The Zoom room opens and a dozen boxes fill the screen. The facilitator, a licensed mental health professional, opens the session with a short lecture, not unlike what you’d find in a psychology class. After, group members participate in a guided meditation followed by a time of sharing. People discuss prayer, spiritual practices, and church hurt. Were you to drop in on the meeting, you might think you were witnessing group therapy, a grad school class, or a spiritual community.
The reality is something closer to all three of these things rolled into one. Group members come from diverse backgrounds, but they share something in common: once they were religious, now they are not.
This is the Spiritual First Responders Project (SFRP), a therapeutic model that addresses the spiritual hurts and persistent spiritual longings of those who have left religion behind. The project is the first mental health intervention of its kind. It meets the needs of an ever-growing population: the religious “dones.”
Done and spiritually homeless
In the 1970s, five percent of people in the U.S. identified as non-religious. Today that number has soared to reach nearly a third of the population. Like any group of people, the religious “nones” are not a monolith. “William James wrote about the varieties of religious experience, and this [project addresses] the varieties of non-religious experience,” says Dr. Preston Hill, a theologian and leader of the Spiritual First Responders Project.
Some religious nones have never set foot in a church. But a growing number of people with no religious affiliation weren’t always that way. More than three-quarters of the nones—and one in every five people overall—have walked away from their religious tradition. These are not the religious nones, but rather the religious dones.
The dones occupy a liminal space between religious and not. Many feel like no one sees them the way they see themselves. In religious contexts, believers tend to think that the dones are still secretly religious. Sure, they might be having a prodigal son experience, some sort of dark night of the soul—but eventually they’ll return to the flock. But the dones don’t feel that way, nor do they want to be patronized. On the other hand, the dones struggle to find a home among those who have never been religious. As Hill puts it, the nones look at the dones and think, “‘We’ve always been non-religious … [but] you smell like a religious person.’ Because they used to be, and it’s hard to get rid of that residue.”
For the dones, this lack of belonging to either group can create a deep sense of spiritual homelessness.
Their wounds tend to be invisible to people who have never experienced traumatizing religious environments. They inhabit a psychological no-man’s-land, where it seems that no one understands their experience.
To complicate things further, there’s a schism even among the dones themselves. About half leave religion for intellectual reasons, unable to reconcile their evolving worldviews with their former belief system. When a person in this camp disaffiliates from religion, they tend to move on with little to no emotional turmoil.
But the other half leaves for much thornier reasons. This group walks away because of spiritual abuse, or religious trauma, or church hurt. They leave because of a problematic label they can no longer identify with (the word “evangelical” comes to mind). Some leave due to what Hill calls “a thin view of suffering.” After experiencing a life-shaking tragedy, when their church or spiritual leaders provide pat answers that don’t acknowledge the complexity of the situation, people look for answers elsewhere.
Unlike those who disaffiliate for intellectual reasons, this second half of religious dones tends to still engage in religious practices and affiliate with religious individuals. They’re much more likely to say they believe in God and want connection with sources of transcendent meaning. But despite their longing for spiritual fulfillment and belonging, they no longer trust religious institutions, leaving them adrift and alone with their spiritual hurt and hunger.
A public health need
Spiritual struggles are some of the deepest and most painful of all conflicts. For the dones, the reasons they left church in the first place—spiritual trauma, abuses within the church, thin views of suffering—cause lingering mental health needs. Among non-religious people, those who disaffiliate from their tradition due to social and emotional reasons have the highest rates of anxiety and depression. Yet these needs aren’t being met by traditional therapy models.
Despite the fact that spirituality can be both a source of distress and a powerful source of survival, the vast majority of therapists feel untrained to address spiritual struggles with their clients. “Year after year therapists are coming out of clinical mental health training programs [feeling] underprepared,” Hill says. “They’ve only had one multicultural class, and religion and spirituality is sort of lumped into one week in that multicultural class.” Therapists are also rightly wary of imposing their own values on clients, particularly clients who’ve experienced spiritual harm.
There are few therapists trained to care for people experiencing faith deconstruction, and no social infrastructures designed to fill this gap. “It’s a spiritual public health need,” Hill says. “You have these people who don’t have access to mentally-healthy spiritual meaning-making that’s unique to their variety of non-religiousness.”
What needs to change for clinicians to feel better prepared to address these central human longings and wounds? Dr. Mary Plisco, a clinical psychologist and SFRP lead, thinks a first step is to better understand the dones’ lived experience. That’s one of the central aims of the project.
“Before we make assumptions or draw conclusions, [we want] to really hear directly from those identifying as navigating difficult faith transitions what their experience is like,” Plisco says.
Remixing spiritual practices in safe community
The Spiritual First Responders Project is the first therapeutic intervention designed with the dones’ particular needs in mind. Launched at the beginning of 2024, the two-year project comprises a team of two theologians, five psychologists, and 20 mental health counselors. The team hopes to better understand the spiritual desires of the dones, and to gather evidence for the efficacy of spiritual practices fused with group-based mental healthcare. The ultimate goal is to help people who are spiritually struggling to discover a path toward spiritual flourishing.
The groups meet virtually over the course of eight to ten weeks. Participants are largely based in North America—though some hail from as far as Finland—and come primarily from Christian traditions. Each group is led by a licensed mental health professional. “That’s actually a key ingredient here,” Hill explains. “Because what it communicates to people is, ‘These aren’t well-meaning religious folks. No one’s trying to reconvert you. No one’s trying to deconvert you. These are people trained at the highest levels of mental health standards.’”
