Yearning for Meaning

In a world in which traditional religious adherence is declining, the search for meaning is taking on new forms. Research from Pew reveals that nearly 30% of U.S. adults now identify as religious "nones" — those without any formal religious affiliation, up from just 16% in 2007 (though their growth may be plateauing). But beyond the "nones," there’s another growing group: the "Dones" — people who were once deeply engaged in religion but have chosen to leave organized faith behind. For both groups, the hunger for connection, purpose, and transcendence remains strong, even if traditional frameworks no longer guide them.

What does it mean to yearn for meaning in a secular age? How do we navigate existential questions without the structures that once supported us? And what new forms of spirituality are emerging to meet this enduring human need?

In this episode, I explore these questions with a psychologist and philosopher who are trying to make sense of spiritual yearning among the non-religious, as part of the John Templeton Foundation research initiative which is sponsoring this season of our podcast.

Daryl Van Tongeren, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Hope College and the director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research. A social psychologist, he has published more than 200 scholarly articles and chapters, and four books, on topics such as religion, meaning in life, and virtues. Most recently, his work has focused on the psychological and social processes of leaving religion and undergoing religious change, culminating in his newest book, Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion. His research has been covered by numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, BBC, Hidden Brain, Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR-affiliated radio stations, Scientific American, and Men’s Health.

David McPherson is Professor of Philosophy in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida as well as Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. McPherson works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020), as well as the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

In our conversation, we discuss the factors that drive religious disaffiliation, the spiritual predicament of alienation, and the search for self-transcendence and meaning in a post-religious context. We also talk about the deep human need for connection, the existential challenges faced by those who leave traditional religions, and the importance of cultivating spiritual practices that fulfill these needs.

Here are three key takeaways from this episode:

1. Cognitive dissonance is a key factor that leads individuals to question and eventually leave their religious affiliations, yet it can prompt deeper existential reflection. We need to cultivate existential distress tolerance.
2. Engaging in serious philosophical inquiry is a valuable practice that offers tools for addressing life's ultimate concerns.
3. As traditional religious structures wane, spirituality is evolving into a blend of time-honored practices and innovative approaches to meet deep-seated human needs for meaning and connection. Yet fulfillment and self-transcendence still require engaging seriously in spiritual practice, even outside conventional religious frameworks.

You can listen to our conversation (in two parts here and here) or watch the full video below. An unedited transcript follows.

Brandon: Daryl and David, it's so good to see you guys. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Daryl: Thanks so much for having us.

David: Great to see you, Brandon.

Brandon: Hey, you, too. You, too. It's such a pleasure. All right. So I'm going to start by asking each of you to share a memory of beauty, of profound beauty, that maybe has lingered with you since childhood. David, do you want to go first?

David: Yeah, sounds great. I was thinking about this. Actually, the thing that came to mind interestingly was my relationship to my grandparents as a young kid. As a philosopher, I think I have a sort of keen sense of mortality and sort of this deep connection I had with my grandparents in just a sense of time and this sort of like preciousness of life and sort of through generations. So I think it's probably, you know, one might think of like natural landscapes or some picture. But I think people, and I especially, think like aging is beautiful. You can think of Rembrandt's paintings of the old woman. I don't know. There's something like, I don't know. Obviously, they're deeply moving. I suppose I've always been sort of an old soul. It's part of maybe what drew me to philosophy. It's the sense of one's mortality and the preciousness of life.

And so if I think about beauty, I think of something that sort of draws you out in some way, some good that sort of draws you out of yourself. It sort of moves you in a deep way. I think sort of the beauty of like one's family, especially one's grandparents, and confronting the fragility of life and our mortality, I think has always been sort of deeply moving to me. And so I think there's something beautiful in old age and that relationship between the generations. Yeah, I think that's sort of what comes to mind if you were to ask me. It's something in my childhood. It was sort of like the beauty of that relationship with one's grandparents.

Brandon: Was there any particular aspect or any particular memory from that relationship? I'm trying to think back. I didn't know my grandparents too well, but I don't have memories that I would consider beautiful. I mean, I have very fleeting memories of seeing them once in a while. But yeah.

David: I think things just like going fishing with my grandpa. We would go out fishing all day on the boat. I don't know. It was just like a very important experience for me as a young kid. Of course, I'd go fishing and hunting with my dad too. But this sort of intergenerational relationship, there was always this deep bond. Some of my experiences of beauty also was just being out in nature, but also having that be a connection between my dad, my grandpa, and then just other things. Grandparents were very involved in our lives. So that's important. I remember giving a speech at their, I think it was their 40th anniversary, maybe 50th anniversary. I just was like choked up, and it wasn't clear why I was choked up giving this speech.

Brandon: How old were you?

David: I was probably like 20. So maybe it was their 50th. It was back a ways now. Both of them have passed on at this point. But I know those are sort of deep things, that sort of bonds you have as a young child, getting older and then kind of like confronting aging, immortality. So I don't know. I just had a lot. They would come to all of our baseball games and everything, and so they were very involved in our lives. It was something deeply moving to me. So I think of beauty as something that's deeply moving and sort of draws you out and helps you to find the beauty and goodness of life.

Brandon: Awesome. Daryl, what comes to your mind?

Daryl: For me, I was born in California. Then I was raised there until middle school. Then my family and I moved to Colorado. And so, for me, it was the first time I saw snow. There was just something deeply moving. I felt like I had a Kierkegaardian set of emotions of both awe and dread. So being a Californian, seeing the snow, I was a little nervous, a little afraid. Like, well, what is this? Is this scary? Is this a threat? But also, this sense of awe of something that was so unfamiliar, so foreign but also so beautiful. And so it was this beautiful mixture of fear and excitement and curiosity. And yeah, I'll never kind of quite forget that first snow. It's kind of stuck with me.

Brandon: Well, that's definitely an experience of the sublime, I imagine, the combination of beauty and fear. How old were you? Do you remember it when you—?

Daryl: I think I was 11 when I first saw snow, yeah.

Brandon: I think I was 20 when I first saw snow. I moved from Dubai to Nova Scotia, so it's quite—

Daryl: Wow! It's a shift.

Brandon: Yeah, I remember very vividly the first snowfall, winter of '99. Well, I want to ask you, Daryl. Maybe to start, tell me a little bit about your own journey into psychology and into the work you do in the study of religion, especially about your recent book Done. Could you briefly trace your trajectory into how you were led to pursue a career in psychology and then this particular area of research?

Daryl: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the first-generation college student. And when I entered college, I came with the parental mandate that I had to choose something very practical. And so I was a business major.

Brandon: Me, too. For that reason.

