I haven’t written here in a while. Partly because life has been busy — a sister’s wedding in India, a family trip to Japan, a breakout session for a festival put on by Wayfare Magazine, two family camps with Uplift Kids, releasing an app version of Uplift Kids, working on books for Uplift Kids, hanging out at the homefront, a roadtrip to Seattle, and so on.

But I also haven’t written here partly because I no longer know how to exist online. I saw an interview recently with a Gen Z influencer who was once banned from every digital platform he posted on, and he said it felt like he no longer existed. That struck me as deeply sad, to believe you don’t exist in real life because you don’t exist online.

It makes me think of comedian-songwriter Bo Burnham’s film Inside, which features a series of songs recorded during the Covid lockdown. I don’t recommend the film broadly because it’s bleak and angry and crude. But I appreciate its biting commentary about the ways that staying inside alone online poisons the soul. At the very end of The Inside Outtakes (a part two of sorts), Burnham shows a one second clip of waves crashing on the beach, suggesting that he’s broken away from confining himself inside and is now enjoying real life again. As far as I’ve seen, he hasn’t posted anything on social media since. I think about that often, his online silence in the wake of Inside. I hope he’s happy.

I don’t share any of this to suggest that I’ve figured things out, that I’ve discovered some sort of balanced way to exist in a world fixated on producing and consuming digital content. To the contrary, another reason I haven’t written much is because I admittedly find these digital platforms alluring. The curated mix I see whenever I sign in — sardonic comedians, offbeat political commentators, matter-of-fact religious researchers, etc. — matches my interests too well. The content, I’m sorry to report, is good! The creators are brilliant! This online world is uncannily matched to my taste.

And that leaves me in a state of confusion. I want to live and write from a place that’s grounded in reality. I want to feel understood by and connected to the people I write to. But how do I know what to write if each individual I write to experiences a dramatically different curated digital feed — a deliberately siloed perspective of the world?

In asking this, I’m not adopting the stale talk track that we should all look at “the opposing side” — that people who watch Fox News (boo) should also watch CNN (also boo). I’m saying that the curators of all of our feeds, regardless of the political “vibe” of the channels we consume, do not have our best interests in mind. They’re happy to have us arguing about anything, to feel self-righteous about anything, as long as we stay glued to the screen. (Even Substack—which started out with a promise to be different—has started to feel primarily driven by the bottomline, with its increasing focus on shortform content and feeds!)

All of this makes it hard to know how to exist online.

I want connection, and yet whenever I’m online I’m aware that there’s a persistent intermediator making money off of the interaction. It’s as though you and I are in a room talking while a marketer and a data analyst lurk in a corner, muttering about new ways to make our exchange addictive and profitable for the oligarchs who fund them.

I don’t mean to wax cynical. I believe that we must love the world as it is as we change it. I believe we cannot hate our way to a better world. But existing online today feels like a hall of mirrors, and I do not like it. I long for a different model entirely — one that isn’t fundamentally extractive, one that’s more tied to place and embodiment.

What do you think? How are you finding connection? How are you making sense of existing online today? What am I not seeing clearly?

For my part, I look for ways to belong where I live. I lead a monthly mindfulness gathering at the wonderful and lovely Compass Gallery (which you should all visit and where you should all buy art). I participate in monthly gatherings where we do group lessons on timeless values with local families who use Uplift Kids, and I participate in monthly gatherings with the Lower Lights School of Wisdom. I’m also leading an online group experience, starting August 9th, with the extremely sharp spiritual director and commentator Britt Hartley.

But I’m always looking for more examples of what’s working well, including traditional examples that feel fresh, such as religious examples. What’s going on where you live? Do you know of spaces online that feel truly connective, free of audience capture and extractive algorithms? Or maybe the problem is just me, and I need to approach all of this differently than I’ve been approaching it?

Right now I notice part of me leaping up as I write this, shouting its desire for me to publish all my hot takes on, say, religion and politics.

“But if I post hot takes,” another part of me responds, “how will I avoid audience capture? How will I get true connection instead of the facade of true connection? And does the world really need another voice giving hot takes when it already feels so saturated with hot takes? Do we all need to be commenting on everything that happens?”

To which the part of me that longs to express hot takes responds, “If you keep all of your thoughts in a folder of unpublished drafts, do you even exist?”

Edited to Add: As I mention below, I wrote this piece hours after returning from a live event. I’ve since managed to get ahold of an audio recording and have listened to it again and have made minor edits here to better reflect what happened. I’ve also posted the transcript of certain portions of the event at the end of this piece to accurately convey what was said.

More than anything right now, I’m struck by a question posed by my friend Jim Dalrymple in the comments, namely: “How do you get the actual results you want by standing against power?” Phrased another way, as I understand it: Is it inherently immoral to work in the federal government under Trump? Does ‘sitting out’ mostly just result in an unhelpful loss of power? Is it better, then, to serve in government positions, even now?”

These are compelling questions that I need to think about more deeply. For now I’ll say that I don’t think absolute purity tests help anyone. Life is complicated, politics is complicated, and power is complicated. We still need capable people leading government agencies, even under Trump, and I believe it is possible for someone to join these agencies with noble motives. And yet Trump’s persistent desire for praise and fealty creates dicey territory. How does one participate in DC without losing their soul? How does one try to do good things in an administration run by someone who—as I detail below—is so deeply morally depraved?

Again, it’s complicated. But, for my part, I hope Latter-day Saints can do it without praising Trump.

Finally, I’ll say that the substance of the discussion about healthcare is worth listening to! Once the official video is live, I’ll link to it here, but for now, here’s the audio.

In any case, here’s the essay:

***

I just returned from a live panel at the Silicon Slopes Summit 2026, featuring businessman Mark Cuban and Director of Medicare Chris Klomp, in which Klomp, a Latter-day Saint, praised Donald Trump.

“Trump is just so present in meetings.”

“It’s hard to keep up with him, he moves so fast.”

You know the sort of thing if you’ve seen Trump’s cabinet meetings, where people leap over each other to heap the most praise they can and get on the president’s good side.

Klomp told a story about how when Trump discovered he was Mormon, he grabbed one of his leather “God Bless the USA” Bibles, signed his name on the cover with a sharpie, and gave it to him. (A weird story to share for many reasons, including the fact that Trump admitted this week that he hasn’t read the book.)

After the praise, I found myself wanting to shout “…and he’s in the Epstein files!” but my basic sense of decorum and, frankly, my cowardice held me back.

I regret it.

If I’m honest, I’m just very tired. The latest batch of files contains more details about Trump sexually abusing teenagers, and while the details still have yet to be publicly verified by outside sources, the fact that a woman signed an affidavit saying that it happened and that Trump told her “he was capable of having her whole family killed” if she told anyone doesn’t bode well for him. Nor do the photos and videos of Trump and Epstein together, or the fact that Trump’s former COO said, “in my mind, [Epstein] was his best friend,” or Trump’s birthday card to Epstein (wherein he drew a naked prepubescent girl), or Trump’s 28 sexual assault accusations, or the fact that Epstein wrote, “I have met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.” (They had a long relationship together.)

Trump supporters often say that Trump’s critics ultimately have nothing to offer against him other than “orange man bad,” but when they’re pressed to list his wrongdoings they squirm, preferring to retreat to “yeah, he’s a little rough around the edges”— which is quite different from what I’ve listed here!

So… what are Latter-day Saints like Klomp doing?

Klomp ended his time on stage by saying that what matters most is building something that matters, and that he cares so much about building something that matters that he was willing to leave behind his job at Bain Capital and now works so hard as Trump’s Director of Medicare that he hardly sees his family anymore.

But at what cost? And for what?? Trump hasn’t brought back manufacturing jobs (which are still in decline, just as they were in his first term). He hasn’t announced his Obamacare replacement, a decade after he said he would. He hasn’t brought down prices generally. He hasn’t brought law and order. (Instead he’s brought the opposite—masked agents!)

I understand complaints against corporate Democrats and corporate media, and I share those complaints. I also appreciated what Klomp said (and especially what Cuban said) about bringing down healthcare costs. I desperately hope it happens.

But I fear that if we don’t practice more courage—and I include myself here (I should have shouted!!)—we cannot possibly claim to have any moral high ground here in Utah.

So, I ask: What’s the end of LDS praise for Trump?

I think of how once upon a time Mike Pence told his wife that tying himself to Trump would be worth it because it would give evangelical Christians power... and how Pence’s career ended with MAGA making a noose for him and chanting “Hang Mike Pence” the moment he didn’t do their bidding.

Latter-day Saint praise for Trump will end in nothing better.

fin

Transcript Segments

Segment One (Opening Question)

Klomp is asked whether Trump really calls him the “Mormon Assassin”:  

Klomp: “ It’s true, the president likes his nicknames. …  And that story came because …I got tasked with being one of the lead negotiators on us going and figuring out how it was that we were gonna get all these pharmaceutical manufacturers to show up and voluntarily lower their prices. …   He’s angry about it. … [In his first term], Trump dropped the prescription drug price index by like 0.1%. It was like the first time it had gone down. And he was really proud of it, but it turns out it’s not enough and he wants to do more. And so he dug into the issues. …

So he does this press conference, and it’s right before he’s going to Saudi Arabia. … And I’m with [Dr.] Oz, and we go back to the Oval [Office] and Susie, his chief of staff, is sitting there—Secret Services outside, Marine One is fired up on the lawn, ready to take the president to Andrew’s Air Force Base to get on the Air Force One to fly to Saudi Arabia … and he comes back into the Oval, and he sees me, and he shakes my hand, and he keeps walking, but he asks a question [about prescription drugs] in passing, and I answer the question, and that leads to another question. …  And all of a sudden you can see … Susie’s eyes roll just a little, because now everybody knows we’re gonna be off schedule.

And in that moment, that was the most important thing he was gonna do, which is a really important thing about him. He’s a very present individual. The thing he is doing in the moment is the thing he’s focused on. It’s incredible.

So Oz knew that he had these Bibles — it’s the Donald Trump edition Bible, it’s leather bound—and Oz, knowing that I’m religious, says, “Hey Mr. President. Show him one of the Bibles.” Now the schedulers are really freaking out. There’s a runner in the room and and the president says, “Hey, go get a Bible.” So he starts to walk and the president yells out, “Run!”

So the kid takes off, goes and gets a Bible, comes back, and he’s like, “Here, I’ll sign it for you.” So he sits down at the resolute desk and he takes out a big sharpie marker, and he starts writing his name on the cover of this Bible, … And "Oz is like, “Go stand together. I’ll take a picture.” Oz is amazing that way; he never fails to document an opportunity. And the president says, “Are you religious?” And I said, “Uh, yes, Mr. President.” And he says, “What are you?” And I’m trying to decide what name I’m gonna give him, and I’m like, “I’m Mormon, sir.” And he’s like, “Whoa, you’re really religious.” … And so that was it.

