A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar

What Happens When You're Done with Religion Altogether?

• Randy Knie & Kyle Whitaker • Season 5 • Episode 13

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What happens when the foundation of your identity crumbles beneath you? When the lens through which you understood the world no longer works? Psychologist Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren joins us to explore this profound transition that one-fifth of Americans have experienced—leaving religion behind.

Drawing from eight years of groundbreaking research across multiple countries, Van Tongeren walks us through what he calls "the great disillusionment," which he documents in his book Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion. We discover that most people who check "none" on religious surveys were previously religious believers—what he calls the "dones." Their past faith doesn't simply disappear but leaves "religious residue" that continues influencing their thoughts, behaviors, fears, and values long after they've walked away.

This conversation ventures beyond theory into practical wisdom for navigating life's deepest questions. Van Tongeren shares his personal journey through faith crisis after his brother's tragic death and how it shaped his research. We explore why rigid faith systems often collapse under scrutiny while flexible faith proves more resilient, how former fundamentalists frequently jump into new ideological extremes, and why developing "existential distress tolerance" might be the most crucial skill for our anxious age.

Whether you're questioning faith, have left religion behind, or simply want to understand this massive cultural shift, this episode offers profound insights into finding meaning and purpose at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. Van Tongeren challenges us to courageously engage life's existential realities rather than avoiding them—suggesting this honest confrontation might be the only path to flourishing.

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Randy:

I'm Randy, the pastor, half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology and spirituality.

Kyle:

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air, around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy:

Thanks for joining us and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar.

Randy:

A few months ago I ran into a psychologist who sparked my interest quite a bit. He's a Christian, he's a grown-up Christian, but he's gone through some real shit in his life. He's gone through some faith crises. He's gone through some real, honest tragedies that have formed and shaped him and formed and shaped the way he looks at the world and the way he looks at his faith. And he took a long, hard look at his faith and wondered if he wanted to continue in it. And, long story short, he wrote this book called Done how to Flourish After Leaving Religion.

Randy:

And I'm excited about this conversation because I know that there are many of you in our community listeners who identify as just that. I love this podcast. This is great, but these guys are a couple of Christians and I'm not anymore. I've moved past that. I've moved beyond that. I can't do it anymore. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't do it because it just feels disingenuous. And I'm excited to have a conversation that centers a little bit and I kind of took us off and back into deconstruction and spiritual evolution land. But I'm excited to have a conversation about what do you, what do you do and how do you find meaning in life and how do you flourish in life when you're done with religion.

Kyle:

Totally. If you've gotten to that point, yeah, cause according to his stats, it's like a fifth of people, uh, broadly, who are, who just are done or out entirely. Um yeah, and I I'm excited to talk to a psychologist because we don't do that a whole lot and the way they think is significantly different from the way that I think. They like describing things and putting numbers on things and drawing statistics about things, and I think this is super useful and many of us need to be much better at it right.

Kyle:

We all have this tendency to to think anecdotally and to justify things based on our experience of them rather than on the broad swath of human experience of them. So so it's super useful, I think, to hear actual numbers put to things and to hear where the trends are really going and where they have been in the past and what people are actually saying about what's causing this and why they're out and how they are finding meaning afterward and all that stuff. So super useful and a really interesting book.

Randy:

Yeah, and it's not even for me, just the statistics and the data and the research, even though there's tons of it in this book and he's done tons of it For me reading a psychologist who's this good statistical analysis. You've seen these really broad trends.

Kyle:

It's much like the Enneagram, which didn't come up. Oh man I know you wanted to talk about it. We never got to it and I held my tongue. How?

Randy:

dare you, how dare you?

Kyle:

let me slip on that we should talk to him again and we'll bring it up, yeah. But like, yeah, there are these broad trends in the population and when you have described them accurately, based on lots and lots of research, it's easy for an individual to see themselves in it, because you're probably not the exception yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's.

Randy:

It's quite comforting to talk to a psychologist. I think in in being able to talk about and speak into the way humans act and behave and think and operate while living in a certain time-space moment actually brings me a little bit of comfort. Yeah. You know like it actually helps me think a little bit more like a scientist and less like an emotional reactive.

Kyle:

You know, child, which is what I feel like most of the time to be honest with you, totally yeah, and there's some hope in this book too, for sure.

Randy:

There's plenty of it. Yeah, so listeners enjoy. We're Dr Daryl Van Tongren. Thank you so much for joining us on A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. Thanks so much for having me. So, daryl, we're talking about your book Done, which is, I believe, your most recent book, correct? Yes, that's right? Yes, awesome, but I would just love for you to tell us about yourself and your work and what you do, where this book came from, if you could.

Daryl:

Yeah, absolutely so. I'm a social psychologist, professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, michigan, and really I've been studying big questions for as long as I've been interested in research, and so I bring psychological science to some of life's biggest existential questions, and so I'd study things like meaning and suffering and the function of religion. And really this book was born out of about eight years of research that my colleagues and I conducted on people who have left religion, and so we know that in the United States and other places around the world, the landscape of religion is changing considerably and an increasingly high number of people are leaving religion and de-identifying from religion. And so my goal with this book was really to do two things One was to translate cutting edge psychological science on religious de-identification and deconstruction into accessible terms and an approachable way that any person could kind of understand where they fit in this journey, and then the second was to offer some practical tips and guidelines for people who are undergoing religious change to find flourishing and meaning after this major life transition.

Randy:

Brilliant. Yeah, I was impressed when I read at the top of all the people who say you should read this book. Adam Cohen, who's a professor at Arizona State University, calls you one of the most important living psychologists studying religion and beliefs. That's high praise. How does a person get to a place where they're one of the most influential psychologists studying religion and beliefs? Daryl, studying religion and beliefs.

Daryl:

Daryl. Well, that's very kind of Adam to say. I mean, my self-deprecating sense of self would say well, if you study something narrow and enough of a niche, then you're going to be an expert on something. But maybe, more realistically, I can say that I'm really grateful that I think that it's one of those moments in time where what I'm passionate about and where I've developed expertise happens to intersect a particularly pressing cultural moment, and so I think these are things I've been interested in for a while.

Daryl:

I just think now we've entered a point in our public consciousness in which this has reached salience, in which this has reached kind of a critical mass. You know, I think that we're at this interesting time in which a number of people, a number of people who I talk to, were raised in Christian evangelicalism in the eighties and nineties and they're in their thirties and forties right now and they're undergoing big identity shifts. They're questioning their faith. Some are deconstructing and reconstructing within religion and some are even staying within Christianity, but but others are seeking a non-religious spirituality, a post-Christian spirituality, um, or really trying to search for something more outside of organized religion. And so I'm just grateful that I'm at the uh, a place in which we're at, what I'm passionate about and what I'm studying, just I think happens to intersect a cultural need.

Daryl:

And so I'm grateful to be in this spot.

Randy:

Yeah, let's go further down that just a little bit. This interest and emphasis of your work did not happen in a vacuum, right? You were a person of faith yourself and you've had experiences that have informed how you process and come to these conversations. Can you tell us and our listeners just a little bit about your faith background and what in your life has brought you to the point where you want to study this stuff?

Daryl:

Yeah, absolutely so. I was born and raised in the church, baptized as an infant in the Christian Reformed Church, and then my parents left that when I was young because they felt it was a little bit too stifling, which I was super happy about, because I always got in trouble for trying to take more than one cookie. So then we kind of landed in a non-denominational evangelical church. Was that not allowed in the CRC by the? Way? Apparently not.

Randy:

I was a hungry kid. I loved the cookies. I mean, somebody has got to talk to the, to the church leaders, that's.

Daryl:

I agree, especially if that's what's causing people to leave.

Randy:

That's low hanging fruit.

