts and movement spaces that incorporate faith into their practices, but notice many others that overlook it entirely.

“I don’t think we’re reinventing the wheel,” Sylvia tells me. “But we are really at a pressure point – and it’s important to explore the theme because of what we’re going through as a society.”

I can hear both faith and doubt in what she’s telling me. “I think even if people don’t respond to it, the fact that the team has this gut feeling is important in and of itself, and we need to explore that.”

Across the team, I notice each of us is hesitant to jump to conclusions on where this exploration might lead. But that’s ok – this is far more about questions than answers.

• Micha Frazer-Carroll is Skin Deep’s online editor

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