What are the psychological stages of leaving religion? How can mourning religion lead to new forms of faith, meaning, and community?
David Morris, PhD, is a publisher, author, and psychologist of religion. In his new book, Lost Faith and Wandering Souls, he treats the loss of faith as if it were any other kind of loss, and asks, what if we learned to mourn? He turns to psychoanalytic psychology for its interpretive power. With the concepts of mourning, pining, and play, he shines a light on a path forward. He and Brad discuss the zig-zag process of leaving religion and discovering new forms of meaning and hope - what often feels like going between feelings of numbness, self-recrimination, and wandering to playfulness, self-agency, and belonging. If we can feel our loss, he argues, then we can rediscover meaning making.
David Morris, Lost Faith and Wandering Souls: https://lakedrivebooks.com/lost-faith-and-wandering-souls/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today I have a great guest, and that is David Morris, a man who bears many titles.
And I'm going to talk about all those in a second, but I'll just say first, David, thanks for joining me.
Hey, it's really great to be here.
I've been a fan first, Brad.
Well, that's awesome, and it's always flattering when people say that, and I never know what to say except for thanks for listening and thanks for tuning in.
We're here to talk about your new book, Lost Faith and Wandering Souls, A Psychology of Disillusionment, Mourning, and the Return of Hope.
Love the title, first of all.
I love the whole project because I think it's a project we've needed for a long time and there's so many people who are going to benefit from it.
But let me talk about you for a minute.
So, David, this is going to not make sense for a second, but it will in the end, I promise.
This is what I tell my class all the time.
So I talk about the ocean a lot.
It's really important to me.
I love surfing.
It's like a big outlet for me.
And in the surfing community, there's often people called like a water men or a water woman, a water person.
And what that means is, yes, you're a good surfer, but you have all these skills in the water.
You might be a great free diver, a great like winds surfer.
You might be a really good paddle board or paddle board from one Island to another 50 miles, right?
You're probably maybe trained as a lifeguard and you can like Save people's lives and help people with water safety.
You are at home in the water, right?
And that title is a very revered title in the surfing community.
Well, I feel like in the book community, you have really reached the level of waterman because you are a publisher.
You've been in publishing for a long time.
You're now a publisher at your own house, Lake Drive Books.
You're an agent at Hyponymous, and you're doing amazing work helping authors get their projects published.
And you're an author, and we're here to talk about your own book.
So I often imagine someone like you wearing a checkered suit with a pocket square and some really hip glasses because you've earned it.
When some people wear that outfit, I'm like, you have not earned it.
But David, I think you have just because you've hit all the marks when it comes to a man of You know, do you feel that way?
Do you wake up and feel, you know, that in your chest or, or am I just pumping you up?
You know, that's the ironic thing.
Like I never planned on being in publishing.
I thought I was going to be a psychologist and a counselor.
And so, yeah.
And in these days, I feel like I just need to morph into a new Alex and I want to put on like this, I want like the, the all black thing going on.
Okay.
Okay.
But I haven't, I don't know if I can do that.
I'm, I don't know if I look good that way.
Well, we'll get you a stylist and we'll just try out the new looks and see what's going on.
So, alright, enough of my ridiculousness.
Of course, we're here to talk about your new book.
And the reason I love this book is in many ways, you know, you call it a psychology of disillusionment, mourning, and the return of hope.
But in many ways, to me, this is a psychology of deconstruction.
You're helping people understand what happens.
When they lose their faith, what are the psychological mechanisms and the steps that people go through?
And it's a really big and important issue because so many folks are undergoing this process as we speak.
And I know you have personal experience with this.
I know that you have some kind of personal tie in here.
And so if you don't mind, I'd love to kind of start there.
You connect the book in some ways to your own faith deconstruction or at least your own sort of faith journey, I'll put it.
I'll let you choose the words.
Before we get into the kind of like very, in some ways, technical aspects of the book, the psychology and the various, you know, the various approaches there, I'm just wondering what is your own background?
I mean, you talk about losing your faith twice.
What happened the first time?
Let's start there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I grew up an evangelical preacher's kid and You know, I think I just, you know, as I went to college, let's just go there right away.
I just sort of like followed my brain out of evangelicalism, really.
You know, I took courses.
I wanted to be in psychology.
So, you know, that in itself is sort of certainly by the evangelical community seen as an intrusion onto their ground.
But I was just doing it, you know, naively and because it was interesting to me.
And then I took courses on religion.
I love studying world religions.
You know, just even reading sacred texts from other traditions, it's like a thing of curiosity, you know?
It's just pure curiosity.
And we don't even approach our own Bible that way sometimes, because we've got so much baggage as we approach it.
You know, and just as I continued to study and learn and get into some philosophy a little bit, you know, it just, it just, it just kind of hit me one day on a college campus.
You know, I wouldn't say I had a traumatic experience.
I wouldn't say that, that it was, you know, just really, really tough, but I really felt a palpable sense of loss.
You know, I just, I remember being sad.
Like, what did I, you know, what have I been believing in all this time?
And, you know, over time I started to put language to that.
One of the things is I just realized that, you know, it's not just a developmental thing.
It's more than that.
It's more than just youthful overcoming and growing up from a logical thought point of view.
It's like, no, I was told some stuff that just, I don't know why I was told that stuff.
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