Missional theology has always confessed something strange about God: that God is a missionary God. We see this claim masterfully discussed in the seminal work of missiologist, David Bosch, in his book Transforming Mission. In other words, God the Father sends the Son. The Son sends the Spirit. The Spirit sends the church. The oldest name for this pattern is missio Dei, the mission of God, and its point is not that mission is one of the church’s programs but that sending runs all the way down into the life of God. Before the church has a mission, the church is one, because it belongs to a God whose love does not stay home.

If that is true of God, it should be true of the life God calls good. And yet the way we talk about the good life now suggests we have quietly stopped believing it.

The good life we have learned to want

Ask most people, religious or not, what a flourishing life looks like, and the answer arrives as an inventory. Health. Happiness. Meaning. Close relationships. Enough money to be unafraid. This is not a foolish list. It maps almost exactly onto what the best flourishing research measures, and the research is right that these are real goods that real lives need. The trouble is not the contents of the inventory but the grammar, which is the grammar of possession. Flourishing, in this telling, is something you accumulate and hold. It is a state you arrive at and, having arrived, defend.

A faith shaped by that grammar becomes a faith organized around acquisition. We come to church to be fed, to be filled, to be helped, to be resourced. None of that is wrong on its own, but notice what has happened to the direction of the whole enterprise. Everything points inward — to self. The blessing terminates in the blessed. And a God who is all sending has been enlisted in the service of people who mostly want to stay.

Blessed in order to be

The first blessing in the biblical story refuses this grammar outright. When God calls Abraham, the call is not “settle here and be well.” It is “go.”

The good life, at its origin, begins with departure. And the blessing that follows is more of a commission of sort: I will bless you, and you will be a blessing; in you all the families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 12:3).

Notice that Abraham is blessed, fully and personally. And Abraham is blessed for something, toward someone, in order that nations he will never meet might be reached by a goodness that passed through his life on its way to theirs. Blessing, therefore, is not a reservoir. It is a current and one that is measured not by how much collects in Abraham but by how much moves through him.

This is the grammar the whole story keeps speaking. Biblical Israel is not chosen instead of the nations but on behalf of them, a light meant to be seen from far off. The prophets insist that a peace hoarded is a peace forfeited, that a people who keep their shalom to themselves have misunderstood what they were given. And when the pattern reaches its center, it takes the form of a person who is himself the Sent One, and who, on the far side of resurrection, gathers his friends only to turn them immediately outward: as the Father has sent me, so I send you (John 20:21). Even the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is not a private warming. It is ignition. The room fills so the doors can open.

There is no point in this story where the good life is allowed to settle into mere having. Every time it tries, the story sends it somewhere.

What the science stumbled into

This is what, I think, should surprise us. When researchers set out, with no theological interest at all, to find what actually makes human lives go well, they keep arriving at the edge of this same claim.

The most reliable finding in the whole field of wellbeing is not that acquisition satisfies. Most psychological science studies point to what self-transcendence does. People who give, serve, mentor, and contribute report better wellbeing than people who merely consume, and the effect is not explained away by the fact that happier people give more. Giving appears to produce flourishing, not just accompany it. The developmental psychologists calls this generativity, which is a word used for the mature adult’s need to invest in something beyond the self, to pour into a next generation and a wider world. Its absence has a name too, and the name is stagnation, a self curved in on itself and slowly going stale. This is also referred to in the flourishing literature as languishing.

I have spent my research life on a related question, working with attachment theory, which studies the bonds that make us secure. Attachment science established something counterintuitive decades ago. A secure base is not for staying; it is actually for leaving. The whole function of a safe haven is to make exploration possible — so that one we confidently mature to seeing the attachment figure as their source of security. The securely attached child does not cling; the securely attached child ventures out, precisely because there is somewhere secure to venture from. Security that produces only more staying is not security working well. In attachment theory we call insecure anxious attachment, or what I like to call security malfunctioning.

Scripture says the blessed are blessed in order to be a blessing. The science says the healthy are made for more than health, that a good life kept turns stagnant and a good life given turns generative, that the whole tapestry of human security is built for sending. The good life, measured honestly, will not sit still.

The failure we mistake for faithfulness

Name the malfunction plainly, because we have learned to admire it. A Christianity organized around acquisition produces people and churches that are, by their own metrics, thriving, and by the deeper metric, stuck. The sanctuary becomes a bunker. Formation becomes a permanent readiness that never releases anyone; we disciple and study and prepare and prepare and are never quite sent. The endless preparation feels like seriousness. It is actually the good life curdling, security that has forgotten it was ever meant for exploration.

The opposite failure is real too, and it deserves a word so no one hears this as a summons to burn out. A sending that is not rooted is exploration without a base, and it collapses. The activist who never rests, the pastor deployed before being secured, the helper using the work to outrun an unhealed wound. These are not counterexamples to the argument. They are what happens when you try to send from a place that was never rooted. The point was never activity for its own sake. The point is that a rooted life is made to move, and a life that roots without ever moving has stopped halfway through its own design.

The good life leaves home, surely

So the good life is a sent life. Not because sending is a burden laid on top of flourishing, a tax levied on the well, but because sending is what flourishing is for. This reminds me of the story of Saul leaving his father’s home to look for missing donkeys — a sojourn that led him to the throne (1 Sam. 9). The blessing was always a current or a movement. The secure base was always for exploring. The God we confess was a sender before the world began, and the life that God calls good bears the family resemblance.

This does not mean that the ideals we measure in flourishing science are wrong. Health and happiness and meaning and love and stability are real goods, and I want them for you. Missional flourishing — this rooted and sent life that carries the googness of God outward for the good of others — changes what these ideals are for. They are not a reservoir to defend nor a means to an end. They are a base to send from. The question a flourishing life finally has to answer, in the final analysis of things, is what has moved through me on its way to someone else.

Abraham’s blessing began with a single word, and it is worth ending where the whole story starts. The word was not stay. The word was go.

I want you to imagine a driver who breaks the speed limit on the way to work. We do not call him or her an illegal driver. Also consider a person who jaywalks across a busy street, a family that underreports their income tax, a teenager who downloads a film he did not pay for. We have no phrase for illegal pedestrians, illegal taxpayers, or illegal teenagers. In every other corner of life, English keeps a careful distinction between an unlawful act and the person who commits it. There is exactly one context in which we collapse that distinction and let the violation swallow the human being whole. Only the migrant becomes the crime.

The lack of equivalence is the tell. If “illegal alien” were merely a description, it would behave like every other legal description we use. It does not, because it is not doing descriptive work. It is rather doing declarative work. The phrase does not say this person has violated an immigration statute. It says this person’s existence is unlawful. And the moment a society accepts that a category of human beings can exist illegally, it has granted itself permission for everything that follows.

What does a dehumanizing phrase mean?

Each word in the phrase carries its own payload. “Illegal,” attached to a person rather than an act, performs a subtle transfer from behavior to essence. Psychologists who study moral perception have shown for decades that labels are not necessarily neutral containers; they organize how we see, and essentializing labels are the most powerful of all. Once a person is illegal rather than has done something illegal, the moral machinery that normally restrains us toward other people begins to disengage. There is no proportionality for an essence. A speeding ticket has a fine. An illegal existence has no remedy except removal or execution.

“Alien” completes the operation. Whatever the word meant in older legal English, in the language of the 20th century and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary it names “the creature from another world”, the thing that is fundamentally not us. Pair the two words and you have manufactured a being who is criminal by nature and foreign to the species. Research on dehumanizing language converges on a sobering finding, reminding us that people extend less empathy, less moral concern, and less protection to those described in terms that push them outside the human circle.

History confirms what research suggests. Campaigns of mass violence against minorities have reliably been preceded by a linguistic phase in which the targeted group was renamed: as vermin, as cockroaches, as disease, as infestation, as parasites, as scums, as flood. Nobody has to be persuaded to fight an infestation. The persuasion happened when the word was chosen. The anti-foreigner wave now moving across South Africa, Britain, and the United States, which the first essay in this series traced to a global crisis of belonging, runs on exactly this fuel. Mobs do not chant statute numbers. They chant categories.

What if it’s the legal term?

The strongest defense of the phrase deserves an honest hearing. I’ve heard some folks argue that “alien” appears in immigration statutes, and unlawful entry is a real offense. Both points are true, and neither rescues the term. First, precision cuts the other way. Under U.S. law, unlawful presence in the country is in most cases a civil violation, not a crime, closer in legal character to overstaying a parking meter than to felony conduct. A phrase that brands millions of people as walking crimes is not legally precise. I dare say it is legally sloppy in the direction of maximum contempt.

Second, and more important for people of faith: the question was never whether the phrase is lawful to say but whether it is godly or humane to say. Statutes set the floor of what a state permits. Discipleship answers to a different grammar altogether, and on this subject that grammar is unusually explicit.

God’s vocabulary for the stranger

The bible, remarkably, has its own word in this space, and older English translations even rendered it “alien.” The Hebrew ger, the sojourner or resident foreigner, appears dozens of times across the Law and the Prophets. Some scholars have gone as far to argue that distinction between ger tzedek (‘righteous alien’) and a ger toshav (‘resident alien’) (see Gen 9:8–17). What matters is the grammar that surrounds it. The ger in the bible is never a category of criminality. The ger is a protected class, listed alongside the widow and the orphan as those whose vulnerability makes them God’s special concern. “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner (ger) residing among you, giving them food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). The command that follows is important to note: “And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”

Juxtapose the two vocabularies side by side. Modern political speech takes the foreigner and attaches the word “illegal.” The God of the bible takes the same figure and attaches the word “beloved.” One vocabulary licenses contempt; the other commands protection. A Christian cannot speak both languages at once, and choosing the first while worshiping the God of the second is what the older theologians would have simply called sin.

In Genesis, naming is a sacred act. God names the light, the darkness, the day. Adam’s first vocation is to name the creatures. When God transforms a life, he marks it with a new name. For example, Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, Simon becomes Peter, Saul becomes Paul. To name is to exercise power over identity, which is precisely why the misuse of naming is treated in the bible as violence. James writes that the tongue is a fire, and lands on the exact contradiction at issue here, saying “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness” (James 3:9). A worshiper who blesses God on Sunday and calls God’s image-bearer an illegal alien on Monday has not committed two unrelated acts. He has contradicted himself at the deepest level his faith allows.

And there is one more fact the church is not free to forget. The Lord it confesses spent his earliest years as a foreigner in Egypt, carried across a border by parents fleeing state violence (Matthew 2:13-15). By the logic of the modern phrase, the vocabulary would have had a name for the holy family. That alone should end the discussion at any Christian table.

Why “evil” is the accurate word

Evil in the bible rarely announces itself with horns. It typically enters through speech, through a renaming of reality that makes the forbidden thing thinkable. The serpent’s whole arsenal in Eden was vocabulary. Measured against that pattern, a phrase that reclassifies image-bearers as criminal non-persons, that measurably reduces the empathy extended to them, and that historically precedes violence against them is not an unfortunate figure of speech. It meets the definition. Calling it evil is not rhetorical heat.

None of this settles a single policy question. Nations may regulate borders, and Christians of good faith will disagree about how. But policy debate conducted in dehumanizing language has already conceded the most important point before the first argument is made. The church’s task is to refuse the concession, and that refusal may as well begin with practice.

Like I noted in the last series, there are three things we can do moving forward. First, rename. Second, correct. And lastly, bless the ger amongst you.

Rename

Retire the phrase from your own speech entirely. Say undocumented neighbor, migrant, sojourner, or better, learn an actual name. Learning how to accurately pronounce one’s name is a discipline of love.

Correct

Challenge the term when it surfaces in your pew, your feed, your community, or your family table, with grace and without apology. Silence teaches the congregation that the vocabulary is compatible with the gospel.

Bless

Recover God’s grammar out loud, honoring the stranger as protected, beloved, and made in the divine image. Communities repeat the words their leaders use. Give them better words to repeat instead.

The first essay in this series argued that the anti-foreigner wave is at bottom a crisis of belonging. This one adds the corollary: every crisis of belonging is fought first at the level of words, because words are where a society decides who counts as one of us. What might change if every congregation on every continent simply refused the phrase?

In Johannesburg, a pregnant woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo has taught her children a drill. If the marchers come, she tells them, run and hide, because there is nothing she can do to protect them. She has been turned away from clinics where protesters now stand at the doors deciding who deserves care. She fled one country to survive. She is…

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On the 4th of July, Atlantic City reached 106 degrees, a record for the city. By nightfall the boardwalk had thinned, celebrations up and down the coast had been trimmed or cancelled, and the concrete under the casinos was still releasing the afternoon back into the dark. On that concrete, people slept literally. Men and women with names, some of them within sight of ten thousand air-conditioned hotel rooms.

The heat dome that settled over the eastern United States this week placed millions of Americans under advisories and has killed at least 23 people so far, most of them in New Jersey. In much of the country, overnight temperatures refused to fall below 80. That last figure matters more than the headlines suggest. Because heat kills at night, when the body expects relief and does not receive it. For anyone with a cool room, night is a reset. For anyone without one, the danger compounds hour by hour until the body loses the argument.

