Suppose a young woman tells her pastor that a leader in the church has been touching her in ways she never agreed to. The pastor asks her to think carefully about what she is implying. The man has a family. He has served the church for years. Has she considered that she might have misunderstood his intentions? By the time the meeting ends, she has agreed to pray about whether she has become bitter. He still has his position. She goes home wondering what kind of person would put a good man’s reputation at risk.
The church has just done something more consequential than dismiss a complaint. It has made her credibility, even in her own eyes, depend on accepting the account that protects the man she came to report. If she persists, her persistence becomes further evidence of bitterness. Once an institution has that much control over what counts as evidence, almost anything you say in your own defense is available for use against you.
I’ve spent ** thirty years working professionally** with questions of faith, spiritual authority, and life after religion. Some of those years I spent in the pulpit of a megachurch. When I think about that role now, I think about the extraordinary permission it gave me to speak into lives I knew only in fragments. Someone could spend twenty minutes telling me about a marriage they had been living in for twenty years, and I had a whole theology ready to tell me what those twenty minutes meant. The confidence with which a pastor speaks in such a moment can feel like care, especially to someone who has spent years wishing for an answer. I know how easily that confidence comes from having an explanation ready before the person walks into the room.
In , I turn that scrutiny on my own years in evangelical ministry. It took leaving the pulpit to see how easily I could mistake the fear of losing my authority for the conviction that I was defending the truth. From inside the role, those two things felt close enough that I rarely had to ask which one was doing the talking.
Dogma gives a high-control church a way to settle questions that experience ought to be allowed to reopen. If a teaching is divinely guaranteed, the suffering it produces has to be explained somewhere else. A woman’s dread of going home becomes a problem with her willingness to submit. A teenager’s fear of hell is treated as proof that the warning is working. Over time, you learn where an honest account of your experience will lead, and you start editing it before anyone else has to.
In , I look at how familiar phrases do some of this work. Consider what happens when someone tells you to “give it to God” just as you’re beginning to say how badly you were hurt. The conversation turns from what happened to whether you’ve surrendered it. Hear that often enough and you begin to wonder whether bringing it up at all is a failure of faith.
The church needs very little overt force once people learn that the price of disagreeing might be the loss of everyone they would normally turn to for help. The same congregation that brings meals when your child is sick might stop calling when you name what a leader did. The meals were real. So was the affection of many of the people who brought them. That is precisely what makes the threat effective. You stand to lose relationships worth having.
This is also a way of interfering with human development. Learning to judge involves making decisions you could get wrong and having enough room afterward to understand what you missed. Moral judgment sometimes requires you to tell someone you admire that what they are doing is wrong. In a high-control church, each of those experiences puts something at risk that ought to be secure enough to withstand it. People become exceptionally good at anticipating what a leader will think and get very little practice using what they themselves know.
Then the church gets to present the dependence it helped create as proof of its necessity. The adult who feels lost without spiritual direction is told that this is what happens when you try to live apart from God. Imagine how hard it is to test that claim when every attempt to live differently makes you a stranger to the people who taught you what love looks like.
The phrase loss of faith makes it sound as though you’ve lost a set of beliefs. For many people, something closer to an entire future disappears. There was someone who would finally explain why your child died. There was a day when the people who hurt you would answer for it. There was a version of yourself waiting at the end of all this who would understand what the suffering had been for. You might have made decisions about the only life you know you have on the strength of those promises.
I think of this as a kind of metaphysical orphanhood. The authority you were taught to address when life became unbearable no longer seems available to you in the way it once did. You might feel tremendous relief at the prospect of never again having to plead with God to make you acceptable. Then someone you love dies, and you reach for the old assurance before you remember you no longer believe it. It is possible to miss a promise you are relieved to be free of. Grief does very little to respect the conclusions you’ve reached.
Some of the hardest grief is for the life you already lived. What would you have done with your twenties if you hadn’t believed your body was a threat? Would you have stayed with the person you married if you’d thought leaving was morally possible? People have children they love inside marriages they wish they had never entered. They have friends they would never have met in institutions that harmed them. Any account of freedom worth having has to leave room for that difficulty. You cannot get the years back, and you would be hard pressed to say which parts of those years you would surrender if you could.
I wrote about the moment you realize that holding on to a belief requires you to deny something you know from your own life. In
Anger has work to do. It can get you through the door of a room where you are finally going to say what happened, in front of people who would rather you didn’t. It can keep an institution from making the cost of silence somebody else’s problem. Some people spend years being told that their anger is evidence against them. When they discover that it has been trying to tell them something true, I want them to be able to hear it.
