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Episode 23 - An Interview with Daniel Dacombe & Daryl Van Tongeren - Part 1
70 Plays5 days ago
Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe sits down with Daryl Van Tongeren.
Daniel sits down with Daryl to talk about his new book "Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion", as well as his research on religious disaffiliation and religious residue.
Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College. He studies big questions central to being human, including meaning, religion, and virtues. He has published nearly 250 scientific papers and four books on these themes. He has earned several international research awards and been named Fellow of several prestigious professional organizations. He lives in Holland, MI with his wife, Sara, and he enjoys running, biking, reading, and making his own hot sauce.
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Transcript
Urban Legends and 'Bloody Mary' Discussion
00:00:01
Speaker
And there is this thing that if you go into the bathroom and you turn off the lights and you say Bloody Mary three times, it's supposed to be this horrible, you know, satanic apparition shows up. Right. Yeah. She said, do you believe that? And I was like, well, no, I don't believe that. And she's like, okay, well, prove it to me. Go into the bathroom and go do that. and I'm like, well, I'm not going to go do that.
Introduction to 'The Voice of Canadian Humanism' Podcast
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to The Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens.
00:00:44
Speaker
Welcome to the conversation. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism podcast.
Meet Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren: Background and Influences
00:00:51
Speaker
My name is Daniel Daycomb, and I'm one of the hosts, and I'm very pleased to be joined today by Dr. Daryl Van Tongeren.
00:00:59
Speaker
Daryl, thank you for coming on our show. Thank you so much for having me. So we usually like to start these interviews by asking our guests to introduce themselves, especially where what their background is and where they came from. Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself, especially the religious and cultural landscape that you grew up in?
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm currently a professor of psychology and the director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. I was raised in in California in a conservative evangelical upbringing. Religion was a ah central part of every really everything my family did.
00:01:39
Speaker
my mom immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands in in part because of a sponsorship by a church. And so, you know, life was kind of oriented around church. We attended religious institutions and for primary and secondary school.
00:01:56
Speaker
And so, ah you know, Christian evangelicalism was was really the the culture through which I kind of came to understand the world and the the water in which
Exploring Terror Management Theory
00:02:06
Speaker
I swam. Mm-hmm.
00:02:09
Speaker
And so, you know, that that was kind of my but my cultural lens. um And then, you know, I went away to university. And even though i I attended a religious university, I would say that I've always kind of been what William James would call a little bit of a sick soul.
00:02:24
Speaker
And by that, this is somebody who is a little bit more existentially curious and angsty. i always had questions about um but a lot of things, which is probably why I became a professor. But in particular, I had a lot of questions about religion, about faith,
00:02:38
Speaker
about deep existential big questions. And so I think that, ah you know, when I went away to university, that's really when I started questioning um and and putting pressure on a lot of my beliefs.
00:02:49
Speaker
and And that continued in graduate school. I had the fortune of being able to do some work with Tom Pazinski, who's a social psychologist who co-founded Terror Management Theory. which a broad you know social psychological theory that tries to explain why why humans do what they do and think what they think and act in the ways that they do, largely because of their motivation to manage death-related anxiety that's resulting from the awareness of our own mortality.
00:03:17
Speaker
And part and parcel of that is is our construction of an adherence to cultural worldviews like religion. And so...
Personal Loss and its Impact on Worldview
00:03:24
Speaker
through this education process, I, again, I started just questioning what I would believe, but I would say probably the most significant, um, shift in my own religious trajectory was when I was in, uh, my fourth year of my PhD program, my brother suddenly and tragically passed away.
00:03:42
Speaker
And, uh, you know He left behind three children under the age of six, so five, three, and nine you know nine months old. And this was really deeply disorienting to me, especially being raised in ah in a theological tradition in which I was taught that God was good, God was all-powerful, God was all-knowing.
00:04:04
Speaker
it really it really struggled with making sense of how something this tragic and unexpected could happen, especially... When I held this such deep belief that my brother, who by all accounts was really a good person and ah and a decent husband, um how something like this could happen if God really was as good and as powerful and as all-knowing as I hoped God would be.
00:04:26
Speaker
And I would say that that that that set off in me, um goodness, I don't think it would be an understatement to say about a decade of both, you know, deep questioning, ah deconstruction, existential wrestling, and um thanks to an outstanding therapist, a lot of personal work ah around that.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, let's not forget the importance of very good therapists in the process these days. William James didn't have access to that, I think. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think it's interesting. You brought up terror management theory, which is something that, um if I recall, is in many ways based on some of the work of Ernest Becker.
00:05:08
Speaker
ah So his book, The Denial of Death, is one that comes up a lot, I think, when people are talking about terror management theory. Before we ah charge off into the into the rest of the interview, you mentioned terror management theory is...
00:05:22
Speaker
typically about you know managing death-related anxieties and the ways that we the ways that we do so. ah When you were doing that work, how much of it was centered on Beck and how much of it kind of went out from there into new territories? I know Beck was quite if you've read the book, he's quite taken with Freud and Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis, and that kind of forms the basis of a lot of his work. And we've come a long way as a field since Freud. But so I'm just kind of curious ah from an academic level where that went for you.
Religion, Immortality, and Meaning
00:05:58
Speaker
yeah Yeah, you're absolutely right. So so chair management theory was largely based on the writings of Ernest Becker. and ah you know Moving beyond some of those theoretical roots, ah you know chair management theory has been found you know to be...
00:06:13
Speaker
or sorry, chair management theory has established empirical evidence in dozens of countries with hundreds of studies. And so they have moved beyond just the mere kind of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic approaches of Freud, really to to a wide range of human behavior and social cognition.
