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- [00:01]
Dan
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
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- [00:27]
Darrell
I get so many headaches every month.
- [00:29]
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- [01:29]
Dan
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- [01:54]
Darrell
I oh, let's go.
- [01:58]
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- [02:22]
Dan
Welcome back everybody to Religion on the mind and Part 2 of Christianity v. Existentialism, which as I said last week, is not really all of verses, but we are. We are talking about where there is tension and where there is also agreement and concord between the two traditions. And man, last week's episode was in my mind, that was the shit. Daryl, that was great. I'm in.
- [02:50]
Darrell
I think we covered a lot of territory this Is great.
- [02:52]
Dan
Yeah, we did. We're going to keep going. So the method that we established in part one is. And by the way, listen to part one at least the first 15 minutes to get kind of the setup before kind of jumping in here. I would recommend that. But briefly, what we're doing is we are talking about where we find divergence or tension between a kind of basically a simplified, basically understood Christianity, try not to get too evangelical specific. And an existential approach to life as evidenced through both philosophy and psychology, which I described at the beginning of part one. And we are taking a little. I gave a point of divergence and then you did a point of alignment, and then you did a point of divergence. And now it's my turn to bring up a point of alignment. And here's one that I really like. And I think I'm drawn. I think I was drawn in part to existential psychology and philosophy, in part because I was formed by Christianity on this one. And that's a question for me with some of these alignments. But it also really fits with my view of the world, which perhaps makes me a snob. And that is the idea that most people are living in a type of illusion, a false self from which they need to be woken up if they are to truly live. You know, I'm actually realizing now, like this is of course Plato's cave. So the very foundation of Western philosophy includes a concept like this, you know, near to its core. But of course, in Jesus we get the narrow road and wide road imagery. We get sheep and goats. We get a whole lot of. There's two categories of people language in Christ's teachings. And in existentialism we get the idea that people are by default. You know, it's a version of kind of Freud and Jung. And Jung talking about, you know, the subconscious. And, you know, Freud uses the image of an iceberg, that the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg that's above the water and there's actually much more mass below it. Your mileage may vary on what you think that ratio is, but the idea with existential psychology is that our naturally occurring deep anxiety angst about the fact that we know we're going to die, that we know that we are in some sense alone, that we can never fully merge with somebody else. The fact that we make our own meaning to the extent that we're conscious of that. These things are so terrifying. The thought of future non existence as well, these things are so terrifying that we end up living in a world of our own interpretive creation that shields us from those realities and that leads to a more superficial life. It leads to a life, it can lead to mental illness and all kinds of issues that derail our lives. It certainly leads to, at a minimum, a less full life, a life less well lived, a life less fully realized. And that there isn't this kind of like waking up. Like, one way to put it is that the matrix, which pill do you want? And the matrix in general is an equally good metaphor for Christianity and for existential thought. Like, that metaphor plays really well in both of those sandboxes. And I find that to be an area of deep alignment. And it rings true to me. It's rung true to me since I was an 18 year old philosophy undergrad. It rings true in different ways now in my 40s than it did then. But I buy that. I mean, I fundamentally buy that. And maybe it's degrees and not everybody is like so, you know, so distorted or so up their own ass or, you know, so deceived, but there is some version of that going on and there is like a need to be sort of shaken awake from that.
- [07:15]
Darrell
Yeah, it's almost like they both have an assault on naive realism. Right. Like I just see the world as it is and anyone who would see the world the same way that I see it, because there just kind of is one way to see the world and be in the world. Yeah. I think they both call into question our own interpretive abilities and our own ability to engage the world honestly in a way that isn't somehow in need of revision or enlightenment or some type of clarification. And yeah, I think that that is, you know, I've thought about it like a little differently. I'm probably going to spill my point of convergence, but I think, I think there's overlap. They both push against just like a mechanistic deterministic behaviorism. Right. And they basically are saying, describe what
- [08:11]
Dan
you mean by that, by that view.
- [08:12]
Darrell
Yeah. So what I mean is they both push back against just this idea that, you know, all that exists is stimulus and response. We're all, you know, we're just kind of these animals chugging through life where we're just kind of waiting to get a consequence and everything is just kind of predetermined by the inputs and the outputs because they're both kind of beckoning, like, hey, there's a little bit more here. If you're just willing to take a moment and think about it, if you're just going to pay attention, if you can engage in the cognitive tasks and you have the skills, you're actually going to see the world in a different way. And I think that that's what was, for me, what was so enticing about existentialism was this invitation to something greater like this next level or this additional way of seeing the world. And so I agree with you, that's a great point of convergence. It's an intoxicating. Right. It's almost intoxicating to feel like you've kind of got an inside track of seeing the world in a different way. And I've found, you know, I've found myself, when I talk about this type of stuff, having similar feelings as when I was in my youth, you know, around, like sharing a different worldview. Right. So who. In my youth, it was like sharing about a religious worldview. Now it's like, hey, do you know the big five fears of existential concerns? Like, I don't. You don't need to know the four spiritual laws, but I want you to know that, you know, you're terrified you're going to die one day. And so there's a. There's almost like an invitation to be part of this conversation that's if you cut down to it, they both are making claims that they have the corner market on something that's more real than real. Right. There's something truer and realer about the world than what we know. And they're both offering entrances into that deeper reality.
