Godless Spirituality

Rediscovering wonder and belonging after leaving doctrine behind

I miss my grandmother most in the early morning. She, too, was an early riser. I’d hear her in the kitchen. There were muted shuffles as bread bags were opened, coffee was prepared, and the unmistakable sound of her chair creaking as she settled to enjoy her coffee before the world awoke.

Then silence. Complete silence. There was comfort in knowing she was still there in that small kitchen, as I lay half-awake, listening for those familiar sounds that felt like a warm blanket lulling me back to sleep. Sleep would indeed come for me, and when I awoke again, there’d be more energy in the air. The sounds were louder now. Pans rattled, bacon crackled, and delicious smells wafted my way.

But none of that is what awakened me from second sleep. It would be the gospel music. Ol’ time gospel music. Predictable in its sound and melody. Quartets filled with men and the occasional woman.

I once was lost in sin, but Jesus took me in.
And then a little light from heaven fills my soul.

The message in these songs was simple: love God, love Jesus, have a personal relationship with Jesus, Jesus solved all problems, and was your best friend.

Jesus…Jesus…Jesus. That’s all you needed. Nothing else mattered, and that was enough.

In my 1960s childhood, it did feel like nothing else mattered, and it was indeed enough. It felt safe. Simple. Straightforward. Logical. That feeling carried over into all areas of my life, including how I would see my relationship with church leaders, family members, and anyone in a position of authority.

It also impacted how I viewed beliefs. Simple. Straightforward. Logical. The preacher certainly made it seem that way. The sermons were filled with verses condemning the unfaithful, ensuring the faithful of a place in heaven next to Jesus, and warning of the dire consequences if I didn’t repent and draw near to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Simple. Straightforward. Logical.

Until it wasn’t.

When I opened the pages of Scripture on my own, the portrait that lived there did not match the portrait I had been handed. It wasn’t simple, straightforward, or logical at all. The scriptures contained a messier, frightening, and sometimes unimaginably cruel God than the sermons allowed. The mismatch lodged in me like a splinter. It hurt every time I pressed my palm against it.

That road from believing faith was simple, straightforward, and logical to acknowledging the questions, leaving church, and then eventually leaving Christianity is told in my book and in these writings.

But leaving Christianity isn’t the end of my deconstructing, but it also doesn’t encompass it. For years I had said “I left behind the angry yet loving, vengeful yet forgiving, all-knowing yet changes his mind, a gray-haired old man who just somehow happens to hate all of the same people that my church told me I had to hate and who had time to point his finger down here to ensure me of my favorite parking space because I believed the right way while he ignored the desperate and urgent prayers rising to cure the baby of cancer God.”

That God.
The Christians who cling to that weaponized portrait of divinity can have him.

Once I let go of the anger of time wasted and the beliefs that isolated me from a world I had been told was evil, space opened. The tight coil of panic began to loosen. I had room to grieve the years of obedience, to name the harms that had been dressed up as piety, and to feel the small, surprising swell of relief. With that relief came a different kind of gratitude: not gratitude for what had been taken away, but gratitude for having a life to reclaim. I learned to inhabit my body without permission slips. I remembered my breath. I learned how to choose.

Although I left church and their angry God, then left Christianity, the calling toward reconciling the human experience to something sacred and spiritual did not vanish. It softened. Gone was the rigid demand for doctrinal assent and public performance. What remained was quieter, humbler, and more human. It wanted attention. It didn’t ask anything of me other than my presence. It invited me to learn without pre-conceived notions and be present with others without prejudice.

That is the work of deconstructing. It peels away the layers of indoctrination until what is left is a human who doesn’t rely on superiority narratives to feel better than and worthy. It seeks connection through humility. It is unafraid if answers don’t come, for the sacred resides in the questions.

For some, it compels them to discover a new spiritual community beyond the rigid dogma of their past. For some, it spirals them entirely out of the grasp of religion and into the empowerment of atheism, where they are at peace with being the keepers of their fate.

For me, it became a godless spirituality.
Thank the stars, I am finally home.

A spirituality unafraid to ask questions

“Godless spirituality” may sound like a contradiction because we’ve been taught for generations that spirituality requires a God or some outside, supernatural guarantor. The hard pivot for me was realizing that much of what passed for spiritual conversation was really an exercise in defending a belief system that needed me to comply with it.