And he’d be checking in all the time with Secretary Kennedy or Dr. Oz or others … [wanting] progress on prescription drug prices. And he said, “Well, who’s working on that?” “Oh, the Mormon’s working in that, sir.” And he said, “He’s a killer.”

So that was it. It took a little bit until we started rolling deals out and then I started speaking at press conferences in the Oval Office and he got to know me and we’ve been working on other stuff since.

Segment Two — Klomp’s closing remarks:

“There are a lot of ways to make money in healthcare. Don’t waste your time on things that don’t make the world better. You can make money in the shark. You can make money owning basketball teams. You can make money selling your startup.

I guarantee if you’re so lucky to have a few seconds before you blast off from this life and think back to everything you did, the thing you’re gonna be most proud of was human suffering that you alleviated by enabling more people, more Americans to have access to affordable healthcare.

And that is why I don’t see my wife and my four kids almost ever right now. I have never worked harder in my life. I have never sprinted faster, by the way, trying to keep up with the president who sprints faster than everybody—he’s incredible—because there’s an opportunity to do the right thing.

“He can totally avoid us now.”

I can’t judge this mother, who was trying to make her son happy in a confusing, quickly changing world. She had no idea what Tyler would find in the dark stretches of the Internet — how he would be exposed to the nihilistic underbelly of blackpilled irony culture reflected in the cryptic “jokes” he engraved on the bullets he used to shoot Charlie Kirk.

Tyler’s mom didn’t know what she was doing, just like millions of other parents living in a system that exploits rather than serves their kids.

The same cannot be said of the most powerful people in the world — that they don’t know what they’re doing. Hours after Charlie Kirk was shot, before we had any hint about who killed him, Elon Musk tweeted that “the left is the party of murder.” Donald Trump lashed out saying, “We have radical left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them” and that he “couldn’t care less” about uniting the nation. Mentions of civil war on X skyrocketed.

It’s all a sign of the same exploitative system that privileges infotainment and team politics above pursuing truth, beauty, or goodness.

Unlike the shooter’s mom, Musk and Trump and plenty of their opponents are using this same system to reward themselves. They’ve tapped into an insane but proven formula: Pick a side to hate and perform the role of “destroying” them to a cheering (and jeering) audience.

It’s World Wrestling Entertainment behind a screen — just as phony, just as performative. In this digital arena, it doesn’t matter much if you’re viewed as the hero or the villain. The cheers and the jeers both give you eyeballs, and eyeballs get you money. Eyeballs get you fame. Eyeballs win elections.

Young people are witnessing this broken system, and many are simply opting out — rejecting both the Republican and the Democratic parties entirely. As one recent Harvard study found, only 15% of young people “believe the country is heading in the right direction,” and “fewer than one-third approve of President Trump or either party in Congress.”

This sense of rejection and hopelessness is mirrored in what we know so far about Tyler Robinson. His messages with his friends on Discord weren’t political, and while he cared about transgender issues, nothing else that I’ve seen ties him to the Democratic party. There’s no hint that he was a fan of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, or even Bernie Sanders, who gets maligned as the leader of “the far left.” Robinson didn’t leave a manifesto outlining why the minimum wage should be higher, why America needs more unions, why healthcare should be universal, or any of Bernie’s other “far left” talking points.

Maybe officials will discover such a manifesto, but it seems unlikely. What seems more likely is that Tyler Robinson will turn out to be what the justice department calls a nihilistic violent extremist, not unlike the young man who tried to assassinate Trump last year — a young man who similarly was perpetually online, who similarly didn’t fit cleanly into the traditional left vs right mold, and who similarly lashed out with violence.

What can we do about any of this?

I’m thinking again of that line from Tyler’s mom:

“He can totally avoid us now.”

It haunts me. It forces me to ask myself: Am I using technology to connect with people or to avoid them? Am I using my device, or is it using me?

These are hard questions I don’t fully have an answer to. I want to be someone whose work online leads to deeper connection and understanding, but it’s difficult. Data shows that what works online is to go negative, use out-group animosity, and push language to an extreme. That will get you likes. That will get you eyeballs.

I know this might be difficult for fans of Charlie Kirk to hear, but if you’re a fan and you happen to read this, I would ask you to consider how much of his fame and wealth came from employing these exact tactics. Notice how he framed his videos:

• “Charlie Kirk VS the Wokies at University of Tennessee”

• “Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State”

• “Charlie Kirk Goes Full Oppenheimer & Drops a Nuke on Pro-Choice Nonsense”

• “Student Argument Destroyed By The Bible's Forgotten Rule”

• “Charlie Kirk COOKS Atheist on "Biblical" Slavery”

• “Woke Mind Virus Takes Over College Kids Moral Compass”

• “Race Baiting Leftist Crushed by Facts & Logic”

• “College Kid Gives the Craziest Abortion Argument I've Ever Heard”

If you’re a fan of Kirk’s, please ask yourself whether watching his videos causes you to feel more disdain and animosity or more love and understanding for the “wokies" he “crushed.” I say this as someone who mourns his death, who is against all violence, and who respects Kirk’s penchant for in-person argument, as well as his call to release the Epstein files and his refusal to take the latest funding from Netanyahu. None of this is to reduce Kirk to a caricature or heap animosity on him, which is counter to everything I’m saying here. It’s just to point out that one of the major reasons that Charlie Kirk got rich and famous is by employing the tactics that our current system incentivizes — tactics that lead us to avoid seeing each other in all our complexity and humanity.

Life will not always be like this. We will either continue to dehumanize each other — to accuse “the other side” of being the side of murder (in which case more lives will end in violence) — or we will change our behavior and incentive structures so that we no longer reward performative, animus-driven activities that distract us from real curiosity, warmth, and love.

The Telepathy Tapes, a podcast so popular it briefly eclipsed Joe Rogan’s place as the most-downloaded show in the US, makes the claim that nonverbal autistic people have telepathic powers. It’s a claim I’d normally dismiss outright, but since the show has surfaced more than once in recent conversations I’ve had and since it’s tremendously popular, I gave it a listen.

The host, a self-described science nerd named Ky Dickens, starts the show by explaining that she used to be skeptical about telepathy — used to be skeptical, that is, until she discovered the work of Dr. Diane Powell, a neuropsychiatrist who has studied the phenomenon firsthand. In Powell’s studies, a facilitator is given a random word or number sequence that’s not visible to the nonverbal autistic person. Then the autistic person, with help from the facilitator, guesses the word or number sequence. More than 90% of the time, Dickens tells us, the autistic person guesses correctly.

Dickens is so impressed after watching Powell’s videos that she decides to gather some of her friends (including a cameraman who Dickens assures us is “a huge skeptic”) to record a handful of tests herself, both with and without Powell present. What follows is a series of scenarios, narrated by Dickens, along the lines of what Powell experienced with her test subjects. In each case, autistic people complete a variety of tasks that suggest they have telepathic powers.

Towards the end of the first episode, however, Powell makes a curious statement. She tells Dickens that despite all the lengths they went to in setting up their tests, their results would not be valid according to the general scientific community.

It’s a line that didn’t completely surprise me, as I’d read a few critiques of the show (including this one from Skeptical Inquirer) before listening. It turns out that the presence of a designated facilitator (who, it seems, is usually the mother of the autistic person) is a monumental red flag. It means that Dickens is witnessing a phenomenon known as “facilitated communication” (FC), which has been thoroughly studied in controlled settings for decades.

You can read the systematic reviews of these studies here and here to see that in every instance where facilitated communication has been studied in a setting with proper controls, it’s been disproven and labeled as “a technique that has no validity.” Why? Because in each case the facilitators end up giving subtle cues — whether through the way they hold a number board in the air, or through physical touch, or through some other means — that influence the actions of the autistic person. This means that the communication comes from the facilitator, not the test subject.

At first blush, this claim might sound every bit as outlandish as believing in telepathy itself. How can tiny, almost microscopic cues be picked up by these nonverbal autistic people who then translate the cues into answers?

What’s more, for those who have listened to the podcast, this critique doesn’t explain the story of Akhil, an autistic person who types his answers onto a digital tablet himself while his facilitator (his mother) is in a completely different room?

I’ll admit that the case of Akhil had me stumped when I listened to the show. I could understand how a facilitator might influence responses when physically touching the autistic person. But what was going on in the case of Akhil?

That’s when I decided I needed to see the videos of these studies, which are offered at TheTelepathyTapes.com for ten dollars. I had a hunch that if I could just see the videos instead of having everything filtered through Dickens, I could know what was going on. So I paid for access and started from the beginning. In case after case, the subtle cues from the facilitators are obvious — physical touch, moving a number board in the air, etc. The process is still remarkable, in the sense that these autistic people can pick up on these microscopic visual and tactile cues from their facilitator, but it’s clearly an instance of facilitated communication.

When I eventually got to the videos with Akhil, they were considerably less impressive than what I’d pictured in my mind while listening to the podcast. In all but one of the videos, Akhil’s mother sits next to or behind him making tiny hand gestures, giving physical touch, or making tiny vocalizations, or all three. In the single video where she isn’t physically right next to him, she’s just a few feet away, within eyesight, and she gives tiny auditory prompts before each letter. (This is far clearer in video format than in podcast format.) While I couldn’t translate those tiny auditory prompts into a word the way Akhil does, it’s not at all outside of the realm of possibility for an autistic person and their primary caregiver who have done this process for years together to have a mutual understanding — a shared language. That’s what I saw when I saw the video.

After reading the studies on facilitated communication and seeing the videos firsthand, my sense is that the Telepathy Tapes flatly exaggerate what’s happening. A true test would show unedited verified footage from multiple camera angles where the facilitator sits in an enclosed room and gives no cues. To prove that telepathy is real, Dickens would need to upload a series of videos with multiple subjects in a controlled setting like that. Then she could earn a $500,000 reward from the Center for Inquiry that’s being offered to anyone who can demonstrate psychic abilities under such settings. Easy money, if she had the proof! But she doesn’t.

***

So, one might ask: Why all have all these people — Dickens, Powell, facilitators, parents, podcast listeners — gone to such lengths to promote the notion that telepathy is real?

As Dickens talks about in the show, facilitated communication often gives these families a sense of hope for the first time. They feel like they’re finally able to communicate with their nonverbal kids, who frequently say wonderful things about love and compassion. It really is beautiful. In addition, the families who ascribe to this worldview often find a sense of community and camaraderie with other families in similar situations, and this community gives them real comfort and a sense of purpose in the face of a desperately bleak life. And then there’s the fact that telepathy makes for a great story. It adds a sense of wonder to a sullen world of concrete and digits and bits.

I’m not unsympathetic to any of this. We all need wonder in our lives, and exploring strange occurrences like those that happen through facilitated communication are one way to do that.

Given this, why bring up all these criticisms of the Telepathy Tapes at all? If there’s no downside, why not just let people believe that facilitated communication is real?

