The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 6: Faith Healing

In more dramatic religion-based therapeutic interventions—such as “faith healing”—the common (nonspecific) factors I discussed earlier are especially salient, magnified further by the awe of a crowd, intense emotions, and a strong attachment to a charismatic leader. Faith healing, much like hypnosis, can appear particularly effective for problems with a substantial functional or psychosomatic component: symptoms that fluctuate with stress, attention, expectation, and social reinforcement (for example, dissociative phenomena, psychogenic seizures, factitious disorders, and other mind–body presentations where meaning and arousal shape the experience of illness). In such settings, a sudden “cure” can allow a person to save face and feel validated—endorsed by the community—rather than being left with a banal story of life stress and misfortune. Their experience may even be framed as sacred or chosen, which can temporarily boost self-esteem and social standing. Unfortunately, these dynamics are easily exploited by charlatans, and one does not have to look far to find examples.

Most people with severe medical problems who pursue faith healing will not experience remission, because many illnesses are not primarily psychosomatic and are not particularly amenable to community support, suggestion, or adrenaline-soaked collective emotion. Yet devout people may then conclude that they did not have sufficient faith, or that they were not worthy of divine intervention. Or they may conclude that it is God’s will for them to continue suffering, while others, for reasons no one can explain, receive a miracle.

Similarly, miracle stories in religious texts—blindness cured, paralysis reversed, even the dead raised—are awe-inspiring if taken literally. But they should be read against the background rate of suffering in the ancient world. In pre-modern settings, roughly a quarter of newborns died within the first year of life, and nearly half of all children did not survive to adulthood.  Maternal death in childbirth was also far more common. In such a world—saturated with infection, malnutrition, injury, and loss—miraculous healing would have had to be common and broadly distributed to register as a genuine explanation of reality. Instead, what we mainly have are vivid stories about rare exceptions (or legendary claims) in a sea of ordinary, relentless suffering.

This is why miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners: if miracles truly occur, they are extraordinarily rare, and the narrative focus on the “winner” distracts from the millions who hoped, prayed, suffered, and received nothing. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to build one’s medical, psychological, or moral planning around the hope of an exception.

There are also some predictable cognitive and statistical illusions at work here. One is selection bias: the “miracle stories” are the ones that get put on stage, recorded, and retold, while the far more numerous failures quietly disappear. Another is regression to the mean: many symptoms fluctuate naturally, and people are most likely to seek dramatic interventions when they are at their worst—so improvement afterwards can look like a miracle even when it is simply the usual swing back toward baseline. Base-rate neglect adds to the distortion: a vivid testimony feels more compelling than the boring, brutal fact that most people do not improve. And then motivated reasoning does the rest: once someone has publicly declared faith, donated money, and staked identity and relationships on the story, it becomes emotionally costly to admit that nothing supernatural happened. The narrative hardens, not because the evidence is strong, but because the social and psychological incentives are.

The same selectivity appears in religious appeals to nature.  For example, there are many Biblical references to birds, with the insinuation that they live joyfully and are fed through divine providence. This is an attractive image, but it reflects a limited understanding of biology. Wild creatures face high mortality from starvation, disease, and predation. Birdsong has natural functions—communication, territory, mating—not simply the expression of joy or a benevolent performance for human listeners. Similarly, “lilies of the field” (another symbol of divine providence) have a difficult existence shaped by competition, pathogens, drought, and chance: the blooming lilies that catch our eye do not reveal the many that did not survive. In other words: nature is beautiful, but it is not reliably gentle—and any spirituality that wants to use nature as moral reassurance has to be honest about what nature actually does.  The same selective gaze that romanticizes birds and flowers can romanticize miracle claims as well: it fixes on the striking exception and looks away from the background rate of suffering.  

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 5: Non-specific Factors

To explain what I mean by “nonspecific factors,” I’d like to share an analogy from psychiatric practice. In the previous chapter I emphasized that religion can provide real benefits. One reason is that many benefits come not from the literal truth of a doctrine, but from the psychological and social frame in which the doctrine is delivered.

