Dr. Darrel Ray on Recovering From Religion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/04

Dr. Darrel Ray is the founder and President of the Board of Directors of Recovering from Religion. He has been a psychologist for over thirty years. He is the author of four books: two on organizational teamwork,  “The God Virus-How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture” and “Sex and God-How Religion Distorts Sexuality.” Dr. Ray has been a student of religion most of his life and holds a Masters Degree in religion as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology/Anthropology with a Doctorate in Psychology. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re here. So, we still need to remember what we talked about before. That was years ago. It was for Conatus News, which is now coming on our media. So, we’ve got your personal story for anyone following the interviews I’ve been doing. Today, we’ll focus on the Secular Therapy Project and Recovering From Religion. We’ll start with the more well-known one, probably Recovering From Religion. So, what’s the current breadth of its services now? There will be many stories, but what does it cover now?

Dr Darrel Ray: We celebrated our 15th anniversary this past April. April 20th is our start date, 2009. We have about 470 volunteers who now cover virtually every time zone on the planet through our chat line, call line, and support groups. We have volunteers from Moscow, Russia, Perth, Australia, and others everywhere, from South Africa to France, England, Mexico, Lebanon, Romania, Canada and all over the US. We just finished incorporating a subsidiary or sister organization in Australia. So, we now have a fully recognized nonprofit in Australia and New Zealand called Recovering From Religion Australia.

That has been a delight. It’s taken us a couple of years to make that happen, but we’ve got an independent board down under, responsible for some of our services, but not all. Many of our services, the call line and the chat line, are centralized, so they use our centralized services. But they’re providing localized services in Australia. We’ve always had support groups. That’s how we started. We added the Helpline (call and chat) in 2014. Since then, we have added many other services, like our resource library, online community, and Monday night RfRx program.

We have face-to-face support groups that might meet in the back of a coffee shop. But COVID forced us to stop those for obvious reasons. So, we transitioned to having online support group meetings. It’s ironic because, unlike most organizations, we benefited from COVID-19. We grew dramatically during COVID because people were at home with nothing to do and had to live with their religious parents or something like that. We expanded and now have about 45 support groups of all different flavours in almost every time zone.

Somebody can join our support group for LGBTQ issues, a women-only or ex-Jehovah’s Witness support group, and many others. They can join from any time zone, depending on the time in their area, because they are on Zoom. We’re serving thousands through these online support groups and still have about 30 face-to-face groups. We’ve got Zoom groups almost every day somewhere in the world. These are important services for people going through the trauma of being rejected by their family or being divorced by their spouse because they don’t believe anymore, or the kid kicked out of his home this week in Salt Lake City because they’re gay. Their Mormon parents can’t deal with that issue.

We also get phone calls from places like Saudi Arabia and Muslims in Toronto, Canada. The stories can be horrendous. Even in the Western world, especially Muslims can be very insular and impose their religion on their children in some pretty crazy ways. That’s the scope of the recovery we deal with.

We also have an enormous curated library that we’ve developed over the last 6 or 7 years, and it’s an active living library. So, if people need a resource for living with a religious spouse, we’ve got that. If they need a resource on how to find asylum out of Pakistan, we know where to send them. We don’t provide that kind of service but connect people to the right places. Besides that, we’re a trained listening ear.

Our volunteers answer the phone and chat, and they are there to be caring and offer support and resources so people can get on with their lives after religion, any religion. We get calls from Hindus, Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons—you name it. We’ve had them call us. We don’t get many chats or calls, if any, from China because they’re so locked down and have outlawed VPNs. But about every other country on the planet can contact us, and we can support people if they speak English or Spanish. We do have a Romanian speaker. We’ve got Latvian, French and even Arabic speakers. We have several Spanish speakers, but we’re not yet geared to support anything more than Spanish and English. Hopefully, we’ll have more volunteers speaking other languages.

We always need volunteers, regardless of their language skills. We’ll train you, and then you can bring your language skills to the table. 

Jacobsen: Given all the resources coming to you from all these different countries and faiths, have you connected any peer-reviewed literature or professional researchers with the work you’re doing in analyzing the structure of the calls and so on? Have you gotten any general idea of the general symptomatology of people who have had a problematic religious upbringing and then come to you?

Ray: Yes, we have. We’ve been doing this for 15 years and see the patterns. Our pattern is number one: fear of hell. That’s usually the number one thing people come to us for. Whether they’re Muslim, Christian, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are all afraid of some afterlife consequence. Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, don’t believe in hell, but they still believe in some retribution from their God. But that’s number one. Number two is shunning and relationship issues, being socially isolated by everybody they loved or thought was on their side.

When people leave a religion, they lose their whole social structure, which may include their family, their spouse, and even their adult children. There are all sorts of things that happen when you leave a religion. Number three, and these are almost universal, is sexuality.

We get many people saying, “I’m gay. I came out to my family, and they’re kicking me out of the house,” or a person says, “I got married because my church told me to, and now I realize ten years later with three kids that I’m LGBTQ, or I’m trans or something.” So those are the top three. In some cases, it’s all three in one person. There are other smaller issues, but I could say we could wrap up 90% of all the phone calls in fear of hell, fear of social isolation, shunning, and sexuality. That would wrap up 90% of them. 

Every major religion emphasizes that you have to be sexually pure. Religions like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity all have a purity culture mentality. So, sex alone is going to be one issue that almost anybody in any religion is going to have, even if it’s a small part. It’s still a part of what’s going on.

And then, of course, social isolation is the way they keep you inside the religion. Because if you dare to leave, “What happened to the last person who left? They lost everything. They lost their spouse. They lost their kids.” Everyone can see what happens, and that instills fear, even terror, which keeps people tightly involved in the religion.

They punish people severely even as they’re saying, “We’re doing it because we love you.” There’s no hate quite like Christian love when it comes to shunning your children; there’s no violence quite like Muslim peace when it comes to killing your children sometimes. We get people calling us who are under physical threat, phone calls or chats from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and India – Those are dangerous places for LGBTQ people and for women who want to think for themselves.

We get women calling us saying that they’re being forced to marry a man they don’t want to marry, and they’d like to escape the country to get away from the forced marriage they’re being subjected to. Anyway, there’s a lot of those kinds of things. I hope that answers your question.

Jacobsen: It does help. Then what about the Secular Therapy Project? I remember doing several interviews with Dr. Caleb Lack. Is he still there?