The disaster we refuse to name

Heat has been the deadliest weather in America for decades. The National Weather Service counted 529 heat deaths in 2024, more than floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and lightning combined. Heat-related deaths in this country more than doubled between 1999 and 2023. Yet heat produces no debris field and no rooftop rescue. Its victims die alone, indoors, out of frame, and policy attention has a long habit of following the cameras.

Consider what New York City’s own health department reports. Nearly half of the city’s heat-stress deaths over the past decade occurred inside homes. Among the home deaths where investigators could determine, not a single person had a working air conditioner. A quarter had an electric fan running: a fan pushing 95-degree air across a failing body. A roof, it turns out, is not the same thing as shelter. During a heat dome, an uncooled apartment can be more dangerous than the street it stands on.

Heat kills the way poverty kills: indoors, out of frame, one unwitnessed hour at a time.

Who the heat finds

More than 770,000 Americans are homeless on a given night, according to the federal government’s most recent count, the highest figure ever recorded. This week, outreach teams in New York fanned out by the hundreds to check on unhoused residents; Newark declared a Code Red; Detroit opened its libraries as refuges. These measures save lives, and the workers who run them deserve honor. But they also concede something we prefer not to say aloud: in the world’s richest nation, surviving July can depend on whether charity finds you in time.

The heat is also unevenly distributed, and not by accident. Black Americans die from extreme heat at nearly three times the rate of white Americans, the compound interest of housing policies that concentrated Black families on the hottest and least-shaded blocks of American cities. A window unit runs $300 to $800. In Brooklyn this summer, a 71-year-old retiree applied for a free one through a city program and was told the city had run out. Then the dome arrived.

Some statistics

Abraham Maslow placed shelter at the base of his hierarchy, beneath belonging, beneath esteem, beneath meaning. The placement was a claim about order and the fact that the higher goods rest on the lower ones. We have inverted his insight. American culture now runs a thriving industry helping the comfortable pursue purpose, optimize habits, and curate meaning, while the base of the pyramid is left to the market to sort out. But nobody self-actualizes at a heat index of 110. Flourishing has a floor, and that floor, for starters, is a cool and safe place to sleep.

I felt the force of this in my own home this week, in the most ordinary way possible: I adjusted a thermostat. It took two seconds and no thought. Somewhere in my own city, in what forecasters called the region’s most significant heat wave since 2012, that same two seconds was the difference between a hard night and a hospital.

Nothing but gratitude

Gratitude is the right response to a roof in July, and on this point the science and the Scriptures agree. Two decades ago, psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough ran the now-famous counting-blessings experiments: people who kept a simple weekly gratitude list slept better, exercised more, and grew more optimistic. The most telling result came later. In David DeSteno’s lab at Northeastern, people induced to feel grateful gave more time and effort not only to those who had helped them but to complete strangers. The field has slowly settled on a conclusion worth sitting with: gratitude exists for something beyond the pleasant feeling. It is the emotion that turns receivers into givers. A thankful heart that never becomes a helping hand is, by the science’s own measure, an unfinished emotion.

Across Wave 1 findings from the Global Flourishing Study, the strongest antecedent of a life going well are not private assets but relational ones; things like close connection, contribution, the sense of being needed. Flourishing, measured honestly, is never a solo achievement. And it has a floor. No index of meaning, character, or life satisfaction rises for a person whose body is fighting a 110-degree heat index at two in the morning. Which points the question at every institution with cool air to spare: the libraries, gyms, churches, and office lobbies that sit empty and air-conditioned while cooling centers run out of chairs.

The answers are within reach, and none of them require new science. Any institution with a roof and a thermostat can open as a cooling site and publish the hours. Neighbors can adopt a block and run wellness checks on elderly residents, the same work New York deployed 200 teams of city workers and volunteers to do. Civic groups can buy window units for fixed-income seniors when city programs run dry. And citizens can demand what winter already has: just as most states bar utilities from cutting heat in January, summer shutoff moratoria and enforced workplace heat standards should be unremarkable law by now.

The forecast says this dome will break within days. Another will come, and it will find the same people in the same places, unless the intervening months change what we do rather than how we feel. Somewhere in our cities tonight, the stranger is waiting out the heat. You can do something about it.

This week I am thankful for a roof and a cool room, and persuaded that a society’s flourishing is measured not at its penthouses but at its floor. The truest way to say thank you for shelter is to become it.

Count your blessings. Then count your neighbors.

Two hundred and fifty years is long enough for a nation to become invisible to the people who live inside it. We stop seeing the walls because we have never known a world without them. We stop appreciating the place because we have never had to stand on anything else. This is the strange privilege of belonging somewhere long enough that belonging itself disappears from view.

Attachment science gives us language for what is happening here, and it applies to places as surely as it applies to people. In Bowlby’s original framework, a secure attachment figure serves two functions at once. It is a safe haven we turn to for proximity — somewhere to return to when the world becomes frightening, when resources run short, when the threat is real or only feels real. And it is a secure base; in other words, the platform stable enough that a person can leave it, explore from it, take risks from it, and build a life that reaches well beyond its borders, all because the base itself is not in question.

These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters more than we usually admit.

Safe Haven

Secure Base

Two Unique Experiences in One Country

For a great many people currently walking American soil, this country is still functioning as a safe haven. They arrived, or their parents arrived, or they are still arriving, because somewhere else was not safe, either economically, politically, physically. They are in the anxious, effortful, hopeful posture of proximity-seeking: working toward their papers, toward a diploma, toward a paycheck that doesn’t disappear before the rent is due. This is the American Dream in its most literal form.

For others, the secure base has already been established. The dream, or some version of it, has been achieved. Citizenship is settled. Opportunity is assumed rather than pursued. And from that stability, people launch outward towards building companies that operate on every continent, doing novel things that shape industries worldwide, sending soldiers and diplomats and missionaries and entrepreneurs into every corner of the globe. America does not simply house its people. It sends them out to shape the world, and it receives them back when the venture is over. That is what a secure base does.

The trouble is that these two groups often fail to recognize each other, and worse, fail to recognize themselves. Those still seeking safe haven can feel invisible to a country that talks mostly about its power projected outward. And those already operating from secure base status can forget entirely that the base was ever precarious. They mistake stability for a birthright rather than an achievement, theirs or their parents’ or their grandparents’ and once something is mistaken for a birthright, gratitude becomes optional.

The Experience of Many American Families

Many American families did not arrive at an American secure base through this soil at birth. They arrived through proximity-seeking of their own, across different countries before this one, until — perhaps — naturalization made what had been a safe haven into something closer to a base they could build from. I say this not to distinguish this kind of Americans from those born on this land, but because the theory insists there is no meaningful difference in the end. Attachment does not ask how you first approached the figure or object who became secure. It only asks whether the bond is reliable.

This should also convict us as a nation

If you are already living from secure base status, the temptation is to forget what the safe haven years cost. You forget the paperwork, the waiting, the years spent proving you belonged before anyone would let you build. And forgetting produces a particular kind of blindness: you stop seeing the neighbor still in the safe haven phase, still anxious, still seeking, still working toward the stability you now take for granted.

Flourishing research is consistent on this point across every domain we study: security that does not extend itself to others tends to calcify into something closer to entitlement than gratitude. The people who flourish longest are the ones who remember what it took to arrive, and who use their stability to pull someone else up rather than to pull the ladder in behind them.

Don’t Let Change Become Separation Anxiety

There is a second temptation worth naming directly. Demographic change, migration, globalization, the shifting face of who counts as American — these are not disruptors of the attachment. Immigration and cultural change can feel destabilizing if the bond to this country was always more fragile than we admitted, but a country this size was never going to hold still for two hundred fifty years, and change is not the same thing as abandonment.

When we treat every new arrival or every political shift as a threat to the base itself, we manufacture a kind of separation anxiety with our own home, and separation anxiety produces defensiveness, not security.

So this July 4th, two things can be true without canceling each other out. We can acknowledge, honestly, that America has been an extraordinary secure base for those who have reached it; thus stable enough to launch from, generous enough to absorb the risk of failure and let people try again. And we can look at the neighbor still working toward that stability, still in the safe haven phase, still proving and waiting and hoping, and remember that we were there too, or someone in our storyline was.

Two hundred fifty years old, and still capable of being both refuge and platform, if we let it be. I think that is worth celebrating. It is also worth the work of making sure it stays true for the next person walking through the door.

Walk into a dark room and turn on the light, and no one thanks you first. They wince. Hands go up to shield eyes that had made their peace with the gloom. For a moment you are not the person who helped them see but the person who hurt them. This is the strange social physics of competence. We are told it is the thing that earns belonging, the currency that buys a seat at the table. Often it is. But there are rooms where competence does the opposite, where doing the work well exposes how long the work has been done poorly, and where the people most invested in the dark start to experience your light not as a gift; sadly as an accusation.

If you have ever been good at something inside a system that had organized itself around not being good at it, you know this feeling. The careful report that makes everyone else’s look thin. The question in the meeting that reveals no one had actually checked. The standard you quietly hold that, simply by existing, indicts the standard everyone else had silently agreed to lower. You did not set out to shame anyone. You just turned on the light. And the room turned on you.

Why the dim room fights back

It helps to understand what is actually happening, because the temptation is to read the reaction as a verdict on you. It usually is not. A dim system is not neutral. It is a structure that people have come to depend on - either for cover, for comfort, for the relief of never being measured against a standard they could fail to meet. When one person raises the light, that structure starts to crumble, and the people relying on it feel the floor move. What follows is predictable: not argument, but coalition. A clique forms. The goal is not to prove you wrong on the merits, which would require meeting your competence on its own ground. The goal is to make you costly and to attach enough social friction to your presence that the light starts to feel not worth it, to you and to everyone watching.

This is worth naming plainly, because the person on the receiving end often spends months wondering what they did wrong. The answer is quite clarifying. Because in a system committed to the dark, you did nothing wrong. You did something bright, and brightness was the offense.

That is the vindication, and it is real. But if the article ended there it would be a flattering lie, and flattery does not help anyone. Because the light metaphor contains a second truth that is harder to sit with.

The light that blinds

Light does not only reveal. At full intensity, suddenly, into eyes that have adjusted to the dark, it blinds. The people who flinch are not always defending mediocrity. Sometimes they are simply in pain, and the pain is not imaginary. Competence delivered without attunement — the right answer with a faint contempt riding underneath it, the standard held up like a mirror you are forcing someone to look into — is experienced as a threat even when no harm was intended. And here is the part that requires a bit honesty and that is the fact that often there is something underneath it. It could be a satisfaction at being the most capable person in the room. A relief in the gap between you and them. The clique forms fastest not around competence alone, but around competence that has begun, however subtly, to hold the incompetent in contempt.

Both things are true at once. The system was protecting mediocrity. And the light-bearer almost always underestimates how destabilizing their presence is, and how much of the reaction is responding to a posture rather than to the work. A person who can hold both of these without collapsing one into the other is on the way to wisdom. A person who can only hold the first is on the way to martyrdom, which is a more comfortable story and a worse one.

Three ways through

So what does a person do? Not dim themselves, because self-suppression is its own betrayal, and a room committed to the dark is not owed your darkness. But there are moves that are neither martyrdom nor surrender.

Learn the gradient

Light that wants to be received learns pacing. Not less light but a rate the room can adjust to, competence made shared and legible rather than a spotlight that exposes everyone else’s gaps at once. The difference between being right and being effective.

Drop the indictment

You can illuminate without making the indictment of others your project. Unfortunately, some end up begrudgingly doing this. So remove the contempt - even the subtle, deniable kind - and you remove most of the fuel the clique runs on. Light reveals; it is not obligated to accuse.

Know the room

Some rooms are merely unlit. Others have built their identity around the dark and will not be reformed from inside or within the chain by shining harder. Discernment is telling them apart, and not martyring your gift or time to the second kind. Sometimes the way through is the door.

That last one deserves weight. There is a heroism we attach to staying - to being the one who keeps shining no matter the cost, who outlasts the clique by sheer endurance. Sometimes that is faithfulness. But sometimes it is only the ego refusing to admit that a room has chosen its darkness, and that staying is less about service than about being proven right. Leaving a room you cannot light is not failure. It is the recognition that your gift or time was meant to be used, not defended to exhaustion in a place that has voted against being lit.

The source beneath the light

There is a vital question underneath all of this, and it decides whether the attacks land or pass through. Where does the light come from? If competence is self-generated, if it is the thing you produce to be worth something, then every attack on the output is an attack on the source, because the source is you. No wonder it feels like dying. You are defending a candle you made with your own hands, and the clique is reaching for it.

But there is another way to hold it. Light that is received rather than manufactured — competence that draws from a source underneath the performance or a sense of being held that does not rise and fall with the room’s approval — can be opposed at the level of output without being threatened at the level of source. The difference is between a candle, which must be defended at all costs because it is yours and it is fragile, and a window, which simply keeps letting the light through and is not diminished when someone curses the brightness. The window does not need the permission of the room to face the sun.