Daryl:

So easy fix. So so we shifted to a just kind of a of an evangelical non-denominational church, which is probably like pretty high in fundamentalism, pretty conservative, and then that's where I kind of did most of my faith formation and development. Went to Christian elementary school, middle school, high school and, with the exception of my freshman year of college, went to a Christian undergrad as well. And so you know, that was really just kind of the water that I swam in or the air that I breathed, you know, depending on the metaphor. And then in grad school I got you know, even in undergrad I was kind of always existentially angsty, so I was always the person who was wrestling with the big questions, wasn't always satisfied with the answers. Found myself studying psychology and in grad school my eyes were open to a broader psychological perspective on religion and maybe more of an understanding of why we're religious from an existential perspective.

Daryl:

Fast forward to my fourth year of my PhD program. My brother tragically and unexpectedly passes away and this is a huge, huge shock to me. I mean, this is just a huge sense of grief and loss. We were very close, mattered the way I viewed God and some of the expectations I had based on what I was taught about God, and so you know, if God is supposed to be all powerful and all knowing and all loving, how could this terrible thing happen? And, and you know, church people are well-meaning, but oftentimes they make things worse by saying things that on the surface look like they're supposed to make you feel better, but down deep they're just trying to reaffirm their own cultural worldview.

Daryl:

Like they're supposed to tell you that everything happens for a reason, not because it's helpful for you to hear, but because it's more helpful for them to believe.

Daryl:

And so that launched probably a you know, conservative estimate of a decade long process of religious doubt, questioning and deconstruction for me, and it was probably amid this time you know there's always the joke, you know, research is me search that I got tenure and I was on a run with a friend and he said you know what's something that you've always wanted to study? And I said, well, you know people leaving religion it. Just, you know, not a lot of people had studied it. It kind of felt like it was this taboo, dark side of religion. But now that I've got tenure, let's go for it. Um, and so I think it was a combination of some of some of my own experiences within the church and my own religious deconstruction and then really just trying to get data from thousands and thousands of people from lots of different countries to try to figure out their perspective on what a changing religious identity looks like.

Randy:

Thank you. Thank you, I'm so sorry about your brother also Thanks. You begin the book with a Nietzsche quote, which is interesting to us because we've got a philosopher with a microphone in his face right now, and the quote is truths are illusions. We have forgotten our illusions. I'm going to say that again Truths are illusions. We have forgotten our illusions. What does that mean to you and why did you start your book that way, daryl?

Daryl:

No, that's a great question. So I had originally um titled the book disillusioned, and so the idea was and I talked about this in the preface I think that that America is going through something that I'm calling the great disillusionment, where people are becoming disillusioned with their faith in profound and transformative ways, and so I was trying to build on that disillusionment. But anyone who's written a book realizes you don't have final say on almost anything in your book the cover or the title, and so they or the title, and so you know they changed the title. But the reason why I kept it in there was because, as a social psychologist, one of the hard realities that I have to come to terms with is all of our beliefs, all of our beliefs, no matter how convinced we are of them, are to some degree illusory.

Daryl:

So all of our beliefs contain some degree of error. So some of our beliefs we're completely wrong about, but most of our beliefs were a little bit wrong about, and we don't really like to think that, um, and so oftentimes what we do is we build up in our own mind that certain things are beyond illusion, some of the things that we hold are beyond mistake, beyond, you know, outside of being questioned, and to me that just smacks of intellectual arrogance, and it is the opposite of intellectual humility. And so I think it's a reminder for all of us that we should hold all of our beliefs with some modicum of humility, because we're we're likely wrong, a little wrong about almost everything, and definitely wrong about a few things.

Randy:

Mm-hmm. Epistemic humility is something that we've talked about off and on regularly throughout this podcast. So you're talking about intellectual humility and you wrote a book on humility, which I would like to talk to you about as well and read, but yeah, that shares a good home here in this podcast.

Kyle:

Totally. It was really cool to see your book and talking about humility.

Randy:

Well, thanks yeah.

Kyle:

We should bring that back up.

Randy:

We should.

Kyle:

And start talking about Nietzsche, who's one of my favorites.

Randy:

Yeah, the crazy thing about this great disillusionment, which again a very common theme on this podcast, almost too common. But you cite the Pew Research Group data that says nearly one in three individuals raised Christian will leave their faith by the time they reach the age 30. One in three, nearly one in three.

Kyle:

That's staggering, yeah it's more than I expected.

Randy:

Yeah, that's staggering. I mean, that's more than I expected. Yeah, yeah, I mean we talk, we, we do this talking about that exact thing, but had no idea that that number was getting that high.

Kyle:

Do you have a sense of when that tends to occur? Is it all over the map or is that certain life um eras? Yeah.

Daryl:

You know, I I do think it's a little all over the map. I do think that there are probably high-risk periods for de-identification. I think kind of a stereotypical high-risk time for de-identification is when people leave home and maybe they go away to college, right? So whether or not they go away to college or they just kind of leave the influence of their primary caregivers, when people kind of have to make their beliefs their own, depending on the style of belief that they were raised in and their life circumstances and some features of their personality. Religion may be more or less sticky with certain folks, and so it could be. I mean, I was raised in a Christian school where, you know, we kind of had this capstone course that was called Western philosophy and the argument was there's only three ways of seeing the world, which is like incredibly reductionistic, but there's at least three. So there's there's secular humanism, there's new age spirituality or there's, you know, biblical Christianity, and we all know what the right way to view the world is. You know it's it's biblical.

Kyle:

Christianity.

Daryl:

Oh sorry, yeah, best, two out of three, yeah, and so and so kind of the whole premise behind it was you know, you're going to go to these secular colleges or even these Christian colleges where you're, there's going to be a lot of you know wolves in sheep's clothing and they're going to be trying to dissuade you from the truth, and so what you need to do is kind of close your mind to, you know, the onslaught on your Christian values, and so if that's kind of the way that that your, you know your faith is developed, it's kind of a tight knit, um, not very intellectually open, defensive way of view in the world.

Daryl:

I'm not sure that's kind of a long-term strategy for withstanding, you know, the just the onslaught of new scientific information that people might receive when they leave home or go away to college. And so I my my sense is that there are some ways in which, at least in the U S, christian Christianity is being portrayed to folks under the age of 30, that has the staying power that religious leaders hope it's having if they're losing a third of their adherence before they even reach kind of adulthood or middle adulthood.

Randy:

So, speaking, Daryl, of different kinds of faith, in chapter one you contrast two different kinds of belief rigid faith, you call it, and flexible faith, and you say that one is built to last longer than the other. Can you tell us about rigid faith and flexible faith and why one of those is built for the longer game perhaps?

Daryl:

Yeah, so this is still an empirical question. We're actually trying to collect data on this right now. But here's my intuition. My intuition is that rigid faith might be able to hold up okay in the short term. And what is rigid faith? So rigid faith is like absolute certainty, orienting around being secure in your beliefs. You know what you believe. You're not going to change what you believe.

Daryl:

Other things kind of have to conform to your beliefs. So in the short term you can kind of get several things to fit in to your existing schema or operating system or working model, whatever it is, whatever kind of metaphor you want to use, and that works okay in the short term. But eventually you're going to encounter something that just doesn't fit Like. There's just too big of a discrepancy between the way you think the world is supposed to work and the evidence the world is giving you. And if that discrepancy is too big you have to adjust your belief system. And if it's so rigid that it's kind of an all or nothing deal, then it's gonna shatter Versus, like a flexible faith says. Well, maybe there's a few things that I can hold right. There's a few core tenants that I believe. I have a colleague named Dave Myers. He says he believes two things. These are his core axioms there's a God, and it's not me and it's not you. Okay, Anything else.

Kyle:

Three beliefs I guess that's three.

Daryl:

Yeah so two yeah, one, and two A and two B. There you go. I guess that's three yeah. So two yeah, one, and two A and two B. So anything else can kind of fit around that, and so if you have more flexible beliefs, right, if you, if you kind of have like a rough structure and then you can, you can kind of fill in the rest. I think over the longterm that's going to be a better solution. The problem with this though and I realize that this is the problem even when I wrote it is developmentally you have to be in the mindset for that to work. When you're a kid, you need black and white, you need certainty. Your brain isn't at a place where you can understand the nuances and complexities of contingent things and postmodernity. But as you age you're able to better intellectually handle and assimilate kind of a more flexible faith, and my sense is those are the types of faith systems that are going to last longer term.

