For most of my life, I thought religion was trying to answer a question.
Which religion is true?
As a child growing up in evangelical Christianity, this seemed self-evident. Different religions made different claims about God, salvation, scripture, and the afterlife. Some of those claims had to be correct. Others had to be mistaken. The task of the believer was to determine which was which.
Over time, however, I began to notice something strange.
The more I studied religion, the less interested I became in determining who was right.
Instead, I found myself wondering why human beings kept creating religions in the first place.
This question emerged gradually. Part of it came from my study of Christianity. Part of it came from my exploration of philosophy. Part of it came from my growing interest in contemplative traditions such as Benedictine monasticism and Soto Zen Buddhism. The more I encountered these traditions, the more I noticed a curious pattern.
Their beliefs often differed dramatically.
Their practices often looked surprisingly similar.
Monks prayed.
Zen practitioners meditated.
Pilgrims traveled.
Communities gathered.
Stories were told.
Meals were shared.
Rituals marked births, deaths, marriages, grief, and celebration.
Different cultures seemed to be speaking different religious languages while addressing many of the same human concerns.
At the same time, my relationship with Christianity was changing.
The supernatural claims that once anchored my faith no longer convinced me. The doctrines that had once seemed certain became increasingly difficult to defend. Yet despite losing belief, I found myself unable to simply walk away from religion altogether.
The stories still mattered.
The rituals still mattered.
The questions still mattered.
Most surprisingly of all, Christianity still mattered to me.
Not because I believed it was uniquely true.
Not because I believed it possessed final answers.
But because it remained part of the history that had shaped me and my relationship to others.
For a time, I tried to solve this tension by becoming something else. I explored Buddhism, philosophy, meditation, and a variety of alternative paths. Yet every attempt eventually led me back to the same realization.
Authenticity is not becoming someone else.
Authenticity is becoming more fully yourself.
That realization would eventually give rise to a phrase that has come to define much of my thinking:
Religious, Not Spiritual.
The phrase often confuses people.
Some assume it means I remain conventionally religious. Others assume it means I am secretly spiritual. Neither interpretation is quite right.
What I mean is something much simpler.
I no longer view religion primarily as a collection of supernatural claims. I see it as one of humanity's oldest and most enduring attempts to answer a deeper question:
What does it mean to be human?
This essay is an attempt to explore that question.
Not as a theologian.
Not as a believer.
Not as a skeptic.
But as someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling with religion and has come to see it less as a source of certainty and more as a practice of attention, authenticity, and human formation.
The journey begins, as all religions ultimately do, with ourselves.
Know Thyself
During my graduate studies, I spent a great deal of time examining leadership. I studied servant leadership, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, managerial leadership, and a variety of other models. Like most students, I tried to determine where I fit. Was I an autocratic leader? A democratic leader? Or something else entirely?
The longer I studied, the less satisfied I became with the styles themselves. The leaders who had influenced me most did not fit neatly into any of the boxes. They borrowed from different approaches. They adapted. They grew. Most importantly, the individuals remained recognizably themselves.
Leadership did not make them less authentic. Leadership made them more of who they already were.
I did not realize it at the time, but this lesson would eventually inform how I understood religion.
Human beings have a remarkable tendency to create categories. We classify animals, plants, political ideologies, personality types, philosophies, and religions. Categories help us make sense of the world. Yet categories are not the world itself. They are maps rather than territories. They are useful until we mistake them for reality.
The same is true of human beings.
We are difficult creatures to classify because we exist in tension between two realities. We are undeniably animals. We eat, sleep, reproduce, fear, compete, cooperate, and eventually die. We are products of evolution and participants in the natural world. Every breath we take reminds us of our connection to the living systems around us.
Yet we are also aware of these realities in ways that appear unique.
A deer flees danger. A human being not only flees danger but imagines future dangers that may never arrive. We anticipate suffering. We replay old mistakes. We wonder what our lives mean. We contemplate our own deaths. We ask questions that nature itself does not answer.
Among the most famous statements in the Western philosophical tradition is Socrates' declaration that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The statement has endured for more than two thousand years because it identifies something essential about the human condition. We are creatures capable of examining ourselves.
That capacity may be our greatest gift and our greatest burden.
One of my favorite illustrations of this idea appears in Frank Herbert's Dune. Early in the novel, the Reverend Mother places the young Paul Atreides in a painful test. His hand is locked inside a box that creates unbearable agony. A poisoned needle rests against his neck. If he removes his hand, he will die instantly.
The Reverend Mother explains that animals react instinctively. They seek immediate relief from pain. Human beings, by contrast, can endure discomfort in service of something larger than themselves. When Paul passes the test, she calls him a “human.”
The scene is not really about pain. It is about awareness.
Human beings can step back from immediate impulse. We can observe our fear rather than simply obey it. We can reflect upon our desires rather than immediately satisfy them. We can imagine future consequences and choose accordingly.
Whether Herbert intended it or not, the scene echoes themes found throughout philosophy, religion, and contemplative practice. The Stoics sought mastery over destructive passions. Buddhist traditions teach practitioners to observe thoughts without becoming captive to them. Monastic Christians cultivate disciplines of prayer, silence, and self-examination. In each case, the goal is not to stop being human. The goal is to become more fully human.
This distinction matters.
Many religious traditions have framed human nature as a problem to be overcome. Some philosophies have treated the body as an obstacle to wisdom. Others have viewed desire itself as an enemy. I find myself increasingly unconvinced by such approaches.
To be human is not to escape our animal nature.
To be human is to become conscious of it.
The breath still comes.
The thoughts still arise.
Fear still appears.