One could say that vindication, freedom, and character formation all intersect here. The vindication is true: the room is dim, the coalition is real, and you are not imagining the cost. The freedom comes when you stop needing the room to admit it. And the character formation, which is the part that is yours to do, that no clique can do for you — is learning to carry light that does not belong to you in the first place, so that you can keep shining without contempt, adjust the gradient without dimming the source, and walk out of the rooms that have chosen the dark without bitterness for having tried.

Competence will always have a cost in a system that has made peace with mediocrity. That cost is not a sign you are doing it wrong. But how you pay it — whether you pay it as a martyr clutching a candle, or as a window that has stopped keeping score — that is the whole character formation. And it is the only part the dim room never gets to decide.

Relevant citations

Kim, E., & Glomb, T. M. (2014). Victimization of high performers: The roles of envy and work group identification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(4), 619–634. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035789

A friend of mine treats the word ‘thriving’ the way most people treat the word ‘fine.’ It comes up every time we connect, unplanned, almost a running joke between us by now. He has a point. Three words show up everywhere in the flourishing literature, in sermons, in HR surveys, in op-eds about Gen Z: wellbeing, flourishing, thriving. Most people use them as synonyms, three warm terms for the same general idea of a life going well. Actually, they are not interchangeable. Each word answers a different question, pitched at a different level, about a different relationship between a person and the world they are living in.

As I think about the difference between the three words, here is the distinction I keep circling back to, and the one I want to lay out properly in this piece. Wellbeing is the individual doing well. Flourishing is the individual doing well in context. Thriving is the individual navigating the structures and systems within that context well. Three cameras, pointed at the same person, set to three different focal lengths.

Wellbeing: the person, examined from the inside

Wellbeing is the oldest and narrowest of the three terms, and the psychology behind it has stayed close to that scope on purpose. Ed Diener’s subjective wellbeing tradition asks how a person evaluates their own life: how satisfied they report being, how much positive affect outweighs negative affect across their days. Carol Ryff’s psychological wellbeing model widens the lens slightly but keeps the camera pointed at the same target, naming six internal capacities: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance.

Notice what both traditions have in common. The unit of analysis is the person’s internal state, measured by the person’s own report of it. I see the gap this creates constantly in attachment work: a person can have a well-regulated nervous system and report high wellbeing by every internal measure, and still be attached to people, places, or an image of God that is not actually safe. Wellbeing can rise or fall somewhat independently of what is actually happening around someone. A person can hold steady wellbeing inside a genuinely hard season, which is one reason resilience research exists at all. A person can also report low wellbeing while sitting on every external resource a life could ask for. Wellbeing is asking one question, and it is an honest, important question: how are you doing, in yourself?

Psychological wellbeing (Ryff): a six-dimension model of internal functioning, measured by self-report and largely independent of the person’s external circumstances.

Flourishing: the person, examined within a context

Flourishing keeps wellbeing’s question, is this life good, but changes where that question gets checked. It asks whether all the major aspects of a person’s life are good in relation to the context that person is actually standing inside, not in some abstract, context-free sense. Tyler VanderWeele’s working definition, the one the Global Flourishing Study runs on, names the aspects that question has to cover: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. None of those can be evaluated without reference to the context surrounding them. A relationship is only as close as the other person makes it. Financial stability is only as real as the economy holding it up. Meaning is usually supplied by a community before it is ever generated alone.

This is the real difference between wellbeing and flourishing, and it is more than a vocabulary upgrade. Wellbeing is checked against the person. Flourishing is checked against the person in their context, so context stops being scenery and becomes part of the measurement itself. It is the difference between asking how someone feels and asking whether the actual shape of their life, examined against the context they are living inside, is in fact good. My own four-stage framework leans on this distinction directly. The outcomes I track, psychological, health, existential, moral, relational, and structural, are an attempt to specify what “good in relation to context” actually has to cover, once context stops being a vague gesture and gets named domain by domain.

Thriving: the person, examined in motion

This is where some of my colleagues both in the United States (see Pam King’s Thrive Center at Fuller) and Australia (check out Lindsey Oades’s thriveability theory) have done the most work. Whenever we connect, the conversation drifts on its own around the difference between the three keywords. For example, both Pam and Lindsey’s work sits in a relational developmental systems tradition, and the way they talk about thriving has stayed with me: thriving is the fit between a developing person and the structures around them, family, school, congregation, economy, culture, and how well that person converts the resources, opportunities, and demands of those structures into forward movement toward purpose. Thriving is not a state a person occupies. It is, essentially—for this reason—a process a person is conducting.

That single move, from state to process, is what separates thriving from flourishing rather than simply restating it. Flourishing can describe a life with good relationships, stable finances, and real meaning, all true at once, and that life can still feel stuck if the person inside it has not learned to work the structures that surround them: the institution that promotes people a certain way, the family system that resists change, the church or community culture with its own unwritten rules. A person can flourish in the VanderWeele sense and still not be thriving in the deeper, developmental-systems sense, simply resourced and parked. The reverse is just as real. A teenager navigating an under-resourced school, a young adult moving through an unstable immigration system, a new believer working out belonging inside a congregation or community that does not yet know what to do with them, can be thriving, actively and skillfully engaging the systems around them, well before their broader context would qualify as flourishing.

What changes when you use the right word

The distinction proves its worth the moment you try to help someone. If wellbeing is the target, the work is internal, the kind of regulation and meaning-making I built my RAIT model around: Regulate, Relate, Rebuild, Respond. If flourishing is the target, the work is relational and structural: repair the relationships, stabilize the finances, restore the sense of purpose, because no amount of internal reframing substitutes for an actually good context. If thriving is the target, the work is neither of those things alone. It is capacity-building for engagement: helping a person read the systems around them, find the actual levers, and learn to move through structures rather than simply endure them.

Wellbeing

“Am I doing well?”

Level: Individual, internal, self-reported.

Lead voices: Diener, Ryff.

Flourishing

“Is my life, in all its parts, doing well?”

Level: Person-in-context; the whole life evaluated in relation to its setting.

Lead voices: VanderWeele, the Global Flourishing Study.

Thriving

“Am I navigating what surrounds me well?”

Level: Person-system interaction, dynamic, in motion.

Lead voices: Relational developmental systems theory.

My colleagues and I keep landing on the same closing thought from different directions, even though neither of us planned to. The words are not competing for the same territory, so the goal is not to pick a winner. The goal is to ask, every time someone says they are doing fine, or flourishing, or thriving, which one they actually mean, and whether the rest of us, researchers, pastors, clinicians, friends, are listening closely enough to tell the difference.

A classroom argument over the “spiritual but not religious” turned into a deeper question: are religion and spirituality two things, or one search wearing different clothes?

It started, as the best class discussions often do, with a disagreement. This healthy disagreement, I must say, has been ongoing throughout the semester. This time, we were working through the standard definitions in my psychology of religion course, the ones every textbook offers: religion as the institutional and doctrinal thing, and spirituality as the personal-transcendental inner thing. One student described herself as spiritual but not religious. Another pushed back. By the end of the three-hour class we were no longer talking about definitions. We were talking about whether the distinction itself was telling us something true about human beings, or something true about us, the people who drew the line.

That question has stayed with me, and I have had reason to keep wrestling with it. I am writing a textbook on religion and psychology for Routledge’s Engaging with Religion series, where the problem of definition is unavoidable. And it surfaced again recently at the Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health Global Summit (APA Division 36 mid-year conference) at Harvard Medical School. During Tyler VanderWeele’s presentation on his meta-analysis of how religious resources help reduce the risk of substance abuse, a practitioner-scholar interrupted to press the distinction between religion and spirituality. I could not help pointing out that we gain little by treating the two as a binary. My argument is simple to state and harder to sit with: religion and spirituality are not two constructs but one. Both are expressions of a single human orientation toward the sacred. And the sharp wall we have built between them says less about the universal structure of religious life than about a particular, mostly Western, way of imagining the self.

One Search, Many Forms

If we accept Kenneth Pargament’s widely used definition of religion (p.32) as a search for significance in ways related to the sacred, then the partition between religion and spirituality starts to come apart in our hands. What unites the two is more elemental than what separates them. Both orient the person toward the sacred. The institutional and the experiential are not rival categories. They are two ways the same search takes shape.

I have come to call this shared ground the sacred core: the human capacity and inclination to perceive, pursue, and relate to whatever is held as ultimate, holy, or set apart. A Buddhist seeking awakening, a Muslim in the discipline of daily prayer, a Christian receiving communion, and an Indigenous practitioner honoring ancestral land are all engaged in the same fundamental orientation, even as the symbols and theologies differ profoundly. The psychological substrate beneath them is shared across these traditions and include but not limited to things like meaning-making, self-transcendence, attachment to a perceived ultimate, the regulation of what matters most.

Where the Wall Came From

Here is the part my students found most unsettling, and the part I think matters most. The modern religion-spirituality split did not arrive through neutral observation of how people actually live. It carries an intellectual lineage. The clean separation of private spiritual experience from organized religious practice reflects a Western, post-Enlightenment inheritance that treats the autonomous self as the true seat of authentic meaning.

In that framework, a person’s inner experience is primary and trustworthy, while collective, institutional, and embodied forms of religious life are eyed with suspicion, as outside pressures laid upon the self. The “spiritual but not religious” or “religious nones” identity is the cultural offspring of this assumption. It prizes transcendence with the obligations, the community, and the tradition removed.

What the Western lens isolates is the self-transcendence part of religious life, then detaches it from the organized and material forms that, in most of the world, are inseparable from it.

Spirituality, in this rendering, becomes transcendence without belonging. The awe, the sense of connection, the brush with the numinous, all of it cut loose from the community of practice and the body that elsewhere hold it in place. The analogy I offered my class was a deliberately pointed one: It is like a Christian who wants to follow and love Jesus while declining any formal identification with the body of Christ, the local church. The longing toward the sacred is real. But it has been individualized in a way the tradition itself would not recognize as whole. The transcendent is pursued in the abstract while its concrete, incarnate, corporate dimensions are set down.

Why This Matters Beyond the West

The cost of this bias becomes clearest when we look outside the contexts that produced it. In much of the world the sacred is not first met in the private interior of the autonomous individual. It is met in and through community, land, ancestors, and the shared everyday experiences of collective life. The very premise that one could extract a purely personal spirituality from religious practice in the context of community would be hard to make sense of in such settings, where the self is understood relationally rather than as a bounded self-authoring agent.

To impose the religion-spirituality split on these populations is to smuggle a culturally specific picture of the human person into categories we present as universal. For a science that aims to study people across cultures, that is not a small problem. It could potentially be a threat to the validity of the whole enterprise.

The sacred core is the foundational construct: the orientation of the person toward what is held as ultimate. Everything else is a variation in form.

The forms of expression — institutional, social, experiential, individual — differ in kind of expression, not in the kind of thing being sought. Which points to a better question: Not “is this person religious or spiritual?” but “how, through what means, and within what relational matrix do they pursue the sacred?”

A Way Through the Impasse

Recovering the idea of a sacred core offers a path out of the definitional muddle that has dogged the field for decades. It keeps the real phenomenological gains of the spirituality literature, the seriousness about subjective experience, transcendence, and personal meaning, while refusing to sever them from the religious whole to which they belong in most human lives.

For the psychology of religion, this means treating the search for the sacred as the foundational construct and treating its different expressions (e.g., institutional, communal, experiential, and individual) as variations in form rather than differences in kind. It keeps the discipline honest about its own assumptions. And it leaves us better equipped to study human beings as they actually are: meaning-seeking creatures oriented toward what they hold to be ultimate, in all the varied ways that orientation takes shape.

My student who began the discussion was not wrong to feel that something in her experience exceeded the institution she had left. That intuition is worth taking seriously. What I wanted her to consider was whether the language she had been given to name it, the language of spirituality set against religion, was a faithful framing of her experience or a Western inheritance she had received without examining. The conversation did not resolve the religion-spirituality split. It was not supposed to anyway. But we left with a better question than the one we walked in with, and in this field that is most of the work.

Republished at vcounted.com.

A refugee leaves a war-torn city. The mosque where she prayed is rubble. The streets that oriented her childhood are checkpoints now, or gone. On every conventional measure she has lost her place in the world. And yet she still has the moon that marks her prayer times, and the earth beneath her when she kneels.

That small persistence points to something we tend to miss when we talk about home, loss, and what helps people cope when their surroundings come apart. We usually treat place as scenery, real estate, or logistics. But for a great many people, place is also where they meet the sacred. And when the places we love are taken, what we lose is not only an address. It is a way of being held and loved.

We are living through an age of disappearing places. Rising seas erase coastlines. Wildfires take neighborhoods in an afternoon. Conflict and climate push record numbers of people from the ground they know. The stability of “place” can no longer be assumed, though that stability was always more fragile than we liked to believe. Most responses to this crisis treat land as a resource to be managed, a carbon figure to be measured, or a backdrop where human life plays out. Necessary, all of it. But it skips the dimension that has motivated people to protect the land for as long as there have been people: the sense that some places are holy.

What the research actually found

A few years ago, my team got a small grant to survey more than 800 nationally-representative North American adults from the three Abrahamic traditions, asking each of them to describe a place where they felt spiritually connected. We then sorted those descriptions by their patterns. Four kinds of sacred place emerged: houses of worship, natural settings, private spaces, and unfrequented places held in memory.