Daryl: Yes, exactly. I realized very quickly, though, I'm not very good at business. The class that I really loved though, my first semester of college, was intro to psych. And so my second semester, you know, I remained a business major because that's what I needed to do. But I was secretly taking all of these upper-level psych courses even though I never switched major. So I eventually switched majors. I had the difficult conversation with the parents and said I'm not going into business. I'm going into psych. I think I've always been interested in some of the bigger questions around human existence. And so I think psychological science offers a unique window into some of those. And so even just very early on, my senior undergraduate thesis focused on religion and death anxiety. And so I think I started engaging with psychological research around religion since I was an undergrad. Because these big questions, enduring questions have always just drawn me in more than some of the other things.

And so, for a long time, I studied how religion is a meaning system and some of the social cognitive functions of religion. But then, shortly after finding out I'd gotten tenure, I was going on a run with one of my friends, and we were kind of celebrating that I'd gotten tenure. He said, you know, "What's something that you've always wanted to study but you haven't, but now that you have the security of tenure, you feel like you can explore?" I thought, well, people leaving religion. He's like, "Well, why on earth?" Like, "Why now? Why not later?" I'm at a religious institution. I was a little worried how would my scholarship be perceived. Also, I think that the idea of leaving religion is a fraught topic. So people on both sides, it's very charged. And so he encouraged me to pursue this. So with a separate colleague, we wrote a grant. We got some funding from the John Templeton Foundation to conduct cross-cultural research on religious de-identification and what we call the "religious dones" — people who are leaving religion. Since then, this has been one of the most rewarding areas of my scholarship. I'm really grateful for the encouragement of that colleague who said that, "Now is the time for intellectual curiosity and courage, so jump after that."

Brandon: Yeah, it's really a fantastic book. I think it's great to coin that term and to distinguish it from the "religious nones," which is what a lot of I think the research has been focused on, is people who are not affiliated with any religion and how that population is growing. Do you see the population of religious dones as also growing? I think, in your book, you said about 20% of Americans are in this category. But what is your sense of the rate of change of this category and its future?

Daryl: I do think that this category is increasing. There are some statistics that one in three people raised Christian will leave their faith by the time they reach 30. Some estimates are as high as maybe three quarters of "religious nones" are actually "dones." They've actually left the faith. And so I do see the proliferation of the dones. I do think that more people are going to be walking away from their faith, and I think there are a few reasons why we might be seeing that. So in my book, I call these the “four horsemen of religion's apocalypse," four reasons why religion might be experiencing a decline. One is because of what I call — research participants have told us. We call this cultural stagnation. They give intellectual reasons. They say, "I'm becoming more progressive, but my religious institutions aren't. There's this gap between the values I espouse and the ones my institution promotes. And I simply can't make sense of those anymore."

Second is because of religious and spiritual abuse or trauma. And so either they have experienced this abuse or trauma, or they've witnessed it, or they've witnessed religious leaders or clergy perpetuating this trauma. They can't stand the moral hypocrisy, and so they have to leave. Third reason is because of theologically thin views of suffering. So when adversity strikes, they simply can't make sense of how a loving God or a just world could allow such tragedy to befall them or someone that they love. Then the fourth reason is because religion, particularly in the US, even evangelical has taken on a social label that many people are not comfortable with. So a recent poll showed that 40% of self-identified evangelicals do not affirm the deity of Jesus, which I'm pretty sure is the core thing it means to be an evangelical. Well, what this means is that evangelical probably has a more socio-political term that some people don't want to be a part of. So there's a number of reasons why people are leaving, and I think these reasons are going to lead to an increase in the religious dones.

Brandon: Yeah, I could identify with a lot of those categories. When I was growing up, I grew up Hindu. I think I left religion for three of those reasons. So everything besides religious trauma, I could identify with. Certainly, the simplistic views of suffering. My mother became severely mentally ill when I was a child. I just could not find any kind of theological resource that was offered to me by at least the way the tradition was communicated to me. The practices didn't seem very helpful and so forth. But then I became Roman Catholic just before the 2002 sex abuse scandal erupted.

Daryl: Wow! Just in time.

Brandon: Just in time for religious trauma. One of the things you talk about is that these four horsemen are all forms of cognitive dissonance, right, this sort of mismatch between — could you say a little bit about cognitive dissonance and then the kind of responses of assimilation and accommodation, I think, that you talk about?

Daryl: Yeah, absolutely right. So in my mind, all four of these things, there's a discrepancy between what people have been taught, or they've learned, or somehow internalized, right? So their expectations or assumptions around the world and their experiences of the world. So there's this gap. Psychologists call this inconsistency cognitive dissonance. It's a negative mental and physiologically arousing state, and we're really motivated to do something to reduce this distance. We don't like it when there's inconsistencies.

And so Crystal Park's research on meaning suggests that the bigger the discrepancy between our expectations and reality, the greater the distress. And so for minor inconsistencies or if people have a worldview that's able to do this, kind of our first pass at trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance is to assimilate our experiences into our existing religious structures, beliefs or frameworks. Basically, we try to make it fit. We try to make sense with the religious beliefs that we have. And if we can effectively assimilate that, the discrepancy goes away. The distress goes away, and we maintain our beliefs. If the discrepancy is too big and the distress is too big, and you simply can't make sense and you can't fit it into your existing belief structures, you accommodate them. What that means is, you just change them. We're hesitant to change them, especially something as big and important as religion. We don't really want to change these beliefs, but sometimes we have to. And so when we accommodate, that's when we undergo this wholesale belief change or significant belief change. For a lot of people, that might mean leaving religion altogether.

Brandon: Is there a third option, Daryl? I was wondering whether it might be a way of just sort of standing in between with it holding the tension, where you know that there's something in the world that you can't quite assimilate into your religious beliefs. At the same time, you don't want to change those beliefs. Do people navigate that middle space?

Daryl: I think I'm secretly an advocate for that middle space. Right. I think that middle space is rare for a number of reasons. I think that that middle space requires us to tolerate uncertainty, and that's very uncomfortable for many people. We're drawn to beliefs and world views and ideologies that provide us with certainty and sure security. I think it also requires intellectual humility to be able to say, "I don't know. Yeah, the world is a wild place. Evil exists. But I also think there's good, and there's beauty. I can't make sense of this even though they pay me as an academic to pontificate on why this might be the case." And so there takes some humility in order to do that. And so all of this revolves around the idea that in order to stay in that middle space, I think what we need to do is we need to cultivate an existential distress tolerance. So we need to be okay with existential anxiety. We need to become comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing and saying, "I'm probably wrong, and I just don't know." That's culturally very challenging. Those things are not valued or valorized in our culture. And so you're swimming against cultural currents.