Randy:

So just to, I hope you're right, I really do, and I think flexible faith is the way to go, absolutely.

Randy:

But we have this phenomenon happening in our country right now, where you know the person who's in the White House for the second time we just began having to listen to him again for four years. He is really good at crafting a narrative that may or may not be true and then doubling and tripling and quadrupling and so on and so forth down on it in a way that like's basically pretending that his truth is the truth. And then you have a whole slew of people following him, many of whom are the evangelical Christians that we're talking about, who are watching him kind of create his own truth and his own narrative and live out of that space. So that scares me, when we talk about things of faith as a pastor, to think what if we have a bunch of people who are being discipled by the most visible and loudest and most important person in our country into kind of living in ways that you can just choose your own adventure and the experience and the evidence doesn't actually matter?

Daryl:

So we know a couple of things. One is, when people feel threatened or people feel uncertain, they're more likely to run to, and attach to, certainty and closure. They really like charismatic leaders who are going to tell them what the right answer is. It's just kind of like a natural, default human response and so to the degree that anyone or situations can create chaos or anxiety or uncertainty, it's absolutely going to drive people towards those authoritarian leaders more quickly than it has before. So that's one thing that we know. The second thing we know is the reason why is because people are trying to eliminate and manage their own anxiety and existential distress. So if there was like one thing, I would want existential distress. So if there was like one thing I would want listeners to take from this, it would be one of the best things they could do is cultivate an existential distress tolerance.

Daryl:

So oftentimes when we feel existentially distressed, we just cling to something in order to manage our own anxiety. But my sense is, for most things in life we don't know what the right answer is. We can give our best guess, we can engage with faith, but we're never quite sure. The best thing we and so what that means is we're always going to live with just a little bit of existential anxiety if we're honest, and so what we can do is get used to that existential anxiety, make it our friend. Be okay being existentially distressed, be okay saying things like I don't know, I might be wrong. This uncertainty is unsettling to me, but I'm okay sitting in the unsettledness Because as long as we're afraid of or reactionary against the existential distress, we're going to do exactly what you say and we're going to flock to people who can take advantage of our vulnerabilities and might look to exploit us.

Randy:

Okay, now we're just going to talk about that for another 50 minutes. We're going to have to come back to that.

Kyle:

I just wrote down what you said, so we're definitely coming back to it. So the title of the book is done, so we should probably talk about that group of people. So we've heard a lot, even on this podcast, about the nuns. So these are the people who don't check any religious box on one of those surveys. They check instead none. And we've had lots and lots of conversations on this podcast about deconstruction, most of them not with psychologists, mostly with philosophers or theologians. I think we did talk to one psychologist, so I'm very excited to have somebody who knows the data, do you?

Daryl:

know Richard Beck, by the way. Yeah, yeah, richard is great.

Kyle:

Yeah, we did talk to him, so feel free to pepper us with numbers, because that's what I love about psychologists that I don't get from most of my fellow philosophers. So who are these duns, and how are they different from the nuns that we're maybe more familiar with, and do you think the duns have somehow been overlooked in these conversations?

Daryl:

Yeah, so the duns are people who are, who have left religion. So they were previously religious and so these are. So duns are essentially just nuns who have left a religious faith. Surprisingly maybe it's not surprising to me, maybe it's not surprising to you Estimates are that three quarters of nuns are actually duns, so more than 75, I think it's like 78% of people who claim no religious affiliation were at one time religious. Say that number again, it's like three quarters, 78% of nuns are duns.

Daryl:

So when we, when we first started studying this, we thought maybe 4% to 8% like less than 10% would be religious duns. When we just sample the normal population, like if you were just to throw a population survey out there, about 20% of the population reports being a dun. That's really high. That's really high. This is one-fifth. One out of five people you bump into on the street is going to be someone who has left religion, with the rest being split between the majority of those being other people being religious and then some being never religious.

Daryl:

So we think that the duns have been overlooked for one major reason and that's because most people treated all non-religious people the same and they totally failed to take into consideration that your religious history actually matters right. The fact that you were religious actually plays a role in your life now, even after you've walked away. And so the easiest way to think about this is we were talking to one of my friends about this. He was like oh yeah, like once a Catholic, always a Catholic. He's like I left Catholicism when I was 18. I'm in my 30s. I absolutely still have this Catholic guilt.

Kyle:

It's always guilt that they identify with when you talk to ex-Catholics.

Daryl:

I know it's always the guilt. They got that down, they got the corner market. When we ran studies, we did cross-cultural studies. We have US, netherlands, hong Kong, united Kingdom, new Zealand data. From all these different countries. We find something called religious residue and what this is is that your religious past continues to linger after you leave religion, after you de-identify from religion. Features of the way you think, the way you feel, the way you behave, the way you spend money, where your values are, even the things you're afraid of, like hell and the devil, continue to persist even after you've left religion. So religion is sticky and it's very hard to fully leave religion.

Randy:

So there's this thing I found happening in me as I was reading through your book pretty much all the way through Daryl, and that is me saying I know that he's writing this book for religious duns, but I think this is true of me as well, and by that I mean I think a lot of the cases you make and the suggestions you make and the kind of the journey that you kind of bring people through and walk with people in is just as, in some ways almost just as applicable to people who have gone through a faith evolution right Like the trendy word is deconstruction, and an easy example of that is in chapter three, which is walking away from religion, that you titled it, and you talk about how people who are dones change their views on what they can eat or drink or what healthy sexuality looks like or any number of things about a lifestyle or about about their lifestyle choices, and I found that to be true of myself after going through a spiritual evolution in many ways, and now I just see myself as on a constant, continual spiritual evolution.

Randy:

That will. What are your thoughts on that? Would you say that's? Would you agree with that, or am I? Am I off?

Daryl:

No, you're absolutely right on. I mean really, I mean, if we're going to get maybe a little technical, you you kind of have left a religion, right, you left a version of religion, and so so you've kind of de-identified from that and aspects of that are lingering and where you've re-identified so. So I kind of I kind of break it down Deconstruction is the process of questioning, doubting, criticizing, struggling with your beliefs, and then you can land in different places. Some people reconstruct and if they reconstruct they're going to land within a religious tradition. Maybe it's their original religious tradition, maybe it's like a more progressive version, maybe it's a different one, maybe they switched to a different religion.

Daryl:

Other people are going to de-identify, right, they're just going to land outside of religion, and for some of those folks they're just completely done with anything spiritual, and others will find kind of a post-religious spirituality or a non-religious spirituality. The topics, the processes, the psychological phenomenon are very much the same. Right, there are aspects of your past that continue to linger and continue to exert an effect, and we have some data that we've published and some preliminary data that suggests this is even particularly stronger if you've left an evangelical Christian upbringing. Like there's something about evangelical Christianity that that's particularly sticky, at least in the U? S, and a little bit harder to shake than some of the other religions that we've been looking at.

Randy:

Why do you think that is Darrell?

Daryl:

You know this is a great question. Um, you know, I think we're still we're still digging into that. I think there are features of evangelical Christianity that are highly demanding and are epistemically exclusive, and so, for example, I think evangelical Christianity asks you to make very high behavioral commitments around who you partner with, what you do with your body.

Randy:

Who you vote for.

Daryl:

Who you vote for, right, the vocation that you might select, the college you might attend, Exactly All of those things, Not unlike other. So I would call it a high-cost religion. So it's very costly to be part of this religion, and we're about to launch a study with some colleagues where we compare it to other high-cost religions like leaving, ultra-Orthodox Judaism or Latter-day Saint Mormonism. So I think the more costly the religion, the more that you've invested in it, the stickier it is, because you kind of get so embedded into who you are, into the fabric of how you see yourself. It's central to your identity.