Many styles of psychotherapy have evolved over the past 150 years, and many of them began with strong, sometimes dogmatic theories about the causes and cures of psychological suffering. The advent of these styles was, on balance, beneficial: at least there was a serious, systematic attempt to help people with mental illness. Psychoanalysis is a good example. It was originally developed with an elaborate and sometimes poetic set of beliefs—its own compelling “scripture,” in the original writings of Freud and others—about the origins of mental health problems, with a heavy emphasis on childhood experiences and family relationships. Over time, many specific psychoanalytic claims have not held up well as literal causal explanations (or have proven far more exaggerated than their founders believed), and yet many people clearly benefited from psychoanalysis. How could this be?

Part of the answer is that the benefit often comes from the frame more than the theory. Visiting a kind, curious, intelligent person to discuss your problems in a professional setting, regularly and frequently, over months or years, can be tremendously helpful for many psychiatric problems. Even if a therapist holds mistaken beliefs about causation, or offers interpretations that are too speculative or overconfident, the overarching experience can still be one of patient, non-judgmental, empathic attention, along with a steady relationship and a structured space to reflect.

Something similar can happen when people visit psychics, mystics, or faith-healers. Some people come away impressed, comforted, and genuinely helped. I don’t believe this is because paranormal powers are operating in the room. Rather, at best, the “healer” may provide a comforting frame, strong social skills, confidence, gentle curiosity, and careful attention; they may pick up accurate insights from verbal and non-verbal cues; and they may communicate these ideas using techniques that resemble psychotherapy, especially when rapport is strong. There is also the Barnum (Forer) effect, in which statements feel uniquely personal and profound even though they are broad enough to apply to almost anyone. And in more controlled research settings, claims of psychic phenomena have not produced results that are reliably replicable and widely accepted, with apparent “hits” often attributable to ordinary psychological mechanisms, biases, and statistical pitfalls.

Dream analysis provides another example. There is elaborate psychoanalytic reasoning about meaning contained in dreams, and for some people this can feel helpful. But dreams are, in many ways, an unusually intimate and ambiguous data source: they borrow from daily events, memories, anxious themes, problem-solving efforts, and emotional concerns. Because dreams feel so personal, interpretations can easily feel meaningful—even when different interpretations contradict each other. I don’t believe there is a single “correct” interpretation of a dream in the way one might decode a message with a key. Dream material can be a useful framework for reflection, but the usefulness comes from the reflective process, not from dreams being literal guides.

Most psychotherapy styles share these nonspecific factors, and many bona fide approaches end up with broadly similar effectiveness when the relationship and the therapeutic frame are strong. At the same time, some specific techniques do add value in particular contexts—especially methods that directly help people change patterns of thinking and behavior and face feared situations in a structured way (an idea most explicit in CBT, but not absent from other traditions). The dark side, though, is when a therapeutic theory becomes so rigid that people misunderstand the causes of their suffering, become more confused or ashamed, or blame themselves when they don’t improve—concluding that they “failed” rather than noticing that the framework itself may be flawed.

Religions often contain many of these same nonspecific factors: kind and stable group involvement; loyal community ties; warm, altruistic mentors; regular devotional practices; a commitment to values that often reach beyond selfishness or materialism; and sermons that can contain useful moral reflections regardless of their supernatural premises. All of this is often couched in moving music, meaningful ritual, architecture that evokes reverence, and a peer group with shared language and shared life. These factors can be psychologically powerful—whether or not the doctrinal claims are literally true.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 4: The Main Thesis

With these acknowledgments in mind, I still have to state my main thesis plainly: the literal supernatural claims at the core of religions are not true. Many sacred stories appear to have, at most, an idealized or embellished relationship to actual figures or events; many others are best understood as products of the same mythic and literary world as the cultures around them. 

We see recurring motifs across civilizations: flood narratives in Mesopotamian texts such as Atrahasis and Gilgamesh that strongly resemble later biblical flood storytelling; traditions of extraordinary or divinely marked birth; and narratives of divine descent, death, restoration, or return that later readers sometimes compare with resurrection themes, though the parallels are not always neat. Even the moral ideas often presented as uniquely Christian have deep pre-Christian pedigrees. The command to love one’s neighbour is already in the Hebrew Bible; versions of reciprocity appear in Confucian and Indian traditions; and the psychological logic of non-retaliation emerges in multiple moral traditions long before Christianity. Christianity did not invent moral grammar from nothing; it inherited, recombined, amplified, and ritualized themes that human cultures had been discovering for a very long time.