Second, it's also personally challenging to be able to withstand that amount of distress. But I don't think it's impossible. I think that would be my encouragement. It's to the degree that we can cultivate more existential resilience and the distress tolerance, for me, less likely to act out of trying to manage existential anxiety and respond defensively or foreclose on ideas, it allows us to remain open. So maybe this is a bit of a leap. In the same way like when I first saw snow, I was terrified but I was also drawn to it. Right? There was dread, but there was also awe. I think when we undergo changes or when we can't understand and explain things, and we're sitting in the existential distress tolerance, that is terrifying. There is some dread. But it's also expansive. You're also overwhelmed with seeing the world in a new way. You can appreciate your relative smallness to something bigger than yourself, and there's a sense of awe that really is motivating. And so being able to hold both of those seemingly competing emotions at the same time, I think might be, as you mentioned, a really fruitful way forward.

Brandon: Thank you. That sounds amazing. I just interviewed this journalist, Maggie Jackson, who wrote a remarkable book called Uncertain. She advocates for uncertainty as a sort of psychological superpower. And yeah, I think certainly it's related to humility, which we can talk about in a little bit. So maybe, David, let me ask you about your journey into philosophy. You mentioned being an old soul as a child. But I'd be curious to know just how you decided to become a professional philosopher. Tell us a little bit about your journey into the study of virtue and humility and then, now, alienation.

David: Yeah, thanks. I mean, I think, yeah, I guess I sort of like indicated maybe some of those motivations. I think I grew up religious. And I think probably as a teenager, I started having a bunch of questions, doubts, problem with evil, all these sorts of things. So I think I kind of felt impelled to philosophize. Aristotle, famous at the beginning of his metaphysics, says philosophy begins with wonder. That sounds really nice. It almost sounds like this nice, euphoric experience. But it's really something being perturbed. He says like we philosophize in order to no longer be at a loss in the world. And so I think philosophy, sort of the ancient practice of philosophy, as a way of life is this attempt to discover an orientation in one's life, to discover wisdom, wisdom as understood as kind of holistic understanding that sort of aims at living well. And so I think philosophy has always been part of that human quest. I mean, I always try to impress this upon my students. It's that we're all natural philosophers. We all ask these questions all the time. In fact, part of a philosophy course should be to help you — one of the things that it should help you do is have your midlife crisis early, so you don't have to go buy the Lamborghini later which isn't going to solve your problems. Not that I actually want you to have the crisis, but I want you to address the kinds of questions from which crisis arise, which are just part of the human condition. I think I just felt impelled to do philosophy to sort of inquire into some of these big questions about meaning in life, how to live well.

I think you asked about virtue ethics. So my first two books have been on virtue ethics — one on called virtue and meaning, which is kind of virtue ethics and meaning of life, and the second one called the virtues of limits. Now my current book project is more kind of philosophy of the spiritual life. The book project is called Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God. I think virtue ethics always seemed to me like, it allows you to reflect upon the good life. Going back to ancient tradition, these big questions were just part of, you know, you look at Aristotle, Plato. The big questions about sort of the nature of the world and our place within it are just so much a part of that. I think I have tried to push virtue ethics in a kind of more — there's always these pressures in this academia to kind of narrow in. I think there's this value in that. But sometimes we lose the big picture, the big questions. And so, for instance, in contemporary virtue ethics, they sort of don't talk about Aristotle on contemplation. They don't have much place for the contemplative life. Whereas it seems to me it's obviously very central to Aristotle, this sort of the place for the contemplative life. He thinks that the best kind of life would be the contemplative life. This sort of a question, how do you square that with also the practical life engaged in human community, which I think there's interesting questions around that. But for the most part, a lot of contemporary students have just been concerned with, how do we use practical reason to live well, to flourish?

But part of flourishing, part of the kind of beings we are is that we are, as I put it, meaning-seeking animals, that we seek meaning in our lives. To flourish as a human being is to flourish in the mode of being a meaning-seeking animal. And so I think a lot of times, contemporary virtue ethicists have attempted to try to make their views scientifically respectable. So they'll talk about flourishing, like flourishing of a tomato plant or like a dog or whatever. So human flourishing is like that. I think there are analogies, but there's also disanalogies. One of the disanalogies is that we seek meaning in life. And so Aristotle himself said that non-human animals are not capable of 'eudaimonia,' which is the Greek term often translated as happiness. But I think it's something more like a meaningful life, a noble life, a worthwhile life, something that's deeply fulfilling. And so I think that we have to get at, what is it to be human? I think a central part of my own research is what we might call philosophical anthropology, sort of philosophical reflection on the human condition. What is it to be human?

And so I think virtue ethics is sort of a way into that, to think about, well, how do we flourish as human beings? How do we live well? The virtues are the excellences that help us to live well. Again, part of that is going to be meaning-seeking. The virtues help us to live meaningful lives. In fact, the virtues help us to be properly responsive to the goods all around us. And being properly responsive to those goods, we find fulfillment or meaning in our lives. And so that's sort of the general picture and I think why I was drawn into virtue. So I think my work has tried to push it more on a kind of, as I've already indicated, meaning of life direction but also in the direction of spirituality. It's not so far from saying we're the meaning-seeking animal to saying we're like fundamentally religious or spiritual by nature, homo religiosus, if you want to use a Latin term here. And so I think the present book project is trying to grapple with what you might call our spiritual condition, our spiritual predicament from a philosophical vantage point.

Brandon: Yeah, it's great. In your book on spirituality, you have defined spirituality as a practical life orientation shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence worthy, which I thought was a really compelling definition of spirituality. I recently interviewed on the podcast Alan Lightman who identifies as a spiritual materialist. So he's sort of ontologically, he's committed to materialism. He doesn't think that there were anything more than atoms and molecules. And yet, he's had this profound experience of transcendence, and he thinks that's what spirituality is. It's being open to those kinds of experiences. What do you mean here, I suppose, by self-transcendence? Which he wants to use that word transcendence as well. Because often, we think of transcendent as implying something beyond the material world. How much of that is needed in your sense of spirituality?

David: Yeah, that's great. So just on the first part of that definition, I describe it as a practical life orientation. By practice, I mean it's a life of practice, or they might say you have to engage in certain kinds of spiritual practices. It's not enough in my view. It's a normative definition how we think we should understand spirituality. So people could of course use the term in all kinds of different ways. So it could just be, you have some wow moments. There's people who are like on psychedelics or something where you could have these wow moments, right? And maybe that could be a route into the spiritual life for someone. But this sort of this question of like, what's the issue of spiritual praxis that you have to engage in some way in spiritual praxis in a way trying to orient your life. This is life orientation towards some vision of the good, we might say. I think that gets into the self-transcending aspect. I think there's some sense that I think the spiritual life, you feel called to something. If you think about like Christ beginning his ministry, calling people to metanoia, to repentance or conversion, there's some sense I think that the spiritual life responds to a call upon our lives. To change, to be reborn, however you think of sort of the great spiritual traditions. They sort of issue a call upon one's life to be changed. That I think necessarily has to be experienced as coming to us from without.