Ray: No, he has since left, but he’s still a big supporter of us. Our new director, Dr. Travis McKie-Voerste, has been our director for over four years, so I guess that says something about how long it has been since we last talked. You’re welcome to talk to him. Dr. Travis is doing a great job. When Caleb told us he would step down, he agreed to continue in an advisory role. We still used Caleb as a consultant.

Dr. Lack has been very valuable in helping us decide what we must do to maintain a professional service within the evolving world of psychotherapy. But Dr. Travis McKie-Voerst did his doctoral dissertation on. I’ll read the title to you; you might even want to get a hold of it.

It’s called “The Atheist Experience of Counseling in the Bible Belt of the United States.” He researched the issues that an atheist has in trying to find therapy, primarily in the Bible South, where there are so many Christian counsellors. Many licensed counsellors can’t keep their religion out of their therapy practice.

Jacobsen: Yes, exactly. A Venn Diagram is a circle.

Ray: So he wrote that as his doctoral dissertation a few years back, and that’s why we hired him. He’s not paid—nobody gets paid here—but that’s why we put him in charge of STP; he had that background. We recently had another volunteer finish a master’s thesis. I love that people are starting to get on the research track and looking to us to help them do research. That’s one of the other interviews I’ve got this week—a master’s level student who wants to talk to us about researching religious trauma.

Ray: Part of the reason for this interview is to build a catalogue of information about RfR’s services for those needing us.  

Jacobsen: Yes, that’s excellent. We’re always happy to talk because we want people to know we’re here to help.

Ray: Another volunteer wrote a thesis titled “Once I felt I Had a Choice, I Didn’t Choose Religion”: A Qualitative Analysis of Meaning in Religious Dones.” It examines how children are raised without a choice in religious matters. Anyway, that’s some recent research I’m aware of. I know two or three other doctoral dissertations are in progress. I know about them, but I haven’t seen the results yet. So the fact that we’ve probably got five to ten active research projects going on right now is pretty cool because this did not exist even five or six years ago. Nobody was talking about religious trauma or how trauma can screw up your sex life, or how social isolation impacts people.

One of the most horrible treatments you can do to a human being is to put them in solitary confinement. Almost any other punishment or physical treatment is more bearable and recoverable than solitary confinement. Religion figured this out thousands of years ago. What they do is, if you leave the religion, they isolate you from everybody you ever knew or loved. It’s hard to explain in words how traumatizing that is—to think these people were the most important thing in your life. They birthed you. They cared for you. They told you they loved you, and now they’re gone and will never talk to you again. Or if they do, it isn’t very pleasant.

We deal with that a lot. People call us, saying, “How do I rebuild my life because I lost everything?” Even if they didn’t lose all their financial means and still have a job, it’s almost worse than losing their job, house, or financial structure because if you still have your family and support network, you can emotionally ride out that crisis. But if you don’t have a support network, all the money in the world probably isn’t going to help that much.

Regarding the Secular Therapy Project, let me be more specific about that. We have passed 891 therapists registered in nine different countries. We’ve got seven or eight therapists in Australia, 29 or 30 in Canada, one or two in New Zealand, and therapists in Belgium, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Argentina. We’ve internationalized and spread out. I’m very happy to have Spanish-speaking therapists whom we vetted. It has grown monstrously. We passed 35,000 registered clients this week.

So 35,000 people have come to us looking for help. That doesn’t guarantee they booked an appointment, but most probably did. Those 891 therapists are getting referrals and clients through our services and providing support for anything, not just religious issues. These therapists are trained to use secular means and help with any mental health issue. You can find someone in our system at www.seculartherapy.org. Register, then search our database for therapists.

We celebrated our 12th anniversary in May. We started in 2012 with 26 therapists I knew would meet the criteria we sought. Then, we put a team together and started getting applications and conducting interviews, letting people know. If you are a therapist, go to our website, https://www.seculartherapy.org/, and you will see if you qualify. We’ve got a page that describes what we’re looking for. If you qualify, apply.

We turn down about 30% of all the therapists that apply. We do that because they need to meet our criteria. They needed to read the criteria more closely or give us the information we needed to vet them. But I see that as a good thing. I hate turning people down, of course, but I also don’t want people who aren’t evidence-based, are still religious, or have supernatural ideas. Because one thing you cannot be if you want to be a therapist with us is someone who believes in supernatural phenomena. If you believe that crystals can heal you or you can pray the gay away or any of that nonsense, you’re not eligible to join us.

Many therapists we’ve heard of do very unethical stuff, like telling people, “Do you think your depression is because you’re an atheist?” They ignore the fact that the person lost their whole family when they left the religion. Do you think losing your whole family might cause some depression? No, they don’t think that. That’s how much they are in that bubble of Christian privilege.

And that’s what we are interested in doing, Scott—challenging Christian privilege within psychotherapy. It should not be there. The Counseling Association, American Psychological Association, and marriage and family associations all have ethical principles that say you may not bring your religion into your therapy. Yet this is violated daily worldwide in all sorts of ways, and none of the professional societies will challenge it. I can make ten complaints to the American Counseling Association daily, and they would go straight into the wastebasket.

So it’s a big problem when the thing that caused you the disease now says, “Oh, we can help you.” A religious counsellor is a representative of the very organization that caused your trauma. I get accused of being anti-religion and anti-therapy.

Jacobsen: You are not anti-religion.

Ray: No.

Jacobsen: You are not even anti-theist.

Ray: No. I’m about the mental health of people, and those people happen to be formerly religious or currently nonreligious. I see nothing bad about that.

Jacobsen: Yep.

Ray: This is an interesting story—whether you want this or not—but we do have therapists come to us and say, “Yes, I’m still spiritual, or I’m still religious, but I can keep that out of my practice.” We don’t believe them. Here’s why. It was probably about seven or eight years ago that I had a Ph.D. psychologist apply, and he indicated that he had his Ph.D. from Notre Dame University in the United States.

You don’t get much bigger or better than Notre Dame University. So, having a Ph.D. in psychology is pretty prestigious. So, I looked it over and said, “Can you keep your religion out of your practice?” And he said, “Yes, I can do that. I wouldn’t apply if I couldn’t.” So I asked him, “I’ve got one question for you. You’ve got a 22-year-old college student who comes to you. She’s been seeing you for a couple of weeks now. On the third week, she comes in and tells you, ‘I’m pregnant, and I’m going to get an abortion tomorrow at the abortion clinic. But I’d like you to help me stay calm as I go through all the harassing pro-lifers that are going to try to stop me from going in.’ My question to you is, how would you help her?” I sent him an email. We were doing it by email.

