About this episode

Dr. Tripp Fuller explores the evolution of faith and the crisis of belief in contemporary religion.

Most weeks now I get an email from someone who's sure they've believed a lie their whole life — that the faith holding their family, their friendships, their sense of self together is collapsing, and they don't know who they are without it. I've been that person more than once. So in this essay I want to say the thing I wish someone had said to me: what's dying might not be your faith. It might just be your idea of what your faith was. Drawing on Whitehead's four stages of religion — ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization — I make the case that belief-centered Christianity is a late, late development, maybe 200 years old in its current intensity, not 2,000. For most of human history religion was bodies moving together, food shared, the dead remembered. The relationship was never in the certainty. It was always in the meal. If you're in the panic right now, this one's for you. Pull up a chair. If this conversation is interesting, then come join me and Ilia Delio for our upcoming class, The Future of Religion, where we will digging in to the evolution of religion, its current belief centered crisis, and the possibilities on the horizon. This audio essay is the kind of theology…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guest: Ilia Delio

Topics covered

• faith
• religion
• belief
• community
• theology
• spirituality

Keywords

• faith
• belief
• religion
• theology
• community
• spirituality
• Whitehead

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Substack

Books & works: Process This

More episodes of Homebrewed Christianity

• There Was a Time When God Was Gods with Ilia Delio · June 9, 2026 · 1h 27m
• Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs · June 2, 2026 · 1h 21m
• The Machine Is a God Image with Ilia Delio · May 30, 2026 · 1h 30m
• The Problem Is Not Poverty. It Is Wealth. w/ Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty · May 28, 2026 · 1h 21m
• Preaching in the WTF Zone: Leah Schade on Saying Something True When the News Will Not Stop · May 25, 2026 · 1h 10m
• The Darkly Radiant Struggle with Gary Dorrien · May 23, 2026 · 1h 27m

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