I'm currently teaching this class on the search for meaning in a secular age. And so we'll get into like, what do people mean when they're spiritual but not religious? What's religion? What's spirituality? There are some sort of test cases. I don't know. I remember this example from Robert Bellah, et al's book, Habits of the Heart, where there's this woman, Sheila, who had her own religion of "Sheilaism." Right? There's sort of this question of like, could that be a spirituality or religion where it's just like you do you, I'll do me? There's a sense in which it's like, I mean, there could be I think some sense of an authentic self, who you really ought to be. But if it's just kind of like I'm going to do whatever I desire, there's sort of no fundamental restructuring of my desires or my orientation, I mean, it's a part we're trying to capture a phenomenon. Like, what has spirituality been and what can it be sort of going into the future? I think that sense of the call upon — that's why I talk about certain normative demands, sort of normative demands, including a sense of the sacred, the holy, the numinous. So we're trying to capture something that seemed very important in the human condition. For me, I'm interested in it as a key ingredient in a flourishing human life. So what is the kind of spirituality that we need in order to flourish as human beings as meaning-seeking, homo religiosus or maybe, by nature, spiritual beings? And so that's why my definition I think will sort of like say, well, some of these views, they may have elements of spirituality but it's not the full package of at least what I think spirituality is at its best.

Brandon: That's really helpful to try to delineate those things. It seems to me, and I've met people who are at least espouse a kind of Sheilaism. They have this sort of little bricolage mentality in terms of the kind of spirituality they want to construct. I don't think they can escape the demands even if they say, "Well, I'm going to practice some yoga, and I'm going to go to this sort of nudist retreat on this beach with other people." I mean, whatever you engage in, the practices bring with them some kinds of demands and values. You have to eat certain kinds of food and do certain kinds of exercise and avoid certain kinds of other practices. And so it somehow becomes inescapable. Then even those who are, say, tied to more conventional religious traditions could live those forms of religiosity in ways that make no real demands of them, right? And so it becomes kind of thorny to navigate what is actually a well-lived out spiritual practice, whether in the domain of religion or outside.

David: Yeah, I mean, this is part of the motivation behind the spiritual alienation project. I mean, all the great spiritual traditions have some sense that things are not as they should be, things are out of joint in some sense, that there is a spiritual predicament or problem that we're trying to address. In some sense, we're not where we need to be. Or, to use language from Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age, that we're not yet at the place of spiritual fullness, right? We're in some way, we're on the way maybe, or we feel exiled or alienated from it. But we're not where we need to be.

I discussed in this current book project three perennial forms of spiritual alienation. The first is self-alienation which is our lack of integration with the good or lack of whole heartedness in relation to it. So you think about like Augustine on the divided will or Aristotle on 'akrasia' or weakness of the will. Sometimes it's translated as lack of self-control. You also think here, I mean, St. Paul. Why do I do the things I don't want to do or things I hate and so forth? So it's a very common experience that we're not fully aligned. You think of the Buddhist tradition on selfish craving and so forth. So there's ways that we're not fully aligned. Then that often leads to alienation from others when we engage in wrongdoing. And so we find ourselves alienated from others. But also, that can just be part of the experience of loneliness that's just sort of endemic to the human condition. Then lastly, there was what I call alienation from the world which is, it comes with that philosophical impulse where we feel at a loss in the world. We feel like we're trying to find that orientation, find our place in the world, trying to grapple with evil and suffering. Right? And so all those, I think, are part of our coming into moral and spiritual self-consciousness.

Actually, in the book, I begin with a philosophical reading of the Garden of Eden story, which is a long tradition of this. I obviously go back to someone like Saint Augustine, with Kant, Hegel and so forth. One thing I think is interesting. It's often referred to as a fall, but it's also a rise into moral and spiritual self-consciousness, the eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They experience shame. They're exiled from this place of harmonious living, right? So it has this deep power to speak to us. Because I think in each of our lives, you might say, we began in a Garden of Eden. We began kind of in a state of innocence, simplicity, harmony as young children. But as we grow and develop, we sort of experience alienation. We don't always do the things we think we should do. We feel shame and guilt in relation to others, or we feel like we're trying to discover our place in the world. I think that's just part of the maturation of each human life. And so that's why I think, to really get at the role of spirituality in human life, I think you have to make a case that there's like a spiritual predicament that we're trying to address. And so that's why, I mean, to just say leave everything as it is, a kind of quietest sort of approach to where we're at. Like I'm fine as I am. It's like not to realize maybe the depths of the problem. And if I could just invoke, probably, we're all fans of William James here. He's got this distinction between a religion of healthy-mindedness and sort of the sick soul. I mean, I think there's actually a place for both. I think maybe healthy-mindedness is an aspiration. But we often began from that sick soul condition that not all is as it should be. Daryl invoked Kierkegaard earlier. You might think of The Sickness unto Death. Or Pascal, knowing your wretchedness and your greatness. You have to kind of pair those two things together.

Brandon: How would you articulate the heart of the spiritual predicament? I mean, is it that we're sort of looking for some kind of belonging that we don't find in this world? I mean, how would you articulate the heart of that predicament?

David: Yeah, that's really interesting because I'm trying to — so the book is called Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God. In one sense, it's a kind of traditional project of saying like, in some way, this leads us on a quest for God or could the spiritual alienation. There's some way that maybe the desire for God or yearning for God could be derived from that experience of spiritual alienation. Of course, other traditions are going to interpret it differently. But one of the things I actually take on is that there are a number of people that criticize theistic religion as causing alienation. Famously, Nietzsche sort of criticized theistic religions as being otherworldly, right? It causes alienation from the world. There's certain kind of autonomy objections towards theistic ethics, right? That it sort of alienates us from our autonomous self. We have to be obedient to the will of God, or maybe religion causes social conflict. So a number of areas people actually argue that theistic religions can cause alienation. So I get into some of that. Maybe in some versions it can. But I think, at their best, I actually think there's ways that they help us to address that.

So, for instance, take Nietzsche's criticism that theistic religion is otherworldly. Well, if you think about the biblical traditions, there's a sense in creation that God creates the world and completes it by contemplating it as very good. And so we might say the task of the spiritual life is to come to a similar affirmation of the world. In one way, a theistic view helps us to do that as it helps us to see the world as a gift. There's a gift in this of the world. So the world, in some sense, although there's evil and suffering, there's a kind of hospitality to the — well, it may seem and sometimes hostile. But it allows us to also see it under the vantage point of hospitality where there's a gift in this of the world, right? Or you think about going to, so if you go to self-alienation, you think about there's that ideal of a whole heart and love of God. Then loving your neighbor in some sense is related to that whole heart and love of God as a way of trying to overcome that alienation, self-alienation. And likewise, with others, you have all these teachings on forgiveness and repentance, right?