Daryl:

Some people can't even think about themselves outside of their religious faith, right, they're like, well, I'm a Christian first, versus. I've talked with other people who have just been nominally religious. You know they're, they're Easter and Christmas Episcopalians and they're like, I don't know, left religion. It's fine with me. I just, you know two more Sundays a year. I got back, but that was about it, Um. So so there's something about the costliness of it, Um. And then I also think there's the feature of I kind of alluded to um, people continue to be fearful of hell and the devil. I think there's this eternal torment and punishment. If you were wrong. That is a pretty good stick If you're not motivated by the carrot.

Randy:

Yeah, yeah, which reminds me of I had underlined and just didn't. There I ran out of I couldn't ask you all the questions. Daryl, but you said somebody quote, you quoted said um, I feel like my belief in heaven and hell is stronger than my belief in God, which is a stunning thing to say.

Daryl:

Yeah, we, we have some data. So this, this, it's all thanks to my wife. My wife's a therapist who sees clients undergoing religious change. One day she said you know, I was talking with all my clients, we're having dinner. She's like I was talking to my clients and like they're totally fine with their new religious beliefs. But they have this nagging fear that, like if they're wrong, like they're going to spend eternity paying the price for them being wrong. And I was like well, that's ridiculous. And she was like well, she's like do you remember we grew up in the 80s and 90s Christian summer camp?

Daryl:

There was this urban legend that if you went in the bathroom and closed the door, turn off the lights, you say Bloody Mary three times and this horrible apparition shows up in the mirror. I was like oh yeah, I remember this urban legend. She's like do you believe that? I was like oh yeah, I remember this, this urban legend. She's like do you believe that? I was like no, I don't believe that at all. She's like well, go do it. And I was like absolutely not. Like there's no way I'm going to do that. And she's like I was like she's like well, why not If you don't believe it and I was like, well, I'm just not messing with that, well, why don't you go?

Daryl:

And what she was kind of cuing into is, even though cognitively we may disbelieve something, on an emotional level we still may retain a fearful belief, especially a negative one. Because in psychology there's this idea of something called the negativity bias, like bad is stronger than good. And so we even found that among atheist duns. So these are duns who no longer believe in God. They still believe in hell and the devil, more than people who have never been religious. So there's still some aspect of that fear and fire and brimstone that they carry with them, even if they don't believe in God. It's a little bit like a Pascal's wager type thing, right, like I got to hedge my bets just a little.

Randy:

Is that? Does that have anything to do with negative thoughts being more sticky than positive thoughts?

Daryl:

I think so, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So the negative things just happen to stick with you a little bit longer. They're stronger.

Randy:

Okay, this is completely unrelated from your book. Well, not completely kind of related. I asked you when we met in Denver, but I just want to hear, or maybe you can say that's for another conversation with me and my wife together but how much have you seen mental health crises send people into being done with religion or a faith crisis? How much is that?

Daryl:

a phenomenon. I think that there's probably a circular or reciprocal relationship, I think for some people they have mental health concerns. They're wondering where God is in all of this and it leads to faith deconstruction, right. So it could be like depression, anxiety, persistent chronic conditions. That kind of erodes their mental health.

Randy:

Or even like manic episodes right where you have delusions about God.

Daryl:

Absolutely, where you have delusions, absolutely, absolutely. And then, on the other hand, I think sometimes religious deconstruction or leaving religion or changing religion can undermine your religious well or sorry, your mental health and your, your, your mental wellbeing. I mean, we have some data where we looked at different types of duns. So we've got duns that are fully discontinued and then there are duns that are still practicing, like showing up to church, doing things like that. We actually found that the duns that were still practicing, that were in church, had poorer mental health and that completely shocked us. We thought, well, if you're in church, you know there's all these mental health benefits and health benefits of going to church and of being religious. But that just wasn't the case for duns, because the cognitive dissonance of no longer identifying as religious but still acting and behaving and being surrounded by people who are, is enough to erode your mental health and well-being.

Kyle:

That's interesting religious residue thing. It reminded me of a conversation I recently had with Carrie Lattiser, who's the director of the Post-Evangelical Collective, which is kind of a consortium of churches that aren't evangelical anymore and trying to figure out what else to do, and she called religion an operating system. And I'm sure this is not original but it struck me and it really jobbed, I think, with a lot of what you're talking about in that chapter, both the positive and negative residue that stick around for people who have left religion. So I just wondered if you think that is an apt metaphor, because for me it's like it jives a lot with a lot of the epistemic training too.

Kyle:

Like we talk a lot about our web of beliefs and how it's so much easier to change the ones on the periphery than it is the ones closer to the middle. And it's almost like uninstalling and reinstalling a program is one thing that I can conceive of if I have deconverted. But um, there's a fundamental basis, basic like structure or framework that that religion has given me for conceiving of the world, and I don't even know where to start there. Like I can't even conceive of an alternative because it's the thing that I've been running on and it results in a situation which you talk about at the end of your book, that when that thing finally is unearthed, and along with it goes so many of these deep fundamental commitments about the world and your place in it, you end up almost like back where a child is in some ways having to consider death for the first time for example yeah, absolutely so.

Daryl:

I think an operating system is a great term if that's helpful. Other terms that people have used are working models, or in psychology we say schema. So a schema is just like a mental framework for kind of understanding the world. It's like glasses or the lens through which you see the world. And one thing we know about schemas is they're notoriously resistant to change. They're so hard to change. And so if you've had a schema, if you've had a way of interpreting the entire world, your entire life, and then you're trying to find a new way, it's just really, really hard to see the world in a different way. Right, it's like learning a new language. You're always going to kind of have your native language or your mother tongue. It's going to be very hard to transition out of that. We also tongue. It's gonna be very hard to to, you know to, to transition out of that.

Daryl:

We also know that it's sticky because, um, oftentimes we're embedded in social, in social settings where other people are religious, and then other times we know it's um sticky because a lot of religion involves ritualized behaviors that become habits. So this one is the the where's my toothpaste phenomenon. So my wife and I have always had the toothpaste on my, my drawer in the bathroom for like the past 12 years. A few months ago, we we switch things up in our bathroom. We moved the toothpaste to her side of the cabinet. Okay, every, every morning and every night when we're brushing our teeth, if you ask me where's the toothpaste, I will tell you it's on my wife's side. But, without fail, and I'm going to do the same thing tonight when I'm going to grab the toothpaste, I'm going to grab from my drawer, because it's just been such a habit, right, and it's like oh, I know it's over there, but it's just so habitualized. So those things are just hard, they're trenches in our brain, they're deep grooves that are really hard to get out of.

Randy:

So we're just going to, you know, go through your book a little bit here, because you said some things that I found compelling and interesting.

Randy:

In chapter five, when you're talking about the finding meaning in the existential chasm of leaving religion, you seem to say and you say it in kind of a coy way that I know, I kind of think you don't think this, but you seem to say that certainty can make your life feel more meaningful, and maybe that feel is the best part of it, that it feels more meaningful. Whether it is or not, I don't know, and I found the opposite of that right. So, as I've let go of certainty and held on to humility and epistemic humility and trying to understand that I don't know what I believe or that what I believe doesn't equate to things that I know empirically, I found great comfort in that. I found profound peace, I found less restlessness. I could go on for a while about what letting go of certainty in my religious world and my spirituality has done for me, and they're mostly all good. What do you mean when you say that certainty makes life feel more meaningful?

Daryl:

Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say that is phenomenal that you have found that place, because it and I mean this with all sincerity I think that's the goal. I think that's the goal of actually traversing the existential chasm. I think that getting to the other side is actually making friends with uncertainty, it's making friends with the unknown, it's embracing the awe, the wonder, the mystery, the curiosity and the humility and at the end of the day, in an honest and deeply thought through second eye of the day, of saying like yeah, I don't know, but in a very different way than than just like I don't know and it doesn't matter. But on the other side of like are you kidding me, man? I've been thinking about this stuff for 15 years, I just don't know and I'm okay with that. So that's where I want to start is by saying I think that's one of the goals.