All religions contain stories that can have moral lessons and often reflect the history of cultural groups striving to improve justice, security, morality, happiness, and harmony in their civilizations, while reflecting on human foibles. Modern religions are not very much different from other historical mythologies, such as Greek, Roman, or Egyptian mythology: they have profoundly shaped culture, and they continue to give us interesting, thoughtful stories, but they are not generally treated as literal truths. The fact that religious narratives can be psychologically helpful, ethically suggestive, or aesthetically beautiful does not make their supernatural claims true; it makes them powerful cultural creations, which is a different category.

It is also worth noticing that while religion is ancient, many features of large-scale organized religion—public priesthoods, written canons, institutional authority, standardized doctrine, and state alignment—intensified alongside agriculture, cities, and larger political structures. In such settings, religion can function as social “glue”: a way to unify large groups, encode shared identity, and establish norms for how people should behave together in communities far larger than anything most hunter-gatherer minds evolved to manage.

Not surprisingly, many sacred texts contain themes of intergroup conflict, invasion, conquest, boundary maintenance, and rules for cooperation—stories shaped by the political pressures, environmental constraints, and moral agendas of their times, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted, and naturally inclined to aggrandize the moral standing of the home tribe. In that way, religions can function like other art forms—literature, theatre, poetry, film—sometimes illuminating human experience, sometimes acting as tools of persuasion, and sometimes sliding into outright propaganda.

People become deeply attached to religious beliefs through powerful psychological forces. Most of all, there is longstanding commitment—often beginning in childhood—bolstered by parents, friends, admired community figures, and the sheer comfort of familiarity. It is as though roots form around a belief system, growing deeper over time, intertwined with identity, memory, and the need for coherence. Weakening those roots can feel like a threat to one’s sense of self, one’s social safety, and one’s personal integrity. For many, it would also be embarrassing—or even humiliating—to admit that something they have honored for decades might be false or misguided; so the mind protects itself by doubling down on prior commitments.

We see versions of this phenomenon far beyond religion, including in medicine and science.  Many people like to imagine that scientists change their views rationally according to evidence. But even among highly educated experts, new frameworks are often resisted when they threaten status, identity, professional sunk costs, or a lifetime of being “the one who knows.” History is full of examples: the Copernican move toward a Sun-centred system; the germ theory of infectious disease; the slow acceptance of plate tectonics; the bacterial role of Helicobacter pylori in peptic ulcer disease; Boltzmann’s atomic theory and statistical mechanics; Cecilia Payne’s early demonstration that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen (and helium); and the recognition of prion diseases as a genuinely new kind of infectious process. 

In each case, the evidence did not simply land on neutral minds; it collided with human psychology—pride, fear, loyalty, identity, and the discomfort of having to revise one’s story about reality.  But unlike religion, science contains formal mechanisms for correction.  

At times, the advent or widespread adoption of a new religion has been followed by improvements in a society’s stability. But the reasons for this, as I will argue, often have less to do with the truth of any particular doctrine, or the real existence of any divinity with imagined powers, and more to do with what I would call “nonspecific factors”: the social technology of shared rituals, shared identity, shared moral language, mutual aid, and coordinated behavior—effects that can be psychologically and culturally potent even when the beliefs are false.



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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 3: Benefits of Religion

Discussions about religion from a psychological—or more broadly scientific—point of view require great care. For most believers, faith is not just an intellectual position. It is a lived emotional landscape, developed over a lifetime. Religious beliefs are often taught in early childhood, and they can represent a fundamental bond and a shared culture with parents and ancestors, sometimes going back centuries.

Religion as Family Inheritance

Religious stories, passages from religious texts, and familiar rituals can become like a “native language,” in the sense of the fluency and familiarity people develop through repeated exposure and practice over many years. Shared religious beliefs can be a bridge to memories of parents—alongside memories of fishing together, playing baseball, going camping, playing music, or cooking together. In that sense, religion is not simply an “idea.” It is the atmosphere of the family home—a mood, a shared vocabulary, and a living link to one’s past.