- [10:09]
Dan
Yeah. I'm going to be careful with my comments because otherwise we're going to step on some other areas of convergence and I want to leave some meat on the bone. There's. But I've got two thoughts here. One is, you talked about you coming to see the world as bigger, like a sort of a next level, you know, view of what is a next level metaphysics or ontology or something. And this project of these, these episodes started in part because I was experiencing, reading deeper into existential psychology, which I started to do primarily for clinical reasons. I had clients who were bringing up issues where I was like, okay, you know, it's time for me to dig in more substantially so that I have like a number of clinical techniques that I am comfortable using when these things come up. And not just kind of gesturing at existential psychology because it, you know, it's about meaning and identity and morality. And so that of course, you know, relates to religious change, which is my clinical focus. But when I did that, when I started reading into it with a mind towards client work, what I found was some of the zeal of the convert. Right. Which I remember, even though I was never converted to Christianity, I was zealous. I was a pious, serious Christian kid and, you know, young adult. And I was like, oh, I remember the feeling of this kind of fire. Right. So actually, I have three points. That's one. Number two, you talk about bigger world. That is also how the existential therapists talk about what happens when we agree to use our anxiety as a lens through which to understand ourselves and where we're at, that we have to kind of overcome an initial fear of doing that when. But on the other side of doing existential work, where you end up is your world has expanded. And in fact, the distinction between unhealthy and healthy anxiety, which Kristen and I talked about in Anxious Times, part one, if people wanna scroll back to, I think that was March the Delineator there, between healthy and unhealthy anxiety is, does this anxiety make your world smaller? Unhealthy? Does this anxiety actually encourage you to make your world bigger and face a new challenge and collaborate with a new partner and, you know, yada, yada, yada, learn more, expand more. That's healthy anxiety. And that bigness of world is kind of baked in to the kind of core clinical insights and concepts in doing that work therapeutically. So that's a nice area of convergence, even just in language. I'll give you a chance to respond to either of those before I go to the third point.
- [13:06]
Darrell
No, I think you summarized it very well. I think the. Yeah, the engagement with the anxiety being, you know, what do we do with that anxiety? Is key. But, yeah, very eager to hear your third point.
- [13:17]
Dan
Okay, so this is going back to something from part one, which is, I think that another way of saying that it's that both Christianity and existentialism fight that naive realism of that simple la di da kind of a thing is actually to refer back to William James's idea of sick soul religion. That sick soul religion starts with, look, any system worth its salt has to give me language to understand the massive capacity for evil in the world. I've been recommending Annie Dillard's book for the time being. Recently, I had a coaching client use it. I gave it to a. I bought it for a buddy who's going through a very hard time. And, you know, she opens that book, you know, describing entries from this old encyclopedia of childhood malformities like, you know, just like kids born with genetic and other deformities and their lives, some of them being just Utterly painful and you know, from our perspective, worthless and just like for what, you know, like just this presence of evil and suffering in the world. And I think she starts there because it is really a book about spirituality. It's kind of a book about Christianity. But Annie Dillard is a sick soul Christian. Like if we can't start with the Holocaust, and this is where the popularity of existentialism comes after the Holocaust, it comes after World War II. If we can't have language for that, then who the fuck are we kidding? And that is also an attack on naive realism. That doesn't mean it's without hope, but it means that it takes those problems very seriously. And I think that therapists, you know, religious therapists are much more likely to be sick soul types than healthy minded types. Although there are types of therapy that are much more kind of healthy minded and approach. But if you even, you know, you have to be able to deal with pretty acute mental distress, like if you're, you know, if you're going to be a licensed therapist. So you really got to be able to handle the dark shit. And I do think that's a part of what drew me to therapy as a profession.
- [15:34]
Darrell
Yeah. Oh no, no, yeah, the good ones are able to do that.
- [15:39]
Dan
Yes. Let's not talk about the bad ones.
- [15:41]
Medical Expert
Yeah.
- [15:43]
Darrell
It kind of reminds me of that Thomas Hardy quote. If weighed to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst. Right. So if we want to have any chance at trying to move toward health, flourishing better, we can't ignore the suffering. Right. We can't ignore the evils. We can't turn a blind eye and be like, ah, yeah, I don't know. Or yeah, there's just, there's so much pain and suffering in the world that to allow them to go by unacknowledged is intellectually dishonest. And I, I really think emotionally stunting. And so you have to engage those
- [16:26]
Dan
in some way to tie that back into my initial claim. It's like the pain and suffering and sort of mismanagement of the world, even in a time of relative affluence like ours compared to most of previous history. Just read the news, it's not hard to find that stuff. And I think crucially the connection to my initial claim is the darkness of the world exerts a psychological pressure on people that encourages us to tune it out basically. And that that's the default human position, if we can manage it, is to live in this ignorant bliss, which is only ignorant at a conscious Level because subconsciously we are aware of it. And that's what they would say. And most forms of psychology have some version of that. And that that's why you got to kind of be shaken awake to like recognize that Christ is pointing you to something bigger and deeper or recognize that you are ignoring things, you're ignoring reality, because it's hard to accept it. Either way, you got to get in there. There needs to be a little bit of violence. Like it's a, it's a somewhat violent process. I don't mean physical violence, but like it's tumultuous to get to the other side of that. And that too feels realistic to me. It feels realistic about the human person and it feels realistic about the gravity of the job, you know, and we're talking about a meaningful versus a non meaningful life that's got gravity, that's got moral gravity, it's got heft and psychological gravity to it. And I really like that both of these, you know, ways of thinking traditions take that very seriously and really kind of work with it as a central piece of the whole project.