Daryl:

And so when you're first approaching the existential chasm and by the existential chasm I mean having to face all of your existential fears afresh, without the comforting beliefs of your previous religious worldview or operating system or schema that's terrifying. And in the moment, certainty feels more meaningful. You want to cling to something to answer those questions, because many people haven't developed the requisite critical thinking skills to address those concerns and so they often feel anger and guilt and shame and anxiety and fear and all these negative emotions and, like you were just saying, they also feel awe and wonder and curiosity and expansiveness. If they can get across, if they can actually take a hard look and accept these existential realities for what they are and accept these existential realities for what they are, then it opens them up into an expansiveness that perhaps they've never seen before.

Daryl:

And in fact I would make a bid that you would say oh, I wouldn't change it, I wouldn't go back Like I am much happier, not like happier all the time, positive, affect wise, but like I am more satisfied or content with this humility and this not knowing, in this uncertainty. And that's the goal of where, of where to get folks. And and if folks don't quite understand, I'm not saying that nothing has meaning, that everything is relative, that I'm not saying that what I'm more saying is making friends with the, with our human finitude and limitations of what it means to be human, and admitting there are just things we don't know, and resting in that comfort. Yeah yeah.

Randy:

So then, going all the way to the end of your book, you have a subheading that says the dark side of doubt and you talk about maybe we can go too far in our humility. Can you bring us into that a little bit? That'd have me intrigued.

Daryl:

Yeah. So, like we were kind of alluding to earlier, kind of one of the other things I study is humility, and most researchers are quick to sing humility's praises, myself included. I wrote a book on it. I think humility is great.

Daryl:

I think we should practice humility with much more regularity and intention than we are, amen and intention than we are.

Daryl:

And I think that if we're going to be truly humble, especially about existential topics, we ourselves will incur sometimes a cost to our well-being, because if we're certain, that provides us a lot more well-being. But admitting that we don't know, admitting that we might be wrong about what happens in the afterlife or what the meaning of life is, admitting that we don't wrong about what happens in the afterlife or what the meaning of life is, admitting that we don't have all the answers, that actually does heighten our anxiety and erode our well-being. I personally think that's a cost worth paying, because I think that that's the only move of integrity is to say how do I know, like I'm not sure, what happens next. I'm open to those things. Of course I could be wrong, and that's why I say value is cultivating this existential distress, tolerance of realizing we could be wrong. But that's okay because the benefits of that humility far outweigh the personal discomfort or disequilibrium we might feel by admitting that we don't know everything.

Kyle:

So minor philosophical quibble here. What do psychologists mean by phrases like well-being? Because it might sound to some of us on the other side of that divide that you just described well-being, because if it is ultimately to your credit to be honest about your existential situation, then you must really believe that that's in your best interest. So you must mean something else by well-being. Is well-being like equivalent to heightened anxiety or something like that?

Daryl:

Yeah, so for well-being we might say things like a feeling of a sense of peace and comfort from one's religious beliefs, or a sense of kind of lasting happiness. So probably a little bit more to the hedonic side of wellbeing than necessarily the eudaimonic side, uh, that that I tend to to nudge people towards. I think, he hedonic wellbeing is is overinflated and a little bit vapid. I tend to nudge people more towards go towards eudaimonia, eudaimonia, right. Go towards meaning.

Kyle:

What's that thing you're talking about there, euda, what Aristotle was right and John Stuart Mill was wrong?

Daryl:

Yeah, yeah. So basically don't, don't worry so much about happiness, worry a little bit more about meaning and purpose, you know. Worry a little bit more about doing right, doing good, being moral.

Kyle:

They're fundamentally competing conceptions of happiness.

Randy:

Someday we're going to have a whole series on morality. We've been meaning to do that. I don't believe you, but we'll see. I'm, I'm, I'm here for it. Um little side note then sidebar Um, can you talk about the difference between happiness and meaning, or meaningfulness, perhaps, darrell?

Daryl:

Yeah, so I mean, with happiness, we're thinking about things that feel good, things that are pleasurable or bring you pleasure, things that, um, uh, you know, like I don't know. For me, like eating ice cream that that makes me happy, um, it's a positive affect, joy, you know those emotional expressions, um. The problem with happiness, though, is it runs, runs out, and it's this hedonic wellbeing. The philosophers call it, but psychologists have identified something called the hedonic treadmill, and that means, as soon as I reach a certain level of happiness, it's not enough, because I compare myself to other people and I adapt to how happy I am, so I'm always wanting more.

Daryl:

On the flip side, we have meaning and meaning. Is this idea that, on the flip side, we have meaning and meaning? Is this this idea that things make sense, that I have significance, I have purpose, um, that what I'm doing is aligned with my values, and so, uh, meaning doesn't always feel good, right? So, like it might be, you know, it might be meaningful for me to make sure that I stay healthy, so I'm around a long time for my partner, right? So my, my wife knows that she can count on me because I'm not dying early of a, you know, heart related condition. So I'm going to get up early and go run in the rain five miles, and does that feel good? Do I feel happy? Not at all. But is that aligned with my values? Is that meaningful to me? It is so the way people can mostly understand this.

Daryl:

We don't have kids, but most people who have kids get this right away. They often say being a parent, especially of a young child, doesn't always bring you happiness, but it brings you meaning. Like when you're up you know multiple times in the middle of the night you're not like, oh man, I am happy right now, but oftentimes they'll say hey this was super meaningful meaningful.

Randy:

Yeah, this is not in the moment, not in the moment, but you can reflect back, that's right. Yeah, yeah, totally reflect back, as as they get sometimes in the moment, sometimes like, oh yeah, that's happened in the past couple days actually good um, so you talk about a meaning penalty when people leave religion.

Kyle:

Can you tell us what that means, and why is religion so good at providing meaning better, better than other things, such that there would be this penalty?

Daryl:

Yeah, so it's been some interesting research that religious meaning is actually rated by people as more meaningful. So if you do something for a religious cause, like, it just seems more meaningful. So like, lighting a candle for to light a room is fine, but lighting a candle in memory of a loved one, like that's super meaningful, right? If I have to skip your birthday party because I have to work late, you're kind of going to be pissed off at me. If I have to skip your birthday party because I'm ministering to somebody, right, then that's a little bit more meaningful.

Daryl:

We also know, though, that meaning or, I'm sorry, religion is kind of an ultimate meaning system, because it checks all of the different existential boxes, like it provides us with structure, it helps us bridge isolation, it gives us an identity, it solves this nagging problem of death, and so, after people leave religion, life just feels a little bit less meaningful, and we have we have some data that suggests that this is the case. They kind of look a little bit like people who have never been religious. I mean, imagine if you had this belief in which the creator of the entire universe dwelled inside of you and had a plan for your life, and you were aligned with this big cosmic plan. That's way more meaningful than to be like. I'm just kind of this blob of protoplasm. I'm this bag of bones marching inevitably towards the icy grip of death, and my ultimate finality will be coming my way in probably 40 years less if I keep eating Chipotle burritos. You know what's this all for? No one's going to remember me. That feels a little bit less meaningful to folks.

Kyle:

Yeah, so does this result change much or at all, depending on how you phrase the question in your surveys?

Daryl:

It could. What did you have in mind?

Kyle:

It's one of those results that makes my flag go. I'm just a little suspicious of it because, having long since deconstructed and knowing lots of folks who both have done that, but also lifelong atheists we don't have a hard time finding meaning in things. It looked quite different, and you talk about that a lot, and I personally don't experience it, which is not good evidence, I know. So I'm just curious if, like you, were to phrase the question differently, or how do you control for what people mean by meaningfulness?