That’s why I started learning from other teachers whose deconstruction had taken them far away from their Christian indoctrination. I share that journey in my book. Since joining TikTok in 2020, I began listening to debates between atheists and Christian apologists. Those conversations often reveal the same dynamic—the apologist insisting the Bible is proof, the atheist carving out space for honesty. The tropes repeat: “Breath proves God,” or “The Bible proves God, therefore God proves the Bible.”

For me, these debates show that God cannot be proven by rhetoric, scripture, or emotion. Once you stop demanding that kind of proof, you’re left with a different and richer question: how do I live when I no longer believe in the God of my Christian heritage?

That question opens the door to a spirituality grounded not in apologetics, but in practice, care, wonder, responsibility, and the slow work of being human together.

A spirituality rooted in awe

The physicist Carl Sagan once reminded us that every atom in our bodies was forged in the heart of a dying star. We are literally stardust. That knowledge alone can stir awe, reverence, and humility. These are the very postures religion has tried to claim as its own. But we don’t need a God designed by humans to remind us we belong to the universe. The universe itself is a reminder enough.

Astronomer Rebecca Elson captured this beautifully in her poem:

“No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there.”
(From A Responsibility to Awe, 2001)

This is spirituality. Belonging. Oneness. Wonder.

A spirituality rooted in mortality

Religious systems often promise immortality — heaven, resurrection, eternal life.

But death still comes.

Psychologists call it “mortality salience” (the heightened awareness of our own death). This knowledge often compels us to seek meaning beyond our finite lives. This is also incredibly shocking for those of us who were taught that suffering on earth will be rewarded by heavenly rest. I’m certainly not saying that heaven doesn’t exist. I’m saying that I no longer let it be the only reason I chase meaning in life or find proof that God exists.

Spirituality can be understood as our way of living with that reality. We seek ways to transcend death not through magical thinking, but through symbolic immortality: the good we leave behind, the love we give, the art we create, the causes we fight for, the world we leave better because we were in it.

This is godless, yes.
But not meaningless.

Michael McGhee, in Spirituality for the Godless, describes spirituality as “an empathetic and moral personhood that tries to cope in a suffering world.” His invitation is not to cling to supernatural promises but to lean into mindful humanity, poetry, philosophy, and moral action.

He asks simply: How can we live well, how can we live now?

That question matters more to me now than whether heaven or hell awaits.

A spirituality rooted in self-transcendence

There is also the spirituality of self-inquiry, of peering into consciousness itself.

Meditation, for instance, reveals how fleeting and fragile the “self” really is. Thoughts rise and fall. Feelings pass. The “me” I grasp at is not as solid as I once believed. This is what philosopher Sam Harris calls “waking up,” not into belief, but into awareness.

This kind of spirituality requires no God. It asks only for honesty, curiosity, and presence. And it gifts us with humility and compassion, because once we see how porous and fragile our sense of self is, we also see how deeply we belong to one another.

Godless, yet sacred

So where do I stand now?

I stand godless. But I am not empty. I am full. Full of awe for the cosmos and all of creation even if I do not fully understand its origin. Full of reverence for this earth. Full of gratitude for the freedom to claim my life as my own.

Spirituality for me is no longer about appeasing a deity or defending a doctrine. It is about connection — to one another, to the earth, to the mystery of consciousness itself. It is about mortality. It is about facing the reality of death and choosing to leave behind something that matters. It is about transcendence, not into heaven, but into the depths of this present moment.

Godless spirituality is not a void.
It is an opening.

It doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to seek to understand the mysteries of creation, or ask questions about who – or what – God is.

For now, all I know is God isn’t.

God isn’t what I was taught to believe, even if some of my fondest memories of childhood harken back to a time when a grandmother found solace in prayers that were never answered, (she struggled financially her entire life) as she sang “I once was lost in sin, but Jesus took me in” at the top of her lungs in her unmistakable contralto voice.

In this space, two things can be true.

My grandmother loved me so deeply that she instilled in me a deep longing to understand God for myself, and that love gave me permission to reject her God.

That space is sacred.

It is the space where love, wonder, and responsibility meet.

And maybe, for today, that is enough.