Desire still appears.
Hunger, grief, loneliness, joy, and love remain part of the experience of being alive.
The question is not whether these realities exist.
The question is how we relate to them.
That relationship, I believe, lies at the heart of religion.
Long before there were churches, temples, monasteries, or sacred texts, there were human beings wrestling with the strange experience of being self-aware animals in a world filled with suffering, beauty, uncertainty, and wonder. Religion emerged from that struggle.
The question that interests me is not whether religions are true.
The question is why human beings continue creating and refining them.
To answer that question, we must first understand what problem religion is attempting to solve. Or perhaps more accurately, what aspect of humanity it is attempting to cultivate.
The Many Languages of Religion
If religion were merely the product of ignorance, we might expect it to disappear as knowledge advances. Yet the opposite appears to have happened. Human beings have become increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of the natural world while continuing to create, adapt, preserve, and reinvent religious traditions.
This persistence suggests that religion addresses something deeper than a lack of information.
Every culture develops stories about origins and endings. Every culture creates rituals surrounding birth, death, marriage, grief, and belonging. Every culture develops practices that help individuals navigate suffering and uncertainty. The details vary dramatically, but the impulse itself appears nearly universal.
Ancient Greeks told stories of gods who reflected human virtues and vices. Buddhist traditions explored the nature of suffering and attachment. Indigenous peoples around the world developed ceremonies connecting communities to ancestors, land, and memory. Jews preserved a covenantal identity through story, ritual, and law. Christians inherited those traditions while adding new narratives centered on Jesus. Muslims developed practices that united spiritual devotion with communal life.
The stories differ.
The symbols differ.
The rituals differ.
Yet beneath these differences lie familiar questions.
Why do we suffer?
How should we live?
What do we owe one another?
How do we face death?
What makes a life meaningful?
These questions are not uniquely religious. Philosophers ask them. Artists ask them. Scientists ask them. Ordinary people ask them while sitting beside hospital beds, attending funerals, raising children, or watching the years pass more quickly than they once did.
Religion is one way human beings have attempted to answer them.
For much of my life, I understood religion primarily as a system of beliefs. That was the framework I inherited. Religions were competing explanations of reality. The task was to determine which one was correct. Once the correct religion was identified, one could align oneself with its teachings and reject competing alternatives.
This approach had a certain logic. It also produced endless conflict.
If religion is primarily about possessing the correct answers, then every disagreement becomes a threat. Different traditions become competitors. Alternative interpretations become dangers. Communities define themselves by exclusion as much as inclusion.
I encountered this repeatedly growing up.
The Episcopal church my grandfather attended was viewed with suspicion. Catholicism was often dismissed. Mormonism was considered something other than Christianity. Seventh-day Adventists occupied another contested space. Even within Protestantism there were endless debates about who truly belonged and who did not.
The assumption beneath these disputes was rarely questioned.
Religion existed to provide correct answers.
The purpose of faith was to believe the right things.
The purpose of doctrine was to separate truth from error. Sheep from goats.
Over time, however, I became increasingly interested in a different possibility.
What if religion is less about providing answers and more about cultivating capacities?
What if religions endure not because they explain the universe particularly well, but because they help human beings navigate the experience of being human?
This question emerged gradually through my encounters with traditions outside my own. As I explored Zen Buddhism, Stoicism, contemplative Christianity, and monastic spirituality, I noticed something unexpected. The beliefs often differed dramatically. The practices often looked surprisingly similar.
People sat in silence.
They prayed.
They reflected.
They fasted.
They gathered in community.
They recited stories.
They marked the passage of time through ritual.
They practiced gratitude.
They confronted suffering.
They remembered the dead.
They attempted to become better versions of themselves.
The more I paid attention, the more religion began to resemble a collection of cultural languages addressing common human concerns.
Just as different societies develop different spoken languages, different cultures develop different religious vocabularies. The words change. The symbols change. The stories change. Yet many of the underlying experiences remain recognizable.
A Benedictine monk chanting the Psalms and a Zen practitioner sitting zazen inhabit very different traditions. Yet both are engaged in practices of attention, discipline, and self-examination. They are speaking different religious languages while addressing similar aspects of the human condition.
This realization did not eliminate the differences between religions. Nor did it persuade me that all religions are equally valid or equally healthy. Some traditions cultivate compassion more effectively than others. Some encourage inquiry while others discourage it. Some foster human flourishing while others become trapped in fear, certainty, or exclusion.
Yet the similarities remained impossible for me to ignore.
The question gradually shifted.
I became less interested in asking whether a religion was correct.
I became more interested in asking what a religion was trying to accomplish.
That shift changed how I viewed Christianity, Buddhism, and religion itself.
It also forced me to reconsider a possibility that had never occurred to me in my youth:
Perhaps the deepest purpose of religion is not to explain reality.
Perhaps its deepest purpose is to help human beings learn how to inhabit reality.
Religion as Practice
One of the most significant shifts in my understanding of religion occurred when I stopped asking what religions believe and started paying attention to what religious people actually do.
At first, this seemed like a small distinction. In reality, it changed everything.
The version of Christianity I inherited was deeply concerned with belief. Sermons focused on doctrine. Sunday School lessons emphasized correct interpretation. Apologetics sought to defend theological claims. The central questions were often intellectual in nature.
Who is Jesus?
Is the Bible inerrant?
What happens after death?
Who is saved?
What is the correct understanding of God?
These questions mattered because belief was understood as the foundation of religious life. Orthodoxy—literally "right belief"—served as both the entry point and the measuring stick.
Yet the more I studied religion historically, the less convinced I became that belief was religion's primary function.
