Religious, Not Spiritual: Q&A

Introduction

This series of essays began as an interview, a set of questions about belief, practice, and meaning, but it quickly became something more personal. Each response is a small meditation on what it means to live religious but not spiritual: to value ritual, community, and reverence without appealing to the supernatural. I wrote these reflections not to argue a position, but to describe a way of being. A position grounded in attention, honesty, and care.

I come from a world where faith was a language spoken fluently, where words like salvation and devotion carried the weight of eternity. I still carry that language, though I speak it differently now. These essays are my attempt to translate that inheritance. My way to show that the forms of religion can remain meaningful even when belief changes, or is lost altogether, and that reverence need not vanish with certainty.

Q1: Origin of the religion/belief - Is it ancient or more modern?

When people ask where my belief system comes from, I usually tell them it’s modern in expression but ancient at heart. What I call being religious but not spiritual sounds paradoxical, but it really isn’t. It’s a way of reclaiming something deeply human—ritual, reverence, and community—without attaching those things to supernatural claims. I see my worldview as part of an old conversation that began when human beings first started wondering how to live meaningfully together. My ancestors might have expressed that question through prayer; I express it through reflection, teaching, and daily ritual. The impulse is the same. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim once observed, “The idea of society is the soul of religion.” What began as worship of gods, I think, was always, in some form, the worship of life itself. The worship of our shared human effort to endure.

The roots of this belief reach back to the earliest forms of community. When I read about monastic orders, ancient civic rituals, or indigenous ceremonies marking the seasons, I recognize the same structure I try to live by: rhythm, repetition, and responsibility. Those practices weren’t merely spiritual; they were practical frameworks for staying grounded in the face of mystery. I don’t see myself as inventing a new religion so much as continuing that lineage in a naturalistic key. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote that “human life is narrative in form,” and I think religions arose because people needed shared stories to make sense of their lives. What I’ve done is keep the narrative but remove the supernatural narrator. The story of meaning-making still matters, it’s just written by human hands.

My turn toward this way of life grew out of personal experience as much as study. I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, surrounded by the language of certainty. In that world, faith meant knowing. But the older I grew, the more I realized that my deepest experiences of reverence—standing in a cathedral, listening to a symphony, teaching a student something that changes them—had nothing to do with certainty at all. They were moments of attention. When belief fell away, I didn’t lose reverence; I only lost the explanations. The sense of sacredness remained. That’s when I began to understand religion as a human art form rather than divine revelation. As I wrote in my book Religious, Not Spiritual, “What I lost was belief in supernatural guarantees; what I gained was reverence for human practice.”

From an academic standpoint, my belief also draws from naturalism and humanism. Naturalism, because I see no evidence of a world beyond nature; humanism, because I believe moral and aesthetic life can flourish without appealing to one. Thinkers like Carl Sagan, William James, and Albert Einstein all shaped this orientation for me. Einstein’s reminder that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious” captures it perfectly. Mystery doesn’t have to mean miracle, it can simply mean awe before what we don’t yet understand. That humility is central to my worldview. I don’t need transcendence to feel small under the stars. I only need awareness.

So yes, my belief is modern in that it belongs to a time after traditional faith, but it’s also ancient because it rests on the oldest human practices: gathering, remembering, working, and wondering. I stand in a long line of people who sought structure without superstition and meaning without myth. My altar is the ordinary—the classroom, the museum, the family table. My creed, if I have one, is that life itself is holy enough. Theologians once said that “the heavens declare the glory of God.” I would say the same heavens declare the glory of being alive.

Q2: Tenets of faith - What are the basic beliefs/ pillars of beliefs?

When people ask what I actually believe, I usually smile because it’s easier to describe what I practice than what I profess. I don’t have a creed to recite or a list of doctrines to defend. What I have are pillars. My pillars are ways of orienting my life around meaning, attention, and responsibility. These aren’t rules handed down from above; they’re habits discovered from within. They form what I call my religious but not spiritual life: a way of living that values the form and discipline of religion without depending on supernatural claims. As Aristotle put it, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” My beliefs live in habits, not in declarations.

