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Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious: Reframed and Expanded
We can't just be done with religion, argues David Dark. The fact of religion is the fact of us. Religion is the witness of everything we're up to--for better or worse.
David Dark is one of today's most respected thinkers, public intellectuals, and cultural critics at the intersection of faith and culture. Since its original release, Dark's Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious has become essential reading for those engaged in the conversation on religion in contemporary American society. Now, Dark returns to his classic text and offers us a revised, expanded, and reframed edition that reflects a more expansive understanding, employs inclusive language, and tackles the most pressing issues of the day.
With the same keen powers of cultural observation, candor, and wit his readers have come to know and love, Dark weaves in current themes around the pandemic and vaccine responses, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, Critical Race Theory, and more. By looking intentionally at our weird religious background (we all have one), he helps us acknowledge the content of our everyday existence--the good, the bad, and the glaringly inconsistent. When we make peace with the idea of being religious, we can more practically envision an undivided life.
David Dark is one of today's most respected thinkers, public intellectuals, and cultural critics at the intersection of faith and culture. Since its original release, Dark's Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious has become essential reading for those engaged in the conversation on religion in contemporary American society. Now, Dark returns to his classic text and offers us a revised, expanded, and reframed edition that reflects a more expansive understanding, employs inclusive language, and tackles the most pressing issues of the day.
With the same keen powers of cultural observation, candor, and wit his readers have come to know and love, Dark weaves in current themes around the pandemic and vaccine responses, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, Critical Race Theory, and more. By looking intentionally at our weird religious background (we all have one), he helps us acknowledge the content of our everyday existence--the good, the bad, and the glaringly inconsistent. When we make peace with the idea of being religious, we can more practically envision an undivided life.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 13, 2022
About the author
David Dark
13 books72 followersDavid Dark is the critically acclaimed author of "The Sacredness of Questioning Everything," "Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons" and "The Gospel According To America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea." An educator, Dark is currently pursuing his PhD in Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He has had articles published in Paste, Oxford American, Books and Culture, Christian Century, among others. A frequent speaker, Dark has also appeared on C-SPAN’s Book-TV and in an award-winning documentary, "Marketing the Message." He lives with his singer-songwriter wife, Sarah Masen, and their three children in Nashville.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 12, 2023
Fantastic. Dark is a bit scattered and rambly but sticking with it provides fruitful results. This books feels like the red pill/ blue pill choice in the matrix, offering readers a way forth towards attention.
Ideas of religion can get meta but a worth while endeavor to recognize the things one’s religion names. Poetry is a great start.
Ideas of religion can get meta but a worth while endeavor to recognize the things one’s religion names. Poetry is a great start.
Read
May 17, 2026I read this one to see if the content was as off-putting as the title. It wasn’t, and there’s worth here, but I’m mightily ambivalent, as you can tell in the post I wrote about it: https://zwieblein.bearblog.dev/new-de...
October 16, 2023
I read this for a class I'm taking with Dr. Dark right now. He is an extremely intelligent man who makes fresh and meaningful connections between things I wouldn't have otherwise paired together -- perhaps because of his ongoing insistence that everything is related to everything else. This book implores readers to pay attention to the stories they tell to themselves and others, because that is what makes up religion; Dark believes (as the title suggests) that we are all religious, and it makes no sense to pretend otherwise. A bit densely-written, I'm not sure how eagerly I would recommend it to my friends, but I appreciate and hope to spread the ideas he champions in these pages.
January 20, 2025
I gave up halfway through. It's redundant! And too wordy. I honestly kept forgetting what the whole thesis was in the first place.
September 27, 2026
A lot to appreciate about this one, along with portions that find themselves a bit muddled and drawn out. He's at his best when he is taking his biggest swings, largely at both sides of a chasm created by a stark western idealism obsessed with sharp, certain dichotomies and polarities. He's a lot less convincing when he's rambling down rabbit holes concerning long, drawn out theoretical musings about how we all just need to get along and find the points which we share together.
On the former front its possible for the book's thesis (that we are all necesarily religious and that we do damage when we fail to acknolwedge this) to actually hold power and provide a biting critique. This power and this critique comes from the simple concession that what makes people an inherently religious creature is our beliefs. Thus understanding that our relationship to the world, to the concept of God (or the absence of such a God), to one another, requires our willingness to engage a clash of beliefs in order to make us rational and coherent creatures. Meaning, a world in which we remain ignortant to this conversation of beliefs and worldviews, pretending as though the modern dichotomy of religion and superstition has somehow freed us from these things, is a world we cannot know and which cannot be rational. This requires addressing our fundamental assumptions about the world and about reality before engaging in argumentation with opposing or differing assumptions, something that pushes us to the all important question of the implications of our given beliefs (or assumptions).