One thing, I think, just one last point here just to fill in one last detail, I think loneliness is a really interesting — I mean, you see it. It's there in the garden story, the Garden of Eden story. You might say at the beginning of the humanizing process or realizing one's humanities when God says it's not good that the man should be alone, it's first thing that begins the process. Then Adam names the animals and then distinguishes. These aren't the source that I'm looking for. It's not the source of belonging I'm looking for. Then God creates Eve. It's only at that point really that Adam — because that's his first instance of speech, it's naming the animals. So distinguishing. Then it's like when God creates Eve at last, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh is this longing. This loneliness is like this reaching out for some indefinite something not fully-defined that we're seeking fulfillment in. A lot of great spiritual writers, I think of like Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, right? I've sort of seen loneliness as having this spiritual implication of, like, while human relationships can go long ways in addressing that loneliness endemic to the human condition, there's a way in which that loneliness seems to reach out even beyond the best human relationships to something more as we confront our mortality and the fragility of human existence. And so, I mean, if you're kind of like, how does it maybe go in a more spiritual, religious direction, I think loneliness is just one kind of point for how that can occur. I think it does have a deep spiritual significance potentially.

Brandon: Yeah, it seems that one way I'm seeing this is that the heart of it is there. It's there's a yearning for connection, right, whether it's connection to God, or higher power, or connection to others, connection to oneself, one's true self or something like that, connection even to nature, which we can feel alienated from. It seems that there is this kind of yearning.

Brandon: Daryl, I wanted to ask, like, what do you think of alienation as a way to conceptualize what's happening when people encounter this sort of four horsemen? You have a concept of the existential chasm in your book. Could you talk about how that relates to this notion of alienation?

Daryl: Yeah, absolutely. So I think in part, besides cognitive dissonance being a major reason why people are leaving, in another sense, it could be that they're no longer feeling as though their religion is meeting their needs. They're somehow feeling alienated from their religious teachings, or institutions, or from other religious individuals. And so the process of leaving religion for those who are undergoing a major belief revision that's landed them outside of traditional religion, I introduce this idea of the existential chasm. And it goes something like this. So religion addresses a lot of core existential needs. What's the meaning of life? What happens to me after I die? When people leave religion, they have to answer those questions again without religion. And so they're facing these new existential fears afresh without being able to rely on religion to provide them with ready answers.

And so there's two kind of unique things about this. One is, if they've previously known what it was like to, let's say, believe in the afterlife — maybe that's a belief that they've jettisoned — then that's going to bring about a whole lot of grief. Because if you comforted yourself by losing a loved one or a friend by believing that they will live on in the afterlife and you no longer believe that, you might be grieving them again. And if you've oriented your life around where to go to college, what profession to choose, whom to marry or partner off with based on your religious beliefs, and now you no longer hold those, you might grieve having spent so much of your life in so many major life decisions or ends around something that you no longer believe. So you're facing these new existential challenges in a brand new way, no longer having the structure of religion but knowing what it was like. Then the second piece is, for many people who are raised religiously, they may not have developed the skills, or the capacities, or the habits of critically thinking about how to engage these existential concerns on their own because they might have been given a complete, comprehensive worldview through religion to address these concerns. And so there's this gap. So existential anxiety is likely heightened among people who've left religion because they can't rely on or are no longer relying on religion to meet those needs, and they're facing them once again. And so, for these folks, existential concerns are going to loom larger. They might feel like they don't have much of a place to turn, and they feel more alienated and alone.

Brandon: So how does one respond to that? I mean, you talk about cultivating some kind of spiritual practices as one route. Is that something that people long for? I suppose maybe the question that I could also ask is, in the aftermath of leaving religion, is there a kind of yearning? Or do people shut it off and say, "I'm just going to live my life according to something else?"

Daryl: In some of our recent work with colleagues, what we're finding is that, yeah, people are yearning. So we've done some work with religious dones and people who've never been religious. We ask them, "Are you looking for something more?" And among those, yeah, they've got mild yearnings. They're kind of looking for a few things. One of the things they're looking for is something that looks and seems like and feels like religion but isn't religion. So basically, something to replicate what religion gave them but without the costly parts of religion. They're looking for connection with other people. They're looking for that community. They're also looking for transcendent connection and lasting meaning. They want to know that whatever they're doing here is going to be remembered and is going to make a difference over the long term.

Then the last thing they're really yearning for are the supernatural experiences. And religion offers those. Outside of religion, it's really hard to get some of those supernatural experiences, which David alluded to the idea that maybe that's why we're seeing this uptick in interest in psychedelics. Maybe is it this way to quickly get to supernatural experiences without, in some cases, traditional religious structures? I similarly share the belief that spiritual yearning is probably just as natural as the desire to make meaning. So to the degree that we're trying to make sense of the world around us and our place in the world, we're natural meaning makers. One of the deepest and most enduring ways that you can make meaning is by connecting with something larger than yourself. That's really this feeling or sense of transcendent spirituality. So, yeah, when people leave, it's not as if they no longer have spiritual needs or long for something larger than themselves. They're probably just looking for it in different areas.

Brandon: How much do you think that people who leave religion really need to cultivate some kind of spiritual practice? Is that necessary? Are these sorts of needs that they once could find answers for in religion important? Basically, is this a universal human quality that we ought to pay attention to?

Daryl: That's a great question. There are other sources of spirituality besides religion. So I think of spirituality as the relational connection of the transcendent, or divine, or sacred. Religion is one of the vehicles through which people can experience spiritual connection. But they can experience it in nature through the cosmos, through connecting with other humans, through an authentic sense of integrity within themselves. So I do think that there are features that allow for spiritual connection or transcendence. But should we be cultivating these, or is it an important thing? I would say probably so. People are going to have different perspectives on this, and there's going to be individual differences and variation. But I don't think that we should neglect or let wither something that has long been a part of human flourishing across millennia, across cultures. There's always been this notion of the spiritual, of something larger than oneself. I do think that's important to attend to and important for us to consider not letting let wither. But instead, how do we cultivate some type of spiritual practices that will meet those needs even if it looks different from how it's previously been done in traditionally organized religious settings?

Brandon: There might be people who — we've encountered some scientists who say, "Look. I don't care about spirituality. I don't even know what you mean by connection when you asked me that question." What do you think of that? Kind of like, is it possible to be completely sort of tone deaf to the spiritual or just not need it at all and still live a flourishing life?