The first pillar is naturalism, the conviction that everything that exists belongs to one continuous order of nature. There is no “supernatural,” only the endlessly intricate natural world, filled with mystery we have not yet understood. To me, mystery is not proof of divinity; it’s proof of depth. Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.” That line feels like scripture to me. It reminds me that wonder does not require belief in another realm. The laws of physics, the turning of the seasons, and the resilience of human beings are enough to keep reverence alive.

The second pillar is ritual, which I think of as the architecture of meaning. Ritual gives time its shape. It teaches attention, humility, and gratitude. I still mark my days and seasons with familiar gestures: lighting a candle before writing, pausing before meals, tending my garden, or walking through the quiet halls of a museum. These small, repeated acts are my way of honoring life. They don’t connect me to heaven; they connect me to humanity. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim observed, ritual is how communities affirm their collective life. Even when I practice alone, I feel joined to the countless others who have used rhythm and repetition to steady themselves in a shifting world.

The third pillar is responsibility, the belief that morality is a human project, not a divine decree. Good and evil are not written in the stars; they are written in our choices. That idea might sound fragile, but to me, fragility is what gives morality its urgency. If there is no God to guarantee justice, then justice is our task alone. I take inspiration from thinkers like Immanuel Kant, who insisted that we should act only according to principles we would want to become universal law, and from Hannah Arendt, who reminded us that evil often arises from “the failure to think.” Moral life, in my view, depends on reflection, empathy, and the courage to act even without cosmic assurance.

The final pillars, community and honesty, hold everything together. Community reminds me that meaning is never a solo performance. It’s created through relationships, through the rituals and stories that bind us to one another. Honesty keeps the whole structure upright. My own deconversion from Evangelical Christianity taught me that pretending certainty where none exists is a form of dishonesty. A dishonesty not only to others, but to the self. I would rather live truthfully in mystery than falsely in certainty. As the philosopher Paul Tillich said, “Faith is the courage to accept acceptance.” For me, that courage means accepting life on its own terms, without demanding metaphysical guarantees.

So if I were to summarize my faith, I’d say it rests on five commitments: naturalism, ritual, responsibility, community, and honesty. These are not commandments carved in stone; they are living practices, always tested by experience. I don’t claim that they solve life’s mysteries, but they help me live inside them with gratitude. To be religious but not spiritual is to choose form without superstition, wonder without illusion, and faith. A faith not in gods, but in the human capacity to keep creating meaning where none is promised.

Q3: Worship practices - How does the person participate in worship (attending services, reading, praying, etc.)?

When people ask how I “worship” without believing in God, I often answer that worship, for me, is simply paying attention. I still love the language of devotion, but what I’m devoted to now is presence itself: the act of noticing, of honoring life as it unfolds. In traditional religion, worship means directing love and gratitude toward a divine being; in my life, those same impulses are directed toward the world we share. My prayers are acts of attention: the quiet pour of morning coffee, the hush before class begins, the slow walk through a museum gallery. These moments remind me that the sacred is not hidden behind the world but woven into it. As poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” That line has become a kind of mantra for me.

I still carry a deep affection for formal liturgy. The cadence of ancient prayers, the structure of a service, the rhythm of standing and sitting, all of that still feels holy, even when I no longer direct those gestures toward heaven. Sometimes I attend an Episcopal or Catholic service simply to hear the psalms chanted or to sit inside the order of the ritual. The comfort of repetition, the solemn beauty of language shaped by centuries, still steadies me. When I hear the congregation recite, “It is right to give our thanks and praise,” I join in. I do so not as a believer, but as a participant in a long human practice of gratitude. As William James observed in The Varieties of Religious Experience, religion “aids us to live” by shaping our emotions into form. That, for me, is reason enough to keep the form.