Unlike hobbies, however, religion carries a far heavier weight. A parent might be mildly disappointed if a child dislikes baseball; with religion, the stakes are much higher. Parents may insist—with fear, sadness, anger, or a sense of emergency—that their children must remain within the same faith. If the children stray, guilt can be induced in ways that are far deeper than ordinary family disagreements. In extreme cases, the divergence leads to estrangement or disowning. It is hard to overstate how high the emotional cost can be, in some families, for simply asking religious questions out loud.

A huge reason why many people are religious is because the people they have loved most have been religious: parents, grandparents, mentors, teachers, community leaders, or admired public figures (for me, someone like Desmond Tutu or Martin Luther King). When these beloved figures explain their moral courage, comfort, or meaning as flowing from God, the religion becomes fused with the goodness of the person. 

Out of love and respect, many people continue the same faith—not because they have evaluated the evidence with fresh eyes, but because questioning the belief can feel like questioning the beloved person. It can feel, emotionally, like an insult to one’s parents, or a betrayal of one’s ancestors, or a rejection of one’s own story. Over time, religion can become so interwoven with identity that challenging it feels less like an intellectual inquiry and more like a renunciation of a precious part of oneself.

Religion as Neurobiological Experience

Beyond family attachment, there is the brain itself: the human mind is remarkably capable of mystical experience. Many people have had moments—alone or in groups—of awe, presence, unity, transcendence, or “spiritual certainty.” Whatever one concludes philosophically, the raw fact is that such states are part of the normal range of human experience. And they can be intensified or triggered by particular brain states: by drugs that act strongly on serotonin and dopamine systems, by sleep deprivation, by stress, and in some neurological conditions. Wilder Penfield’s neurosurgical stimulation work in the mid‑20th century, for example, illustrates how focal stimulation can produce vivid sensory phenomena and “dreamy states” that feel subjectively profound. In temporal lobe epilepsy, similarly, some people report intense subjective or spiritual states in association with seizure activity.

A point that matters here—psychiatrically—is that the brain constantly seeks to make sense of things. When something unusual happens in perception, emotion, or bodily feeling, the mind strains to explain it. Often a mystical explanation feels logical even when the actual cause is biological.  A powerful feeling state can be interpreted as “God,” “fate,” “destiny,” “the universe speaking,” or “a presence,” depending on one’s cultural vocabulary and expectations.

The same instinct often fuels belief in other mystical phenomena, such as ghosts, spirits, or psychic abilities. These beliefs can act as a lens for understanding reality, where coincidences are read as evidence of a hidden world. This can make life feel “magical” in a deeply satisfying way, offering a sense of specialness and wonder akin to the feeling one gets from a fantasy story like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.

Religion as Culture

The vocabulary we use to describe these states matters. Many religious phrases are woven into everyday language; other words and symbols have roots in ancient mythology. For example, our word “panic” comes from the Greek god Pan, and our month “January” is named for the Roman god Janus. Language forms a lens—deeply ingrained in the brain through memory infused with emotion—through which we describe and interpret experience; in a religious household, one naturally develops the habit of interpreting events with religious references in mind, because those are the interpretive tools one has practiced. And historically, in some homes and communities, scripture was not merely a weekly reading—it was a central text around which literacy and moral education were organized.

Religion has also served, in many families and cultures, as a framework for moral development. Lessons about how to be kind, how to deal with guilt or mistakes (“sin”), how to navigate conflict, how to be a decent citizen, how to face suffering and loss—these have often been taught through weekly sermons, study of sacred texts, and the social modeling that occurs in a community of adults trying (at least some of the time) to be better people. Daily habits—such as saying grace—can instill a rhythm of gratitude. Religious services often use architecture, music, and ritual to evoke awe and reverence. And it would be dishonest to deny the artistic beauty and power that has emerged from religious contexts: sacred music, religious painting and sculpture, the architecture and acoustics of churches, cathedrals, temples, mosques. Many of my own favorite pieces of music are deeply tied to that history.

It is no surprise, then, that for many people their happiest memories—friendship, loyalty, meaningful service, celebration, “ecstatic” spine-tingling moments of being emotionally moved—are associated with church or religious community. Many believers interpret these peak emotional states as manifestations of God. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason to treat them as anything other than natural emotional states whose interpretation is culturally shaped: in a cathedral, at a concert, at a political rally, in nature, or even at a sports event. 

