Interview with Brittney Hartley (author and atheist spiritual director)

Brittney Hartley is an atheist spiritual director and author of No Nonsense Spirituality.

How do you define “spirituality”?

I define spirituality as connection – connection to your deepest self and connection to outside of yourself. For some people that includes a higher power; for me, it doesn’t.

Can this be any connection? Or is there a special depth of connection that needs to be there to qualify as “spiritual”?

Twenty years ago, I may have said spirituality needs to be these specific things, it needs to look like this. But feminine voices in this space have really taught me that spiritual connection can be in any activity at any time. Spirituality used to be a list of shoulds… I should do this, I should do that. And now it’s more, am I awake right now? Can I be awake while I wash the dishes? Can I be awake while I’m talking to my child? Can I be awake when I’m walking my dog, listening to a podcast? From the outside, my life may not look very spiritual. But when I’m truly awake, even the most menial tasks can become incredibly spiritual and incredibly connected.

Is having a spiritual dimension in life vital?

I would consider spirituality vital, but I’m okay if people are uncomfortable with that term, certainly in atheist and agnostic camps where that word “spirit” may be triggering. If I talk to someone who says, “I’m not spiritual at all,” but I really dig into their life, I’ll find that they have rituals, they have some form of community, they have stories that help guide them. They have moments of awe or transcendence – maybe looking at the stars or reading Carl Sagan. And so, when you put all of that together, I see a spiritual life. There’s no great secular word here, maybe “well-being.” But I do think spirituality is connection, and we are all relational creatures. When you look at anything in nature that is disconnected, it shrivels and dies. I think there’s an aspect of that for us humans too, that if we’re not connected, we suffer.

Do you see a lack of spirituality/connection as the underpinning that leads to existential crisis?

I do. When we talk about the existential problems we’re having, and specifically the meaning crisis of GenZ, where all our stories, and our myths, and our institutions, and organized religions are declining, what’s being lost is a lack of connection and community to something bigger than us. I do think we have to figure out this piece, which is how we can have rituals, community, love, transcendence, and all of these things that seem really positive for human flourishing… without having to go the fundamentalist route where we must turn off our brains and believe things that we just have no business believing in this day and age. So, we haven’t quite figured out that problem yet. How do we do that? I think spirituality is going to be one key.

What does the absence of spirituality feel like? How do you know that what’s missing is spirituality, or the loss of a spiritual dimension in life?

For me, the absence of spirituality is going to look and feel like deep disconnection. It’s going to be a deep disconnection with yourself. You’re not living with intention, you’re just reacting to situations around you. You are, for lack of a better word, asleep. You’re in a place where you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. You don’t feel like you are living a life that’s an accurate representation of you or your values. The telltale signs of that can be depression, which is your body saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore… this life is not one worth living for me.” It can also look like numbing behaviors, where we’re just trying to drug ourselves into the next day. The absence of spirituality is also going to be disconnection outside of yourself, where you’re not part of any projects that feel meaningful to you. You’re not connected to nature or the world. You’re not part of relationships. You’re just doing your nine to five because you feel like society says you have to, and you hate your job, and so you go home, get drunk, watch Netflix, and then do it all again the next day. I would look at that as a lack of spirituality – being disconnected from yourself and your values and the kind of life you think is worth living, and being disconnected from the outside world, from anything that could help pull you out of your natural neurotic mind. Some percentage of depression is certainly going to be not getting enough sunshine or vitamin D; maybe you just need some yoga and a bit of meditation and you’re going to be okay. But some depression really is a symptom of a deep lack of spirituality, a deep lack of meaning and purpose. That’s why depression can be a catalyst, a sign that you need to make shifts in your life, so that it becomes a life you want to live. And that’s how we can use depression as information from your body saying, “I’m not okay here and we need to do something about it.” It’s a sign that we have to do some rewiring, and spiritual tools can be very helpful for that.

In your book No Nonsense Spirituality, you talk about mysticism, awe, and ritual as spiritual tools. Do these tap into the science of well-being?