A week goes by. Two weeks go by. I finally sent him another email, “How would you help her? Here’s the story. How would you help her?” Another week goes by, and he finally gets back to me and says, “I couldn’t help her.” Right there, it tells me I don’t care how much you think you can keep your religion out. Even with a Ph.D. from Notre Dame University, you are still infected with Catholic ideology. I don’t want anybody using any religious criteria to support or counsel people. 

Jacobsen: I remember a funny story. I searched it up. It was from 2020 with the South African Secular Society. A gentleman had applied to be a marriage officer through SASS, South African Secular Society. Here it is:

We point people at the SASS mission statement and ethos, which includes the naturalist worldview.

We say very early on, “Do you support the SASS mission and ethos?” The only choice is, “Yes.” We say, “Are you prepared to do marriage ceremonies free of supernatural content?” The only answer is, “Yes.”

We say, “Are you prepared to do same-sex and heterosexual sex marriages?” The only answer is, “Yes.” There is, “Are you prepared to do counselling?” It is an optional one. Anyway, people will blithely skim through these, “Yes, yes, yes, carry on, no problems.”

Then we ask for motivation, “Why do you want to become a secular marriage officer?” At that point, we can quite easilyget things like, “Oh, I am a pastor at so-and-so congregation. I wanted to marry my congregants.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Raubenheimer: We also get, “I am a prominent member of x, y, z church.” We don’t see it is in the motivation, but we also ask them for sample ceremonies.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Raubenheimer: For example, in fact, we had one very recently. I hadn’t gone through the ceremony when we copied it in. We put this one on Google Docs, so the whole team could see it. But I started reading it.

And oops! This chap is mentioning God!

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Raubenheimer: He has four citations of God! He has several references to several biblical verses.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Raubenheimer: Now, in fact, Wynand can tell you more about how this one got through the cracks. He set up various protections. But due to technical website issues, he turned it off. So, the person had got through right to that point.

I emailed him to say, “I noticed that you’ve ticked all the boxes saying you’re a secular person and everything else. You’ve agreed to the terms and conditions and everything else. But I see that you’re citing God and making biblical references in your marriage ceremonies. Can you clarify for us?”

He writes back and says, “Cancel my application, I am a Christian and I believe in GOD!”

[Wynand’s Meijer’s wife laughing in the background – not part of the conversation, but listening into it, obviously.]

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: I remember doing a group interview with the South African people, and one of the people who was a part of it was Wynand’s Meijer. He’s a South African. In the background, his wife is laughing at that call. So, the whole thing around that. But yes, you get this kind of confusion. But you’ve seen that too, the confusing information that comes up in Pew Research where people will say that they’re atheist, and 1% will say they believe in God.

Ray: Yes, which makes no sense at all, but yes. Yes, that’s true. We’ve had to tighten our criteria because people sometimes don’t tell the truth. Sometimes, people are merely confused. If you give them the benefit of the doubt but ask for clarification, you discover the real story.

Jacobsen: Yep.

Ray: They need clarification about terms and what they mean.

Jacobsen: Yep, I agree.

Ray: They have this notion that because they went through an ethics course and were taught how to keep their religion out of their practice, they can do that. But they have never faced the challenges we see in people. So, we’re not going to take a chance on somebody. Let’s put it that way. 

Jacobsen: People are too vulnerable. I critiqued where I used to live in Fort Langley. They have a sobriety center that calls itself a ministry. In their language, they’re looking to make disciples for Christ. People are coming to them for sobriety or substance misuse detox. They go on a farm, and they’re closed off. They work at a farm for a year. In circumstances like that, what is your professional opinion of the ethics of taking people at the most vulnerable point in their lives and then trying to make them disciples in the guise of a ministry sobriety center or treatment center?

Ray: I’ll say I addressed that in my book, The God Virus. Whether you’ve read that or not, I spend much time showing how. Why do we have religiously based hospitals? Why do we allow chaplains in prisons? Why are there so many chaplains and ministers in hospitals? What religion does best is take advantage of people when they’re at their most vulnerable. That’s the example you’ve given me. It’s taking people when they’re most easily reprogrammed because the brain is confused. The brain is under a detox process, perhaps, or has been under a drug influence.

There are many reasons why the brain might need to be more balanced. So, yes, you put them on a farm for a year, plus they probably are using another religious concept. I’m going to throw this out at you: Alcoholics Anonymous is nothing but a religion. Eight of the twelve steps name something related to deities, higher powers, gods, or whatever. That is a religion.

Eight of the twelve steps and none of these twelve steps are psychologically sound. Alcoholics Anonymous is a horrendous psychological model because it’s a helplessness model and it’s a disease model. None of the research supports what AA purports. Many churches take the AA model way too seriously. People need to hear this. Those who read this for the first time may not get it.

Jacobsen: Oh, that’s a very important point. People have to approach this from multiple angles. This is incredibly key to my reading of it, too.

Ray: So Alcoholics Anonymous is not based on sound psychological principles. It is based on bad psychological principles. The notion that you are helpless means you must have some supernatural thing outside of yourself. That’s problematic. Alcoholics Anonymous tries to get around all that all the time, but they can’t. They are a religion because eight of the damn twelve steps refer to something supernatural or God or religious.

So, I am dead set against AA. I am, on the contrary, supportive of secular sobriety and harm reduction programs. There are good evidence-based secular programs for drug and alcohol recovery. They’re often based on cognitive behavioural therapy with a 50-year proven track record. We know it works or works the best. Nothing works perfectly, of course.

So what religion and any other religion that’s getting into recovery is doing is simply taking advantage of people when they’re at their most vulnerable. Yes, they might make missionaries out of them. They might make people that can go out and propagate, but it’s a horrible thing because they’re not addressing the underlying issues that drove the person to the addiction in the first place. Jesus can’t solve your addiction. Jesus can’t solve your depression. Jesus can’t solve your social skills. There are many reasons people indulge in drugs of any kind. 

Most of the time, they overindulge in drugs or alcohol because of some other issue. They’re going through a divorce. Their spouse died. They were in a car wreck, and they were on medication to deal with the pain. Most people who could be defined as people with an addiction are no longer addicts three to five years later. Most people are self-medicating for social or psychological reasons. AA has this notion that alcoholism is a lifelong disease. There’s no evidence for that. None whatsoever. So if you buy into the Alcoholics Anonymous focus on this being a disease that will last your whole lifetime and you’re going to die of this disease, you’re wrong. So, how can you support a treatment based on such a total fallacy? Most people don’t die of alcohol. They may die driving a car while under the influence.