Because there is a downside.

Over the past decades, a long list of lies, fraud, and abuse cases have surfaced around the use of facilitated communication. In many, a facilitator suspects that the subject is a victim of abuse and calls in the police for questioning. When the police show up and start asking questions, the facilitator reveals lurid details of abuse — so lurid that these children have been forcibly separated from their parents. But when the children are questioned by a different facilitator, the answers they give aren’t the same. It turns out that, again, the answers were coming from the facilitator, not the subject. The facilitator got it in their head that the subject was the victim of abuse and, when prompted with leading questions from police, they filled in the details. (“Were you hurt?” “Yes.” “Who did it?” “Dad.” “What did he do?” And so on.) They made up a story, ad-libs style, and tore families apart in the process. And that’s just one of many types of lies, fraud, and abuse stemming from this process.

***

In the end, for me The Telepathy Tapes is a useful case study in how easy it is to go wrong in our thinking as human beings. We see something genuinely remarkable (a nonverbal autistic person picking up and interpreting microscopic cues) and we mistake it for something magical (telepathy). We see something we hope is true, and we ignore the red flags — or smooth over the bumps — that suggest it is not true. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s one way we find meaning and community. And heaven knows, being a lonely cynic about everything we see isn’t a good way to live. “Better to be crazy with the rest of the world,” the philosopher Baltasar Gracián wrote, “than to be wise alone.” We all must make concessions to belong to each other.

But wouldn’t it be best if we could find a way to belong without having to make so many concessions to pseudoscience? Wouldn’t we be even healthier as a species if our sense of belonging stemmed from a vibrant blend of love and skepticism?

If you’ve been following Ken Klippenstein’s work here on Substack, you’ve seen his series about our gerontocracy in Congress. This Congress is among the oldest in history, especially the leadership, and it has resulted in injuries and embarrassments—a few of which are shown in the photos above. You may have also seen the recent story about current Congresswoman Kay Granger, 81, who was found with dementia in a nursing home after quietly slinking away from the Capitol six months ago.

And then there’s the matter of Joe Biden, whose empty-headed performance in his first and only debate against Donald Trump last year was emblematic of this whole issue. As Ellie Anderson points out, “The two oldest living presidents are now the incumbent president and the president elect.”

What’s going on?

Part of the problem is that too many people in Congress refuse to pass the baton to the next generation. They refuse to admit when enough is enough. Retiring is for other people. Democrats need Nancy Pelosi to win elections! Republicans need Mitch McConnell to get stuff done! And yet Pelosi has not been winning elections and McConnell has not got stuff done.

It’s not just Congress. America’s rich and powerful almost uniformly lack the capacity to practice the virtue of enough. Wall Street and Silicon Valley fixate on quarterly returns at all costs, regardless of environmental and societal destruction. Jeff Bezos flaunts his $500 million properties, Mark Zuckerberg flaunts his $900k watch, Elon Musk flaunts his $277 million investment in politics (which led to a $200 billion post-election return). Bill Gates flaunts his philanthropy while somehow managing to also keep himself on the world’s “top ten richest people list” year after year. (Gotta stay in that sweet spot between giving just enough to help the personal brand without giving too much to hurt the personal brand!) They all have more money than they could possibly spend in several lifetimes. Like our career politicians in Congress, they have no sense of enough.

***

I’m reminded of a haunting scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away.

A creature named No Face enters a bathhouse and starts offering gold to the guests. As the guests grab the gold, wide-eyed with greed, No Face gobbles them up, growing larger and more ferocious with each bite. He lunges down the hallway with his spindly legs, gulping anyone who takes his gold.

And then No Face comes to Chihiro, the story’s main character, who is looking for a way to turn her parents back from a spell that changed them into pigs after they snarfed down a feast that didn’t belong to them. When No Face offers Chihiro overflowing handfuls of gold, she shakes her head and refuses to take it, saying, “You can't give me what I want.”

“You can’t give me what I want.”

It’s a scene that stands out to me in part because the message feels foreign to the American mind—the virtue of refusing to take more than you need. The virtue of enough.

In so many ways, we live in an era of abundance. We have enough food to feed the world. We have the capacity to create shelter for everyone. We could offer basic healthcare to all, such that most people could live long, happy lives.

In short, we’ve already achieved the potential for paradise. Eden is a few feet away!

But a few feet away isn’t here.

I’m not making some ageist argument—that the elderly have no place in society. Nor am I spouting a blind screed against the wealthy. What I’m saying is that America must learn how to celebrate people who know what “enough” is—people who can relinquish the insane drive to always be at the center of attention, people who know what it means to have sufficient for their needs. We must celebrate the virtue of enough.

What if we were to collectively look at all the surplus that’s being shoved toward us, all the status games and posturing and empty calories, and emphatically say, “You can’t give me what I want”?

Until I watched the first cartoons he starred in, I had no idea that Mickey Mouse used to be wild.  In those first cartoons Mickey throws potatoes at a parrot, fights a goat, brings down skyscrapers, builds airplanes, and splits Donald Duck’s flute in half. His mischievous antics still make my kids laugh today, 100 years after they hit the silver screen.

Tragically, as Disney became an institution, Walt caved to worries that Mickey would be a bad influence on kids. So he made Mickey perfect — cheery, bland, safe, and forgettable. That’s the Mickey I knew growing up. A vapid high-vocaled mascot.

I wonder whether something similar happened with Jesus. Not the silly cartoony stuff, of course. I just wonder whether Jesus was similarly swallowed up and un-wilded by the institution that worshiped him. The living Jesus was a poverty-stricken carpenter who preached about an inverted kingdom, broke the Sabbath, and lashed out at the powerful. The institutionalized Jesus, by contrast, is too often safe, clean, and without flaw — sitting on a throne, pronouncing lists of commandments. 

At some level, this transformation makes sense. Institutions tend to celebrate whatever is lawful and dislike whatever is chaotic. That’s part of the appeal. People want something safe and predictable from their institutions so they can feel a sense of belonging, and tamed figureheads are safe and predictable.

But there’s at least one problem with institutions that lose their wildness: They aren’t living. 

As such, they can’t wake us up.

To be living, religions must integrate the wild. They must be less like cities of steel and stone and more like gardens — like nature, structured. Gardens have borders, sure. But the boundaries are blurred. Birds and insects and worms come and go. Seeds travel in and out. Rains pour from the skies, or not. When there’s so much happening across borders, where, precisely, does a garden end and begin?

Wild religion is similar. Yes, there’s structure so people can gather together, but the structure sits inside a living system that’s far bigger than the structure. Like how Jesus participated in the structure of Judaism while criticizing it and stretching beyond its limits. Was he “in” or was he “out” of his religion? The answer is yes. That’s what wild religion looks like.

Maybe the same could be said of all religious founders. Buddha studied under Vedic masters and then sat under the bodhi tree, Muhammad was versed in the religious conversations of his day and then entered a cave, Lao Tzu belonged to the city but only wrote the Tao Te Ching as he left, Moses grew up in the courts and died in the wilderness, and so on. They each channeled something living because they were open to the wild — to that which cannot be predicted.

That which cannot be predicted is evolving, and that which is evolving is alive. It is not perfect. It is wild.

It’s no wonder then that our machines shape our thoughts and metaphors. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve heard someone compare their career to an ever-declining escalator that requires non-stop effort to stay competitive and someone else compare an ailing relationship to a car in need of repair.

Humans have always used the physical world to “build” the abstract world of language and concepts, so it makes perfect sense that we turn to mechanical metaphors in an era where machines dominate our lives.

But more often than not these mechanical metaphors are inaccurate and unhelpful. Why? Because we are not machines. We are nature.

If a machine stops working, you have one option: Do something. Take your car to a mechanic, bring your bike to a bike shop, take your phone to a repair store. 

By contrast, nature gives us two options: Do something and do nothing. 

Do something, do nothing is a concept I likely first heard from the mindfulness teacher Thomas McConkie, who I’ve been learning from for nearly a decade. In a meditation titled “Healing Meditation” on Insight Timer, Thomas guides the listener into a state of stillness and then says, “There’s absolutely nothing you need to do but trust the stillness. You don’t need to do the healing. … Stay soft, stay open. Let the body-mind purge itself of anything it doesn’t need. Let stillness be the tonic, the solution that draws all of this out — everything you don’t need, everything holding you back. Let the healing simply come to you.”

Let the healing simply come to you. If we were machines, such a process would be impossible. No amount of time, stillness, or patience can fix a broken dishwasher. 

But time, stillness, and patience are embedded throughout the natural world, as wisdom teachers have long known. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “In spite of all the farmer's work and worry, he can't reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.” And Jesus says, “The farmer sleeps at night and is up and around during the day. Yet the seeds keep sprouting and growing, and he doesn't understand how. It is the ground that makes the seeds sprout and grow into plants that produce grain.”

Since the earth bestows and the ground makes seeds sprout, it stands to reason that beyond a certain threshold no amount of watering, weeding, or fertilizing will help your plants grow. In fact, over-watering, over-weeding, and over-fertilizing will only make things worse. 

The same is true of healing from a cut. You can wash and bandage the wound, but beyond that bit of effort you must let nature do the work. Picking at a scab won’t heal you.

The creative process is similar, as are relationships. Sometimes what’s needed is not more effort but long, deep, healing sleep. Or silence. Or a hug. Sometimes (often?) our efforts can even backfire. We might anxiously cling to our view in an argument only to discover that our partner has doubled down on their view in response, placing us further than ever from getting what our heart desires. 

Of course, the answer isn’t always to do nothing. Sometimes arguing fiercely for your position is precisely what’s needed, and sometimes a long stretch of work is the only way through a difficult problem. The point is just that like everything in nature, we heal by doing something and by doing nothing. Hard work and deep rest.

“When you have nothing to say, you may as well keep your mouth shut,” reads one translation of the Tao Te Ching. “The wind and the rain don’t go on forever. If nature knows enough to give it a rest sometimes, so should you.”

If I had to rank the stories that have transformed my life, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol might top the list. I encounter it multiple times each December and each time it speaks to me, whether it’s the original text, a local theater production, or the Muppets film version. I’m in awe of how much depth it contains.

The scenes conjured by the Ghost of Christmas Future haunt me most — Scrooge seeing how gleeful the cityfolk are in the wake of his death, the passing of Tiny Tim, his own gravestone. These horrors lead Scrooge to cry out with conviction, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

“I will live in the past, the present, and the future.”

It’s a noteworthy line juxtaposed next to another book I’ve revisited several times in the past decade: Eckart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Unlike Dickens’s work, Tolle’s book is one I can’t recommend without caveats (Tolle tips into the woo-woo), but I’d be lying if I said I don’t find some immensely powerful insights in it. He offers a map to find stillness in a busy world — to be present in the now.

