Leaving religion doesn’t solve everything.
A person can leave and continue asking permission to exist. The authority is gone, but they are still waiting for permission. Is this feeling acceptable? Have I earned the right to rest? Can I trust my own judgment? How much more of myself must I fix before I’m allowed to live?
This week, I found myself approaching that predicament from several directions: the social consequences of theology, the unfinished work of religious departure, the conditions of belonging, the policing of emotion, and the strangely conditional humanity Christianity has often offered through Jesus. Running through these pieces is a question that has become central to my work:
What do the worlds we build allow people to become and what do they force them to bury?
Writing a book is not for the faint of heart. I’ve ** written eight**. It wasn’t easy. I can’t type worth a flip. Publishing a book is brutal for a highly sensitive person such as myself. I received word that people were deliberately targeting
has reached #1 on Amazon’s Existentialism bestseller list. Seeing this book find readers matters deeply to me. It brings a long personal and intellectual journey into contact with people asking how to participate more honestly in their own lives.
A ranking records something visible. It cannot show what happens when someone closes a book and recognizes a bargain they have been making with their life.
They have been waiting to become less anxious before attempting something important. Years of self-examination have become a requirement to keep their life under review. They have grown so accomplished at meeting expectations that their own desires now feel like interruptions.
These are among the experiences that brought me to write The Practice of Being Alive. I wanted to examine how a person remains engaged with existence when certainty is unavailable, the past remains consequential, and being human continues to involve vulnerability.
The #1 milestone gives that inquiry a wider audience. I am grateful for every person who has read the book, recommended it, discussed it with a friend, or written a review. When you share what a book has meant to you, you give another reader something a ranking cannot provide: a human account of why it might deserve their attention.
You can find The Practice of Being Alive on ** Amazon**. If you have read it, I would welcome a few sentences about your experience there.
In ** The World Our Gods Make**, I confront something I failed to grasp as a pastor: people had to live inside the ideas I preached. What I called obedience could make someone afraid to refuse. What I called sacrifice could persuade them to remain available to people who were exhausting or harming them. My words carried authority into private decisions whose consequences I would never bear.
Beliefs distribute power. They teach people whose account of harm deserves attention, whose anger should be silenced, and who must absorb the damage to keep a family, church, or institution intact. A community can become so invested in its own goodness that exposing cruelty becomes a greater offense than committing it. Leaving the religion does not necessarily free someone from that arrangement. Its authority survives wherever people still have to choose between telling the truth about their lives and keeping their place.
Death belongs to being human. Being humiliated, controlled, or abandoned by people with the power to act otherwise does not. When religion treats both as suffering we must learn to accept, it conceals human responsibility inside divine mystery. The person being harmed is told to find peace while the person causing harm remains free to continue. Who gets to call suffering sacred—and who has to live with the consequences?
** I Left Religion. I Still Had to Learn How to Live.** traces how my work moved from dismantling religious belief toward existential health. In a previous article,
I no longer believed God was directing my life, yet making a decision without his approval still felt dangerous. I had rejected the doctrine that I was inherently corrupt, but wanting something for myself could still feel like evidence that the doctrine was right. I could dismantle the argument and still obey its verdict. Leaving exposed how thoroughly I had learned to treat my own judgment as a threat.
Eventually, I recognized the same struggle in people who had never left a religion. A career ends, a partner dies, an illness overturns the future and someone must learn how to live when what once gave their days coherence can no longer hold. These experiences brought me toward existential health: the human capacity to engage meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and responsibility when familiar answers fail, and the conditions that help that capacity develop.
This article traces how thirty years of questioning religion became a deeper inquiry into being human. The Practice of Being Alive grew from that inquiry, as did my commitment to building a field that takes these dimensions of our lives seriously.
This week’s addition to The Existential Health White Papers: Volume Two—Applied Domains of Existential Health is ** White Paper No. 14: Community and Belonging: The Relational Conditions of Existential Health**.
This paper advances my work to establish existential health as a distinct field of inquiry and practice: one that gives our relationship with meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and self-trust an explicit place in how we understand human wellbeing.
My published, ** peer-reviewed academic work** and the eleven papers in
Community and belonging belong at the center of that undertaking because people learn what their lives are worth through how others receive them. A welcome means little if remaining welcome requires silence. Someone may be included in every gathering yet have no meaningful influence over decisions that affect them. Another person may be celebrated for their authenticity until they express something the community would rather not hear.
I address this more specifically in the LGBTQIA+ community in the article, [The Authority to Be Human: The truth behind religion’s conflict with LGBTQ identity.](http://The Authority to Be Human The truth behind religion’s conflict with LGBTQ identity)
These encounters teach us what connection costs. We learn which perceptions to suppress, which questions to withhold, and how much of ourselves a relationship can accommodate. Eventually, preserving our place can require becoming less present within it.
The paper examines belonging as a condition of existential health, with consequences for agency, self-trust, and participation. A community has to answer for what people must surrender to remain part of it.