00:06:30
Speaker
And so for me, I think the intersection that was so fascinating was you know the the death-related anxiety which motivates us to create these worldviews and imbue our life with meaning and permanence and significance, we we can rely on a host of them. But I always thought, and and I still hold, that probably the most the the prototypical, the best cultural worldview that we could have ever ah contrived would be religion.
00:06:57
Speaker
Because religion does all of the things that other cultural worldviews you know claims to do, but it also permanently solves the problem of death. right So Woody Allen says, i don't want to achieve you know immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality by by not dying. right i don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment.
00:07:18
Speaker
And there's something about that promise of literal immortality that just takes the sting out of death for so many people that makes religion such a powerful and potent cultural worldview.
00:07:30
Speaker
I think ah you know Woody Allen's ah a great example of, leo that quote's a great example. I want to achieve it by not dying. Everybody wants to not die. And the you know lest we think that it's somehow just a religious thing, there's a lot of people out there who aren't religious who are spending vast sums of money to put their names on buildings.
00:07:49
Speaker
Absolutely. And what they would call immortality projects. you know Try to make sure that something of them gets gets left behind. And so it's something that we're all, I think, vulnerable to in some ways.
00:08:00
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. The tarant management folks would call that symbolic immortality. right and And I love that you mentioned that, whether that's by you know naming a building, hoping that we're going to remembered by our art or our work or our legacy through children.
00:08:13
Speaker
you know Each of us kind of want to be remembered so a part of us lives on and so that the finality of our death really isn't as final as we fear that it's going to be. Yeah. And even ah even Christopher Hitchens, the famous British atheist speaker, debater, when he was asked about you know the afterlife, he said, well, I have two children, so my heart is walking around in two people.
00:08:33
Speaker
That's all the immortality I'm ever going to have. And I thought that was a beautiful beautiful picture of it. And still, you know likely we all, even if we have kids, are feeling a bit of anxiety about what comes next or about the end of our own existence.
00:08:48
Speaker
um I think Becker called it the worm at the core. Isn't that right? That's exactly right. yeahp That's that strange dual kind of ah experience of we were the only creature that we know of on planet Earth that both has a strong survival instinct and total awareness that we're going to cease to exist someday, which is just ah miserable state of affairs. I'd much rather be a dog.
00:09:11
Speaker
That's right. My dog seems so much happier. oh yeah. mine I mean, mine is quite overweight, but he's terribly happy all the time. we He's just a big potato. um You mentioned that your the loss of your brother had been sort of the catalyst for a lot of the introspection that really landed into, like you said, the sick soul process.
The Value of Life and Critique of Evangelical Views
00:09:34
Speaker
person that you were, William James, the famous writer, sociologist, I think, and, to you know, originator of many different bits and pieces that get talked about in the psychology or social science study of religion, including things like religious experience and And all of that and i always personally identify with that sick soul concept as well, being someone who thought a lot and spent a lot of time thinking about thinking and a lot of time thinking about death and thinking about existential issues. And I didn't go through a ah deep loss that triggered
00:10:08
Speaker
all of those things. So it sounds like that was something that for you, it didn't just limit itself to one area of your life, like religion. it It really went through all parts of it because your worldview was integrated into all parts of your life.
00:10:23
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it really was. I would say, yeah, I think that you captured that quite well. The you know the loss of my brother, it was a deeply um unsettling and jarring reality for me to deal with, not only for my religion, but just the cascading effects. you know We later came to find out that his condition was genetic and we...
00:10:42
Speaker
you know about five and half years ago, lost my father because of the same condition. It's something that my my sister is is monitoring. It's something that I am regularly reminded of my own mortality every but every year when I have my yearly ah visit with a cardiologist. And so it's it's one of those persistent reminders of my own human frailty and and the boundedness of being human.
00:11:05
Speaker
and And yeah, not only did it jostle me religiously, I think that it changed things relationally. um You know, the reminder of death just has this wonderful way of of cutting out all the crap, cutting out all of the unnecessary in our life and really making most salient those values that we think are the most important.
00:11:24
Speaker
and and it And it just... The scarcity of life, I think sometimes, is the very thing that imbues it with meaning. I think for a long time i worried that the finality and the you know of death and the permanence of death and and only having one life would be something that would absolutely rob our life of meaning. But on the contrary, I think it's it's precious because it's so short. right it's's Our time is precious because it's limited. We only have the time that we have.
00:11:55
Speaker
and that and And that makes it all that more more sweet. And that perspective is not typically found in evangelical circles, I've noticed. it's much more It's much closer to some rabbinic traditions in the way they teach and talk about death.
00:12:11
Speaker
um I've been, I could say the word blessed, I've been blessed with many Jewish friends and some Jewish family members. And so i I've been on the edges of some conversations around those kinds of things. And I remember hearing ah someone talking about a story that rabbi told about ah a kid who finds a dead bird and asks their dad to you know to fix it. And he says, well, you can't fix it because everything dies. And he says, well, am I going to die too? And he says, sure, you're going to die. We're all going to die so that you'll know that life is precious because something that's yours forever can never be precious.
00:12:45
Speaker
So yeah, I think that yeah sounds a lot closer to that rabbinic traditions. Yeah, absolutely right. And that's one of the that's one of the kind of the pernicious sides of one particular set of evangelical beliefs is that you know this this life is is kind of a – it's just kind of ah a pause. It doesn't really matter that much, right?
00:13:03
Speaker
it's It's all about the next life, which if taken to its extreme really suggests that as long as people just get their ideology and their beliefs lined up, then complete environmental degradation, you know overuse of the planet, the draining of environmental resources – are completely justified because, you know, this, this doesn't really matter. It's the next life that matters the most, right which is, which is really just in a a travesty.