I also know how easy it is for me, as a writer, to give that anger a fresh object every week. A piece that takes the church to task finds its readers. I understand why. There’s relief in seeing somebody put into print what you once had to whisper. But if the main thing I offer is another chance to despise the people who hurt you, the church still gets a remarkable share of our attention. It gets to set the terms of the conversation even when everybody in the room has turned against it.
In , I look at how easily people who have left religious authority behind begin looking to new voices for permission. You learn which doubts get applause, which attachments you’re supposed to have outgrown, and what you’d better keep to yourself if you want to stay in good standing. That’s part of why I make the case for existential health. The freedom I care about includes being able to tell the truth about your life even when it disappoints the people who cheered when you left.
The questions I want to spend more time with are harder to write about, in part because I cannot settle them for anyone. What do you owe the living when you no longer count on the dead being made whole? How do you choose what to give your life to when you’ve already given years of it to something that claimed too much? These questions would be waiting for us even if every church that ever harmed anyone issued a full confession tomorrow.
My work in existential health begins with the ** human relationship to existence itself**. Before we reach for an explanation, there is a life already underway. Someone has died, a child needs us, a choice has consequences we will have to live with. Religious and secular interpretations alike enter a situation already in progress. The first question is whether our way of making sense of it lets us take in what is actually happening.
That is what I mean by reality contact. Think again of the woman who went to her pastor. A response grounded in existential health would take her account seriously and attend to what she faces now. Who has power over her? What would it cost her to speak publicly, and who would stand beside her if she did? She deserves people willing to help her think through those questions without demanding control over her next move. And the institution still has a responsibility to answer for how it responded. Recovering her authority over her life cannot be made the price of holding the church accountable.
Self-authorship starts to take shape when a person has enough room to consider what they owe and to whom. Someone who once mistook obedience for goodness might wonder whether they have any basis for moral judgment after leaving. Start with a particular obligation. If you stood by while someone else was shunned, you have a person to answer to. You have to reckon with what your silence cost them and consider whether an apology would serve them now. There is moral work here even if you never settle what the universe thinks of you. The person affected by your choices has been there the whole time.
Meaning also takes shape in a life that affords us limited time. After years of being told that your life mattered because it served an eternal purpose, the idea of giving yourself to anything temporary might seem almost absurd. Yet caring for someone in their last months, when there is very little left to fix, makes sense on terms available right there in the room. The person needs company, and you have some hours you could give them. Over time, what you find worthy of those hours gives your life a shape you have had some part in choosing. You learn what a commitment means by discovering what it asks of you once the excitement of choosing it wears off.
In , I return to a question that took me years to ask plainly. What makes a life worth giving yourself to when you no longer believe its purpose was decided in advance? Much of the answer has come to me through paying attention to what I would miss if I kept waiting for certainty. Some of the commitments that give my life meaning now are ones I could only understand from the inside, after I’d given them enough of my time to find out what they asked of me.
This is why the communities we build after religion matter to me. If we want people to develop judgment, we need places where someone can use it in a way that inconveniences the people in charge. A community that welcomes doubt in the abstract has learned very little until a member raises a question about how power is being used and is still welcome the following week. Some of the freedom we need is built into the way people treat us when we disappoint them.
Consider sitting beside someone you love who is dying. Years ago you would have known what to say about where they were going. Now you find yourself wanting to say it anyway, partly because you would give almost anything to believe you will see them again. They open their eyes and ask whether you’ll be there when they wake. You know the answer to that question. You pull your chair closer so they’ll see you if they do.
The ability to remain in that room, with all the tenderness and fear the moment asks of you, is part of what I mean by existential health. There will still be questions when you go home, and there might be nights when you want the old answers back. I am interested in what becomes possible when people have enough trust in what they’ve lived to give an honest account of it, and enough trust in one another to bear what the account leaves unresolved. After thirty years, that is where I want my work to go. The church had a great deal to say about what happens after we die. I want us to get better at being here for one another while we’re alive.
If this essay put words to something you’ve lived through, I’d love to keep the conversation going. A paid subscription ($50/year) gives you access to my subscriber-only writing and membership in the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality**, where we meet for live gatherings, discussion and support groups, workshops, and the Daily Reader.
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If you’d like to spend more time with the questions in this essay, I’d love for you to read my new book, . It’s about learning to trust your own judgment and deciding what’s worth giving yourself to when the old answers give way.
