Bonding with God is Finally Here
A word from the author on a book years in the making
What if the way you relate to God is not a fixed fate, but a living story — one that can grow, heal, and flourish?
Today is a day I have been quietly working toward for a long time. Bonding with God: Attachment Theory and the Psychology of Faith is now officially published and available through Baker Academic.
This book began as a question — one that I kept returning to in my research, my clinical work, and my own spiritual life: Why do so many people believe in God intellectually yet feel emotionally distant from him? Why does faith sometimes feel like obligation rather than intimacy? And what does science actually say about how human beings form — and reform — deep bonds of trust?
Attachment theory gave me a language for what I was seeing. Developed by John Bowlby and expanded by decades of psychological research, attachment science tells us that we are wired for secure connection from the moment we are born. Those early bonds shape everything — how we see ourselves, how we see others, and, as this book argues, how we relate to God.
What the Book Is Really About
Bonding with God challenges a common — and quietly discouraging — assumption: that our early attachment patterns are our destiny. The psychological literature has long documented how insecure attachment formed in childhood can ripple outward into adulthood, affecting our relationships, our mental health, and our faith. But this book does not stop there.
The deeper claim of this work is that relationship with God can itself be a source of earned security — a corrective emotional and spiritual experience that rewires how we bond. Faith is not just a belief system. It is an attachment system. And when that bond is cultivated with intention, the results are nothing short of transformative.
We were not created to be spiritually anxious, avoidant, or ambivalent. We were created to be securely held — and to live from that security.
— Bonding with God, Chapter 1
Drawing on the Global Flourishing Study — one of the largest cross-cultural studies of human wellbeing ever conducted — alongside decades of research in the psychology of religion and attachment, this book brings science and Scripture into genuine conversation. Not to reduce faith to psychology. But to let each illuminate the other.
Who This Book Is For
If you are a pastor, therapist, spiritual director, or counselor working with people whose faith feels dry, fragmented, or distant — this book was written with you in mind. If you are a scholar or student of psychology, theology, or spiritual formation — it offers a rigorous framework for understanding faith as attachment. And if you are simply a person trying to make sense of your own relationship with God — you will find both honesty and hope in these pages.
Bonding with God is not a self-help book. It is an invitation — to see yourself as someone whose deepest longings for connection were placed there by design, and whose spiritual flourishing is not beyond reach.
A Grateful Moment
Publishing a book is never a solo endeavor, and I am grateful beyond words to Baker Academic for the care they have brought to this project, to the scholars and clinicians who offered early endorsements, and to the many students, research participants, and congregation members whose stories quietly shaped this work.
Most of all, I am grateful that this conversation is now in your hands. A book only becomes fully alive when it meets a reader. My hope is that what you find here opens something — a question, a memory, a longing — that draws you closer to the God who has been bonded to you all along.