- [18:18]
Darrell
Yeah, yeah. And I think both of us that played a role in our invitation into becoming existential, being more existentially minded and having these types of approaches shape our thinking.
- [18:37]
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- [19:13]
Dan
Okay, let's mix it up here. Now it's my turn to do a divergence and then it'll be your turn to do both. So here's one, and I haven't shared this with you at all. We'll see where this goes. If existential psychology is primarily true, then there is a strong motive as a natural, I think logical consequence of that to spend our available time and educational energy learning more about reality. So that like. And I mean, I guess what I mean by that is I mean physical reality. But I, I guess I mean understanding the limits of reality. What is, what is reality like? Like what is actually here in this universe? Because we don't have access to anything in the future. So it's, it's very. This world focused. If I've got bandwidth, I ought to be spending that Bandwidth understanding what this world is like so that I'm not at cross purposes with it, so that I'm not, you know, rubbing my head against a wall, that I'm not spinning my wheels. And maybe you're going to, maybe you'll help me see that this is not as much of a divergence as I think. But if Christianity is primarily true, then my time is arguably better spent in worship, in Christian fellowship, in prayer, in religious study. I could be studying the life of Jesus. I think of what I used to do with my free time in my 20s. I would read Thomas a Kempis Imitation of Christ and try and apply it because the real pearls of great price are going to be found somewhere in and around the life and person of Jesus. If that's the truest reflection of reality, as opposed to the sort of truest reflection being, you know, that the existential model of my anxiety at my knowledge of the way things are and the tendency I'm going to have to not want to look at that. So now you could. Maybe there's. And I just want to get ahead of. There's a, I think a kind of a lame way to equivocate and say, well, all truth is God's truth. Okay, sure, technically those are both attempts at getting at reality, maybe. But I think practically that's a genuine divergence of like, do I do thing A with my time or thing B with my time? And at least thus far in my life, I notice a tension between those two things. Like, well, what's the best use of my time and energy and bandwidth? How does that one hit you?
- [22:07]
Darrell
Oh, that hits me as absolutely true. Absolutely true.
- [22:11]
Dan
That, that is tension. Okay.
- [22:12]
Darrell
Oh, there, yeah, there's a huge tension. So a lot of committed Christians who have a strong afterlife belief are going to be more likely to invest in what they think will pay off in the afterlife than what they think is going to pay off in this life. And they're going to vault those types of activities. For example, it's fine for me to miss my relative's birthday in order to get more people into heaven, because that matters more versus viewing this life as the only life you have really puts a pressure of meaning on this life. So I think about, from the psychological perspective, something called the scarcity heuristic. So the scarcity heuristic is the more scarce something is, the more valuable something is. Right? So there's like not a ton of diamonds. Diamonds are valuable. So the idea being if this is the only life that there is, it's actually More valuable because our time is compressed to 80 years at best, depending on, you know, how poorly you eat and, and, or other things well outside of your control, like your biology or other people's actions. Whereas if you think that this life is, is nothing compared to what happens in the next or after death, this life is a little bit less valuable. You're, you're. And so what we see is like less of an attunement to environmental care and a willingness for environmental degradation in order to maybe even promote what are perceived as afterlife congruent motivations. So sure, like let's buzz down the rainforest or let's not worry about global warming because we need to do the things that are going to usher in the kingdom. Whereas, whereas, you know, true existentialists might be saying you are really wasting the only thing that you know for sure that you have and that is this moment, this one time, this one life for something that, you know, you're, you're queuing up for a train that's never going to come. And, and everyone else is, you know, spending their time trying to make autonomous choices, trying to make meaning out of this life, trying to make, ostensibly you could do lots of things. You could try to make the world a better place. You could just get as much pleasure as you possibly wanted. You know, you could do a number of things, but knowing that this is the time we have, that you're absolutely right, that puts the pressure, it makes it more scarce, it makes it more valuable.
- [24:55]
Dan
Okay, love that. Okay, so many things here. So first I want to say that there are some instances for most average Christians where the same action satisfies both. So the thing that you do that is valuable in heaven, you know, like, like, like for instance, anything you do to sort of make the Lord's Prayer active like that you do on earth as it is in heaven. So anything you're doing, you know, and we can also think about, you know, like David Brooks talks about resume qualities versus eulogy qualities. So like eulogy qualities, the kind of stuff you do so that at the end of your life people will say the kind of person that you were. That's going to be quite a bit of overlap. Like most of those are going to, they're going to count for both. Okay. That's a meaningful human life lived from an existential lens. It's also a morally and sort of faith wise meaningful life from a Christian lens. But there are a lot of examples where it's attention and where my mind went is missionary work might be kind of the Best crucible for understanding this one. Right? What are you like, whether or not like basically I think the logic of missionary work. Now sometimes some people, I think there's just a nice selection. Some people just don't want to live in America, whether or not they can admit that to themselves. And they self select into missionary work and like, great, you know, you're probably happier living in another country. But there are, there's a subset of missionaries, perhaps the lion's share, who make genuine sacrifices to be missionaries. You know, like a stupid example is when I was on tour in a rock band in my 20s, I missed my cousin's wedding because with five guys in the band, you can't, you can't say no to tours because of cousins weddings, siblings wedding. Okay. You know, I don't know if your, if your mom or dad gets remarried. Okay. I guess we gotta, you gotta be there.
