The Practice Without the Pretense: On the New Religiosity

I’ve been watching with growing concern, and I’ll admit, mounting irritation, as more and more otherwise intelligent people in my circles execute what can only be described as an intellectual collapse back into traditional religious belief. These aren’t the credulous masses; these are people who’ve read their Dawkins, who understand evolutionary psychology, who can discourse fluently on Bayesian epistemology. And yet, here they are, suddenly finding Jesus, or rediscovering Catholic “tradition,” or worst of all, cobbling together New Age spiritual frameworks, all while concocting elaborate rationalizations for why Bronze Age metaphysics are actually sophisticated theology that we moderns are too spiritually impoverished to comprehend.

This is yet another sign we are headed for a new Dark Ages. Living in our technological golden age, we’ve forgotten what history teaches: societies regularly collapse backward into worlds of ignorance, stasis, and superstition. The Enlightenment project isn’t a done deal, it’s a fragile achievement that can be lost.

What makes this particularly maddening is that there’s a simple move available, an evolutionarily-coherent path that would let us keep what actually works while jettisoning the metaphysical baggage that weighs down rational discourse and enables all manner of tribal pathology. The difference between practices and beliefs should be obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

The Practice-Belief Confusion

Religious traditions bundle together two fundamentally different categories of human activity. First, practices: embodied, social, rhythmic activities that are deeply satisfying and psychologically regulating. Singing together. Moving in synchrony. Gathering weekly for structured social interaction. Engaging in contemplative practices. Creating space for reflection on meaning and mortality. Performing rituals that mark life transitions. These practices work on our nervous systems, our social bonding mechanisms, our sense-making apparatus. They’re adaptive. They’re beneficial to human flourishing. The evidence is overwhelming.

Second, beliefs: propositional claims about the nature of reality. Virgin births. Resurrections. Transubstantiation. Eternal souls. A tripartite deity. Karma and reincarnation. Celestial spheres. These are metaphysical assertions that posit mechanisms and entities for which we have no empirical evidence, and in many cases directly contradict what we do know about how reality works. They’re not adaptive in the sense of tracking truth; they’re adaptive (when they are) only as social coordination mechanisms or existential coping strategies.

Traditional religions weld these together. They say: you want the benefits of the practices? You must swallow the beliefs. It’s a package deal. And for most of human history, in small-scale societies without alternatives, that was perhaps understandable. But we’re not in that world anymore. We have the cognitive tools to unbundle the package. And yet people keep buying the whole thing, like they’re trapped in a prior about how these things must work.

The Vervaeke Framework

John Vervaeke, in his superb Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, has given us a much better framework: the “ecology of practices.” Vervaeke understands something crucial that the new religious converts seem to have forgotten in their enthusiasm: practices are the active ingredient. They’re what’s actually doing the work on human consciousness and community.

An ecology of practices is a structured set of activities, contemplative practices, communal practices, embodied practices, dialogical practices, that are mutually reinforcing and that address the full range of human needs for meaning, connection, growth, and transcendence. The genius of this framing is that it’s naturalistic. It doesn’t require you to believe that the universe has a cosmic purpose or that a particular first-century rabbi was ontologically unique. It only requires you to understand that we’re embedded in biological, social, and cultural systems, and that certain practices help us navigate those systems with greater wisdom and flourishing.

Want the benefits of contemplative prayer? Great, we can call it meditation and strip out the theistic framework. Want weekly communal gathering? Excellent, let’s create a Sunday Assembly where we sing songs together, listen to a lecture on ideas worth grappling with, and then discuss it over lunch. Want ritual and ceremony? Let’s craft secular rituals that mark life passages with gravitas and beauty. Want a framework for ethical development? Philosophy has been in that business for 2,500 years without requiring supernatural enforcement.

The practices work because of how human nervous systems evolved, how human societies cohere, how meaning-making operates in the human brain. They don’t work because an invisible being is listening to your prayers or because you’ve accumulated good karma. Those are explanatory stories we told ourselves before we understood psychology, neuroscience, and social dynamics.

The Simple Move

Here’s the simple move that could avoid the slide back into darkness: Accept that certain practices benefit human flourishing without needing metaphysical baggage.

Is that really so hard? Apparently, yes.

I think I understand the psychology at work here. People are experiencing what Vervaeke calls the “meaning crisis”—a genuine poverty of meaning-making structures in modern secular life. Liberalism and free-market capitalism are great at creating wealth and protecting rights, but they’re terrible at creating community and meaning. The old mainline Protestant churches have collapsed into irrelevance. The new atheism offered a critique but no positive program. And so people feel unmoored. They look around and see that religious communities seem to have something they lack: coherence, ritual, shared purpose, weekly structure.

And they make the fatal error of thinking the metaphysics is load-bearing. They observe that religious communities generate coherence and connection, then conclude the theological beliefs must be causing those benefits. But the beliefs aren’t the active ingredient, the practices are. The weekly gathering, the structured rituals, the communal singing, the space for reflection: these are what work on human psychology and social bonding. The metaphysical claims are just along for the ride.

