Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
When Even the Faithful Stop Being Certain
Silent • September 26, 2026
A new study of American religious life shows belief eroding even inside the tradition best known for keeping its people — and asks what's actually left once certainty goes.
On September 22nd, Pew Research Center published one of the more quietly startling religion studies of the year, and it isn't about a fringe group or a sect nobody expected to hold together. It's about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a faith practically famous for how thoroughly it keeps its own. In 2007, seven in ten Americans raised Mormon still identified as Mormon in adulthood. By 2023–24, that number had fallen to fifty-four percent. Nearly a third of those raised in the faith now describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or "nothing in particular" — double the share sixteen years earlier. Even among those who stayed, certainty thinned: belief in God "without doubt" dropped from ninety percent to seventy-six, daily prayer from eighty-two to seventy-three.
I want to handle this data carefully. It's easy to hear "church retention falls" as bad news for the faithful, or quiet vindication for everyone else. Both readings miss the point. LDS retention, even diminished, still outperforms most American denominations. This isn't a story about one institution losing its grip. It's a story about certainty tested under close to the best conditions available to it — strong community, generational continuity, real doctrinal coherence — and still, gradually, coming apart at the seams. If it can happen there, the architecture holding up anyone's inherited certainty is less permanent than it looks from inside it.
What the Study Can't Measure
Pew can count who still checks a box on a survey. It can't tell you what it's like to be the one doing the leaving — or the one staying while something you used to feel without effort quietly stops being available to you. That's a different kind of data, and it's the kind spiritual direction actually works with.
I've sat across from people in exactly that middle distance: still going through the motions, still loving their community, privately unsure whether anyone is listening. It's one of the loneliest positions a person can occupy, because it often can't be spoken aloud inside the very community that would otherwise hold you. You're not ready to call yourself a leaver. You can't quite call yourself a believer without qualifying it into something smaller. Most traditions have no name for that middle room, so people sit in it alone, assuming they're the only one there.
They rarely are. The Pew numbers say so.
The Gate You Can't Skip
There's an old Sumerian story about Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who descends into the underworld to see her sister Ereshkigal. At each of seven gates, the gatekeeper takes something from her — her crown, her jewelry, her royal robes — until she arrives at the bottom stripped of every marker that told anyone, including herself, who she was. Only then does she meet what's actually down there. The myth doesn't treat this as tragedy. It treats it as the price of admission to a truth the ornaments were never built to survive.
Deconstruction, in the modern sense, usually doesn't announce itself as myth. It shows up as a nagging doubt during a hymn, a question you stop asking out loud, a certainty that used to arrive automatically and now has to be manufactured. But it follows the same shape as Inanna's descent: something is removed at every threshold, and there's no route past the gate that lets you keep all your jewelry. The theology goes first, sometimes. Then the community. Then, for some, the habit of feeling addressed by anything larger than themselves.
I'm not going to rush in here and repair anyone's faith, and I'd be suspicious of anything that claimed it could. Some absences aren't problems waiting on a solution. The silence where God used to answer immediately isn't necessarily a malfunction — it may be the actual terrain, and the task is learning to stand in it rather than paper over it with a faster answer.
The Question Worth Sitting With
So here's what I'd actually ask, if you were sitting across from me instead of reading this: if the certainty you were handed finished eroding completely — not into a different, tidier belief, not into an argument you could win, but into open silence — could you survive being someone who simply doesn't know? Not forever. Just for now, while it's true.
I won't answer that for you. I don't think it can be answered from outside the room it happens in.
A Practice for the Middle Room
If you recognize yourself here — still present, quietly uncertain — try this before the week is out. Write one sentence naming exactly what you used to believe without effort. Then write, honestly, whether that sentence is still true for you, true with an asterisk, or no longer true at all. Don't fix it. Don't defend it to an imagined critic. Just let it sit there, accurate, on the page.
That's the whole practice. It won't resolve anything tonight. It will at least stop costing you the extra work of pretending, even to yourself, that nothing has moved.