00:13:31
Speaker
Yeah. Gosh, i wonder what it would look like if a whole bunch of people thought that. Um,
00:13:37
Speaker
We got real deep, real fast, which I'm i'm definitely here for. um But yeah, i I agree with you. That is that is a shortcoming and in some
Environmental Nihilism and Social Psychology
00:13:47
Speaker
worldviews. And then, of course, on the other side, there's some who are non-religious and who are nihilists and say, like well, yeah nothing matters. We're all going to die. like Why bother trying to preserve...
00:13:56
Speaker
the planet or the species, because it's just going to go on without us someday anyways. And I think that equally that, ah you know, that can be a worldview that lends itself to not caring about the environment, ah not caring about other people, destruction. And I, I suspect that there's a lot of relatively powerful and rich people in the world who hold to a similar view as that.
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. we We need some Aristotelian golden mean between those two. Yeah, i would I would like to see what that could look like. Unfortunately, doesn't seem like we're getting the the opportunity at the moment to to reach that. I think it would look a lot like Star Trek, honestly, but we'll have to well to see if we get there or not.
00:14:38
Speaker
um I actually want to back up just slightly because you you mentioned going to PhD studies. You mentioned um that you're the head of a department and that you're a psychologist. But I know that you're that the area of psychology that you practice in is actually social psychology.
00:14:55
Speaker
And I was wondering, yeah we've had social psychologists on the podcast before. ah Social psychology is my area of study in my university, but we ah we might not actually have many listeners who know the difference between you know social psychology and then, for instance, clinical psychology. When you say you want to be a psychologist, probably the first thing most people picture is like people going to come and sit and lay down on a couch and talk to you about how they're feeling.
00:15:22
Speaker
But that's actually not like social psychology. ah Would you mind giving just a brief overview for the listeners of what ah what social psychology is, what sets it apart from the rest of the field? Yeah, absolutely.
00:15:32
Speaker
You know, I say this tongue in cheek. I say I'm the type of psychologist that can't help people. Now, that's not totally true. but But like you said, I'm not the one that would, you know, um be a clinical psychologist, have you lay down the couch or ask anything about your mother.
00:15:46
Speaker
um i am the the type of psychologist, though. So social psychologists tend to study ah the self. So individuals and but in particular individuals and how they relate to their social world.
00:15:57
Speaker
And other people as well. So I mean, like, technically, it's a scientific study of the mind and behavior in light of the imagined or real presence of others, right? That's a really just technical way of saying, how do I exist in the world?
00:16:10
Speaker
And so my my entrance into social psychology was really predicated on my interest in in religion. And so even back in my... ah you know my junior year of university, I did a research project on religion and self-esteem. I had this this nagging feeling that, you know, some of the behaviors that that people would engage in when they were engaged in religious rituals would really...
00:16:35
Speaker
be in part because it would enhance their sense of self-esteem. And so i ran a study and sure enough, I found that, you know pre-test to post-test after people engage in religious singing, their self-esteem went up. Then for my senior thesis, I i looked at the role of religion and death anxiety.
00:16:49
Speaker
And so when I started reading, you know, who's doing all this interesting research in why people are religious and the functions of religion, found that most of them were social psychologists. And so, you know, my my entrance into the field was really based on this content area. And I got opened up into this entire world of researchers who were studying just fascinating things about the limitations of human knowledge, the the perils of of insight and intuition, how incredibly biased we are cognitively, um how we understand
00:17:26
Speaker
think we know more than we actually do, how our stereotypes and worldviews shape the way that we see the world so subjectively, that objective truth always kind of feels just beyond our fingertips, um and really what we can do to try to help improve the world and make it a more...
00:17:45
Speaker
you know a more just, equitable and flourishing place to live. And I gotta say, i was hooked. there There was something about that endeavor, that collective enterprise to me that felt incredibly meaningful. It felt like something that would be worth spending my my life's profession ah trying to advance and trying to better understand ourselves, each other and the world around us with the goal of making the world a better place.
00:18:11
Speaker
And I know that seems like really high and lofty. and But but if even if I can just do it on a small, small scale, that felt particularly meaningful to me. Well, that's got to be the best and most hopeful description of social psychology that I've ever heard. that you know ah Because often the the descriptions are, oh, well, we study you know X, y and Z. And you you mentioned like the real or or imagined or implied presence of others. And you know I think one of the standard explanations I got probably back to my undergrad was like, well, what about a stoplight?
00:18:44
Speaker
You know, if you stop at a stoplight, there's nobody else around. You're stopping because of the implied presence of others. Like that's yeah that's social psychology, you know, now go sit in front of SPSS and do statistics. for six Yeah, that's exactly right. And and i've I've learned a few things since then. One of them is that social psychologists can actually do qualitative research too, like interviews and stuff.
00:19:05
Speaker
So that saves people like me who have, ah you know, trauma bonded with others over statistics who have no desire to do it again from doing that. But it's also, ah you know, you mentioned the the high and lofty goals.
00:19:20
Speaker
It is really a continuation of many other kinds of human thinking and kinds of human ah academic exploration, even non-academic exploration into what it means to be a species together here on this earth, what it means to work together, how do we work best together and what, you know, what sort of world could we create out of those conversations and using research to get there, which I think is really wonderful. You can make an argument that, you know, a lot of the people who came up with the idea around democracy were practicing,
00:19:54
Speaker
ah practicing things like social psychology, which I think is a really fascinating area of overlap for us and the rest of the world. Yeah, it really, you know as a social psychologist, I think part of what I've appreciated is you know there are two, what when it's working the best, and I'm not saying that it always works the best or that we're the flawless at this, but when it's working the best, I feel like the two core values the that social psychology puts forward. One is empiricism, right? And that is the reliance on data.