“Are you worried?” Tolle writes, in a passage that illustrates his main point. “Do you have many ‘what if’ thoughts? You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a mental phantom. You can stop this health-and life-corroding insanity simply by acknowledging the present moment. Become aware of your breathing. Feel the air flowing in and out of your body.”

I imagine the specter of Tolle showing up to Scrooge after his transformation and telling him no, no, no, the “what if” thoughts sparked by the ghosts (“what if Tiny Tim dies?” “what if everyone is happy when I die?”) were actually life corroding, not life giving, and that what he needs to do instead is become aware of his breath. Such a scene would feel as flat as a leaked balloon.

“That’s nice,” I can hear the transformed Scrooge saying while patting Tolle on the head, “but my experience says otherwise.”

For Scrooge, it is precisely his encounters with the past, present, and future that change him.

So, is there a way to reconcile these two works? 

I don’t have a solid answer, but I’m intrigued by the question.

My hunch is that it all hinges on the approach we take to the past and future. When I’m in the headspace of wishing I’d made different choices in the past, I can either wallow in woe about those mistakes or I can transmute my pain into making better decisions now. Likewise, when I reflect on my inevitable death and how people who know me might respond to my death, I can either let paralysis take hold of me or I can transmute my fear into making better decisions now. In either case, it’s about returning to the present. 

What I’m talking about is using A Christmas Carol as a transformative, meditative practice — a practice where I conjure up each ghost (past, present, and future) and imagine what they might show me, all for the purpose of living well right now. Given that Dickens wrote this book with the direct intent to transform British society, this approach feels aligned with the spirit of the story.

• Past: Like Scrooge, I’ve failed friends and selfishly disassociated myself from the lives of others in the past. Reflecting on these failures is a call to do the opposite now.

• Present: People I know are experiencing pain in the present, similar to the Cratchits. Seeing their pain calls me to help them now. 

• Future: I will die, as will everyone I know. Seeing my gravestone is a call to rejoice in life — to not stoically disassociate myself but to instead lean into right now.

There’s much more to explore here, including how this idea points to a possible unity between Eastern and Western approaches to transformation. For now I’ll say that meditating on the past, present, and future like this feels like a portal to transformation similar to what Scrooge experienced. My hunch is that if we’re going to truly transform ourselves, we need now and then.

At some level, everyone intuitively understands development. 

It’s like this: As infants, our world is a crib. As toddlers, our world expands to include a house and a yard. As kids, we’re aware of a neighborhood. As teens, we’re more aware of nations and the world. As grownups our world continues to expand, both internally and externally. 

That’s a vast oversimplification, and developmental theorists have shined a light on the nuances and complexities of the growing process for hundreds or (if you include ancient Greek thinkers) even thousands of years. 

Today the field is abundant with theories that each have a different flavor and level of detail, and while I appreciate aspects of every major theory I’ve encountered, I’ve found the one from former pastor Brian McLaren to be the easiest to explain quickly, so I’ll use it here to flesh out where I’m coming from. 

McLaren lists four stages of adult development: simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony. Each “higher” stage represents an increased capacity (more on that in a moment) to see someone else as real — to genuinely articulate their position as they would articulate it. 

Here’s how I think of McLaren’s stages:

• Simplicity = awareness that people in your tribe (political party, religion, etc.) are real.

• Complexity = awareness that people outside of your tribe — but whose views don’t directly discount your tribe — are real.

• Perplexity = awareness that people whose views directly discount your tribe are real.

• Harmony = awareness that people in each of the stages listed above are real.

Like I said, different theorists use different labels for these stages, such as premodern, modern, postmodern, and metamodern or different person-perspectives. My point is that, whatever the label, stages of adult development describe an expansion of awareness.

But here’s the rub.

A mature life isn’t just one that’s aware of more and more. A mature life is one that actually treats other people as real in practice. And that requires virtue — the capacity and conviction to treat others as they want to be treated.

Developmental Pools

Framed this way, we might think of stages of development as expanding “pools” that have an increased capacity to hold virtue. So stage one (simplicity) would be, say, a kiddie pool and stage four (harmony) would be an Olympic-sized pool. 

And yet having a large capacity doesn’t equate to having a great deal of virtue. You could have an Olympic-sized pool that's holding nothing but a thin layer of sludge or a kiddie pool that’s full to the brim with living water. The latter is more mature (wiser, kinder, more compassionate).

To illustrate, a friend in my Latter-day Saint community once told me that when he asks for volunteers to help people in their congregation move to a new house, it’s seldom the most expansively minded members who show up to do it. That notion matches my lived experience — including, by way of confession, my personal experience. As my worldview has expanded, I’ve found it more difficult to volunteer to help others in my immediate vicinity partly because I’m so stressed about international politics, global warming, the collapse of institutions, etc. I fixate on the grand problems so much that I tell myself I don’t have as much time for the small immediate problems. (And yet the small immediate problems are the ones I’m more likely to actually be able to do something about!) The whole situation reminds me of a character named Mrs. Jellyby from Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House who fixates on helping kids in Africa while living in a home that’s in total disarray. Expansive… but not mature.

Given this tendency, I have to remind myself over and over that while having an expansive view of life is potentially helpful (global warming really is a problem! criticisms against institutions really are valid!), it’s not an excuse to neglect life where I live. After all, the only place I ever am is here.

To return to the pool analogy: The point isn’t the size of the pool. The point is the amount of living water it contains. The most mature person therefore embodies an expansive worldview while also being willing to skillfully alleviate the pain of others in their immediate vicinity (including themselves, by avoiding burnout). Such a person has an Olympic-sized pool of pure water — love in theory and love in practice. That’s the goal. 

More than anything, my worry is that when developmental theorists give primacy to stages, they risk celebrating a model that results in little more than ego-puffery. It’s what I’ve seen in the rise and fall of Ken Wilber, who’s among the most popular writers in the space. Sure, Wilber makes nods toward “growing down” (i.e., developing virtue), but the focal point of his work, as captivating as it is, seems to be his color-coded form of stages. And what good is being teal, turquoise, or indigo (as Wilber calls the higher stages) if we don’t embody virtue?

Recently, my son asked what church is like for most Christians in America. (He’s been to a variety of services from a range of traditions, but never an evangelical service.) 

“They sing songs about God and listen to a sermon,” I told him. 

That was terribly vague, I realized, so I pulled up YouTube and typed in the first evangelical Christian that came to mind: “Joel Osteen church service.” 

As it so happened, a Joel Osteen service was airing live right then, so we watched it together — polished songs, sermons, prayers, and all. Professional singers belted out praises to God over guitar licks and drum kits. I had to tell my son that not all services were as amped up as this one was, but it conveyed a flavor (from what I understand) of one form of contemporary evangelical worship.

Worship. In a secular age, it feels like a strange word. But for thousands of years, it’s something most human beings did — and did often. It’s also something that most human beings (not just evangelical Christians) still often do today. Muslims worship Allah. Buddhists of the popular Pure Land tradition worship Amitābha Buddha. And most forms of Hinduism consist of worshiping one of many possible gods. 

Still, the word sounds… antiquated. 

Worship? 

What’s it good for? 

The Practice of Being Small

If we define worship as “an expression of reverence for something bigger than ourselves,” then worship is the practice of being small.

When we worship — when we express reverence — we attune to the idea that we aren’t the main character in life. We bow our heads to something bigger or beyond us.

That “something” doesn’t have to be God. As the philosopher Paul Woodruff writes, “Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control—God, truth, justice, nature, even death.”

To illustrate his point, Woodruff gives an example of a reverent scientist. “A scientist who is reverent toward the truth is reverent in seeking the truth,” he writes. “Her very reverence makes her cautious.” Reverence, in other words, is what makes scientists effective. It’s the attitude and act of putting the truth above personal bias. 

Framed in this way, scientists must worship the truth to be good at their work.

Something similar can be said of the other things Woodruff mentions: Justice, nature, and especially death. For instance, no matter who we are, death will have its way with us. All the skin creams, blended veggies, and supplements in the world cannot save us from what lies ahead, as good as those things may be. We have no choice but to bow down to life as it is, and life includes death. 

Worship Keeps Us Honest and Humble

Tragically, contemporary popular culture tends to celebrate irreverence — an absence of worship. Just think of the typical person who dominates our news cycles lately and ask whether they’re more likely to embody reverence (“the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods,” as Woodruff puts it) or irreverence. 

Irreverence surfaces in scientific communities when scientists intentionally falsify their data, or, as happened recently with the president of Stanford, refuse to fix mistaken data.

Irreverence also surfaces in religion whenever a group believes that they are the chosen people and everyone else is lesser-than. “If a religious group thinks it speaks and acts as God commands in all things, this is a failure of reverence,” writes Woodruff. He adds, “Reverence is not faith, because the faithful may hold their faith with arrogance and self-satisfaction, and because the reverent may not know what to believe.” (I’ll add that while I don’t know much about Joel Osteen, the fact that he lives in a mansion and plasters his face on his books suggests he might struggle with reverence despite worshiping every week. This suggests the possibility that grandiose, amped up church services might exhibit only the veneer of worship and not the actual thing.) 

In short, worship — the act of bowing in reverence — keeps us honest and humble. It helps us develop respect for others, seeing them as fellow travelers or fellow brothers and sisters. 

It reminds us, above all, that we aren’t the main character in life.

That’s what it’s good for. That’s what we lose when we lose worship.

But what does it look like in practice? Is it possible to develop forms of worship that work for believers and nonbelievers alike? I hinted at some possibilities in my previous post, and I plan to explore more in upcoming posts. It feels urgent to me — a needed corrective in an age that over-celebrates irreverence.

In my previous post, I wrote about how religion is a “language” for communicating about the transcendent — a language that uses a bundle of methods including ritual, parable, metaphor, song, and more.  

Think of it this way. Say you were moved to tears during a beautiful scene in a film and wanted a close friend to have the same cathartic experience. You wouldn’t say, “I cried during a movie” and expect them to be moved to tears. Instead, you’d take them to the movie. In this way, the movie is a “language” that communicates the cathartic experience far better than any information about your experience could. 

To an extent, religion is like the movie, with its bundle of music, words, and visuals. It attempts to communicate about something transcendent such that a person actually has a transcendent experience. 

So, what about atheism? Is it a language in a similar way? 

I’d say it’s not. Atheism is just a statement (“I don’t believe in God or gods”) and as such it doesn’t contain a set of methods for communicating about the transcendent the way that religion does. (For what it’s worth, theism also lacks a set of methods for communicating about the transcendent, which is why, one might argue, religions exist in the first place.)

In short, atheism — and theism — are statements in need of a language.

This doesn’t mean that atheists are without a language for describing the transcendent. On the contrary, plenty of “language” exists.

For instance, when the atheist philosopher André Comte-Sponville wrote about a time he was suddenly struck by an overwhelming feeling of transcendence at night, he waxed lyrical to describe it. He wrote, “Above me, the starry sky was immense, luminous and unfathomable, and within me there was nothing but the sky, of which I was a part, and the silence, and the light, like a warm hum, and the sense of joy. Yes, in the darkness of that night, I contained only the dazzling presence of the All.”