The finding that surprised us most concerns nature. Among these religious believers, the people centered on traditions built around temples, churches, and mosques, nearly a third anchored their deepest spiritual connection in forests, mountains, rivers, and parks. When we asked everyone to describe a spiritually significant place, two out of three pointed to large outdoor environments rather than buildings or rooms. The cathedral, for many believers, turns out to be the open sky.

I want to be careful here, because this is one study, of one population, in one part of the world. It does not prove that everyone everywhere senses the sacred the same way in nature. Culture shapes these bonds profoundly. Many Indigenous peoples hold a genealogical tie to one specific river or mountain, a relationship of descent and obligation that cannot simply be transplanted somewhere else green. So I am not claiming a universal human instinct. What I am noting is that even inside the great architectural religions, the pull toward sacred nature is far stronger and more widespread than we assumed.

A different kind of value

The people in this “nature” group were set apart less by their doctrine than by their experience. They reported more peace, more awe, more of that vertigo of standing before something vast. Over half named peace or restoration as the heart of their connection.

This is where I think the research speaks to our larger predicament. When you experience awe in a forest, the forest stops being an object you manage and becomes something closer to a presence you answer to. Pollute a river you consider holy and you have not committed a management error; you have committed a desecration. Standard sustainability talk runs on a logic of utility: save the earth because it sustains us. True enough, but it keeps humans in the driver’s seat and nature in the trunk. Sensing the sacred in a place overturns that arrangement. The place is no longer an “it.” It becomes, in the old language, a “Thou.”

I call this shift radical relationality, and it is where ordinary flourishing becomes co-flourishing. Our well-being and the health of the living world stop being separate goods we trade against each other. You cannot calm a frayed nervous system in a clear-cut forest. You cannot feel the grandeur of creation in a poisoned river. The flourishing of the person and the flourishing of the land turn out to be the same project, approached from two directions.

Why this matters when the ground gives way

Here is the part that returns us to the refugee and her moon. A spiritual life tethered to one building is fragile. During the pandemic, millions felt a genuine spiritual crisis when the doors of their churches and synagogues and mosques were locked. A home lost to fire takes its sanctuary with it. But a connection rooted in the natural world carries a strange durability.

I want to be honest about the limits of this, because it is the claim most worth questioning. What travels is not the place itself; a concrete lot behind a gas station is no substitute for the forest of your childhood, and losing a specific sacred place is real grief that no theory should paper over. What can travel is the capacity to recognize the sacred in the natural world wherever enough of it remains. The displaced farmer who arrives somewhere unfamiliar still has the semblance of the tides, the quiet of a local park, the turning of the seasons. Through these, slowly, a new landscape can be received as sacred too. The park becomes a kind of Bethel, a house of God in a foreign country. This does not erase the loss. It widens the self to include a new home alongside the grief for the old one.

There is a parallel comfort in time. Trauma traps people in a frantic present where the past is severed and the future is terrifying. The natural world runs on a slower clock. Winter turns to spring. Burned ground sends up green shoots. To align yourself with those cycles, even a little, is to be reminded that endurance is the oldest pattern there is.

What we might do with this

If a significant share of people anchor their spiritual lives in the living world, then the degradation of that world is not only an ecological emergency. It is a threat to spiritual and psychological continuity, a casualty hidden in plain sight.

That suggests some concrete turns. Planners and governments might treat sacred natural sites as genuine infrastructure for well-being rather than as scenery or biodiversity statistics, and measure “spiritual displacement” alongside the economic kind when a beloved woodland is cleared. Cities might leave wild patches that allow for awe instead of only manicured lawns, and protect quiet enough for nature to do its restorative work. Therapists working with eco-anxiety or displacement might help clients build a relationship with an accessible patch of nature, inviting the living world to help steady them.

None of this asks anyone to abandon their tradition or their God, but the opposite. It takes seriously that for a great many people, the encounter with the sacred has always happened partly out of doors, in the company of trees and water and sky, and that protecting those places is therefore not a secular chore but something closer to an act of devotion. Recover the self, restore the world. It increasingly looks like the same act.

Further readings of my work on place and spirituality

Counted, V., Meagher, B. R., & Cowden, R. G. (2026). Spiritually significant places as adaptive psycho-spatial resources: Mattering struggles, spiritual ties to place, and mental well-being in US adults. Archive for the Psychology of Religion https://doi.org/10.1177/00846724251408338

Counted, V. (in press). Sensing the Sacred in Place: Embodied Mechanisms of Spiritual Ties to Place. B. Jorgensen (ed.), Handbook of Sense of Place. Eldger

Meagher, B. R., Cowden, R. G., Goldammer, L., Piazza, M., Aten, J., & Counted, V. (2025). The Varieties of Spiritual Ties to Place: A Latent Class Analysis. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000560

Counted, V., Lomas, T., Cowden, R., Lee, M. T., Allen, K.-A., Basu, J., Laidler, D., Routledge, C., Seaman, D., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2025). Love of place: Conceptual framework and template for measuring the contributory and unitive affection towards a place. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 107, 102203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102203

Counted, V., Meagher, B., & Cowden, R. (2024). The Nature of Spiritual Ties to Place: A Conceptual Overview and Research Agenda. Ecopsychology, 16(1), 60-70. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2022.0078

Counted, V. & Newheiser, D. (2023). How Place Shapes the Aspirations of Hope: The Allegory of the Privileged and the Underprivileged. The Journal of Positive Psychology. Online publication ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2023.2257654

Counted, V., Ramkissoon, H., Captari, L. E., & Cowden, R. G. (Eds.). (2023). Place, Spirituality, and Well-Being: A Global and Multidisciplinary Approach (Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach Vol. 7). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39582-6

Counted, V, Neff, M., Captari, L., Cowden, R. (2021). Transcending place attachment disruptions during a public health crisis: Spiritual struggles, resilience, and transformation. Journal of Psychology and Christianity 39(4), 276-286.

Counted, V. (2019). The Role of Spirituality in Promoting Sense of Place among Foreigners of African Background in the Netherlands. Ecopsychology 11(2), 101–109. http://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2018.0070

Counted, V. & Zock, H.T. (2019). Place Spirituality: an attachment perspective. Archive for the Psychology of Religion 41(1), 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672419833448

Counted, V. & Watts, F. A Space of Transition and Transaction: A rejoinder to selected commentaries on place spirituality. Archive for the Psychology of Religion 41(1), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672419832673

Counted, V. & Watts, F. (2019). The Psychology of Religion and Place: Emerging Perspectives. Springer/Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28848-8_1

Counted, V. (2018). The Circle of Place Spirituality: Toward a motivational systems theory in the psychology of religion. Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion 29, 149-178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004382640_009

Counted, V. & Watts, F. (2017). Place Attachment in the Bible: The role of attachment to sacred places in religious life. Journal of Psychology and Theology 45(3), 218-232. https://doi.org/10.1177/009164711704500305

Neil Postman did not live to see this. He died in 2003, two years before YouTube existed and a decade before the smartphone colonized every moment of human attention. But on the evening of June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House, beneath a structure called “The Claw,” with jet fighters screaming overhead and 4,000 invited guests watching two men attempt to knock each other unconscious, his 1985 prophecy completed itself in real time.

The occasion was UFC Freedom 250. The framing was America’s 250th birthday. And the spectacle — a custom-built octagon where Lincoln once walked, surrounded by giant video screens and patriotic staging, with the sitting president of the United States watching cage-side — was not, as critics rushed to say, a departure from American political culture. It was its logical destination.

Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was unsentimental. He was not worried about censorship but something more insidious: a culture so saturated in entertainment that it loses the cognitive infrastructure required for serious public life. His villain was not politicians. It was television and the epistemology television installs, in which all content, including the gravest, must be made entertaining to exist at all. “We are now a culture,” he wrote, “whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by television, which is to say, by entertainment.”

What happens, he asked, when the medium of public discourse is entertainment? You do not get citizens. You get audiences. You do not get deliberation. You get spectacle. You do not get a republic. You get a show.

Ancient Greek’s Agora vs. White House’s Octagon

Postman borrowed from Aldous Huxley the insight that democratic civilization faces two threats, not one. The Orwellian threat, which he refers to as jackboots, censorship, or coercion. This is the one we trained ourselves to recognize and resist. The Huxleyan threat, on the other hand, is the one we never saw coming: that people would come to love their oppression, that the apparatus of control would take the form not of a prison but a pleasure palace. “In 1984,” Postman noted, “people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”

The UFC event at the White House was not coercive. Nobody was forced to watch it. Thousands, if not millions, cheered. The Zac Brown Band played the National Anthem. The Armed Forces Joint Chorus sang. Fighter jets performed a flyover. It was, by all visible measures, a celebration, and that is precisely the point.

Postman’s concern was not that entertainment is bad. His concern was what happens when entertainment becomes the standard by which all public occasions are evaluated. When the question “Is this meaningful?” is replaced by “Is this watchable?” When gravitas is not merely absent but actively suspicious — a sign that something has gone wrong with the production value.

Postman’s Framework

A symptom is a much bigger problem

It would be satisfying and probably false to locate the problem in one man or one administration. Trump is not the author of the culture that made the UFC 250 possible. He is its most fluent reader. He grasped, earlier than most, what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan had argued decades before Postman: that the medium is the message. In a television culture, the person who understands television wins. In a social media culture, the person who understands social media wins. Trump did not create the appetite for spectacle but inherited it and accelerated it.

The most worrying question is what conditions made such fluency politically viable and even rewarding. And the answer runs through four decades of a media ecosystem that steadily replaced thoughtful deliberation with entertainment, civic literacy with emotional intensity, and policy argument with brand performance. By the time a cage fight on the White House lawn became possible, the cultural groundwork had long been laid.

Postman was indeed describing a structural shift, not a personality flaw. The presidency was always going to become more theatrical as television became more dominant. The only variable was how far the theatricality would travel, and how completely the audience would consent.

What entertainment does to public life

Postman identified three specific harms that result from the entertainment-ification of public discourse. Each is visible in the UFC White House event, and each is worth naming clearly.

First, it collapses context. Entertainment works by stripping away everything except the moment. A cage fight is, by design, complete in itself: two bodies, one outcome, the crowd. It requires no prior knowledge, no sustained attention, no interpretive frame. When this logic migrates into politics, everything becomes self-contained. There is no before and no after, no historical memory and no policy consequence; and sadly just only the event, the reaction, and the clip.

Second, it makes complexity illegible. The conventions of entertainment demand clarity of conflict: hero and villain, winner and loser, applause and silence. Democracy requires something much more different and that is the tolerance of ambiguity, the patience to hold contested claims simultaneously, the recognition that most serious problems resist clean resolution. When entertainment becomes the grammar of public life, ambiguity reads as weakness and nuance reads as confusion. The audience becomes impatient with anything that cannot be resolved before the commercial break.

Third, it produces audiences rather than citizens. Postman drew this distinction carefully. An audience is passive, reactive, and essentially private. It receives. It responds emotionally. It does not deliberate, does not persuade, does not bear collective responsibility for outcomes. A citizenry, by contrast, is constituted by participation in shared self-governance. It argues. It decides. It holds itself accountable across time. Entertainment does not destroy citizenship directly. It simply offers a substitute experience and the feeling of participation without the weight of it.

The 250th celebration and the question of self-understanding

There is a particular poignancy in the timing. The UFC event was framed as a birthday celebration and a marker of what the United States has become, two and a half centuries after its founding. And in that sense, whatever one thinks of the event, the framing is not entirely wrong. The event is a marker. It reflects something real about what this culture has become, what it values, and what kinds of occasions it reaches for when it wishes to commemorate itself.

The founders, for all their strengths and weaknesses, understood that republican self-governance required what they called virtue — a disposition toward the common good that could only be cultivated through education, deliberation, and the exercise of civic responsibility. They disagreed, sometimes bitterly, about what virtue required. But they shared the premise that democracy was demanding work, not entertainment.

John Adams wrote that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” He was not predicting authoritarianism. He was predicting the exhaustion of the civic capacity that democracy requires. A polity that cannot sustain deliberation — that finds it boring, unappealing, or simply less engaging than a cage fight — will not lose its democracy in a single dramatic moment. It will lose it in a long, pleasant drift toward managed spectacle.

The flourishing we are not having

From a flourishing science perspective, there is an important distinction between hedonic well-being (the experience of pleasure, excitement, and positive affect) and eudaimonic well-being (the deeper sense of meaning, growth, relational depth, and contribution to something larger than oneself). Both matter. Neither is sufficient alone.

What the White House UFC event delivers is a powerful hedonic experience. Excitement. Energy. Belonging to a crowd. The visceral pleasure of spectacle. These are real experiences, and they are not nothing. But a civilization organized primarily around hedonic intensity and around the perpetual provision of stimulating content will find its deeper eudaimonic needs slowly unmet. Meaning is not produced by spectacle. It is produced by shared struggle, honest conversation, and the willingness to engage complexity without resolving it prematurely.

This is what Postman feared: not that Americans would stop caring about their country, but that they would express that care in increasingly shallow registers, and mistake the emotional intensity of entertainment for the substance of civic life. The crowd cheering in the octagon is not a republic deliberating. It is an audience enjoying itself. These are not the same thing and confusing them is the specific danger Postman spent his career naming.

