Many Alienated Americans Don’t “Have God”
But they could — and our national poets show us how
If asked what she likes about living in the United States, my Guatemalan wife will answer, Cracker Barrel. If asked what she doesn’t like, she’ll say The fact that Americans don’t have God.
I know exactly what she means.
Rosa isn’t referring to simple non-participation in organized religion, or even to a preponderance of people saying they don’t believe in God. She’s identified something much more nuanced: a lack of appreciation for those elements of existence that are truly essential, and for the magic and mystery of life. She’s identified our alienation.
Once, shortly after Rosa and I had started dating, we were sitting in my room before a planned walk through the center of town. The pitter-patter of an incipient shower sounded from the roof above our heads, and I said what almost any American would have: “Oh no, it’s raining!” Rosa was horrified.
“Oh no?” she said, incredulous. “Oh no? What, is rain a bad thing? Rain! A bad thing? Just because it ruins our plans? Does rain not give us life? Is it not a blessing from God? Oh no? How could you have said something so stupid!”
It was the angriest she’d ever been with me.
Rosa is from an agricultural community in the Guatemalan highlands. Many of her relatives work as small-scale farmers, and the town’s market is stocked with locally grown fruits and vegetables. Malnutrition is also rampant. When the rains are scarce, crops fail. When crops fail, people starve.
It’s only because of our alienation from the primal factors allowing for human life that Americans routinely complain about the rain. We’ve lost sight of what sustains us. We’ve also forgotten what a miracle it is that there’s anything to sustain us at all.
We stumble through our lives, intermittently working and being entertained. We live. We laugh. We love. That’s all true. But we’re missing the awe and appreciation that people in Rosa’s community take for granted.
We have so, so much — but not God. Rosa’s right. Too often, we don’t have God.
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But we can have God, and it doesn’t require joining an organized religion. We can embrace the world’s divinity, even without affirming the existence of a specific deity from this or that tradition. All it requires is an acceptance of divinity and transcendence.
Luckily for us Americans, there’s a precedent for this spiritual stance in our culture. It’s in the very pillars of our literary tradition. It’s in the work of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Whitman is not a dogmatic writer, but he is a religious one. He exalts the mystery of the world and delights in its manifold provisions. “Clear and sweet is my soul,” he writes, “and clear and sweet all that is not my soul… I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God in the least.”
Dickinson’s poems also act as odes to divinity. Just consider the final stanza of Poem 632: “The Brain is just the weight of God— // For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— // And they will differ—if they do— // as Syllable from Sound—.” There, a human consciousness is presented as an instantiation of God that carries His entire weight, just as a syllable as an instantiation of sound. In her typical, deceptively simple style, Dickinson evokes our shared divinity.
In Whitman and Dickinson, we don’t find parsons or Biblical scholars — but we do find people brimming with transcendence. We find people who “have God.”
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What does it mean to “have God” or “experience transcendence” without participating in a formal religion? It amounts to recognizing that life, or consciousness, or being, is both good and unexplainable — which makes it worthy of marvel and appreciation.
We know life is good because, by and large, we prefer it to death. We know being is unexplainable because, despite centuries of employing the scientific method, we’re so utterly far from explaining it (and because, given what we know about the limited intellectual capacities of all the other creatures on earth with which we share an evolutionary provenance, we can assume our intellectual capacities are similarly limited in relation to the ultimate complexity of the universe).
Within this framework, it’s possible to formulate a sort of neo-transcendentalist creed: “Existence is good. Its origins are unknowable. For the unknowable forces behind this existence, I’m grateful. I marvel at them, and I consider them divine.”
I’ve intentionally employed simple, precise language in these proclamations because I don’t want them to stray from the foundations of what I absolutely believe to be true. But I hope the reader can extrapolate and appreciate the wonder, delight, awe, joy, and loving-kindness this formulation, unless infringed upon by questions of psychology or disposition, would likely produce in a person. What’s good and unexplainable is magic. To live in appreciation of the magical is to nourish that mysterious essence within you that many would call a soul.
What’s missing from my framework is faith. To “have God” in the sense I’ve described requires one to believe nothing beyond what they can clearly deduce. This eliminates the rewards some other traditions offer, like a perceived knowledge of what will come after death or an assurance that a benevolent God has a comprehensive plan. There might still be plenty of reason to take that Kierkegaardian leap and live in religious faith. But for those who won’t or can’t, my formulation — which is also Whitman’s and Dickinson’s formulation — offers an alternative way to appreciate the divine.
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Part of the reason I love Rosa’s phrase, “have God,” is that it leads with a verb. It suggests continuity and action.
Simply accepting the premise outlined above, that the world is good and unknowable and therefore worthy of marvel and appreciation, is not enough to “have God” continually throughout each and every day. To really “have God,” you have to live in such a way that enacts the “have God” premise.
There’s no definitive list of activities that would facilitate “having God” — but there are some that I’m quite sure would help. Exercising out in nature. Gardening. Reading poetry. Being kind to the people around you.
If you go the poetry route, there are countless poets who will help you on your journey. Whitman and Dickinson would be a hell of a place to start.
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A few quick announcements!
From now on, I’ll be posting on Substack every two weeks. I’d initially been aiming for a weekly cadence, but… Life. Baby. Work. You know… Besides, I found that, between my freelance ghostwriting, my journalism, my fiction, and this Substack, I was writing more than I was reading. That’s not good. It’s like speaking more than you listen, which is no way for a thoughtful person to move through the world.
I’m proud to announce that my story “Beyond the Esquiline Gate,” published in the September 2025 issue of After Dinner Conversation, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Check out the story if you haven’t yet!
When I was twenty-two years old and in a not-so-sober state, I wandered around an abandoned golf course and asked myself repeatedly, “What is art?” After ten years of reading, writing, and thinking, I’ve finally landed on a definition I’m (provisionally) happy with: Art is a representation that simplifies or stabilizes reality such that it can be better perceived or understood. I arrived at this definition after a few weeks with Sontag and Camus. Read more about what I think of them (and art) in my last Substack post.
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