This communal power is often concentrated through the figure of the minister. Some ministers are wonderful orators: gifted storytellers with compelling voices, humor, and genuine moral seriousness—sometimes with a breadth of knowledge about history and literature that makes their sermons a kind of free education in the humanities. Some of the great orators in modern history, such as Martin Luther King, were ministers. Churches have been one of the few sustained modern venues where people regularly gather to hear impassioned, ethically themed rhetoric delivered with skill and intensity. Mind you, preaching can be used for darker purposes: demagogues can weaponize charisma, spectacle, and group emotion to fuel intolerance.

Religion as Refuge

Religion can also function as refuge. Many people who feel lonely, adrift, or ungrounded are drawn to a religious or spiritual group because it offers instant community: new friendships, mentorship, comforting rituals, structure, sometimes even material support, and a ready-made language for meaning. This differs from many other community organizations because the commitment is thicker: it is not merely “we play badminton together,” but “we share a destiny that goes beyond this life.” It's a little bit like an orphan finding a home and then gratefully adopting the new family’s beliefs.

This is also part of why religious (and ideological) communities can become so resilient: they meet deep social and psychological needs. Research on radicalization and extremist commitment—work associated with researchers such as Nafees Hamid—has explored how peer influence, identity, and social exclusion can harden commitment in tightly bound groups. The point here is not to equate ordinary religious life with extremism, but to recognize a shared human vulnerability: when belonging and identity are fused to belief, questioning belief can feel like social annihilation.

Religion as Charity

It would also be unfair not to acknowledge the amount of genuine charitable work done by some churches, including some quite conservative ones. In downtown Vancouver, for example, a well-known fundamentalist church has helped provide temporary winter shelter for street-involved adults; and on a much larger scale the Salvation Army reports thousands of shelter, detox, addiction, mental-health, supportive-housing, healthcare, and corrections beds available each night across its Canadian programs, millions of meals distributed, and large numbers of street-outreach interactions plus housing and employment referrals. The financial scale is substantial as well: Statistics Canada reports that religious organizations receive billions per year in donations. 

Still, this needs to be interpreted carefully. These figures do not mean that all religious giving goes directly to the poor, and church charity can at times be paternalistic or conditional—tied to sobriety rules, doctrinal messaging, or a subtle expectation of loyalty. Nor is this benevolence unique to religion: secular charities, food banks, municipal programs, and public agencies also provide shelter, low-cost food, outreach, housing support, and addiction services. So the charitable success of churches is real, and sometimes admirable, but it demonstrates the power of organized community, volunteer labour, and pooled resources more than it demonstrates the truth of any supernatural claim.

Religion as Moral Leadership

Many religious leaders are wonderful people: warm, generous, giving, gentle, and wise. They can motivate others to focus on positive values, inspire acts of kindness, encourage a healthy lifestyle, and even exert political influence as peacemakers or as voices standing up to injustice.

On a small or local scale, a church minister, rabbi, priest, or imam may be a gentle and respected pillar of the community, organizing acts of kindness, comforting people in need, mediating conflicts, and providing counseling.

On a larger scale, some religious leaders have offered profound moral leadership on the world stage. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop from South Africa who helped lead his country peacefully out of the apartheid era, was one of the great moral figures of the late twentieth century. Mother Theresa, a Roman Catholic nun, was beloved for her profound acts of charity. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen monk, spread a message of compassion and peace. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has become a global symbol of nonviolence, gentleness, and compassion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, drew on his Christian theology to resist the Nazis, ultimately leading to his execution in 1945. Rabbi Abraham Heschel used his standing as a Jewish theologian to combat racism and support the civil rights movement. Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani Muslim whose charitable work followed a simple religious ethic of mercy and service, was one of the world’s great humanitarians. B.R. Ambedkar, the Indian intellectual leader who helped write India’s constitution, used a Buddhist framework later in his life to stand peacefully against caste-based discrimination. The current Pope, Leo XIV, is emphasizing a theology of peace, while other darker forces in the world use religious language and symbolism to support war. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, used the moral language of Christianity not to flatter power but to restrain it, calling on political leaders to show mercy toward people living in fear. There are thousands more examples—many of the greatest humans who have ever lived have been religious leaders or devout followers of a religious faith.