Daryl: Yeah, you know, I certainly think that there are people for whom what we're talking about is absolutely of no interest to them, or they don't really spend much of their day thinking about these types of questions. Probably, by every kind of measure and metric, they would probably report their lives probably just fine. It's meaningful enough. They've got work, if they're able to. They have got relationships. They likely have relationships. Maybe they have a hobby. So they have things to fill their time, and they probably have things that make their life quite meaningful. One might imagine, though, that even richer sense of meaning might be available to those who are willing to cultivate a sense of spirituality. But they would not presume that a lack of spirituality means that someone is living necessarily in a deficit.

Brandon: David, what do you think? In terms of as human beings, as meaning-seeking creatures, is the sort of response of someone who says, "Look, I don't need this stuff," how do you make sense of that? Is it just that there's enough scaffolding that they don't have to confront themselves with universal questions that percolate from within us, or is that just there is — is there a viable way of living, maybe a life of fullness that doesn't require dealing with these existential questions?

David: Yeah, that's a great question. I want to add one thing just on the spiritual alienation because I think it connects up with this. I think it's helpful to distinguish between spiritual alienation and religious alienation. So I think, for instance, a lot of Daryl's work is on what I might call religious alienation, people who are done with religion or sort of in some way alienated from religion. One of the interesting questions is like, does that make the spiritual search more difficult? Does it exacerbate the more fundamental spiritual alienation, that I argue we all have? Right? I mean, a great example of this is Nietzsche's. When he proclaims the death of God, he sort of describes two experiences. One is a kind of make all existential vertigo where it's like which way is up, which way is down? You're trying to find an orientation in life, trying to find a meaningful life orientation. Then the second experience is, at least, he describes as a more positive one which is this experience of an open sea of possibilities. That is sort of like you're liberated from certain kinds of restrictions. For some people, they may actually find it easier if they're sort of throwing off some baggage from their past. Although they're sort of tasked with this, which path then, right? And I do think spiritual practices do play an important role just as vehicles of our longing, right? Whether it's prayer, or meditation, or whatever it might be, I think that they play an important role as vehicles of our longing.

Now, I do find this question very interesting of the person who says that they don't have any spiritual longings. Like, I don't even know what you're talking about. So Max Weber famously, he said that he was religiously unmusical. In other words, he didn't resonate with religious or spiritual questions. But nevertheless, when he was asked why he does his work, he said, "I want to see how much I can stand." It's sort of this image of this courageous person facing the bleakness of reality and carrying on nevertheless. And so I think oftentimes there are these sources of meaning. So even if they don't find any larger meaning in the cosmos, they may find personal meaning just in confronting this.

Now, of course, there are cases of people who just go through their lives and maybe don't reflect on it too much, right? But this is sort of that midlife crisis experience that can come up. You might think, just being human, there's just questions that are going to arise sooner or later, right? You come up against some failure in your life, or you come up against mortality, or you come up against a tragedy and suffering. You're trying to make sense of it, right? And so this is a sense of like, well, people might not frame it as — some of it is the framing of spiritual longing, right? But you might switch to thinking about meaning, right? So another way to think about spiritual yearning is just to talk about in terms of the search for meaning. And I do think we are fundamentally meaning-seeking creatures, and we seek meaning in lives. We want our lives to be significant. We want our lives to matter. So I think, in that sense, sometimes you just have to frame the reference. I mean, spirituality can sound spooky to people. It can sound like ghosts and goblins and whatnot, right? People have maybe of a more kind of like spirit, or soul, or whatever that they may know. Partly, I just think of it as this realm, what you might call, as one philosopher John McDowell calls it, the space of meaning. We live in the space of meaning. We sort of swim in it. We're already in the midst of it.

So in that sense, I think if we reframe it as search for meaning or search for fullness I think, as you did yourself, I think it's more easier to see how that's kind of a universal human quest. Sometimes I think it's the language or the baggage associated with certain language that can hold us up. But maybe there are people like, "I don't seek meaning. I just want to—" sometimes I'll use this what I call the Jim Morrison position, the lead singer of The Doors. At the end of their live album, at the end of Roadhouse Blues, he's talking about astrology and all this sort of things. I don't believe it, though. I think it's much bullshit. I tell you this, though. I'm going to get my kicks in before the whole shit house goes up in flames, right? And it's sort of this, like, he's just going to seek pleasure. And so that would seem to be example of like if someone is just kind of living more, you might call in a non-human animalistic kind of way. But it's not even clear that that's fully possible. I mean, Kierkegaard will talk about this with his account of the, it's deep, the person who lives for the immediacy of the moment. The problem is you get bored, and you begin to reflect upon your life. Well, not all the time are we always engaged in meaning-seeking activities or what we might call spiritual yearnings. I think they have a way of cropping up. Sometimes I think like thou dost protest too much when people are like, I'm religiously unmusical. Clearly, Weber, for instance, was very moved by and attuned to the sort of hard, big questions. I mean, he's the one who sort of coined the term the "disenchantment of the world," right? How do we go on in science in the face of disenchantment? So I would say he's this person very alive to, what we might call, spiritual or existential questions. So maybe existential could be — Daryl, I know, uses this framing as well — sometimes existential. I think it's how you frame it, I guess, is how I put it.

Brandon: I wonder at times whether we build lives to inoculate ourselves from these questions. Because they are pesky, right? They have a way of erupting. These aren't questions that, I mean, or maybe some of us could sit around and sort of ask these questions in a laconic way. But that's not how often they crop up, right? There seems to be a kind of — it's almost like I have this image of even a plant sort of shooting up from hard, rocky ground. Right? So it's almost when the cracks in our narratives, our societal narratives or our personal narratives, start to reveal themselves, or we've got some kind of breakdown in our routines and habits. Unexpected tragedies are often the ways in which some of these things might crop up. Then we have to either really shore up a defense against these questions in some way or just try to live them. The question of yearning becomes interesting. Because yearning is not just a pesky question. But then, there's also this longing. There's almost desire that's built into it. There's David. You were familiar with this Seinfeld clip, right? Which we shared at the convening we were at a few months ago, where Kramer sidles up to George Nassim if he ever yearns. George was, "Oh, yearn? I crave sometimes." Can we live lives that our entirely lives dedicated to following cravings but not yearning? Is that a reasonable account of fullness to just pursue craving?