What then remains

The question that follows from Postman’s diagnosis is the hardest one: what do we do? He was not optimistic. He saw no clear corrective and no lever to pull that would restore a print-based epistemology to a television-saturated culture. He ended Amusing Ourselves to Death with a note of careful despair, suggesting that awareness might be the best available resource: “that we take seriously the matter of who will master whom.”

Awareness is not nothing. It is, in fact, the precondition for everything else. A culture that can name what is happening to it and can recognize entertainment as entertainment and deliberation as deliberation, and understand that these are different activities that produce different kinds of people will retain a foothold that a culture of pure spectacle does not.

But awareness requires honest institutions, honest media, and citizens who are willing to do something genuinely difficult: to find the unspectacular work of self-governance more compelling than the spectacle offered in its place. Whether that capacity still exists, and in what numbers, is the question the next decades will answer.

On the South Lawn, the fights went on. The crowd cheered. The jets flew over. And a republic, somewhere between its 250th birthday and its reckoning, watched itself on the screen.

For reflection

I have spent most of my adult life studying what makes people flourish. I have also spent most of my adult life trying to flourish. Some seasons it was easier. Some seasons it was not. What I can tell you is this. Something is hurting people in our day that was not hurting them in quite the same way before. Three things, really.

They show up in my classroom. They show up in my consulting room. They show up in my own quiet hours. And the strange part is that they are usually treated as three separate problems. But I no longer think they are.

The Crisis of Identity

The first crisis is the problem of identity. I spent some time in South Africa about 15 years ago doing a fieldwork on youth identity crisis. I have seen how young people, struggling with a poor sense of identity, get plunged into despair. Our culture has given each of us a strange job. Build a self. Make it from nothing. Curate it. Defend it online. Revise it when it stops working. Then sell it back to people so they will give you the approval you need to keep going. The self has become a small business. And the business never closes.

By no slightest measure is this freedom. Frankly, I think it is a kind of homelessnes. We were never made to build the self from scratch. We were made to receive and embody a sense of identity that require a transcendent marker. One that is to be named and known before it is seen.

When that gift is missing, the self gets thin. It goes up with every compliment and down with every slight. It cannot carry suffering, because suffering breaks the performance. It cannot carry aging, or illness, or failure, because all of those feel like attacks on the self. They are not. They are chapters in a longer story. But you have to know the Author to read them that way.

The Crisis of Loneliness

The second crisis is loneliness. We talk about it as if it were a problem of contact. Not enough friends. Not enough community. Too many screens. Those things are real and quite honestly true. But they are not the main issue.

I have sat with people who have full calendars and full homes. They still lament about how lonely life can be at the top. I have sat with people who are surrounded by family and still feel completely alone. The ache is not really about contact. From my own research, I can confidently (and humbly) say that it is about attachment—secure, healthy attachment at that.

Billions of people across history have found that home in the Sacred. God is a better understanding of this divine entity throughout history. I talk about this in my new book Bonding with God. God does not abandon. He does not die. He does not fail. Others find a smaller version of it in family. Some find it in significant figures. A mentor. A spouse. A community that has been there for them for years. Some find it in significant places of attachment. The home that holds memory. The land that holds belonging. These objects of attachment are not all equally strong. Attachment science shows that the more enduring the figure, the steadier the security. Loneliness, on this reading, is the felt sound of a heart that has not yet found its secure object of attachment or source of security.

The Crisis of Meaning

The third crisis is meaning. And here I want to push back on something I have heard repeated in psychology, in therapy, and even in pastoral care. We say, almost without thinking, that human beings are meaning-makers.

I understand the impulse. It honors how personal meaning is. It is true that no one can hand you your meaning the way they hand you a coat. What is meaningful is personally your own.

But there is a problem with that phrase, and I do not think it is right. To make something is to bring it out of nothing. Or out of materials you control. We do not make meaning out of nothing. We do not stand outside the world and decide what counts. We stand inside a world whose meaning is already pressing on us. Its beauty stops us. Its suffering wounds us. Its mysteries call us. All of this happens long before we have written a single sentence about it. We sense, even before we can say it, that meaning is bigger than we are.

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Augustine said it best. Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. The restlessness itself is the clue. We did not invent the longing. The longing found us. And by its very shape, the longing cannot be filled by anything we could make ourselves. It can only be filled by Someone greater than we are.

This is why I think we should retire the language of meaning-making. I would replace it—like my colleague Eric Johnson suggested in a facebook post—with meaning-discovery, or, better still, meaning-realization. This shift is not small because it changes how the we makes sense of life. Meaning-making puts you in the position of source. Meaning-discovery puts you in the position of finder. You are not the author. You are the one who is invited in. Meaning-realization adds one more note. As you find the meaning, the meaning is also shaping you—hence, you become part of an ongoing story.

Is this an excessive correction? I do not think so. Words shape how we feel. And how we feel shapes how we suffer. If you believe you have to make meaning, then in the dark seasons when no meaning comes, you will think you have failed at one of life’s most basic tasks. If you believe meaning is to be found, you will keep looking. And you may discover, as I have, that sometimes meaning finds you first.

The Three Are About Belonging

I said at the start that these three crises are connected. They address the inherent psychological need of being connected, associated, or linked by origin, kinship, or shared characteristics. I hope you can see it now. Each one is a crisis of disconnection.

I have a book coming out this Fall with my philosopher friend Shaun Respress titled “Caring with Despair: Disconnection as a Public Health Crisis”.

In the book, we show how disconnection is crippling all of the human ecosystems, and offer a simple solution of “care”.

The way through is not a new strategy. I propose a “turning”. To be a self that is known before being seen. To be held by Someone who endures. To live inside a meaning that was given before it was found. These three crises only require one answer. And like St. Augustine knew, our hearts, are restless. The good news is that restlessness has a destination.

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Something has gone badly wrong in the formation of young men. Across the English-speaking world and well beyond it, a generation of males has retreated into online communities defined not by aspiration or brotherhood, but by resentment, grievance, and a profound sense of relational exile. Scholars call this ecosystem the manosphere. Sociologists catalog its subcultures — incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists, men’s rights activists — and document their alarming overlaps with radicalization and violence. What receives far less attention is the question: What kind of wound produces this kind of infection?

The answer, I want to argue, is an attachment wound — and understanding it clearly requires us to take seriously both the legitimate relational disorientation many young men experience and the cultural conditions, including certain strands of feminist discourse, that helped produce it. Neither side of that sentence can be abandoned without losing the truth.

The manosphere is more than a gender backlash

The standard account of the manosphere frames it as reactionary: men who cannot tolerate women’s equality striking back at gains they did not want to concede. There is something to this. Misogyny is real, entitlement is real, and the violence that has erupted from incel communities — from the 2014 Isla Vista killings to subsequent attacks claimed in the name of incel ideology — cannot be minimized or explained away.

But the backlash framing, taken alone, is insufficient. It cannot explain why the manosphere has grown most rapidly precisely among younger men — men who did not grow up under the old patriarchal order, who did not personally lose power or status, and who in many cases are the most economically and socially marginal members of their generation. These are not men defending privilege. It appears that these men never felt they had any.

What they share is not entitlement but isolation. And isolation, in the language of attachment science, is the start of a relational crisis.

Protest, Despair, Detachment: Reading the Manosphere Through Attachment Theory

Attachment theory, developed across decades of careful empirical work, tells us that human beings are wired for connection. When the relational environment fails to provide secure belonging — when attachment figures are unavailable, rejecting, or hostile — the attachment system mounts a predictable response. John Bowlby described this sequence as protest, despair, and detachment.

Framework

Protest. Loud and rageful rejection of the relational environment perceived as hostile. Manifests as incel forums, misogynist content, grievance communities. The attachment system is still activated — still reaching, even if violently.

Despair. The collapse of hope that belonging is possible. “Blackpill” ideology — the belief that one is genetically and permanently unlovable — is protest giving way to despair. The system begins to shut down.

Detachment. Withdrawal from the relational field entirely. MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way — represents detachment: the decision to abandon the quest for connection altogether and build an identity around self-sufficiency and contempt for intimacy.

The manosphere, read through this lens, is not a coherent ideology. It is a spectrum of attachment distress responses, each corresponding to a different stage of relational breakdown. Incels are in protest. “Blackpilled” incels are in despair. MGTOW adherents have reached detachment. The rage, the nihilism, and the withdrawal are not signs of strength. They are signs of a wounded attachment system doing exactly what wounded attachment systems do.

What triggered the protest?

Attachment protest is triggered by the perception of rejection — specifically, rejection from the relational environment one depends upon. For young men navigating identity formation, that relational environment can also be within a context of culture. Is not merely personal. It can include but not limited to the ambient messages that a society sends about who belongs, who is valued, and whose longing for connection is legitimate.

I am careful in my analysis here because what follows is easily misread. I am not claiming that feminism or the #MeToo movement are responsible for the manosphere. The claim is that a specific drift in cultural messaging — a drift that occurred within a particular strand of feminist discourse during the 2010s — contributed, to a large extent, to a relational environment that many young men experienced as hostile to their very existence.

Feminist critique of patriarchal structures — of dominance-based masculinity, of systems that subordinate women and constrain men alike — is a legitimate and necessary intellectual project. The problem arose when the critique of structures migrated into a critique of persons: when “toxic masculinity” ceased to name a set of distorted social scripts and became, in popular usage, something closer to a description of maleness itself. When young men absorbed, from cultural media, from educational environments, and from online discourse, the message that their desire for connection was suspect, that their masculinity was a pathology to be managed, and that their relational needs were a form of entitlement they had not earned.

The attachment system reads this as rejection and not as a call to grow or reform. As rejection. And rejected attachment systems protest.

We got what we deserved

There is a third element in this story that is rarely named in secular analyses but is essential to a full account: the collapse of alternative belonging structures that might have intercepted young men before they reached the manosphere.

For centuries, the church provided men with a framework for masculine identity that was neither domineering nor dissolute — an account of strength as self-giving, of dignity as derivative of image-bearing rather than performance, of belonging as a gift received rather than a status earned. It offered what the manosphere now desperately mimics: brotherhood, initiation, meaning, and a narrative that made suffering intelligible.

As that formation infrastructure eroded — as churches became less effective at discipling men, as the secular state cancelled the church, as the theological resources for a constructive account of masculine identity were either abandoned or never developed — the vacuum did not remain empty. The manosphere filled it. Online communities of resentment offered what the church had stopped providing: identity, in-group belonging, a story about why one’s suffering is not random, and a sense of mission, however dark.

For reflection

The priests they deserve

There is a detail in this story that deserves its own reckoning, one that carries an uncomfortable irony for those who spent the last two decades dismissing pastoral authority as irrelevant, patriarchal, or dangerous. The same cultural moment that delegitimized the pastor, the priest, the rabbi, and the imam did not produce autonomous, self-determining men liberated from the need for guidance. It produced men who were starving for exactly the kind of formation that religious leaders had always offered — and who found it, eventually, in the worst possible places.

Consider what Andrew Tate, the most visible figure of contemporary manosphere culture, actually provides to his followers. He offers moral framing: a story about why their suffering is not random, why they are struggling, and who is to blame. He offers behavioral prescription: a code of conduct, a regimen, a set of rules for how to live. He offers community identity: a sense of in-group belonging, a shared language, a brotherhood of the initiated. He offers an account of the enemy: the forces arrayed against them, the ideology they must resist. These are, in structure, liturgical functions. Tate is not a social media personality who stumbled into influence. He is, functionally, a ‘leader’ — performing, in corrupted form, every office that religious formation has always performed.

“The manosphere is not a new phenomenon thankfully. It is a dark liturgy that is performing, in corrupted form, every office that religious formation has always performed, for men who were told they no longer needed priests.”

The irony is pointed. A culture that scorned religious authority as unnecessary, that caricatured pastors as power-hungry and faith communities as instruments of control, has watched its young men develop something indistinguishable from religious devotion — directed at figures whose actual contempt for those men’s flourishing is barely concealed. They traded the shepherd for the wolf and called it liberation.

This is not karma in the punitive sense but in the structural sense. Human beings require formation. They require figures or role models who embody ideals and narratives that make suffering meaningful. When institutions capable of providing these things are dismantled or discredited without replacement, the need does not disappear but finds another outlet. The question was never whether young men would have ideological leaders, but always what kind.

The Irony

A constructive response

None of this is an apology for misogyny. The violence, the dehumanization, the rage directed at women that saturates incel communities is genuinely dangerous, and naming its psychological roots does not diminish its moral seriousness. Protest behavior that harms others remains harmful, whatever the wound that produced it.

But understanding the wound is a prerequisite for treating it. Condemning the manosphere without attending to the attachment conditions that generate it is like treating a fever without asking what infection drives it. The fever is still there and the infection matters a lot more.