- [27:03]
Darrell
Yeah.
- [27:03]
Dan
But you know, you get it, you get a 60 date run and it's like, oh, we can't do these three or four shows in a row because this guy's got to fly back for his cousin's wedding. We just wouldn't do those things. Think of like that times 20. Is a missionary living on the other side of the world? Like how much are you saying no to from the members of your community that are back in your home country? There are really interesting questions about, you know, the benefits and costs to raising children overseas in, via missionary work. And a lot of that's dependent upon where you're living and working. But there can be potentially huge costs there. You know, let's say your, your kid really wanted to follow like a, you know, a classical American style career. Are they going to be able to do that? Like, you know, like it depends on a lot of things. Like can they might not be able to just go to med school or become a lawyer or you know, do these kinds of things or if they do, they won't be able to see you very often. They're gonna live, if they go back. They live across the world from their parents and their siblings maybe. So there are, that's where the tension becomes a lot clearer of like oh my gosh, like, yeah, that's choose you this day, motherfucker. You know, that's, that's serious. Yeah.
- [28:21]
Darrell
And the most valuable thing that they're giving is their time. Right. So every, every moment spent doing that is saying no to every other potential thing they could be doing. And to the degree again, if one abuses himself of the belief of the afterlife, then you could Imagine that if none of those aims are oriented towards humanitarian care or improving the lives of others, and they were merely a glorified persuasion exercise to convince people to embrace new ideology. My word, reconciling how one spent their time could be very devastating.
- [29:01]
Dan
Yeah, that's good. And that's the starker version because the type I described, the self selection type, another type of self selection is like you would have just worked at an NGO or you would have done global economic development if you had gone to regular college or something, then that's great. Some people like that. That is what they prefer to do and, and they should go where they are feel called, you know. Yeah, okay, so that one. All right, well the report card on that is genuine tension, I think.
- [29:27]
Darrell
Genuine intention. That's right.
- [29:28]
Dan
Okay, your turn to do a convergence.
- [29:32]
Darrell
The convergence. Now, I don't know that this is inherently true about all branches or schools of existential thought.
- [29:40]
Dan
Okay.
- [29:41]
Darrell
But, but you know, maybe you can, can put me in check here because I'm thinking, you know, share someone who is probably not in convergence with. But I think that both agree that there's something at least a bit unique about being human. So, so humans kind of have an elevated status relative to other life forms or animals. Now Ernest Becker, who's a cultural anthropologist who is very strongly influenced by existentialist thinking, you know, called humans gods with anuses, right. He, he thought that we were just defecating pieces of meat, right. And so there was really nothing particularly special about us other oversized brains which gave us the capacity for symbolic thought and self awareness. But even that right there does make humans a little bit unique. And so I think a point of convergence, it might differ on how they get there. And what it means is that humans are a little different. We're not only animals. There's something about us that's different than just stimulus response of other organisms.
- [30:44]
Dan
Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Well, I think you're right that there is a genuine convergence here because every. I'm not a scholar of existential psychology and philosophy, but I'm aware of the thought of at least four or five of the psychologists and they will all point to the cognitive capacity that we have over other species. And as far as we can tell, other Homo species like Neanderthals and Denisovans and the like probably roughly shared what we've got in this way. Maybe not, maybe Neanderthals are a little bit smaller brain or whatever, but it's still a big advantage over apes and dogs and deer and all of that. And so the, the specialness, you know, the sort of thinking about existential psychology cognitively, you would say we have the cognitive capacities of projecting into the future. We have theory of mind of other minds. You know, there's some evidence that maybe cephalopods have a kind of a theory of mind. They're quite intelligent. But like we can really, you know, we can think about non existence. We can think about before the Big bang. We can, we can get to the cosmological physics and science that told us about the Big bang. We could predict background microwave radiation, you know, like Einstein predicted 80 years before it was discovered or whatever. We can do a shit ton with our brains and that really does make us special. And, and they would also say that our meaning making capacity, I think I've never read or heard of an existential psychologist who didn't connect that to our meaning making. That that is also a function of our greater capacities. And you know, at this point it's a little bit a question of poetry. Like how much do you emphasize that in terms of specialness? Like, is that a, is that a main feature? Do you kind of. Do you laud it? Do you, do you throw laurels around the neck of our meaning making? You know, there's a more dark, absurdist sort of version of this that says, ah, what a burden we have that we make meaning. And you know, my guess is that people saying that would be chronically depressed and maybe if they weren't, they wouldn't, you know, have that view. I think the broad scope would. Yeah. Put some real value on that and would. So some real uniqueness and real value. Does that get all the way to Imago dei? No, it doesn't get to that exactly. But it, you know, it gets a good chunk of the way there. I do think it is an area of convergence.
- [33:42]
Darrell
Yeah, yeah. And I think like you said, how they get there is different. Right. So Christians might just take at face value, I'm creating the image of God. Great. You know, which means I can study things about me. Maybe that means things about God or vice versa. But, but, yeah, but they don't. Yeah, they're, they're not as reductionistic down to just biological processes.
- [34:03]
Dan
Okay. Yeah.
- [34:05]
Commercial Announcer
So.
- [34:05]
Darrell
So my point of point of divergence.
- [34:07]
Dan
Let's do it.
