4 Reasons People Abandon Religion and Still Fail at Spirituality
I grew up watching a particular kind of performance, the type of Black womanhood shaped by church tradition, obligation, and generational habit. My mother went to church every Sunday, but not because it changed her or softened her or made her more self-aware. She went because that’s what the women before her did. She went because optics matter. She went because in our culture, church is something you show more than something you embody. She didn’t interpret scripture. She didn’t apply anything she heard. She didn’t carry compassion into the world. She remained critical, defensive, controlling, unchanged. And the part that shook me years later, once I began holding space for intuitive guidance, was seeing the same pattern in Black women who had already “left religion.”
They didn’t evolve. They just changed costumes.
They dropped the church culture but kept the emotional rigidity. They rejected the pastor but carried the same entitlement and unhealed wounds straight into spirituality. And there’s something particular about the way Black women do this to each other: demanding softness from spaces they refuse to be soft in, demanding transformation from practices they refuse to surrender to, demanding clarity while doing everything possible to avoid being honest with themselves. It’s the same behavior, just in a different room.
The truth is, many Black women aren’t choosing between religion and spirituality. Still, they’re failing at both, and miserably, because neither path works when the person walking it is emotionally unavailable to herself. We were raised in households where women performed faith with the same intensity they performed strength. You go to church because that’s what respectable women do, never mind that you haven’t examined your patterns or learned how to love without conditions. Then some leave the church and show up in intuitive spaces with that same mother-wound logic: “Tell me something I like. Fix my problems. Don’t hold me accountable. Validate my suffering, but don’t ask me to look at the harm I cause.” It’s the same energy that made our mothers bark commands while hiding their vulnerabilities behind scripture they couldn’t actually interpret. The same emotional immaturity dressed up as righteousness. The same refusal to self-reflect, now repackaged as “being spiritual.”
When Our Mother Wound Becomes the Way We Treat Each Other
And this is where the first failure happens: they left religion but kept the performance. Spirituality becomes another identity to cosplay. A vibe. A look. An aesthetic. But the emotional body? Still untouched. Still unexamined. Still running the show.
The second failure is dropping the church’s structure but refusing to build inner discipline. Church gave our mothers a rhythm, even if they didn’t let the rhythm change them. They knew where to be and when. They knew the ritual. They knew the routine. Once people leave religion, they abandon everything—including the parts that gave them grounding. They float around expecting intuition to just fall into their laps without cultivating any spiritual muscle. They want freedom without commitment, which quickly becomes chaos disguised as awakening.
Then comes the third failure: carrying generational wounds into every new spiritual space and calling it discernment. Black women often inherit emotional defensiveness as a survival tactic. But without healing, that defensiveness becomes the lens through which they interpret everything, including spiritual guidance. They come into sessions armored. Suspicious. Needing to control the outcome. Unable to receive anything that threatens the fragile identity they’ve built to survive their upbringing. And some show up the exact way my mother did: combative, demanding, secretly terrified to be seen. Church never healed that in her. Spirituality doesn’t heal it in them. Because healing requires willingness, not aesthetics.
And finally, the deepest failure: they want the comfort, not the transformation. They want the soft life but not the softening. They want intuition to “tell them the answer” without being willing to surrender the patterns that created the problem. They want the luminous parts of spirituality without the mirror. They want to be special, not responsible. And when they don’t get that, when the work starts pressing on the wound, they label the guidance as too harsh, too much, not aligned. Meanwhile, they sat through decades of sermons that never challenged them and called it faith.
So yes, many Black women leave religion and still fail at spirituality. Not because either path is flawed, but because the same unexamined wounds are walking both journeys. And until those wounds are acknowledged, named, and healed, both paths will feel hollow. Both will be performances. Both will be lived from the outside in.
Black women deserve more than inherited faith and aesthetic spirituality. But the truth, the uncomfortable one, is that most won’t evolve until they stop treating both religion and intuition as stages to perform on and start treating them as invitations to break the patterns that have shaped us for generations.
If this stirred something awake in you, the grief, the clarity, the resistance, the truth—then you’re already standing at the threshold. My work meets women exactly there. Book an Akashic session if you’re ready to stop repeating what was handed to you and start shaping what you came here to become.