Long before theological systems were formalized, human beings were already practicing religion.
They buried their dead.
They gathered around fires.
They observed seasonal festivals.
They fasted.
They prayed.
They told stories.
They made pilgrimages.
They marked births, marriages, and deaths with ritual.
The practices came first.
The explanations came later.
This pattern appears repeatedly across cultures. Communities establish rhythms of life long before philosophers and theologians explain why those rhythms matter. Ritual often precedes doctrine. Participation often precedes understanding.
A child learns to celebrate holidays before understanding their historical origins. A family develops traditions before anyone writes a theology of family life. Human beings frequently practice first and explain later.
Religion is no different.
The older I get, the more I suspect that religion functions less like a textbook and more like a craft.
A person does not become a carpenter by reading about woodworking. A person becomes a carpenter by working with wood. Knowledge matters, but knowledge emerges alongside practice. The hands learn as much as the mind.
The same, I suspect, may be true of religion.
Prayer teaches prayer.
Meditation teaches meditation.
Community teaches community.
Hospitality teaches hospitality.
The practice itself becomes the teacher.
This insight helped me understand why I remained drawn to religious traditions long after I stopped believing many of their supernatural claims.
I no longer believed the world was governed by the God I had been taught to worship. I no longer accepted the doctrines that once seemed unquestionable. Yet I continued to find value in practices that religion had preserved.
I still found meaning in ritual.
I still found value in reflection.
I still found wisdom in communal traditions.
I still found myself drawn to prayer, even after I no longer believed anyone was listening.
At first, this seemed contradictory.
How could someone reject the beliefs while retaining the practices?
The answer emerged slowly.
The practices were doing something different than I had assumed.
They were not merely reinforcing beliefs.
They were shaping attention.
A daily prayer reminds a person to pause.
A ritual meal reminds a community of shared bonds.
A period of silence interrupts the momentum of ordinary life.
A liturgical calendar transforms time from a sequence of dates into a narrative of remembrance and anticipation.
The value of these practices does not depend entirely upon accepting a particular metaphysical explanation.
Their value lies in what they cultivate.
This realization also changed how I understood the difference between religion and what many people today call spirituality.
Spirituality often emphasizes individual experience. It privileges personal insight, personal meaning, and personal exploration. There is much to admire in that approach, particularly for those emerging from rigid religious environments.
Yet spirituality can also become detached from discipline.
Religion, at its best, provides structure.
It creates rhythms.
It preserves practices that individuals might otherwise abandon when enthusiasm fades.
A person may not feel like meditating today.
A tradition reminds them to sit anyway.
A person may not feel grateful today.
A tradition reminds them to give thanks anyway.
A person may not feel connected to others today.
A tradition invites them back into community anyway.
This is one reason I eventually stopped describing myself as spiritual.
The word never felt quite right.
It implied a freedom that I did not actually want.
I did not want to discard tradition.
I did not want to reinvent myself from scratch.
I did not want to sever myself from the religious world that had shaped me.
What I wanted was something more complicated.
I wanted practices without dogmatism.
Tradition without conformity.
Ritual without literalism.
Community without exclusion.
I wanted a religion that could survive the loss of certainty.
That desire eventually led me toward monastic traditions, contemplative practices, and forms of religion that seemed less concerned with possessing answers than cultivating mindfulness and attention.
It also led me toward an uncomfortable realization.
If religion is primarily a practice, then the most important question may not be what a tradition teaches.
The most important question may be what kind of person a tradition helps create.
Christianity Between Belief and Practice
When I was young, Christianity seemed remarkably simple.
There was truth.
There was error.
There were Christians.
There were non-Christians.
The task was to determine which side of the line a person occupied.
The churches I attended spoke often about salvation, doctrine, and biblical authority. Conversations about religion frequently revolved around correctness. The goal was not merely to follow Jesus but to believe the right things about Jesus.
As a child, I absorbed this framework without much question.
I remember attending the Episcopal church with my other grandfather. The experience felt familiar enough. There were prayers, scripture readings, hymns, and sermons. Yet I was repeatedly told that something was wrong. Episcopalians were not practicing "real" Christianity. Similar warnings were offered about Catholics, Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and various other Christian and religious groups.
The details changed depending on who was doing the talking, but the underlying assumption remained constant.
Christianity was primarily a matter of correct belief.
The purpose of religion was to identify and defend truth.
The purpose of doctrine was to separate insiders from outsiders.
Looking back, I find it striking how little attention was given to practice.
No one asked whether Episcopalians were becoming more compassionate.
No one asked whether Catholics were serving their communities.
No one asked whether people were growing in wisdom, humility, or self-awareness.
The question was always whether they were right.
Religion functioned as a test.
As I grew older, that framework became increasingly difficult to sustain.
Part of the problem was historical.
The more I learned about Christianity, the harder it became to imagine a single, pure version existing somewhere beyond history. Christianity appeared less like a fixed object and more like a sprawling family tree.
The earliest followers of Jesus disagreed with one another.
The Church Fathers disagreed with one another.
Councils debated doctrine for centuries.
Creeds emerged through conflict, compromise, and politics.
Orthodoxy increasingly appeared not as a timeless truth but as a historical achievement driven by empire.
The winners wrote the creeds.
The losers became heretics.
This does not mean the winners were necessarily right or wrong. It does mean that orthodoxy is inseparable from history.
What one generation calls orthodoxy, another generation may call innovation.
What one community preserves, another community rejects.
History is rarely as neat as theology would prefer.
At the same time, my understanding of Jesus was changing.
The more I studied the historical Jesus, the more I became convinced that he was fundamentally an apocalyptic teacher tied to a specific time and place.
