There were many times when Gail1 thought she’d hit rock-bottom, only to fall even further and land with an even harder thud.
Her childhood was rough. Her mother was encumbered with undiagnosed and untreated depression, and her father was bipolar—also undiagnosed and untreated. Part of his mania manifested in his packing up the family to move to new possibilities in a new state every year. Under such rudderless conditions and with her relationship to her parents perpetually painful, Gail ended up dropping out of high school and doing what she had been raised to do: wander. It didn’t go well, and her lengthy stretch living as a homeless high school drop-out on the streets of Austin, Texas, was more than precarious.
She became an alcoholic. Then she became addicted to heroin. Then her boyfriend died from a drug overdose. Then she was arrested for burglary—yet again—trying to get cash to support her addictions. She was found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison. That’s when things felt their absolute worst.
But it was also then and there that things finally started to change for the better for Gail. Crumpled in the fetal position on the hard floor of her prison cell, overwhelmed with hopelessness and helplessness, Gail experienced the initial stirrings of a protracted existential shift that would gradually lead to her successful recovery.
Now, for most people, such a positive change comes from an experience with God. When they find themselves in the pit of despair, out of control and buried in what feels like self-inflicted suffering, that’s exactly when religious faith comes to the rescue. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to attend any decent church revival worth its weight in baptismal water without hearing countless versions of the same coming-to-God narrative: “I was deeply down and utterly out. I had screwed up my life beyond repair, and when I finally had nothing left to lose, I called out to the Lord for salvation. Hallelujah!”
But that’s not what happened to Gail. Although she had turned to God often when destitute and depressed, this time she didn’t find herself seeking that same solace in the divine. While there in her prison cell, feeling completely alone, she experienced a sense of something that was profound and poignant yet wholly secular: that she was the sole master of her fate.
It’s not that she let go of God. Such a characterization implies that God was there for her and she just decided to release her grasp of his generous hand. Gail’s awakening went down differently. It was more like God as a viable idea, a meaningful concept, a felt presence … just evaporated. No, she didn’t “let go of God.” Instead, she calmly and quietly realized that there was in fact no god to let go of. There was just herself. In prison. Alone in the world. Alone in the universe. And if her life was going to play out differently, it was up to her.
As she explained to me, “In all the mess, you know, I had to look internally … I just had to draw from inner strength. I had to look internally to find that. To embrace my own resilience, to get through it all.” There was no prayer involved. No miracles. No magic. Just Gail. “I just did it. I got through it. I worked so hard … if you can’t find it out there in God, you’re going to find it inside—inside yourself. I couldn’t turn to God, so I turned to myself, because that’s all I had.”
Gail’s climb upward was protracted. She credits prison with getting her sober. After her release, she worked diligently to surround herself with good people—that is, people who were kind, thoughtful, hardworking, not involved with drugs or alcohol, and trying to better themselves. She avoided toxic individuals and dangerous situations. She sought therapy to help overcome her shame and insecurity. She got into a healthy relationship with a supportive partner. She attended endless meetings for people recovering from addiction. While many of those meetings had a focus on God or a higher power, Gail either ignored such words or mentally replaced them with her own secular meanings. She also reached out to some relatives and fortified those relationships. She read a lot, finding existential comfort in the words of various secular philosophers. She ate healthy food. She earned her GED. She took enough classes at a community college to allow her to successfully transfer to a state college where she graduated with strong grades. Then she went to graduate school. Then she became a licensed social worker. She eventually got married and raised two children while working as the director of a large outpatient rehabilitation facility, helping others to overcome their own addictions.
Gail managed to do what she did because she decided, long ago, to be the active driver of her life. She chose not to lay down in the back seat, close her eyes, plug her ears, and have faith that some supernatural deity was driving the car for her.
You, Self-Reliantly
Atheism is to self-reliance as sunshine is to summer: the source, the sustainer.