David: Yeah, that's a great question. Because I was thinking about this when you were mentioning your Buddhist scientist friend earlier. Because, of course, the Buddhist teaching is the problem of selfish craving, right? But it doesn't necessarily — I mean, there's ways I think of reading the Buddhist tradition as totally allowing for yearning. We're trying to achieve this state of nirvana, right? We yearn for it, where we're not sort of consumed by selfish craving, where we're acting more compassion, more in tune with the world in some way, right? And so I think we have to distinguish between kinds of desires, those appetitive maybe selfish cravings, the sort of thing that maybe Jim Morrison was talking about when he wanted to get his kicks in, right? But then there's like the yearning, which I think, I mean, sometimes that language can sound overwrought. Like, "Oh, I yearn." And so some people may react to the overwroughtness of the sound of "I yearn for this," right? But I mean, it's hard not to see it as involving this strong normative dimension. If we put it maybe in platonic terms for the good or for the beautiful, or I'm thinking of your podcast name here reflecting on beauty, that calls out a deep longing from us, right? This sort of reaching out to something, some mode of existence where we feel like we'll be more as we should be or have that experience of fulfillment or a deeper sense of meaning in life.

And so there is this more strongly normative dimension to yearning or longing. We feel in a way called or drawn to it in some way, right? That's different than craving, right? I mean, it's like you have a craving. You have a desire to scratch an itch, right? But that's different from longing for connection with your spouse, or with others around the world, or with nature. There's some sense we feel called or drawn into some deeper sense of goodness, of purpose. I think, I mean, longing is another term. It comes from a German root that sort of means reaching out, right? So kind of reaching out. I think it goes back to that experience of loneliness too. It's like a reaching out for something that we think would fulfill us. And so I actually think it's hard to completely articulate it because it has this open-ended quality to it. When we yearn for something, we're not quite sure. But we think some things may be missing. It's like when we have that experience of something may be missing in our lives that we yearn for something. We yearn for deeper connection with others, with the good, however we want to describe it.

Brandon: There's a philosopher of aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell, who argues that — he defines beauty as the object of our longing. Whatever it is we're longing for, that's what beauty is. That's an interesting kind of way of characterizing beauty. I'm curious to know, maybe, Daryl, what do you think psychologically the valences of these yearnings are? I don't know if you've already seen this in your research. But is it oriented towards something that one could call beauty? Also, do you see any kind of personality dimension? Are there some personality types that yearn more than others?

Daryl: Yeah, so we were actually quite curious, like, are these yearnings a good thing or a bad thing? If I'm yearning, maybe it's a deficit. But maybe if I'm yearning, it's, well, I want to grow in some way. So far, the early returns on the data suggests that yearnings are seen as mildly positive. So it's not bad. So when people are experiencing yearning, this isn't an aversive thing. That's one thing we've realized. We haven't yet gotten into the personality features. It's on our list, so stay tuned for that. I don't want to speak ahead of the data. I could make some predictions, but we're still not quite there. But I would be quite curious to see if there are people that are more naturally inclined to yearn. Perhaps if they're higher in openness to new experience, for example, we might imagine they might be more likely to yearn. But we're not quite sure yet. The data aren't there.

Brandon: I have an image of a life that is driven by yearning versus its various other alternatives. I mean, certainly, one would be the kind of maybe scaffolded life where one is insulated from this, which I'd mentioned. An alternative might be or maybe this is also a form of the scaffolded life. It's a caricature of Jane Austen's world of restrained people, Victorian England or something of that sort. If you look at the life of yearning as, say, Sufi mystic or like a desert father or one of those people living out this deep spiritual yearning, you could see these other modes of life perhaps as being alternatives that for some are compelling. Or at least, one could say there's a virtuous life being lived out in the Victorian mode. I don't personally find that a really — I don't know. It seems that it requires so much social scaffolding to be able to construct that sort of life that it seems, psychologically, not really a sustainable project. And somehow, if we could figure out how to better confront and encounter and deal with these existential questions, it might actually serve us better. But that might be my prejudice. I don't know. Daryl, what do you think as a psychologist in terms of thinking about fullness from a psychological perspective?

Daryl: I could not agree with you more. I could not agree with you more. I think that the only pathway to authentic flourishing is through an acceptance and a real engagement with existential realities. I think a lot of psychological dis-ease, a lot of defensiveness, a lot of interpersonal conflict, intergroup turmoil, ideologically motivated violence stems from our inability or unwillingness to see existential concerns as the realities they are. And so if we could work together personally and collectively to embrace these existential realities as truths and not threats, as facts and not fears, I think that it would be transformative. Because that's the only way to fully appreciate what it means to be a bounded human, and then make decisions in light of that to engage in a full and flourishing life. Otherwise, we're just reacting. We're being defensive. We're trying to skirt the issue or avoid the fact that we have to encounter these fundamental features of being human. We're running from and trying to elude our human boundedness. I think embracing it is the only pathway to flourish.

Brandon: Do you have recommendations for how one would go about doing that? What could that look like?

Daryl: Well, it's not easy. I think a big reason why we've evolved these complex and sophisticated psychological defense mechanisms is it's rather terrifying. I think, Brandon, I think you mentioned it, that I think suffering or adversity have a way of thrusting these existential realities into the forefront of our minds. It's harder to avoid. One of the recommendations is, when people experience adversity and suffering, when they encounter the harsh realities of the existential concerns, that they use that time to really engage with them and start seeing them for what they are and start accepting them. It's much easier to do in the comfort and luxury when life is more settled and you're not undergoing the maelstrom of stress and adversity. But we often don't seek that out because we don't want to psychologically rock the boat.

Irvin Yalom has a book called Staring at the Sun. It's kind of coming to terms with, for example, death. And so it's basically like, we have to habituate ourselves over time to these types of realities. And so there's been work on, for example, terror management theory, which suggests that reminders of death make people really defensive. But then, what they found was these trends are reversed among older adults. The reason for that was because they were thinking, well, they're just more habituated in the reminders of their own mortality. Their friends are dying. They're thinking about it. So the more we talk about and can actually embrace these existential concerns, I think the more habituated we will come and become, and the less defensive and reactive we will be. So having these conversations, actually engaging in them in times of calm and peace but also in times of suffering and adversity. The more we have these conversations and the more people are willing to take the hard look, the more able they will become to move toward acceptance rather than defensiveness.

Brandon: Thank you. David, what do you think?

David: Yeah, I was thinking. So you're asking about humility. You mentioned it as we might come back to here. And so I think, you know, Daryl mentioned acceptance. It sort of brought me back to mind. My most recent book is called The Virtues of Limits. I talk about these, what I call, two fundamental existential stances. One is the "accepting-appreciating" stance and the other is the "choosing-controlling" stance. I think both are actually really important in human life. The sort of trick is how to get it right. If you go too far in acceptance, it just becomes a kind of quietism, where you just sort of let things lie. You don't try any kind of change or improvement in one's life. The other, the choosing-controlling stance, we take up whenever we seek improvement. But it can also become this kind of Promethean project of mastery. It can also be going back to what you were saying, Brandon, earlier about trying to insulate yourself, right? So I think humility is really important because I think it acknowledges that it's a proper recognition of our place in the world. I think it's actually really closely connected with reverence. That there are things of value beyond ourselves, maybe even of greater value. So it helps to define your proper place in the scheme of things, so to speak.