The atheist Marius Favre wrote in similar terms about a similar experience, saying, “Had I been absorbed by the universe, or had the universe penetrated me? These expressions had become virtually meaningless, since the border between my body and the world had vanished.”

And Barbara Ehrenreich, another self-proclaimed atheist, writes that when she was a young woman, she was on “a pre-dawn walk” when “the world flamed into life. … Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, ‘inside’ and out, the only condition was overflow. … There is one image, handed down over the centuries, that seems to apply, and that is the image of fire, as in the ‘burning bush.’” 

The dazzling presence of the All? Being absorbed by the universe? The world flamed into life? 

All of this sounds… religious. In fact, some religious adherents, such as theologian David Bentley Hart, would say that these transcendent experiences are God. This is what human beings have been pointing to via religion — via imperfect metaphors, rituals, and mythologies — for tens of thousands of years. Viewed through this lens, these three atheists are speaking the same “language” as many religious adherents through the ages. 

And it’s not just those three atheists. A series of recently published books explore this transcendent aspect of secularism further, including For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals For Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan (Carl Sagan’s daughter), The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices by Casper ter Kulle and Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner.

None of these authors hold a mainstream religious view of the world, but they all assert in their own way that having a “language” for the transcendent matters. They even go beyond the call for metaphor and poetry, talking about the need for spirituality, mystery, meaning, and ritual. 

“For me the biggest drawback to being secular is the lack of a shared culture,” writes Sasha Sagan. “I can live without an afterlife, I can live without a god. But not without celebrations, not without community, not without ritual. There are no hymns about the testing of theories or mapping of genomes. No festivals to commemorate great inventions or medical breakthroughs. Since I long for ways to honor the wonder of life, I’ve found myself making up new rituals. Sometimes I find I can repurpose the traditions of my ancestors to celebrate what I believe is sacred.”

For Sagan, this has meant, among many things, returning to her ancestral tradition of Passover seder in her own way — a way that incorporates her secular worldview and her husband, who was raised Christian. 

Similarly, even though Casper ter Kulle was raised in a non-religious household, he’s found it healthy to hold a weekly Sabbath where every Friday evening he lights a candle, meditates, and then stays off electronic devices for 24 hours. 

And Dacher Keltner, in talking to the hosts of the Faith Matters podcast, says that even though he was raised non-religious, his studies on awe have led him to see the wisdom and power of religious practices. 

What we’re seeing here is a blend of the secular and the spiritual or religious. These people — and I would argue millions of others outside and inside of religion — recognize both the valid reasons to criticize religion and the valid reasons to celebrate religion. We recognize that transcendent experiences are an essential aspect of life and that religions (again despite all their flaws!) have evolved some helpful methods to communicate about those transcendent experiences through ritual, parable, metaphor, song, and more. We recognize that these methods are a “language” and that language is an essential foundation for shared culture and community.

We also recognize that science and spirituality are not at odds with each other. As Carl Sagan wrote, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.” 

If I might cut straight to the point: Finding a shared language that blends the secular and the spiritual matters to me because, like Sasha Sagan, I want shared culture. I want community. And I don’t want just any culture or community. I want a shared culture and community that nurtures the most transcendent experiences that humanity can have together. 

Call it spiritual humanism or religion or something else entirely. The point is to hold the wisest aspects of secularism (scholarship, intellectual rigor, a global perspective, etc.) alongside the wisest aspects of religion (tradition, community, shared culture, reverence, etc.). That’s the project that I’m personally interested in.

In so many ways, it’s the exact same project that has been going on the entire time that humans have been around. I mean, Sasha Sagan is certainly not the first in her ancestral line to update the Passover seder to meet her needs and connect with her ancestors. All rituals evolve over time, depending on context and need. Inside and outside of religion, we’re all working to evolve tradition, culture, and community. It’s on us to evolve our language in the healthiest, wisest way possible.

Last night I heard Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,  speak at Brigham Young University. I read Zealot nearly a decade ago, and it revolutionized my view of Jesus, so I was surprised and intrigued to learn that Aslan was speaking at my alma mater. (As it so happens, Zealot remains the most engaging book I’ve read about the historical Jesus, though I’d recommend other books for being more rigorous in their scholarship.)

Aslan’s speech — ”Why I Am a Believer: My Journey of Religious Exploration” — was part of the Richard L. Evans Memorial Lecture series, a series that commemorates Evans, a former LDS apostle, for his interfaith bridge building efforts.

Aslan first told his own story. He grew up in Iran with a mother who was mildly Islamic and father who was ardently atheist. When the Iranian revolution of 1979 came into full swing, his father rightly sensed that something was amiss and migrated with his family to the US. Here, Reza faced prejudice for being an Iranian during the Iranian hostage crisis. 

When he was a teen, he was invited to an evangelical youth camp, which led to his conversion to Christianity. Then, years later, he read about the historical Jesus and realized that there’s quite the gap between the Jesus of Christendom and the Jesus of history. As he told the audience last night, this discovery led him away from institutional Christianity even as it deepened his respect for Jesus.

He soon realized that what he wanted more than anything was to explore religious traditions from the inside. So he did, participating in rituals around the world. In the process he realized that there’s no consensus about what religion is. It’s not a group of people who worship God or gods, since the Jains and certain strains of Buddhists don’t worship divinity. It’s also not a hierarchical institution, since the Quakers don’t have a hierarchy. 

For Aslan, religion is a language. It’s a way of communicating about something transcendent that can never fully be put into words. (“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” the first line of the Tao Te Ching reads.) So we human beings use religion — again, a language — to try to communicate about or experience the transcendent. 

Aslan didn’t invent this metaphor, but for some reason hearing him use it on BYU campus gave me more confidence to use it publicly myself. It’s a metaphor I’ve long felt drawn to because it cuts in two directions.

First, the metaphor cuts against a traditional, exclusivist take on religion. After all, we don’t say that English (or Cantonese or Spanish or Punjabi) is the world’s “true” language. Rather, we recognize that English is one of many possible ways to communicate. By framing religion as a language, we can hold each tradition (including our own) with humility, recognizing that we might be able to learn something from how other traditions communicate about the transcendent. 

Second, the metaphor cuts against a militant atheist take on religion. Just as we don’t say that English is the world’s “true” language, we also don’t say that English is a “false” language. Languages aren’t 100% right or wrong. They’re organic (and often clunky) attempts to communicate subtle thoughts and feelings. So it follows that if religion is also an organic and often clunky attempt to communicate about the transcendent, then blanket statements like “religion is evil” don’t make sense. You can do evil things with language, and you can do evil things with religion, but language and religion aren’t inherently evil. They’re simply tools for communicating and framing our experience.

One powerful aspect of this metaphor is that it allows for the move that Aslan has personally made. He’s returned to Islam in his own way and on his own terms — not from a position of saying that his religion is the one true religion (he was emphatic that it’s not), but instead from a position of personal preference. He personally prefers the language of Islam, in light of his own cultural upbringing, as a way to communicate about and experience the transcendent.

Aslan closed his speech with a final metaphor that he attributed to the Buddha. (From what I can tell, it’s an erroneous attribution — one that likely came from Sufism — but it’s a useful metaphor nonetheless.) The metaphor says that if you want to reach water, you don’t dig a bunch of one-foot wells. That will never get you to the Source. Instead, you need to dig deep. 

When you dig deep into a single religious tradition, you access states and experiences you couldn’t otherwise access if you just studied that tradition on the surface (or from a distance). In short, you need breadth and depth, all while recognizing that the most important thing isn’t the well. The most important thing is the water — the water of Life, to use the Christian “language.”

This is a different take on religion than many traditional Latter-day Saints may have encountered before, but to me it’s the healthiest path toward growth. The metaphors of language and wells open up an expansive approach to faith. Time will tell if the LDS tradition will fully embrace such an approach, but hearing Reza Aslan speak at BYU last night gave me hope.

I built a following on Medium a year before it became clear that Substack, not Medium, was the future of independent online writing. Since then I’ve been paralyzed, overwhelmed by the thought of starting over, unsure of what I want to say here or even if I should say anything here. Do I keep writing about Mormonism because it’s what I know? Do I write about politics even though I mostly loathe it? Do I write about wisdom, or is that too trite? Do I write about all of it, whatever strikes me?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I want to find a groove here because I’m enjoying Substack. 

How about you? Do you like it? If so, who do you read?

Here are a few of the many publications I love, in no particular order:

• The Elysian | Elle Griffin — Elle explores the future of economics and culture with optimism, clarity, and warmth. If you’re a fan of solarpunk (and you should be!), I highly recommend it. Every post is well researched, smart, conversational, and easy to dive into.

• The Column | Adam Johnson — Adam writes about the way mainstream publications ignore the underserved and overlooked. He’s helped me see the ways that simple choices in headlines (such as the abundant use of the passive voice when a cop kills someone) benefit the powerful. It’s an angle I don’t see many other places.

• Design Mom — Gabrielle writes in a clear and confident voice inspires me. Would that my writing could be so blunt and warm! She writes on a variety of topics (politics, gender, home), always thoughtfully.

• Freddie deBoer — I don’t understand all the reasons why yet, but I feel drawn to read essentially everything Freddie writes here. Mostly, I appreciate the frank way he pushes at groupthink wherever he sees it, even when it’s on his own “side.”

• The Haunted Librarian — Haunted Librarian has been featured multiple times by Substack’s official publication and deservedly so. It’s comics and essays, humor and grief. It features some of the most lyrical, moving sentences on Substack. (Also: Becca’s my spouse!)

• Nuclear Meltdown — An exploration of the family in the 21st century. I share Jim’s view that contemporary Americans, especially young Americans, have downplayed the importance of the family to our detriment. It’s an under-appreciated take.

• Less Foolish — Peter Limberg’s reflections on wisdom have been personally meaningful to me as I’ve searched for a pragmatic yet expansive philosophy of life. I’m tempted to follow his lead in writing for myself, whatever’s on my mind.

I could easily list seven more, followed by seven more again. Maybe I will.

The more I practice mindfulness, the more I notice how much easier it is to practice in community. Years ago, I didn’t think I could survive a seven-day silent retreat, but I arrived, settled in, and put in the hours. How? I had no other option. Everyone sat in a single room without phones or laptops or children running around. My mind stopped looking for other things to do, and I committed. By the end of the week I’d reached a level of mental clarity I hadn’t reached before. A year later, I did it again. 

Then I hit a stretch in early 2020 where the more I meditated, the more I retreated from life. I felt pulled toward a state of bland passivity — no goals, no direction, no gumption. Sure, I was “practicing,” but something was off. I can see now, with the clarity of hindsight, that part of it was that my life at the time felt too painful to fully sit with and part of it was that I’d been relying on a false conception about mindfulness.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to try a different way forward. So I recalibrated. For a while I simply checked in with myself throughout the day to see if what I was doing was what I truly wanted to be doing. If not, I pivoted (or at least tried to). After many months of doing this, I returned to formal meditation, revisiting apps like Waking Up and Insight Timer.

