For much of my life, I assumed there were essentially two choices when it came to religion.
You could believe it or reject it. You could remain inside the theological world you inherited, perhaps modifying it around the edges, or eventually conclude that its claims were no longer credible and leave it behind. The argument seemed to be between faith and unbelief, religion and secularism, God and no God.
I no longer think those are the most interesting choices.
After decades of thinking, writing, and working with people navigating religious deconstruction, I have become increasingly interested in a different question:
What was religion trying to do for human beings in the first place?
That question changes the conversation.
Religion did not appear because ancient people happened to have bad scientific explanations for thunderstorms. It emerged from the human confrontation with existence itself. We became creatures capable of knowing that we would die. We experienced suffering and needed ways to carry it. We encountered beauty, terror, love, injustice, mystery, and awe. We needed belonging, moral orientation, collective identity, ritual, meaning, and some way of locating our brief lives within a reality unimaginably larger than ourselves.
Religion did not invent these questions. Religion became one of humanity’s most consequential attempts to hold and answer them.
The doctrines, institutions, scriptures, gods, rituals, hierarchies, and metaphysical systems that developed around this existential encounter eventually acquired an authority of their own. The structures created to mediate our relationship with reality became confused with reality itself. The container became confused with what it contained. The explanation became confused with what it attempted to explain.
Modernity has destabilized much of that architecture. Science changed our understanding of the universe. Historical scholarship changed our relationship with scripture. Psychology complicated our understanding of religious experience. Religious pluralism made exclusivist claims increasingly difficult to sustain. Liberation movements exposed the ways theology could legitimize power. Modern philosophy challenged many of the metaphysical assumptions upon which traditional conceptions of God depended.
For millions of people, the old structure no longer holds.
But the human questions remain.
We still confront mortality. We still experience awe, terror, beauty, love, suffering, transcendence, injustice, and mystery. We still ask what matters, how we should live, what we owe one another, whether life means anything, and how to inhabit a reality that offers no guarantees.
This is why I am increasingly dissatisfied with a conversation about religion trapped between preservation and rejection. One side attempts to defend inherited beliefs and institutions against modernity. The other assumes that once supernatural claims become implausible, religion has simply been outgrown. Both positions can make the same mistake: confusing the historical structures of religion with the human realities those structures were created to address.
These eleven articles explore another possibility.
They are not an argument for returning to religion, nor are they an argument for dismissing it. They ask what religion carried, what it distorted, what we have outgrown, what we may have prematurely discarded, and what forms our spiritual and existential lives might take next.
Along the way, I engage thinkers including Rudolf Otto, Alfred North Whitehead, James Cone, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. I reconsider God, theology, Jesus, religious exclusivity, the evolutionary significance of religion, and the existential impulse beneath them all. These thinkers do not offer one coherent system, nor do I want them to. They offer different openings through which we can reconsider questions too often imprisoned inside the binary of belief and unbelief.
The deeper argument running through this collection is developmental.
The decline of traditional religion is not the end of humanity’s spiritual development, but a transition within it. Theology can continue after certainty about God. Jesus can matter beyond Christianity. The sacred exceeds the categories of theism and atheism. Religion itself was an extraordinary evolutionary achievement, but some of its structures have become too small for the consciousness they helped produce.
Humanity’s task is not simply to become less religious. It is to learn how to carry what religion once carried on our behalf. To live without rushing uncertainty toward certainty. To face mortality without imagining ourselves exempt from it. To make meaning without requiring the universe to guarantee it, to belong without disappearing into conformity, and to act morally without the watchful eye of heaven. It is to discover that spirituality can survive the loss of metaphysical certainty, and that wonder may deepen when we no longer require mystery to explain itself.
That would be more than secularization. It would mark a deeper stage of human maturation.
The question, then, is not whether religion survives. It is whether we can learn to inhabit for ourselves the realities religion once helped us face, without needing the structures that once sheltered us from them.