Closing Reflection
Nearly a third of a generation raised inside one of America's most cohesive faiths now names no faith at all. Whatever tradition raised you, ask honestly: which of your certainties are still yours, and which have you simply kept saying out of habit? Sit with the answer before you try to fix it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This week the day and night stand equal for a moment — then the dark begins to win, and so does the question of what you actually belong to.
The FDA is spending an afternoon on the future of psychedelic medicine — the harder question, what to do with what you saw, isn't on the agenda.
New research on AI companionship raises an old, unglamorous question about which voices deserve our trust. Back in early August, researchers at Stanford published something quietly damning. They studied more than a thousand adults who talk to AI companions on Character.AI, and, for a smaller group, actually read the conversations themselves — nearly half a million messages, donated for analysis. The people who leaned on the chatbot hardest, who disclosed the most, who called it a friend or a partner, were not the ones who felt better. They were the ones with the smallest circles of people in their actual lives, and the ones most likely to end up feeling worse. This week, a psychotherapist put the finding more bluntly than any journal abstract would allow, telling a reporter that human beings cannot have a genuine relationship with an AI. Not won't. Can't. I want to sit with that word "can't," because it is doing more theological work than its author probably intended. The Oldest Kind of Listening Every tradition I have spent real time inside — Pagan, Heathen, the Judaism I grew up in before I grew out of it — assumes that some voices deserve more trust than others, and that telling them apart is a skill, not a given. The Hávamál, that blunt old Norse book of household counsel, spends stanza after stanza warning against handing someone your whole mind before you have tested them: watch how a person behaves under some strain, it counsels, before you decide what their friendship is worth. That isn't cynicism. It's discernment — the discipline of asking what a voice actually is before you let it tell you who you are. An AI companion never fails that test, because it was never built to be tested. It has no bad day to reveal it. It does not get tired of you, contradict you out of its own need, or risk anything by staying. That isn't intimacy. It's a smooth surface with nothing underneath to discover — comfort without the friction that would ever prove it real. What the Study Actually Found, and Didn't To be fair to the research, it did not find that AI companionship is worthless, or that everyone who uses one is in trouble. It found something narrower and more useful: the people most likely to be harmed were already isolated, already leaning hardest, already treating the chatbot as a substitute rather than a supplement. The researchers themselves reached for a food metaphor — the comparison one summary used was "social junk food." It satisfies a real hunger, briefly, in a way that can make the deeper hunger harder to notice. That distinction matters, and it isn't mine to blur into something tidier. This is not a clinical finding about any one person's mental health, and if you're using an AI companion and wondering whether you're in trouble, that's a conversation for a therapist, not a blog post. What I can speak to is the older question sitting underneath the study — not whether the voice is helpful, but whether you have quietly stopped asking. The Uncomfortable Question So here is the question, and I am not going to answer it for you: what have you been listening to lately because it was easier than listening to something that might actually disagree with you? It doesn't have to be a chatbot. It can be a version of a friend you've stopped really talking to, a teacher whose books you've read but whose challenge you've never let land, a version of God who conveniently wants exactly what you already wanted. The AI companion is only the newest and most efficient shape this problem has ever taken. It is easier to notice in a machine because the machine is honest about what it's doing. The rest of us have gotten very good at hiding it. A Practice Pick one voice you've been trusting easily lately — a person, a habit, an app, a feed you check first thing. Ask it plainly: when was the last time you told me something I didn't want to hear? If you can't answer, sit with that. Don't rush to fix it tonight. Just notice, honestly, which of your voices have never once cost you anything to listen to. Hekate keeps her post at the crossroads for a reason no myth fully explains. She doesn't walk the road for you, and she doesn't tell you which fork to take. She just holds the torch up so you can see there's more than one way to go, and so the choosing happens in the light instead of the dark, where the easiest voice always sounds like the right one. That's the whole of it. Not an answer. A little more light at the fork, and the old, unglamorous work of choosing while you can still see. Closing Reflection Name one voice you've been trusting easily — a person, a habit, an app. Ask it plainly: when did you last tell me something I didn't want to hear? Whatever the answer, don't rush to fix it tonight. Just notice, honestly, which of your voices have never once cost you anything to listen to.