Agnostic and Seeking

For women in the long middle. Raised in faith — usually Christian, sometimes Muslim, sometimes in an ancestral tradition — and no longer practicing in the same way. Not yet (or never) calling themselves something else. We are sitting with the questions. The questions have been with some of us for a year and with others for twenty years. This network is for the in-between, which is a real and inhabited place for many Black and African-diaspora women, even if our communities have rarely given us language for it.

Membership includes women across many starting points. Women raised deep in the Black church who no longer attend regularly. Women raised Muslim who have stepped back from formal practice. Women raised in West African traditional religion who are not actively practicing. Women raised in Catholic households who have left the church but who hold its theological formation in how they think. Women in interfaith households who have arrived at a settled agnosticism. Women who have never been religious and want a community that includes that experience. Women who are actively seeking and have not yet found their place.

What we talk about. The grief of leaving a tradition that raised us. The community we lost when we stopped attending. The way leaving has been received in our families. The mothers who pray for us. The grandmothers who do not understand. The cousins who send us scriptures and articles. The way we have decided to respond to all of that, and the way our responses have changed over time.

The intellectual work. The reading we have done — across philosophy of religion, religious studies, the history of doctrine, the comparative study of traditions, the science-and-religion conversation. The writers who have helped us name our experience — James Baldwin's complicated relationship to the Black church, Audre Lorde's spiritual practice that did not fit into a single category, Toni Morrison's spiritually charged fiction, contemporary writers like Anthea Butler and Eboni Marshall Turman writing from inside the academy on the Black religious tradition from a critical vantage point.

The emotional work. The therapy that has helped us process growing up inside a tradition whose specific theology no longer holds for us. The grief over the loss of a community that was our family of origin. The slow building of new community structures that hold us without requiring a faith commitment.

Raising children without a tradition we no longer carry whole. What we teach them about meaning, mortality, and ritual when we are not handing down what was handed to us. The decisions about whether to take them to church or mosque for cultural reasons. The decisions about whether to mark life events — naming, puberty, marriage, death — with secular or hybrid rituals we have built ourselves. The way our children ask us about God and the way we answer.

The seeking work. The members who are reading across traditions to figure out what they want their practice to be. The members who are visiting different communities to see how it feels. The members who are giving themselves permission to stay agnostic and to call that a settled position rather than a transitional one. The members who are returning to a modified version of the tradition they were raised in. The members who are taking up an ancestral practice they were not raised inside but want to learn. All paths are welcome here.

The cultural specifics for Black and African-diaspora women. The way religion has been woven into our communities historically and the way leaving a tradition has carried particular weight in those contexts. The way the Black-church tradition has been a civil-rights institution, a mutual-aid institution, a cultural preservation institution, all alongside its theological function — and the way leaving has been read as leaving more than just theology. The parallel weight in Muslim and ancestral communities. We name it. We hold the complication.

Death and meaning. The questions that show up at funerals, at diagnoses, at the deaths of parents. The way we sit with mortality without the answers our childhood tradition provided. The frameworks members have built — secular, contemplative, philosophical, naturalistic, ancestor-centered — that hold us through hard moments. The honesty about the days when those frameworks feel insufficient and what we do then.

Ethics and meaning without a single tradition. The ethical frameworks members have developed. The way we make moral decisions when we are no longer rule-following. The way we hold the moral teachings of our tradition that still feel right to us, without taking on the metaphysics that came with them.

Cadence: a weekly thread, conversational and unhurried. A monthly long-form thread on a single existential or ethical question. A quarterly virtual reading group with one book or set of essays. Smaller subgroups for those who want them — agnostic mothers, post-Christian women, post-Muslim women, women raised in ancestral traditions who are now seeking.

Rules. No conversion attempts in any direction. We do not try to bring members back to a tradition or to a position of non-belief. Honest conversation only. Confidentiality. Respect for the specific shape of each member's journey.

What we are: the room for the in-between. Big enough to hold the many shapes it takes. Quiet enough that nobody is being preached at. Steady enough to keep being here while you figure out what you are figuring out. We do not need you to land anywhere particular. We just want you to have somewhere to talk about it while you sit with it. That is the value of this circle.