Perhaps that is what is appearing on the other side of religion: not a world emptied of depth, mystery, sacredness, or spiritual life, but new ways of encountering them.
The religion of the future may look nothing like religion. It may look like becoming more fully human.
This collection begins before God and ends beyond religion. I removed all of these articles from behind the paywall so everyone can read them.
Before criticizing religion, we should understand what it accomplished. Religion gave early human communities shared stories, rituals, moral frameworks, collective identities, explanations for suffering, relationships with death, and forms of social cohesion capable of binding increasingly large groups together. Whatever its later failures, Big-R Religion represented an extraordinary evolutionary and cultural achievement. This article establishes the foundation for the entire collection: moving beyond religion does not require pretending religion was merely a mistake. We can recognize what it made possible while asking whether the structures that once served human development can eventually constrain it.
Long before humans constructed sophisticated concepts of God, they confronted the raw conditions of existence: death, vulnerability, uncertainty, belonging, suffering, wonder, and the mystery of being alive. The religious question therefore begins deeper than the question of whether God exists. This article relocates the conversation from metaphysics to existential anthropology. The fundamental subject is not God but the human being attempting to inhabit reality. Once we recognize this, the familiar battle between theism and atheism begins to look strangely secondary to the larger question both positions are trying to answer.
Religion cannot be reduced entirely to doctrines, institutions, moral rules, or supernatural propositions. Rudolf Otto’s concept of the numinous points toward an elemental human encounter with reality that precedes theological explanation: awe, fascination, dread, mystery, and the experience of confronting something larger than the conceptual self. What we call “religious experience” may survive the collapse of traditional religion precisely because its source was never religion itself. The numinous may belong not to Christianity, theism, or institutional faith, but to the phenomenology of being human.
The problem with religion may not simply be that some of its beliefs are false. The deeper problem may be that static systems struggle to survive contact with a dynamic reality. Through Alfred North Whitehead, this article examines the conflict between religious structures organized around permanence and a universe characterized by process, emergence, relationship, and change. Spiritual maturity under modern conditions requires more than replacing old doctrines with new ones. It requires developing forms of consciousness capable of remaining alive to reality as it unfolds.
No theology emerges from nowhere. Ideas about God are shaped by histories, cultures, power arrangements, racial structures, and the interests of those authorized to define what counts as sacred. James Cone’s liberation theology exposes the fiction of a politically innocent God and forces theology to confront the social worlds it legitimates. This article marks an important turn in the collection: once theology recognizes that its images of God are historically constructed, it can no longer present those images as neutral descriptions handed down from outside human history.
Modern debates about religion often obsess over whether God exists while avoiding a more destabilizing question: what exactly do we mean when we use the word God? The word carries centuries of metaphysical assumptions, cultural projections, psychological needs, institutional interests, and inherited imagery. Beneath the familiar alternatives of belief and disbelief lies the category itself, and whether it still holds what we imagine it does. Perhaps some people are rejecting a particular construction of God rather than whatever reality the symbol originally attempted to name. Before deciding whether God exists, we may need to ask whether the God we are debating was ever there in the first place.
What becomes of theology when God can no longer function as the guaranteed explanation behind reality? Perhaps theology does not end. Perhaps its task changes. Instead of constructing metaphysical certainty, theology can become disciplined reflection on existence, responsibility, finitude, meaning, relationship, and the conditions under which human beings become more fully alive. Metaphysical orphanhood can feel like loss because there is no longer a cosmic parent guaranteeing that everything will ultimately make sense. But it also removes the alibi. We become responsible for the worlds we create and the lives we inhabit.
Religious traditions have often imagined themselves as roads leading toward a final sacred destination. Christianity intensified this logic by interpreting Jesus as the exclusive route to God. This article challenges the architecture underneath that claim. What if reality is not a destination from which we are separated? What if the sacred is not somewhere else waiting to be reached through the correct religion? The question then changes from finding the right road to learning how to inhabit more fully the reality in which we already participate.
