The Secret Despair of the Secular Left: Our Fraying Connections with Our Communities, Our Bodies, and the Earth

by Ana Levy-Lyons

219 pages, Hardcover

Published June 10, 2025

Reviews

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perceptive in places as to the cultural and social shifts creating a marginal role of religion in American life. I could resonate with some of her observations based on experience but also did not fully agree; then I had to remember she is speaking of a defined Secular left, and stress secular and left.

[Alice Vandommele · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’ve ever been in progressive religious circles, there’s a refrain you hear again and again. The idea that yes, of course, science and modernity are all very well and even very beneficial, but that you still need spirituality for a certain something that you cannot get otherwise. Generally, it’s conceived of as a certain sense of awe and beauty as well as guidance on what matters and what is valuable in the world. The exact articulation varies by the teller, from very quiet suggestions that you need something to add some enchantment to your life to a loud and radical demand for a spiritual counterculture against mainstream society.

Levy-Lyons’ call is very much the latter.

Now, a lot of what she pinpoints in the book is a real issue. We are more and more disconnected from ourselves, the people around us and the earth. Capitalism and the internet (strong allies) continue to have an increasing stranglehold on our communities, and the environment is degrading at an alarming pace. There is absolutely a general sense of existential malaise that many people (including myself) feel on a day to day basis. And yes, sometimes progressive ideas can become very maladjusted and toxic.

Unfortunately she utterly fails to link this to a lack of spirituality or to argue that religion is an answer to this issue.

Not that it can’t be, on an individual level. Of course a congregation can be a community, and of course the balm that religious beliefs give can help to keep someone standing in difficult times. Individual practices like the sabbath might indeed be a good counter to capitalist demands on our time. But that doesn’t mean these are the only ways to go about things.

For example, she links the degradation of community to the degradation of religion. To be sure, the breakdown of communal spiritual life is linked with the breakdown of third spaces in general. But you could easily have a very strong sense of community and social life without religion being involved. At the same time that churches and synagogues have shut down, so have bars, libraries, community centres, sports clubs, fraternal organisations, etc. etc. There is a wider breakdown in community life in general, and it seems unlikely that religious decline is the cause of this, not the symptom. So do we need people to be more religious? Or do we need to work towards having more in person community spaces?

Sometimes she also just draws… extremely tenuous connections. For instance, in a slightly convoluted way she tries to link the downward trend in young people having sex to a general deprecation of the idea of natural vs unnatural sexual desires (note for readers: she doesn’t seem to mean this in a homophobic way, though it’s utterly unclear what she does mean by that) and the commodification of sex in modern western society. But to ignore the fact that this is happening at the same time as increasing social isolation and the aforementioned decline in community spaces is…. A choice.

In general, there is also a strange ambiguity about the dichotomy of religion vs secular modernity here. On the one hand, this book is, ultimately, an argument for people to reclaim their faith traditions. It’s explicitly arguing that instead of secularity, religion is the option we should return to, and it strongly implies that it should be the religion tied to your family, culture and home country. But at other times this breaks down. First off, she explicitly mentions that secular modernity is, in essence, it’s own kind of worldview, with its own kinds of assumptions and norms, that exists alongside religious worldviews. For instance, she discusses how someone wanted to bury his dead wife, due to lingering catholic and Jewish feelings on the matter, but ultimately chose to cremate her instead because the progressive liberal environment he lived in had cremation as an unspoken tradition. This certainly gives the lie to her idea that secular modernity represents a breakdown in norms and customs, it’s just a new set. Moreover, while she gives shoutouts to elements of various other religions other than her own Judaism (she used to be a UU minister and it shows), she also critiques a lot of other religions when it comes to, for example, the idea that the soul and the body are separate. Thus her argument becomes not one of religion vs secularism, but rather an argument for her own particular spiritual worldview against other worldviews, spiritual or not.

Another flaw with this text is that… well, it’s very Jewish. I do not mean that deprecatingly, because there’s nothing inherently wrong with writing from your own religious and cultural pov. But it does create a blindspot. In particular, she very easily skims over the truth claims of religion. This makes sense in her context: Judaism, especially the non-orthodox forms (she got her rabbinical degree via Renewal), put a lot of emphasis on action and ethics over faith and cosmology. It is, comparatively, easy for someone who’s a secular jew to gradually increase their observance over time without necessarily having to buy into every aspect of the traditional theology, and to gradually adopt some of those ideas in their own way over time.

This is not the case in other contexts. To be a Catholic or a Calvinist and not accept that Jesus Christ is the messiah who died on the cross for humanity’s sins makes you a heretic that will go to hell. To be a pagan who does not believe in the gods as literal separate personalities makes you impious and leaves your rituals ineffective. To be a buddhist who does not strictly believe in its cosmology is, from what I’ve heard, a western colonial construct.

This creates an uneasy situation for anyone who wishes to follow the advice of this book. You shouldn’t be secular, that’s spiritually harmful and leads to a nihilistic, destructive worldview. You should embrace your traditional religion. But what if what would be your traditional religion has issues? Whether issues she has with it, social issues such as misogynistic rules and ideas (which she doesn’t deem to be worth more than a sideways mention) or simply truth claims you are not able to accept? Well, you shouldn’t really convert to something different, because that would place you at odds with your cultural background and your sense of place (she doesn’t like the idea of people moving to other areas), and it would be part of the cheapening of spirituality as just a menu of options to choose. And the space outside of organized religions is denigrated as pop-spirituality. So really, what are you supposed to do? Either accept secular nihilism or cognitive dissonance, it seems.