Atheism begins with the steady acceptance that we currently occupy a moist and arid planet rotating in space in an unfathomably vast and mostly oxygen-less universe, and no one knows why it exists or what it all means and there is no God or any other magical invisible beings pulling the strings, causing tornadoes, watching your every move, reading your every thought, judging the circumstances of your every orgasm, cringing at your every lie, beaming at your every act of charity, or doling out favors. Rather, there is just a natural, physical, and godless cosmos that is bleak, beautiful, wondrous, and mysterious in equal measure. And within this strange but very real world, there are people who struggle and dance, wilt and thrive, love and hate. And amid these people, there is you. Undoubtedly here, undeniably now. And given the absence of supernatural saviors, prophets, gurus, or gods, you can, you will—indeed, you must—rely on yourself.
While this can be both dizzying and daunting—especially for those of us who have suffered mightily, have been denied certain advantages, or lack certain resources—it is nonetheless the reality of the situation. Those who heartfully embrace it, and embrace the self-reliance it necessitates, are in a much more advantageous position to better themselves and improve their lives than those who deny or avoid it.
It’s essential, however, to know just what self-reliance in this context does and does not mean.
Unless you find yourself stuck in an ice crevasse on the side of a mountain that you fell into while hiking solo, self-reliance doesn’t mean going it alone. Nor does it mean cutting yourself off or separating yourself from others. It certainly doesn’t mean egotistical defiance or solipsistic self-centeredness. It doesn’t mean rugged individualism or rigid independence. Few people, ever, manage much alone.
Rather, atheistic self-reliance encapsulates an orientation to life that is consciously self-determined within a context of natural reality. It entails a thoughtful affirmation that it is you who must choose, through the best deliberation and discernment you can muster, what it is you will rely upon, knowing that only natural possibilities exist. It is a lifestance resolute in the fact that there are no lucky charms, magic spells, hovering ancestors, haunting spirits, auspicious tarot cards, mystical guides, benevolent gods, or sanguine goddesses. There’s just this world and this life, with you doing your own navigating. As humanist Zora Neale Hurston once said of her secularly self-reliant orientation, rather than pray to something utterly inscrutable if not nonexistent, “I accept the means at my disposal for working out my own destiny.”2
To be sure, aid and assistance—from whatever corners you can find either—are a must. In certain circumstances, it may be a spouse, siblings, cousins, or friends. In others, it may be therapy or support groups. In still others, meditation or medication. In yet others, help from the government. Or it may be a potent combination of various sources of support, guidance, and help. Either way, you determine your course, choose what you will depend on, and decide what will merit your reliance.
Remember that famous biblical assertion: “The Lord helps him who helps himself,” or as it is sometimes put, “God helps those who help themselves”? Well, guess what? It’s not in the Bible. That’s correct; this famous adage of self-reliance is not biblical, nor is it rooted in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. The proverbial phrase comes from the writings of pagan playwrights of ancient Greece. They knew—and explicitly asserted—that your ability to improve your own life is fundamentally and primarily in your own hands, heart, and mind.
From Esteban to Emerson
Like Gail, Esteban3 had his share of rough times growing up. Born and raised in Southern California, he fell in with the wrong crowd, developing into a taut and tattooed gang member. After a stretch of criminal endeavors, he ended up in jail. In his case, religion initially did help him; while behind bars he became a born-again Christian and after his release an ordained minister. He then devoted his life to working with and mentoring incarcerated men, trying to help them through the healing powers of Jesus. He became a bright light within the evangelical world and was even a guest on various syndicated Christian television shows, where his gang-member-to-minister-of-Christ story struck a hearty chord.
Then, after nearly fifteen years of Christian ministry, Esteban lost his faith.
First, he couldn’t ignore the fact that much of the altruistic work that he and his fellow ministers were doing was often self-serving at root. “It was B.S.,” he explained. “I was there to help them, but the end goal was always really to recruit them to the Kingdom of God. We used their situation—their despair—to push our own agenda, to win converts, to increase our flock. Yeah, we might give a homeless person a meal, but the end goal was always to recruit.” The more lost souls recruited, the better his professional standing, and the more money brought to his program. Increasingly aware of this dynamic, the biblical words Esteban had long savored began to leave a bitter taste in his mouth.