That’s not the same thing. I’m saying what AA preaches: that you’re helpless, you’re going to die of alcoholism is simply false in most cases. The twelve steps push some bad narratives. There are better and more proven ways to help people dealing with drug abuse. Does that answer your question?

Jacobsen: It does. What are the most controversial ethical areas in cases received? How do you trace that fine line? How do you overcome those challenges?

Ray: It starts with training our agents. Ethically, we want to stay as neutral as possible because we’re not here to convert or deconvert. That is a challenge because people often come to volunteer for us with unreasonable expectations about their role, and they have to learn to be more like a counsellor than an adviser. So the challenge is to help people stay in that neutral zone and learn good Socratic questioning techniques, or if you’re familiar with street epistemology. We teach those concepts so that volunteers stay in their lane. Stay in your lane as the peer support and be nonjudgmental, not advising.

Another challenge we face is that we’re not, for example, a suicide hotline. It’s not our purpose; we’re not trained to do that. But we do get people calling in who are in danger of ending their lives. That doesn’t happen often, but it happens once or twice a month. Even more often, people mention that they used to be suicidal. So that’s a challenge for us. We want to serve them because they may come to us around religious issues. Or an existential issue—if there’s no god, then I’ve lost all my meaning. We hear that a lot. So we have to help the client with the religious side. But if they’re expressing active suicidal ideation, we will stop the call right then and there and say, “You must call this number,” and we will give them the number if we know their local area. We don’t always know their local area.

We know the suicide hotline in South Africa. We know the suicide hotline in France. So we’ve got a database that we’ve collected over the years. We will send them immediately to a suicide hotline. We will refuse to talk to them because we are not a suicide hotline. Of course, we can’t guarantee they’ll go and do that, but we cannot take that responsibility since it’s not something we’re trained in. It’s not a part of our mission. However, at the same time, and this is a gray area that we have to walk, people call us and say, “I’ve called the suicide hotline in my area, and they’re all religious. They want to tell me to go back to Jesus or God or pray with me, so I don’t want to talk to them.” We understand that problem because so many people are volunteering for those suicide hotlines that want to help bring people back to Jesus. So we’ll continue talking to them as long as they’re not in danger. We can no longer talk to them if we think they’re in danger. Does that fit with what you’re looking for?

Jacobsen: Yes, it’s the kind of thing that people might not necessarily think about or even think to ask because every organization, especially when dealing with emotionally sensitive subject matter or people in a vulnerable state, will inevitably have to, on an increasingly regular basis, make difficult ethical decisions that will impact people’s lives long-term, sometimes permanently. And it’s not individuals who don’t care about the people they’re dealing with, like prosperity gospel preachers. It’s that you care. You’re trying to provide neutrality. It’s similar to the difficulty of independent journalism, where you have to make independent ethical decisions. I don’t consider myself beholden to the idea of the objective journalist. I believe in objective language. You can describe something in objective language. However, any experience is going to be coloured. The language framing is going to be coloured.

Even if you can use perfectly objective and neutral language, the frame and the information, the fidelity, will leave out certain things because of word count limits on concision, et cetera. So you’re left with, in my opinion, better and worse journalists relative to a particular context who try to attain certain universal standards of ethics and conduct. But, when you’re saying those things, I recall myself in similar circumstances because dealing with these religious areas is always difficult. It’s context. 

Ray: We also have a training issue, and we work hard at this to figure out how to deal with people who come to us with clear, serious mental health issues. For example, we will get people who are schizophrenic or bipolar or have some other condition. We’re not trained to do that. I’m trained to do that—I’m a psychologist—but that’s not the purpose of what our volunteers are trained to do. So we have to work with our volunteers to know where that line is between helping them, supporting them, and crossing that line into mental health support and therapy. We cannot do that, and so that’s another ethical guideline.

We work well at it. Over the years, we’ve refined our systems and our guidelines. But people come to us as volunteers wanting to help people in the worst way possible. They need to realize that you can’t help everybody. 10% of the people who call us, we cannot help. It takes a while for volunteers to understand and accept that.

We can help 90%, but we cannot help those few. We don’t try because you can cause more damage. We refer them to the Secular Therapy Project or other mental health resources.

That’s partly why we created the Secular Therapy Project—so we would have a safe place to refer people with those issues. I should also say that we’re all volunteer-based, and we survive on donations. We don’t ask anybody who calls us to give us a dime. No money. We are not Joel Osteen. We’re not helping you for a blessing or anything. So, if somebody wants to help us, they can donate to help us as we help others.

Jacobsen: How can people get involved?

Ray: Every dollar helps. We have huge fees to maintain our Meetup accounts throughout the world. We have to pay for our many Zoom accounts. We have to pay for our international phone lines. We have software development. We have a whole team that does software. We are constantly doing outreach like tabling at conferences or Pride events, county fairs, etc.  But people can get involved with us in many ways, not just by donating but by volunteering. They don’t have to have any certification or training. We’ll take anybody because we will train you. If you have certain skills, like web development or graphic design, we also need that kind of help. But we’ll train you if you want to help people on our helpline or run a group for us.

You don’t need a college degree or a background in psychology. You don’t need any of that. We’ll train anybody. It takes about 10 to 20 hours to train a volunteer properly. We only let people touch our clients if they’re properly trained. Some people don’t make it through the training, but most people do if they’re committed to helping people. We have a very extensive training program that allows us to do good work and know what our limits are at the same time.

Jacobsen: Are you looking to find a third organization for any particular area where you think you need to include a particular part of emphasis?

Ray: No. I’m telling you, Scott. I spend way more time than I ever thought I would helping run Recovering From Religion. Fortunately, we have an amazing executive director, Gayle Jordan. She is awesome. She is the operations person. She runs it from an operations standpoint. My role is to be president of the board and help set the pace and vision for the organization.

However, I needed help handling 450-470 volunteers and all the programming and software development. Gayle does a good job with that. So, no, I don’t have time. I’m not writing any other books. My books, The God Virus and Sex and Goddeal with the very issues that we’re dealing with every day at Recovering From Religion. They’re almost, I won’t call them textbooks, but those two books are almost textbooks for what we do and why we do it.

They explain the theoretical and psychological principles behind what we do, even though I founded the organization after I wrote the books. I wrote the books, and then after having dozens, if not far more, people called me and emailed me saying they needed help after reading my books. They read my books and said, “I need your help.” I couldn’t help all those people. So that’s what led me to start Recovering From Religion.

The fifth chapter of The God Virus was about sex, a huge issue. That one chapter got more responses, emails, and phone calls than almost anything else I published. So I realized, oh, there’s a whole other book there. Two years later, I published Sex and God. But I don’t need to start anything else. I have my hands full. I’m retired—73 years old—and I want to make sure this organization is solid.

