Board shaper and writer, Dave Parameter, has long been considered one of the pre-eminent thinkers when it comes to the surfing’s mystical side. In his essay The Uncommon Journey of a Pioneer Waterman he explains Tom Blake’s spiritual impact this way:

"Some argue that surfing is a religion. If so…Duke Kahanamoku would certainly have been seen as surfing’s messiah or prophet and from the vantage point of the present day we can see that Tom Blake became his chief apostle….The missionaries brought their western God to Hawaii, but in the end it was surfing’s missionaries such as Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake who had the last word. Not only is surfing more widespread than many established religions; it has also proved to be a far more peaceful, benevolent and inclusive “faith” than most."

Truthfully, at the time of Blake’s carving, he wasn’t alone with his newfound, water-borne mysticism. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna reported “I am the ocean,” and, not surprisingly, in the late 1960s many wave riders agreed. Bill Hamilton, early Hawaiian pioneer and father to big wave master Laird, was one of the main progenitors of these ideas. In 1971, Baba Ram Dass published the decade’s most fabled spiritual survival manual: Be Here Now and, three years later, Hamilton gave his sentiment a surfer’s twist: “Life to me is a constant movement, an ever-changing, swirling mass of variables interconnecting with each other to create a whole, if you’re willing to compare them to riding a wave, then comprehension of the totalness here and now is at least partially attained.”
This new spirituality kick started a second revolution in equipment design (the first being Blake’s decision to include a fin) when celebrated shaper Dick Brewer made a Buddhist meditation-inspired decision to hack the nose of his board and thus lower lengths from the traditional ten foot range into the more maneuverable seven foot range. This decision was the very thing that made tube riding possible. Tube riding is exactly what it sounds like: when powerful waves break, they leave a gap between their face and the descending curl. Time spent in that gap is surfing’s ultimate experience and one never bereft of mystical connotations. To quote Surfer magazine’s book: Surfriders: In Search of the Perfect Wave: “Tube-ride descriptions quickly spiraled out of control, as the experience was metaphorically linked to sex, birth, touchdown and God.” Simply put: the more surfers who got a shot at the tube, the more surfers who really began to understand their sport as religion.
As time passed, the hippies gave way to the yuppies and Jesus began to appear in the conversation. By the late 70s, what was once a wayward idea had become a flowering movement. Christian Surfers International formed in Australia, growing steadily in the years since. In the United States alone, this fellowship now has 28 chapters and a membership in the thousands. Not limited to one organization, the Christian surf movement has produced everything from movies like Noah’s Arc and The Outsiders to legendary shapers like Roberts and Al Merrick adorning their output with the Jesus fish.
In 1999, Judaism entered the mix when Rabbi Nachum Shifren told Salon magazine: “I just take people surfing and they get tuned on to the divine energy of the ocean” Two year later, he turned this idea into a book, publishing The Surfing Rabbi: A Kabbalistic Quest for Soul. By March 2005, this spiritual trend had gathered enough momentum that Surfer magazine’s Brad Melekian did a multi-page interview with Shifren and used that to anchor his cover story: “Is God a Goofy-Foot: If So, Surfing May be the Next World Religion.”
In December 2007, the prestigious Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) published Bron Taylor’s article: “Surfing into Spirituality and a New, Aquatic Nature Religion” and settled the debate once and for all. Taylor is both a professor of religion at the University of Florida and the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. In his article, he talks about the soul surfer: “a subset of the global surfing community [that] should be understood as a new religious movement—a globalized, hybridized, and increasingly influential example of what I call an aquatic nature religion.”