On the latter front, it's the rabbit trails and the drawn out musings that undercut this at points, finding himself walking up to the line of that conversation (and sometimes stepping over it), before quickly allowing the uncomfortablness of that space that push him back over the other side. Usually in an effort counter the recognizable problems he finds in common religious behavior in the first place. At his least compelling he entertains the perception (even though most of the book is saying something otherwise) that religion can reclaim its relevance by appealing to a purely utilitarian approach. Religion afterall, like metaphor or symbolism, can only be as true as the true thing it is rooted in. Matters of utility are speaking to something quite different. The real concern is our underlying beliefs.
I did like the early sections the most. Here I found him at his most biting and most unfiltered. Willing to challenge the old conventions about old conventions regarding a constantly shifting penchant to render "everyone is religious" a tired cliche or a relevant and forgotten adage ready to be recovered. And that's the thing. Everytime someone seeks to recover it they are doing so with slightly different context and nuances in tow, always with an eye on the relevance of the most recent years or decades that are now demanding fresh considerations. Here I think Dark does a good job of recognizing where the conversation sits at this present moment.
It's not so much that Dark is advocating for a specific religious claim (although no one can have this sort of discussion or make this sort of argument without doint so in some fashion), rather he is advocating for a proper, rational approach to knowledge (or obtaining knowledge). The modernist might think their way is rational because they've done away with the prejoritive label "superstition," but they might be the least rational of all societal expressions purely on the basis that they remain uniquely positioned as the only historical viewpoint that believes they no longer have need for belief itself. Which of course leads to the least rational society precisely because it doesn't accord with the reality. What we need is to recover the practice of artful conversation with our differing beliefs. To be able to sit around the table with 10 different people seeing the world in 10 different ways means recognizing that everyones way of seeing the world is incorporating an explanatory narrative that can make sense of all of those stories. That is step one. We all do this. We all must do this if we want to grow in knowledge of what is true. I do think this is a helpful book for setting that table and establishing the rules of the conversation. On that level alone I recommend it. And it offers some good insights along the way. Such as the phrase "policy is liturgy," which underscores how understanding our stories is always a social concern and social exercise.
Or his observation that religion doesn't suddenly appear. It's something that's already there. That alone challenges the modern story that it has become obsolete.
Or the religion is a process rather than a proposition. A process of knowing. A process that applies to a whole life. A process that allows us to see how division (not difference) cuts us off from ourselves.
That we, as humans are storied creatures and story tellers, precisely because we seek that which is true about this world that we inhabit.
Or that relgion which is abusive and at its worst is one in which it becomes a curse word and a way of othering.
That a love of knowledge (or wisdom) begings in wonder, and that wonder can be seen as the art of self awareness. "We are what we pretend to be. So we must be very carefeul of what we pretend to be." Indeed, we must in order to understand a Truer story of who we are and what this world is.
That religion, existing outside of ourselves, is constantly seeking that thing that already exists. This is what existence of hinges on, is this kind of awareness of what belief is and why we engage it.
And that any discussion of religion must then move to the art of defintion and defining. It means little to say "I believe in God." In means much to say, "this is what I mean by God." All religious belief, regardless of which transcendent truth we are appealing to, pushes us towards such definition, precisely because religious truth is always attached to a life. It is participatory by it nature, and as such all life is an interpretive exercise.
On the former front its possible for the book's thesis (that we are all necesarily religious and that we do damage when we fail to acknolwedge this) to actually hold power and provide a biting critique. This power and this critique comes from the simple concession that what makes people an inherently religious creature is our beliefs. Thus understanding that our relationship to the world, to the concept of God (or the absence of such a God), to one another, requires our willingness to engage a clash of beliefs in order to make us rational and coherent creatures. Meaning, a world in which we remain ignortant to this conversation of beliefs and worldviews, pretending as though the modern dichotomy of religion and superstition has somehow freed us from these things, is a world we cannot know and which cannot be rational. This requires addressing our fundamental assumptions about the world and about reality before engaging in argumentation with opposing or differing assumptions, something that pushes us to the all important question of the implications of our given beliefs (or assumptions).
On the latter front, it's the rabbit trails and the drawn out musings that undercut this at points, finding himself walking up to the line of that conversation (and sometimes stepping over it), before quickly allowing the uncomfortablness of that space that push him back over the other side. Usually in an effort counter the recognizable problems he finds in common religious behavior in the first place. At his least compelling he entertains the perception (even though most of the book is saying something otherwise) that religion can reclaim its relevance by appealing to a purely utilitarian approach. Religion afterall, like metaphor or symbolism, can only be as true as the true thing it is rooted in. Matters of utility are speaking to something quite different. The real concern is our underlying beliefs.
I did like the early sections the most. Here I found him at his most biting and most unfiltered. Willing to challenge the old conventions about old conventions regarding a constantly shifting penchant to render "everyone is religious" a tired cliche or a relevant and forgotten adage ready to be recovered. And that's the thing. Everytime someone seeks to recover it they are doing so with slightly different context and nuances in tow, always with an eye on the relevance of the most recent years or decades that are now demanding fresh considerations. Here I think Dark does a good job of recognizing where the conversation sits at this present moment.