- [34:09]
Darrell
I think that existentialism takes as givens at least five core realities that we've been talking about. We've been just passing back and forth so we. I have the freedom to make decisions, but I have to bear the responsibility of my choices. I'M isolated, so no one knows what it's like to be me or me to be them. I have to navigate an ever changing identity. I have this mortality, so I'm going to die. And then last is I have to find some meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. So I think existentialism takes those as givens and says, okay, now how do you be and become amid the kind of these rules of life? Right. This is kind of the frame in which you were born. I think Christianity looks at those things not necessarily as givens, but as problems that Christianity has solved, thus rendering them falsehoods. So they would say the world is actually not meaningless. Right. Death is not all there is. I am not fundamentally isolated from every being or agent in the universe and on. And I think that is when I teach this at Hope College and I have a large majority of my students who are coming from Christian backgrounds. This is the area, this divergence, this seeming incompatibility is where many of my students experience the most distress.
- [35:45]
Dan
Can you give examples of like, de. Identified things that they'll say, like, like how do, how do you see that show up in their, you know, answers to questions or their language with you?
- [35:57]
Darrell
Yeah, so we'll, we'll review some research on terror management theory. So, for example, those who aren't familiar, Terror management theory is a social psychological theory that explore what happens when people confront or contemplate their own mortality or their own death. And I mean, there's a wide swath of literature that suggests we get kind of anxious thinking about our own death. And so I'll just have students patently say, oh, I'm just not afraid because I just know I'm going to live forever with Jesus. I mean, it's just so right out of hand. And so I say, you know, this is great. I'm, I'm so. And you know, just. Can we take a moment to reflect on how easy it was for you to vanquish what has been like a perennial fear of humanity for millennia? You just have that answer right there and you're not afraid. And so it's only once we start unpacking the veracity or the validity of their worldviews or the confidence with which they can hold their worldviews that they begin to start wondering whether or not there's alternative explanations or viewpoints. So, you know, I had a student, I taught a course on what makes for a meaningful life this past fall semester, and I had a student who came up to me in the spring before she graduated, and she said, the most chilling thing that I told her that still haunts her was that I told the class, my sense is that we're more religious as a species than committed to a particular religion per se. And that if many of them were born in a different country, they might be more ardent Muslims or ardent Buddhists or ardent Taoists, fill in the blank just based on the location, geography, time in which they were born. And she said that that really troubled her because she was. Again, she had kind of embraced this naive realism of, well, no, any thinking person would be a Christian, because I'm a thinking person and I'm a Christian, therefore that correlation has to stand. It can't just be that religion is this culturally transmitted meaning system. And I caught it, and it makes the most sense to me.
- [38:13]
Dan
I think this is the best one either of us have come up with, first of all. So nice work, Darrell. This is a great one. Thanks. I'm not sure what criteria I'm judging this on.
- [38:22]
Darrell
Just feels right. This feels true.
- [38:23]
Dan
This feels true. Yeah, exactly. I have very high unearned certainty on this being the best divergence or convergence, this one. It really depends on your version or conception of Christianity. Right. Like, because this is one of the ones where I recognize, certainly in fundamentalist Christianity, in many versions of evangelicalism that I was given this. This tension of like, no, we have. Well, I'll throw in one of my. I have a small single line divergence item that I will actually put into conversation here, which is special revelation. Right. So in most versions of Christianity, there is some special revelation. I mean, it's at least the person of Jesus specially reveals God to the people that were physically around him. And then usually that will go further to be like the Bible reveals truths that God gave humans sort of directly so that we would understand God and the world better than if God had not given us that special revelation. I think that's very sort of. It's pretty tied to the. To the distinction that you're drawing here and that, you know, so. So either you have special knowledge or you don't, or you should. And in fact, you should be kind of skeptical of people who think that they do. It actually goes further. It's not just a lack of confidence in some special revelation. It's like, that's the kind of thing that's too convenient. Like, that's the kind of thing that is psychologically convenient for someone to think. I. One way of describing your, you know, your response to that student was, well, how convenient for you. You didn't say it like an asshole. That's kind of what you're saying is like, well, that's really convenient. Yeah, yeah. And so. But then there's also a version of maybe this is more, you know, liberal Protestantism. But you think about, if I think about, I'll tie it to a particular thinker. So Friedrich Schleiermacher, you know, Kierkegaard is the grandfather of existentialism, and Schleiermacher is probably the grandfather of liberal Protestant theology. He thought of the sort of Godlikeness of Jesus moment to moment, or maybe what we would call like the sinlessness of Jesus. He thought of it in kind of experiential terms that map pretty well onto existential psychology that really focused on Jesus's internal experience, which of course we don't have access to. But he theorized about it through a theological lens. And he sort of described it as like Jesus is constantly channeling only the best for all the people in front of him at all times. That is the sort of perfection of Jesus life. And I think of it as a kind of like Jesus having been like much more connected to whatever is deepest, the deepest truths of reality. For purposes of this claim, it doesn't need to be 100%. Jesus doesn't need to be divine for what I'm about to say. Just the idea, which I think is pretty well attested, that Jesus is pretty clued into reality. Even if he got things wrong, like, he obviously got a lot more things right than most people. And that's a part of his enduring influence on the world as certainly the most influential man in person in Western history, if not all of human history. And he, like, he exuded a kind of tenderness towards people and pointed to that being a fundamental part of God's character. That God is like loving Abba Father, that God is like, not out here just to punish people and God is with us. That kind of idea. And that is easier for, you know, that's. I'm just showing my cards of the kind of Christianity that makes sense to me that that's more about, like, that's what, you know, what I'd like to believe or what I'd like to be true because it would cohere with my worldview is that that's what Jesus was like. And it's humans, it's human Christians who need it to be about a more exclusionary, next worldly kind of framework. And I would say that's to meet these psychological needs that existential psychology names, I think, pretty well. And so I kind of have a way out of this one, I guess, is what I'm saying. My way out is my particular conception of Jesus as not being particularly interested in that level of certainty and naivety or whatever, but more just trying to show people God loves you like God is for you. The good news is that God actually gives a shit about you in this big universe kind of a thing. But I'm recognizing in real time that that might be a convenient solution for me.
