The Unsolvable Loss of Losing Your Religion

Almost every day, I feel a sense of loss in response to the ubiquity of religion in the US.

Almost every day, I wish people would better acknowledge that God might not exist, that Jesus wasn’t necessarily supernatural, that the promise that all is “under control” isn’t so clear. These ideas are a given in US culture, and to think otherwise would appear absurd in polite company. Yet simple conversations on these spiritual topics can feel perilous.

Some days the misgivings and frustrations around religion haven’t been so intense. Thank God the evangelists aren’t at the door, some new spiritual prescription isn’t in my inbox, another movie or TV series about Jesus isn’t in my streaming suggestions. Still, at other times, seasons like the one we’re in now, the events of the day just assault your psyche, like hearing about a government task force posturing to remove “anti-Christian bias.”

Disillusionment, Deconstruction, and Endless Refrains

It’s not just the obvious hypocrisy of conservative religion and politics today that spurs disillusionment. It is a broader phenomenon. In the world of religious studies, for example, there’s a new major book release, yet another study about the historical Jesus. This book, which I won’t name, isn’t by one of those faux intellectual evangelicals that Christianity Today loves to feature, but a more serious scholar, who indeed has some revealing, counter-dominant-culture things to say about Jesus, an intellectual who Christianity Today also might love to feature, though perhaps in a deceptively backhanded way.

I’ve seen some publicity around the book, including a brief review in The New York Times. When I found the book’s description, I unexpectedly lost my mind. Another account of how Jesus was a real person who didn’t intend to start a religion? Another discussion about the made-up nature of a virgin birth? Another body of evidence that much of the sayings and events around Jesus were later inventions or borrowings from other cultures? Are we doing this again? Did we forget, again, the modernist-fundamentalist debate in the 1920s, or the Jesus Seminar in the 80s and 90s? Are the seemingly godless broad market book publishers who keep falling for this American obsession compulsion with Jesus really that tone deaf? I work in publishing, and you might guess my answer.

Of course, I realize that for some readers of this article, or for those who might encounter that book, historical-critical ideas may be new, fresh, and necessary. But what I’m saying here is, are you going to be any better than the millions of people who just keep mowing their Christian lawns?

Over and over again, the centering of the same arguments around Christianity causes me to lose my faith. There’s a right way to understand the Bible. There’s a right way to think about God. And above all, there’s a right way to understand Jesus. Shouldn’t it sometimes occur to us that the assumed framework of the conversation is part of the problem? To be sure, there indeed is a better way in each of these declarations, and there indeed is a benefit in finding that better way. But I’m more interested in why a friend who left the leadership at a prestigious seminary once confided to me that he doesn’t believe in theological education anymore.

This ubiquity problem doesn’t go away—either as the impossible-to-disperse imprint religion made on me as a child, or the constant crush of religion in the US. Hence there are days when I’m inconsolable about this unsolvable, insoluble problem.

When I was contacting the individuals whose spiritual memoirs I analyzed in my doctoral dissertation that eventually became Lost Faith and Wandering Souls, I was still in a mindset that people needed to find their way back to church—to reconstruct their faith and their following of Jesus.

I asked one of the memoirists, Carlene Cross, who wrote Fleeing Fundamentalism, about whether she was going to return to church after leaving her husband, a beloved pastor yet also a secret alcoholic and an abusive tyrant to Cross and their children. She responded, saying that doing so was not really in the cards for her. At the time, her response struck me as negative, maybe a little self-deluded. Today, though, I think about how forgiving she was with my naivete, she who could no more set foot in a church than set herself on fire. How presumptuous I was with that question, how American.

Cross’s response reminds me of my Lake Drive Books author, Christa Brown, who writes in her memoir Baptistland that a Christian god that can be used to justify the sexual abuse she endured as a teenager, or a Christian god that can stand by while Southern Baptist denominational leaders gaslight her and obfuscate the patterns of abuse in their churches, is no god she could ever approach again.