Three responses follow from this analysis. First, the church needs a constructive theology of masculine identity — one grounded not in dominance or passivity but in the image-bearing dignity of persons called to self-giving strength. Second, therapeutic and pastoral communities need to become skilled at meeting men in protest rather than waiting for them to arrive composed. Attachment protest is loud and often ugly; effective helpers must not be frightened away from it. Third, the broader culture needs to distinguish, far more carefully than it has, between the critique of harmful masculine scripts and the ambient message that men themselves are the problem. That distinction is very important and not merely an academic exercise. For many young men, it is the difference between receiving an invitation to grow and receiving a verdict of condemnation.

Rage as distress signal

What looks, from the outside, like hatred is often, at its root, a distress signal from an attachment system that has given up hope. The manosphere did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of real relational dislocation —- dislocation shaped partly by economic marginalization, partly by the collapse of male belonging institutions, and partly by cultural messaging that, at its least careful, communicated to young men that their longing for connection was a form of harm.

Recognizing this does not require us to be naive about the dangers the manosphere poses. It requires us to be serious about the conditions that produce it, and serious, in turn, about building the relational environments, the ecclesial communities, and the therapeutic cultures capable of intercepting that distress before it becomes rage.

Flourishing, for men as for all people, begins not with the suppression of the need for belonging but with the provision of conditions in which that need can be met. The task before the clinic, church or the culture is not to explain away young men’s pain. It is to become communities capable of receiving it and offering, in return, the one thing that actually heals an attachment wound: secure and unconditional belonging.

We were working through the experimental psychology literature on parochial altruism — the well-replicated finding that humans, and especially people of faith, cooperate generously with their in-group while showing markedly less concern, and sometimes outright hostility, toward outsiders. The data are uncomfortable. They suggest that much of what we call moral behavior is calibrated to the boundary of the group rather than to the dignity of the person in front of us. We were sitting with that, as one does, when our class discussion slipped toward my concern about short-term mission trips. Some of my students pressed me to explain what I meant.

I hedged in the moment. I said something about how the picture is complicated, that intentions matter, that there is real good done. All of that is true. But I walked out of the classroom knowing I had not answered the question I was actually asked. So let me try again here, in print, because I think the honest answer is one that the American church needs to hear before another summer of departures begins.

A practice that did not always exist

It helps to remember that this is a new thing. For most of Christian history, missions meant going and not coming back. Patrick stayed in Ireland. Boniface stayed among the Germanic peoples and died there. The Jesuits who reached Japan in the sixteenth century learned the language, wore the clothes, and were buried in the soil. William Carey, often called the father of modern Protestant missions, sailed for India in 1793 and never returned to England. Hudson Taylor spent fifty-one years in China. Adoniram Judson buried two wives and most of his children in Burma. Whatever else one thinks of the colonial entanglements of that era, the missionary vocation was a vocation. It cost a life.

The short-term mission trip as we know it did not exist before the Second World War. It is a product of three converging developments in the second half of the twentieth century: cheap commercial air travel, the rise of parachurch youth organizations like Operation Mobilization (founded in 1957) and Youth With A Mission (founded in 1960), and the emergence of American evangelicalism as an affluent suburban movement with disposable income, paid vacation, and a felt need to do something with both. Within a generation, the practice had become institutionalized in nearly every evangelical youth group and Christian college in the country. Current estimates put the number of Americans going on short-term mission trips at well over a million and a half each year, with annual spending in the billions of dollars. This is not a minor adjunct to the missionary enterprise. It has, in budget and in cultural weight, largely become the enterprise.

And it is almost entirely a North American phenomenon. Nigerian and Korean and Brazilian Christians are sending long-term missionaries in extraordinary numbers, often to harder places than American missionaries are willing to go. Americans, increasingly, send teenagers for ten days.

What the evidence actually shows

Researchers have been looking at this for two decades now, and the findings are remarkably consistent. Kurt Ver Beek’s study of post-Hurricane Mitch housing reconstruction in Honduras compared communities served by short-term American teams against communities where local labor was hired with the equivalent funds. He found no meaningful long-term difference in housing outcomes, spiritual outcomes, or community development. The American teams cost roughly thirty thousand dollars per house. Local labor would have built four houses for the same money, employed Hondurans, and left behind skills rather than memories.

Robert Priest, who has done more ethnographic work on this than anyone, has concluded that the short-term mission trip functions primarily as a rite of passage for the American participant. It is formation for the sender, not evangelization of the receiver. Brian Howell, in his book on the subject, shows how participants come home rehearsing a narrative they were given before they ever left — the script of being changed, of seeing the real face of poverty, of returning grateful. The script is so consistent across trips, denominations, and destinations that it cannot plausibly be coming from the trips themselves. It is a cultural performance.

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s When Helping Hurts documented, painfully, the ways in which well-meaning short-term teams routinely undermine local economies, displace local leadership, create dependency, and damage the long-term work of indigenous churches and missionaries who must clean up afterward. The orphanage tourism industry in places like Cambodia and Haiti — which exists because of American demand for emotional encounters with children — has been linked to the active separation of children from living parents. This is not a fringe critique. It is now mainstream missiology.

Where the psychology gets uncomfortable

This is the point at which the parochial altruism literature stops feeling academic. The behavioral signature of parochial altruism is high-cost, high-visibility cooperation that strengthens the in-group bond while delivering modest or negligible benefit to the out-group it claims to serve. The short-term mission trip fits this signature almost perfectly.

Consider the structure. The cost is high and conspicuous, often paid through public fundraising in the home church, which produces social recognition before the trip has even begun. The duration is short, which limits real entanglement with the recipient community and protects the participant from the kind of disruption that long-term presence would produce. The destination is photogenic, which produces images that circulate back through the sending community as evidence of seriousness and faith. The recipients are usually members of a racial, economic, and cultural out-group, which makes the in-group’s generosity legible as generosity. And the return is celebrated with testimonies, slideshows, and renewed status within the home congregation.

Every one of these features serves the bond inside the group. Almost none of them serves the person who was visited. The mathematics of it should trouble anyone who reads the Sermon on the Mount carefully. Jesus reserved his sharpest warnings for exactly the kind of piety that is performed in a way that signals to the in-group. He did not warn against generosity. He warned against generosity that is visible.

The structural mismatch

The theological problem with calling it missions

The deepest issue is not strategic but theological. The word missions belongs to the missio Dei — the sending of God into the world for the sake of the world. It is a word that names God’s outward movement toward the stranger, the enemy, the one who has no claim on him. To borrow that word for a practice that is structurally calibrated to strengthen the in-group is to commit a small but corrosive theft. It empties the term of its scandal. It makes it harder, over time, to recognize the real thing when we see it.

There is also the matter of what we are teaching the next generation. A young person who goes on three short-term trips between sixteen and twenty-two has been formed, whether anyone intended it or not, into a particular understanding of what Christian love looks like. Christian love, in this catechesis, is episodic. It is photogenic. It is performed in front of the in-group. It costs about what a used car costs, and then it is over. The person returns to their normal life, which is structured in such a way that no actual neighbor — no immigrant family in their own city, no struggling congregant down the pew, no addicted cousin — has any sustained claim on them. The trip has, in fact, made it easier to ignore the neighbor by giving the conscience something to point at.

This is the catechesis we should worry about. Not the bad theology in the sermon series, but the embodied theology of a practice repeated every summer for a generation.

What missions could mean again

I am not arguing that Americans should stop crossing borders, or stop giving, or stop caring about people in places they do not live. I am arguing that we should stop calling what we are mostly doing missions, and that we should ask harder questions about what we are forming in ourselves and in our young people when we do it.

A few honest reframings would help.

Call it what it is. If a church wants to send a youth group to do construction in another country for a week, call it a service-learning trip, or a cross-cultural exposure trip, or a pilgrimage. These are real categories with real value. None of them are missions, and naming them honestly would do less violence to the word.

Send people who are going to stay. The recovery of long-term missionary vocation — five years, ten years, a life — is the single most important thing the American church could do for the world it claims to want to reach. This is harder, more expensive, more disruptive, and infinitely more faithful than what we have substituted for it.

Partner before you go. If a trip happens, let it be at the invitation of, and under the authority of, an indigenous church or organization that has named what it actually needs. If they need money, send money. If they need silence, send silence. The reflex to show up in person is itself a parochial reflex. It assumes that our presence is the gift.

Stay home and love your neighbor. The hardest missionary call in twenty-first century America is to the suburb, the cul-de-sac, the apartment complex two blocks over. It does not photograph well. It does not produce a slideshow. It will not give a teenager a story to tell at retreat. It will, however, do the thing that missions was always supposed to do, which is to embody the strange, slow, unphotogenic love of God for the actual person in front of you.

It is summer again. The flights are booked, the t-shirts are printed, the fundraising letters are out. I am not going to tell anyone to cancel a trip. I am going to ask, instead, that the American church find the courage to look honestly at what this practice has become and to consider whether the word we have used for it still fits.

The parochial altruism literature will keep producing its findings whether we read them or not. The honest question is whether we are willing to let the gospel of a God who crossed every boundary, including the boundary of death, judge a practice that has quietly become a way of staying inside our own.

I think we are. I think the American church is more ready for this conversation than its institutions are. And I think the students in my classroom — the ones who asked the question I could not answer in the moment — are the ones who will lead us out.

On May 25, 2026, a pope and the co-founder of one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence laboratories shared a stage at the Vatican to release a document about what AI is doing to the human person. The image is worth pausing over. Christopher Olah of Anthropic, alongside two cardinals and two theologians, presented an encyclical written by a pope who, ten days earlier, had signed the document on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 letter that defended factory workers against the machinery of the first industrial revolution. The symmetry was deliberate. Two industrial revolutions. Two Leos. The same question: who is being ground up inside the new machine, and who will name them on the world stage?

Most of the press coverage will focus on the optics. A pope sharing a stage with an AI executive is a story by itself. But the optics are not the news. The news is buried in paragraph 110 of the encyclical, and it is the most radical thing a major world leader has said about artificial intelligence in this decade.

Pope Leo XIV calls for the world to disarm AI.

What “disarm AI” actually means

The phrase appears in a paragraph that almost no news outlet will quote in full, because it does something the standard policy vocabulary has no category for. Leo XIV writes that the AI industry is operating inside a mentality of “armed” competition. He clarifies immediately that he does not mean military competition alone. He means economic and cognitive competition. He means the race for ever more powerful algorithms, larger datasets, and geopolitical or commercial dominance. He means the assumption that whoever builds the most capable system fastest will get to set the terms for everyone else.

To disarm AI, in Leo XIV’s framing, is to discredit that assumption itself. It is to refuse the premise that technical power confers the right to govern. It is to break the logic of the race.

This is an important move than the AI safety community has been willing to make. Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and the long line of researchers who have warned about catastrophic risk have framed the problem primarily as a technical alignment question or a future-tense scenario in which sufficiently powerful systems escape human control. Their warnings are serious and deserve a hearing. But they leave the structure of the race itself intact. They ask whether the cars in the race can be made safer. Leo XIV asks why we are racing at all, and who is being run over while we do.

The casualties are already counted

This is the harder move, and the encyclical takes it seriously. In §173, Leo XIV gives a description of the present that any reader paying attention to the AI industry knows is accurate, even if it is rarely said this plainly from a public pulpit. He names the people whose bodies are already part of the supply chain.

Casualty One

The hidden workers

Casualty Two

The children in the mines

Casualty Three

The data-colonized

Casualty Four

The deskilled and surveilled

Casualty Five

The trafficked

Casualty Six

The young and the lonely

These are not predictions. These are people who exist now. Leo XIV’s argument is that any framework which treats AI risk as a future-tense catastrophe to be averted while ignoring this present-tense list of casualties is participating in a moral evasion.

Why the language of war is not metaphor

The reflex response to the encyclical’s framing will be that “disarm AI” is rhetorical overreach, that the AI industry is not literally a war and that calling it one cheapens the word. This response is worth taking seriously, because the integrity of language matters, and inflated comparisons damage moral discourse. But Leo XIV anticipates the objection and answers it carefully.

His point is about the structure of the tool. A war is not defined by uniforms or borders. It is defined by a competitive logic in which actors believe their survival depends on out-producing or out-positioning an enemy, and in which that logic produces casualties as a normal byproduct of the competition. By that definition, the AI industry now operates in conditions remarkably close to a wartime economy. Firms openly speak of an existential race against each other and against geopolitical rivals. Investment is justified by the language of national security. Talent is treated as a strategic resource to be denied to competitors. Capabilities are kept opaque to prevent enemies from learning from them. And the casualties are externalized to populations that have no voice in the contest.

If that is not a war in the conventional sense, it is something close enough that the conventional categories no longer protect us from its consequences. Leo XIV’s contribution is to refuse the polite vocabulary that would let us pretend otherwise.

The Central Move

What he is asking for is not a treaty. Pope Leo seeks a transformation in how the industry understands itself.

The third position

The public debate about AI tends to collapse into two camps. The optimists argue that the technology will be net positive and that excessive caution will only hand advantage to less scrupulous developers. The catastrophists argue that the technology may end the human story and that everything else is secondary to preventing that outcome. Both camps share an assumption: that the central question is what AI will do once built.

Leo XIV is articulating a third position, and it is the position the AI safety conversation has needed for some time. The central question, he argues, is not what AI will do. It is what the race to build AI is doing already, and what kind of human person is being shaped, sold, and discarded in the process of its construction.