00:20:25
Speaker
So we are going to make our decisions. We are going to make claims based on empirical evidence that has been sufficiently gathered and is and is adequately rigorous. And then the second, again, if we do it right, but we don't always, but if we're doing it right, there's a sense of intellectual humility that I could be wrong and that's okay because the goal is not for me to be right.
00:20:47
Speaker
The goal is that as a collective, we're we're more closely approaching the true nature of things. And so if i had if I had a hypothesis and we test it and I'm wrong, whatever, I'm wrong. Let's just collectively get to a better place.
00:21:00
Speaker
So using a humility-based approach to rely on and interpret data so we can more closely approximate the the truth or the true nature of things.
00:21:10
Speaker
that that was That's powerful. And I think that's an admirable way of trying to assemble a worldview that could help inform some of our values. Yeah. It's like slowly dialing in the ah intensity of a microscope. We're slowly getting closer and closer to an understanding of humanity.
00:21:28
Speaker
we're We're increasing the the depth at which we can examine. And that means that some of the things that we thought we knew along the way are, are going to be shown to be, well, it wasn't quite like that, but you know, that's okay.
00:21:39
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah. Thank you for that overview. I think that we're going to see an uptick and people signing up to become social psychologists after the episode drops. That's my hope. hope so.
Religious Residue: Ongoing Influence of Past Beliefs
00:21:50
Speaker
So you mentioned that your interest in studying religion ah through a social psychology lens came from not only your background, not only your,
00:22:00
Speaker
you know, your tendency towards the existential questions and not being super satisfied with some of the answers all the time and wanting to dig deeper and through personal experience and loss. ah All of those things have gone into ah your work for in one way or another. And the the first area that I encountered your work was actually through ah some of your research into religious residue, which um First of all, I'm not sure if it was you or your co-author who coined the phrase, ah but it's one of those what are those terms that doesn't need ah doesn't need a huge explanation because just the words religious residue, you just get this image of like, oh, yes, like residue, something very sticky.
00:22:44
Speaker
And then, you know, it kind of falls from that. ah Would you mind telling us a bit about what religious residue is and and where you came up with that concept? Did it come before you did the research into it or did it come out of the research that you did?
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for asking. So, you know, religious residue is the is the psychological tendency for religious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to persist ah in people after they de-identify from religion.
00:23:14
Speaker
So even after people walk away, religion is sticky and it continues to exert an influence on people's lives. And so we've we've seen it in a whole host of earth areas that I can get into in just a minute. But to kind of kind of back up and talk and give an idea of where we came up with this and how we conceptualize this.
00:23:34
Speaker
you know i I approached a colleague because I was really interested in studying people leaving religion. And you know we were having conversations and two things kind of came out. One was we thought, well, you know are there actually that many people who have left religion? you know So this is you know seven, eight years ago.
00:23:51
Speaker
We did some initial ah digging around and we thought maybe between four and 8% of people had left religion because we had to make a case to the the grant agency that you know there's really something here that we should that we can measure.
00:24:05
Speaker
When we did our first cross-cultural study in the US, s Netherlands, and Hong Kong, what we actually found is that 20% of people identified having left religion. And we thought, okay, we're we're onto something here. Now, when we to the second point, when we were writing our proposal, you know did we actually think that we would find religious residue?
00:24:23
Speaker
That was our hypothesis. So there's some research on depression that has shown that if people have, I think it's two depressive episodes, from that point forward on on depression inventories, even when they're not in an active state of depression, people who've had two previous depressive episodes will score more like depressed people, even when they're not in an active depressed episode, than people who have never been depressed before.
00:24:48
Speaker
So there was something about being in a depressive episode, or two of them, that changed people's cognition. It changed how they viewed and interacted with the world.
00:24:59
Speaker
And I'm not equating, we and we're not equating religion to depression, but what we thought was if if there's something so central to someone's world to someone's worldview, sense of identity as religion,
00:25:10
Speaker
and they've been religious for a long time, even if they're not actively religious anymore, could it, in the same way, like being in active states of depression changes how your brain operates, could have being religious change the way you think, feel, and respond, even when you're no longer religious? Could it leave some type of residue?
00:25:27
Speaker
And so our initial cross-cultural research revealed that actually, yes, it does. And after people leave religion, they still have attitudes, they still have emotions, and they still ah act in ways that are somewhere closer to the religious than than not than people who have never been religious before would act. So they're kind of in between.
00:25:49
Speaker
There's some residue that remains. Because we had also noticed that you know before our work, a lot of people had been treating non-religious people as this homogeneous, you know all the same right group of individuals. And we thought, no, there's got to be some heterogeneity in there and a wide variety of variability in people who are not religious. And we thought, your religious history has got to matter.
00:26:11
Speaker
you know When we first I first shared these results with one of my colleagues, he laughed at me. And he's like, well, of course. It's like my mother said, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. He's like, guy you know and I haven't practiced Catholicism, he said, since I was 16. He's like, but there's still something deep inside of me that you know because of my upbringing, because of how important Catholicism was to me, it's going to be nearly impossible for me to shake.
00:26:35
Speaker
So that's like the difference between the religious duns and the religious nuns, N-O-N-E-S. Yes, that's exactly right. So a lot of people had been studying the religious nuns. So people, when they asked which are religious affiliation, they say nun, N-O-N-E. and o n e yeah um and And we thought, well, the people who have left religion, you know to us, those are the religious duns. They're done with religion.
00:26:57
Speaker
And there's something qualitatively and quantitatively different with those people. And so we found this on explicit report measures, implicit, so ah measured variables, so things you know even quicker than conscious awareness.
00:27:12
Speaker
We found this on behavioral measures, things like donation and volunteering. right We found this cross-culturally. We found this longitudinally. we kind of Across the board, we found this in surprising areas. Mm-hmm.