It has a good structure, so they can keep going when I kick the bucket. They won’t need me. Nothing is worse than having an organization whose founder doesn’t know their limits. I was an organizational psychologist for 30 years. I’ve seen how often the founder becomes indispensable to the organization. You’ve got to admit your limits on this planet, and I want to do that. I want to leave a good, strong organization. I travel a lot for RFR. We did a whole tour of Australia last year.

I’ve attended several conventions and spoken at many others. We’re raising awareness, developing allies, and developing a donor base. This requires much work.

Jacobsen: Who have been people that you’ve looked up to in your career?

Ray: Probably early on in my career, my mentor was Albert Ellis, the developer and founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. He was my mentor. I had a strong and deep understanding and skill in cognitive behavioural therapy in the 1970s. That’s when I was studying with him. That was one of the major influences on my life. I’m glad I had that opportunity to study with him and be influenced directly. Face-to-face with somebody, you learn quickly. With him, he was a very powerful person. That’s an understatement of how his personality expressed itself.

I’ve been influenced at a distance by many other people in my life. I had a good family situation. I grew up in a good family. My dad was a good influence on me. My family was supportive. I was the first person in my family to go to college—the first person to get a doctorate. So, I had much support in that area. I’ve been influenced by people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who recently died. I could name a half dozen others who influenced my writing or what I chose to write about.

My best friend, Dr. Dan Dana, has been a mentor. He’s internationally known for his work on mediation in the workplace and is a psychologist, too. Those are people you probably wouldn’t be aware of.

Jacobsen: Who impresses you in secular therapeutic settings?

Ray: I can tell you who doesn’t impress me, and that’s the new age woo-woo bullshit theories that pop up every month. There’s a new psychological theory every month. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, has some good stuff going on there. There’s more evidence needed for his polyvagal theory, but it’ll probably, in 10 or 20 years, be seen as valuable. My colleague and friend, Dr. Hector Garcia, has written quite a bit on interesting topics. One of his favourites is Alpha God. He shows some interesting stuff. His day job before he wrote those books was helping develop some cutting-edge practices for soldiers with PTSD at the Veterans Administration. So, Dr. Hector Garcia was instrumental in helping develop something nobody had ever done before. He wasn’t solely involved in it, of course, but learning a lot about trauma is now paying off. Trauma with soldiers because trauma is everywhere.

Trauma comes from child abuse, war, spousal abuse, and car wrecks. There are a lot of trauma or opportunities for trauma. So, I’ve been very influenced by him, and I appreciate his work there. Dr. Marlene Winell has been a hugeinfluence on the secular movement because she coined the term religious trauma syndrome. She was seeing in her clinical practice person after person coming in with what appeared to be trauma, but they hadn’t been in a car wreck. They were never a soldier. What’s going on here? And if you scratch below the surface, you find out religion was the root cause of the trauma. So I credit her and thank her. She came to me at a conference in 2010.

I was there to speak on my recently published book, The God Virus, and she was there to speak on her book, Leaving the Fold. We connected over a beer or something. She said, “Hey, I got this idea. Let me pass it by you.” She opened her mouth. Within a few sentences, she used the term “religious trauma,” and my brain went wild.

I thought, “Whoa, that explains so much.” It was one of those moments in your career—it rarely happens, of course—when you realize that explains much behaviour and what I’d seen in my clinical practice, but I’d not delved below the surface. Therapists are trained to tread very carefully around religion.

So, I didn’t sit there in the office with a patient thinking, “This trauma, where is this trauma coming from?” I was seeing trauma, but it never occurred to me to ask, “What was your religious background?” and explore that. Knowing about religious trauma today, a client might say they’re Baptist. Then I’d ask, “Tell me about your upbringing in the Baptist faith.” They might say, “I had to learn my Bible lessons.” I’d ask, “What happened around your Bible lessons?” They might respond, “I got beaten several times because I didn’t memorize them properly.”

Let’s explore that more. “What about your parents? What was their religious belief?” They might say, “They were super fundamentalist and believed in ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ from Proverbs.”

That kind of exploration never occurred to me until she said those words. I thought, “Dang it. There’s a whole component of this human being in front of me that I should have explored.” In some ways, I feel guilty about that. I could have helped many people 30 years ago if I’d known that then, but I didn’t. That’s a long answer to your short question.

Jacobsen: Trauma is so easy and frequent for many people, especially concerning religious dogmatism. Do you think that for many people, especially as most people don’t get therapy, life is a continual series of moments of grieving and mourning?

Ray: What we found—this is, again, another insight that’s only come in recent years—is that a person may be within a religious framework, in a religious family or community, and be able to do fine, they may have experienced or may not have experienced trauma. I was raised in a pretty darn religious and fairly conservative community and family. I was not traumatized by that. I don’t want anybody to think I’m making that claim. However, what we see in many people who are leaving high-control religious environments is that the very act of leaving is what causes the trauma.

They may or may not have been traumatized by their religion, but when they step out of it and lose everything, they’re homeless now. They’ve lost their family. As we’ve spoken before, that can cause trauma, or more commonly, it can trigger or exacerbate the trauma they experienced when they were in their religion. So, it adds insult to injury. You’re dealing with the trauma.

How many people were sexually abused in their childhood by religious figures and had to hide it? Catholic priests molested thousands and thousands of people. They went to their parents and said, “Hey, the priest is doing bad things to me,” and the parents denied it. The parents said, “Oh no, the priest would never do that.” So, here’s a child who has to spend the rest of their life within the parent’s care, denying that the priest ever did this to them. What happens when they step out of the religion and their parents now disown them, which can happen to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, and Catholics? That adds another layer of trauma to these people.

Oh, by the way, we do see much sexual-related trauma coming to us. Often, as I’ve already mentioned, LGBTQ identities are being persecuted or suppressed in people. So, yes, there’s so much opportunity for trauma to stay hidden. You see much behaviour within the church. I was raised in the church, and I look back on where I am now.

Look at all this behaviour within the church that was probably rooted in trauma, but it wasn’t recognized. Even if somebody went to a psychologist, that psychologist, as I was, might not have recognized it either. 

Jacobsen: In doing many of these interviews with people who gained prominence in the 2000s or 2010s, they’re functioning off at least three interrelated movements: Militant Atheism, Firebrand Atheism, and New Atheism. They see that as a very important moment with a couple of mistakes, but it was great in bringing to light the concerns and voices of atheists and those generally affected by the legislation. A big question that arises more often now, as two major people have passed away and two more are in the latter years of life, is: what now?