It's not so much that Dark is advocating for a specific religious claim (although no one can have this sort of discussion or make this sort of argument without doint so in some fashion), rather he is advocating for a proper, rational approach to knowledge (or obtaining knowledge). The modernist might think their way is rational because they've done away with the prejoritive label "superstition," but they might be the least rational of all societal expressions purely on the basis that they remain uniquely positioned as the only historical viewpoint that believes they no longer have need for belief itself. Which of course leads to the least rational society precisely because it doesn't accord with the reality. What we need is to recover the practice of artful conversation with our differing beliefs. To be able to sit around the table with 10 different people seeing the world in 10 different ways means recognizing that everyones way of seeing the world is incorporating an explanatory narrative that can make sense of all of those stories. That is step one. We all do this. We all must do this if we want to grow in knowledge of what is true. I do think this is a helpful book for setting that table and establishing the rules of the conversation. On that level alone I recommend it. And it offers some good insights along the way. Such as the phrase "policy is liturgy," which underscores how understanding our stories is always a social concern and social exercise.
Or his observation that religion doesn't suddenly appear. It's something that's already there. That alone challenges the modern story that it has become obsolete.
Or the religion is a process rather than a proposition. A process of knowing. A process that applies to a whole life. A process that allows us to see how division (not difference) cuts us off from ourselves.
That we, as humans are storied creatures and story tellers, precisely because we seek that which is true about this world that we inhabit.
Or that relgion which is abusive and at its worst is one in which it becomes a curse word and a way of othering.
That a love of knowledge (or wisdom) begings in wonder, and that wonder can be seen as the art of self awareness. "We are what we pretend to be. So we must be very carefeul of what we pretend to be." Indeed, we must in order to understand a Truer story of who we are and what this world is.
That religion, existing outside of ourselves, is constantly seeking that thing that already exists. This is what existence of hinges on, is this kind of awareness of what belief is and why we engage it.
And that any discussion of religion must then move to the art of defintion and defining. It means little to say "I believe in God." In means much to say, "this is what I mean by God." All religious belief, regardless of which transcendent truth we are appealing to, pushes us towards such definition, precisely because religious truth is always attached to a life. It is participatory by it nature, and as such all life is an interpretive exercise.
February 28, 2025
The author is able to think about a lot of things in unique ways, and the titular theme is valuable, but he has only managed to deconstruct traditional and conservative thoughts, everything politically and theologically left is considered sacred (I'm not just summarizing; he makes this point directly). Despite his suggestion to question everything and keep growing in one’s mindset--the reader is left wondering why the author can't bring himself to question both sides. There’s definitely some bits of wisdom in this book, but it’s mixed in with a ton of polarizing references that casually (and sometimes not so casually) put down anyone who disagrees with the author. There are consistent nudges to believe in one’s own truth, but it is clear whose truth he thinks is true.
If you are on the edge for reading the book, just pick up and read the afterword, which makes extremely clear how foolish and spiritually abusive he thinks those people are with whom he disagrees.
Maybe the original edition was better? The afterword shares his thanks that he can repent of certain views in the former book.
If you are on the edge for reading the book, just pick up and read the afterword, which makes extremely clear how foolish and spiritually abusive he thinks those people are with whom he disagrees.
Maybe the original edition was better? The afterword shares his thanks that he can repent of certain views in the former book.
Read
December 14, 2022One of the few thinkers who I feel understands religion in the same sense I do—someone who’s more likely to cite Dostoevsky or Octavia Butler than he is a Bible verse or theologian. It’s a way of looking at things that renders the phrase “not religious” just as nonsensical as “not cultural” or “not political.” It doesn’t add up. “True religion knows no neat divisions. The more we divide, the less we see.” Yeah. Yeah.
Also: props to Dark for rethinking some of his earlier positions and vocally renouncing “the soft fascism Christian supremacy.” I haven’t read the previous edition, but it sounds like this is a vast improvement
Also: props to Dark for rethinking some of his earlier positions and vocally renouncing “the soft fascism Christian supremacy.” I haven’t read the previous edition, but it sounds like this is a vast improvement
December 26, 2022
i think i like the older edition slightly better just because i've memorized certain phrases or the whole "label" paragraph but there are so many good helpful phrases i forgot about, the top two being Beloved Community and Attention Collection. either edition is well worth your time.
October 15, 2025
dnf. i want to read this so bad, but literally what the hell is this man on about.. i’ve picked this book up several times since buying it and i either fall asleep 2 pages in, have to skip several pages because i get lost, skip chapters because his anecdotes make no sense. i want to say i’ll continue to pick this up and try again throughout my life to see if it becomes a less challenging read, but it’s far too dense and i can’t get with the writing style no matter how much i try. good concepts - that’s about it for me.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews