You Need Theology:

Why Spiritual But Not Religious folks should consider the sacred.

I'll be sharing my Masters of Divinity thesis here in chunks over the next few weeks.

Should this go on a Substack? Probably. I don't feel like hooking up a whole new platform though, so enjoy the pleasure of some deep & meaningful time on LinkedIn.

This does illuminate lots of the thinking behind Soul Work Coaching , which is how I try to bring the treasures of seminary out into the world of social justice to figure out what, if anything, they mean to people who are attempting with all their might and life force and elbow grease and night sweats and programs and campaigns and actions and OKRs and strategic plans and retreats to heal our world through organizing, movement and nonprofit work.

So in a way, maybe it's meant to be posted here, in the capitalist wilds of LinkedIn?

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You need theology! That’s right, you.

You who wandered away from church, nonplussed, maybe even a little relieved, when you were 12 because your soccer games conflicted on Sundays.

And all of the rest of you too, folks who are “non-binary with God,” (thank you Eduardo Placer for this term), haughty atheists, traumatized exvangelicals, and all of you in-betweeners avoiding organized religion like the plague.

Or maybe a better way to put this is: you’re already doing theology.

You’ve been stringing together thoughts about the sacred (Nature? or God?) and what you worship in order to make your way through life. So why not make that process conscious? Then you can make some active choices.

That sounds better than living on autopilot in this age of catastrophe and nihilism.

I ended up attending seminary at age 30, sort of by accident, as a “spiritual but not religious person.”

When my friend Claire Goebel first texted me suggesting that I should check out seminary, I was offended. I imagined a bible-toting, MAGA-loving Liberty University student. What Claire?! That’s what you think of me?

She told me to scroll up in our text history. I pressed the little “media” button and it was true: in the nine months since I’d left my job as the executive director of a youth education organizing nonprofit, I’d sent Claire a long list of links about faith-based activism and religious perspectives on social justice issues.

The latest was from a womanist pastor in Nebraska who parsed Kobe Bryant’s public legacy using words like “repentance” and “atonement.” Her take was the most nuanced I’d read in that painful and complicated news cycle. The terms of art she used attended to so many layers of relationship and ethics – what’s between you and God, you and someone you’ve harmed, you and your family, you and the public, you and the past, present, and afterlife.

I googled seminary. What was my search term? “Leftie seminary?” “Multi religious, no pressure to convert seminary?” or “Seminary when you’re not religious? Seminary without judgement?”

Union Theological Seminary , in my city, New York, popped up.

Within a month, I’d visited, toured, taken a weekend class, sat in on a class about different Buddhist ethical ideals and had a follow up coffee with that professor (hi Simran Jeet Singh ) and mapped out the entire degree planner. When I walked down the old, wooden hallway of Union’s campus, I felt deeply that there was something I had to learn there. I talked to friends about the opportunity cost and financial irrationality of grad school.

I filtered my network on LinkedIn to see who’d gone to Divinity school and saw a list of suspiciously nice and deep people whom I’d always gravitated towards, unknowingly (hi Andrew Nurkin ).

I surveyed those folks: does seminary complement community organizing and nonprofit work?

One friend shared: “I actually don’t know how anyone organizes without theology and divinity school.” Intriguing. That was Will Fuller MATS, M. Ed.

I also asked everyone at Union – alumni, professors, the tour guide: am I going to have to convert? Can I stay as noncommittal and mixed up as I am?

Most people who go to seminary have a very clear religious tradition and affiliation, and a lot less confusion about their relationship to religion.

I shared the idea of applying to seminary with my boyfriend and family as a test balloon and the conversations were even more awkward as I anticipated. “Are you a born-again Christian!?” “Have pod people abducted you?”

I hadn’t ever connected on a spiritual level with Christianity or any religion. Until applying to Union, I lived mostly as an agnostic or a functional atheist, engaging in a sporadic meditation practice, reading some nightstand Buddhism books, and joining Jewish friends for shabbats and holidays. Going to seminary would be a massive change.

