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When I think back on my youth in the church, one moment stands out as both promise and foreshadowing. I was seen as a future preacher, a young man marked for ministry. For a time, I believed it myself. But the deeper I went, the more I realized that what felt powerful in the moment was often more performance than practice, more spectacle than substance.
The sermon that best names this journey for me is R. G. Lee’s Payday Someday. Its theme was divine judgment, but for me it has come to symbolize something else: the day when the contradictions of my inherited faith could no longer be ignored. My “payday” was not the wrath of God but the reckoning between belief and honesty, between the religion I was given and the one I have chosen.
The Allure of the Spiritual
That Sunday night in my youth group still lingers in memory. We transformed the sanctuary into an old-time tent revival, stringing lights across the ceiling to mimic canvas, singing hymns chosen for their fire-and-brimstone cadence. When it came time to preach, I stepped forward with a copy of R. G. Lee’s famous sermon Payday Someday in my hands. In a sudden flourish, I tossed the script aside and delivered the sermon from memory. Fear was my engine, but in the moment it sounded like conviction. The band swelled at the end, I called for repentance and opened the altar for prayer. At my word, people came forward.
It was exhilarating. It was terrifying. For many, it was confirmation that I was destined for ministry. For me, it was the first and last time I would preach. My grandpa even recorded it, replaying it in his office like a proud archive. I couldn’t bear to watch. It felt like watching the earliest videos of my teaching — all nerves and performance, painful to revisit.
At the time, though, it felt real. That was the allure of evangelical spirituality: the rush of performance, the drama of the altar call, the theater of urgency. Lee’s words captured it perfectly: “Pay-day Someday is written in the constitution of God’s universe.” The sermon promised a reckoning, delivered with thunder, and in echoing those words I felt, for a moment, like I was channeling something beyond myself.
Looking back, I can see why it worked. Spirituality in that form gave me a role, a voice, a sense of belonging in a community that wanted me to embody their hope for the future. It was authentic in emotion, but it was staged in form. The lights, the music, the sermon itself — all crafted for effect, designed to move hearts through fear and feeling. That night taught me early what I would only later name: that “the spiritual,” at least as I had inherited it, relied on spectacle. It could stir, even overwhelm, but it did not sustain.
The Breaking Point
If the revival night embodied what drew me in, college revealed the cracks that would eventually drive me out. One Sunday morning in a college Sunday school class, the lesson turned to creation. Our teacher explained that a particular name in the genealogies of Adam marked the very moment when Pangea split apart into the continents we know today. He leaned on material from ministries like Answers in Genesis, which argued that Noah’s flood had catastrophically reshaped the planet and fractured the landmasses. For him, this was not speculation but confirmation: the Bible itself contained the geological key to Earth’s history.
I disagreed. What he offered as proof, I saw as inconsistency — a claim that simply did not align with observable science or the complexity of the natural world. When I voiced that, the room chilled. Soon I was branded an “educated idiot,” a phrase that carried both dismissal and insult. Not long after, the leadership roles I had held — roles that had once marked me as a future minister — were stripped away. For someone raised in a Sola Scriptura tradition, where the Bible was both literal and final, this clash exposed how brittle that foundation could be.
Looking back, I can see this as my own payday someday moment. The cognitive dissonance I had carried for years came due. The faith I had inherited could no longer be sustained without fiction, and when I tried to be honest about that, I was pushed aside. I was not alone in this kind of experience. Many who leave evangelical churches tell similar stories: the moment when rigid all-or-nothing expectations collapse under the weight of honest questioning. Scholars of deconversion note that these testimonies often mirror evangelical conversion narratives in reverse — once I was blind, now I see, retold as once I was certain, now I doubt.
For me, this was less a sudden break than a gradual erosion. Each confrontation, each inconsistency, each loss of role chipped away at the structure until finally there was nothing left to sustain. I had not stopped caring about religion, but I could no longer participate in it as if I believed what I did not. Being told to leave the church might have been meant as punishment, but by then it was a kind of release.
Another Path
Leaving the evangelical church did not mean leaving religion behind. If anything, it sent me searching more urgently. For a time, I turned to Buddhism. The simplicity of Zen appealed to me, the stripped-down promise of a practice without the weight of dogma. I thought perhaps in silence, meditation, and attention to breath I might find a form of faith that did not collapse under contradiction. But as I read further, I realized that no religion is simple. Zen, too, carried layers of ritual, tradition, and history that could not be reduced to technique.
Yet that detour opened new doors. I discovered Thomas Merton, whose Seven Storey Mountain described a Catholic monk’s search for God with the same intensity I felt in my own search for honesty. At the same time, I read Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Old Path, White Clouds, a poetic retelling of the Buddha’s life. The two books, though from very different traditions, spoke to me together. They suggested that the real depth of religion was not in spectacle or certainty but in practice, patience, and humility before mystery.
Alan Watts, too, found his way into my library. A former Episcopal priest who engaged deeply with Eastern philosophy, Watts embodied the kind of person I was looking for: someone who could live inside contradiction without trying to erase it, someone willing to face doubt with curiosity rather than fear.
What drew me to these figures was not their answers but their honesty. They did not demand that I silence my skepticism. They did not dismiss me as an “educated idiot.” Instead, they invited me into a rhythm of life where faith was less about proclamation and more about practice. Monastic hours, Benedictine rules, even the chanting of psalms — these were not emotional crescendos designed to overwhelm me but steady disciplines that carried meaning across time.