What happens to Jesus when Christianity no longer controls his public relations? Beneath two thousand years of doctrine, institutional authority, salvation machinery, and religious branding remains a disruptive human figure whose life can still provoke questions about courage, solidarity, power, compassion, freedom, and what it means to become fully human. Recovering Jesus need not require Christianity as the price of admission. A post-religion Jesus does not need to be defended as divine, rejected as irrelevant, or confined inside a salvation system. He can return to the larger human conversation.
Leaving religion does not eliminate the impulses religion once organized. Human beings continue seeking meaning, orientation, belonging, transcendence, moral seriousness, ritual, depth, and ways of facing mortality. The question “What replaces God?” therefore cannot be answered simply with science, secularism, therapy, or another worldview. What remains is the existential impulse itself: the persistent human movement toward deeper participation in being alive. The task after religion is not necessarily to find a new object to put where God used to be, but to develop our capacity to inhabit these dimensions of existence without outsourcing them.
The collection ends not with the death of religion, but with its developmental transformation. Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future offers a provocative framework for imagining spiritual life beyond inherited metaphysical and institutional forms. Modern human beings increasingly face existence without the structures that once mediated uncertainty, mortality, transcendence, and meaning for them. That creates both freedom and exposure. The challenge is therefore developmental: can human beings cultivate the existential capacities necessary to live deeply without returning to borrowed certainty? The religion of the future may cease to look like religion because its task will no longer be to protect us from the conditions of existence, but to help us become capable of inhabiting them.
Some forms of religion have done more than estrange human beings from themselves. They have estranged us from the living world to which we belong. Theologies that place humanity above nature, imagine Earth as temporary, or locate our ultimate destiny somewhere beyond this world can weaken our sense of responsibility for the planet beneath our feet. The ecological crisis is therefore not only technological, political, or economic. It is also existential and spiritual. Repair requires recovering our place within the more-than-human world, not as masters standing above it, but as participants whose lives are inseparable from the living systems that sustain us.
Leaving religion does not require abandoning spirituality. It may instead create the conditions for encountering spirituality without dogma, supernatural certainty, institutional authority, or prescribed belief. Non-religious spirituality begins with human experience itself: awe, wonder, connection, embodiment, love, mortality, meaning, relationship, and participation in a reality larger than the isolated self. The point is not to construct another religion for people who dislike religion, but to create space for spiritual depth without surrendering intellectual honesty, self-authorship, or contact with reality.
The collection arrives here at a constructive framework for what can emerge beyond the old religious binaries. Existential Health approaches spirituality not primarily as a matter of supernatural belief, but as one dimension of the human relationship with being alive. Spirituality can involve depth, wonder, transcendence, connection, meaning, reverence, and participation without requiring adherence to a religious institution or metaphysical system. Rather than asking people to adopt another set of answers, Existential Health asks how these dimensions of life can be cultivated while preserving reality contact, pluralism, discernment, and self-authorship.
If the argument of this collection is correct, then the future of religion is not ultimately a question about religion. It is a question about human development.
The institutions, doctrines, rituals, metaphysical systems, and sacred stories we call religion have always been responses to deeper human conditions. Mortality. Uncertainty. Suffering. Meaning. Belonging. Moral responsibility. Awe. Identity. Transcendence. The need to locate ourselves within a reality larger than the self.
When religious structures weaken, those conditions do not disappear. They become more exposed.
That exposure can be liberating, but it can also be destabilizing. A person may leave behind doctrines they no longer believe, yet still find themselves without a language for death, grief, purpose, belonging, or the experience of mystery. They may gain freedom from institutional authority while discovering how difficult it is to trust their own judgment. They may reject inherited answers only to realize that the questions remain.
This is where Existential Health becomes important.
Existential Health is concerned with the quality of our relationship with being alive. It asks whether we can inhabit uncertainty without c…
