We Got the Order Wrong: How Christianity Traded Relationship for Religion
For generations, we have handed children doctrines before we gave them a living God to hold onto. The consequences are written in the data — and in the
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.
Bonding with God
Bringing attachment science and faith together to explore what a secure relationship with God looks like and how it shapes everything from resilience and prayer to suffering and spiritual formation. Available now from Baker Academic.
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.
Join the Building a Secure Faith Future Initiative
We are bringing together researchers, faith leaders, educators, and parents committed to moving the church from propositional faith formation to relational, attachment-informed discipleship. The future of faith is not more information but deeper belonging.
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.