I do think tools like ritual and awe and mystic wisdom, that have been in the realm of spirituality, are good for human flourishing. At Yale there was a class on happiness and well-being, and it was so popular with burned out Yale students that it filled up every semester. Eventually, they just released it for free and said, “if you want to understand the science of happiness, take this course.” Because we’re never really taught this, right? We’re never taught what’s needed to keep your brain happy, so that you can experience joy, meaning, purpose, community, and all of these things. Sometimes you get those tools from religion, but there’s a cost. The cost is believing certain things. And so, the pathway to these tools without dogma is going to be the science of spirituality, and all that does is give you permission to say there’s something here worth exploring. We’re not going out to woo-land. We’re not making claims about magic or crystals. But there’s something here that we have some data to show is good for you. There’s science that shows ritual helps us process something in the body. There’s science to meditation, awe, and states of consciousness that we call transcendent. All of these may have dogma or religious language wrapped around them, but now we can dig into the science and say, oh, there’s something here. There’s something here that’s interesting. That allows us to use these tools without feeling like we’re being bamboozled or feeling like we must have faith in order to get that tool.

John Vervaeke has said the problem with religion today is its focus on beliefs. Vervaeke’s thesis is that meaning and well-being are not about beliefs, that they don’t come from possessing propositional knowledge, but rather from a deeper participatory and perspectival knowing. They are enacted, embodied. They are being. Do you agree that your conception of spirituality involves recapturing the importance of this in-the-body element (and not just the intellectual element)?

Yes, I really love that, and this is where feminine voices historically are going to have much more to say. Embodied spirituality is something that we see a lot more from women because their spirituality had to be relational. It had to be communal. It had to be on-the-move. There was no… sit on your mat for eight hours and think about love. It was love in action – love in the middle of the night, love when you’re tired, love when they’re sick, right? And so again, it’s one of those things that we really benefit from female mystics being in this space. Our traditions, especially those coming from the masculine approach, are often about transcending the body, ascending to different planes of consciousness. The ego, the body, is something to be killed. There’s something about the feminine approach that encourages us to connect with our bodies. There’s beauty and empowerment in this.

The body isn’t something to be killed. The body is just another aspect of you worth exploring in this relational way. I think that’s healthier for everyone. It says, give your attention to what’s going on in your inner world, like when you’re in a flow state. When do you feel like you’re resonating? Buzzing? When do you feel excited? What kinds of voices move you? And which ones don’t? That’s helpful for everyone because our subconscious and our bodies hold much more information than our conscious mind can. That’s a movement I think is really important in the realm of spirituality, that we’re not trying to kill the body or kill the ego. We’re trying to make a space big enough for our feelings, for our inner child, for our shadow, for our thoughts, and achieve a kind of eye-in-the-storm where we can have inner peace with all of this going on inside of us.

I want to pick your brain a bit about deconstruction and reconstruction. In your book you say, “Skepticism is a fantastic tool, but it’s not the tool you need for building.” Why is deconstruction alone insufficient?

If there is a lie of atheism, it would be that all you have to do is deconstruct religion and you will just magically know how to run your life, what your core values are, what your meaning and purposes are, how to deal with relationships… and I think the reality is not that we’re born broken, like the Christians say, but we’re also not born without need of help. So, skepticism and deconstruction are great tools when you need some unlearning and some breaking open. But there may come a time where you’ve taken your bulldozer and knocked down God, religion, sense of self, gender, free will, all of these things. And then you get… rubble. Nothing. There’s nothing left. Deconstruction is a fantastic tool, but it’s just one type of tool. Instinctually, there came this moment for me where I felt I’d processed Mormonism, I’d processed Christianity, I’d processed that part of my journey… and what was next? I didn’t want to live forever as just an ex-Mormon because what is that? Or even live as an atheist. What is that? That’s an identity of negation. And if you ask atheism, “how should I structure my life?” all that atheism can say is, “not the theistic God.” That’s all that it has to offer. Humans have more needs than that. We have more needs than just is there a God or not a God? And so, this is where atheism is lacking. This is the weakness of atheism and the atheist “community.” There’s nothing holding this group together except what they’re not.

