What Constitutes Healthy Exploration of Spirituality?

Part I: Gods that Fail and the Seductive Nature of the Forbidden

When I was an admin for the Exvangelical Facebook group, which Blake Chastain founded in 2016, we established a rule of thumb that we would welcome people who left evangelicalism for any healthier path, be that path religious, spiritual, or nonreligious. We also made it a group rule that the religious and nonreligious exvangelicals in the group refrain from antagonizing each other, and instead hold space for each other in a spirit of tolerance and pluralism.

But given how toxic New Age beliefs and leaders can be, lately I find myself wondering what exactly constitutes healthy spirituality. To many of my fellow atheists, the answer to this question falls along a simple black and white binary: there is no such thing. Many would immediately dismiss the sincere posing of the question as stupid, and even harmful, with a contemptuous sneer.

I think that kind of knee-jerk antitheist response is a cop-out. Still, I have some empathy for those antitheists who come by their anger honestly, as opposed to the Richard Dawkins types: atheists of extreme privilege who seem to get their jollies from condescending contrarianism and an obnoxious sense of superiority. The kind who put their (ostensible) IQs in their social media bios and snark about the relatively small number of Nobel Prizes that have gone to Muslims.

Blanket antitheism reflects bias, prejudice, and ignorance about religion, as anyone who has taken even one college-level religious studies course should be able to understand. And in our western societies, this kind of antitheist atheism tends to manifest as Christian atheism, mirroring Christianity in its proselytizing and universalist nature and its colonialist contempt for Islam, and mirroring Protestantism specifically in its narrow focus on belief as opposed to the more fundamental matter of values.

Still, atheists are a classic American bugbear, historically associated with moral panic surrounding “godless Communism” and the Soviet enemy. In many parts of the United States today, the nonreligious continue to face discrimination and persecution unless they stay quiet about their nonbelief, which can be difficult when one of the first “small talk” questions you’ll get in a typical encounter in much of the South and parts of the Midwest is “Where do you go to church?” Some atheists feel compelled to pretend to be the local flavor of Christian just to get by, and being in that situation is psychologically damaging.

So yes, it’s not easy to be an atheist in families and communities dominated by evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, or similar. And in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can check out the data for yourself, starting with the groundbreaking 2019 Secular Survey published by American Atheists.

That being said, the idea that religion and spiritual practice per se are inherently harmful is simply not consistent with the psychological and sociological literature on the topic. Yes, this literature reflects Christian privilege and the bias in favor of religion that permeates our society. Further, I’m glad that some literature has begun to emerge about religious trauma and the ways in which adverse religious experiences are a very real and harmful phenomenon (you’ll find links to relevant reading below the paywall). Religion and spirituality absolutely can (and often do) break bad, and when they do it can be devastating. But it is simply not true that one must be either “spiritual” or strictly secular in order to achieve wellbeing.