- [43:44]
Darrell
Well, it could be. It could be. And I appreciate that. Self awareness and vulnerability. You know, I've often wondered or thought about religion as a way of responding to the invitation of those five or whatever number of it is. Big questions, right? And so religions are. Are offering in their best form a, a loose framework for ways that we should engage those realities. Not because they're true, but precisely because they are true. Right. So thinking about, you know, why is it that religions might offer a moral guidance?
- [44:28]
Dan
It's because, just to make sure you may have misspoke there. You mean that Christianity and other religions, they give us tools for those five givens, not because they nest like, not because we for sure know the five answers to the five givens, but rather that they need to be addressed. So a religion is going to address them. And I would say that that fits in nicely with my picture of Jesus. I would say if Jesus is the way that I conceive Jesus to have been, then he was extremely psychologically astute that he understood human psychology much better than most people of his time and that he wanted to address those for people. That's the tenderness part. But it's not about like, well, here's the. I just know the solution to all of these five things.
- [45:18]
Darrell
That's right. It's taking seriously those existential realities and saying, here might be a way forward. This might be the way to live based on our context, based on our culture, based on our perception of reality to this moment. Here is what we think might be tentative answers or ways to explore these questions in ways that take them seriously. And I agree with you. I think over time, because it's so much more psychologically soothing and rewarding, we've codified these into these very rigid frameworks and hard, fast rules where it's just, oh, you have this question, boom, there's the answer, there's this answer. Look, we've removed all uncertainty, we've removed all relationality. We no longer have to cultivate the courage to discover the process because we have just been given the answers and can bypass to get to the psychological goodness on the other side, completely ignoring the fact that that would be like just printing off a marathon completion certificate without actually training for and running it. Yeah, right. You're just like, I did it. There we go. Where there's so much more richness in wrestling with and coming to terms with our human limitations.
- [46:39]
Dan
To sound a note similar to kind of our earlier claim that, you know, some amount of uncertainty seems required for genuine faith. I think that at a certain level of certainty, there starts to be at least a correlation, if not a causation, with, like, using violence. Right. Like, you. Some people, like, some, you know, immature or evil or whatever, people will use violence anyway. They're gonna use it. It's just the quickest way to get done what they want to get done. But other people are reticent to use violence, and they will only use it when they're really shocked.
- [47:17]
Commercial Announcer
Sure.
- [47:17]
Dan
That, like, this is what we gotta do. And ideally, that's the way we ought to use violence. It's like, okay, let's not go to war with Europe, okay? But no, yeah, Hitler is actually. He is just gonna kill everybody. Like, he really is gonna take over the world if we let him. So, okay, we're gonna use violence. Like, that's a. That's a good time, I think, to resort to that. But you think about the Crusades or the Inquisition. You think about times where state power was wed to church power. And if you are so damn certain that whatever you're doing here, well, at least it's going to increase the number of people who go to heaven and not hell. And you have to be really sure of that to start swinging axes and loading crossbows. And so there is, you know, I don't want to overstate that, but there is a relationship there between too much certainty in that arena and a willingness to break norms that are actually within your religious tradition. Nonviolence is in there. Right. But you. That certainty can propel you on a really unsafe, damaging and evil path. And it does seem kind of related to, like, and. And basically anybody whoever was at any point in charge of the Crusades or the Inquisition. You'd want a bit of existential style humility. You'd want them to have a bit more of that and go, well, are we totally sure that the Moors are in league with the Devil? Are we sure about that? Because we'd want some really good evidence for that before we start chopping them down.
- [48:57]
Darrell
And it becomes the most dangerous when it's fused with an epistemic exclusivity. And by that I mean when we hold a belief system in which an alternative belief system is incompatible with ours, so one of us has to be wrong, and we all assume it's not me. And so we first try to persuade or convince the other person to change their mind. If we don't, we denigrate them, derogate them, put them down. If that doesn't work, then we try to eliminate the worldview. And the best way to eliminate the worldview, sadly, is through aggression or violence by eliminating people who hold that worldview. Because if you hold an epistemically exclusive worldview, you know, just the mere existence of alternative, competing conceptualizations of reality necessarily undermines the confidence with which we can hold our own beliefs.