At home, my worship takes quieter, more personal forms. I write every morning before the day begins. For me, it is  a kind of secular prayer on paper. I read widely: the Psalms, Marcus Aurelius, Rilke, Thích Nhất Hạnh, and the occasional scientific essay that manages to sound like poetry. I meditate for a few minutes each evening, repeating the mantra so-hum, a breath that simply means “I am.” These are not mystical exercises but disciplines of grounding. They help me inhabit the present rather than escape it. When life becomes chaotic, these small devotions remind me that meaning is not something to be found later; it’s something to be practiced now.

Music is another form of worship for me. The hymns I grew up singing still move me, though I hear them differently now. The lyrics no longer point to salvation, but the melodies still carry longing and hope. When I play an old gospel song on the piano or hum a Bach chorale, I’m reminded that worship has always been a form of art. That worship is the transformation of feeling into pattern. The human voice itself is the first instrument of praise. Art, in that sense, continues religion’s oldest task: to turn emotion into shared expression. As I wrote in Religious, Not Spiritual, “I no longer believe the song is addressed to God, but I still feel the beauty of people breathing together, shaping hope into sound.” That is worship enough.

So when I speak of worship, I mean the daily practice of reverence: attention, gratitude, and care enacted through rhythm and routine. I no longer expect my prayers to reach beyond the ceiling, but I still believe they reach someone. That when I pray, they reach into myself, my students, my community, the people I love. The act of noticing, of naming what is good and fragile in the world, is its own kind of sanctification. To worship, in my life, is to stay awake. It is to say thank you without needing to know to whom the thanks belongs. It is to say thank you to life itself. 

Q4: Religious/belief Structure - How is the religion/belief structured?  What role does the priest/rabbi/spiritual leader play in the religion?

When people ask how my belief system is structured, I usually say that it isn’t, at least not in the institutional sense. There is no hierarchy, no priesthood, no official creed to recite. My faith is not organized around authority; it’s organized around practice. What holds it together isn’t a chain of command but a network of relationships, memories, and rituals that give shape to life. In that sense, the structure of my religion looks more like a circle than a steeple: fluid, participatory, and rooted in the belief that meaning is made between people, not handed down from above. It’s an echo of what the philosopher John Dewey called “a common faith,” the sense that shared experience and reflection are the true foundations of any spiritual life.

If there is leadership in this framework, it takes the form of mentorship rather than priesthood. I look to teachers, writers, artists, and public servants as the moral voices of our time. I look to the people who, through their disciplines, embody attentiveness and integrity. In a traditional church, one might go to a pastor for confession or comfort; I find that same guidance in the quiet mentorship of those who live thoughtfully and teach with humility. The classroom, the council chamber, and the museum have replaced the pulpit in my life. Each is a sanctuary where wisdom circulates, not from a single source, but through dialogue. The sociologist Max Weber wrote about the “routinization of charisma,” how religious authority becomes institutionalized over time. I think our age demands the opposite: the democratization of wisdom, where anyone capable of reflection and care becomes a bearer of meaning.

Ritual, in my belief system, performs the role that doctrine once did. Repetition and rhythm are the structures that bind my days. My morning cup of coffee, a quiet recitation of a psalm, the measured breathing of meditation, the weekly act of teaching,  these are my liturgies. They remind me that structure itself is not the enemy of freedom; it’s what allows freedom to endure. The Rule of Saint Benedict, which has always fascinated me, begins with a simple word: “Listen.” That single instruction could serve as the charter for my own faith. Listening to oneself, to others, to the unfolding of the world is the first and last commandment of my religion. The rest is commentary.

Community forms the backbone of this structure. Without others, ritual collapses into habit. I think of community as the living architecture of meaning. My circles include family, colleagues, students, and neighbors: the people whose presence gives context to my efforts. Together we build what Durkheim called “moral communities,” groups united not by creed but by shared care. When I serve on city council or sit with a group of students discussing ethics or history, I feel the same current of belonging that once pulsed through church pews. There’s something liturgical about civic life when it’s practiced with sincerity: the agenda becomes an order of service, the roll call a kind of confession, and the vote an act of communal discernment.