So, we’ve garnered prominence. In terms of the culture war, it was clear that the nonreligious won. When anyone watched the documentaries by Dawkins or others engaging with these extremely prominent religious apologists, theologians, and others, they didn’t have many strong arguments. Or if they did, they were tired of arguments that didn’t produce much.

Ray: Yes, we certainly had a major push from some great authors and thinkers, which helped a lot of people move past religion. I think it helped create a critical mass that we still enjoy today. At the same time, those people who left or are leaving often need support, which was missing from those books. So, from a therapeutic standpoint, what should people do for their health and well-being when asking the “what now?” question?

Jacobsen: So they’ve gotten some equality. They’ve gotten some recognition. It is okay to be nonreligious where we might be in your country, even though your larger culture might not necessarily accept you. What do they do now? How do they build a life after they’ve left these faiths? Or find others who have none?

Ray: I hear several questions there. Let me focus on the “What now?” piece because there are movement and therapy pieces. Which one should we start with? We can do both. As mentioned, I was in clinical practice for ten years and in organizational psychology practice for 30 years. My real love was studying organizations and helping them become psychologically healthy places to work.

I loved that work. It was great. However, during those 30 years, I observed how organizations and movements work. What I saw in the 2000s with the publication of Daniel Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris, the so-called “Four Horsemen,” was the creation of an intellectual movement that transformed into more of an activist movement, as you’ve noted.

However, every movement goes through cycles or phases. That’s what I see here. We’ve gone through a movement of getting people active, people becoming aware, pushing back legally, pushing back socially. I’m not convinced we won the war. There are still a lot of legal battles and equality wars. However, in terms of the singular goal of being known in the wider culture as what they are, that was largely won.

So, that piece we’ve achieved. We’re in what I call a consolidation phase right now. It will last for a few more years. When I looked at this, I considered myself a rabid activist. I’m always doing stuff—not just Recovering From Religion – but looking at how organizations and movements function. We’ve got a consolidation right now. The earlier leaders are leaving, dying or are involved in other things. The new people must get on the ground and develop their approach. It’s like breathing in and out. The movement is taking a breath right now, but also, there are many other things to take people’s energy and focus, which may not be bad. We will see new ways of acting and challenging religion in the coming years. Most importantly, I see many more secular people running for office, so we may see more “inside work” as people find their voice in school boards or Congress.

We’ve got thousands of people leaving the church, and there’s nowhere to go, yet they still want community. So, the real issue right now is building communities that are friendly to secular people and families. Where is their childcare for a group that wants to meet and have a secular program? I’ve been saying this for 20 years: if you want a movement, it has to be childcare-friendly. It has to be family-friendly.

So, I’m seeing some very quiet but powerful movements. It’s almost like the current underneath the sea. You can’t see it, but it’s there. It started with two things: Sunday Assembly and OASIS. Those are two organizations that you are familiar with. I helped start OASIS here in Kansas City, and we celebrated our 10th anniversary in April. Sunday Assembly is about a year or two older than that. My partner spoke at the Sunday Assembly in Detroit yesterday.

So, these are viable parts of the movement that may need to be recognized. Yet, isn’t that as important as whether Dawkins writes another book? That’s the way I see it. These are human beings bringing children and young people into a meeting once a week or once a month, and they’re dealing with secular issues. We flew Anthony Pandojas from Tufts University to speak at Kansas City OASIS yesterday. That will not make the atheist headlines, but it supports a growing secular movement that doesn’t show up on Capital Hill or the news.

Anthony is the paid humanist chaplain for Tufts University, which is pretty cool. But where are the humanist chaplains? There aren’t only a few of them; they didn’t exist five or ten years ago. So you ask, “What’s next?” That’s what’s next: building out our social support network, creating more humanist chaplains, and starting more family-friendly groups.

Looking at this from a religionist’s point of view, if I go from Kansas City to Nashville, Tennessee, I can find a Baptist church that’s very much like the one I went to, and I may even know people in that Baptist church. So, I’ve got a network or a potential network if I’m a Baptist. Why don’t we have that in the secular world? My partner called the Sunday Assembly people and said, “Hey, I’m gonna come up there. “

Do you want me to speak? And they said yes. How did they know about her? Why did they trust her? So they trusted me, knew what I do, and let her speak. That’s the beginning of networking and creating a social support network. I see Recovering From Religion at the very center of this whole thing. Because when that Baptist person who’s leaving their church calls us and says, “Where can I find community?” We turn around and say, “Here’s a Freethought Group in your city. Here’s an Oasis in the city right next to you. Here’s where you could go to a Sunday assembly if you’re in that place.”

We are connecting. When those people leave the church, we can help them find community. But a few things have to happen. There has to be a Recovering From Religion in the first place to catch them. I look at us as catching people when they fall out of the church, and then there has to be a secular community out there for us to send them on to.

So we will send people to Atheist United in Los Angeles if that’s where they’re at. We’ll send them to the Texas Freethought Church in Dallas if that’s where they’re from, Oasis in Toronto, or Oasis in Houston. We have a hugedatabase of communities that we can feed people into. So that’s probably not the answer you were looking for, but that’s where I see the movement going—building communities. Of course, those communities are interested in secular issues, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and challenging religious privilege.

Those new secular communities also support traditional organizations like American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association, big national organizations. But I prefer to be more interested in local organizations. I’m more interested in that local group that’s changing the way secularism is looked at within a local community and maybe helping a school board member get elected or going and complaining to a city council when they’re discriminated against because they’re a secular group meeting in a community center – which has happened more than once. We’ve been kicked out. Oasis people have been kicked out. I have two examples of Oasis people being kicked out of facilities because the local politician didn’t want us. 

Jacobsen: Who was the source of the complaints? Who are the complainers?

Ray: We met at the Tony Aguirre Center in Kansas City, and we’d met there for a year. An election came, and they elected a new city councilman from that district. The city councilman found out that an “atheist” group, we’re a humanist group, not an atheist group, but those were his words—was meeting in the community center there. It’s open on Sundays. People come in and work out. It’s got a gym, workout facilities, and things. It has a meeting room. We were using the meeting room. It’s a gymnasium thing. He found out about it and decided to change the policy. They’re no longer going to rent to anyone on Sunday mornings. Isn’t that convenient and interesting? Oh, and by the way, he was an evangelical Christian.

