The Problem With Religion
A Personal Story
I grew up in a family with an uneasy relationship with Christianity. On my mother’s side, there were Methodist ties and an enduring respect for faith, chapel culture and the moral earnestness that often went hand in hand with it. My father, however, had deep reservations about Christianity stemming from a personal tragedy that left wounds too painful to easily reconcile with religion. Faith was therefore neither completely rejected nor warmly embraced in our home. It existed more as a shadow in the background of family life: something familiar yet approached with caution.
The Britain of the 1960s also shaped this atmosphere. Churches had already lost much of the authority they once held over society. Religion was increasingly becoming a private matter and a personal choice rather than an unquestioned social expectation. Christianity still occupied a visible place in public life, and the clergy were generally treated with respect. They might still be addressed as ‘Reverend’ or ‘Father’, though usually only in their presence and often with an implication that the old certainties were fading. Society retained the language and rituals of Christianity, but the confidence behind them had begun to erode.
As a child, I was drawn to biblical stories in the same way that I was drawn to all stories. The Bible seemed filled with grand characters, dramatic journeys, betrayals, storms, wars, miracles and moral conflicts. At around the age of seven, while on a camping holiday with a Christian Endeavour group, I found myself sitting with some adults, reading from the Bible and listening intently to their discussions. I was captivated by the atmosphere — the seriousness with which they spoke and the sense that these stories mattered not merely as entertainment, but as windows into deeper truths about life and human nature.
During that same trip, we took a small ferry from Mumbles to Ilfracombe and encountered a violent storm at sea. To my childish imagination, already stirred by biblical imagery, the crossing felt almost mythical. I remember standing there as though I were part of a great drama, a character in one of the stories I had just heard, facing the chaos of wind and water with exaggerated courage. In retrospect, I realise that the biblical narratives had already begun to influence the way I experienced the world, imbuing ordinary events with symbolic and emotional depth that remained with me long afterwards.
Rediscovery
Yet religion itself soon receded into the background of my life again. I did not think seriously about Christianity for many years. It was only when I married in Germany that it returned unexpectedly. Before the wedding service, my wife and I had the obligatory meeting with the pastor, and something about that encounter rekindled the fascination I had felt as a child. I bought a Bible and began reading it earnestly, hoping to rediscover something profound and enduring.
But my enthusiasm was quickly met with confusion. I repeatedly came across passages that I could not understand with obscure genealogies, contradictions, violence, strange laws and theological assumptions that felt far removed from modern life. I put the Bible aside in frustration more than once. Nevertheless, my curiosity about religion remained. I read widely, including many critical works examining the role of the Church in society, especially its darker historical legacy. While institutional religion often repelled me, individual figures within the biblical world continued to fascinate me.
Like many people of my generation, my initial impressions of biblical characters were shaped as much by cinema as by scripture itself. Jesus, Abraham, Moses and others appeared in epic Hollywood films that were traditionally shown during religious holidays. Yet despite their spectacle, these figures remained distant and somewhat unreal to me.
Then something unexpected happened. One day, while wandering through the ruins of a former church, I discovered a small German booklet entitled Ausländer auf Befehl — ‘Foreigner by Order’. It retold the story of Abraham in plain language, free from religious jargon and pious embellishments. For the first time, Abraham ceased to be a remote biblical icon and became recognisably human: a man called away from certainty into insecurity, wrestling with trust, displacement, fear and hope. The story affected me deeply because it spoke less like doctrine and more like my own lived experience.
Intrigued, I asked the pastor who had married us where I could find more literature of that kind. Through a series of seemingly accidental circumstances, I eventually became involved in a Pietist Bible study group. What began as curiosity gradually turned into serious engagement. I attended the studies regularly, participated actively in discussions and eventually led Bible groups myself. I even gave lectures. For a time, the sense of community, shared exploration, and intellectual rigour were immensely attractive to me. It offered structure, a sense of belonging, and the feeling that life had meaning beyond material concerns.
At the same time, I became interested in creationism and the idea that the world had literally been created as described in Genesis. Initially, I was drawn to the certainty with which these ideas were presented. However, my own observations and education increasingly created tension. Scientific explanations of the universe, geology, evolution and human history contradicted much of what I had been told. As I have always been driven by a need to examine both sides of an argument, I began reading critical scholarship alongside devotional literature.
Gradually, my understanding changed. It became impossible for me to read Genesis as literal history. Instead, the stories revealed themselves as allegories, myths and symbolic narratives that express profound truths about human existence, morality, identity, exile, suffering and consciousness. Over time, I realised that much of the Old Testament had a mythological and legendary character, shaped over centuries of oral tradition, political struggle and theological interpretation. The more I read, the more I realised that questions surrounding the historicity of biblical events extended far beyond Genesis.