The Beatitudes increasingly struck me as the heart of his message.
Blessed are the poor.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
These are not abstract theological statements. They are announcements about a world being turned upside down. A world where the first were last and the last, first.
Jesus appears to have believed that God's kingdom was near. Paul seems to have shared that expectation. Both spoke as though history stood on the verge of transformation within their own lifetimes.
Yet the kingdom did not arrive.
Rome remained.
The generations passed.
History continued.
If Christianity had remained only an apocalyptic movement, it likely would have disappeared like countless others before and after it.
Instead, something remarkable happened.
Jesus' followers changed. Christianity adapted.
The movement survived the failure of its central expectation.
What began as anticipation gradually became tradition.
What began as expectation became institution.
What began as a movement became a civilization.
This transformation produced both extraordinary achievements and profound problems.
Christianity gave rise to cathedrals, universities, hospitals, monasteries, literature, art, music, and systems of charity. It also produced inquisitions, religious wars, exclusions, and dogmatic certainties.
Like every human institution, it became capable of both wisdom and folly.
For a time, I thought this realization might require me to abandon Christianity entirely.
If the doctrines were historically contingent, if the apocalypse failed to arrive, if orthodoxy was the product of centuries of debate, then what remained?
The answer surprised me.
What remained was practice.
The stories remained.
The rituals remained.
The communities remained.
The questions remained.
Most importantly, the human beings remained.
Christianity endured because it became more than a collection of beliefs. It became a way of inhabiting the world.
That realization changed how I viewed the tradition of my childhood.
I no longer saw Christianity primarily as a set of propositions to defend.
I began to see it as one cultural response to the challenge of being human.
Not the only response.
Not necessarily the final response.
But a response nonetheless.
And among all of Christianity's many developments, one tradition seemed to preserve this insight more clearly than any other.
The monks.
Monks and Masters
When most people think about Christianity, they think about churches.
When I think about Christianity, I think about monasteries.
This was not always the case.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church that saw itself as the successor to the church in Acts.
As a child, monks seemed like historical curiosities. They belonged to a distant world of stone walls, illuminated manuscripts, and medieval Europe. They occupied the margins of Christianity rather than its center.
Over time, I came to see things differently.
The more I studied Christian history, the more convinced I became that monasticism represents the beating heart of the tradition.
This is not because monks possess superior theology.
Nor is it because monastic life is more difficult or more holy than ordinary life.
Rather, monasticism preserves something essential about the Christian religion itself.
It understands that practice comes first.
A monastery is not fundamentally a place of belief. It is a place of formation.
The Rule of Saint Benedict contains remarkably little speculation about metaphysics. Benedict spends far more time discussing daily life than abstract theology. He is concerned with sleeping, eating, praying, working, welcoming guests, resolving conflicts, and living in community.
In other words, he is concerned with what it means to be human.
The monastery takes ordinary life seriously.
Prayer is important.
Work is important.
Meals are important.
Hospitality is important.
Silence is important.
Everything matters because everything contributes to the formation of the person.
This insight is captured in the Benedictine phrases ora et labora (pray and work) and laborare est orare (to work is to pray).
At first glance, these phrases appear to describe two separate activities.
Pray and then work.
Work and then pray.
Yet the longer I sat with the ideas, the more the distinction began to dissolve.
Prayer becomes work.
Work becomes prayer.
The monk washing dishes participates in the same spiritual life as the monk chanting psalms.
Attention and mindfulness transforms both.
Years after encountering Benedictine spirituality, I found myself next drawn to Soto Zen Buddhism.
Initially, the attraction surprised me.
Theologically, the traditions could hardly appear more different.
One emerged from Christianity.
The other emerged from Buddhism.
One speaks of God.
The other often remains silent on such questions.
One developed in Europe.
The other developed in East Asia.
Yet the deeper I looked, the more familiar the landscape became.
Zen practitioners sit.
Monks pray.
Zen practitioners cultivate awareness.
Monks cultivate attentiveness.
Both cultivate mindfulness of thought and action.
Zen practitioners return to the breath.
Monks return to the Psalms.
Different symbols.
Different stories.
Different vocabularies.
The practices, however, often seemed to point in similar directions.
One Zen saying in particular stayed with me:
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
The saying challenges the assumption that spiritual life is about arriving somewhere else. Enlightenment does not exempt a person from ordinary life. The wood still needs chopping. The water still needs carrying.
The task remains the same.
Only the relationship to the task changes.
The first time I encountered this saying, I immediately thought of ora et labora.
The point of prayer is prayer.
The point of work is work.
The point of chopping wood is chopping wood.
The point of carrying water is carrying water.
The practice is not a means to some distant destination.
The practice is the thing itself.
This realization helped me understand why I remained drawn to both traditions despite my inability to fully inhabit either one.
For a brief period after leaving the church of my youth, I considered becoming Buddhist. It seemed like a logical move. I had lost confidence in Christian doctrine and found Zen meditation deeply meaningful.
Yet something never felt quite right.
The problem was not philosophical.
The problem was personal.
I could learn from Buddhism.
I could appreciate Buddhism.
I could practice meditation.
But I could not become someone else.
I did not possess the cultural experiences that had shaped Buddhist traditions. I had not grown up inside those stories. I had not inherited those symbols. I could not simply exchange one identity for another.
At first, I viewed this as a failure.
Eventually, I came to see it as a lesson.
Authenticity is not imitation.
The goal of religion is not to become someone else.
The goal is to become more fully oneself.
That realization transformed how I understood both Christianity and Buddhism.
The monk and the Zen practitioner are not engaged in a competition to determine which tradition is correct.
They are participating in practices that shape attention, character, and awareness.
Their traditions provide different maps.
Their destination may be surprisingly similar.
Neither seeks escape from ordinary life.
Both seek a deeper participation within it.
This, I believe, is where religion is at its strongest.
Not when it argues.
Not when it apologizes and defends itself.
Not when it draws boundaries.
But when it creates spaces where human beings can practice the difficult work of becoming more fully present to themselves, to others, and to the world around them.
The question, however, remains.
What exactly are these practices cultivating?
To answer that question, we must turn our attention to attention itself.
Attention
When I first began meditating, I assumed the goal was to stop thinking.
This is a common misunderstanding.
Many people imagine meditation as the achievement of a perfectly silent or still mind. The practitioner sits motionless, transcends ordinary consciousness, and enters a state of complete serenity.
My actual experience was quite different.
I sat down.
My mind wandered.
I noticed.
I returned to the breath.
Then it wandered again.
And again.
And again.
The practice was not eliminating thought.
The practice was noticing thought.
This distinction changed how I understood not only meditation but religion itself.
In Soto Zen, thoughts are not enemies. They arise naturally. The mind plans, remembers, worries, imagines, judges, and narrates endlessly if allowed to. The goal is not to wage war against these activities. The goal is to notice them without becoming captive to them.
The moment of noticing becomes an invitation.
Attention returns to the breath.
The breath becomes an anchor to the present moment.
Nothing dramatic occurs.
The practitioner simply begins again.
And then begins again.
And then begins again.
The repetition is the practice.
The older I become, the more convinced I am that this pattern extends far beyond meditation.
It appears in philosophy.
It appears in religion.
It appears in ordinary life.
At its heart, the examined life is not a collection of answers. It is a practice of returning attention to reality.
The Stoics understood this.
Marcus Aurelius filled his journal with reminders to himself. He was not writing for publication. He was practicing attention. Again and again he called himself back to what mattered.
The Desert Fathers understood this.
They withdrew into solitude not because they hated the world but because they wanted to see themselves more clearly.
The Benedictines understood this.
The bell rings.
Work stops.
Prayer begins.
The monk's attention returns.
Several hours later the bell rings again.
Attention returns again.
The pattern repeats throughout the day.
The purpose is not information.
The purpose is awareness.
Even the ancient command to "pray without ceasing" begins to sound different when viewed through this lens.
The phrase no longer suggests constant verbal communication with a deity. Instead, it suggests a life lived in continual awareness.
An attentive life.
A conscious life.
An examined life.
This is where I find myself increasingly at odds with many forms of religion.
Too often religion is presented as a collection of answers.
The believer is expected to arrive at certainty.
The questions are resolved.
The doctrines are settled.
The work is complete.
Yet my experience has been almost the opposite.
The deeper I explore religion, philosophy, history, and human experience, the less interested I become in certainty.
Certainty closes a conversation.
Attention opens one.
Certainty says:
I already know.
Attention asks:
What am I missing?
Certainty defends.
Attention observes.
Certainty often creates boundaries.
Attention creates curiosity.
This is one reason I find the Zen saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," so compelling.
The statement is not an attack on Buddhism.
It is a warning against attachment.
The moment the Buddha becomes an object of certainty, the teaching has been lost.
The symbol has replaced the reality.
The map has replaced the territory.
The finger pointing at the moon has become more important than the moon itself.
I increasingly suspect that every religious tradition faces this temptation.
A tradition begins as an attempt to cultivate awareness.
Over time it develops stories, practices, institutions, and doctrines.
These can be valuable. They preserve wisdom and create continuity.
Yet they can also become obstacles and stumbling blocks.
The practice intended to cultivate attention becomes something performed without attention.
The story intended to reveal truth becomes something defended against inquiry.
The tradition intended to guide becomes something worshiped.
Religion succeeds when it helps people pay attention.
Religion fails when it distracts them from the very realities it was meant to illuminate.
This insight has transformed how I understand transcendence.
As a younger man, I often imagined transcendence as escape. The spiritual life seemed aimed at rising above ordinary existence. One transcended the body, transcended desire, transcended the world as they drew closer to Christ.
Today, I think differently.
Transcendence is not escape.
Transcendence is attention.
Transcendence is mindfulness.
The miracle is not leaving the world behind.
The miracle is seeing the world clearly.
The breath.
The meal.
The person.
The conversation.
The grief.
The beauty.
The moment.
Attention transforms these experiences not by changing them but by allowing us to encounter them fully.
Religion, at its best, teaches this discipline.
It trains people to return.
Return to the breath.
Return to the prayer.
Return to the community.
Return to the present moment.
Return to the life that is actually being lived.
Yet attention alone is not enough.
Human beings do not simply observe the world.
We interpret it.
We tell stories about it.
We place our lives within narratives that help us understand who we are and who we might become.
To understand religion fully, we must examine not only its practices but also the stories that give those practices meaning.
The Problem of Orthodoxy
Human beings do not merely experience reality.
We interpret it.
We construct narratives that help us understand where we came from, who we are, and what our lives mean. We tell stories about our families, our nations, our communities, and ourselves. These stories are not decorations added to life. They are among the primary ways we make sense of life. The way we reflect on our experiences both individual and collective.
Religion with its testimonies and doctrines is no exception.
If practice teaches us how to pay attention, stories help us understand what we are paying attention to.
A funeral is not merely a gathering.
A wedding is not merely a legal arrangement.
A shared meal is not merely the consumption of food.
Religion surrounds these ordinary experiences with narrative. It places individual lives within larger frameworks of meaning.
This is one reason religious traditions endure.
They preserve stories that help communities navigate the recurring experiences of being human.
Birth.
Loss.
Love.
Failure.
Suffering.
Death.
Hope.
The stories vary from culture to culture, but the experiences remain familiar.
As I have grown older, I have become increasingly convinced that the power of a religious story does not depend entirely upon its historical accuracy.
A parable need not be historical to be meaningful.
A myth need not be factual to reveal something true.
A story can communicate wisdom even when it fails as journalism.
In many ways to me religion resembles art.
No one stands before a painting and asks whether it is literally true. The question is whether it reveals something about reality that might otherwise remain unseen.
Religious stories often function in a similar way.
They illuminate aspects of the human condition.
They provide language for experiences that are otherwise difficult to articulate.
They offer symbols through which communities preserve memory and meaning.
This realization transformed my relationship with Christianity.
As a younger man, I often felt compelled to choose between two positions.
Either the stories were literally true. Sola scriptura.
Or they were worthless. 1 Corinthians 15: 12-19.
There seemed to be no middle ground.
Over time I came to see that this was a false choice.
The value of a story is not exhausted by the question of whether it happened exactly as described.
The Book of Job remains profound even if it is just poetry and wisdom.
The story of the Exodus still instills awe whatever its historicity.
The parable of the Good Samaritan remains meaningful regardless of whether the events literally occurred.
The Psalms continue to give voice to grief, gratitude, anger, and hope regardless of who composed them or when.
Stories survive because they continue to speak to human experience.
Yet stories alone are not enough.
Stories require traditions.
Without traditions, stories disappear.
Communities preserve stories by retelling them, reenacting them, and embodying them through practice.
This is where I find myself increasingly appreciative of religious traditions.
For many years I viewed tradition primarily as an obstacle.
Tradition seemed synonymous with dogmatism, rigidity, and resistance to change.
Certainly traditions can and have become these things.
But traditions also preserve wisdom.
Every generation inherits questions it did ask or not create.
Every generation benefits from insights it did not discover on its own.
Tradition serves as a conversation across time.
The challenge is knowing how to participate in that conversation without becoming trapped by it.
This is where orthodoxy enters the story.
At its best, orthodoxy preserves continuity.
It provides a shared vocabulary.
It protects communities from losing touch with their roots.
Every tradition requires some mechanism of preservation.
Without continuity, traditions dissolve.
Without memory, communities lose themselves.
The problem arises when preservation becomes the primary goal.
Orthodoxy often begins as a way of safeguarding a tradition.
Over time it can become something else entirely.
The tradition no longer serves human beings.
Human beings become servants of the tradition.
Questions become threats.
Curiosity becomes suspicion.
Authenticity becomes conformity.
The map becomes more important than the territory.
This is the tension I experienced throughout much of my religious upbringing.
The Christianity I inherited often seemed more concerned with defending boundaries than cultivating wisdom.
The central question was not:
What kind of person are you becoming?
The central question was:
Do you believe the correct things?
The result was a world divided into categories.
Real Christians.
False Christians.
Orthodox believers.
Heretics.
Insiders.
Outsiders.
Every tradition seemed to draw its own lines.
As a child, I learned that Episcopalians were suspect. Catholics were suspect. Mormons were suspect. Seventh-day Adventists were suspect. Depending on the church, even other Baptists could be suspect.
The list never ended. It was also never meant to.
Everyone possessed a different version of orthodoxy.
Everyone believed they were defending the truth.
What fascinated me later was not that these groups disagreed.
Human beings disagree about everything.
What fascinated me was how little attention was given to the lives being lived.
Compassion rarely appeared in doctrinal statements.
Humility was difficult to measure.
Attention could not be quantified.
Authenticity could not be tested.
Belief became the easiest standard because it was the easiest to enforce.
This realization helped me understand why I found Soto Zen so compelling.
One of the most famous Zen sayings advises:
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
The statement sounds shocking until its meaning becomes clear.
The Buddha is not the destination.
The teaching points beyond itself.
The tradition points beyond itself.
The moment we become attached to the symbol, we lose sight of what the symbol was intended to reveal.
I increasingly suspect that every healthy religious tradition contains some version of this insight.
The story is not the destination.
The ritual is not the destination.
The doctrine is not the destination.
The tradition is not the destination.
They are tools.
Maps.
Guides.
Teachers.
Their purpose is not to replace reality but to help us encounter it more honestly.
When they succeed, they deepen our humanity.
When they fail, they become idols.
The challenge, then, is not deciding whether we need traditions.
We do.
The challenge is learning how to inherit them without being possessed by them.
That task, more than any doctrine or ritual, may be one of the central responsibilities of a mature religious life.
Authenticity
For many years, I assumed authenticity meant freedom.
Freedom from expectations.
Freedom from institutions.
Freedom from traditions.
Freedom from labels.
Like many people leaving conservative religious environments, I believed authenticity required reinvention.
If Christianity no longer made sense, perhaps I could simply become something else.
For a time, I thought that something else might be Buddhism.
The attraction was understandable.
I had become increasingly skeptical of Christian doctrine. I no longer believed in the supernatural claims that had once anchored my faith. Zen meditation resonated with me in ways church services often no longer did. The emphasis on direct experience, mindfulness, and practice felt refreshingly different from the apologetic debates that had consumed so much of my religious life.
The need to be quiet after years of arguing was refreshing.
The more I explored Zen, however, the more I encountered an unexpected problem.
The problem was not Buddhism.
The problem was me.
I could learn from Buddhist traditions.
I could admire Buddhist traditions.
I could practice meditation.