I think humility also allows for a proper receptivity. So I think one of the things that we need to cultivate is — I think we think a lot in sort of modern American culture about individual choice and control and so forth. But cultivating a posture of receptivity is much more difficult than I think if you look at a lot of these ancient spiritual practices. A lot of them involve practices of receptivity, whether that's like prayer, meditation, contemplation. And so I think that's really one of the greater challenges. I'm brought to mind of Pascal's remark that the great besetting condition is that we don't know how to sit quietly alone in our rooms, right? We're always trying to constantly distract ourselves. It's the expression of our spiritual predicament, trying to avoid. I mean, kind of back to your comment about insulating ourselves, right? We're really good at distracting ourselves. Our modern technologies have made that all the more easy, right? And so it's to try to cultivate modes of receptivity or proper responsiveness to the good and the beautiful and the true that's all around us, I think, is one of the real challenge. If you think of Matthew Crawford's book, The World Outside Your Head, the issue of attention. You see that in Iris Murdoch or Simone Weil. This issue that attention is a really important part of the spiritual life. It's a receptive mode of being. Simone Weil talks about waiting on God. We could talk about waiting for the good or the beautiful, trying to be receptive to what comes to us. And so in that sense, I think it is kind of like a spiritual task to learn how to be properly attentive or receptive to the existential realities that are all around us. Again, we can try to ignore them. I mean, that's why we distract ourselves. But it does seem like, sooner or later, we come up against them. So why not just work on dealing with them now rather than being sort of caught off guard, so to speak? Probably, still we'll be caught off guard because that's the human condition. I think it's something really important. It connects with this issue of humility that I think is really important.

Brandon: It seems that attention becomes incredibly fraught resource in a world in which there's so much monetary incentive to colonize our attention, right? And so there are lots of powers that stand to gain from fracking our attention, as D. Graham Burnett puts it. So it's a tough battle. What questions do you guys have for each other? I know you all are in conversation as part of your own project on this. But is there anything that comes up that you want to ask?

David: Yeah, we've been talking for a bit. It's been wonderful. I think I've just been very interested in the empirical side that Daryl looks at with the people who are “dones” or “nones,” what are their experiences? So I think Daryl already touched on some of this. Do they have spiritual longings? Maybe one on the moment, I mean, so I mentioned from my philosopher's armchair, I kind of have this sense that there's challenges and opportunities, I guess, in terms of spiritual yearning and seeking meaning. There is that, I'll go back to Nietzsche, that sense of disorientation that can arise. I think Daryl touches on that with the existential chasm. But maybe also that side of spiritual possibilities. Daryl, do you find that people feel like there's these spiritual possibilities, that things are sort of opened up to them in a way? Or is it may be like almost too much choice? I mean, this is something Taylor talks about A Secular Age, sort of the optionality of different perspectives. We can almost feel paralyzed and not knowing where to go, which path to choose. What do you see on that, Daryl?

Daryl: Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. So I do think that there are these twin — it's kind of those twin feelings again of on dread. It's the twin feelings of grief and sadness and fear but also awe and wonder and curiosity. So I kind of think about it as, when they're in the existential chasm, there's this sense of being untethered. For some people who are high on a growth orientation, that feels great. It feels good to have the world of possibilities. But for those who are high in security orientation, being untethered feels very groundless. That feels very anxiety provoking. Sometimes we can have both of those feelings within us just depending on the context. And so, yeah, I think that there's a combination of possibility and concern, of anxiety and curiosity, of wonder and the fear. Wonder and fear sometimes are very closely — there's a thin line between those two. I think that's one of the areas we're seeing that.

David, I guess just for you, my one last question, David, would be, what do you see as the future? If you're seeing an increasing spiritual alienation, if you were to prognosticate, what would you see moving forward?

David: I don't think religion is going to go away, for instance. I think they're just sort of tried-and-true practices. They also meet needs for human belonging. So I wouldn't accept going back to sort of the death of God view of secularization or religious is just going to completely fade away. In fact, we just sound like birth rates are low. I know Pew has estimated the world is getting more religious, just not maybe in America or Europe. But yeah, it's hard to predict the future. Prognostication is not typically my forte, but I think we can expect — I mean, if it is true that we are meaning-seeking creatures and we have a spiritual predicament, I think the great spiritual traditions are always going to offer pathways. I think for belonging, for spiritual practices, that sort of orient us towards the good.

I think, oftentimes, what we'll have is people — Robert Wuthnow has this distinction between seekers and dwellers. And so I think we do have a world of seekers, but I think even dwellers are going to be seekers as well. So you might call it a secret dweller conjunction, that people, they may sort of have eclectic spiritual practices. They may sort of inhabit a spiritual tradition but seek from out of that spiritual religious tradition. And so I think spiritual seeking is going to continue. In some ways, I think that what the data suggests on the rise of the “nones” is that — I mean, some of what you have is sort of like low practicing. The amount of people who are very serious in their practice is maybe roughly the same. But it may even decrease more. I mean, that certainly has happened in Europe. So it's hard to prognosticate. But going back to your points, religions have addressed these existential concerns. And so it's hard to see the great religions as completely being eradicated. I think their numbers may be less, but they're going to be there as resources for people who are spiritually seeking. And so I just don't think spiritual longing or seeking is going to go. I think that's what I feel most confident in saying. It's that it's not going away. It's just part of the human condition. I think because traditional religions are sort of tested practices, and they've been helpful for people — sometimes not helpful but oftentimes helpful as well — I think they'll continue to have a role in human life even if maybe somewhat of a reduced role than it has been in the past. That's my best prognosis. I'm not going to give you numbers or percentages.

Daryl: That's perfect.

Brandon: Yeah, that's super important to think about, I think, especially in a context in which there's a lot of incentives for various entities to prey on all of our longings and yearnings, right? Whether for belonging or to connect with others, et cetera, and to cultivate healthy forms, healthy responses to those yearnings becomes really, really critical. So we'll direct our readers and listeners to your websites. Is there anything else you're working on or that's coming out that you want to draw people's attention to?

David: I don't think so.

Daryl: Yeah, I appreciate you directing them to our books. Your readers and listeners will know that we're both working, independently but also collaboratively, on some work on spiritual yearning. So, hopefully, in the next couple years, we'll be able to report back on what the future holds.

David: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you Brandon. It's been a lot of fun.

Brandon: Yeah, for me, too. Thanks guys. I really appreciate it.

Daryl: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you.

If you found this post valuable, please share it. Also please consider supporting this project as a paid subscriber to support the costs associated with this work. You'll receive early access to content and exclusive perks for members.