I got excited. I had a moment of “knowing” that I’d figure out a way to afford tuition one spring day, on the sidewalk outside of my apartment in Brooklyn. Maybe that was a moment of divine clarity if God bothers to weigh in on matters of generally very privileged peoples' higher education funds?

As I’ve trundled -- okay, I loved it all, and found it almost unrelentingly scintillating, but some semesters we had 9 Moodle submissions due each week and that definitely felt like a trundle -- through this three-year-long Masters of Divinity degree, I've been wondering how I can bring the extremely cool, mind-bending-and-expanding, spirit-blossoming ideas from seminary back to my community who are mostly “spiritual but not religious” millennials, deeply invested in social justice work, living in the U.S., and to a tee, extremely unlikely to go anywhere near a seminary. Like might take a different route to avoid the block the seminary is on. Most of my people have deeply estranged relationships with organized religion.

I want to respond to the spiritual needs and theological thinking of other mixed-up (and often insecure) “spiritual but not religious” people like myself.

And this isn’t only a personal passion project: we are part of a phenomenon, and part of the "Religious Nones," the fastest growing religious group in the United States who don't claim any religion. A third of millennials identify as “Spiritual but Not Religious” (SBNR) according to Pew.

Enter this thesis, which is an attempt to digest some of the coolest things I learned in seminary. It’s a nerdy and earnest theology experiment, an invitation and a love letter to SBNRs.

I’ll straddle two worlds: an informal conversation with you, and the world of academia and theology where so many extraordinary ideas are waiting for us, out of our usual reach.

This thesis is built around a series of questions.

The first: for those of us who are SBNR, what can theological thinking and ritual add to our lives, our work and our dreams about justice?

I don’t care if you are “religious." I have no conversion agenda. I just want to give you enough footholds to start to think about what you consider sacred.

I’ll take you through the building blocks of theological thinking as they clicked in my head over the semesters, starting with key terms and vocabulary, then moving through a survey of what’s been written about us, and then launch you into a collision course with theological ideas that might apply to your own life and your justice work.

I hope that by the end of this, you’ll understand how your ethics and commitment to justice are spiritual and theological, and you’ll be motivated to keep exploring how thinking about the sacred & what's beyond the material realm can strengthen your social justice work.

I also want to make you laugh enough to put down your hackles around religion and feel safe and welcome engaging in theology.

Again: no religious conversion agenda! I am not qualified to convert you to anything even if I wanted to! You have to go through ordination as well as seminary for that! Which I didn't do. Because I don't want to convert you.

The second question is: What is theologically generative about being SBNR? Will we all live secular, atheistic lives, devoid of any meaning-making about the sacred, just because we don’t fall neatly into one religion? Does my SBNR-ness make my soul shallow? Yikes. I hope not.

Are there liberatory and ethical possibilities within our (a)religious identities? Lots of religious leaders fear that we’ll be the downfall of society. Lots of academics and theologians think that we’re vapid.

I suspect that you and I, as ethically driven, activist, social justice SBNRs are up to a more interesting project than we’ve been given credit for.

I also want to set the table for us to enter into dialogue and engagement with religious people who share many of our ethical commitments.

And the third question is: what is our role in the project of theology, e.g. humans’ words and thoughts about the sacred, as SBNR people?

What can y/our specific, out-of-bounds spirituality contribute both to social justice movements and to our human understanding of what's sacred?

How should theologians, the folks who devote their lives to studying divinity and religion, whether in the academy or as faith leaders serving congregations every single weekend, engage with us heathens? And why and how should we talk to them?

To explore these questions, I’ll share reflections from my personal experiences as a Religious None-turned-SBNR person and put them into conversation with the ideas I bumped into at Union Theological Seminary.

I’ll also include insights that come out of from working with over 100 SBNR millennials who value social justice as a leadership coach for the past three years.

Thank you for your trust to read this, even if you don’t know what the word theology means (yet).

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Big huge thanks are due to my advisors and professors John Thatamanil and Claudio Carvalhaes . They are so brilliant and everyone should read their books, listen to their lectures and podcasts, and go take Union classes with them!