This is why the encyclical does not read like a typical Vatican intervention in a technology debate. It does not call for prohibitions. It does not romanticize the pre-digital past. It accepts that AI will be part of human life going forward. What it refuses is the framing that the race itself is morally neutral, and that the casualties of the race are an acceptable cost of progress. On both points, the document is uncompromising.

What disarmament would look like

Leo XIV does not leave the phrase abstract. The encyclical names specific moves that would constitute disarmament in practice.

The first is transparency in supply chains. No competitive advantage should be built on hidden exploitation, and the labor and material chains that produce AI systems should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other industry. The second is independent oversight of algorithms that make consequential decisions about employment, credit, services, and reputation. The third is the treatment of data as a common good rather than as private property to be extracted from populations who have no leverage to refuse. The fourth, and the sharpest, is the absolute prohibition of autonomous weapons systems that delegate lethal decisions to machines. On this last point Leo XIV is direct:

no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.

The Vatican’s position, formally restated, is that AI-enabled warfare in which machines select and engage targets without effective human control cannot be morally licit, full stop.

These are not utopian demands. They are versions of the same accountability frameworks humanity has built, slowly and incompletely, around nuclear technology, pharmaceutical research, and medical experimentation. The argument is that AI now warrants the same seriousness, and that the industry’s resistance to providing it is itself one of the clearest signs that the disarmament is needed.

The flourishing question

There is a deeper reason this encyclical matters for anyone working on human flourishing, and it is not the one most readers will reach for. The standard frame would say that AI poses risks to wellbeing and that policy should mitigate those risks. That frame is true but shallow. Leo XIV is making a more demanding claim. He is saying that the question of whether human flourishing remains possible at all depends on whether we can build technologies without sacrificing the people who are not in the room when the technologies are designed.

The contemporary science of human flourishing has been mapping the conditions under which persons across cultures actually thrive. Meaning, relationships, character, health, material sufficiency, and the structures that hold these together. My own work on the Relational Theory of Hope sits inside that project, and what the data keep showing is that flourishing is irreducibly relational. It depends on bonds, on place, on being seen, on the moral imagination of communities that refuse to write any person out of the picture.

The Closing Thought

The most provocative line in Magnifica Humanitas is not about machines. It is about us. Leo XIV writes that

the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us.

The disarmament he calls for is not, in the end, a policy program. It is a conversion of the imagination that refuses to accept that the race we are running is the only race available.

Whether the AI industry can hear that is the question this encyclical leaves on the table.

On May 15, 2026, the Vatican released what many believe to be the most consequential document of the 21st century: Magnifica Humanitas. While the global press initially focused on the Pope’s general acceptance of AI as a “valuable tool,” a closer reading reveals a targeted, surgical dismantling of the “predictive logic” that defines the modern data-industrial complex—specifically the models utilized by transnational surveillance and analytics giants like Palantir.

The Shift of Sovereignty

The Pope begins by noting that the “drivers of development” have shifted from the public interest to “private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments” (Para 5). He is not just making a comment on corporate wealth; it is a warning about the privatization of sovereignty. Pope Leo observes that this “technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good” (Para 5).

For companies whose business models rely on providing governments with the “invisible infrastructure” (Para 107) to manage populations, the Pope’s critique is devastating. He argues that when we entrust an algorithm with the power to “select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment,” we are handing over “the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities” (Para 103).

The Architecture of Visibility

At the heart of the “Palantir logic” is the ability to profile, predict, and influence behavior. Pope Leo XIV describes this as a “further risk, less visible but no less serious,” facilitated by the “massive collection of data and use of algorithmic systems” (Para 171).

He writes:

“When every action—movements, purchases, relationships and preferences—leaves a trace, a new form of power emerges, namely the power to profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fully aware of it” (Para 171).

The Encyclical warns that this creates an “architecture of visibility,” where what is amplified or rendered invisible “ultimately shapes opinions and choices, fostering conformity and self-censorship” (Para 171). For a magazine publication dedicated to human flourishing, this is the ultimate alarm: a society that is constantly being “predicted” is a society that has lost its capacity for the “slow and arduous effort” of genuine freedom (Para 62).

Data as the New Colonialism

Perhaps the most blistering section of the document—and the one that most directly challenges the global data-harvesting trade—is the Pope’s identification of a “new mindset of extraction” (Para 178). He argues that “colonialism assumes new forms” today, no longer dominating only bodies, but appropriating data.

The Pope identifies the specific assets that companies like Palantir thrive on—health data, epidemiological profiles, and genetic maps—as the “new ‘rare earths’ of power” (Para 178). He notes that this data is “once aggregated and analyzed... used to train predictive models... [to] determine who and what is deemed to matter” (Para 178). He continues:

“Those who control the health data of entire peoples... possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets” (Para 178).

In the eyes of Leo XIV, this is a violation of the “universal destination of goods” (Para 65). He argues that “ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands” (Para 108) and that the current distribution of power allows “a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own” (Para 72).

The Call to Flourish

The Pope’s conclusion is quiet clear:

If we are to flourish, we must follow the “Way of Nehemiah,” a model introduced in the document as a way of “shared responsibility” (Para 8) that rebuilds relationships “piece by piece” (Para 184) rather than the “Babel Syndrome” of “automated control” (Para 132). Magnifica Humanitas is more than a letter for our time. One could say that it is a prophetic declaration of independence from the algorithmic gods of the 21st century.

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV will release his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. He signed it ten days earlier, on May 15, exactly 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed Rerum Novarum, the 1891 letter on the rights of workers in the age of industrial machines. The symmetry is not accidental. Two Leos, two industrial revolutions, the same underlying question: when the machinery of an age threatens to forget what a person is, who will remember on their behalf?

This is the question that has quietly organized one of the most consequential moral traditions of the modern era. Most readers know the encyclicals only by name, if at all. A handful of Latin titles drift through history syllabi and Catholic seminars. But read together, in sequence, they form something more than a religious archive. They form a slowly expanding cartography of the human person, written across 135 years of upheaval, and they have shaped global policy, law, economics, and moral imagination in ways the secular world rarely credits.

Before going further, an honest preface is needed. The Catholic tradition was not always on the right side of this question, and pretending otherwise would falsify the whole argument.

The shadow before the widening

Long before the modern social encyclicals, popes wrote documents that helped underwrite some of history’s gravest violations of human dignity. The bulls Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) granted Portuguese sovereigns authority to “reduce to perpetual slavery” non-Christian peoples in West Africa, and Inter Caetera (1493) divided the so-called New World between Iberian crowns, helping to seed the legal architecture later called the Doctrine of Discovery. These texts did not invent colonialism or the Atlantic slave trade, but they baptized them. Centuries later, when the Holocaust unfolded in Christian Europe, the Vatican’s diplomatic caution, however it is finally judged, made clear that papal voice and papal silence each carry historical weight. Modern Catholic social teaching is, in part, a long act of moral self-correction by a tradition that learned, painfully and incompletely, that its understanding of the human person had been too narrow. The widening that begins in 1891 is not a triumphal arc but a tradition working out, in public and in writing, who it had been failing to see.

That context is what makes the modern encyclicals readable as an argument rather than a settlement. They are not pronouncements from a tradition that always knew. They are revisions from a tradition that was learning, and that kept widening the circle of the person each time history forced a new question.

Five widenings, but one tradition

The pattern is easier to see when the documents are placed in chronological order and read for the figure each one defends. What follows is not a complete summary of the encyclicals. It is a portrait of the human person, drawn in five movements.

1891 · Leo XIII

Rerum Novarum

The worker becomes a person.

1963 · John XXIII

Pacem in Terris

The citizen becomes a global person.

1967 · Paul VI

Populorum Progressio

The developing person becomes the measure of peace.

1995 · John Paul II

Evangelium Vitae

The vulnerable life becomes the test of dignity

2015 · Francis

Laudato Si’

The person becomes ecological.

The Pattern

The sixth widening

This is where Pope Leo XIV comes into the picture. The announced focus of his Magnifica Humanitas is the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. The Vatican has emphasized that the document was deliberately signed on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, and the parallel is exact in its structure. In 1891, industrial machinery had begun to absorb human labor, making the worker invisible inside the system that consumed them. In 2026, algorithmic systems are beginning to absorb human judgment, attention, relationship, and even creative voice, in ways that make the person inside the data flow harder to see.

If the pattern holds, Magnifica Humanitas will not simply moralize about technology. It will name a new figure in the long widening: the person under algorithmic gaze, whose dignity is being quietly redefined by systems they did not consent to and cannot fully see. Whether the encyclical succeeds in this is a question for next week and the years that follow. But the timing makes clear that Leo XIV understands himself to be standing at a hinge moment of the same kind Leo XIII faced in 1891.

When the machinery of an age threatens to forget what a person is, the question becomes who will remember on their behalf.

What the encyclicals were building

Read sequentially, the social encyclicals form something the modern world has rarely had: a publicly written argument that the human person is irreducible to any single dimension or world order. Not labor alone. Not citizenship alone. Not economic development alone. Not autonomy alone. Not even relationship to the earth alone. The person is all of these at once, and any age that loses sight of one of them is failing the whole.

Dimension One

Dimension Two

Dimension Three

Dimension Four

Dimension Five

Dimension Six

These are not abstract principles. They are the deposit of 135 years of writing in response to specific historical pressures, and they have shaped global policy in ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they have become ordinary. The architecture of postwar human rights, the language of integral development used by UN agencies, the moral grammar of the climate movement, the categories used in global poverty frameworks, the bioethics consensus around vulnerable populations: each of these owes more to Catholic social teaching than most secular accounts acknowledge.

The flourishing lineage

This is where the contemporary science of human flourishing meets a tradition older than itself. In the last fifteen years, flourishing has become a measurable construct. The Global Flourishing Study, the longitudinal collaboration between Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, is now generating data on more than 200,000 participants across 23 countries, examining how dimensions of life, including meaning, relationships, character, health, and material conditions, hold together across cultures. My own work on the Relational Theory of Hope and on relationships, place, and integral flourishing sits inside that broader empirical project.

What the encyclicals offer, read in this light, is the moral cartography that the empirical science is now beginning to investigate. Long before flourishing became a construct one could measure, this tradition had been articulating, in public and in revision, a multidimensional vision of the human person grounded in dignity, solidarity, work, peace, vulnerability, place, and transcendence. The science is catching up to a vision the tradition had already widened, encyclical by encyclical, into something our current world badly needs and rarely names.

A Closing Thought

Every generation of young adults has arrived in cities with expectations. That is not new. What is new is the scale and the degree to which contemporary culture has constructed the city as the singular destination of young adult aspiration, the place where real life begins, where identity is formed, where the future is made. Social media has accelerated this narrative to the point where the city is not merely a place young people move to. It is a promise they have been handed since adolescence. And the Global Flourishing Study data, drawn from 22 countries and tens of thousands of respondents, now allow us to assess, with some clarity, how that promise is being kept.

The answer is not encouraging. Adults aged 18 to 24 report city satisfaction at 75% — the lowest of any age group in the study, and 18 percentage points below adults aged 80 and above, who are the most city-satisfied demographic on earth. This is the generation that cities are most visibly designed for — the rooftop bars, the co-working spaces, the curated neighbourhoods, the cultural programming aimed squarely at the young professional demographic. And they are the generation least satisfied with what those cities are delivering. That gap between design intention and lived appraisal is what this article is about.

Satisfaction is a ratio and the ratio is broken

Place satisfaction is not a raw assessment of environmental quality. It is a relationship between experience and expectation — between what a place delivers and what a person anticipated it would deliver. A city that performs adequately against calibrated expectations produces satisfaction. A city that performs adequately against inflated expectations produces dissatisfaction. And one of the most consequential things that has happened to young adults in the past two decades is an extraordinary inflation of urban expectation, driven by a media environment that curates cities relentlessly and omits almost everything that makes them hard

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The 18-to-24-year-old arrives in a city having consumed years of carefully edited representations of it — the highlight reel of urban life, with the housing search, the loneliness, the cost, and the grinding transience largely absent. The expectation is formed against an image. The experience lands against a reality. The appraisal reflects the distance between them

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This is not a counsel of pessimism about cities. I am simply trying to lay out an observation about the asymmetry between how cities are narrated to young people and how young people actually experience them. The 75% satisfaction score is not evidence that cities are failing in absolute terms but points to an evidence that the promise substantially exceeds the delivery and that young adults are the demographic most exposed to that gap. This is, partly, because they are the ones who arrived with the largest expectation and the least accumulated experience to calibrate it against.

Transience as a place satisfaction killer

Young adults aged 18 to 24 are the most mobile demographic in most societies. They move for university, then for entry-level employment, then for better opportunities, then for relationships, then for housing affordability in whatever city has become unaffordable in the one they started in. This relocation frequency is not incidental to their low place satisfaction scores. It might be structurally causal–and I will tell you why I say that

Place satisfaction, the research consistently shows, deepens with residential duration. The familiarity with local rhythms, the accumulated knowledge of neighbourhood geography, the gradual formation of local social ties, the sense of having history in a place — all of these are products of time spent in a specific location. They cannot be downloaded. They cannot be rushed because they require presence, repetition, and the kind of unhurried accumulation that frequent relocation structurally prevents.