I haven’t perfected mindfulness. I’m not enlightened. But I now have a better sense for the role I want mindfulness to play in my life.

It has to do with practical wisdom — phronesis in Greek. It’s about attuning to the moment without any prior conception of what the moment should be, even when the moment calls for something difficult, such as acting from a place of anger. Aristotle put it well when he wrote, “Anybody can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” 

That’s phronesis. Living appropriately moment to moment. No distraction, no fragmentation, a life aligned, an eye single. That’s also, it turns out, what it means to be mindful.

Again, I’m not there yet. But I’m interested in practicing with other people. 

Before Covid, I attended in-person events with Lower Lights School of Wisdom, which has since gone remote as its founder, Thomas McConkie, attends divinity school in Boston.

I also led a monthly mindfulness/discussion group in Utah County for three years — a group that met in a space that tragically didn’t survive the shutdown.

I made friends in both places and enjoyed the moments of presence and the discussions we had, so I’m starting this group up again this Sunday. If this sort of thing interests you and you live in Utah County, I’d love for you to join. We’ll practice mindfulness and discuss ways to live more fully aligned with life — whatever that means for you right now. 

“Can you remain unmoving,” says one interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, “till the right action arises by itself?” As I see it, that’s the practice. It’s a practice I know I can’t do alone.

Details:

Utah Valley Mindfulness Workshop
A Monthly Meetup, Centered in Mindfulness and Wisdom

Join the mailing list for updates about future events. (I likely won’t post on Substack about future events.)

Next Event: Sunday, April 30th  7:30-9:00pm   
Topic: The Middle Way
Where: Harmon Psychotherapy & Consulting, 760 N. 530 E. Orem, UT (Below Orem Eye Clinic)

Questions We’ll Explore

• How can I live more aligned with the life I truly want to live? (How can I live wisely?)

• How can I more fully share what’s on my mind and heart?

• How can I be more present moment to moment, especially with other people?

Schedule
7:30 — Welcome
7:35 — Intro meditation
7:40 — Introduce the night’s topic
8:00 — Meditation 
8:20 — Discuss in small groups
8:45 — Share collective insights
9:00 — End

Facilitated by Jon Ogden  
Jon has been practicing mindfulness for nearly a decade, primarily via offerings at Lower Lights School of Wisdom, including week-long silent retreats, weekend retreats, multi-week courses, and a 9-month intensive program. In addition, Jon has had a decades-long interest in the world’s wisdom traditions, which he pulls from as a co-founder of UpliftKids.org.

***

Who is this workshop for?
People interested in practicing meditation and exploring how to live wisely together.

Do I need to have prior meditation experience?
No. These events will serve people who have never meditated before, as well as people who have meditated for many years. 

Do I need to bring a cushion?
No, we’ll sit on chairs, making it easy for people of all experience levels to participate.

What’s the cost?
This offering is currently free, though we might eventually ask for a small fee to contribute to the rental costs at Harmon Psychotherapy.

What is “wisdom”?
The capacity to make choices that best align with the short-term and long-term wellbeing of yourself and others. We will pull insights from wisdom traditions around the world, including Christianity, Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism, and more.

For the last few years, I’ve worked on a project that helps families explore timeless values and expansive spirituality at home. Users tell us that it’s helped them navigate their mixed-faith marriage, take a more expansive approach to their religion, or provided some needed structure after leaving. (Our Instagram page features their stories.)

What we offer isn’t for everyone, and one critique in particular continues to live inside me. 

That’s what I explore in this dialogue, which features two fictional voices (1 and 2). 

On the surface, it’s a dialogue about the project I linked to above. But really, it’s a dialogue that explores what it means to “just let kids be.”

***

1: Hey, have you heard of this resource that helps families explore values together? We’ve been using it on Sundays for the past three weeks, and we’ve really liked it.

2: Yeah, I’ve looked through that. I admire the effort, but it’s not for me.

1: Interesting. Why’s that?

2: I used to worry that my kids wouldn’t be good unless they had a specific set of rules to learn and follow — a “program.” But it was overwhelming. My kids resisted. I felt exhausted. So I don’t worry about that anymore.

1: Yeah, some days it’s hard to pull the kids together. 

2: Trust me, it only becomes more exhausting the older they get.

1: So what do you do now? 

2: Nothing. I just let them be. My kids will become who they’re meant to become regardless of what I do anyway. They’re not mine to control.

1: I get that — in theory, at least. In practice it stresses me out.

2: Why? Try it. You’ll feel relieved.

1: What does “nothing” look like?

2: You know, on Sundays we’ll joke around or play a game together. Or maybe — and I know this isn’t the best — sometimes Madison will hop on TikTok and Instagram while Clay plays watches YouTube or Netflix. But whatever happens, it’s just calm. No expectations, no feeling like we’re not enough.

1: That does sound relaxing.

2: Totally.

1: But that’s not just “letting your kids be,” is it?

2: What do you mean?

1: I mean that all of those companies — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix — shape kids in their own way, usually according to a set of algorithms. So if “nothing” includes “watching something on a device,” then it consists of outsourcing influence to someone else. That’s not letting them be.

2: But you let your kids watch things on a device.

1: Sometimes, yeah. In a limited way. 

2: So it sounds like you’re saying I should let my kids be on devices but I should do it with more anxiety.

1: Hahaha, I can see how it comes across that way. I only mean that it’s difficult to “just let kids be” when they’re part of a context and culture that pulls them in a certain direction, usually toward consumerism. That’s why I worry that if I don’t add my voice to the mix — if I don’t have regular conversations about what matters most in life — then my kids will be whoever our consumer-driven culture wants them to be.

2: You worry they’ll be too… consumerist?

1: I worry about rising rates of teenage depression, anxiety, and despair — which feels related to consumerism. 

2: Well, the solution to that problem isn’t more worry. I think about that Mary Oliver line, “I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up.”

1: Yeah, but Mary Oliver didn’t say to give your one wild and precious life to a device. 

2: That’s not what I’m saying either. Sure, sometimes we’re on devices. But when my kids need something, I put my device away and listen. I give them hugs. I tell them I love them. I let them know they’re always worthwhile. 

1: I do the same thing.

2: That’s great. I just know that when I’m full of worry about sticking to a program, I have less room for love. 

1: What if the program were held lightly and rooted in love? 

2: That could work, if it came naturally.

1: “Naturally”? Or “effortlessly”? Good things often take effort and don’t feel natural at first.

2: I like that question, and I’ll sit with it. For now, I just know that when I think about doing a program, I feel the part of myself that can’t relax rise to the surface — that stifling perfectionist I’ve worked so hard to let go of.

1: Yeah, I hear that. I feel that tension inside too. It’s a question I ask myself all the time: Am I letting my inner perfectionist run the show, or am I rooted in love?

***

I’ll leave those voices there in their questions. And as always, I’m left with more:

• Are structure and love inherently at odds? 

• Does structure lead to love or detract from it? Or is that the wrong question?

• What sorts of things help a kid become their best self? Should that even be the goal of parenting?

I can’t stop thinking about footage I saw years ago of a plastic-filled junkyard contrasted with a timelapse of a tomato disintegrating into dirt. The tomato swiftly returns to the earth; the plastic sits lifeless in landfills for centuries to come.

It’s not the only image of modern life that haunts me. There’s the photo of Jeffrey Bezos and his trophy wife standing awkwardly in front of their new $165 million-dollar home. There’s the rotting feet of a homeless man who wanted me to buy him Burger King before taking him to the hospital — the feet propped, sockless, on the table in the middle of the restaurant so he could relieve his pain. There’s the visual chaos of the interstate near my home: the billboards for botox, the uninspired architecture of corporate America, the scars of tire screeches on the road — each a semi-permanent memorial of a likely accident or death.

I could go on, and have gone on like this in my head for years, hurting under this weight.

Yet I’ve found that when the only voice in my head is the cynic, I hate the world. And since this world is where I am, I end up hating life, which is all I have.

I want the world to change, but I also want to love it. I want to love the world as I change it.

I’m embarrassed by how trite that sounds. And still, it’s what I want. To better hold gratitude and dissatisfaction together. To celebrate modern marvels like two-day shipping while also opposing the fact that Bezos makes 6,474x the median Amazon worker. To enjoy instant communication while also mourning the fact that it sometimes makes me feel lonely. To be grateful for fully stocked grocery stores nearby while also worrying about the toll that food production today takes on the planet. 

All of it together is true.

***
I’m not sure how this little post fits with spiritual humanism, but I’ve been sitting with the idea for so long that I felt I needed to get it out as a stepping stone to what’s next. Thanks for reading!

You can either be secular or religious, writes Princeton professor Robert George in the Deseret News, but not both. 

“You can’t have it both ways,” he writes. “One gets to choose whether to be a faithful Catholic, for example, or instead an adherent of a secular ideology whose tenets and practices are incompatible with the Catholic understanding of human nature.”

To bolster his claim, George tells the stories of Moses and Joshua. These men, the story goes, urged the Israelites to hold firm and reject the beliefs and practices of surrounding cultures. “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve,” and so on.

George says that religious leaders today must do the same. Separate the true believers from the heretics. End the “risible” and “pathetic” (pathetic!) phenomena where people try to belong to a religion despite not fully aligning with every truth claim.

In short, George says he’s against cafeteria religion — the practice of picking and choosing which aspects of a religion to hold and which aspects to drop.

What he doesn’t seem to realize, however, is that he practices cafeteria religion.

To start, Robert George, a Catholic, published his article in a newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To him, it’s a non-issue, as it should be. But it’s a non-issue thanks to secularism. 

Long before the secular era, Catholics and Protestants fought wars — including the Thirty Years War — over religious differences. The divide persisted for centuries after the literal wars ended in the form of anti-Protestant and anti-Catholic screeds. (Within Latter-day Saint circles, for instance, church leaders from Orson Pratt to Bruce R. McConkie declared that the Catholic Church was founded by the devil himself.)

Today, such theological screeds are rare. Why? Because most Protestants and Catholics no longer believe their differences matter much. Not enough to kill over, at any rate. They’ve instead adopted the value of religious tolerance, choosing to downplay irreconcilable distinctions in their faith — a hallmark of cafeteria religion. (Thank goodness!)

Their “true believer” ancestors would likely be shocked at the reconciliation. “We died for these religious differences!” they might say. “And now you don’t even care!?” 

So it goes.

The same thing has happened with the Book of Joshua. According to that text, Joshua leads the Israelites to destroy the walls of Jericho and kill the people there. “They utterly destroyed all that was in the city,” the story reads, “both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword.” 