- [49:48]
Dan
Okay, let's move to my next convergence. And this. This might be. We might just kind of do this, give ourselves some time, have some spare thoughts, and wrap things up. And this is a little bit related to the kind of zeal of the convert stuff that we talked about earlier. But I think it's a distinct point. In both Christianity and existentialism, especially in the applied clinical. The applied clinical version of existential psychology, it's never too late to get right with the Lord. It's like the. The value of waking up. In that sense, the value of the conversion experience in either of the two is so valuable that it is available on your deathbed. And some people criticize that about religion, actually. They. They, you know, some cultural commentators and philosophers and folks will think that that's evidence of the weakness of the view. But I disagree. I think it's evidence of the strength of the view. I think it is evidence of the way that both of them value human life for different reasons. Maybe it's the scarcity as a part of it, maybe on existentialism in a different way than for Christianity, but this intense value of human life and an intense value for telling the truth, for, like, getting it right. And, you know, from a therapeutic perspective, you know, a deathbed confession, let's say, from a parent to a child, you know, they fight. Like, imagine the dying mom who says, I'm so. I never admitted I was wrong. I didn't tell you I loved you nearly often enough. You did not disappoint me. I had my own demons. I had my own shit. I hope you can come to see that it was not your fault, that it was my stuff. I hope God will forgive me. Whatever. That's a single moment. And you can be cynical and say, well, that doesn't make up for the last 50 years of life, true. But you know, it might do a whole hell of a lot for the next 30 years, years of life. And that kind of like refusal to ultimately give up all hope, you know, sort of like holding out for even the last moment of repentance. I mean, I'm getting fired up. Like I'm, I'm feeling this emotionally talking about it like this to me is it, it indicates a deep throated value and celebration of life to be willing to hold that out indefinitely to the last moment. And there is, I could, I could even go a little farther and say that this is a sort of a connection to sort of the version of the gospel in each of those. You know, in Christianity it's like God's ready at any moment. Like God's not bored, it's not too late for God. God's not operating on a human timetable. So at any point God's there, ready, ready for you. And that's like good news. And I think there's a similar good news that at the core deep center of life is the possibility of living fully and honestly, of like, of doing your best to get a clear picture of yourself and reality, to name what's gone wrong, to take responsibility for what you've done and not done. And that is like, I mean, talk about sick soul as naming the, naming the evil and the suffering. I think this is the sort of. It's not healthy minded. Well, I guess it is in the sense that for James healthy minded religion, it did draw on genuine capacities that people have. Like, it's not, it isn't just like a popular self help book that's marketed well like it, you know, there's something really to it. And of course like, you know, the mind is extremely powerful and we do have access to a lot of resources, but this is about the affirmation of life and it shows through that chronological openness. Okay, I'm repeating myself at this point, so I'll let you know.
- [54:26]
Commercial Announcer
No, I love that.
- [54:27]
Darrell
Yeah, there is a. Yeah, it's like there is a value for getting it right or celebrating the good in life and an invitation to do so. And the barrier for entry to do that remains open until death. It is the lowest possible barrier of entry. You don't have to have logged any amount of service hours, commitments, committees. Right. It's available to you as long as you are living. This invitation to embrace life fully and to authentically engage with what it means to live a flourishing life. And I think that's absolutely okay.
- [55:07]
Dan
You know what's interesting about that. It's like I'm comparing it now. The way you phrase that makes me think of like Egypt and ancient Egypt, like, you know, the scales of. We get that sort of scales of justice image of like, you know, the weight of your life and, you know, how much evil you did and how much good you did, and then that determines which way you go. And that's a, you know, in. In evangelical terms, like a works based whatever kind of earning your. There's a lot of problems with that whole framework. But these, Christianity and existentialism both solve that same problem, but in a different way. Christianity says, yeah, there is that the morality implied in the Egyptian formulation is that there is a thing there that it points to. But I am the Lord and I decide that you're good. You know, like, the good news is I'm not holding you to that standard. Actually. What I want is communion. Right. And so it solves it that way. And existentialism says, no, there's no scales. You know, there's no, you're not going to be weighed. This is all about you. It is about you and everybody else and the prison that you have let yourself live in. And you can be free of that by recognizing that there's no scales at the end. And so they're both solutions to that, but in different ways. That's just kind of jumping out at me.
- [56:39]
Darrell
Yeah, yeah. And there's. Yeah. And in both of those, it requires some degree of autonomy and personal responsibility to step into bringing that about.
- [56:52]
Dan
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So that was my. Kind of. For now, my last one. Do you have, like, I've got a couple more small things. I am heading out. Literally. We're going to end this. I have one client and then I'm flying to Denver for a conference on existential therapy. So I think I'm going to have some more ideas later, you know, after this weekend. And I. These have, these have been so fun that I would love to at least do a third part and see what other threads we can pick up. Also, I'll say listeners, like, if you think of something you'd like us to talk about around, you know, contrasting Christianity, existentialism, shoot me a message. Would love some fodder. I'm sure Darrell and I could have some fun with any questions there. But I would say, like, we got time. If you have one more that's been dangling that you'd like to chat about on either end, it can be tension or convergence.
- [57:45]
Darrell
You know, we've covered a lot of ground. It's hard to believe that we've, you know, what we've gone through. Yeah. I'd probably be open for a third episode where we can dig in a little deeper to some of these others. But, you know, I think my takeaway right now, my interim summary at intermission, if you may, is, you know, I wasn't actually expecting that many points of convergence. I was actually.
- [58:10]
Dan
Oh, you weren't?
- [58:11]
Medical Expert
Okay.