Second, he loved to read. One day, he found a book that pointedly challenged the authenticity of the Gospels. “I was in a Barnes and Noble, and I came across a book by Bart Ehrman called Misquoting Jesus. When I saw his background—Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical School of Divinity, Princeton—I thought, how could he have left the faith? How could he be right? I bought the book and took it home, and that book was the beginning of my journey out of faith. It planted the seeds of doubt.” Esteban went on to read similar books by former ministers who had become atheists, people such as John Loftus and Dan Barker. Such books caused the fabric of his faith to continue to fray.
Finally, he came upon the Clergy Project—an online site for pastors, ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams who have lost their faith. With his immersion into this website, his enlightenment was complete. He sold off his massive personal library of Christian books and began replacing them with works of philosophy, science, humanism, and secularism.
This transition from Christianity to atheism was extremely liberating for Esteban. He felt a great burden lifted off his shoulders. Raw relief. No longer was he tormented by the persistent existential fear that an angry god was going to send him to hell. No longer did he feel like his life was being determined by angelic, demonic, spiritual, or mysterious forces that would ultimately determine his eternal fate. No longer did he feel the need to prey off the suffering of others by feeding them stories of a tortured and resurrected messiah who would send them to hell if they didn’t worship him.
As an atheist, Esteban experiences his life on solid natural ground rather than the unstable sands of religious supernaturalism. He also feels he is ethically improved. “I have a whole new outlook,” he mused. “Now I do good not because I think God is watching my every move, but I do good because it is good for humanity, for people. To be kind is good in and of itself.”
Self-reliance is now key for Esteban. He lives with the secure conviction that he is truly his own person responsible for his own fate rather than a pious peon constantly seeking to please a cosmic master. This new sense of secular self-determinism has been both calming and inspiring. He feels free—not to do whatever he wants without a care but, rather, to do what he understands to be right in the light of his own conscience and experience. Instead of doing what is commanded by an invisible almighty deity, he now makes his own decisions based on reason and personal reflection. It’s a shift from supplicatory obedience to responsible self-reliance.
After becoming secular, Esteban’s life didn’t suddenly become smooth sailing. Far from it. His parents passed away within six months of each other, and the care of his younger brother, who has a neurological disorder, fell to him. His income nosedived after giving up the ministry. He’s also dealt with some depression. But rather than turn to faith in the face of these hardships—rather than seek help from an imaginary god—he confronted each new challenge by assessing the situation, informing himself of his options, thinking through possible solutions, and moving forward as healthily and rationally as possible with a battery of this-worldly sources of solace and support: his wife, aunts, uncles, cousins, talk therapy, medication, meditation, and exercise. He has also found tremendous ongoing comfort and healing in ceaseless reading; his thirst for knowledge is joyfully unquenchable.
Unfortunately, because of his rejection of Christianity, his social circle all but disappeared. His best friend for over a decade—a fellow pastor—told him that his new-found secularism was being caused by the devil, and as such he could no longer have anything to do with him and his Satanic ways. “None of my friends talk to me anymore. All my friends from church … they have all shunned me.”
As Esteban found out, in a world where most people believe in gods, those who don’t can find themselves stigmatized and rejected. It can be hard to be on the receiving end of such social eschewal. But, as one of America’s leading champions of individualism has noted, such is the price one often pays for living a life of intellectual integrity.
It is no accident that the man who wrote the most famous work on self-reliance, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a radical religious dissenter who rejected traditional theology, didn’t believe in the supernatural claims of Christianity, and was castigated as an atheist by many in his day. In the 1840s, Emerson published his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” and although it is riddled with references to God—which was so common in such essays in the 1840s that even Emerson couldn’t fathom writing his own without them—the essay’s theses are boldly secular and fiercely unlike anything you will ever find in any holy scriptures: do not follow the dictates of authority or the norms and whims of socially dominant trends and traditions; do not fear the condemnations of the crowd; follow your own conscience; stick to your own convictions; believe in yourself, for there is no ultimate authority other than that.