According to the story, then, the reason it’s worth choosing the Lord is that the Lord will help you win wars wherein you slaughter men and women, boys and girls, toddlers and animals. And that’s what many true believers throughout history did, ostensibly in the name of religion.

But George (hopefully) isn’t saying that today’s believers should slaughter nonbelievers. Why? Precisely because he’s a cafeteria believer. He knows that taking the Book of Joshua at face value is morally reprehensible. And the reason he knows this is because he grew up in a secular era which declares that all people (even nonbelievers) are worthy of life and dignity. Gone are the days of Catholic priests burning heretics at the stake!

Like everyone, George picks and chooses which scriptures to emphasize and which scriptures to downplay or ignore.

***

What I’m pointing to is far bigger than a single article by Robert George. I’m pointing to the rise of a strange collaboration among so-called “true believers” across religious traditions. From Robert George to Ben Shapiro to Ted Cruz, these “true believers” have essentially branded themselves as defending “the faith” while simultaneously ignoring the fact that “the faith” does not exist.

These people want unity across traditions while also downplaying that true believers in their traditions have historically killed those of other traditions who didn’t believe the “right” way.

In short, the so-called “true believers” today are having it both ways. They’re citing certain verses to bolster their claims while ignoring other verses. If they interpreted every verse the same way their “true believing” ancestors did, they would still be at war with each other. At the very least, Ben Shapiro’s Judaism would be irreconcilable with Ted Cruz’s Protestantism, which would be irreconcilable with Robert George’s Catholicism. 

The truth is quite simply that it’s impossible to be a “true believer.” What, after all, is “true belief”? Who defines it? Those who take, say, 40% instead of 10% of the Bible literally? You might say that “true belief” is self-evident from the Bible and that you should take 100% of the Bible literally, but anyone who has wrestled with that text knows that’s bogus. Some verses assert the humanity of all people. Other verses (yes, even verses in the New Testament) assert the exact opposite. You have to pick and choose.

Alternatively, you might say that you just have to follow a certain religious leader and ignore everyone else. But if that leader relies on the Bible, then you’re back at square one, having to decide for yourself which verses to emphasize (1 John 4:16) and which verses to downplay or ignore (Judges 19-21). 

The Bible defies any single unified interpretation. (Hence the thousands of irreconcilable religious beliefs stemming from the book!)

We’d be better off, from my perspective, if we just admitted this and lived accordingly.

Ignore the calls to separate the true believers from the heretics. After all, each one of us is in our own way (again, thank goodness) a heretic.

Last week a woman reached out to tell me she’s a fan of a project I’m working on that helps parents nurture their kids’ authentic spirituality at home. However, she said that her spouse wasn’t so supportive, that he called it “spiritual woo… a lot of good feelings with no substance.”

I’m sympathetic to such doubts about spirituality. A lot of what counts as spirituality is fluff — harmful mantras (“positive vibes only!”) and unfounded belief statements (“Mercury is in retrograde, so I feel sad”). 

What’s worse, as I wrote in “Spiritual But Not Conspiritual,” spiritual circles are overrun by fakes and charlatans. John of God, Marshall Applewhite, Carl Lentz, Keith Rainier, Dennis Merzel, Joshu Sasaki, Chögyam Trungpa, Osho, Bentinho Massaro, Joya — the list of people who’ve abused their power in such circles seems so ample that you have to sometimes wonder if anyone in this space is actually enlightened.

And yet the more I dive into the research around spirituality, the more I believe that there is substance here. The emerging science points to something profound and urgently needed.

An Early Study of Spirituality

At the turn of the 20th century, Harvard psychologist William James collected and analyzed hundreds of spiritual experiences and came to the conclusion that “we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.” The specifics of the experiences he collected differed widely, but the fruits were almost always the same: Peace, gratitude, awe, love, connection, and joy. Because of this, James viewed spirituality as essential to well-being.

But because human beings can’t create spiritual experiences on demand, we can’t easily study spirituality in a lab. This is one reason why the methodological study of spirituality dried up after William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience. We didn’t have the tools to measure it.

Thankfully, modern brain imaging technology has started to change all of this.

What Brain Scans Say About Spirituality

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines and other technologies allow researchers to see what’s happening inside the brain. In light of this, a range of researchers — including Dr. Lisa Miller of Columbia University, Dr. Michael Ferguson of Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Andrew Newberg of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital — have started applying this technology to the field of spirituality.

The science is emerging, but it’s consistently showing at least two things. 

First, it shows that spiritual experiences correlate with positive changes in the brain. For instance, when researchers invite participants into an imaging machine and then have them enter into a state of spirituality — whether through meditating, saying prayers from their faith tradition, or reading the words of a religious leader — they see that certain areas of the brain associated with well-being light up.

For instance, Lisa Miller and her team invited participants to recount three experiences in detail — a stressful event, a relaxing event, a spiritual event — as they were scanned by an fMRI machine. Participants then returned two weeks later to listen to themselves recount these experiences as they were scanned again, solidifying the findings. As participants recounted spiritual experiences, they tended to show increased activity in the part of the brain that is “implicated in processing positive and rewarding emotions such as love and bliss, distinct from the positive emotions of a relaxing experience.” Participants also showed decreased activity in the part of the brain that distinguishes between us and others, indicating an increased sense of unity. Taken together, these findings suggest that spiritual experiences differ from stressful and even relaxing events in ways that bring the peace that William James spoke of more than 100 years ago.

Second, the emerging science shows that people who regularly practice spirituality tend to exhibit differences in the brain from those who don’t. Again, Lisa Miller and her team at Columbia looked at brain scans of people who say that spirituality and religion are highly important to them and found that they have healthier neural structures compared to those who say the opposite. Michael Ferguson and his team at Harvard have found similar results, indicating that certain people have traits — whether inborn or developed — that lend themselves to experiencing spirituality and the fruits that come with it.

Why Spirituality Matters

Why does any of this matter? 

Put simply, the emerging neuroscience shows that spirituality makes us healthier in every sense of the word. 

The neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg writes that “spiritual practices, even when stripped of religious beliefs, enhance the neural functioning of the brain in ways that improve physical and emotional health.” 

Dr. Lisa Miller writes that “children who are raised with a robust and well-developed spiritual life are happier, more optimistic, more thriving, more flexible, and better equipped to deal with life’s ordinary (and even extraordinary) traumas than those who are not.” 

And Dr. Michael Ferguson echoes all of this, saying that the emerging research points to the possibility of being able to suggest specific spiritual practices to help people recover from specific mental health problems. In an episode of the Latter-day Faith podcast, he says that he hopes that neuroscience will one day allow clinicians “to look at a patient’s brain circuit maps that are associated with their clinical symptom and then to look at this library of brain circuit maps associated with spiritual practices, and, in an evidenced-based fashion, recommend that they try a particular spiritual practice in order to stimulate the brain circuit that ought to be stimulated in order to alleviate their symptom.” This level of precision opens up the possibility of effective natural mental health treatment. (Ferguson calls it neurospirituality.)

Whether we’re talking about meditation, chanting, expressing gratitude, connecting to nature, the emerging science shows that spiritual practices are good for us.

And these benefits aren’t just helpful in an “awww, isn’t that nice…” sort of way. 

They’re essential to our survival. 

A Cure For Persistent Sadness and Despair

Tragically, the percentage of American teens who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” has ballooned from 26 percent to 44 percent over the past 12 years, according to a new CDC study. 

There are a lot of factors behind the sadness, including maladaptive social media use and economic inequality. But one overlooked aspect here also has to do with the declining interest in religion, which is where many people have traditionally gone for spiritual support and practice. 

Young people are leaving religion en masse and not coming back. This exodus is understandable in an era when the messages that young people hear at church conflict with their ethics and when it’s easier than ever to hop online and discover uncomfortable facts about religious truth claims. But this exodus away from religion comes with a cost. Without a community that explores life’s deepest questions together, life can start to feel meaningless. The draw toward consumerism (outside and inside of religion) is strong — and ultimately unfulfilling.

It’s little surprise, then, that American teens feel persistently sad. They too often don’t have the community and guidance they need to have a robust spiritual life. Religions are failing young people by not expanding their circle of love beyond their in-group and by ignoring difficult and authentic questions about religion. And secular society is failing them by downplaying the importance of spirituality, writing all of it off as “spiritual woo.”

The truth is that our kids and teens need spirituality, whether inside or outside of religion. They need the experience of connecting beyond themselves to something bigger, an experience that brings peace, purpose, and connection — all of which serves as an antidote to despair, hopelessness, and isolation. 

They don’t need dogma, which is small-minded and proud, or conspirituality, which is “woo” and all about the ego. 

They need authentic spirituality.

What’s an API?

The best way to explain it is with an example.

Say that you’re ordering a ride in an Uber. You type in where you want to go, and their app calculates the directions to tell you the cost of the drive. 

This experience works partly because Uber has paid Google millions of dollars to use the Google Maps API, an API that ports Google’s map data directly into the Uber experience.

Why would Uber do this? Because Uber doesn’t have the ability to map the entire world. So rather than build all that from scratch, they’ve used (via an API) what Google has already built.

An API ports in data from somewhere else. Plug and play.

The process has also been compared to a waiter at a restaurant. You sit down and order your food and then the waiter takes your order to the kitchen and brings your food to you.

Likewise, an API takes a command (“drive me to the airport”), and translates that to a data source and back.

Here’s a visual:

Because APIs help programmers build on what’s already been created, they’ve taken off in recent years. Web APIs alone have increased more than 10x since 2005.

How is the future of religion an API?

Again, I’ll start with an example. 

A reporter once asked the Dalai Lama what he’d say to Americans who wanted to become Buddhists. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Learn from Buddhism if that is good for you. But do it as a Christian, a Jew or whatever you are.”

The Dalai Lama advised Christians to port in concepts from Buddhism.

Like this:

I don’t interpret the Dalai Lama as saying that no one should ever change religions or belief systems. I just hear him acknowledging that Buddhism is embedded in certain cultural contexts from India, Thailand, China, and Japan — and that it’s typically not worth trying to force all those cultural contexts into your life if you haven’t previously had much experience with them. Instead, it’s better to port the best ideas from Buddhism into your own cultural context, whether it be religious or secular.

It’s an approach that happens the other way around as well.

One story tells of a university student who visited a Zen master and asked if he’d ever read the Christian Bible. When the Zen master said he hadn’t, the student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

“Whoever uttered those words,” the Zen master said, “I consider an enlightened man.”

The Zen master didn’t convert to Christianity, but he “ported in” this Christian idea into his own worldview.

In some sense, this process of “porting in” ideas has always been a quality of religions. In academic circles, it’s called syncretism — the process of merging separate ideas together as one. It’s seen in Islamic-style arches in Christian cathedrals, Buddhist temples attached to Shinto shrines, Egyptian gods in Greco-Roman form, etc.