Religion as Psychological Comfort

Religious beliefs, services, and rituals have helped countless people cope psychologically with death and loss. You can have less fear about death—your own death, or the death of someone you love—if you believe that death is an entry point to another world, and that separation is temporary. 

I think it is a psychological skill, for any person, to practice acceptance of the fact that everything ends: every pleasant experience, every day and night, every song, every meal, every breath, every firework, every life, every mountain. They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then they are gone—sometimes literally in a puff of smoke. It is entropy in action: one of the underlying realities of the universe. On some level, religion can interrupt that acceptance by bypassing finality with an imagined eternity. This calms fear. But it can also be a kind of avoidance—a comforting story that softens grief by blunting the truth.

It is easy to see, then, why the idea of “taking away” religion can feel like taking away a rich cultural inheritance and a shield against despair. Many people imagine that without religion they would be left adrift, empty, or nihilistic. I do not believe that is a necessary outcome, but I do believe it is a real fear—and a psychologically understandable one.

Religion & Persecution

There is another layer as well: persecution and trauma. Many individuals and communities have been oppressed because of their religion, sometimes brutally—often by other religious groups, including rival branches of the same tradition. This happened to my own ancestors, most recently in my grandmother’s generation near the beginning of the Soviet era. There were experiences of fear and brutality that she could never speak about for the rest of her life. Trauma can cement belief--or at least cement loyalty to the people, symbols, and stories associated with survival.  

Mind you, people who questioned the religious beliefs of their time have often been persecuted and executed through the ages. The point is simply that fear—whether fear of outside violence, or fear of internal exclusion—can make belief feel like survival.

Religion, Stigma, and Politics

Finally, we should acknowledge the stigma surrounding the word “secular.” To many ears, it evokes coldness: a painting devoid of color, music devoid of emotion. It can evoke memories of totalitarian states that discouraged religion. Some people equate secularism or atheism with nihilism, criminality, or a lack of moral grounding. Many believers sincerely think that without God there would be moral decay.  People who are religious benefit from its association with moral stability, regardless of whether the association is valid.    

Politics amplifies this. In many contexts, public piety is rewarded, and some leaders clearly perform religiosity to secure loyalty. Leaders with life histories that are far removed from traditional piety can simply hold up a Bible for a photo op—a performative gesture that successfully rallies support from religious followers by trading on the symbols of their faith. So it is politically beneficial to appear religious.  

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All of this is why critique of religion, to be intellectually honest, must begin with an honest accounting of religion’s benefits: the attachment, the community, the rituals, the moral vocabulary, the beauty, the refuge, the saintly leaders, the buffering against death.  These are good things, even when the supernatural claims do not align with the evidence. The political advantages of religiosity are also understandable.  Understanding these benefits is not a concession—it is a prerequisite for explaining why religion persists, and why leaving it can be psychologically and socially costly.

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The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 2: Mennonite Roots

My ancestors were part of a Protestant Christian denomination and cultural group known as the Mennonites, which originated in the Netherlands in the 1500s. While similar to other Protestant denominations, Mennonites stood out for endorsing pacifism and for avoiding participation in war, except as medics or to assist refugees. When I was young, I always admired this stance, though I have come to realize that there were situations, such as in World War II, in which this "conscientious objector" policy meant that other people had to risk or lose their lives for the greater good, while members of the church remained at home in safety—so my admiration for this pacifism became more mixed over time.  

There was cultural unity among the Mennonites, migrating together for hundreds of years, maintaining their language of origin, Low German (Plattdeutsch), and other shared traditions. Such cultural unity is admirable, but there are downsides, such as reduced genetic diversity leading to an increased rate of heritable diseases. In groups with a relatively small and insular founding population, marrying within the community is genetically comparable to marrying one’s third cousin—or even a closer relative than that if families are more tightly connected.

Many Mennonites migrated east from the Netherlands to maintain cultural and religious freedom, settling as farmers in Ukraine for over 100 years. Eventually, most relocated again—under the trauma and duress of war and persecution—to various regions in North America, such as southern Manitoba. Some Mennonite subgroups adopted practices comparable to the Amish, while most others became quite mainstream Protestant denominations, often leaning toward conservatism or fundamentalism, though some became more liberal or progressive. The branch my family was most recently part of was comparable to other common modern Christian Protestant denominations. As with many families, the culture of my family over many centuries has been shaped by its religious involvement. Faith traditions carried within a family become woven into its history, culture, and values. Much of this history is something to feel proud of.