00:27:25
Speaker
One of the things that I noted in your research, you you did us you did a study and I think a poster with some of your undergrad students on um I can't remember if you call them negative spiritual beliefs.
Negative Spiritual Beliefs: Persistence and Impact
00:27:38
Speaker
Yes, yes. That that one, which was about like belief in things like the devil or hell or sin or curses. I think there was some other ah bits and pieces there. And um you know you you mentioned ah religious residue in terms of spending and values and how people think. And of course, the you know the culturally Catholic concept has come up, even on this podcast before, as we ah interviewed an anthropologist from Ireland about the issue.
00:28:05
Speaker
ah in one of our recent episodes. But the the negative spirituality one really stuck out to me as something that um that had two surprising things. One was that people tended to kind of carry with them some of those negative spiritual beliefs, maybe a bit more tendency to be superstitious or something like that.
00:28:24
Speaker
And then there was the the trend with taboo behaviors, which was not ah carried forward in the same way. Do you mind telling us a bit about that? No, not at all. So this really originates so from a conversation over a dinner that my wife and I had. So she's ah a therapist, a licensed clinical social worker, and she sees people who are undergoing religious change as part of the the people on her client list.
00:28:48
Speaker
And she was mentioning to me about some of the you know how it was intersecting with some of my research because she said, you know Some of hers her clients who have left religion are worried that, well, what if they got it wrong? like What if they should have stayed religious? and and Hell is actually a real place, and they're going to spend the rest of their life realizing that they've made this eternal mistake.
00:29:07
Speaker
Very unsettling for them. and that there's this i you know Even though they they no longer believe in God, they they still are worried about hell. And so she said – I said, really, why why is it that would people would do that? And she's like, okay, well, do you remember when we were growing up and – she also grew up evangelical and you would go to to summer sleepaway camp.
00:29:29
Speaker
Right, right. And there is this thing that if you go into the bathroom and you turn off the lights and you say Bloody Mary three times, it's supposed to be this horrible, you know satanic apparition shows up. right yeah She said, do you believe that? And I was like, well, no, I don't believe that. And she's like, okay, well, prove it to me. Go into the bathroom and go do that. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to go do that. like um that That's ridiculous. And she she laughed at me and she's like, are you kidding right now? like You're this rational, intelligent person. You study this and you still won't do this.
00:29:55
Speaker
And said, well, you go do this. And she was like, oh, hell no. There's no way I'm doing that either. And so we we kind of had this chuckle. And we're like, well, why is it? What is it about that that still, even though we don't believe this, still kind of is unnerving to us almost on like a core level?
00:30:09
Speaker
And so she's like, you should study this. I proposed it to my team. And like you said, we found that duns are still more likely to believe in hell and the devil than people have never been religious.
00:30:20
Speaker
And that's even among atheist duns. So that's even among people who no longer believe in God. They still hold some remnant of a belief of hell and the devil. And we think that's in part because of the psychological phenomenon called the negativity bias.
00:30:34
Speaker
So negative information carries far more weight than positive information. And really, the consequences for being wrong about something like this are pretty significant in the minds of of the participants.
00:30:45
Speaker
But the second thing that we found was we thought that we would also see religious residue with taboo behaviors and things that taboo, I mean, things that religion had told them they should not do, like, yeah you know, visit a psychic or get a tarot card reading.
00:30:59
Speaker
um And in fact, we didn't see that at all. Instead, what we found was that religious duns were just as likely as the never religious to go do those things. And so when we were reflecting, and we and we double checked the data because we thought, you know, did we mess something up here?
00:31:13
Speaker
But we double checked and that was accurate. and And upon reflection, what we thought was, well, maybe maybe there's two things. Maybe if you've always told religious duns, you can't do this thing. This thing is off limits.
00:31:26
Speaker
but We know from reactance theory, as soon as you have the opportunity, that's the thing you're going to want to do. right If you can't put your hand in the cookie jar and get the cookie, as soon as the parent walks away, you're going to devour a cookie.
00:31:38
Speaker
The second thing is it could be that this is a path these are pathways in which religious duns are trying to to engage in new spiritual experiences outside of traditional religion.
00:31:49
Speaker
So maybe they've given up on religion. They've given up on on God. But they're still yearning for something more, and they're thinking, could I get it through you know crystals or tarot card readings or visiting a psychic or something like that?
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah.
Understanding Negativity Bias
00:32:03
Speaker
ah The piece about negativity bias, I think, is such an interesting intersection with like you know broader social science studies of human behavior, because, of course, a lot of it comes back to things like evolutionary theory.
00:32:15
Speaker
Why would be we be more likely to remember something bad that might happen to us? Because a lot of the humans who weren't like that didn't survive because they forgot the bad things that might happen to them.
00:32:27
Speaker
And then they got eaten by a crocodile down by the river. That's exactly right. Yeah, so that part made total sense. The taboo piece really stuck out to me ah because my initial reaction was, well, why? Like, what's that about? Because you hear from some people, you know, when you become an atheist, then, you know, you you suddenly start sinning a whole lot more.
00:32:50
Speaker
And i when when I went through my own deconversion process, when i you know it was ah and was a long process for me of deconstruction, which we should probably define deconstruction later ah for anybody who doesn't know what it means, but went through a long process and left it all behind and you know started identifying as an atheist and then a secular humanist.
00:33:10
Speaker
And people would say, well, you just did that so you could sin. And I was like, I'm... I'm still married to the same woman. I'm i'm still being honest on my taxes. Like, I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
00:33:21
Speaker
So that was my first kind of thought reading about your your taboo behaviors piece. But ah the more I thought about the more it started to make sense. And it reminded me of a good friend of mine who... who is secular now, but grew up in ah and a very high control religious environment. Like women had to wear dresses that went up to their the throats went all the way down to their ankles.