Daryl:

Yeah, no, I mean. I mean this is a good question and let me contextualize it. Everybody is still well above the, the, the midpoint for meaning. So no matter who you ask, they'd still say, oh yeah, my, my life is like plenty meaningful, and the sources of meaning don't change that much. Like for most people, the biggest source of meaning in life is going to be family, like, or relationships or other people are almost always the biggest sources of meaning and usually in the top five, like work is there as well, at least in like many developed countries.

Daryl:

So it's it, the, the effect is not huge, right, it's not like. Oh man, you know my friend that goes to church. They're like so meaningful and I'm like in this nihilistic depression all the time. It's not a huge difference. And so when we're looking at meaning, we use just kind of like a well-established scale that says, like I know my life's purpose, like I have a clear sense of what makes my life meaningful, my life feels meaningful, just like a couple items, just on kind of global perceptions of meaning and, like I mentioned, it's not a huge difference and most people are still well above midpoint.

Kyle:

And it ticks back up over time, right? Did I remember that right from your book? So the sense of meaningfulness gets better, is that right?

Daryl:

Yeah, that's something that we're still looking into. It is possible that kind of you know, we do know that residue kind of decays over time, so kind of like the longer you've been away from religion, the less sticky it is. So like if, like, the longer you've been away from religion, the less sticky it is. So like if you, if you've, you know, left religion a couple months or a couple of years ago, it's going to be much stickier than if you've left, like a decade ago.

Kyle:

Um you, you know where your toothpaste is. I just remember you talking about how this nihilism thing can't last. Oh, that's exactly right. It's just not going to work.

Daryl:

Yeah, that's exactly right, like if, if people feel nihilistic, no one stays there forever because it really is not pragmatic, it's absolutely a layover, it's not a destination. People kind of just watch that. You just can't do that much, your German accent starts to fall off.

Kyle:

I mean, it's just awful. So I'm curious what you think about thinking about this meaning-making tendency that humans have. What do you think about the epistemic consequences of that? You didn't address this directly in the chapter, but I recall during COVID reading and in one case even writing think pieces about how this tendency can get us into trouble because we start looking around for meaning when we're bombarded with all sorts of data that we don't know how to process and we start inventing conspiracy theories, for example. So has your research revealed any significant effects on, for example, susceptibility? Your research revealed any significant effects on, for example, susceptibility to misinformation, maybe for folks who have left religion?

Daryl:

Yeah, that's a great question. So, by and large, on average, our tendency to make meaning of the human tendency to be meaning makers is pretty adaptive, right. Like we can kind of make sense of the world around us, we can make predictions about what's going to happen, we can organize things into useful bits of information so we can make decisions. Then we're going to apply this meaning-making where we don't need it anymore. So sometimes I think that this existential crisis that many of us find ourselves in is a little bit of a curse of privilege or luxury, right? So if we're constantly being chased by predators or trying to figure out where our food is coming from, or trying to figure out where we're sleeping tonight and where it's safe, we already know what the meaning of our life is. It's those things Avoid the predators, find the food, get the shelter. If all of our needs are met and our brain is still trying to solve the problem of how do I make meaning, we're going to start looking for ways to make meaning and so, like you said, we can over-apply our need to make meaning into places where it's just very simple and we don't need to do that, I think. Why?

Daryl:

People who might be predisposed to certain types of religious orientations might potentially be more likely to believe conspiracies is. If you're already used to a worldview belief where you have to believe impossible things, then applying that elsewhere does two things. First of all, it doesn't seem so outlandish that there would be impossible things that are true, right, that other people would deny Cause. If you're like no, no, no, there is a heaven, and other people like that seems ridiculous to me, or no, there are miracles. Or the earth was created in six days, and people are like there's evidence to the contrary. You're like no, I.

Daryl:

So the first thing you can do is you can believe in possible things. And the second is, with certain religious groups, that belief often grants you a special status. Right, you're extra special if you have that belief, like you're part of the chosen, if you kind of know what's really going on behind the scenes and so there is some type of appeal about you. Know, if I, by me knowing this thing that no one else knows, I'm kind of set apart and I'm kind of special. And what's so fascinating about this is research has revealed that the people that are most susceptible to conspiracy theories are actually not the people who are the most gullible. It's the people who are the most afraid of being gullible, so it's the people who are like I don't want to be gullible, so I am going to believe in. Fill in the blank conspiracy theory.

Kyle:

Returning to the existential chasm real quick. So while I was reading about that in your book, I was reminded how sharply people's experience of religion can diverge. So for some, like myself and lots of my friends, religion actually provides an occasion for confronting existential chasm like issues. So you give a list in your book. You include things like freedom, isolation, identity, death, meaninglessness. These are all things that I include in my Intro to Philosophy course, and much of that is because of my religious experience.

Kyle:

The way I received it and practiced it asked me to confront those things and then kept the pressure on to continue confronting those things and then, of course, studying philosophy like heightened that by like a hundred. But for lots of other folks probably the majority it instead religion provides a framework whereby those issues could just be tidally avoided like we don't do that at all. And so for those folks, when they leave religion later in life, they end up, like I said before, with this almost childlike orientation towards those issues, realizing almost for the first time what meaninglessness feels like, or what you know, as Nietzsche said, staring into the void feels like. Or, as one of my favorite sitcoms, the Good Place, has it, you have this character who's like millions of years old, but for the first time is considering this and suddenly they're like a human kid right Facing up to their own mortality. So I guess my question here is are there any traits that you think separate these diverging experiences of religion?

Daryl:

question. So you know, one of the ways that my colleagues and I have kind of conceptualized approaches to religion and I've kind of alluded to this a little, a little bit both in the book and then in our conversation is there's there's more of like security focused religious beliefs and growth oriented religious beliefs. And so security focused beliefs are about about certainty, about closure, about getting it right, about knowing for sure, even if it means that you're a little bit prejudiced towards other people and intolerant of other viewpoints. Those are the people for whom they probably haven't given it much thought other than just ascribing to whatever they were taught to kind of thwart the fear of existential anxiety that comes from contemplating these realities.

Daryl:

Growth-focused people they've probably wrestled with this. So it sounds like you're a little bit more of a growth-focused person. You've wrestled with this stuff before. Like you said, your religion gave rise to occasions for you to wrestle with these ideas, and so, if you remove the religion, it's not the first time you've thought about these things. And so, with folks with more of a growth orientation, they're a little bit more open-minded, they're a little bit more curious, probably open to new experiences. They're going to be more likely to engage this with curiosity and probably be a little bit more equipped to handle this, as opposed to more of the childlike response of oh my gosh, I had a sure thing with my worldview. It got removed, and now I'm just kind of standing here empty handed and without any skills.

Kyle:

That's interesting. Yeah, it seems like in that first model I think you called it the security they still talk about things like growth, but growth means you become more and more informed about the answers of your framework to these kinds of questions, so that you never actually have to genuinely confront them.

Daryl:

That's exactly it. Yeah, I love how you put that. They say like growing in my faith or deepening my faith really means just kind of like doubling down on my certainty and, you know, marshalling more defenses or answers if I'm ever questioned for why I believe what I believe.

Kyle:

Yeah, right. So last question about this existential thing. Earlier, you said and I said we're going to come back to this we need to cultivate an existential distress tolerance. How the hell do we do that? I know how I did it and I cannot recommend that everyone listening to this gets a PhD in philosophy. So how does the average, actual, normal person who doesn't want to spend endless hours reading Socrates and Nietzsche develop that practically?

Daryl:

Well, I mean, all jesting aside, you're not too far off. Not everyone has to get a PhD, but I do think that exposure does help, right. So I do think that actually taking time and contemplating and wrestling and thinking about setting aside time and thinking about these existential concerns to allow yourself the ability to start responding to and developing the epistemic muscles to respond to these types of concerns is important. If you're always going to avoid it, you're never going to be able to start to cultivate that tolerance Once you give yourself opportunities to practice engaging it.

