Part IV: What Survives
Chapter 14: What If Godliness Is Something Humans Practice?
One of the strangest things about leaving religion is that the world can feel less enchanted and more demanding at the same time.
It feels less enchanted because the invisible furniture is gone: no divine plan you can confidently map, no cosmic parent whose intentions can be read off church authority, no priesthood structure holding the universe in place, no guarantee that justice will finally be done by someone wiser and stronger than you. It feels more serious because if heaven is not going to descend and fix things, no one gets to outsource repair.
Christianity teaches that human beings are God's children. Mormonism, characteristically, raised the stakes: children who are expected to grow up. It refuses to leave ordinary people in permanent smallness. It says we are not trash, accidents, or creatures destined only to kneel forever at the edge of someone else's glory. I no longer believe the literal version. I do not want to lose the grandeur.
I do not believe there is a celestial bureaucracy waiting to promote the faithful into godhood. I do not believe exaltation depends on ordinances recorded by the right institution. I do not believe the highest reality is an endless expansion of the Mormon family ideal into the cosmos. But I do think the doctrine of divine childhood helped lift human beings to new moral heights. It made ordinary lives feel cosmically dignified.
The problem is that it can make humanity too central. What if the story of humanity is not the most important thing going on? What if the planet's story is the grander drama, and we are tiny creatures living in and cultivating its outer layer, more like skin cells than protagonists? What place do ancient proto-humans occupy in a theology of God's children? What about the creatures who may evolve from us and become more intelligent, more ethical, and more capable of contact with whatever God is? What will they think of us?
I want a theology large enough to ennoble more than humans: the creatures beside us, the cells inside us, the planet beneath us, and whatever comes after us. Maybe future religious thinkers can do for a wider living world what Christianity and Mormonism once did for human beings. Maybe they can make more of reality sacred without pretending the old answers were enough.
The translation I care about now is this: beings become godlike when they take responsibility for other beings' experience.
Not godlike as status or cosmic promotion. Godlike as the capacity to make the world safe and beautiful for beings who depend on us.
My best post-Mormon thinking about God happened in letters to my father. He writes a weekly letter to the family, and a few days after my public announcement he sent me a private supplement. He did not want to alienate me in the slightest, he wrote, but waxing religious was who he was and always had been — did I have any requests? Then, instead of retreating to safe subjects, he leaned in. He had read what I wrote about planets, and he attached an article by one of the church's intellectuals about the creator's cosmos. He wanted to know what I thought. That is its own kind of grace: a believing father answering his son's apostasy with an astronomy article and a question.
So I told him what I thought. I had become drawn to scale. We are made of smaller living systems and live inside larger ones. Our bodies are worlds to the beings that compose us. The earth is a world to us — though even that puts it too distantly, because we do not live on the earth like tenants. The earth grew us in its outer layer. I could not think of a definition of life that included trees but not the planet that grows them. Perhaps reality is nested with forms of life and relation we barely know how to imagine.
So I do not say there is no God. I say I do not believe the one I was handed. It would not surprise me if there are beings larger, wiser, and more alive than we are — beings we depend on the way the cells of my body depend on me, without knowing my name. If gods means that — wise, dependable creators who hold worlds steady for the beings inside them — then the question of gods is not settled. What is settled, for me, is that no institution on earth has shown me its credentials for speaking on their behalf.
If I am, in some sense, a world to smaller beings, then responsibility is not abstract. My anger, tenderness, neglect, discipline, self-hatred, and self-care are not only private experiences. They are weather in a world inhabited by others. I grew up inside an institution's moral weather. Now I am the weather, and my children live in it. That does not prove God. It enlarges responsibility.
Prayer, in that frame, becomes less like sending a request to an enthroned father and more like a gesture from one scale of life toward another, a reaching outward without knowing who or what might receive it. Maybe no one does. Maybe the gesture still matters because it trains attention beyond the self. I do not know. I am trying to preserve wonder without pretending wonder has solved truth.
When I was nineteen, in the Missionary Training Center, I asked a teacher why God could not just forgive. Why did forgiveness require punishing Jesus for our sins? Why could mercy not simply be mercy? I do not remember the answer, only the feeling that it did not really answer the question.
Theologians and preachers have struggled with the same problem for a long time. Sometimes they let phrases like "by some means we do not understand" do the heavy lifting. Sometimes they write long books on atonement theory to justify the torture of Jesus on our behalf. I do not think anybody really knows why love would need punishment before it could become forgiveness.
After Mormonism, I no longer think love and forgiveness depend on cosmic violence. I believe love and forgiveness are real and in infinite supply, even if nobody gets punished. That does not make morality lighter. It makes it heavier. Not every good deed is recorded in heaven. Not every wrong will be righted by some final court. If no one is coming to make things right automatically, goodness has to become more practical, not less.
If I hurt someone, there is no mechanism that lets me skip repair. If a child needs safety, angels will not reliably provide it. If someone is lonely, there may be no heavenly messenger unless another human being becomes that messenger. If a community needs beauty, people have to make it. If a family needs peace, someone has to stop transmitting harm.
We are one another's angels and saviors. That can sound grandiose if heard badly. I do not mean we are omnipotent, self-created, or worthy of worship. I mean actual rescue in this world comes overwhelmingly through finite beings choosing to care about what other beings experience. A parent becomes a kind of god to a child because the parent's power is world-making. A harsh home and a gentle home are different universes. A person who forgives can interrupt the inheritance of bitterness. A person who tells the truth can make reality more habitable.
Mormonism tried to preserve human grandeur. It gave people a cosmic destiny and told them their choices mattered forever. The literal structure was wrong. But life after religion can become too flat if it decides disbelief has made all vertical language childish. I want transcendence without fake authority. The old Mormon dream was to become gods later; the better translation may be to become more responsible now.