So the structure of my religion is less like a cathedral and more like a network which is sustained by conversation, ritual, and mutual respect. Its leaders are those who practice attentiveness; its congregations form wherever people gather to think and to care. I no longer look for revelation from on high; I look for wisdom exchanged eye to eye. As I once wrote, “Religion endures not as a hierarchy of belief but as a choreography of care.” That choreography — the steady rhythm of giving attention and receiving it in return — is what keeps my faith alive. It may not fit on an organizational chart, but it fits the contours of a human life.

Q5: Cultural practices - How does religion/belief influence daily life? What are the most important day(s) and how are they celebrated?

When people ask how my beliefs show up in daily life, I tell them that the culture of my faith is made of small, durable gestures. I don’t celebrate feast days in cathedrals anymore, but I do treat ordinary time as sacred. My life follows a rhythm of rituals that keep me attentive: making coffee in the morning, feeding my cats before sunrise, pausing in the classroom doorway to take a breath before greeting students. These moments are my liturgy. They mark time with intention, transforming routine into reverence. As Rilke advised, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself… for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” Every act can become devotional when performed with care.

Growing up, I went back and forth between a Southern Baptist and Episcipoal church depending on which grandparent I was with at the time. I still attend church occasionally and observe the calendar of my religious upbringing, though the meanings have changed. Advent, for me, has become a season of patience and preparation; Lent a reminder to live simply; and Ordinary Time a practice of endurance. These old structures still shape my year because they echo something universal: the need to balance anticipation with gratitude, fasting with feasting, rest with renewal. The theologian Karl Rahner once wrote that “the devout Christian of the future will either be a mystic… or he will cease to be anything at all.” I’ve taken that line and reinterpreted it: the devout human of the future will either find mysticism in the ordinary or lose touch with life altogether. My holidays are human days — birthdays, anniversaries, civic celebrations — the milestones that gather people around food, laughter, and memory. In that sense, my religion is communal even when it is secular.

Food has become one of my main sacraments. I learned this at my grandparents’ Sunday table, where the meal outlasted the theology that once surrounded it. After my grandfather’s death, we rearranged the seats and kept the tradition going. The table became an altar of continuity. It became a place where memory and nourishment meet. Sociologist Claude Fischer called meals “the daily miracle of social life,” and I think that’s true. Every shared meal is an act of faith in one another, a small declaration that the world can still be repaired by gathering and grace. Whether it’s Thanksgiving dinner or an impromptu potluck with colleagues, breaking bread is my way of saying amen.

Art and public life also carry religious weight for me. Visiting a museum feels like entering a temple where the saints are painters, sculptors, and architects. Standing before a Rembrandt or a Wyeth, I feel the same hush that others might feel in prayer. Civic spaces work similarly. When a city council meeting unfolds with respect and patience — when neighbors argue passionately and then vote for the common good — it feels like a form of collective worship. The philosopher John Dewey argued that “the function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.” That’s what both art and civic ritual do: they awaken us to each other.

So my cultural practices are humble but deliberate. I honor the rhythm of the year, the meal as sacrament, the museum as chapel, and the community meeting as shared liturgy. These practices root me in gratitude and remind me that meaning doesn’t depend on miracles. To be religious but not spiritual is to keep celebrating the ordinary world as though it were holy, because it is. The sacred, I’ve come to believe, is not something we visit on special days. It’s the way we inhabit every day with attention, generosity, and care.

Q5: Family- What impact does religion/belief have on the family? Did the person follow this religion/belief due to family?