Human beings can’t help but take aspects of ideas they like from the cultures they’re surrounded by. They port these ideas into their own worldview.

It’s rampant in my own Latter-day Saint heritage, where the surrounding Christian American culture gets woven into meetings. People express reverence for America’s founders, quote Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis in general conference, play Christian pop music at Especially for Youth. It’s all ported in from the surrounding culture.

But we’re facing something bigger than traditional syncretism today.

Why? Because we live in an increasingly connected world. Thanks to the internet and social media, it’s easier than ever to encounter wisdom from dozens of traditions at once. The Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the poetry of Rumi — it’s all instantly available.

Some people may see this accessibility as a threat to traditional institutions. And in a way, it is. No culture exposed long enough to another can remain the same.

But it doesn’t need to be a threat. It can be an opportunity—an opportunity to port enriching ideas, stories, and practices from around the world. Like the Apostle Paul wrote, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

Just as we now have access to technology that maps the entire world (allowing us to get anywhere we need through the power of APIs), we also now have access to the entire world’s wisdom. We should port this wisdom into our cultural experience and enjoy how our cultural experience evolves.

In this way, the future of religion is an API.

Questions and (Attempted) Answers

I gave a version of this piece as a presentation to a group of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). After my presentation, several people asked questions. Here is my recollection of a few of those questions along with my answers.

What’s an example of an API that Latter-day Saints could offer?

When I was asked this question, I couldn’t think of a good answer. Since then, I’ve realized that data from the site JustServe.org—which helps people find service opportunities in their area—could make for a perfect API (and may already being used in that way). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could offer the data from JustServe.org to other religions and service organizations, and these other institutions could then offer the data to their members in their own apps. The value for the Church is that this move would build good will. The value for the other institutions is that they wouldn’t have to build this database from scratch.

How can the future of religion be an API when those who have embraced syncretism have historically been disempowered?

It’s true that monotheistic religions—particularly Christianity and Islam—have often overpowered polytheistic religions. But syncretism is still rife inside of monotheism. To name one example: Christianity is the result of porting in Jewish texts into Greek and Roman philosophies about the divine. And the religion dominates to this day largely because it merged a story about a child born in a manger with a militaristic empire to become the universal religion (which is literally what the word “catholic” means). This empire then conquered all of northern Europe and then the Americas, converting millions of people in its wake. Without merging with this empire, Christianity would not have so many adherents today, so it seems to me that 1) syncretism is happening all the time, and 2) syncretism isn’t necessarily a threat to institutions but part of their evolution, for good and for bad (depending on your view).

Still, this question is perceptive. Is it possible for a religion to thrive if it truly believes wisdom can come from anywhere? Doesn’t it need rigid hierarchies—to say, “This source of wisdom is the true source”—to grow? I have to admit that historically it seems that starkly defined canons seem to increase adherents. I have my doubts this will continue to work in a hyper-connected world, but time will tell.

Isn’t this idea of an API equivalent to sleeping with lots of people rather than being faithful to one person? And isn’t there a downside to all this?

No, the metaphor of an API isn’t equivalent to sleeping with lots of people. Instead, it’s more about taking whatever is true, beautiful, and good and integrating it into whatever relationships you already have.

But yes, there are risks and potential downsides. When you “port in” new ideas, your relationships (to people and to the institutions you belong to) evolve. These relationships may look quite different—so different, in fact, that some people might think you’ve completely lost your way. When this happens, it can strain certain relationships, resulting in loneliness or even at times a complete loss.

So yes, there are downsides. But they are the downsides that come with growth.

***

Put simply, I’m saying is that since we now live in a hyper-connected world, it’s inevitable that religions will “port in” ideas from around the world. Given this, we should 1) be aware that it’s happening, and 2) ensure that we’re deliberately porting in ideas that are generative for us and our communities.

There are many ways to do this. For my part, I’m working on a slowly growing wisdom library for kids from traditions around the world—a library I hope becomes a literal API one day.

Have you seen other examples? If so, I’d love to know.

In the mid-2010s, publications across the United States were buzzing about the rise of secular churches. “Atheists are starting their own global church,” wrote The Week. “A church for the godless picks up steam,” wrote NPR. “The world’s newest major religion: No religion,” wrote National Geographic. 

Within just a few years, however, many of these communities had either shrunk or withered. As The Atlantic recounted in 2019, one of the premier secular churches — Sunday Assembly — fell “from about 5,000 monthly attendees in 2016 to about 3,500 in 2018” and “the number of chapters is down from 70 three years ago to about 40 this year.” Other secular humanist groups, such as Oasis, saw a similar fate.

It seems that people appreciate these secular communities in theory but don’t care for them so much in practice. 

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s an old story. 

More than 170 years ago, the French philosopher Auguste Comte started the Religion of Humanity, a secular community that replaced revelation and faith with science and reason. He celebrated love, order, and human progress, adopting the slogan “love as principle, order as basis, progress as end.”

The Religion of Humanity built chapels and employed a trained clergy, but the project struggled to take off. Growth stagnated. Today there are no chapters of the Religion of Humanity in the United States and very few in other places. Even in France, it’s little more than an interesting historical artifact. 

Why is this? Why have secular humanist communities that orient around shared values and meaning so frequently died over the past 170 years?

I’ve been sitting with this question inside and outside of a variety of communities (including a struggling chapter of Oasis in my city) for years, and I have a hunch: I believe that by reducing the entire human experience to science, logic, and reason, secular communities deny the poetic power of the world’s wisdom traditions.

To understand what I mean by this, take Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, the night before he was murdered. 

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” King said. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Look at all the language here that secular communities would likely find off-putting. The mountaintop? God’s will? The promised land? The coming of the Lord? It’s all too… religious. Too Christian.

But Martin Luther King, Jr. knew what he was doing. He’d been through a faith crisis in college, and he understood that the Bible was not a literal account of history. Yet he also recognized that it still held power. He wrote, “I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape.” In other words, he used the poetry of his tradition to speak truth to power. To do otherwise in his particular context — to only use science and logic and reason to make his case about injustice — would have been unpersuasive. Sterile. Lifeless. 

This doesn’t mean, of course, that all human beings must embrace the words of the Bible. King himself wasn’t a religious zealot who demanded that everyone bow to the dogma of the Christian church. On the contrary, he celebrated spiritually motivated activists of all traditions, endorsing a Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize. 

As it so happens, Thich Nhat Hanh used Buddhist language to a similar end as King did, advocating for a form of engaged Buddhism. “When bombs begin to fall on people,” Hanh once said, “you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time. Meditation is about the awareness of what is going on — not only in your body and in your feelings, but all around you.”

Many other religious adherents have similarly reached beyond their own tradition. Mahatma Gandhi was a Hindu who wrote that “a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.” Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister but also “a student of Catholic mysticism, Buddhism, Judaism, and other faiths,” according to his biographer. And Florence Nightingale wrote at length about her expansive view of religion in the service of helping others. 

And then there are all those who’ve held reverence for wisdom despite not belonging to a particular tradition, including the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, the author Ursula K. Le Guin, and the poet Mary Oliver. 

The point is that regardless of belief or disbelief, these people valued spirituality while also extending empathy beyond their tribe. They saw, in the words of researcher Brené Brown, that “spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us.” They also believed, in the words of the World Humanist Congress, that they had “a duty of care to all of humanity including future generations.” 

In short, these people valued spirituality and all of humanity.

They were spiritual humanists.

I can imagine some readers saying that spiritual humanism is a contradiction in terms since, they might say, humanism is by definition secular.

But history doesn’t bear this out. From the outset, the study of the humanities during the European Renaissance was all about merging spirituality with a variety of traditions. Students supplemented their study of Judeo-Christian texts with a greater attention to writers like Plato, Cicero, Sophocles, Euclid, and Lucretius. Religion and humanism existed side by side and even blended together, as is most visibly evident in the era’s sculptures, which envisioned figures like Moses and David in form of ancient Greek and Roman art. 

This was humanism, and it existed long before “secularism” was coined in 1846.

This same spiritual humanist project is still alive. 

It’s alive within traditional religions when adherents use their religious language in a poetic sense without aggressively holding a literalist or tribal worldview. It’s alive within expansive religions such as the Unitarian Universalists or Franciscan Catholics when adherents pull from a variety of wisdom traditions. It’s alive within “spiritual but not religious” communities such as meditation groups, book clubs, retreat centers, etc. It’s alive within service centers such as New York Society for Ethical Culture, which encourages believers and nonbelievers to unite around ethical causes. 

Spiritual humanism is alive, and it’s powerful.

By not positioning itself against religion, spiritual humanism opens itself up to the best of all traditions. It values the parables of Jesus, the paradoxes of Lao Tzu, the dialogue of the Bhagavad Gita, the poetry of Mary Oliver, the speeches of MLK, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the wisdom of Rumi, and on and on. It integrates wisdom wherever it surfaces. As such, it has roots, a lineage, a canon, a connection to the past. It places human beings in a story full of meaning, a story that instills a duty to pass along wisdom to the next generation in the hope that the future will bring more light to the mystery of life.

By positioning itself alongside and even within religion, spiritual humanism also sidesteps the self-congratulatory feelings and conversations that frequently underlie secular humanist circles. As such, spiritual humanism doesn’t get bogged down with tribal arguments of any stripe, recognizing that all traditions — yes, even spiritual humanism — have flaws and must therefore be held lightly. 

In addition, spiritual humanism is rational, backed by science. Based on his findings, the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg writes that “spiritual practices, even when stripped of religious beliefs, enhance the neural functioning of the brain in ways that improve physical and emotional health.” And Lisa Miller, professor of psychology at Columbia University, writes that “children who are raised with a robust and well-developed spiritual life are happier, more optimistic, more thriving, more flexible, and better equipped to deal with life’s ordinary (and even extraordinary) traumas than those who are not.” The emerging science supports certain kinds of spiritual practices, including forms of meditation, chanting, expressing gratitude, connecting to nature, and more. To deny all spiritual practices, then, is to deny rationality.

Finally, spiritual humanism allows people to value their own spiritual experiences (which are frequently considered among life’s most meaningful moments) alongside the experiences of those in other traditions. In this way, spiritual humanism celebrates all experiences that help people feel generous and fully alive. It encourages people to seek out this liveliness together in community.

My hope is that spiritual humanism will continue to thrive, whatever form it takes. I share the vision of former pastor Brian McLaren in his book Faith After Doubt when he writes about religious and nonreligious people joining together. 

“Imagine if these religiously connected people join with their nonreligious counterparts,” McLaren writes, “not simply to become happy consumers in the suicidal economy but rather to see ‘beyond self-interest, attachments to organizations and countries and our species.’ Imagine that they integrate the best resources they can find from religious traditions, brain science, education, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and art, gleaning anything of value from anywhere they can find it, systematically helping people to achieve the most advanced forms of moral development possible.”

It’s a beautiful vision, a future full of life.