When Faith Forgets to Love: A Theologian’s Uncomfortable Truth

I need to remind you who is writing this before I write another word, because this particular conversation requires that kind of honesty.

I am an ordained minister. A former hospital chaplain. A theologian who has spent more years than I can easily count sitting with the sacred in its most unguarded forms. At bedsides where death was making its slow and certain approach, in therapy offices where the accumulated weight of religious wounding had finally become too heavy to carry alone, in sanctuaries that felt like courtrooms and in living rooms that felt like church.

I say theologian now rather than minister, not because I have left faith but because I have refused to let faith be smaller than the truth I keep finding at its edges.

And the truth I keep finding is this:

The most genuinely Christlike people I have ever met in my years of chaplaincy were not always the ones who claimed his name the loudest. Some of the most open-hearted, most tenderly human, most genuinely present people I sat with at the threshold of death identified as atheists. There was in them a quality of attention, of compassion, of radical acceptance of the human condition, that I can only describe as sacred. Even as they would have rejected that word entirely.

And some of the most defended, most hostile, most closed rooms I have ever entered belonged to people whose faith was loudest and most certain.

I am not saying this to indict anyone. I am saying it because it is true, and because the truth of it has been asking me for years to find the courage to say it out loud.

Faith, when it remembers its purpose, is a soft hum beneath the noise of the world. A melody that calls us back to ourselves and to each other. It is the quiet hand that brushes away tears. The voice that whispers “you are enough, you are loved, you belong.” The thread that stitches us into something greater, something sacred, something that honors the breathtaking fragility and beauty of being human.

Faith, at its best, is a sanctuary. A place where the armor comes off. Where we remember that we are all connected, all flawed and all worthy of grace.

But somewhere. And I have spent a long time trying to understand exactly where, faith forgot how to love.

It became tangled in fear. Twisted by the hunger for power. Weaponized by people who discovered, early and with devastating efficiency, that nothing controls a population quite as completely as convincing them that God agrees with their idea of hierarchy.

What was meant to liberate became a mechanism of containment.

What was meant to heal…. became one of the most reliable sources of wounding I encounter in my clinical practice, week after week. I hear deep heartbreak in the stories of people who came to faith looking for belonging, yet left carrying shame so deep they could not find the bottom of it.

The neuroscience of religious trauma is only beginning to be studied with the rigor it deserves, but what we are finding is not surprising to anyone who has sat with its aftermath in a therapy room.

When the nervous system learns, in childhood or adolescence or any vulnerable season of life, that love is conditional. That belonging requires compliance. That the self must be edited or hidden or denied in order to remain acceptable to God or community, it responds the way nervous systems always respond to conditional love.

It adapts. It armors. It learns to perform rather than inhabit.

And the particular cruelty of religious conditional love is that it claims to be the opposite of what it is. It calls the cage a place of freedom. It calls compliance devotion. It calls the silencing of the authentic self a holy sacrifice. And it does this in the name of a love so total and so unconditional that the contradiction, once seen clearly, is almost unbearable.

I have sat with gay men whose churches told them their love was an abomination and watched what that does to a nervous system across decades. I have sat with women whose faith traditions handed them a theology of their own smallness so early and so completely that they had to dismantle themselves in therapy, piece by painful piece, to find the person underneath. I have sat with people of color who loved an alabaster Jesus, genuinely and completely and then watched their churches go quiet, or worse, go complicit when the conversation turned to the racism being done in his name.

These are not the failures of faith. They are the consequences of faith being used as empire.

And empire, as I have come to understand it, is always the same project regardless of the flag it flies under: the concentration of power in the hands of those who have decided they understand the divine better than you do, and the enforcement of that understanding through the most intimate and devastating weapon available:

The threat of spiritual unworthiness.

I think about the indigenous understanding of the sacred, which is where I find myself returning more and more these days, as the years pass and the questions deepen.

There is a scene I encountered in a film once that has never left me. A ceremony in which a newborn child is lifted toward the sky and dedicated not to a set of doctrines or a list of behavioral requirements, but to their own authentic becoming. The prayer offered was essentially this: “may this soul be entirely itself, may it come to teach the community whatever it came here to teach, may we be wise enough and humble enough to learn from it.”

And sadly, I have never heard that prayer in a church.

And I think the absence of it explains a great deal about where organized religion finds itself today.