So, you need to ask yourself, are you in need of deconstruction tools, because your life is too ordered and you’re in a box that doesn’t fit you anymore? Or, are you floating in the void? Because if what you need are tools for building, you don’t need deconstruction tools, you need reconstruction tools. You need to build things back into your life. A lot of times, finding the right spiritual tools is really about asking, “do you need more chaos, or more order?” Do you need deconstruction, or reconstruction? Because if you try to use the tools you don’t need, it’s just going to make things worse.

Greta Christina once argued that atheism is not presently a “safe place to land” for people leaving religion. Do you think the lack of a legitimate spiritual framework (those tools for building) turns folks off atheism?

I definitely think so. I have seen people crack the door open to the void… to oh my God, I will die, the universe doesn’t care. And they’ll slam that door shut and say, “it doesn’t even matter if religion is true or not.” If we don’t have the tools, if atheism isn’t a safe landing place to deal with existential fears, it essentially doesn’t matter if atheism is true. If we were even to find some proof, were somehow able to look across the universe and say, conclusively, there is no God… until we have secular tools to deal with death, and meaninglessness, and isolation, and fear of freedom, and all these other existential fears… unless we have tools for that, it won’t matter, because it doesn’t just matter what’s true. If you really challenge religious people on their beliefs, they’ll eventually say, yeah, I hope it’s true, but I can’t be sure. People will choose the tools and community that help them combat a sense of meaninglessness and chaos. They’ll go back to religion because it makes them feel better, because life feels worth living that way. And so, we do have to make atheism better, provide those secular spiritual tools, and start to work on community building, however difficult that’s going to be.

Some outspoken atheists, like Richard Dawkins, will claim that all they care about is truth, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient. Is forcing people to face the “truth” of big existential concerns always moral?

When I first left religion, I had this attitude, a kind of burn-it-all-down phase. I was spreading these really harsh arguments about religion and religious people. Then I had a friend in a kind of post-religious community who got all that at once – the loss of God, the loss of religion, the loss of free will, the loss of self – and it drove them to a suicide attempt. That absolutely floored me. I learned in that moment that to pull the rug out from under people without providing reconstruction tools may actually be dangerous. It may actually be unethical. To say, “I don’t care, that’s the truth, I don’t care if you kill yourself over it”… that’s like a Christian saying, “this is the truth, I don’t care that you’re going to hell.” We should care. That moment for me was like, oh shit, I can’t just say “well, this is the truth,” and not care about the suffering that causes. How does that make me any different than Christians who tell me the same thing? That’s when I started to realize, oh, if I’m going to pull on these security blankets, I better have something else to offer. I better have an alternative… because I do think it may be unethical to do that psychologically to a person if you don’t have tools for them, or if they’re not ready for it.

It’s also a matter of privilege. I didn’t have my deconstruction all at once. It was a long journey, a piece at a time. I also learned that to go into nihilism or even to go into atheism, there can be elements of psychological privilege in the sense that you’ve had a good enough life, you’ve had a level of security and belonging in those lower stages of Maslow’s pyramid, that allow you to jump into chaos and the void. There’s privilege in having enough resources to leave religion and survive. Not everybody has that option. I can explore these really scary places, but not everyone can. If you didn’t have that security during those developmental stages, if you have deep religious trauma, who am I to say I’m better than you? I’m smarter than you? All your beliefs are wrong, deal with it? Atheists can get really holier than thou without recognizing the privilege that it takes to be an atheist.

None of this means I’m going to stop speaking out against ideas that harm people. But also, I hope that religion gets healthier for the people who need it. Growing up in a religious community with that safety and security may have been the nest I needed to feel comfortable flying off into the void. I can’t take that for granted.

Do you think a lack of spirituality, a lack of connection, leads to nihilism and feelings of meaninglessness?

My sense is that nihilism is a beast with two heads. One is the death of God and the decline of religion – certain religious claims are just hard to handle given what we know with modern science. The second is the postmodernist movement, which is this idea that we’re not participating in capital T truth as much as we thought we were. Both are a big part of nihilism. So, it’s the combination of the death of God, the decline of religion and religious community – which is going to be where we used to find our foundation for spirituality – combined with postmodernism, where it doesn’t seem like we can get a handle on capital T truth or capital M morality. How do we deal with this? I think those two aspects are really driving a rise in nihilism.