The 80-year-old who scores 93% on city satisfaction has almost certainly lived in their neighbourhood for decades. They know it in the way that only time teaches. The 22-year-old who scores 75% arrived recently, plans to leave when the opportunity presents itself, and is inhabiting a city they have not yet had time to learn. The difference in satisfaction is not only a difference in what the city is providing. It is a difference in how much of the city has been allowed to accumulate into the person’s experience of it

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Digital displacement and the fractured experience of place

There is a dimension of the young adult’s relationship to place that has no historical precedent and that the existing literature on place satisfaction has only begun to grapple with. Adults aged 18 to 24 are the most digitally present generation in history. They conduct significant portions of their social lives, their professional lives, their leisure, and their self-presentation through screens — and those screens are, spatially, nowhere in particular.

This matters for place appraisal because satisfaction with a place requires actually inhabiting it — attending to it with sufficient presence to form a meaningful evaluation. A person whose attention is distributed across a dozen digital environments simultaneously is not fully inhabiting any physical one. The neighbourhood is experienced through a phone as much as through the street. The local park is a backdrop for a photograph rather than an environment to be known. The city is something scrolled past as much as something walked through.

This is not a moral argument about screen time. It is an observation about the conditions under which place satisfaction forms. Appraisal requires presence. And sometimes, this presence requires attention. And the attentional economy of contemporary young adult life is structured in ways that systematically pull attention away from the immediate physical environment toward the mediated, the curated, and the elsewhere. The 75% satisfaction score may in part be measuring what the young adult is no longer fully present enough to receive and not necessarily what the city is failing to deliver.

The country-level picture adds a further layer

The demographic data do not exist in isolation. The country-level findings from the Global Flourishing Study add an important comparative layer. The countries with the highest city satisfaction scores — the Philippines, Indonesia, India — are not the countries most associated with the youth-oriented and digitally saturated urban culture that characterises cities in the global north. They are countries–in the global south—where local community structures, religious institutions, and intergenerational neighbourhood ties remain stronger, and where the narrative promise of the city has not been as comprehensively inflated by social media and aspirational marketing.

Countries in the global north — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia — cluster in the middle and lower portions of the country ranking. These are precisely the countries where the promise of the city has been most aggressively narrated, most comprehensively marketed, and most thoroughly embedded in the aspirational culture that shapes young adult expectations. They are also, not coincidentally, the countries with the most severe housing affordability crises for young adults. The country-level data do not simply reflect objective urban quality. They reflect the size of the gap between what was promised and what was found.

What cities owe the young and are not providing

The policy reflex when confronted with young adult urban dissatisfaction is typically to propose more — more amenities, more nightlife, more cultural programming, more co-working infrastructure. More of the things that cities are already providing in abundance, under the assumption that the problem is quantity rather than kind.

The Global Flourishing Study data suggest the problem is more fundamental. The features that produce the highest city satisfaction across the entire demographic spectrum — as demonstrated most clearly the 80+ finding — are not amenity-driven. They are stability-driven: walkable scale, residential affordability, long-term community anchors, local institutions that outlast a lease cycle, and the conditions under which place familiarity can form and grow over time. These are precisely the features that contemporary cities systematically under-provide for young adults, who are instead offered transience dressed as freedom and density dressed as community.

What cities invest in for young adults: cultural programming, entertainment districts, co-working spaces, short-term rental supply, transit optimised for commuting patterns.

What produces high place satisfaction: residential stability, walkable neighbourhood scale, long-term community activities, local institutions that persist across years, the conditions under which place familiarity accumulates.

The gap between those two lists is a significant part of what the 75% satisfaction score is measuring.

The city that works for the over-80s — legible, local, stable, relationally situated — is the city that young adults need in order for place satisfaction to form. It is not the city being built for them. And until the gap between the city that is promised and the city that is built begins to close, the data are unlikely to move.

Young adults are not asking too much of their cities. They are asking what they were told to ask. The problem is that cities, for all their investment in youth-oriented design, have not yet reckoned seriously with what it would actually take to make young people feel at home in them. The Global Flourishing Study data make that reckoning harder to avoid. 75% percent is not a crisis, but a signal to something happening unnoticed. And signals, if attended to early enough, are more useful than crises.

In the first episode of the Bonding with God series, I explore proximity seeking: the instinct that drives us toward safety when life feels uncertain. When that safe haven is God, something profound happens in our faith.

🎥 Free chapter + more: http://vcounted.com/bondingwithGod

📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/Bonding-God-Attachment-Theory-Psychology/dp/1540968413/

Walk into almost any evangelical church on any given Sunday, and you will see it at the end of the service — the altar call. The music softens. The lights dim slightly. A voice says something like, “If you want to give your life to Jesus tonight, repeat this prayer after me.” Heads bow, hands raise, and those who respond walk forward to confirm what has just happened in their hearts. The ritual is so deeply embedded in Protestant Christianity that most people assume it has been there forever — as ancient and unquestionable as the cross itself.

It has not. The altar call is an American invention, less than two hundred years old. And understanding where it came from — and what it quietly assumed about the nature of faith — may help explain one of the most urgent puzzles of our religious moment: why so many people who once raised their hands have since walked away.

A 19th-Century Innovation Dressed as Ancient Practice

The altar call was pioneered by Charles Finney in the 1830s. Finney was a lawyer turned revivalist, and he approached conversion with the precision of a courtroom argument. He believed that if you laid out the evidence compellingly enough, the rational individual would make a decision. He introduced the “anxious bench” — a front row reserved for those under conviction — as a deliberate technique to move people from deliberation to decision. Dwight L. Moody refined it further, and by the 20th century, Billy Graham had made it the defining symbol of evangelical Christianity worldwide.

There is something admirable in this — a genuine desire to see people encounter God and respond. But embedded in the ritual is a set of assumptions that have quietly shaped how entire generations understand what faith is and how it works. The altar call treats faith as fundamentally a cognitive-volitional event: you hear a proposition, you judge it to be true, you decide to accept it, and you act on that decision. In short: you believe the right things, and then you belong.

“The early church practiced the reverse. You belonged first — you were welcomed into a community — and from within that belonging, belief had space to grow.”

What the Early Church Actually Did

The early church had no altar call. What it had was the catechumenate — a formation process that, in many traditions, lasted two to three years before baptism. During that time, you lived alongside the community. You ate with them, served with them, suffered with them. You were formed into patterns of prayer and practice long before you were asked to formally confess a creed. The Nicene Creed, when it came, was not an entry point. It was a testimony — a description of a God you had already begun to know.

The church fathers understood faith as primarily relational and participatory. For Augustine, the longing for God was not a conclusion arrived at by reason but a restlessness built into the human soul — a restlessness that only quiets when it finds rest in the One it was made for. For Irenaeus, to know God was to be known by God, caught up in the divine life not through intellectual assent but through lived participation. This is not mysticism in a vague sense. It is a profoundly developed theological anthropology: human beings are relational creatures who come to know by belonging, not the other way around.

Research finding

Studies on religious disaffiliation consistently find that those who leave faith communities most often cite not intellectual doubt but relational disconnection — from God, from community, and from a sense of being truly known. The problem is not that they stopped believing. It is that they never experienced the belonging that makes belief livable.

Descartes, the Enlightenment, and the Anxious Bench

To understand why Christianity moved from the catechumenate to the altar call, you have to understand what happened in Western thought between the 5th and 18th centuries. René Descartes, writing in the 1640s, made a move that would reshape everything. He located the ground of certainty in the thinking self — cogito ergo sum — making the individual reasoning mind the seat of all knowledge. The Enlightenment extended this impulse across every domain of human inquiry. If something could not be verified, measured, or rationally demonstrated, its claim to truth became suspect.

Protestant Christianity, already oriented toward doctrinal precision after the Reformation, was particularly susceptible to this pressure. Every protestant theologian that came afterward wrote and talked about faith as religious cognition. In other words, faith became belief–it was a way knowing God and intellectualizing God’s existence. This fits quite well with British empiricism priciples, since most of the leading protestant theologians at this time were writing from England. The question was no longer “Do you trust God?” —- which is a relational question —- but “Do you believe these propositions about God?” or simply put “Do you belief?” —- which is a cognitive one. Faith quietly shifted from trust to assent. And the altar call became the ritual that sealed the transaction.

This is not a conspiracy. Nobody sat down and decided to replace relationship with religion. It was the slow, largely unconscious drift of a tradition trying to make itself legible in a world that increasingly valued what could be verified and decided. But the consequences of that drift have been profound.

What Happens When We Begin With Belief Instead of Sacred Belonging?

When you hand a child correct doctrine before you have given them a relational experience of God, you are asking them to build a house starting with the roof. The information is not wrong. But it has no foundation beneath it —- no felt sense that God is present, safe, and responsive; no internal experience of the divine as a secure base from which to explore the world and face its difficulties.

Developmental psychology has understood for decades that formation follows a relational logic. Children do not trust their parents because they have evaluated parental behavior and concluded it meets their criteria for trustworthiness. They trust —- or fail to trust -— based on thousands of small, embodied, pre-reflective experiences of being held, responded to, seen, and kept safe. Belief about the parent grows from and within that prior relational reality. Reverse the order, and you will not get formation —- what you get is performance.

What the research shows

Research in the psychology of religion consistently finds that secure attachment to God —- not the content of belief, but the quality of the felt relationship security —- is among the strongest predictors of psychological well-being, resilience in suffering, and sustained faith over a lifetime. We have spent generations getting people to believe the right things. We have invested far less in helping them experience the right relationship.

This is precisely what attachment science reveals about God-representation as well. When people have a secure internal working model of God —- when God is experienced, not just believed in, as reliably present and genuinely responsive —- they navigate suffering and life’s uncertainty from a position of security. When God is primarily a set of propositions to which they have given assent, life stressors and cloudy seasons dismantle the framework because there is no living, secure relationship underneath to hold them.

Why I Wrote Bonding with God, and What Comes Next

This question has shaped my scholarship for years, and it is the heartbeat of my book Bonding with God. The book brings attachment theory into direct conversation with faith and psychology to ask a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to form a secure bond with God, and what conditions make that possible or difficult? I draw on both empirical research and the lived experience of over 100 young people during my fieldwork in South Africa. In the book, I argued that psychological security and spiritual vitality are not separate concerns, but are richly connected.

The attachment system that drives an infant toward a caregiver in moments of threat is the same system that, across development, shapes how we orient toward God in prayer, in suffering, in worship, and in the quiet of an ordinary day. If that system is formed in an environment that offers warmth, consistency, and genuine responsiveness —- in a family, in a faith community, in a church that understands what it is doing —- the result is a faith that can hold the weight of a real life and the ups and downs that come with it. If it is not, no amount of correct theology fills the gap.

Bonding with God is not a critique of doctrine. The book presents an argument for restoring doctrine to its proper place: as the language we develop to describe a God we have already encountered, rather than the door we must walk through before the encounter is permitted.

An Invitation: Building a Secure Faith Future

But scholarship alone is not enough. The problem is not only that we need better research —- though we do. It is that the people who shape faith formation on the ground: pastors, children’s ministry directors, parents, youth workers, seminary educators, need a different framework to work from. They need the tools to move from transmission of information to cultivation of relationship. They need to understand what secure faith looks like in a child’s body, in an adolescent’s questions, in a young adult’s late-night doubts.

This is why I am launching the Building a Secure Faith Future initiative —- an effort to translate what we know from attachment science, developmental psychology, and the psychology of religion into practical formation resources for communities of faith. This project has not received any funding as of yet. But because of the urgency of this initiative, I am lead to launch Building A Secure Faith Future by faith and the right partners–with a shared burden–will come. The initiative will bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators to develop tools, training, and frameworks that help churches and families build the kind of relational environment in which secure faith can actually grow.

If you are a parent who wants your child to know God —- not just know about God. If you are a pastor who has watched your most committed young adults drift away and suspects it is about something more than intellectual doubt. If you are an educator or therapist who sees the intersection of attachment and spiritual formation as one of the most urgent areas of our time. If you are a funding organization called to invest in building a secure faith in the next generation. This is an initiative for you.

The Long Way Home

There is a reason Augustine’s Confessions remains one of the most read books in Western history fifteen centuries after it was written. It is not a theological treatise, though theology fills its pages. Confessions is a love story of a man searching, running, intellectualizing, resisting, and finally being caught by the God who had been pursuing him the entire time. The God at the end of the Confessions is not a proposition Augustine finally accepted. He is a person Augustine finally stopped running from.

That is the kind of faith that endures. Not the kind measured in altar calls, but the kind forged in the slow fire of genuine relationship —- in prayer that sometimes feels like silence and sometimes feels like presence; in communities that hold people through their doubts rather than managing them; in a theological anthropology that takes seriously what developmental science confirms: that we are made for relationships, that security in the context of a relationship is the soil in which everything good grows, and that a living God, fully known and fully knowing, is exactly the kind of attachment figure the human soul was built to need.

Getting the order right matters. I think it has always mattered. We are only now measuring the cost of getting it wrong, and unfortunately, beginning, at last, to find our way back.

Be sure to get Bonding with God today.