Each session opens with a half hour of education. The group’s clinician introduces a concept in psychology that’s pertinent to the group’s process, such as Dan Siegel’s window of tolerance. Afterward, participants are invited to ask questions and discuss ideas. Dr. Hillary McBride is a psychologist, researcher, and one of the project’s clinicians. She explains that each meeting’s education component is designed to give participants language to articulate what they’re going through and to better understand past experiences. “In many faith or spiritual contexts, people were deprived of accurate scientific and psychological information which would help them identify their feelings, symptoms, understand what creates psychological injuries, and where to go to get support,” McBride says. The knowledge participants gain in these sessions can help them understand what happened and express how it made them feel.
The next portion of the meeting is spent exploring an active spiritual practice. All practices are meant to be invitational rather than prescriptive, and participants can decline to join in at any point. For example, the group might practice lectio divina, a close reading of a certain text. Or they might take part in a guided meditation. Facilitators use inclusive language whenever possible. Rather than asking, “What is God saying to you?” They might ask, “What do you notice while reading this text?” Some practices engage spiritual texts from new angles, while others work with material that’s not traditionally considered sacred, such as a Maya Angelou poem. Hill calls these kinds of activities “remixed” spiritual practices. They are recognizable to participants, but not identical to their religious tradition. Ideally, this allows people to engage in the practice without experiencing a trauma response.
Much of the power comes from giving participants a chance to remix familiar practices in a communal context. Another key factor is spiritual autonomy. Everyone is free to decline to answer or participate at any point during the session. The autonomy itself is corrective for a lot of people, says McBride. Group therapy helps diffuse power, which is particularly important for people who have experienced high-control and authoritarian religious contexts.
“For people who were never able to say ‘no’, or ‘pass,’ or ‘I don’t want to’ in the context of a spiritual group—or were never able to do so without it being followed with judgment, punishment, shaming, or rejection—the ability to have a boundary and stay connected is completely novel, and thus liberatory,” says McBride.
Receiving mental healthcare in a group where autonomy is clearly communicated and upheld, authority is decentralized, and participation is chosen by each individual can be a powerful corrective experience when it comes to dealing with spiritual content.
The gatherings conclude with an hour of sharing and active listening, during which participants are invited to talk about their experiences and to witness the same in others. This time of open-ended discussion offers a sense of connection and community to people who feel spiritually homeless.
Research shows that the biggest thing de-churched people report missing from their religious lives is the community. “It’s pretty univocal,” Hill says. “They say, ‘For all the crap, there really was a community. I miss that sense of belonging… and brunch and SoulCycle just doesn’t quite replace it.’” After all, there’s very little in our culture that can replicate a multigenerational gathering of people tied together by something ancient and huge.
The SFRP group setting is designed to create a sense of belonging among people who feel unmoored from their community. “In our SFRP groups, I have observed that the two most significant therapeutic factors at play in creating healing experiences are spiritual autonomy and connection to others,” says McBride. Clinically, group settings are also important for trauma work. Trauma makes a person feel as though they are cut off from others, so receiving care in a communal context is an important facet of post-traumatic recovery. The groups offer a safe space to voice doubts, discomfort, and loneliness in the presence of others, with an understanding that voicing these feelings won’t result in shaming, punishment, or disconnection.
Acknowledging grief, reaching for growth
Project leaders hope that this therapeutic model will empower participants to build a capacity for spiritually-healthy meaning-making long after the groups conclude.
For those who live with religious trauma, project leaders hope that SFRP equips them to encounter artifacts from their prior religious identity—whether that’s external, like a passage of scripture, or internal, like their own religious residue—without the force of a trauma response. Before participants can begin the work of mourning and reconnecting, the team wants them to learn the skills needed to contain and regulate trauma responses. The goal is for someone to encounter a religious artifact with a kind of acceptance, acknowledging that something is part of their story, and they are now choosing a different path forward for themselves.
Ideally, the project will help the team compile a catalog of evidence-based practices that have proven to be effective for this population, which mental health professionals can then integrate into their own therapeutic approach. But the goal isn’t necessarily to furnish participants with a shiny new set of replacement spiritual practices. Rather, the first step is to do foundational repair work on the damage caused by spiritual abuse, church hurt, and religious trauma.
Mentally-healthy spiritual fulfillment for people who have left their religious contexts, says Plisco, looks like “moving from a fear-based experience with religion, or institutions promoting religion or spirituality, to one that is more love-based, acceptance-based, focused on connection and grace.” Ultimately, Plisco hopes these groups equip participants with the language they need to articulate what they’ve been through, in the context of a safe community. Healing results from participants finding the ability “to say whatever might have been their experience, and what they’re hoping or longing for—and for that to be witnessed and affirmed by others.”
McBride says that, for some group members, part of the healing process includes feeling grief over what they’ve been through and what they’ve left behind. Sometimes it takes finding spiritual meaning on the other side of religious trauma that allows a person to finally acknowledge their grief over what happened, what they lost, and the wounds they still carry. Despite this sense of loss that many religious dones feel, McBride sees their journey as a hopeful one, pointing to the human drive to seek safety, healing, and transformation.
Many religious dones have experienced spiritual harm—yet they continue to reach for spiritual flourishing. McBride likens this impulse to a flower reaching for sunlight through the cracks in a sidewalk:
“It will always be an undisputedly hopeful thing that people, in spite of the injuries or shame and control used to suppress them, keep longing, keep looking, keep reaching.”
Annelise Jolley is a journalist and essayist who writes about place, food, ecology, and faith for outlets such as National Geographic, The Atavist, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Find her at annelisejolley.com.
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