Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion

Consensus Volume 46 Issue 2 Lutherans and the Nicene Creed Article 13 7-25-2025 Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion Allen Jorgenson Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Jorgenson, Allen (2025) "Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion," Consensus: Vol. 46: Iss. 2, Article 13. DOI: 10.51644/BQWI4040 Available at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol46/iss2/13 This Book Reviews is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact . Jorgenson: Done: How to Flourish Book Review Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion Daryl R. Van Tongeren Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2024 D aryl R. Van Tongeren has written an important book for all who are interested in people who have become religiously disaffected, which he describes as “a practical guide for people who are undergoing religious deconstruction or change” (p. 11). In so doing, he draws upon years of work as an experimental social psychologist. And while the book truly does feel like a conversation between him and religious “dones”, others can surely benefit from overhearing it. So, who are the “dones”? Unlike religious “nones”, the dones are people who were previously religious and have taken leave of religion. This is a significant population. A recent Pew report indicates that one in three young adults in the US are increasingly likely to leave their religious homes (p. 4). The dones sometimes simply walk away from any expression of spirituality. For some, religious deidentification also involves religious reconstruction, as leaving is followed by a reshaping of a spiritual identity (p. 7). Van Tongeren’s interest in parsing out the particular experiences of the dones as over against that of the nones, the spiritual but not religious, etc., is significant because it is often thought that non-religious identity is monolithic (p. 87). Dones face an especially acute existential crisis and task in that their religious issue is not the lack of answers so much as the loss of answers; this differs from the currently and never religious (p. 126). In looking at the phenomenon of belief across a spectrum, I was especially intrigued to discover that extensive research has indicated that religious folk prefer dones to never religious folk, while those never religious are suspicious of dones and dones dislike religious people and “strongly favor the never religious” (p. 165). As a guidebook, this text is especially interested in the existential task of deconstructing religious faith. Philosophically astute readers should be aware that this term is not being used in some Derridean sense (although it might draw upon that in some ways from time to time with some thinkers) but rather it has become a way to reference critical analysis of religious life, thought, and practice that dismantles a religious way of being, or components thereof. Van Tongeren notes that this task is often precipitated by the four horsemen of religion's apocalypse: cultural stagnation, religious trauma, simplistic views of suffering, and the problematic associations that come with the label “religious” (p. 20). His studies have demonstrated that certain characteristics have served as predictors of departure from religion, including: intensity of dissonance between what religion claims to be and what it is in the experience of dones, the severity of trauma experienced from religion, the style of belief (many references in the text are to the experiences of the so-called exvangelicals), and the personality or demographic features (pp. 39–40). The book is enhanced by his use of personal examples, which makes it less like a guide and more, at times, like a letter. I was especially touched by the strong use of the personal example of his brother, whose young and tragic death evoked theodicies from Christians that really seemed to be less about caring for the grieving and more about marshalling a defense of the divine. These kinds of experiences result in religious trauma for many dones. In Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2025 1 Consensus, Vol. 46, Iss. 2 [2025], Art. 13 previous studies, Van Tongeren has discovered that this trauma distorts people’s image of God, troubles their spirituality, makes it problematic to accept grace, and problematizes relationship issues with the sometime-concomitant complication of being unable to set appropriate boundaries (p. 49). The task of deconstruction is triggered by such experiences. Interestingly, Van Tongeren notes that dones can be fundamentalist in how they hold new beliefs (p. 142). He attributes this to religious residue, which points in part to a change in what people hold to be true while remaining unchanged in how beliefs are held. He notes that, “deidentification without altering religious behavior may not be a tenable long-term solution” (p. 74). The response to leaving religion can span the spectrum marked by deemphasis, antipathy, and secular spirituality—the latter marked by the replacement of religious ways of being with what he names religious adjacent practices or beliefs (p. 77). People who make meaning using the Enneagram, for example, or who replace a pastor with a spiritual guru evidence a kind of religious residue. These are not necessarily bad, but they can be problematic for some. An interesting doctrinal residual his research has found is that of hell and the devil—which, his studies indicate, continue to trouble many (p. 94). He notes that this might be related to the psychological observation that we “prioritize negative information” (p. 96). This propensity to religious residue (especially potent in ex-vangelicals) bespeaks a human desire for meaning and also reflects, I think, that religion has met deep needs in people even while it has been destructive for too many. In light of this, people hurt by religion seem to have the options of reconstruction or deidentification (p. 66). Those who do the latter find themselves leaving religion by disbelieving, disengaging, discontinuing requirements, and/or disaffiliating (p. 68). In discussing meaning, Van Tongeren notes that when we lose meaning in one area of life we bolster it in others to compensate (p. 107). At the same time, when meaning is ruptured, we either adjust beliefs to fit reality or “change our interpretation of reality to fit beliefs” (p. 108). Attention to meaning, in his estimation, is not a part of religious residue (p. 122) but a part of the human condition, which can in fact be compromised by religious residue, which advances the danger of dones seeing themselves as possessing a special truth resonating in echo chambers that replicate the fundamentalism that they seemingly escaped (p. 145). Reconstruction for those done with religi (...truncated)