Awareness
Yet, alongside these intellectual developments, another layer of awareness emerged, strongly influenced by my professional training and experience as a nurse. Nursing has taught me to observe people, both individually and collectively, and to consider how groups function, how authority operates, how vulnerability can be exploited, and how emotional needs shape behaviour. Over time, I began to notice that the religious groups I attended were no different from other human systems. Beneath the language of humility and spirituality, there were often power struggles, manipulation, insecurity, rivalry and unspoken hierarchies.
Some individuals exerted influence through charisma, while others did so through fear, guilt, or claims of spiritual authority. What had initially appeared to me as harmony increasingly revealed itself to be something far more fragile and complicated. Then came the wider public revelations of abuse committed by clergy and trusted religious figures against children in their care. These scandals shattered much of the innocence I still had about religious institutions. The contrast between the proclaimed moral authority and the hidden cruelty was impossible to ignore.
The disillusionment was profound. The things that had once attracted me — sincerity, truth and moral depth — were overshadowed by the painfully familiar realities of human weakness, corruption and the misuse of power. My earlier naivety gave way to a far more sober understanding of religion and human nature.
And yet, despite all this, I never entirely lost the fascination that first drew me to those stories as a child. Rather than certainty, what remained was the recognition that biblical narratives endure because they symbolically speak to enduring aspects of the human condition: exile, suffering, hope, betrayal, redemption, meaning and the search for belonging. Over time, my relationship with religion shifted from accepting doctrines to understanding humanity, our longing for transcendence, our need for community and our tragic tendency to corrupt even the things we hold sacred.
However, my disillusionment did not simply lead me to cynicism or rejection. Instead, it forced me to look deeper — beyond institutions, doctrines and competing claims of certainty — towards the underlying values that Christianity shares with many other spiritual and philosophical traditions. Beneath the layers of theology and religious identity, I began to recognise recurring themes that appeared almost universal: truth, unity, beauty and goodness — but above all, love, which seemed to bind them together and give them meaning.
Rather than viewing religion as a system of control or tribal identity, I became interested in the human search that lay beneath it. I began to see how easily profound insights become buried beneath centuries of pious language, ritualism, dogmatism and cultural baggage. Many religious ideas that may originally have offered liberation, compassion or inner transformation had become weighed down over time by fear, moralism, institutional self-preservation and endless doctrinal disputes. The simplicity at the heart of many traditions was often obscured by the need to defend authority or maintain boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
The more I reflected, the more I found myself drawn to simplicity itself — not simplistic answers, but a simplicity of approach: honesty instead of pretence, compassion instead of judgement, presence instead of performance. I began to feel that some of the deepest spiritual truths were also the simplest. These truths concern how human beings treat one another, how we endure suffering, how we remain truthful with ourselves and how we learn to love despite disappointment, fear and vulnerability.
Caring
My experiences as a nurse also profoundly deepened this understanding. Working closely with people who were suffering stripped away many illusions. It became impossible to divide humanity neatly into the righteous and the fallen, the faithful and the lost. Time and again, I encountered the hidden pain that shaped people’s behaviour: wounds carried from childhood; loneliness; humiliation; fear; grief; trauma; poverty; rejection; and the constant struggle for dignity. I began to see how people with good intentions often found them distorted by unresolved hurt and the survival instinct.
Many behaviours that I had once judged harshly appeared in a different light when viewed through this lens. Fear could manifest as aggression. Shame could manifest as a desire for control. Emotional deprivation could manifest as manipulation or dependency. Even seemingly selfish acts often concealed desperation, insecurity or an aching need to be seen and valued. While this did not excuse cruelty or abuse, it made human contradiction more understandable.
Gradually, I came to believe that much of human life is shaped by the tension between our better intentions and the emotional wounds that prevent us from fully realising them. People often have ideals of kindness, loyalty, love and goodness, yet find that these aspirations are obstructed by psychological burdens that they barely understand. In this sense, the human condition itself began to seem both tragic and deserving of compassion.
This understanding also changed the way I viewed religion. The spiritual traditions that spoke to me most deeply were not those offering certainty, superiority or ideological purity, but those that acknowledged brokenness while still insisting on the possibility of reconciliation, mercy, healing and love. The meaningful thing was no longer the claim to possess absolute truth, but the shared human longing to move beyond fear and division towards something more wholesome.
Over time, my faith shifted from belonging to a system to recognising the fragile humanity within all people, including myself. The older I became, the more I realised that wisdom lies less in certainty than in compassion, humility, and the willingness to recognise the beauty and vulnerability that exist within all of us.
But such insights rarely come quickly, nor do they take root without cost. It often takes years for them to settle deeply enough within us to alter the way we truly see ourselves and others. Along the way, we experience disappointments, betrayals, injuries, losses, failed certainties and the gradual collapse of the illusions we once depended on. Every stage leaves its mark. The question then becomes whether we have enough time, strength and resilience to regain our balance and start again after each disillusionment.