** Allowed to Feel: Between Shiny Happy People and Mandatory Misery** examines what happens when an emotional atmosphere becomes a requirement.
In some settings, suffering must arrive accompanied by gratitude, growth, or a reassuring conclusion. Elsewhere, joy becomes suspect, as though enjoying an afternoon betrays an inadequate understanding of the world.
Both arrangements make honest conversation difficult. A person begins editing their experience to preserve their credibility in the room.
This article also asks something of my own writing. Work concerned with meaning and human possibility can become too eager to bring pain toward a constructive ending. Sometimes the responsible response is to stay with what someone has actually said long enough to understand it, without requiring their experience to become useful to the rest of us.
In ** Fully Human. Terms and Conditions Apply: Jesus and the Practice of Being Alive**, I consider the discomfort that arises when taking Jesus’s humanity seriously brings ordinary human experience into view.
That discomfort exposes something larger. The ways we interpret Jesus help establish what we believe a good human being is permitted to feel. Theology becomes consequential wherever anger, desire, doubt, or vulnerability must be explained away to preserve an acceptable identity.
The question follows us beyond Christianity. We can exchange religious perfection for an ideal of complete healing or relentless self-awareness, then continue measuring ourselves against a person no human being could consistently be.
What would it mean to approach our humanity with enough honesty to acknowledge it and enough responsibility to consider how we live it?
Taken together, these pieces have left me thinking about the difference between receiving permission and acquiring standing.
Permission depends on someone’s continuing willingness to grant it. Standing means our experience has a legitimate place in the conversation, including when it complicates the preferred story.
Consider someone who says, “I am unhappy here.” A relationship might permit that sentence only if it is quickly softened. A workplace might welcome feedback only while its decisions remain untouched. A community might celebrate authenticity until someone’s honesty challenges an influential member.
Over time, people learn the terms. They bring forward the parts of themselves that can survive the encounter. Eventually, even in private, they may struggle to distinguish what they experience from what they have learned to report.
This is one reason a change of beliefs can leave so much unfinished. We need opportunities to discover what happens when our actual response enters a relationship. Can disappointment be heard? Can a boundary survive another person’s displeasure? Can we acknowledge a mistake without forfeiting our right to exercise judgment?
There is a question worth carrying from this week into the next:
Where in my life am I still presenting an acceptable account of myself because I doubt my actual experience will receive a fair hearing?
The answer may reveal something about an old inheritance. It may also reveal something that needs to change in the present.
These questions need places where people can explore them together. The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality now has a ** new landing page**, making it easier to discover the community and begin participating through a free membership.
I founded CNRS in 2019 for people rebuilding their lives after religion and those exploring a non-religious spirituality. Through workshops, discussion circles, support groups, and conversation, we make room for questions that rarely resolve on an individual timetable.
I want CNRS to be a place where people can encounter one another without having to demonstrate that they have successfully reconstructed a life. People arrive with different convictions, unfinished histories, and different understandings of what they need. The quality of the community depends on how we meet that reality.
If you have been reading from a distance and wondering about participating, I hope you will ** take a look**.
I am delighted to celebrate a #1 book. I also keep thinking about the quieter encounters through which this work will find its meaning: someone recognizing a pattern they could never name, a conversation becoming more honest, a person discovering that disagreement does not have to cost them their place.
Writing gives me a way to bring these questions into public life. Your reading, responses, and conversations carry them into circumstances I will never see.
Thank you for giving this work a place in your life. I hope something here helps you take your own experience more seriously—and helps make you someone in whose presence another person can do the same.
The five-part series fits well here: this week examines the conditions placed on our humanity; the series brings those questions into the intimate details of living.
During the release week of The Practice of Being Alive, I published five essays about the ways a life can become something we manage, postpone, or perform. Read together, they trace a question beneath this week’s writing: how do we begin participating in the life we keep preparing to live?
** Your Life Keeps Happening Without You** begins with the distance between getting through a day and actually inhabiting it.
The final two pieces turn toward commitment and its costs. ** Stop Waiting for Something to Believe In** explores how we find direction without waiting for certainty to authorize our care.
You might begin with whichever title feels uncomfortably familiar. Give it enough time to bring an actual moment from your life into view: a conversation you keep rehearsing, a desire you keep explaining away, something you care about but have yet to make room for. That is where these essays have somewhere to go.
If this work has become a meaningful part of your life, I’d be grateful for your support in sustaining it. A paid subscription is $50 a year and includes membership in the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, with access to our Daily Reader, workshops, discussion circles, and support groups—opportunities to explore these questions in the company of others.
A Founding subscription is $250 a year and includes those benefits, plus two private, 60-minute video conversations with me each year. I value those conversations as a chance to know the people reading my work and give attention to the questions taking shape in their lives.
Your support helps make room for the sustained writing, teaching, and community-building behind what I share here. Thank you for considering becoming part of that support.