This isn’t a trivial error. When you commit to metaphysical packages to get community benefits, you don’t just acquire some harmless abstract beliefs. You acquire frameworks that often encode ancient prejudices about human diversity, that deprioritize ecological thinking in favor of otherworldly concerns, that align you with institutions whose truth-claims impede clear thinking about the challenges we actually face. The practices can be separated from these commitments. The correlation-causation confusion prevents people from seeing that separation is possible.

Understanding What’s Doing the Work

What’s happening here is a failure to see how these benefits actually arise. The sense of community, the psychological grounding, the meaning-making—these aren’t delivered by the beliefs themselves. They arise from the patterns of interaction: people gathering regularly, moving and singing in synchrony, engaging in shared rituals, creating space for reflection together. These repeated social and embodied practices generate something greater than their parts—a felt sense of belonging, coherent meaning structures, psychological regulation. The theological beliefs are the substrate on which traditional religions build these practice structures, but they’re not what makes the structures work. You can build the same social architecture, generate the same higher-order benefits, on an entirely secular foundation, provided you’re willing to cultivate them with sufficient care and commitment.

Some communities already understand this. They’re building new social structures, new practices, new coordination mechanisms that don’t depend on believing false things about reality. It’s hard work—much harder than just showing up at the church you grew up in and letting them do all the heavy lifting. But it’s the grown-up move.

What we need is a serious cultural project: the cultivation and spread of secular ecologies of practices that are as rich, structured, and socially embedded as the religious traditions they would supplement or replace. We need philosophers working with psychologists, neuroscientists working with community organizers, ritual designers working with systems theorists. We need to take the cultivation of meaning-making structures as seriously as we take the design of political institutions or economic systems.

The Stakes

Beliefs have consequences. When you commit to believing things that aren’t true—even for instrumental reasons, even because the community benefits are real, you damage both your own epistemic integrity and our collective epistemic commons. You make it harder to reason clearly about other domains and create permission structures for other kinds of magical thinking. You align yourself with institutions that have historically impeded scientific understanding and social progress, and continue to do so.

The civilizational cost is real. Consider how much intellectual energy gets burned reconciling ancient texts with modern knowledge, or debating theological questions that have no answers. That cognitive capacity could be directed toward actual problems—climate adaptation, coordination failures, existential risks. Instead, it circles endlessly around questions that are fundamentally unanswerable because they’re rooted in unfalsifiable claims.

And there’s a network effect: every person who returns to traditional religion lends legitimacy to the idea that the old package deal is necessary and inevitable. This makes it harder for the rest of us to build the alternative structures we desperately need. When intelligent, educated people validate supernatural belief systems, it signals that reason alone is insufficient for human flourishing. That signal makes the secular project look like an impoverished half-measure rather than a complete alternative.

The Path Forward

So here’s what I’d like to see: more people with the courage to cherry-pick shamelessly. Take the practices that work. Sing the hymns if you like the melodies—just swap out the lyrics. Keep the Sunday gathering—make it about philosophy, science, community building, whatever gives you substance to engage with together. Maintain the contemplative practice—call it meditation, mindfulness, or just reflective silence. Preserve the ritual structure around life events; craft ceremonies that are meaningful without being aupernatural.

Cultivate local communities centered on shared practices and values rather than shared metaphysical commitments. Create spaces for depth and meaning-making that don’t require checking your rationality at the door. Support the people and projects doing this work—and there are more of them than you might think.

And please, stop trying to rationalize supernatural beliefs you don’t actually have evidence for. I understand the appeal. You’ve found community, structure, a place where people gather with intention and show up for each other. The meaning crisis is real, and traditional religious communities do address genuine human needs that secular modernity has badly neglected. But here’s what’s actually happening: you’re subscribing to metaphysical claims you wouldn’t otherwise accept in order to access social structures that don’t actually require those claims. You’re paying a steep intellectual price—accepting assertions about reality that contradict evidence, for benefits you could have without that cost. The practices work. The community works. Neither requires the supernatural framework.

We can have community without cosmology. We can have practice without pretense. We can have meaning without taking literary myths literally. It takes more work, more intentionality, more creativity. But it’s the only intellectually honest path forward, and in the long run, it’s the only path that’s actually sustainable for a technological civilization navigating multiple existential challenges.

The alternative, this retreat back into comforting fictions, really is a road toward darkness. When the educated elites abandon the Enlightenment project, when they decide that maybe all that faith-and-revelation stuff was onto something after all, you get a society that can’t think clearly about existential risks, can’t coordinate rationally around collective challenges, can’t distinguish evidence from authority. We’ve seen this before in history. Societies forget how hard-won rational inquiry was, how fragile it remains, how quickly the darkness returns.

We can do better. We must do better. The ecology of practices framework shows us how. Now we just need the will to cultivate it.

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