00:33:42
Speaker
And she told me once in a personal conversation, one of the first things she did when she left was she bought a dress. And she bought a dress that you know went down to mid-calf.
00:33:55
Speaker
And that was just so scandalous for her. Right, exactly. This is it. It's got a collar at my collarbone and it goes up to my mid calf. I'm finally free. And that was like the same day she she did that.
00:34:09
Speaker
And so I thought, yeah, you know what? That does make sense because of course people are gonna have some reactants there. and And if they're looking for spirituality in their places, well, why not try ah visiting a psychic or tarot cards? It seems to make sense to me, certainly.
00:34:26
Speaker
Yeah.
Deconstruction and Cognitive Dissonance in Religion
00:34:27
Speaker
So i ah I wanted to talk with you about your book ah because your book is is more than your research and more than you know my interest in your ah work professionally and academically. Your book is really what ah brought brought this interview together. So the name of the book is Done, How to Flourish After Leaving Religion, and it came out just this just this year, I think.
00:34:54
Speaker
um And I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about where this book came from. Obviously, that a lot of it came out of your own research, but where did the ah we're the inspiration or the decision to actually take some of that research and to turn into something tangible that the average person could understand without going through grad school first, which by the way, is it is a neat trick that a lot of academics haven't figured out yet.
00:35:18
Speaker
Well, thank you. Very kind of you. ah so So the book was born out of the American Psychological Association. So APA approached me years ago and asked me to write a book on...
00:35:30
Speaker
on the research around leaving religion. And they graciously allowed me ah to to agree, but gave me years to get this book done. So this has been years in the process. I said, if you give me three years to write this, which is much longer than they normally give people, I said, we will have a more, a much more robust understanding of, of the process around leaving religion than if I just were to write the book now.
00:35:54
Speaker
And they, they were patient and they said, that's, that's fine. And they said, we got to tell you, you know The editors who are are reading this, a number of our team, we're excited about this book because we're done. you know We and we kind of want to understand what's going on.
00:36:08
Speaker
right and and The framing, they said, here's the idea. We want you to frame it. and It was under what was called their Life Tools imprint. so Basically, make it as practical as possible, but it's got to be based on science.
00:36:19
Speaker
And so what I try to do is I try to interpret the cutting edge and and more foundational research in this area into something that is digestible, understandable, and then at the end of the day, incredibly practical.
00:36:32
Speaker
If somebody is a done, they know a done, they love a done, or they just want to understand religious duns and this process of leaving religion. And so i drew from my own research. I drew from the established research of of the long line of people who had been studying deconversion.
00:36:48
Speaker
i i read memoirs. I watched a lot of videos. I watched documentaries on church abuse and trauma. um And I tried to make something practical that that people would be able to use the kind of almost broadly kind of step by step. So kind of like what is religious de-identification? What's deconstruction? What's reconstruction?
00:37:11
Speaker
Why do people leave? What do I think is going to happen to me? How do I craft a new identity? How does this affect my relationships? And then if I have any interest whatsoever in a post-religious spirituality, what might that look like?
00:37:25
Speaker
Right. So deconstruction is the word I think that some people might not ah be familiar with because it just sounds like you're just taking something apart, but it's actually not quite what it means.
00:37:35
Speaker
Do you mind giving us like a very short definition of deconstruction? Yeah, it's the process of really questioning, analyzing, and criticizing one's own religious beliefs. So it's really just putting one's religious beliefs ah under complete scrutiny and thinking about them in in in critical ways.
00:37:53
Speaker
And you know it means technically kind of breaking it down to its core elements with the idea that you're going to do something from that point. Now, Some people, right it's not always the case that deconstruction means that people leave religion.
00:38:08
Speaker
Sometimes people can deconstruct and they can reconstruct within religion, but it looks just vastly different. right they They revise some religious worldview that's very different than the one before, but they'd still identify as religious.
00:38:23
Speaker
But sometimes deconstruction would lead to religious switching. So you switch to being a different religion. But other times it leads to religious de-identification or or walking away from religion. People saying, I'm no longer religious. I've criticized, I've analyzed, I've thought about this.
00:38:37
Speaker
I've put it through my the intellectual wringer. And it just it's not passing muster, so I'm going to walk away. And we really only call it deconstruction when it's about our own religion. worldview, even though we use those critical thinking tools with basically every other worldview that we encounter and usually reject them if we're not planning on making a switch of our own. So it's not something unusual or putting ah unfair scrutiny or standards to our own religious beliefs. It's really just doing what we do with everything else, just allowing it to happen to something that we hold very dear.
00:39:12
Speaker
That's exactly right. I love that you mentioned that. It's just more the case that our self-defenses are so high that we don't engage in that type of self-reflection. So it's it's usually not until something is so overwhelming to us.
00:39:24
Speaker
Or there's one way I like to think about it is what might trigger this is we experience so much cognitive dissonance about something, right? So either our attitudes and our and our behaviors or the way we think the world is supposed to work and our experiences of the world are so discrepant.
00:39:41
Speaker
That that discrepancy generates a significantly enough distress that we just can't fit in what has happened to us in reality with our expectations about the way the world is supposed to work.
00:39:54
Speaker
And so... Since we can't integrate that, something you know cognitive psychologists call assimilation, instead we have to accommodate. we have to change our our worldviews.