But I could not become Buddhist in the deepest sense of the word.
I lacked the cultural experiences that had shaped the tradition. I had not inherited its stories. I had not grown up within its symbols. I did not see the world through the lens of centuries of Buddhist history.
No amount of enthusiasm could change that reality.
At first, this realization felt disappointing.
Eventually, it felt liberating.
For the first time, I began to understand authenticity differently.
Authenticity is not becoming whatever we wish we were. e.g. Fake it till you make it.
Authenticity is becoming who we actually are.
This distinction may seem obvious, but it changed my life.
The same lesson had appeared during my years studing leadership.
Throughout graduate school, I encountered endless leadership theories. Servant leadership. Transformational leadership. Transactional leadership. Managerial leadership. Each framework attempted to describe effective leadership. Each offered useful insights.
Like many students, I spent considerable time trying to determine where I fit.
Was I a servant leader?
A transformational leader?
Something else entirely?
The longer I studied, the less satisfied I became with the categories themselves.
The leaders who influenced me most rarely fit neatly into any of them.
They borrowed ideas from multiple approaches. They adapted to circumstances. They evolved over time. Most importantly, they remained recognizably themselves.
Leadership did not erase their individuality.
Leadership deepened it.
The best leaders were not those who perfectly embodied a theory.
They were those who allowed leadership to expand who they already were.
Years later, I realized religion functions much the same way.
The healthiest religious traditions do not produce identical people.
They produce authentic people.
Or at least they should.
This insight represents one of my deepest disagreements with many forms of religion.
Too often religion seeks conformity.
It asks people to become copies of an approved model.
The ideal believer learns the correct doctrines, adopts the approved vocabulary, and performs the expected identity.
Authenticity becomes secondary to belonging.
The result is often a strange form of self-alienation.
People learn who they are supposed to be before they learn who they are.
Yet the traditions that have influenced me most point in a different direction.
The Desert Fathers entered the wilderness not to become someone else but to encounter themselves honestly.
Benedictine monks cultivate stability, committing themselves to a particular place and community rather than endlessly searching for a new identity.
Zen practitioners return repeatedly to the present moment, not in pursuit of a different self but in pursuit of a clearer relationship with the self that already exists.
Each tradition, in its own way, asks a similar question:
What remains when illusion falls away?
For me, the answer was surprisingly simple.
I was still shaped by Christianity.
Even after losing belief.
Even after leaving the church.
Even after questioning doctrines that once seemed untouchable.
The stories remained.
The language remained.
The symbols remained.
The questions remained.
Christianity had become part of my cultural inheritance.
I could no more erase it than I could erase my childhood, my family, or my education.
The goal, then, was not to abandon Christianity.
Nor was it to return to it.
The goal was to understand it honestly.
To inherit it critically.
To learn from it without being imprisoned by it.
To acknowledge both its wisdom and its failures.
To recognize it as one thread in the larger story of my life.
This realization eventually gave birth to the phrase that has come to define much of my thinking:
Religious, Not Spiritual.
I chose those words carefully.
I am not spiritual because I do not believe I exist apart from the natural world. I do not believe there is a hidden self waiting to escape the body. I do not believe enlightenment will transport me beyond the ordinary realities of human existence.
I am religious because I remain convinced that ritual matters.
Stories matter.
Community matters.
Practice matters.
Tradition matters.
The challenge is not escaping these things.
The challenge is engaging them authentically.
To be religious, in this sense, is not to surrender oneself to a tradition.
It is to enter into conversation with one.
To inherit without merely repeating.
To question without merely rejecting.
To practice without demanding certainty.
To remain open to transformation without abandoning oneself.
Authenticity is not self-expression.
It is not rebellion.
It is not independence.
Authenticity is the difficult work of becoming more fully oneself.
Religion succeeds when it helps us undertake that work.
It fails when it asks us to become someone else.
The goal is not to become a perfect Christian.
The goal is not to become a perfect Buddhist.
The goal is not even to become a perfect religious person.
The goal is to become fully and honestly human.
For me, that journey began the moment I stopped asking which religion was right and started asking what kind of person religion was helping me become.
The Promise and Peril
If religion is a human creation, then it should be judged like every other human creation.
Not by its intentions.
Not by its claims.
But by its results.
This realization marked another significant turning point in my thinking.
For much of my life, I evaluated religion primarily through the lens of truth. The central question was whether a doctrine was correct. If a belief was true, then the religion was successful. If a belief was false, then the religion was mistaken.
Today, I find myself asking a different question.
What kind of people does a religion help create?
This shift does not eliminate questions of truth. It simply recognizes that truth claims alone are insufficient. Every major religion claims access to unique truths. Every philosophy claims insight. Every ideology believes itself justified.
The more revealing question is what happens when those ideas are embodied in actual communities.
What kinds of lives emerge?
What kinds of relationships emerge?
What kinds of institutions emerge?
Religion, like education, leadership, politics, and art, must ultimately be evaluated by its effects on human beings.
At its best, religion performs functions that few other institutions perform as well.
Religion teaches people how to pay attention.
It preserves wisdom across generations.
It creates communities of belonging.
It provides rituals for moments that otherwise overwhelm language.
It reminds people that they are part of something larger than themselves.
It offers frameworks for confronting suffering, grief, aging, and death.
It encourages humility by placing individual lives within larger stories.
It creates opportunities for service, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
At its best, religion helps human beings become more thoughtful, more attentive, and more compassionate.
The monastery offers one example.
The local congregation offers another.
The meditation hall offers another.
The details vary, but the goal remains recognizable.
Religion creates spaces where people can practice being human.