As Emerson declared—and Esteban experienced—“nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” And furthermore, “nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” These are powerful sentiments to be sure. They can inspire courage in the face of social contempt, help affirm one’s grounded sense of self, and inspire an individual to change the direction of his or her own life.
Taking Control
It’s what psychologists call “locus of control.” It has to do with the way you orient yourself in the world: Do you see yourself as mostly in charge of your life, or do you think of yourself as largely at the mercy of outside forces? That is, do you feel like your life is primarily in your own hands and that the decisions and choices you make are determinant of what you experience, or do you more feel like your life is ultimately being shaped and regulated by other entities beyond your control? If the former best describes you, then you have what is known as an internal locus of control. If it is the latter, then you have what is called an external locus of control.4
Religious people are more likely to have an external locus of control.5 They tend to believe that God shapes their lives and determines their fates and fortunes. Many also believe that additional spiritual forces—such as benevolent angels or malevolent demons—are supporting them or tripping them up along the way.
Atheists, however—because they don’t believe in God or other supernatural agents—are much more likely to have an internal locus of control. They are much more likely to have a greater sense of personal agency, to feel empowered in their own right, to feel more self-confident.6 Such was the case for Gail and Esteban when they switched from a religiously couched external locus of control to a secular, internal locus of control.
And just as Gail and Esteban experienced, maintaining an atheistic, internal locus of control is often quite personally beneficial. For example, studies have shown that religious people with an external locus of control are much more apt to interpret misfortune as active punishment from God, which induces unnecessary guilt and self-loathing.7 Atheists don’t have to deal with such pointless turmoil; they are better able to perceive the real sources of their misfortune rather than obsess over imaginary sources. Additionally, research shows that those with an internal locus of control are less likely to feel despair, distress, and helplessness, and they exhibit higher levels of life satisfaction, than those with an external locus of control.8
Thus, contrary to popular belief, atheism does not lead to depression and alienation. It is, rather, one advantageous element to a self-reliant, resilient life. It helps individuals better understand their place in the natural world and prods them to seek this-worldly solutions to their problems.
[1] Name changed to protect her privacy. The interview took place on January 21, 2009.
[2] Hurston quoted in Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2019), page 69.
[3] Name changed for confidentiality. Interview with E. on June 16, 2020.
[4] J. B. Rotter. Generalized expectancies for internal vs. external control of reinforcements. Psychological Monographs 80 (1966): 1–28; N. Krause. Stress and coping: Reconceptualizing the role of locus of control beliefs. Journal of Gerontology 41 (1986): 617–622.
[5] Katherine L. Fiori, Edna E. Brown, Kai S. Cortina, and Toni C. Antonucci. Locus of control as a mediator of the relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction: Age, race, and gender differences. Mental Health, Religion & Culture 9 (2006):3, 239–263, DOI: 10.1080/13694670600615482.
[6] B. A. Shaw, and N. Krause. Exploring race variations in aging and personal control. The Journals of Gerontology 56B (2001): S119–S124.
[7] See, for example, K. S. Seybold, and P. C. Hill. The role of religion and spirituality in mental and physical health. Current Directions in Psychological Science 10 (2001): 21–24; S. H. Barlow, and A. E. Bergin. “Religion and mental health from the Mormon perspective.” In Handbook of Religion and Mental Health, Edited by: Koenig, H. G. 225–243. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998.
[8] J. Mirowsky, and C. E. Ross. “Education, social status, and health.” In Series Title: Social Institutions and Social Change, Hawthorne, NY, 2003: Aldine de Gruyter; L. C. Perlmuter, and R. A. Monty. The importance of perceived control: Fact or fantasy?. American Scientist 65 (1977): 759–765; Katherine L. Fiori, Edna E. Brown, Kai S. Cortina, and Toni C. Antonucci. Locus of control as a mediator of the relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction: Age, race, and gender differences Mental Health, Religion & Culture 9 (2006):3, 239–263, DOI: 10.1080/13694670600615482.