I don’t know the full story in Houston, but they had the same thing happen to them several years ago. They got kicked out of a facility they were meeting in. The war is not over. We still fight discrimination against us today, and we’re on the lookout for it. For example, we volunteered with the City Union Mission for two years, feeding people experiencing homelessness. Before the third year started, they decided to find a way to get rid of us. 

Jacobsen: So, we’ve got two points of contact before we wrap up. First, I wanted to talk about collaborations and the importance of those. Then, let’s call them lessons. So, collaboration. I now notice the vast breadth of secular and freethought organizations worldwide, not just in the United States. It’s everywhere now. There’s been such a global push for this level of equality, which has been great. The next step is the integration of effort. How have you done that? How would you recommend people do that?

Ray: You’re knocking on a door I have been working on for quite a while. Not long after I started Recovering From Religion and the Secular Therapy Project, I came up with the idea of the secular support network. It’s based on the idea that we’ve got national and international organizations like American Atheists, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and the American Humanist Association. Those are high-level organizations doing high-level work and dealing with the political stuff. But who cares for the person who walked out of the church this week and is looking for a new community, support, and information?

Churches do a pretty good job of supporting people. If somebody’s house burns down, the church will show up and help them. If somebody dies, the church will show up with a meal or two. But nobody was doing that 10 or 15 years ago for secular people, and there’s a need that crosses localities. So, as an organization—Recovering From Religion—we have been actively and intentionally reaching out to other organizations to create networks that can support people in the same ways that churches do but across wide ranges of geography—for example, death and dying. Churches do a good job of that, but we don’t. So why can’t we do something around that area? We’ve started working and cooperating with some people who are experts in death and dying and who were willing to come in and cooperate with us.

So, we’re starting, literally next month, a grief and loss service where we will be providing information and brochures that describe the issues secular people need around funerals and memorial services. We want to put that right next to all the Christian material in funeral homes. Every funeral home needs to have a brochure that says, “Here’s what you do when you get an atheist that dies.” Nobody’s doing that. It’s not our core mission at Recovering From Religion, but we can cooperate with other people to make that happen. We cooperate with LGBTQ groups.

We tabled at many pride events over June and interacted, did outreach, and cooperated. Even if they’re religious, we’ll still cooperate with them in trying to help people because there are so many LGBTQ people who suffer because they left religion or because religion made them suffer while they were still in it. I see us and other organizations that are similar to us or have missions focused on emotional and psychological support leading the way. There are a lot of other organizations joining with us.

That is a growing connection with many ideas coming out of it. People are starting to combine two and two and work across geographical boundaries. For example, Black Nonbelievers and the Central Florida Freethought Community have a yearly cruise. There are two or three other secular cruises now. They weren’t there ten years ago. I see OASIS, which is a nationwide network of about ten groups. Are you familiar with OASIS?

Jacobsen: I am, yes.

Ray: I thought you probably were. I helped start that organization here in Kansas City, and we have 70 to 100 people. We had 73 people show up yesterday to hear the humanist chaplain of Tufts University speak. That’s a network.

We now have a connection between OASIS and the secular hub at Tufts University. Others, like the secular hub in Denver, where I speak next week, are connected, too. So there’s much connection, and the collaboration will evolve from that connection, which may still need to be there, though not as strong as we’d like to see it.

But I can see that in 10 years, the network will grow. I see networks like spiderwebs. You will not catch flies if you only have three or four threads, but if you have 1,000 threads, you’ll catch many flies.

We’re still at the stage where we need more strings in our net to catch a lot. It will take a few more years before we start catching much more. When those networks help in political and social activism, we will see changes we don’t currently see. But I see a lot of it coming.

Locally, people are doing it, and we will soon start learning from each other. That will increase the synergy among these different groups. With that collaboration, we make progress. It’s more than one little place in Denver, one in Dallas, or one in Boston. It’s got to be a network of places that then gain political power, not because we’re the fastest-growing nonreligious group, but because we’re the fastest-growing network of nonreligious people who have political power and a vision for what we want this country to be and what kind of neighbour we want to be to our Canadian friends, by the way. I’ve got Canadian friends who are scared of what’s going on down here.

Jacobsen: We are, too, by the way. It’s not just there. I’ve interviewed many people worldwide in different contexts, from different ages and demographics. It’s hard to be surprised about much anymore. When you talk to people in other countries, assassination attempts and coup attempts of their leaders and governments are not new to them. This is America joining some of the more unsavoury parts of international affairs regarding internal matters. This has happened before. The last official one was in 1981 with Reagan. I’m aware Barack Obama in 2008 and Bush in 1998, or was it Clinton, had additional guards due to what happened to Reagan. So, a long, unillustrious history goes back to Roosevelt and Lincoln. 

Ray: Three American presidents have been assassinated. And two others have been wounded: Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt wasn’t currently president; he ran for president when he got wounded.

It was his second time running for president. So you could say four or maybe five American presidents have either died (three did die) or had assassination attempts. Look at what happened to Trump yesterday. That’s the same thing that happened to Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was not president. He had been president after McKinley was assassinated.

No, that’s wrong. It was Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy who were all killed by assassins. Then Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and now Trump all had unsuccessful assassination attempts, but they still took a bullet. So that’s seven presidents out of how many we’ve had? If you look at it, your chance of being murdered, or at least having an attempted murder, if you’re running for president or are president, is pretty high. That goes with the territory.

How did we get off on that? 

Jacobsen: Oh, your Canadian friends are worried. I don’t share that worry. In a sense, I don’t share the fear, although I realize the context. We can predict the same. I wouldn’t feel the fear. That’s the difference. Doing this kind of work, you learn a lot. You grow. You change. You adapt to new evidence from the world. What would you consider things that, at the moment, were failures but, in hindsight, were lessons?

Ray: I will go back to when I was in college. I do a whole talk on my civil rights work back then, protesting and such. I was also a church youth minister and created a bus ministry. These are both long stories, but I was still a Christian—a very liberal Christian within a pretty darn conservative independent Christian church—two of these churches. Over my college years, I was a paid youth minister and had semi-paid jobs.

I ultimately got fired from every one of those jobs I did. The first was because I brought another Sunday school class to meet with ours. We were the same denomination, Independent Christian Church, in the same city. The only problem was that the other Sunday school class was in a Black church. This was 1969-1970. I brought a Black Sunday school class to meet with the white Sunday school class I ran, and within a month, I was fired.

That’s a lesson learned about change within a structure and an institution. You can’t change the church from within. It doesn’t work. I had two other projects there; they were very successful, and as long as I was involved – I could make something succeed. The problem is when I’m not involved. How do you make sure what you’re doing has staying power? All three of my church projects ultimately failed. I learned a lot from those failures.

