Religious, But Not Spiritual

On atheist churchgoers

It’s 2025, and you’ve all heard of “spiritual, but not religious.” Now, get ready to meet the new “religious, but not spiritual.”

The British author Louise Perry has applied this little reversal to herself, with some gentle self-deprecation. She’s talked about how after shopping around for a church that wasn’t insufferably woke (in England, this takes some searching), she and her husband finally settled on something, not because they were having a “Come to Jesus” moment, but because they feel it’s important to give their children a Christian heritage. As a child, Louise barely went to church at all, barring the occasional school carol service, didn’t read the Bible, and didn’t have any Christian friends that she can recall. By her own description in conversation with my friend Justin Brierley, she became “an annoying teenage atheist,” just in time to read The God Delusion and think it was the cleverest thing ever.

But Louise doesn’t actually think she’s “a natural atheist.” If she had been born centuries ago, she thinks she just would have believed, like everyone else. It’s only now, as a child of jaded modernity, that she finds she can’t flip the switch in her “disenchanted brain” and embrace all this supernatural stuff. Still, like Tom Holland, she can’t deny that Christianity is the wellspring for all her humanist values, all the work she’s ever done in her career to protect women and girls. She didn’t set out to write a book that would more or less reinvent the Christian sex ethic from scratch, but at the end of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, there she was. So here she is now, dutifully going to church because it’s good for the kids, because that’s all she can do. “Some weeks I believe, some weeks I don’t.” But maybe her children will.

Earlier this year, I heard some similar sentiments from Carl Benjamin, otherwise known as “Sargon of Akkad.” Our short chat with Brierley, recorded in London, is here for the curious. It wasn’t the world’s most organized chat, and I had to more or less follow the flow with zero prep time, but it was rather interesting. Benjamin’s public profile is quite different from Perry’s in various ways, most obviously in the fact that she writes on women’s issues from a soft feminist stance, while Benjamin is, er, stridently anti-feminist. Yet when it comes to religion, they fall in basically the same place. Benjamin is also very concerned that his children go to church and see themselves as Christians, but he himself just isn’t the “believing” sort. Like others of his generation, he feels like a man in a wheelchair being commanded to walk. In the same way, Perry wants to say it’s not so simple to take the advice a Christian friend offered her over coffee: “Why don’t you just believe and stop worrying about it?”

I hear an echo of Pascal’s hypothetical exasperated non-believer, in the passage introducing his famous Wager. This imaginary interlocutor has patiently listened to Pascal’s probability calculus, but he’s not buying it: “I have my hands tied and my mouth closed; I am forced to wager, and am not free. I am not released, and am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?”

I have some answers, but they’re not quite the same as Pascal’s.