During my childhood, we attended church frequently. For the most part, these were positive experiences. One virtue of weekly church attendance is the opportunity for moral reflection. Sermons contained messages about dealing with difficult issues or about being a better person. Some sermons appealed more to the intellectual side of the audience, with references to academic theologians or philosophers; others would appeal to the more emotional or sentimental side. Many contained moments of gentle humor or playfulness, and many deliberately reached out to children. Sermons were based on Bible passages, many of which were good foundations for moral reflection and also had a poetic quality. Members of the congregation would participate in the services, often volunteering to read the Bible passage aloud. I was frequently moved by stories about Jesus—a gentle, loving, humble, heroic figure who accomplished amazing, transformative things not through superhuman strength or military prowess, but through wisdom, love, and self-sacrificial devotion to others.

The congregation was always reminded to care for members who had experienced recent loss or illness, or to celebrate those who had experienced a recent joy, such as a marriage or birth. In some church services, perhaps during prayer or music, some people would become deeply absorbed, in a joyful, flow-like state. This kind of regular experience can be profoundly healthy: it offers structured moral reflection with an attitude of gratitude, service, and reverence, couched in a loving and supportive community. It encourages people to be aware of—and involved in—the joys and travails of other people’s lives.

However, this format favored people who could tolerate long stretches of stillness and conformity; for children with ADHD traits, learning differences, restlessness, or physical discomfort, many services would have felt stifling (I recall many unfortunate children during my childhood who were frequently scolded due to their impatience). I think this is one of the reasons why some modern fundamentalist churches, which put on a more exciting and emotionally dynamic show with charismatic preachers, rock bands, and other performers, have been so appealing, especially to the younger generation.

I also attended a religious high school, with significant exposure to daily religious practice and education. Once again, this was quite positive, since the teachers were for the most part kind, thoughtful people. The motivation of most of this education was to help students grow in kindness, morality, and ethical leadership while being humbly conscious of important local and global issues. However, I also noted that the frequency of bullying, conduct problems, and social ostracism among students was no different from what one would find in a public secular high school. Alongside educational content in religion, there were meaningful, enjoyable, and comforting practices almost every day, such as choral singing, “chapel time,” and opportunities for community volunteering. I only noticed major gaps in parts of the science and social studies curriculum years later.

At times my family went to a fundamentalist Christian camp in Minnesota for a summer holiday. I have fond memories of camping, being out in nature, camp songs, and friendly people. One family there had a wonderful little dog that I loved. I was excited about the use of tambourines by the musicians. People were engrossed by charismatic preachers and energetic sermons every day; many were in an almost trancelike state of excitement or passion fueled by group energy, music, and prayer. Some people would get baptized in the lake; for many, this was emotionally moving and transformative (“born again”), accompanied by tears of joy.

In my young adult life, I also appreciated the philosophical contributions of many religious thinkers. C.S. Lewis was a favorite (following a pleasant introduction during my early childhood, reading his children’s books aloud with my mother), as were Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. In my final undergraduate year, I took a course covering historical theology and its manifestations through art and literature, looking at Western religious themes through the ages. This course became one of my intellectual foundations, resonating with my personality and interests, and combining the study of philosophy, art, literature, and history to deepen my understanding of the world.

Prayer and other symbolic actions can have a peaceful, meditative quality which is psychologically beneficial. It can be comforting to know that someone is praying for your well-being, and it can feel meaningful to pray for someone else’s well-being. (However, controlled studies, such as Benson’s 2006 STEP study, have not found reliable benefits of intercessory prayer beyond placebo effects).

Many church buildings are enjoyable spaces due to their architecture and acoustics, and their association with calm, comfort, safety, refuge, and transcendence. Church buildings in much of the world have historically been architectural gems in the middle of communities, sometimes the most visible or distinctive physical feature of the neighborhood.

I want to emphasize that I did not have a negative or bitter experience of religion in my childhood that led me to my current stance on this subject. There must be great respect and sensitivity for the many intimate, positive experiences of cultural enrichment and meaning that religion—or what others might call “spirituality”—brings to people in their own life history and in their family history.

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