What are the ways that atheists typically approach nihilism?

I see four most commonly. The first would be Stoicism, which is I’m going to choose these values and live according to these values, and that’s going to give me meaning and purpose. The second is Existentialism, which is this idea that it’s your responsibility to build meaning and purpose, to be your best self. Third would be Absurdism, which is deeply accepting that there’s a disconnect between our desire for meaning and purpose and the fact that the universe has none and doesn’t seem to care about us. Fourth would be Optimistic Nihilism, the approach that if there’s no ultimate meaning and purpose, that’s great news because then you can create your life however you want to experience it. Those last two I see the most, and the difference between the two is not very much. I think your preference often depends on your personality. Those people who just naturally enjoy life tend toward Optimistic Nihilism, constructing a life of joy. For positive Absurdism, there’s a little bit more rebellion in the personality… it’s wanting to create meaning and purpose in spite of meaninglessness. My take leans toward absurdist… I know there’s no ultimate meaning, but I’m going to create it anyway. The universe doesn’t care, but I’m going to care.

I’d say I tend toward optimistic nihilism… I’m always searching for those silver linings. One perspective that I love is that because it’s life that creates meaning, the universe becomes meaningful because you are in it.

That’s the shift that really saves people’s lives. The shift from thinking, “does my life have meaning 10,000 years from now?” to just diving into the experience of being alive. Intellectually, if I stand on the ground of ultimate meaning, I realize the universe doesn’t care, and that could make me quite nihilistic. But from a different ground, which is the ground of my body and my experience, and the fact that whatever this consciousness is gives me the experience of existence… that’s a totally different game. Suddenly, things are incredibly meaningful. The fact that sound waves that come from a Weezer song can make my body dance, that’s amazing! That’s magical, you know, as well as your relationships, your projects, your body, what’s going on in your inner world, your dreams. And I don’t say that as a unicorn and rainbows-type person. I say that as someone who has been deeply nihilistic, but has learned through these spiritual tools, that there’s this other place to stand, which exists at the level of experience, where life becomes magical and meaningful again.

We’ve talked quite a bit about religion. What about the occult? Why are occult tools, which enable you to connect and converse with your subconscious, so important?

The subconscious holds so much more information than you could ever access with your conscious mind. Tapping into that wisdom is going to give you access to that information. Occult tools let you tap into your subconscious wisdom through symbolism. For example, if I were to ask your conscious mind, “what resources do you need in your life right now?” Your conscious mind might say, “I’m not really sure, I don’t know the answer to that.” But if I were to ask your subconscious mind, maybe by showing you pictures, something then pops up into your consciousness that you weren’t aware of before. This is why I think atheists are sometimes too rough on occult practices. I may ask you a question that your rational mind doesn’t have an answer for, but then I use a tarot card to dig a little deeper, and you find a wound or something you just weren’t aware of. It was always there, just underneath, outside the bubble of your awareness… and now you have a piece of information that’s really going to help you with your decision making. We shouldn’t entirely throw this thing away just because it does something the rational mind can’t. And I don’t always love that… because I tend towards rationality and have that bias. But I do recognize that things like guided meditations, symbolism, rituals, psychedelics, archetypes, and dream work tap into the wisdom of your subconscious and dig deeper into what’s driving your behavior so that you can make more intentional choices. Now, I’m going to do that with my skepticism, which means I’m not going to believe truth claims around it, but there are tools here that are valuable, and if you don’t have one of these tools, then you’re not accessing all the information in your brain that you could. If you’re a rational person, that should matter to you.

When it comes to spiritual experiences and spiritual tools, do you feel the need to know the reasoning or science behind something before you accept it, or before you incorporate that tool?