Family is where my first theology began and where my new one continues. I grew up in a family shaped by a blend of Southern Baptist and Epsicopal rhythms: Sunday mornings in church, prayers before meals, and hymns sung softly in my grandparents car. Those rituals taught me that faith was not just a set of beliefs but a pattern of living. Even after my convictions changed, the pattern stayed. I sometimes say that I left the church but kept the liturgy. The structure of family life—the meals, the routines, the gestures of care—remained my first and most enduring form of religion. As I wrote once, “Ritual survives by adapting.” That’s as true for families as it is for faith.

The most important ritual in my family has always been the Sunday meal at my grandparents’ house. It was never a feast of extravagance—fried chicken, mashed potatoes, unsweet tea—but it was sacred in its regularity. Week after week, the same people gathered, the same stories were retold, and the same chairs creaked under the same laughter. When my grandfather died, we rearranged the seats and kept going. That act—the decision to keep showing up—became, in my mind, an act of faith. Sociologist Émile Durkheim called this collective effervescence, the feeling of belonging that arises when people gather in a shared ritual. We didn’t call it worship, but that’s exactly what it was. It taught me that holiness can survive even when the language of God no longer fits.

My family also taught me that faith and disagreement can coexist. When I began to drift away from traditional belief, the conversations around our table changed but didn’t end. My parents and I didn’t always agree, but we kept talking and they gave me space to grow into my own person. Over time, our love learned to stretch across theological, political, generational and  lines. That experience shaped how I now define community: not as uniformity, but as the courage to stay connected in difference. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur once wrote that “memory and narrative are ways human beings reconcile time and loss.” In our family, the story became that bridge. By retelling our shared history, we found ways to honor the past without being imprisoned by it.

Family remains the testing ground for my beliefs about ritual and compassion. I see in my parents’ and grandparents’ faith the virtues I still admire: perseverance, generosity, gratitude. Those qualities endure even when their doctrinal scaffolding has fallen away. My mother’s quiet prayers, my father’s steady work ethic, my brother’s humor, all of these are the living texts I read now. They remind me that the best theology is embodied. “Faith without works is dead,” the New Testament says; I would simply add that works often outlive faith. The way my family tends to one another through illness, change, and grief has become my clearest example of religion’s lasting power.

In the end, I didn’t inherit my family’s theology so much as their discipline of care. They gave me a model for how to keep showing up: for one another, for the meal, for the memory. My religious but not spiritual life is an extension of that inheritance: faith translated into fidelity, doctrine replaced by devotion. The table remains our altar, the stories our scriptures, the love that endures our creed. I may no longer share every belief they hold, but I share their sense of sacred duty: the belief that showing up, again and again, is itself an act of grace.

Q6: Education- What impact does belief have on education in an American school? 

Education has always been the place where my beliefs find their most practical form. I see the classroom as a kind of secular chapel. I see it as a space where curiosity, reflection, and community become daily rituals. Teaching is, for me, both vocation and devotion. I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean that education embodies everything I value about being religious but not spiritual: structure without dogma, meaning created through shared effort, and reverence for the fragile process of growth. The philosopher John Dewey once wrote that “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” That insight aligns perfectly with my worldview. If religion once aimed to prepare the soul for heaven, education now prepares the mind and heart for the world,  a world that is no less sacred for being natural.

When I step into a classroom, I feel the same attentiveness I once felt in church pews. There’s a liturgy to it: the greeting at the door, the graduation bell that signals transition, the quiet moment before discussion begins. These rhythms aren’t arbitrary; they give form to learning, just as prayer once gave form to belief. My students may not think of what we do as ritual, but I do. Each lesson, each question, each act of listening is a rehearsal of community. The sociologist Parker Palmer calls teaching “an act of hospitality to the young,” and that’s how I understand my role, to invite others into the shared work of making sense of the world. That invitation, when offered sincerely, becomes a kind of worship of knowledge and connection.