00:40:05
Speaker
And that changing initiates a process of deconstruction, which oftentimes can lead many people to walk away. Mm-hmm. And it seems like that cognitive dissonance, first of all, i love that you brought up cognitive dissonance because that seems to be a ah really key part of a lot of stories ah that come out of the the deconstruction, deconversion groups or books and and so on. And that's the that's the area that I'm doing most of my work in right now as a PhD student and hoping to yeah hoping to look at what ah you know what emerges what what themes emerge in some of these stories related to cognitive dissonance and different ways
00:40:45
Speaker
experiences around de-identification, but it seems like there's a tipping point for a lot of people where, you know, they they had these experiences, they knew these things about the world or about God or about faith, and then the cognitive dissonance becomes so much that suddenly they've crossed a line and now all those things that they could accept previously, they can't accept anymore. And like you said, they have to change and they have to accommodate.
00:41:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. And usually we see it when, mean and and I'm drawing from terrific work by Crystal Park, who's a phenomenal psychologist, and she proposes this meaning-making model that says, when when our expectation or scheme of the world does not fit with or we can't make meaning of what we're experiencing situationally, it creates a discrepancy. And it's when that discrepancy is too great, then that distress is too high, we have to make a shift.
00:41:36
Speaker
And so yeah, that tipping point it it differs for each person. um And it could be elicited by some significant event like trauma or ah you know something, adversity, suffering, something that someone just can't make sense of.
00:41:49
Speaker
Right. And you mentioned some of those things in your book and and trauma was one of them. I think you described as the four horsemen of religion apocalypse or religion's apocalypse in someone's life. Yeah. Trauma was one of them. What were the other three?
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah, so so like the the four reasons why people may leave religion. So one is a spiritual and religious abuse and trauma. The second one is something I would call cultural stagnation, where might kind of think about this as belief misalignment.
00:42:13
Speaker
So basically, my beliefs no longer line up with my religious institutions or the religious teachings I was taught. there's just I can't get them to fit. A third is simplistic views of suffering.
00:42:27
Speaker
So this is some something horrible happens and you just, again, you can't square the bad thing that's happened with you with the way religion said the world's supposed to work. And the fourth, and we particularly see this a lot in the US, but i think Canada has has a version of this as well, is a problematic label.
00:42:43
Speaker
So religion has taken on a connotation that people no longer want to identify with and they say, well, if that's religious, that's not me. i don't want to be religious. Right. Right.
Navigating Relationships and Family Reactions Post-Deconversion
00:42:53
Speaker
That is something that we do see in Canada a fair bit. And there's a lot of people who will say things. I think this probably happens down with you guys as well.
00:42:59
Speaker
Well, it's not a religion, it's a relationship and yes different kinds of ways of getting around that. um I think what stuck out to me when I was reading that part of your book was how I could i could see each of those horsemen in the stories and in the lives and the experiences of the people around me, the people I talked to, and recognizing that there were some that you know, they just couldn't they just couldn't reconcile with their previous worldview, things like simplest diff views of suffering.
00:43:28
Speaker
Well, how often have we heard everything happens for a reason? those other thought terminating cliches, right? That are just supposed to, let's put this to bed, let's not worry about it too much.
00:43:39
Speaker
And if you're not able to give in to that, if you're not able to accept that kind of a cliche or that kind of ah a reasoning, then you're probably going to feel pretty alone compared to the people around you who are able to ah more easily so understand suffering from that perspective.
00:44:00
Speaker
So I thought that was a really, really well put and and easy to understand model that you can put down there. Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. um I think one of my favorite parts of the book ah was your section on navigating relationships.
00:44:18
Speaker
And ah it actually came into mind again over the last, ah just the last couple of weeks as I was looking at some new research that came out of Belgium about people navigating deconversion with their families and friends. i'm not sure if you saw this paper that came out recently or not,
00:44:36
Speaker
ah But it was about how ah how people who have deconverted will experience the reactions of their social networks and how they'll navigate those reactions, ah how people will sometimes gradually reveal their deconversion. ah You know, they'll... they'll they'll reveal it with just a few people or they'll only reveal a little, you know, how far they've gone a part of the way, like they're they're doubting or they're not sold on some things and before they kind of reveal it all the way. And i that brought to mind ah your piece on navigating relationships.
00:45:10
Speaker
It just seemed to be ah really harmonious. um your ah Your description of it was the reverse ABCDs. Yes.
00:45:22
Speaker
The DCBAs, I think I did that right. It's like I'm doing a test now. um But what stuck out to me about that section was how closely that mirrored the process that many of my relationships went through.
00:45:36
Speaker
ah Closely enough that I was slightly suspicious. Some of them had been calling you for tips. But I was wondering if you could walk us through the DCBAs and what ah what people might be experiencing during those processes.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. um you know so So the way i frame this is one of the reasons why it's so challenging for other people when when we change our religious beliefs is because we now present a threat to those individuals in their cultural worldview, especially if we were particularly close to them.
00:46:11
Speaker
Because if we held the same beliefs and they thought they were a lot like us and we changed, they may start to worry, oh my goodness, what does this mean about me? Does this mean I could also lose my faith too? yeah so And I know this is hard to hear, but are the the mere existence of people changing their religious beliefs is a threat that they have to do something to. Yeah.
00:46:33
Speaker
With the DCBAs, first people may deny your religious change. So they may say things like, you haven't really changed. right like it's you know You're just going through a phase. right This is an adolescent spirituality. I get it. You're just angry at the man, whatever.
00:46:48
Speaker
yeah We've done tons of research. Religious dons are done. like they They have no interest in going back. And by the time they get to that point, it's not like they haven't given it a lot of thought. The second thing they try to do, they may try to do is convert.
00:47:01
Speaker
They may try to convert you back. So basically put pressure on you to come back to a religious worldview. And they often would say that they're you're trying to do this out of love, right? Like, oh, it's because I love you. I don't want you to spend eternity in hell. And so they're going to try to convince you to change your mind and come back.