- [58:11]
Darrell
Yeah, no, I think I kind of came to this thinking, like, these are two fairly distinct approaches to life, worldviews, philosophies. There's a really slender sliver that's overlapping, and you and I are the only people hanging out there. And as we've been talking, I've realized, I think it's actually a bigger overlap in the Venn diagram than I had originally thought. And so I'd be keen in future to kind of think about then, what are some of the sticking points? Why is it that it feels to me, and I don't know if it feels this way to you, that there aren't many people in these overlapping spaces? Why is it oftentimes that it feels more like people have to pick or choose? And maybe that's, Maybe that's just because I operate in academic circles where atheistic existentialism is just much more the norm and I'm prey to a selection bias of my own making. Or are some of the divergences we've talked about just so fundamentally discrepant at their core that intellectually honest people just can't make some of them work for very good reasons?
- [59:30]
Dan
I have one answer to more, and maybe pick that up in part three, but one answer I have is, I do wonder if. If it's not dissimilar to the way that the, the number of Americans who, who not. Who feel neither aligned with sort of right wing media or left wing media, but we don't know about them because they're not talking about it? So there's a kind of availability bias at play for the louder voices. I think that there might be some of that. And the reasons I'd give are there's a lot of data about pastors, even in conservative denominations, like, being much more orthodox than the people sitting in their pews. Right, so you're familiar with that, with that research coming out of like Barna Group and Lifeway and other groups like that. And those researchers are concerned about that. I'm less concerned about it, you know, and, and there. And I think, like, I just think like this is more anecdotal, but I'm wondering if, if it, if it speaks to that kind of less evident middle. I feel like I talk to a lot of people, you know, like talking to people at like school pickup or something. You know, people at like a kid's birthday party or something. Like these are random assignments of same aged adults who have children, same aged children in public schools. This is as close as I get to random assignment of people in my life because everything else is so damn self selected. I do feel like I find people because it comes up because people ask about my work and I say I'm a therapist. And eventually if we talk long enough I'll tell them my specialties and religious issues and religious change. And a lot of people have like some time and space for some religious and spiritual claims, but not like a ton of skin in the game or they've got, you know, like there is a way that people kind of can hold this stuff, I think maybe where it's. Maybe what, what you're right about is that it's less commonly held in systematically well defined ways. There aren't like a ton of well known Christian existentialist like philosophers or theologians or something. Although I think most people argue that Tillich, who is sort of the most the largest looming figure in liberal Protestant theology was a Christian existentialist effectively. And his book the Courage to Be is the most straightforward account of that. That's obviously waned a lot. So that could also be in our. You know, you and I are both keenly aware of how out of fashion that way of thinking has become, certainly at the popular level. But so yeah, so some of that could be like accidents of history and geography, you know, sort of the time we happen to be living in. But I don't know, do you think that, do you think that that sounds plausible that it might be more than you think through any of those lenses?
- [62:35]
Darrell
Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point. There's. Yeah there. I mean, and it even just reminds me of research that psychologists do on what are called like explanatory frameworks. And most laypeople hold co occurring explanatory frameworks for things that would seem seemingly incompatible. So like offering both scientific and religious explanations for why grandma died. Like well, God, you know, it was God's timing also colon cancer. Right. Like, and they're totally fine moving in between those two. So I think you're right. I think the average person that you encount would be open to some of these bigger questions. And if they're a religiously inclined person might engage them through their lens of their faith and don't see these things at odds at all. And I do think that we are at a time in which we are seeing an increasing kind of existential unsettling to where some of these questions are reemerging into public consciousness. I'm imagining into the therapy room, into academic university settings. In a rate, they haven't as much in recent history, at least in past couple decades. And so I think as these stirrings happen, I think more people are starting to wrestle with these bigger questions, which makes conversations like this fairly valuable.
- [63:50]
Dan
It was valuable to me, and as a good existentialist, that's the only value that counts. You could tell me it's valuable, but I don't have any way of accessing that.
- [64:00]
Darrell
Darrell.
- [64:01]
Dan
Dude. Okay. So much fun. Again, your book done is out and relates to a lot of this stuff. And then your and Sarah's book is forthcoming. That's, like, later this summer.
- [64:14]
Darrell
It should be August of 2026, called Sacred Unraveling. And it's a therapist guide for helping clients who are experiencing religious and spiritual change.
- [64:23]
Dan
That's right. So she's kind of speaking from her clinical perspective. She and I have a lot of clinical overlap there. And then you're coming in from the research perspective. What a little. What a fucking duo you guys are.
- [64:34]
Darrell
I'm very, very grateful to try to
- [64:37]
Dan
keep up with her such synergy. Okay. All right. Well, listeners, please, as I said, if you have thoughts or questions about this Christianity and the various overlaps or tension with existential thought, please send them my way. And we will throw all the good ones into a note between. To share between the two of us. And we will. We'll do a third episode. I also might have a couple more things pop up at the conference. So, yeah, I think we'll. We'll kind of roughly plan on at least a third part in a few weeks or something like that. So thank you guys for tuning in, for listening this far. You're. You're one of the. One of the lucky few, the chosen. No, we don't believe in that stuff. Okay, I'm rambling. I got to get back in the therapy mind. Thank you so much, Darrell. So fun.
- [65:28]
Darrell
This was awesome. This flew by. I could not believe this was over two hours.
- [65:32]
Dan
Yeah, listeners, we did these back to back. So we've been recording for two hours and ten minutes or so here, parts one and two. So. But that's. That's. You know what? Find a job you love, never work a day in your life. Am I right?
- [65:46]
Darrell
That's right.
- [65:47]
Dan
Yeah.
- [65:47]
Darrell
Dan, thanks for having me on. Love this conversation. Station.
- [65:49]
Dan
All right, man. Peace.