New Definition, Same Old Story

17 May, 2026

If the title of a book a friend recently gave me was intended to be provocative, that intention surely succeeded for yours truly—because the assertion that Life’s too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious certainly raised this reader’s hackles.

The title feels like a familiar accusation, thrown at you via the representative of an aggressively evangelical branch of Christianity, say the member of a campus group who approaches you out of nowhere to lay out all your wrongheadedness and their possession of every last answer. But with the recognition that “religious” or “religion” is such a broad term, one that means any number of things to different people, one of the tasks author David Dark sets out before launching into his claim is nailing down a working definition of said term.

Dark describes religion as “perceived necessity; it is that which a person perceives as needful in their everyday thinking and doing”—or later, as “the what, the to whom, and the how of our everyday lives.” Fine enough, in terms of getting right to the point that religion does not apparently equal (one version of) Christianity. But the definition seems overly broad—why isn’t “commitment,” or “conviction,” for example, good enough here? And it still feels a bit sneaky to include even the noble example of “the acted-upon desire for equal access to excellent public education for all young Americans as good religion” or “a refusal to wear a mask over a person’s mouth and nose in an enclosed space when asked during a pandemic as bad religion.”¹ It comes off as a variant, in other words, of the assurance that everyone is actually, if unconsciously, existing according to the terms of the speaker’s understanding of reality.

I do appreciate Dark’s emphasis on the fact that religion doesn’t boil down to an unthinkingly vocalized creed or set of beliefs to which one supposedly subscribes; for him, religion is instead a lived way of relating to the world, and “happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out, or compelled by something outside ourselves.” Plus, in an age of angry division and/or ironic hipsterish dismissal of anyone getting really excited about something, I also appreciate Dark’s sense of how important it is to share with each other what he repeatedly calls our “attention collections,” the interests that make us who we are and get us too enthusiastic to shut up about them. But calling “[y]our obsession with the Marvel cinematic universe,” for example, religious is stretching the term a little too far, methinks.²

What seems to dwell at the heart of Dark’s reason for writing this book is his weariness of being lumped in with ugly right-wing religionists eager to condemn to hell those who don’t look and think and act exactly like them—of their tendency to set the terms for everyone else. And that’s understandable. An evangelical Christian himself, he makes a good argument for the social/cultural/environmental/relational responsibilities we owe to the world and everyone and everything within it. Here, too, it’s fine, even laudable, that he grounds these commitments in his religious tradition and his continuing participation in it. He’s come a long way from that Limbaugh-listening youth he once was. And yet, I still can’t shake the feeling that Dark is less concerned about how religion gets defined and used in ugly fashion, or about the possibility that he’ll be mistaken for someone who defines and uses it in that way—and more vexed by the fact that people simply don’t identify themselves as religious or want anything to do with religion, even if they have no beef with people who do, even if they’re standing right next to him at a protest and going to the same organizing potlucks and reveling in relationship and running the best damned eco-friendly after-school program out there. Dissatisfied that not everyone shares in the same sort of grounding that drives him to do what he does, akin to the missionizing sadness that because your fantastic, solidly good human being of a friend doesn’t accept Jesus as his personal lord and savior, he’s going straight to hell. In his afterword, Dark does seem to approach, without totally arriving at, this realization, noting that he glimpsed in the first edition of the book “a bullying, high-handed tone—a certain pushiness…. [which] can serve to enable spiritual abuse,” a practice he in turn defines as “try[ing] to deny someone the right to assess their own thoughts, feelings, or experiences without me.”³

That assumption is welcome—but is also related to another presumption often made by people who complain about others saying they’re “spiritual but not religious,” or checking “none” when asked on a form to select their religious tradition. Dark seems to fall into the category of these complainers who surmise the “nones” want nothing to do with church because they’ve been “hurt” in some way by their or others’ traditions. While that may indeed be the case for many of them, he and others fail to consider the fact that a none may have checked that box for the simple reason that she just doesn’t buy the metaphysical assertions being made within religious communities or traditions. It’s not that a congregation has been mean, or that she thinks the members of it are annoying; it’s just that there’s no reason to participate in a community whose very reason for existing she can’t get behind, viz., to celebrate and cultivate a basic sort of understanding about how the universe operates.

That lack of belief is then related to not wanting to participate in well-meaning interfaith dialogue groups such Interfaith America. So often, these communities are eager to insist upon the participation of atheists and agnostics, assuming said nonreligious individuals want to be part of the conversation and have lamentably been made to feel left out, instead of wanting to just be left alone, left free to turn down the terms of someone else’s discourse. To have it accepted that I’m of this mind for a reason, thanks very much, and I don’t want to be forced to discuss it or prove its validity to you. Again, it’s not any hostility to religion on the part of this nonbeliever, just sheer lack of interest, probably accompanied by being perfectly comfortable with any uncertainty about what the purpose of the universe is, etc. As the bumper sticker has it, all who wander (or who are fine where they are) are not lost.

So yes, I’m irked by the book, but I also realize its value for the religiously minded who aren’t open to doing or supposedly believing things that aren’t the exact replica of their own preferred systems or behaviors. I don’t want to dismiss Life’s too Short, then, or its author’s goodwill. Maybe if we switched the terms, though, to something like life’s too short not to be enthusiastic about or committed to something, I’d feel a lot less prickly about the project as a whole.

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