A faith that believes it already understands everything cannot be taught anything. A tradition that has decided in advance what God looks like, what family looks like, what love looks like, what a human body is allowed to do and desire and become: that tradition has confused its own cultural inheritance with divine revelation. It has mistaken the map for the territory. And it is so invested in the map that it will fight, sometimes literally, to prevent anyone from looking out the window at the actual landscape.

So, as of late I find myself fed by many streams.

There is beauty in the Christ consciousness that strips away every hierarchy and says simply “love one another as I have loved you”…..not love those who look like you, not love those who agree with you, not love those whose love makes you comfortable, but love one another. Full stop.

There is wisdom in the Buddhist understanding of suffering and impermanence that the anxious, achievement-driven West is only beginning to receive.

There are tenants of Islam and Judaism that carry genuine light when freed from the distortions of empire.

And there is something in the Orisha traditions, in the stories of Yemaya and Obatala, in the music and the ceremony and the deep ecological wisdom of the African and indigenous spiritual lineages, that feels to me like the most honest theology I have ever encountered. A spirituality that knows the river is sacred, that the ocean is alive with meaning, that every child born into this world carries medicine the community needs and should be received with curiosity rather than immediately shaped into compliance.

This is what Nativ Elementz means when we speak of elemental wisdom. Not a rejection of faith but an expansion of it. Not the abandonment of the sacred but the insistence that the sacred is larger, wilder, more generous, and more radically inclusive than any single tradition has yet had the courage to fully claim.

I know why people are leaving organized religion.

I have watched it happen. I have sat with the grief of it in my office. The grief of people who did not want to leave, who loved the community and the music and the ritual and the sense of something larger than themselves, but could not remain in spaces that required them to close their eyes to racism, to hand their autonomy over to a leadership that had never earned it, to pretend that taco night constitutes genuine diversity, while the hard conversations about power and history and who actually gets to lead go permanently unscheduled.

The church is not dying because people have lost their hunger for the sacred.

The church is dying because people’s hunger for the sacred has outgrown the container they were offered.

And that, I want to say clearly and with genuine hope, is not a tragedy.

It is an invitation.

What if we dared to reimagine faith not as a building or a denomination or a set of propositions to be agreed with, but as a practice. A daily, embodied, relational practice of showing up to life with the full force of our attention and our compassion and our willingness to be changed by what we encounter?

What if the most sacred thing we could do was not to get our theology exactly right, but to see the person in front of us exactly as they are. Not as a project, not as a soul to be saved, not as a deviation from the norm to be corrected, but as a complete and irreducible human being carrying gifts the community needs?

What if we built spaces, not necessarily with steeples, not necessarily with any particular name on the door. Where the armor could come off, where the questions were more valued than the answers, where the diversity of human expression was received as evidence of a creative force so abundant and so generous that it could not be contained in any single image or story or tradition?

This is the faith worth dreaming of. Not the faith that knows everything. The faith that is still learning. Still listening. Still humble enough to be taught by the atheist at the bedside, by the child being lifted toward the sky, by the river and the ocean and the two-spirit and the elder and the newborn and every soul that arrives carrying medicine we did not know we needed.

So this is my honest word to anyone who has been wounded by faith that forgot to love:

Your hunger for the sacred is not the problem. It is the most human thing about you. The wound is not evidence that you asked for too much. It is evidence that you were given too little. That the container you were handed was never large enough for the spirit you carried into it.

And to anyone still inside a tradition that is struggling to remember its own purpose:

The love that faith was always meant to embody is not complicated. It does not require a doctorate in theology or a perfect understanding of doctrine. It requires only this: the willingness to see another human being fully, to meet them where they are without an agenda, to offer presence instead of judgment, to build a table long enough for everyone and then keep adding chairs.

That is the faith that heals.

That is the faith that sets people free.

That is the faith, whatever name we give it and whatever tradition we find it in, that the world is aching for right now with everything it has.

Let this be our prayer. Not the prayer of the certain, but the prayer of the still becoming.

Not the prayer that closes doors, but the one that keeps finding new ways to open them.

Not the faith that looks like empire, but the one that looks like love.

Because in the end, faith is not about what we believe.

It is about how we live.

It is about the love we give, the people we see, the sacred we recognize in the most unexpected faces and places and moments.

And if our faith does not make us more tender, more curious, more radically and recklessly open to the full and astonishing diversity of what it means to be human and alive on this earth…

Then it is not yet finished becoming what it was always meant to be.

And neither, perhaps, are we.

~Nativ Elementz