I now realise that I cannot return to my earlier, more naive beginnings, and perhaps nobody truly can. Once lost, innocence cannot simply be recovered by an act of will. Attempts to recreate it can lead people back into the very traps that experience should have freed them from, such as surrendering critical thought to authority, mistaking emotional certainty for truth, or seeking refuge in rigid systems that promise protection from ambiguity and doubt. What once seemed comforting can become dangerous when it requires the abandonment of honesty or self-awareness.
Yet one cannot live entirely without meaning, trust, or hope. This is the deeper tension. Human beings seem to require some sense of purpose, belonging and transcendence, even after experiencing firsthand how such longings can be exploited. Perhaps maturity lies not in abandoning these longings, but in embracing them more carefully and humbly.
Slow down
What troubles me most about modern life — and religion within it — is the way we have sped everything up. We have sped up the clock of human existence to such an extent that few people are given the necessary time, silence, patience or inward stillness to examine themselves honestly. Reflection is becoming increasingly difficult in a culture dominated by noise, distraction, performance, outrage and constant stimulation. We move from crisis to crisis, opinion to opinion and identity to identity without pausing long enough to understand what is happening within us.
Religious life has not escaped this acceleration. Even spirituality is often consumed hurriedly, reduced to slogans, ideological positions, online tribalism, self-help formulas or fleeting emotional experiences. The slower disciplines once associated with genuine inner transformation — such as contemplation, patience, self-examination, solitude, silence, confession, forgiveness and reconciliation — do not sit easily within a culture that prizes immediacy and certainty.
However, human healing does not seem to operate according to the speed of modern society. Wounds carried for decades cannot be resolved overnight. Trauma cannot simply be argued away. Grief follows its own rhythm. Wisdom grows slowly and often painfully. Even love itself requires patience and endurance, as well as the willingness to remain present through uncertainty and disappointment.
Perhaps that is why so many people remain inwardly fragmented. We are expected to continue functioning while carrying unresolved pain, social pressures, economic anxieties and emotional exhaustion, with little opportunity to process any of these issues deeply. Under such conditions, people cling more desperately to certainty, ideology, identity or distraction because genuine reflection can feel too threatening or time-consuming.
The tragedy is that many religious and philosophical traditions originally recognised this human need for slowness, stillness and inward attention. Beneath all the institutional layers, there was often an awareness that transformation requires patience, and that people must sometimes wrestle with doubt, suffering, contradiction and failure for years before arriving at a deeper understanding.
I increasingly feel that the real challenge is not in recovering lost innocence, but in learning how to live truthfully after innocence has gone. This involves accepting ambiguity without surrendering to nihilism, recognising human weakness without losing compassion, and staying open to beauty, goodness, and love, even after witnessing hypocrisy and corruption. This is a far less comfortable path than naive belief, but perhaps a more honest and humane one.
Compassion
Above all, we need to understand compassion as the difficult and deeply human ability to recognise ourselves in the struggles, failures, fears and woundedness of others. Compassion begins when we realise that most people are carrying invisible burdens and fighting internal battles that rarely reveal themselves openly.
The older I have become, the more I have come to believe that compassion is the one thing capable of holding human society together when certainty, ideology and authority begin to fail. Knowledge alone does not make us humane. Intelligence can be used to justify cruelty as easily as kindness. Even religion, when stripped of compassion, can become cold, judgemental and destructive. However, compassion has the power to soften rigidity without abandoning truth and to address wrongdoing without losing sight of the humanity of those involved.
Compassion is difficult because it requires patience and humility. It asks us to resist the temptation to divide the world too neatly into good and bad, believers and non-believers, worthy and unworthy. Human beings are rarely so simple. Most people are a mixture of generosity and selfishness, courage and fear, love and hurt. Often, those who long most deeply to love others are themselves struggling with wounds that distort their intentions and make intimacy challenging.
Therefore, compassion is neither blindness to harm nor an excuse for abuse. Rather, it is the refusal to let suffering turn us into cold and hateful people. It enables us to recognise that much human conflict stems from unresolved pain. Entire societies can be shaped by unresolved fear, humiliation and trauma, passed from one generation to the next.
Perhaps this is why the simplest teachings endure across cultures and traditions. Long before theology became a system of arguments and institutions became concerned with power, the far simpler insight existed that human beings belong to one another and are diminished when they lose the ability to care for one another. Themes such as love thy neighbour, show mercy, forgive, care for the stranger and tend to the weak survive because they speak to something fundamental within human existence itself.
Ultimately, compassion may be less about possessing answers than learning how to remain human in a world that constantly pressures us towards hardness, speed, fear and division. It is the quiet realisation that everyone we meet is more fragile, more complex, and more deserving of understanding than we initially realise.