Daryl:

I think what you do is you kind of notice what is going on inside of you and a lot of times people will panic, They'll have like this big emotional reaction, but it's just emotional reaction, like it's not. Like you know, emotions can be discomforting, emotions can be alarming, they can alert us to threats in the environment, but they themselves are not threatening, they themselves are not the problem, kind of cognitively, uh, kind of coming to terms with the fact that these are realities, right, they're just truths to be accepted rather than threats, or they're facts and not fears, um, I think, realizing that and then assembling just kind of a tentative response to them, um, that that acknowledges them as realities and acknowledges them in an accepting way is a good start.

Randy:

Yeah, it sounds.

Kyle:

I know very little about psychology, so if this is really stupid, I'm sorry. It sounds a little bit like what I've heard about cognitive behavioral therapy, which, when I read about that, sounded a lot like stoicism.

Daryl:

There are some overlaps. There are some overlaps.

Randy:

Yeah, I mean, I feel like, even as a religious person, a pastor you know me that cultivating an existential distress tolerance for me maybe started to happen when I forced myself to stop giving trite religious answers to tragic circumstances and I just decided to sit with and be a better pastor, which is also being a better Christian, which I think is also being a better human, which is just like when I'm sitting with a young couple who just lost their baby and now is holding their 24-week-old stillborn baby that the wife had to deliver dead. Um, we're holding them in our arms and, instead of rushing to a trite, spiritualized explanation or corny saying that might make them feel better, actually just sitting there and weeping with them yeah, Teaches me how to sit in existential distress, while also being like being present with them can actually teach me in in those moments. Not just minister to them is what I'm saying at all, you know a hundred percent, a hundred percent.

Daryl:

What I mean the the very, the very first book, um, I wrote, I co-wrote with my wife, and it was about finding meaning in the midst of suffering, and we talk about. What people really want is a vulnerable compassion. They want you to be vulnerable with them in their time of need and be compassionate to them. They don't want the trite platitudes, they don't want the corny religious phrases. What's so shocking or insightful to me is that most world religions were oriented around the question of human suffering. So Buddhism is about just acknowledging that life is suffering. Hinduism is about escaping the suffering.

Daryl:

The first chronological book in the Christian Bible was Job, and it was about this person who was suffering and whether or not his suffering was a cosmic joke. What I love. I don't know that, I've heard it any better than the way Richard Rohr puts it and he says that in Christ's crucifixion we have evidence that God suffers with us, and in Christ's resurrection we have evidence that love will conquer all right, that love will win out at the end of the day. And so there's something very beautiful about you know. He offers no explanation for theodicy right, the problem of evil, and instead says all we can take comfort in is knowing that God suffers alongside of us. Yeah.

Daryl:

That's about the. That's about the best. That's about the best we have.

Randy:

Yep, which is my favorite kind of theodicy, which isn't really one to begin with, and I'll just tell my co-host to like turn off his mind about the evidence word and all that stuff.

Daryl:

Yes, yes, of course.

Randy:

Almost done here, daryl. We're almost done In chapter six, though I found it which is crafting a new identity. I found it fascinating when he talked about how religious duns have this propensity to exchange one form of fundamentalism for another, which I find in just in profound ways among the deconstructing crowd in in myself and many, many people who say I'm done with that form of religion or I'm done with that way of believing. Something now moved over here and all of a sudden, boom, you get an another form of fundamentalism. How do we notice that within ourselves? Why does that happen and how do we avoid it?

Daryl:

yeah, so it's. It's this great William James quote. You know, a great number of people think they're thinking when they're merely rearranging their prejudices and so. And so you see people who say I'm leaving conservative fundamental evangelicalism because they were so intolerant to people who didn't believe like they did, and they have this ideological purity and then they go to become super politically left-leaning and they, you know, are intolerant to people who don't believe like them and, you know, insular and have ideological purity.

Daryl:

I think it's a. It's a if you were raised in a way, in a style of believing that you feel like that's the only authentic way and style of believing it's just going to feel like at home, it's just going to feel comfortable there, and I think for many people there's a personality structure that's kind of drawn towards that style of believing, and so we just need to guard against the fact that any time we think we're absolutely right and the other team is absolutely wrong, that should absolutely be a red flag. The second one is and this one's a hard one to swallow I call this the creep of moral sacralization, and this is the idea that if there there are absolutely moral imperatives, like things that are just absolutely morally wrong. But if everything that you believe is absolutely morally, you are absolutely morally sure about it and no one else can have another opinion, it's possible that you're not super intellectually or epistemically humble about those things. Right, that's another red flag If you can't even see that there could be another perspective on this. And so I think what we guard, the way we guard against this, is the way that we are so under-practiced in the United States right now, and that is to cultivate social diversity in our groups.

Daryl:

So many people this is so sad lost family or friends or cut out family or friends or were cut out by family and friends after the 2016 election and then have just continued to perpetuate that. And so we've created these ideological echo chambers where we think the entire world thinks like we do. So we've created these ideological echo chambers where we think the entire world thinks like we do. Our news is cultivated and given to us in a way we think only reasonable people think like we do. And then we're surprised when we encounter someone whom we love, maybe who raised us or who were raised alongside of us, who don't believe the way we do, and we have no ability to interact with them.

Daryl:

And if you're even a person of faith, newsflash. No one cares what you believe if you're interpersonally a jerk and you can't withstand difference and tolerate people who are ideologically or socially or relationally dissimilar than you are. And so we need to expose ourselves to different information. We need to have actual, authentic friendships with people who are different from us. Don't just have like your token conservative friend and you're like oh look at me, I'm so liberal and progressive, I'm open-minded. But actually seek out the way that other people might hold beliefs that are different than yours and treat them charitably. Try to see why they hold their beliefs and realize that this is just a natural human tendency.

Randy:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it resonated with me so deeply. I find myself in now these progressive Christian circles that I'm in post-evangelical collective and other things, and I've been in rooms where somebody's saying something that we as the movement need to do and if we don't do this we're losing our way and we've lost all our credibility. And I'm sitting there quiet because I'm like I don't think I agree with that. I don't think it's that black and white, but I think if I said something I'd be seen as a bad progressive Christian and not as a legitimate progressive Christian. To me that sounds like a form of fundamentalism.

Daryl:

Yeah, it is, it's fundamentalism just wearing a different hat, right? It's just like, oh look, we're totally different now. And so what I tell people is oftentimes the style of their belief hasn't changed, it's just the content. And so if they're thinking that they've undergone some type of religious evolution, it's likely that they haven't. They've just swapped out kind of what their idol is or they've swapped out the content of their belief, but really they're just kind of operating in the same way.

Randy:

Yeah, and one of the things that you said that really resonated, that I was trying to speak to in a very awkward way, is that if you find yourself that you're expected from the leaders of this movement that you're part of that, you have to agree with 95% or 99% of everything that we say. You've you've just exchanged one set of fundamentalism for the other. That is so common in any movement, right Like any in any movement. We have to be convinced that this is all right.

Daryl:

Absolutely, and you have to signal it publicly all the time like signal that you're still, that you're enough, signal that you're really on board with this next thing, this next thing, this next thing. It's exhausting and we can't do it. And, like you said, that is a concern and that's a red flag that you should pause and say I should be able to have individual differences, I should be able to have variability, there should be ideological heterogeneity here and I can still be part of the group. And if not, I'm not sure that I want to be part of a group that demands this type of ideological purity.

Kyle:

Yes, I will say and this might be getting me in some hot water if you can't find your way to that just yet but you don't want to be that conservative kind of fundamentalist. Being a progressive fundamentalist is better. It is not better for you, but it is better for the world, like demonstrably way better.

Randy:

That is maybe a separate conversation, sure sure, I would concede that, of course, but I don't want to be a fundamentalist.

Kyle:

No, no, but that's a hard road. Yeah, that is a hard road Again.

Randy:

A couple more questions, Daryl, In that same chapter you advocate for religious duns to learn to move from religious mandated moral behaviors to making value-based decisions. I want to say that's another thing that we people, those of us who have kind of disassembled and remodeled our spirituality and our faith and our religion, can deeply identify with as well. Would you agree with that, and what do you mean by saying let's move from religiously mandated moral behaviors into making value-based decisions?

