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Liberal Religion for Earthlings: My First Book!

Liberal Religion for Earthlings: My First Book!

Last updated on: October 23, 2026 at 10:02 am by Carl Gregg

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Liberal Religion for Earthlings: My First Book! 2026-10-23T10:02:37-04:00 Carl Gregg

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I’m thrilled to share that my first book, Liberal Religion for Earthlings: Learning to Belong in a Living World, is available!

I wanted to share the book’s Introduction here for free, so you can get a sense of what the book is about and whether it might be of interest to you. I hope you enjoy it!:

Introduction

Do you really want to know?

I was not raised in a liberal religion for Earthlings. I grew up Southern Baptist in the Midlands of South Carolina, where I learned to think of this world as secondary, evolution as false, and heaven as home.

As a child, I would have been perfectly happy if every person on Earth were a Southern Baptist. My church taught me that the most important decision anyone could make was whether to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, and I believed it. Then I started meeting people who hadn’t made that decision and who were unmistakably good people. Some of them were kinder, wiser, and more compassionate than many of the Christians I knew.

My best friend in middle school was an agnostic. In high school, I gravitated toward the drama club crowd, which meant that Brock, the only out gay kid in our school, became one of my friends. My church had taught me that there was something fundamentally wrong with him. The person I knew was funny, loyal, and braver than I was—not at all the person my church had taught me to fear. The more I learned about the world, and the more remarkable people I met beyond the boundaries of my childhood faith, the more my inherited assumptions began to unravel.

In college, as a religion and philosophy double major, I caught my first glimpses of unapologetically liberal religion, one that asked how to love this world and how to belong here. One of those moments remains especially vivid. After the end of my sophomore year, I was driving home when I stopped halfway at a bookstore. On a table of new books was John Shelby Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die. The title caught me. I picked up the book and started reading. It felt like an electric charge. New hardcovers were expensive, and I had very little spare money, but I knew I had to buy this one and would stay up that night until I finished it. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Spong’s book today, but at that moment in my life, it helped fling open a door and gave me some of the courage I needed to walk through it.

Part of what struck me was the book’s bold, direct declaration that the Christianity of my childhood needed to change—and that another kind of religion really was out there, one that could make room for the questions that had been opening inside me. Perhaps that is part of my hope for the title of this book as well: that someone might encounter the words Liberal Religion for Earthlings and wonder, Wait—is that a thing? You can be liberal and religious?

What kind of religion makes sense once we recognize that we are not at the center of the universe but on the third rock from the sun, orbiting an ordinary star near the edge of one spiral galaxy among hundreds of billions of others?

This book begins with the conviction that the scientific story of who we are changes how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. That conviction begins with a question Peter Mayer poses in the title of his song “Do You Really Want to Know?” In the lyrics, Galileo and Darwin each pause before revealing discoveries that would permanently unsettle humanity’s understanding of itself. I discovered that I really did want to know. I still do.

There was no single moment when my old worldview collapsed. Rather, years of reading, study, relationships, and experience gradually taught me to let evidence lead and my beliefs follow, trusting that truth—even when it overturns my most cherished assumptions—is a gift to be welcomed rather than feared.

Yet knowledge alone does not transform us. Over the past five centuries, the Scientific Revolution has reshaped humanity’s understanding of the universe and transformed civilization in countless ways, but it did not automatically make us wiser about how to live within the world it revealed.

Never before have we known so much about the universe and our place within it. Even so, we often continue to imagine ourselves as separate from the very world that sustains us. We celebrate individual achievement while forgetting our dependence on countless human and more-than-human relationships. We consume as though the Earth were merely a warehouse of resources rather than the larger web of life to which we belong.

Many religious and philosophical traditions have long taught that human life is bound up with the larger community of life. Modern science has shown just how literal those ties are. The question for a liberal religion for Earthlings is what that knowledge asks of us.

By Earthling, I mean more than someone who happens to live on Earth. I mean a creature formed by this planet’s history, dependent on its living systems, and inseparable from the other lives it sustains. We are already Earthlings biologically. The task is to become Earthlings consciously and ethically: to recognize how deeply we belong and live from that knowledge.

Liberal religion names the approach through which I have learned to explore what that asks of us. For me, that path has led through progressive Christianity, Buddhism, and now Unitarian Universalism. Here the word liberal is often misunderstood because it is heard primarily in partisan political terms. In this context, however, I am using the word in its older sense, from the Latin liber, meaning “free.” Liberal religion (or free religion) is rooted in the conviction that truth need not fear honest inquiry.

Liberal forms of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other religious traditions share this commitment. The liberal branches of different religions often have more in common with one another than they do with the more theologically conservative expressions of their own traditions. What unites them is not a shared creed or theology but a shared commitment to remaining open to wherever honest inquiry leads.

Rather than locating religious authority primarily in ancient texts, inherited dogmas, or institutional hierarchies, liberal religion believes that our understanding can—and should—evolve as we learn more about ourselves and the world. As Gary Dorrien writes in The Making of American Liberal Theology, liberal theology is “based on reason and experience, not external authorities.” In other words, don’t believe something simply because someone tells you it is true. Believe it because it makes sense, because it is supported by the best available evidence, and because it is confirmed in your own direct experience. That commitment changes how we live.

Consider two questions that have divided religious communities in recent generations. Should women be ordained? Should same-sex couples be married? The answers depend on what one regards as the highest authority in matters of religion. Theologically conservative traditions have typically begun by asking what their ancient texts and inherited doctrines appear to teach. Liberal religion also values scripture and tradition, but believes they should be continually reinterpreted as human knowledge and experience grow. That willingness to learn from reality has led many liberal religious communities to ordain women and to marry same-sex couples.

Liberal religion has reshaped theology in many ways, from its understanding of scripture and religious authority to its commitments to democracy, human rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ inclusion. This book asks what happens when that same willingness to learn from reality is brought to bear on humanity’s place within the living world.

Seen this way, the spiritual life is not about escaping the world but paying closer attention to it. Meaning, wonder, and transcendence are not waiting somewhere else. They are here: in this world, among the lives we share, and in the ordinary moments that make up our days.

The chapters that follow explore what that means in practice. They approach the larger inquiry from different angles.

Part I begins with ourselves. What changes when we see human beings as Earthlings: evolved animals, latecomers in a vast cosmic story, and participants rather than masters in the systems that sustain life?

Part II turns toward the more-than-human world. Trees, fungi, plants, and animals challenge many of the assumptions we have inherited about intelligence, perception, relationship, and our place among other forms of life.

Part III moves from understanding to practice. Attention, discernment, embodiment, and the rhythms of everyday life ask what it might mean to live more wisely within the world we are learning to see.

Part IV widens the horizon toward the future. If we belong to a living world, what does that belonging ask of us in the communities we build, the crises we face, and what we leave to generations we will never meet?

The movement is from seeing differently, to encountering differently, to living differently, to asking what our lives make possible for others.

How do we learn to belong to a living world?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thanks for reading! If the Introduction sparked your curiosity and you’d like to explore more, Liberal Religion for Earthlings is available in both paperback and eBook formats.

You can learn more or order your copy at Amazon or Bookshop.

And if you know someone who might appreciate the book, I’d be grateful if you’d share this post with them!

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