In monasteries like Saint Gregory’s in Michigan or Assumption Abbey in Missouri, I found myself welcomed even in doubt. Ora et labora — prayer and work — was not a slogan but a way of ordering life. Bells marked the hours, meals were shared in silence, psalms were chanted with patient repetition. Here was religion not as spectacle but as structure. It did not erase the contradictions, but it gave me a way to live honestly within them.
Institutions and Belonging
What I found in monasteries helped me recognize something I had already experienced elsewhere: institutions, in their varied forms, are the vessels of belonging. Churches, schools, councils, and museums may differ in purpose, but they share a common function: they discipline life, preserve memory, and bind individuals into a story larger than themselves.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim once argued that religion is less about belief than about the moral community it creates. What matters most is not the creed but the collective life it sustains. That insight has shaped how I now understand institutions. They do not need to claim supernatural sanction to be sacred. They are sacred because they give form to our shared existence.
I see this clearly in my vocation as a teacher. A school day unfolds with a rhythm not unlike liturgy: bells ring, students gather, lessons begin, discussions rise and fall. There are rituals of greeting, shared meals, closing reflections. To teach is not only to instruct but to participate in a civic priesthood, shaping citizens for a common life. My classroom, in its way, has been as much a sanctuary as any church I once served in.
Museums, too, carry this character. To serve on a museum board is to curate a community’s memory, deciding what stories will endure and what artifacts will be preserved. The gallery becomes a kind of temple where the past is made present and the present is shaped by remembrance. Walking among exhibits, I see not just objects but rituals of meaning — the ways a society worships its own history.
Even in city councils, I have felt this. Agendas, motions, votes, and roll calls may look procedural, but in their patterned repetition they resemble liturgy. They ensure that each voice has its place, that conflict is given order, that community finds direction. Hannah Arendt called this the “public sphere,” the place where human plurality becomes visible. To sit in those chambers is to feel the push and pull of Kurt Lewin’s field theory — forces of tradition and change pressing against each other, shaping the equilibrium of communal life.
These institutions are not perfect. They are fallible, bureaucratic, sometimes corrupted. But they endure, and in enduring they provide stability that spirituality alone cannot. Revival tents collapse after the crowd disperses. Emotional highs fade when the music ends. But institutions — monasteries, schools, museums, councils — hold their shape across generations. They carry us when feeling falters. They discipline us when we drift. They bind us into belonging not for a night, but for a lifetime.
Religious, Not Spiritual
Today, when I say I am religious but not spiritual, I mean something very specific. I do not mean that I hold to doctrines or supernatural claims. I mean that I value the institutions, the rituals, and the communal practices that shape human life across time. Religion, in this sense, is a human construct — a vast and evolving artwork created by generations to answer needs for belonging, memory, and meaning.
Spirituality, as I inherited it, was different. It thrived on spectacle. The revival tent — or in my case, the sanctuary hung with lights to resemble one — promised catharsis through drama. The altar call swelled with music and urgency, as if salvation depended on one more verse, one more plea. But what it offered in intensity it lacked in endurance. The emotions faded; the contradictions remained. “The spiritual” was real in feeling, but fleeting in form.
Religion, by contrast, endures because it is embodied in institutions. In monasteries, I have seen how prayer and work mark time with steadiness. In classrooms, I have experienced teaching as a liturgy of citizenship. In museums, I have felt the weight of memory curated for generations yet to come. In council chambers, I have witnessed the patterned deliberations of democracy. These are the cathedrals I inhabit now — sanctuaries not of heaven, but of human life lived together.
I am not alone in this. Many who leave evangelicalism find themselves searching for structures that honor doubt without collapsing into cynicism. Some turn to Judaism, some to Catholic or Anglican liturgies, some to secular humanism. What binds these stories together is the recognition that belief in supernatural supremacy is not what sustains us. What sustains us is practice — the habits, rituals, and institutions that give coherence to life.
This is why I am religious but not spiritual. I accept that religion is human. I even embrace it. Its contradictions no longer trouble me, because I no longer expect it to be divine. What matters is that religion, in its many forms, provides a way to live meaningfully within the limits of time. Spirituality may dazzle for a moment, but religion, in its institutional weight, carries us forward.
In Closing
I no longer believe what I once preached, but I still carry the memory of that night. The revival tent we built inside a sanctuary was more theater than truth, yet it revealed something that has stayed with me: the human need to gather, to sing, to act out our hopes in ritual form. What I left behind was the demand to call it supernatural. What I kept was the recognition that these practices matter because they are human.
For me, Payday Someday no longer signals divine judgment but a different kind of reckoning — the day I accepted that religion is not about certainty but about practice, memory, and belonging. To call myself religious but not spiritual is to honor that recognition. I have given up the promise of the revival altar, but I have not given up on religion itself. I find it in the weight of institutions, in the rhythm of liturgy, in the ways human beings create meaning together. Religion, at its best, is one of humanity’s great works of art. That is where my search has led me, and it is enough.
References
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1973). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Benedict of Nursia. (2001). The Rule of Saint Benedict (C. White, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 530)
Durkheim, É. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1912)
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books.
Hạnh, T. N. (1991). Old path white clouds: Walking in the footsteps of the Buddha. Parallax Press.
Lee, R. G. (1919). Payday Someday. (Sermon first preached 1919; later published and widely reprinted).
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics. Human Relations, 1(1), 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103
Merton, T. (1998). The seven storey mountain. Harcourt, Brace. (Original work published 1948)
Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and narrative, Volume 1 (K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Watts, A. (1957). The way of Zen. Pantheon Books.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1922)