Daryl:

Yeah, I think a lot of people externalize the responsibility for their decisions, and it's easy when it's like, well, religion told me I can't do this, religion told me I can't do that, I have to do this.

Daryl:

And then, once that goes away, they're kind of in this moral confusion, right, they're like, well, I'm not quite sure what to do, and so sometimes they just feel like they do whatever they want. Yeah, but that also doesn't work. Like you know, in societies where there's no religion, people are still plenty moral, and so shifting into taking responsibility for one's actions and saying the way that I'm going to craft a moral way forward, a life well-lived, a meaningful life, is to discern what are my values and then to live according to those. And what's fascinating is some of those values might have been influenced or might resemble your religious values. You might actually, at the end of the day, say you know what religion told me, kind of these things, and some of these are worth keeping. Now, these parts aren't, but these parts are, and so it's almost like taking ownership or responsibility over one's life rather than just reacting or acting in response to an external set of values.

Randy:

And what's the difference in your estimation, Daryl, between values and beliefs?

Daryl:

Daryl, between values and beliefs. So values are things that I'm going to enact because I find them as kind of orienting life principles, and so if I think things like, you know, charity towards other people or humility, or I mean for me, when my brother passed away, he was one of the most generous people I met, I'd ever known, and so I've honestly and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not very good at it I try to be a generous person, and so that's like a value that I that I hold, um, I don't really have to believe in, in generosity. I mean, I can kind of I guess down deep. I think generosity is like a good idea and that's why I'm doing it, but it's more of like an orienting um way for me to live my life.

Randy:

And a belief. How is that different than the value, then?

Daryl:

Then a belief would be something like well, I believe that God exists, or I believe that humans are generally good, but I'm not sure that there's a value that goes behind that, Because I can believe that humans are good and then I can still take advantage of them because I'm like, oh, humans are so good, but my value would be I believe humans are good and therefore I'm going to act with charity towards them. I'm like, oh, humans are so good, but my value would be I believe humans are good and therefore I'm going to act with charity towards them, I'm going to act with humility towards them, I'm going to act with gratitude toward them. So it's more of a way to orient my actions as opposed to just kind of like a cognitive assertion. Perfect, Thank you. Good.

Kyle:

Last question, at least for me and I know it's a big one I don't expect you to have a definitive answer to it when do you think American religion is headed? So it may be a decade, decade and a half ago it seemed kind of in vogue to sit for people to say at least people to say things like American religion is going the way of Europe, that we're just a few decades behind Europe. You can, you can see, you know, the next 40, 50 years of here by looking at, like France or something, or the UK. Maybe that doesn't seem as uh compelling to me anymore, frankly, after the last several years. So I'm curious what your thoughts on it, having traced some of the trajectory of how people are responding to your surveys for several years, what's your, what's your take?

Daryl:

Yeah, no, this is a great question, and I've heard the exact same thing, and I've actually had very smart people tell me to my face that what I'm about to tell you is absolutely wrong, and that they're absolutely convinced. We are just a few years behind Canada and just a couple of decades behind Europe, and so I'll tell you my totally wrong opinion in the court of public opinion. I would not be surprised if we are entering a period that was similar to the great awakening, in which we are actually experiencing a significant spiritual evolution in the United States, and so I think that we're seeing a big shift of people who are, who are de-identifying from religion, but their spiritual yearnings are not changing. In fact, if anything, they're freed up to kind of more vigorously pursue creative expansions and expressions of their spirituality outside of traditional religious structures. So I would not be surprised that in the next couple of decades we see a complete evolution of what the church might look like in the United States, what spiritual engagement looks like in the United States, and I think that we're going to see a form of spirituality and a spiritual yearning and spiritual meaning making that that does not slow, that does not wane.

Daryl:

I think that there's a hunger for it and I think that we're going to be quite surprised at what this next um, this next iteration of spirituality and religion would look like. So to me this seems like like kind of like a turning point in American culture. I could be completely wrong. Lots of sociologists have told me on many occasions with great uh enthusiasm and in public settings that I'm completely wrong. So I have the humility, I've got the humility to acknowledge I could be completely wrong and maybe I just I want it to look different. So maybe I'm reading my own bias into it, but I would not be surprised with some of the data that people are actually still pretty spiritually hungry.

Randy:

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, all right. My last question Um, you said you had two lovely things to say at the very end of the book. It was like the last couple of chapters and I would love to hear you just kind of bring us into what is behind those statements. At the end of the book, you say first that a good life is one that is value, aligned, authentic and centered on improving the well-being of others. A good life is one that is value, aligned, authentic and centered on improving the well-being of others. Let's start there. Can you flesh that out? What does that look like in real life, daryl?

Daryl:

Yeah, I think what that looks like is and I say this with a deep sense of respect, and I'm not, I say this with no judgment. I say this as someone who has gone through deconstruction. Oftentimes, deconstruction can be very inward focused.

Daryl:

It can be very individualistic and it can be very um, it can narrow your focus, and rightfully so. All of those things are fine. I'm not making judgment statements about that, but that's but. But that's not a full life. And so I think a full life is one in which we can transcend ourselves. It's one in which we actually deeply care about the wellbeing of others, in which we can transcend ourselves. It's one in which we actually deeply care about the well-being of others, in which we realize my well-being is tied to the well-being of other people, and I can't flourish unless my community is flourishing, unless those around me are flourishing.

Daryl:

And one of the most sure pathways to meaning, with or without religion, is really improving the lives of other people. Is what can I do to make the world more just, more loving, more fair, more equitable? What can I do to improve the lives of other people? If most people can say that they've dedicated their lives towards that, they'll look back and say that was a meaningful life. I I had purpose, I felt like it was generative, I didn't just live for myself. So it's really about finding self-transcendence in a reliable way.

Randy:

And then the second thing you said was that a core axiom guiding your work is that an honest engagement with existential realities is the only pathway toward flourishing. I'm going to say that again for people listening A core axiom getting your work is that an honest engagement with existential realities is the only pathway toward flourishing. Explain that for us, please.

Daryl:

Yeah, this is. I have this written down. This is almost like my mission statement.

Daryl:

I think that if we want to actually have a life well lived, if we want to approach what human flourishing actually could be in our lifetime, we have to embrace our human limitations.

Daryl:

We have to acknowledge the finitude of what it means to be human. And the way we do that is we have to come to peace and accept the fact that we live in a world without structure. We're isolated from one another. We're navigating our own identity throughout our entire life. We're going to die one day and we have to contend with the threat of meaninglessness. We have to come to terms with those realities. If we ignore them, if we avoid them, we're going to be reactionary, and that leads to aggression and prejudice and ideologically motivated violence. But if we can come to terms with those, we're able to craft a more thoughtful response, that that are more based on the ways we want to live, on our values, on on being communal than on being reactionary. So so to me, the only way we can approach an authentic life of integrity and flourishing is by coming to terms with actually what it means to be human first to terms with actually what it means to be human first.

Randy:

That's good stuff, Daryl Sheesh. Our time is up, but don't be surprised if I send you another email in a little while. Here the book again is Done how to Flourish After Leaving Religion and I'm excited that we got a chance to talk about this, because we talk about, like Kyle said, all the nuns and the deconstructing, but not a lot about the people who have just said I'm done with religion, I can't do it anymore, and I know we have some of you listeners who deeply identify with that, or are there exactly? So thank you, Daryl, for being concerned about this and just helping guide our way through how to interact and how to embody flourishing when you're done with religion.

Daryl:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Randy:

Thanks for listening to a pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. We hope you're enjoying these conversations. Help us continue to create compelling content and reach a wider audience by supporting us at patreoncom. Slash apastorandaphilosopher, where you can get bonus content, extra perks and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle:

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Randy:

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Kyle:

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Kyle Whitaker

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Randy Knie

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