About This Work

Imagine someone walks into my consulting room for therapy.

They come for a reason. They are suffering. Something isn’t right in their world. And so far, they haven't found an answer.

As we talk, it becomes clear that their symptoms have a nucleus, a nexus, or a point of contention. They all point back to religion and their conflicts with and because of it. This isn’t clear at first, and it isn’t direct, but as I explore the roots of their suffering it becomes clear that certain held beliefs about people, life, and the world are dissonant with the realities they encounter every day.

As a therapist, I don’t care what they believe. I don’t care whether they’re Christian, transitioning, ex-Christian, Buddhist, New Age, atheist, or agnostic. I care about the client. I care about their suffering. And if their suffering points to religious conflicts, then we sure as hell are going to talk about it.

People suffer their worldviews. This can be due to the worldviews themselves or it can be due to their relationship to that worldview (all worldviews are idiosyncratic). Worldview can also cause suffering, hence one’s relationship to their worldview is a psychological issue.

The first order of business is to engender a therapeutic alliance. You need to trust me, but trust takes time. So we start off gently and you feel out whether or not I am a threat to you. Do I have your best interest at heart, regardless of our different views of the world?

Next, I address the core anxiety: it’s ok to talk about what’s bothering you. It may be the first time you’ve had the opportunity to explore yourself, your thoughts, and feelings. You might even surprise yourself: “I didn’t realize I was angry about that”. My job is to help you make these discoveries. On and on we go, until we’re neck deep in childhood phantasies and personal experiences surrounding religious experiences, beliefs about God, and the structures of the mind influencing its specific contents.

All this—with one big exception. The client doesn’t come to me. I go to them, in the form of a popular trade book. And I bring all the big guns of a philosophically trained depth psychologist (doctoral candidate) to bear on the problem. It is currently under development and is the reason I earned this degree. At this point, the book is called: FROM CHRISTIANITY TO GOD: AN ONTOLOGY OF CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM.

Christian fundamentalism has caused harm and people do suffer under its jurisdiction. I approach the reader as I would a Christian client, establishing rapport and addressing core anxieties before bringing ontology to bear on the discussion of truth, death, metaphysics, and ideology. I prepare the reader to forgo dogma in favor of an expanded worldview free of unexamined prejudice. In other words: I write to Christians as Christians, with the goal of combating dogma, harmful ideology, and concomitant pathogenic suffering. However, this book is also for ex-Christians interested in exploring their own unfinished business with the church, Christians, and Christian fundamentalism. It does not establish a new worldview, but opens up the reader to a transformative and non-sectarian openness to life, God, religion, and worldview. In other words, this book's aim is therapeutic. It aims to heal.

If you’d like to know more, I’ve compiled a list of the written chapters as I continue to structure and write the book, below. If you’d like to contribute to this project, please sign up for a subscription to the blog and participate with feedback and thoughts. Thanks!

Describe the Book

Chapter One: Where to Begin?

The book opens gently to set the sympathetic nervous system at ease, to help deactivate defenses. It addresses a core anxiety about the danger of asking questions about doctrine. It puts the reader in an immediate existential space and makes questions permissible.

Chapter Two: Suffering as Symptom

Hermeneutics started as a process of biblical exegesis. It can be applied to all instances of understanding. Existential suffering indicates a rupture in understanding, forcing new understanding. Ruptures in understanding scare us because they open us to the fear of death.

Chapter Three: A Problem Called Death

Christianity is a solution to the problem of death. Its solutions to life are secondary. In acting like a solution, it refuses to be a problem. Treating Christian doctrine as a problem exposes Christians to the fear of death. The fear of death was the original condition of accepting Christian faith and may be the means of a renewed encounter with God.

Chapter Four: Solutions and Finitude

Christian doctrine fails as a solution to life, leading to awkward behavior, exclusivity, and outright harm. The fear of death causes Christians to make the solution limitless in scope and application. The attempt to make Christianity limitless in application shows that Christians still fear death, despite their ideology. Christianity is not God and is not omniscient and omnipresent. Nor is it human. Yet it interacts like a culture, alive in the world.

Chapter Five: God, Truth, and Ontology

Christian ideology is grounded in its claim to truth. But what is truth? That is a question for ontology. Christian metaphysics is different than materialism in that it places God outside the physical universe. But God is not outside truth. Or is He? Ontology forces a choice: truth or God. The choice determines worldview, and the consequences are worked out.

Chapter Six: Hell, a Game of Stakes

Christian fundamentalism sets the stakes as high as the human imagination: heaven and hell. But the stakes are only that high so long as heaven and hell are metaphysical places. The next highest stake in the game is death, as when Christianity causes death (and it certainly has). To play fair, the consequences of the Christian worldview must be brought to the table.

Chapter Seven: An Ontology of Fundamentals

Which fundamental in the Christian faith comes first? Christian fundamentals are organized into a hierarchy to show that personal experience is the bedrock of Christianity, even more than scriptures.

Chapter Eight: Conversion and Hermeneutics

Conversion is the first moment of faith, which entails a personal experience of God. Hermeneutics shows us that the context of conversion influences how that experience is interpreted. On the contrary, Christian dogma asserts that its interpretation of events is the only plausible explanation. Perhaps dimensional spiritual growth is not about more worship, prayer, and devotionals but a radical openness to death and the unknown.

Chapter Nine: An Existential Crisis

Christian fundamentalism has been dealt a deadly blow. This leads to catastrophe for the solution to death, leading to existential disorientation and panic. A pattern is established between Adam and Eve gaining knowledge and the moment of conversion pointing the way to a new experience of God. Perhaps deconstruction is the way to spiritual growth and maturity.

Chapter Ten: The Path with Heart

[Under Construction]

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