Mourning Faith

I consider myself a religion scholar who wants to help us understand our relationship with religion in the US. I focus mostly on interpretive disciplines like psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s classic 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” for example, explores how we might better understand the emotional movements of the kind of deep, ongoing religious disillusionment people experience today.

Freud distinguishes mourning as a natural, of course painful, response to loss—one in which the ego, our processing mind, gradually and consciously detaches from a lost object. In this journey, the grieving individual re-remembers and freshly accesses their memories and associations, acknowledges difficult emotions and layered meanings, and ultimately reengages with life in creative ways. Mourning and sadness like that of my disillusioned seminary friend, then, is not a pathological state but a necessary psychological task—difficult, yes, but ultimately constructive and transformative.

Melancholia, by contrast, represents a more insidious and unconscious process. Outwardly it resembles mourning—withdrawal, sadness, a sense of impoverishment—but inwardly it is marked by self-reproach and a disturbance of self-regard. The ego does not simply grieve a lost object; it turns against itself, identifying with the loss in a toxic and debilitating way. Freud describes this as a process in which the ego attacks itself in place of the lost ideal—often because the loss cannot be consciously accepted or is too intertwined with one’s identity. In melancholia, then, the work of mourning fails to occur, and the individual becomes stuck in a loop of unconscious anger, guilt, and self-blame, complemented also by conscious outward scapegoating, complaints, and nostalgia for an imagined past.

Freud’s statement that “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” provides a powerful insight for understanding how some forms of grief can be inwardly harsh yet outwardly moralized. The melancholic clings to the lost ideal not through healthy remembrance but through unconscious fixation (think evangelical MAGA). The ego—the ability to process and think—becomes depleted, percieving the loss of the ideal as a personal one. What’s left is not just sadness but a fractured sense of self, vulnerable to the hope of an authoritarian savior (think Trump, or MAGA Jesus).

With regard to a religion, a spiritual worldview, or a long-held sense of belonging, the loss becomes harder to articulate and harder still to resolve. The work of mourning is that much more difficult, and the presence of melancholia that much more likely.

What Might Remain if We Lay Down Our Jesus

If you sense in my writing a certain cynicism, that’s because I want to be explicitly mourning religion, even if I risk failure and instead stew in melancholia. By saying faith loss is unsolvable, I am learning to deal with that reality, that absence. You can’t exactly bring back someone who has died. Likewise, the broken symbols of our American Christianity are forever broken. There’s no recovery of certain symbols, ideas, or tropes. They are lost forever. If we admit that, then we’re on our way. We’re moving forward, like Carlene Cross or Christa Brown already have.

It isn’t just the constant talk about Jesus, it’s the attachment to the constant talk about Jesus. You might replace bad theology with better theology, but are you still so attached to it that you can’t hold it loosely, you can’t help but not talk about it? When we are talking about the real Jesus or better theology—as we sometimes must—are we also not stuck talking about the bad Jesus or bad theology? Is that mourning, or is that melancholia?

What we’re struggling with isn’t just our bad institutions, bad theology, bad ideas about Jesus, we’re mourning our lost attachment to a religion that became our identity substitute. This is a disillusionment and a sadness lying far beneath, like a child who suddenly realizes they are not wanted by a parent, or that their parent is someone they themselves don’t want. We are that destabilized, we are that lost, despondent, and confused, as if we’ve invested so much only to reach a dead end.

Yet there in the pain of this unsolvable, irretrievable, insoluble, and inconsolable loss lies the mystery of what we are looking for.

There’s that Buddhist saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” All it means is that we should not make our teacher just another unhealthy attachment. Don’t assign your agency to your mentor who is trying to help you with your agency. Don’t use your teacher as a cultural, social, or political emancipator. Lay down your Jesus, hold your religion loosely, as life is made up of so many things. There is the same goodness in it all, where Jesus is only one manifestation.