00:47:21
Speaker
if If they can't deny that you've changed and they can't convert you, um that's when things kind of turn a little bit more ugly, and that's when they may start belittling you. And so they may start othering you. They may start treating you um negatively, derogatorily.
00:47:37
Speaker
it might even turn towards hostility or regression, and that's where it's really important to keep your boundaries open. And then sometimes if that doesn't work, they just – they go to void, right? They start avoiding you. they They cut you out. They ice you out, give you the silent treatment um because really they say i we can't even – you know, stand sadly to be around you because your mere presence and existence is a threat to us.
00:48:00
Speaker
um And that, that is such a heartbreaking cycle. That is such a heartbreaking cycle. um Because this is, you know, we we have some research that shows that, you know, leaving religion is a very isolating experience. And this is not a time when people need to be losing friends or family over this. If anything, this is a time when people need loved ones, loved ones in their lives even more.
00:48:23
Speaker
And so this a heartbreaking reality of of what often happens. I think that the way ah the way you describe that shift from um trying to convert people to, well, then it's belittling, it really is more about the person's own fears and their own um you know their own concerns that they might lose their faith with everything that comes with that. And we can circle back to terror management theory now as maybe a bit of a foundation for some of those strong feelings. And you know it mirrors many of the conversations that I had
00:48:58
Speaker
and And some of those are very painful conversations. and And I'm not going to pretend that I always handled them well because I don't think I did. And yeah arguments are not helpful.
00:49:12
Speaker
and and to And I think that one of the most helpful pieces for me from from your book was to... ah was to give me an understanding that, okay, this really is genuinely much more about this other person than is about me.
00:49:28
Speaker
So if I can have that understanding, then I can show a bit of empathy and show a bit more... um a bit more openness to the experience that they're embroiled in related to my deconversion as as as opposed to seeing it as a, okay, so this is this is just another bad thing that religion does in the world. It's just, you know, we're going to have some kind of debate now. I'm going to be, I'm going to re-embody Christopher Hitchens.
00:49:54
Speaker
See, now he gets to really be immortal because I'm going to give it give him yes right give his stuff to this guy. I'm going to take go after this person like I was Hitch. And, um, And really, that's ah that's the opposite of what's needed, because this other person is is really in an experience of of fear.
00:50:13
Speaker
and ah And I think that one of the most beneficial things that people might get out of your book is reading through the sections on the navigating relationships and how that actually ah can give them some tools or give them some even just a foundation of of understanding and peace when they experience someone who's in some of those stages of trying to reconvert you or trying to bloody you just go, okay, well, i I do understand where you're coming from.
00:50:39
Speaker
That's a very, very powerful ah gift, I think, to give people. So I was really glad that you included that in your book. Thank you. that That means a lot. I'm grateful for that.
Conclusion and Encouragement to Read Daryl's Work
00:50:49
Speaker
ah We're getting close to the end of our time.
00:50:52
Speaker
And ah while I feel like we probably could go on for a while, and i i ah i hope that you'll consider coming back because there's many other pieces to both your research and the experience of religious duns that could be discussed or described, and I, ah you know, selfishly,
00:51:12
Speaker
I enjoy conversations like this very much, especially especially with researchers that um you know that I've been following and that I respect. But before we wrap up, I want to speak directly to our listeners about your book, because you and i both know we've discussed that for many people who are deconstructing their faith or who have...
00:51:29
Speaker
you know, deconverted or even reconstructed a faith that's different and maybe more progressive, ah which could be an unsettling place to be as well, surrounded by those who think differently within a faith tradition, ah they may still be carrying pain or loneliness or the effects of trauma, even if their deconversion or deconstruction has been going on for a long time, or if they deconverted a long time ago. And you rightly point out that in your book that religion is ah central part of people's cognitive schema. It's a central part of the way they see the world and losing it or having it shaken or even changed ah can be really painful.
00:52:07
Speaker
And so I think that a lot of people who might be in that experience or might be in the middle of that or have it happen in the past may look at a book written by ah a professor from a Christian college, even if the college is focused on liberal arts and many good things come out of Hope College, ah they might hesitate to pick it up.
00:52:25
Speaker
It might seem risky or it might seem potentially triggering to them. They might even be worried that your book is an attempt to convince them to go back to a faith that was harmful for them. yeah Having read your book,
00:52:37
Speaker
and having read the research at its foundation, I would like to encourage our listeners to not be afraid to pick it up, ah to not be afraid to give it a chance. um for For their benefit, I'm a secular humanist ah and an atheist. And if people want to get really specific, we can use all kinds of fancy words that, ah you know, agnostic atheist or ontological naturalist or like whatever, like lots of like, I don't want to get too attached to labels anymore. That's...
00:53:03
Speaker
that's not really what i'm about but speaking from the perspective i'm coming from and speaking as someone who went through a long deconstruction and deconversion process of my own as someone who lost relationships many relationships as a result and as someone who had many of those dark nights of the soul along the way and and scars from the experience i want to tell people that this book was a healing experience it was validating it was insightful It was written from a supportive and empathic perspective with no hidden agenda to trick people into believing something that was harmful for them.
00:53:37
Speaker
and Even years after having left my religion, I still found this to be a beneficial book for me to read that gave me a few puzzle pieces I hadn't had before.
00:53:48
Speaker
And I think the strongest thing I could say is this. I wish I had this book 10 years ago. So if people are feeling hesitant about picking it up, I would just encourage them to give it a chance ah to find it at a local bookstore or order it in.
00:54:01
Speaker
I don't think you'll regret it because I sure didn't. I can't tell you how much that means to me. It's very, very meaningful. And I'm and very, very grateful. Thank you, Daryl, for writing it. And thank you for coming on the show. And I hope you'll come back.
00:54:14
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
00:54:19
Speaker
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00:54:38
Speaker
You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.