I prefer when there’s some solid science there because that allows me to jump in and feel like I’m safe to do so. But there are many things that we just don’t know a lot about. One of the misnomers, I’m sure you know and have experienced, is that people think being an atheist means you know what ultimate reality is… like if you don’t believe in God, then you must know what’s really going on. No. I have no idea. I just don’t think that first century people know better than I do. So, I’m okay saying I don’t understand many of these things, it’s more about can I experience this tool or whatever is going on here without having to believe in something? Because when I have to believe in something, that’s a red flag for me. But if you say, “something’s happening here, we can’t fully explain it,” then I’m okay with that. I’m okay with saying something is mysterious. I had no desire in psychedelics until science said hey, there’s something going on here… people are having drastic personality changes, their depression is improving… but we don’t know exactly how it works. There was enough there for me to say, okay, I’m going to give it a try, even though I don’t fully understand how mushrooms work. As long as it’s okay that I don’t know, then I’m fine. Atheism for me doesn’t mean I understand all of this, that I understand consciousness or I understand what happens after we die… that I understand mushrooms or I understand what’s really going on here. I don’t. I really don’t. But if there’s enough science saying this is a tool that’s interesting, but let’s keep our wits about us here, then I’m okay to explore those things.

In reading your book, you had said that atheists must create spirituality for themselves, that there isn’t going to be a spiritual community with a you-shaped hole that you can just walk into. How skeptical do you feel that we will eventually be able to create secular spiritual communities that provide what religion used to… shared values, shared identities, shared beliefs, shared moral ideals, etc.?

I’ve seen many, many atheist communities attempt to build something like a religious community. To try and do that without the dogma. What I think we’re finding is that without dogma, these communities are not cohesive enough to stay together more than about five years. If you have really strong stories about heaven and hell, then you can get people to put their time and money and resources into creating those communities. Religious communities have pre-schools, and after-church programs, potlucks, social gatherings, softball leagues… every aspect of community you can find within religion. I don’t think we’re going to find that again, that one roof that houses all your communal needs… your sports needs, your kids’ needs, your social needs, your spiritual needs, your intellectual needs. I think we only get that with dogma. And so, if we’re not going to play the dogma game, it will have to be a la carte. It will have to be a piecemeal construction of all the communal and ritual and relational needs you have that are unique to your values and your family. I think we’ve deconstructed the idea that you can get it all in one building. We’re just far too complex for that, and the world is more complex. But I have rebuilt a community for myself, and I have been sustained by that community; you don’t need a one-stop shop.

I feel similarly. I think in any “one-stop-shop” community, I would be in a state of constant BS vigilance… looking for things becoming problematic, hyper-focused on leadership becoming immoral or abusing their power. I don’t think I could just surrender myself to the experience. I would always be on high alert.

This is why it’s hard to gather skeptics and atheist types, because it’s so hard to get enough stickiness there to get a community going. It’s really, really hard. How do you have doors that are open enough to allow for everyone’s beliefs, but actually have sturdy enough tent walls to make it a community? That’s a problem we haven’t solved yet. But I was able to create that in my own life and, as an atheist spiritual director, help others create that in their own lives. And maybe that’s going to be the healthiest way to do it.

What’s an atheist spiritual director?

That’s a title I gave myself. I have a Master’s degree in Theology, and then I did a two-year program for spiritual direction with the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. People want to talk about their fear of death, or about their beliefs, but going to a pastor feels inappropriate. If they go to their therapist, their therapist may not be trained on these kinds of deep existential questions. I will always recommend therapy for everyone, but for this specific thing… when we’re talking about nihilism and existential fears… therapy wasn’t the most helpful tool for me. I found therapists couldn’t engage philosophically the way I needed because that’s just not in their training, right? We need something between a pastor and a therapist, but how do we address the need for this space when we don’t really know what to call it? So, for me, “atheist spiritual director” gets people to say, “what is that?” It’s clear from the title that I’m doing spiritual stuff, that’s the place I want to hang out, but I’m not going to push my beliefs on you. I can help guide you towards a healthy spirituality without doing any sort of spiritual manipulation where I’m telling you what to do or believe. If your depression or anxiety is existential, an atheist spiritual director or secular chaplain can help and can sit in that deep soul space with you.

Thanks for your time, Britt! This has been a fabulous conversation. And thank you for your book, which is an incredible resource for atheists deconstructing and reconstructing.

I so enjoyed this conversation. Stay in touch!

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