A Conversation with a Humanist

At Encounter, we speak a lot about religion but we less often cover unbelief (or disbelief if you prefer) and thought we would set out this week to remedy that. I recently had the occasion to meet Daniel Dacombe. Daniel was a devout Christian who went through a process of deconversion and is now an active member of the Canadian Humanist Association. Daniel works in the mental health field and is a thoughtful person of good will. I hope you enjoy hearing his story. 

(Our interview is edited for length and clarity)

Source: Canva.com

Started on a Christian Path?

Daniel was originally a quite committed Christian. 

“I went to evangelical churches and then Evangelical Bible College and Seminary. I worked for Youth for Christ for a number of years. I was always very interested in critical thinking and reason, and apologetics for quite a while as well.”

“As I continued to get older and more exposure to other perspectives and to people who were struggling with like deep-rooted mental health issues, I became much more interested in that end of helping people.”

Daniel Dacombe

Things Started to Change

“It’s kind of difficult to describe when the transition out of faith happened. I think a lot of people feel that way, because sometimes there’s one line that you cross, but other times there are many little lines that you cross in that journey.”

“For me, the cognitive dimension of belief fell away long before the rest of it did, the practice and the social community dimension and so on. So I left ministry and seminary in 2010 though we still attended church as a family. I had children, and there were a lot of things that I thought were still important about being in church that we were doing.”

“But over the years there was just kind of a continual shedding of belief in different ways, cognitively, emotionally, socially, etc., while still trying to maintain relationships with everybody within the church that we had.”

Daniel explained that he’s a fan of the famous Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice.

Source: Canva.com

“There’s this great line where Mr. Darcy is telling Elizabeth that he’s in love with her, and she’s obviously incredulous because he’s such a jerk. And she essentially says, ‘when did this happen? What are you talking about?’ And he replies, “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”

“And for me, that describes my deconversion as well, where someone said, ‘you sound like an atheist,’ and I said, ‘well, yeah, I think I am.’ And they said, ‘when did that happen?’ I didn’t know. I think it was a while ago, but the date, I couldn’t give you.”

The Costs

Daniel shares that the pandemic was the final step in his process of deconversion. They stopped attending and then didn’t want to go back. He was fortunate that the whole family was on the same page (often these stories involve divorces). And so, a transition began.

“I lost most of the close relationships I had with people around here, not through arguing but just through ghosting. I’d reach out to some to say hi or see if they wanted to go to a movie but they would say, ‘well, I can’t, because you’re an apostate.’ Others just quietly stopped responding.”

“While it hurt for a while, I’ve learned a lot more about in-group and out-group socialization since then. So it doesn’t really kind of impact me the same as it used to. There are social costs, interpersonal costs to leaving religion. And for people who are feeling maybe especially anxious about the stability of the world or the stability of their in-group, seeing people leave creates a lot of internal conflict, especially if these are people that they were close to since it poses the question ‘could that happen to me too?’”

Source: Canva.com

Moving Forward Positively

“It was a journey. I started looking for something to help me not just sit in that “angry atheist” camp like the Richard Dawkins kind of ex-Christian. I wasn’t really interested in doing that. So I found Humanist Canada. I became a member, started volunteering, started looking for other ways to help out. I also went back to grad school for my PhD researching this area of study [deconversion].”

“I think everybody needs some kind of worldview to base their lives on. We need a story.”

“I was influenced by the social scientist Ernst Becker who wrote about terror management theory, namely that our belief systems manage the difficulty we have as a species that both has a strong survival instinct and knows that we’re going to die someday. So how do we manage that? How do we give back to the world? How do we leave some mark of ourselves here?”

“For some people, they believe in an afterlife. I found humanism to be a useful way to participate in trying to make the world a better place for future generations.”

What is humanism?

“Humanism has several different definitions. A definition we have at Humanist Canada, and I’ll just verbally paraphrase it, but you can find it on our website. Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life based on a profound respect for human dignity and the conviction that human beings are ultimately accountable to themselves and to society for their actions. It’s a secular worldview that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical and meaningful lives.”

Image: Humanist Canada Logo, group of people standing together, Source: Humanist Canada Wesbite, Canva.com

His Work

Daniel’s employment, as noted, is in mental health and addictions. But I asked him about his work for Humanist Canada, part of which includes hosting their podcast. 

“The podcast was kind of an accident. where I was writing the newsletter for Humanist Canada, doing some webinars for them, and I was enjoying it because I do really enjoy public speaking. During my time at the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba, I probably put in 500 hours of public speaking. A lot of that was to teenage audiences, which, if you’re nervous about public speaking, start off by talking to a gymnasium full of hostile 16-year-olds about weed because, after that, it’s all downhill. It’s so much easier talking to a group of professionals, none of whom are going to throw stuff at me. “

“I was asked to be one of a few people who would host the podcast but I’m the one who’s kept up with it. I do really enjoy it because, selfishly, I get to pick the authors and the researchers that I’ve been reading for a while, and I get to pick their brains about my favorite books they’ve written.”

“I really enjoyed hosting Ryan Cragun and Phil Zuckerman and my first guest, Dr. Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme from University of Waterloo, who’s done so much research about secularization in Canada and North America, and is just a reservoir of knowledge. Sarah later came back with her co-author (this episode hasn’t dropped yet) Joel Thiessen, who’s actually a Christian professor at a Christian university, and they do a lot of work together. And so we had a good conversation about reaching across the aisle and working together to provide good data to the public during a time when things are getting really polarized.”

“I also had Daryl Van Tongruen on, who’s a Christian professor at a Christian University who does a lot of research on religious deconversion and is, you know, a very compassionate and lovely man who wrote a very good book that I think should be standard reading for everybody who leaves a religion. They would probably really benefit from his book called Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion.”

Image: Humanist Canada Podcast graphic, Source: Humanist Canada Website

Concerns

I found it interesting that two of his podcasts on deconversion had Christians as the researcher or co-researcher. He noted this collaboration happens on other fronts. 

“Look at the Freedom from Religion Foundation in the United States. They do a lot of work to protect the separation of church and state from collapsing. So they’re a secular organization. One of their biggest donor groups is a Christian denomination.”

“We all need to work together right now. There’s a dominant white Christian nationalist group and anyone not part of that group is at some risk. There’s a fascist impulse out there that can threaten anyone, be you a Mormon, a Catholic, a Muslim or an atheist.”

“This is a really, really good time for people of goodwill and common values to find each other and work together, even if our beliefs might be different about the questions of ultimate reality and meaning.”