In those three examples, being only a college student taught me a lot about institutions, my dedication, and how other people work. When I entered graduate school, I had a mentor, Bill Barnes; I should have mentioned him earlier. Bill Barnes was an incredible mentor and civil rights leader who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. That’s the kind of person he was. He was my mentor at Scarritt College for Christian Workers. I went there because it was the most liberal college I could find that still did social justice work.

I learned a lot there, mostly being introduced to Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. It’s a very influential book in my philosophy about how to go about social justice and change. That was the learning piece of it. The church staff was the failure piece of it. Over the next 30 years, I worked inside Fortune 500 companies doing a lot of organizational psychology stuff. I can’t tell you all the stuff I learned, but I used that learning for over 30 years, so when I decided to start Recovering From Religion, I knew what the fuck I was going to do and how to do it. Hopefully, it is set up so that it lasts beyond my lifetime.

If you were ever to come inside Recovering From Religion—not that I’m asking or expecting that—and knew anything about organizational psychology, you would see that we’ve worked hard to create the structures that make for very strong and resilient organizations. We have an excellent training program, very well-trained leaders, and an executive director who understands the mission, keeps us on track, and has a great donor base.

Our robust fundraising program allows us to serve our clients and expand our outreach. Our reputation for financial responsibility in the secular world gives people confidence that we will use their money wisely, and that’s important.

We can meet our budget without having to scrape by and worry about where our next dime is coming from. For the first seven or eight years, we struggled with finances. A lot came out of my pocket, but we have learned much about fundraising. That was one area I needed to improve at. So that was a big thing, and, of course, I failed several times there. I also learned that you can rely on more than grants. Grants are hard to come by and may only last for one year. So, we have built our budget and process around solid financial philosophy and accountability. I could talk all day about places I failed and what I’ve learned, but is that good enough for you, or do you want more?

Jacobsen: That should be good. What are the things you were pretty much right about all along?

Ray: I was right about how you train and recruit people. We have a philosophy that I was right about, and that’s what I call the Marine philosophy, like the U.S. Marines’ “The few, the proud, the Marines.” If you want good people, you must make them jump through hoops. Just because someone fills out a volunteer application doesn’t mean they will make a good volunteer. They have to prove it to us.

We make people go through an interview process. There are jobs with fewer hoops than what we put you through. Once you’ve made it through the application process, the interview process, the self-training process, the one-on-one training process, and the supervised training process, that’s five steps, and every one of those steps is important. If you make it through all five, you’ll make a good volunteer, but we get many people dropping out at each step. So that’s our philosophy, and that’s a philosophy we’ve had since the very beginning.

You can volunteer for us if you are dedicated and willing to follow our model. I could put that in the “I’ve always known”column. I always knew it would take much work to find a good executive director. We went through two executive directors early on in Recovering From Religion’s life, and they weren’t a fit. That was my fault.

I failed there for various reasons. One, I’ll take responsibility for; the other, I won’t. But finding the right person is challenging. Once you do, it’s a blessing. It’s amazing what Gayle can do, how people love her, and how tough she can be. She doesn’t put up with bullshit. She keeps us laser-focused on our mission to provide “Hope, Healing and Support for those dealing with doubt and nonbelief.”

Jacobsen: I remember the politician’s quote about her being the most dangerous woman in Tennessee. These are the personalities, from local Sunday Assembly leaders to big leaders like myself, Dan Barker, and others. These are the personalities making things happen. Some people make mistakes, too. I’ve also talked to people who have had public controversies in our communities, but they’re usually not that major. The big thing is, do we have a culture of people being able to forgive, be forgiven, improve, and show themselves worthy of that stature they had before? That could be an open question that we need to ask ourselves. It’s a bunch of freethought communities.

Ray: Yes. I want to add one thing. I wanted to say earlier, and I don’t think I did, a little piece of philosophy: activism comes from the community. It’s an important concept. Activism does not come from individual action. It comes from the community. Every successful activist had a community at their back.

Jacobsen: Constantly, there are people whose names we’ve forgotten, but who were the only reason and ways by which people like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were able to rise and represent a movement and be “the movement.”

Ray: That’s right. Exactly right. One of my visions for the future is to develop young leadership, to develop leaders in the secular community. That was my career for 30 years. Although I have yet to succeed in that area, I would love to systematically develop leaders who could step up and develop more communities.

Jacobsen: My critical question to you, though, would be, how do we make it so that it’s not like some leadership programs can be, where it’s an ego thing? It’s an ego game. It’s selfish self-interest rather than someone taking this training to be of better use to a community. How do we bolster against that, if we can?

Ray: You’ve already hit the nail on the head. That’s why I’ve yet to be successful. Because I look out there and see many egos that want to be leaders. I don’t call them leaders. That’s not a true leader. Unfortunately, we are plagued with one thing. I’ll say it out loud because I’ll get in trouble for it, but I’ll say this. There are a plethora of ex-ministers who are now atheists, and they all want to become atheist ministers. They all want to create a church again as an atheist, and they don’t want to share leadership. They want to be the charismatic person.

Jacobsen: I’ve been told about this. I haven’t been told specific names, but I’ve been told this is a trend that people, leaders coming out of these churches or whatever religious tradition, want the same automatic status for whatever reason.

Ray: Oh, they’re egos. I even wrote an article and published it in American Atheist magazine. They are narcissists. Most big, successful ministers are probably narcissistic. When they leave, they don’t lose that. They want to create another following. I’ve watched half a dozen of these people come out splashily but unsuccessfully try to create their little cult or following. I’ve only seen one of them make the transition successfully, and he’s one of the least egotistical people I know among that group. He’s still egotistical. I won’t say that he’s not. So there are leaders out there, and if you say you want to develop leadership, they’ll jump on the bandwagon. They’re the last people I want to teach, train, or work with. I want people who are capable of cooperating and collaborating with others.

Jacobsen: That’s an important issue. Thank you for your time. 

Ray: I appreciate you doing this. For whatever reason, you’re going to put it out there. I do have this thing in the back of my mind. I’m 73. I will kick the bucket somewhere in the next 20 years. Who knows? I want to pass along some of what we’ve accomplished, how and why we did it, and the philosophy behind it. So, thank you for doing this. This helps categorize and document the whole or part of the process in some small way. So, thanks for doing it. Let me know when or if any of it comes out. We’ll push it on our end.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Thank you, Darrel. I appreciate it, as always.

Ray: You’re welcome. Have a good night.

Jacobsen: Bye.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.