This sounds a tad harsh. Again, it’s not like nothing said in the book has any value. There are absolutely valuable parts here, and it’s convinced me to get rid of my Facebook and Instagram accounts for example. But what’s valuable here you can also get from a bunch of tumblr posts, or from your average reform rabbi’s shabbat service sermon, and it’s loaded down with utterly unconvincing arguments that often don’t even fit together well (as far as I understand, certain chapters are collations of her blog posts). It’s certainly not going to convince anyone to become spiritual if they weren’t already, and will probably only serve to increase the holier-than-thou attitude many spiritual + progressive people already have.

Sidenote but can we stop with this weird idea that transgender stuff emerges from body/mind dualism? I understand where it comes from I guess, the whole "born in the wrong body" story (which... she seems to believe souls do exist independently from bodies before and after death so it shouldn't sound strange to her.) But there's nothing about taking hormones or gender reassignment surgery that implies it, not any more than any other modification we make to the body. It's very easy to conceive of dysphoria and the desire to change gender originating in a unified mind-body, if anything it's more coherent since it explains why there is a desire to modify the body in the first place. Fundamentally it validates the importance of the body to the human being by grappling with, rather than ignoring it.

[Ryan Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Even as someone who was raised in a deep religious tradition, but considers themselves secular now, I’m highly sympathetic to some of the author’s claims. Many people looking around at the current state of liberalism have noted its seeming poverty in addressing deeper needs, in a way that has gained much more traction than the critiques of Alasdair Macintyre and others 30 and 40 years ago.

With that in mind this book was much too broad and much too polemical for my taste, including a straw man definition of what religion is that serves her broader purposes. Frankly, it’s very easy for me to imagine, and indeed I know many people who describe themselves as religious who fall prey to the same criticism offered by the author as the more secular. Much of the cultural commentary in the book is directed at a fetishization of the market and that’s clearly not simply a secular phenomena. Indeed the author’s criticism of the meritocracy cut against the grain of many deeply American religions. With that in mind it’s much too vague to what extent the problems document can be pointed at the left and to what extent it’s simply capitalism.

The author finds deep problems in the heart of approaches like Unitarian Universalism, of which she was formerly a minister. She explains multiple times that in these denominations the most important thing is to make sure your congregants don’t feel guilt and that she lacked tools to give them advice. The last part is perhaps most true, though I think she overstates the extent to which many religions give guidebooks to major life events. One of her early examples, a woman whose husband is dying and opts not stay with him in his final moments on the advice of doctors, is in my mind an example of a values failure in a way not described here. While Levy claims she had no tradition to call the woman to, it seems like the wife’s default values were deferred to the doctors and she outsourced her morality. It’s not hard to envision the same case, with a highly secular person who disagrees with the doctors for a number of moral and or ethical reasons. Even without making the wife feel guilty she could have interrogated the values the woman held, by asking some more probing questions. Certainly most people are not going to undertake this kind of values self-interrogation, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible or that secularism can’t offer an alternative to Levy’s religious tradition approach.

[Kelly M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ana Levy-Lyons is both a keen critic of our contemporary culture and a thoughtful observer of human nature. Her newest book titled The Secret Despair of the Secular Left is a searching and soulful response to the dark malaise that marks too much of our modern-day lives; this work mines her many years of experience as a congregational minister and offers unique insight into the intrinsic value of wisdom traditions and spiritual communities alike. Pointing to the unholy trinity of disembodiment, disconnection, and dislocation that have conspired to occasion a mass existential crisis, Levy-Lyons calls for a nothing short of a religious revival. “What if we were to take a brief pause from critiquing ancient traditions and allow our modern selves to be critiqued by them instead?” she asks. What if we ourselves actually tried answering to them and not for them? Levy-Lyons invites readers to imagine doing just that. If the despair marring secular existence was a secret before, the secret is out now, thank God! We all owe a debt of gratitude to this author for helping us break the painful silence.

[Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

a lot of really interesting/challenging ideas and anecdotes in here, and im very glad i read it. however, it doesn't really live up to the title (maybe i just have a problem with the title?); like, for example, the whole section about disconnections fostered by technology - with which i completely agree - doesn't really have anything to do with a left vs right distinction. there were many points at which she IS pointing out specific issues on the left, but then these points get muddled by including more general issues. is there a secular right? a religious left? what's the difference re: the issues being brought up in the book? also, on despair, sometimes it's a despair that the people she's writing about is feeling and sometimes it seems to be a despair that SHE is feeling and with which i am sympathetic, but again, and yeah ultimately maybe it's just a title issue, but if you're going to write about 'secret despair' i think that needs to be developed/defined more...i mean it's a bold claim, 'there is secret despair' and great, let's talk about it, but i just wish it had been done a bit differently.

[Novel Crush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ana Levy-Lyons’ The Secret Despair of the Secular Left is a profound and timely exploration of what we lose when traditions, religion, and community fade. Drawing from diverse spiritual and cultural perspectives, Levy-Lyons examines disconnection, dislocation, and disembodiment, revealing how modern life often leaves us spiritually unmoored. Thoughtful and compassionate, this book doesn’t just highlight despair, it offers guidance toward reconnection, grounding, and meaning. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking insight into modern spirituality and a more connected, fulfilling life.

[Evan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reactionary garbage lmao