Yet every strength contains a corresponding danger.
The same stories that create meaning can become dogma.
The same traditions that preserve wisdom can resist growth.
The same communities that foster belonging can create exclusion.
The same certainty that comforts can become oppressive.
Religion's greatest strengths often become its greatest temptations.
A tradition that begins as a path toward wisdom can become an institution concerned primarily with self-preservation.
A practice designed to cultivate attention can become an empty routine.
A story intended to illuminate reality can become a boundary marker separating insiders from outsiders.
The history of religion is filled with examples of both possibilities.
Religions have inspired hospitals, universities, charitable organizations, social reform movements, and profound works of art.
They have also justified violence, exclusion, persecution, and intolerance.
Neither reality can be ignored.
To acknowledge one while denying the other is to misunderstand the human nature of religion itself.
Religions do not transcend humanity.
They reveal humanity.
Every virtue and every flaw found within religious institutions originates in the people who create and sustain them.
This is why I have become increasingly skeptical of religious certainty.
The more certain a community becomes, the less curious it often becomes.
Questions become threats.
Doubt becomes weakness.
Inquiry becomes disloyalty.
The community's energy shifts from exploration to preservation.
Attention gives way to certainty.
Transformation gives way to conformity.
This is not a uniquely Christian problem.
It appears everywhere.
Buddhist traditions face it.
Philosophical schools face it.
Political movements face it.
Educational institutions face it.
Every human community must navigate the tension between preserving wisdom and remaining open to new understanding.
The challenge is not eliminating tradition.
The challenge is preventing tradition from becoming an idol.
One of the most important lessons I learned from both monastic Christianity and Soto Zen is that healthy traditions understand their own limitations.
The best teachers point beyond themselves.
The best traditions point beyond themselves.
The best practices point beyond themselves.
They recognize that no story can fully contain reality.
No doctrine can fully contain truth.
No institution can fully contain wisdom.
The purpose of religion is not to replace the human search for meaning.
The purpose of religion is to accompany it.
This is where I find myself today.
I am neither a defender nor an opponent of religion.
I am a student of it.
I see religion as one of humanity's oldest and most enduring attempts to answer the question of what it means to be human.
Sometimes it answers beautifully.
Sometimes it answers poorly.
Sometimes it helps people flourish.
Sometimes it helps them hide.
Like every human endeavor, it remains capable of greatness and failure.
The question is not whether religion is good or bad.
The question is whether it is helping us become more attentive, more compassionate, more authentic versions of ourselves.
When religion accomplishes that task, it becomes one of humanity's most valuable achievements.
When it forgets that task, it becomes just another institution demanding loyalty.
The difference is not found in doctrines.
The difference is found in the people who emerge from them.
In Closing
When I first began asking questions about religion, I assumed the answers would be found in doctrine.
I wanted to know whether Christianity was true.
Whether God existed.
Whether miracles happened.
Whether the creeds accurately described reality.
Like many people raised within a religious tradition, I believed these were the most important questions a person could ask.
Today, I am less certain.
Not because the questions are unimportant.
But because I have come to believe there is a deeper question beneath them all.
What does it mean to be human?
Every religion, philosophy, and wisdom tradition attempts to answer that question in its own way. Some answer through stories. Some answer in riddles. Some answer through rituals. Some answer with doctrines. Some answer through silence.
The answers differ.
The symbols differ.
The practices differ.
Yet the question remains.
How should we live?
How should we face suffering?
How should we treat one another?
How should we confront mortality?
How should we inhabit the brief lives we have been given?
These are not uniquely religious questions.
They are human questions.
Religion endures because the human condition endures.
As long as human beings love and lose, hope and despair, create and destroy, wonder and suffer, they will continue searching for ways to understand themselves and the world around them.
Some will find answers in churches.
Others in temples.
Others in philosophy.
Others in art.
Others in silence.
What matters is not the particular path.
What matters is whether the path helps us become more fully ourselves.
For me, this realization transformed my relationship with religion.
I no longer see religion as a contest between competing truth claims.
I see it as a conversation stretching across generations. A collection of stories, practices, communities, and traditions through which human beings have attempted to make sense of existence.
Some of those traditions deserve criticism.
Some deserve admiration.
Most deserve both.
The challenge is learning how to inherit them honestly.
To preserve their wisdom without becoming trapped by their certainties.
To learn from them without surrendering ourselves to them.
To allow them to shape us without allowing them to define us completely.
This, ultimately, is what I mean when I describe myself as religious, not spiritual.
I remain religious because I believe human beings need stories.
We need rituals.
We need communities.
We need practices that teach us how to pay attention.
We need traditions that remind us we are part of something larger than ourselves.
Yet I reject the idea that any tradition possesses a final claim upon truth, identity, or meaning.
No creed can fully contain reality.
No institution can fully contain wisdom.
No doctrine can fully contain the human experience.
The goal is not conformity.
The goal is not certainty.
The goal is not becoming the ideal member of a particular tribe.
The goal is authenticity.
The goal is becoming more fully oneself.
Not by escaping one's history.
Not by abandoning one's inheritance.
Not by constructing an entirely new identity from scratch.
But by engaging honestly with the stories, practices, and experiences that have shaped one's life.
In the end, I find myself returning to two simple ideas:
Pray and work.
Chop wood and carry water.
Different traditions.
Different cultures.
Different languages.
Yet both point toward the same insight.
The purpose of religion is not to remove us from the world.
The purpose of religion is to return us to it.
To this breath.
To this moment.
To this life.
Not as perfect believers.
Not as enlightened beings.
But as people learning, day by day, how to become more fully and authentically ourselves.