My belief system also shapes what I teach. I want my students to see knowledge not as possession but as participation. Facts matter, but reflection matters more. In a world that prizes certainty, I try to model what it looks like to live with questions. The writer Rainer Maria Rilke urged, “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” That line could serve as the motto for my classroom. I want students to understand that learning is not the acquisition of fixed truths but the cultivation of curiosity, empathy, and humility. I want to cultivate intellectual virtues that mirror moral ones.

Because I teach in an American public school, I am also mindful of the pluralism that defines our classrooms. Students arrive carrying different faiths, cultures, and identities, each with its own rituals of meaning. My job is not to impose a single narrative but to create a space where many can coexist without fear. That pluralism is, in its way, a sacred experiment. One that attempts to build belonging without demanding uniformity. When students learn to listen across differences, to argue without dehumanizing, they participate in what I would call moral education. It’s the civic counterpart of the family meal or the monastic chant: the practice of harmony within diversity. As Dewey suggested, democracy itself is “a mode of associated living.” Education is how we rehearse that association every day.

Ultimately, my belief that meaning is human-made makes teaching an act of hope. I no longer expect divine revelation to set the world right; I trust in the small, persistent work of learning and connection. Every time a student grasps a difficult idea or discovers their own voice, I see evidence of what I once might have called grace. Education reminds me that salvation, if the word still fits, happens not in an afterlife but in moments of understanding between people. To teach, then, is to practice faith in the human capacity to grow. It is the way I pray, the way I serve, and the way I keep believing that our shared world, fragile as it is, can still be redeemed through attention and care.

Postscript: On Language and Inheritance

People sometimes ask why, after all my critique of organized religion, I still use so much religious language. Why speak of faith, prayer, or salvation when I no longer mean them in the traditional sense? The answer is twofold. First, this is the language that shaped me. I was raised within its rhythms: Sunday sermons, altar calls, revival hymns, and dinner-table prayers. These words are the cadence of my childhood, the vocabulary of belonging that formed my earliest sense of meaning. To abandon them entirely would feel like cutting myself off from my own past. Reclaiming them allows me to stay in conversation with the world that raised me, to translate rather than to renounce.

But there’s another reason, one that reaches beyond autobiography. Words like faith, grace, prayer, and devotion carry human truths that transcend the institutions that coined them. They describe postures of the heart — attention, hope, gratitude, perseverance — that belong to everyone. When I use these words, I’m not speaking in “Christianese” so much as in a shared, ancient tongue that predates its theological ownership. As the writer Marilynne Robinson once observed, “The language of religion is poetry before it is theology.” I use that poetry to name what might otherwise go unspoken: the longing for connection, the courage to endure, the practice of love in a transient world.

I also resist the idea that sacred language must remain exclusive property of the church. Over time, words like saved or born again have been confined to what some call “church-ese,” a dialect of certainty that narrows what was once expansive. I want to reopen those words, to let them breathe again. When I speak of salvation, I mean the daily work of saving what is fragile: trust, memory, kindness, community. When I speak of prayer, I mean attention made deliberate. When I speak of faith, I mean the decision to keep trying in the absence of guarantees. These are human acts, not supernatural ones.

In reclaiming this vocabulary, I hope to bridge two worlds: the one I inherited and the one I now inhabit. Language, like ritual, can evolve without losing its soul. To speak in the words of my upbringing while filling them with new meaning is a way of honoring both the past and the present. It’s also a reminder that the boundary between the sacred and the secular is not fixed but fluid, carried in the words we choose and the care with which we use them. As a writer, I borrow the tools of religion not to preach but to translate. I borrow them to render human experience in a dialect wide enough to include belief and doubt alike.

So I keep the language, even when I no longer keep the creed. These words are the scaffolding of my thought, the echoes of prayers I no longer pray but still understand. To speak of them now is to redeem them: not from religion, but for humanity. They remind me that every person, believer or not, is fluent in the same ancient longing: to name what is beautiful, to endure what is difficult, and to keep speaking, in whatever tongue we can, about what feels holy in the human world.