Were We Betrayed? On Faith, Religion, and What It Costs to Think for Yourself
This episode was different. I flew in from Virginia to Washington. First time we’d ever been in the same room after almost a year of recording across two coasts. We sat in her living room, lavender lotion and Chapstick on the table, and we just went there.
We went there for religion. On faith. On what it means to be a millennial who grew up inside systems that told us how to think, what to believe, who to be — and what happens when you decide to start discerning for yourself.
This one is long. This one is messy. This one is real. Buckle in.
Refresher: What is The Capacity Conversations series
Do we actually have the capacity to live the lives we want?
Through challenging dialogue, ancestral storytelling, nervous system awareness, social history, and honest reflections on identity, work, and humanity, this series dives into the forces shaping our exhaustion — and the possibilities for reclaiming self-trust, purpose, and aliveness.
Each episode blends:
* Millennial survival tools
* Global + ancestral context (colonization, capitalism, migration, lineage)
* Nervous system + somatic wisdom
* Spiritual and cultural literacy
* Real strategies for rebuilding capacity
* AI-era awareness + digital overwhelm navigation
* Modern identity, burnout, boundaries, and self-trust
If you’ve ever felt tired for reasons you can’t name, overwhelmed by the world, disconnected from your purpose, or trapped in roles that no longer fit — this show is for you.
In This Episode 9: The Question We Couldn’t Not Ask
Have we been betrayed by religion?
Not religion as a concept. Not spirituality. Not the human impulse to reach for something beyond yourself. But religion as a system — as an institution with rules, hierarchies, gatekeepers, and the power to decide who is worthy, who is silent, and who gets to speak.
We’re talking primarily about what we know — Abrahamic traditions, specifically Christianity in America. Because that’s where we grew up. That’s what shaped us. That’s what we’re still, in some ways, metabolizing.
And the honest answer?
For some of us — yes. There was a betrayal. Not always dramatic. Not always visible. Sometimes just a quiet, accumulating cost.
The Slap in the Uterus
Because that’s what it was for her.
Growing up in a conservative Christian environment where sovereignty — real, embodied, self-directed sovereignty — was something that had to be outsourced. To the man in the church. To the doctrine. To the institution.
And she’s not talking about the extreme cases, though those exist, and she named them. She’s talking about the subliminal messaging. The slow, ambient teaching is what your job is to submit. That your body is not your own. That the man holds the power and the woman holds the silence.
“Women keep silence in the church” — taken to its extreme in the most conservative corners of American Christianity. And even in its mild forms: a slow erosion of the belief that you are enough, that you know enough, that you can trust yourself enough to lead your own life.
The deepest anxiety for some of us is still tied to the fear of hellfire. Am I good enough? The answer, according to the system, is no. You are not, by nature, enough. You need saving.
And I don’t want to be a fish. I don’t want to be sold fish. I want to be a fisher person.
That’s the whole thing, honestly.
Religion as a System — What It Does and What It Costs
Here’s the thing about systems: they do something useful. They create a container. They provide structure when you don’t have one internally. They say this is the substrate of reality, this is how you orient, this is what the world is.
And that’s genuinely powerful. When you’re a child. When you’re in survival mode. When you don’t have the internal resources yet to build your own compass.
But here’s what happens to some of us: the system becomes a substitute for discernment.
You go. You confess. You say your Hail Marys. You’ve got your hell insurance. And then you go back to your life unchanged because the system processed your sin for you. You didn’t have to sit with it. You didn’t have to look at how it lives in your body, how it shows up in your relationships, what the fruit of your actions actually is.
You outsourced it.
And outsourcing — whether it’s to religion, to a job title, to a relationship, to money — feels like safety until it doesn’t. Until one day you wake up and realize that no one has been driving. That you’ve been sedated the whole time.
I don’t want to be sedated.
I want to be conscious at all times. Even when it’s hard. Even when nobody’s watching. Even before bed, turning over the day, asking: Did I say that the way I meant it? Did I cause harm I didn’t intend? Was I true to myself in that moment?
That’s not a punishment. That’s a practice. That’s the work.
The Slave Bible — When the System Shows Its Hand
This came up in our conversation, and it stopped both of us.
The Slave Bible. An edited version of scripture used during the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath, in which the chapters on freedom and sovereignty were literally removed. Because if the enslaved people had access to the God who liberates, the system would have had a problem.
That is religion as a tool of control made visible.
And what it reveals is something worth sitting with: the institutions that claim to point us toward the highest good have historically had a vested interest in deciding which humans deserve that pointing.
The cherry-picking of what knowledge the plebs are allowed to have. The withholding of the higher version of truth. The cathedral, with its eyes pointed upward — drawing your attention to the divine — while the institution below controls the terms.
This is not to say that all religious practice is this.
It is to say that the impulse toward control and hierarchy will colonize anything — including the sacred — if we let it go unexamined.
Lowercase f: Faith as a Personal Practice
Here’s where Sarah and I both land, and it’s not in abandonment.
We both believe in something. We’re both people of faith in the lowercase-f sense — the inner compass, the mystery, the relationship with what we call the divine without needing to give it a specific name or gender or doctrine.
Sarah calls it the highest good. I call it the Great Mystery, the Great Grandmother, the universe, the divine — whatever language doesn’t close the door.
And what both of us are doing is placing the responsibility of our own discernment back on ourselves.
We’re not outsourcing it. Not to the church, not to a man, not to a doctrine. We’re in a relationship with the mystery directly — like calling a friend, as I said in this episode. Not through an institution. Just: Can you help me here? Can you witness me?
That’s the same thing I needed from Sarah. And the same thing the mystery offers when you stop outsourcing it.
Millennials as the Bridge Generation — And What We’re Holding
We kept coming back to this: who are we as a generation? What is our actual situation?
We grew up without the internet, and then the internet grew up with us. Flash drives, CDs, hit clips, iPods, laptops, smartphones — we didn’t get handed a world that was already formed. We watched it form. We had to adapt to every pivot. And that gave us something the generations before us didn’t necessarily have: an ability to hold uncertainty as normal.
We’re the bridge between analog and digital. Between the post-WWII baseline of at least we’re not in a global war and the new baseline of AI, gun violence, climate, economic precarity, and the ongoing reverberations of every historical trauma we were never taught was happening.
We’re in our 30s and 40s, and it still feels like we’re supposed to have figured it out. But we’re the first generation to be doing this — whatever this is — with this level of emotional awareness. With therapy language. With the ability to say I need space right now in a way that small children in Seattle apparently knew, but many of us didn’t learn until we were adults.
And Sarah said something that I keep returning to: Because we’ve never known, we can create it and define it for ourselves.
That’s the lens. Not the trauma of uncertainty but the possibility of it. We don’t have a blueprint. Which means we can build one.
What Thriving Looks Like When You Stop Waiting for Permission
The culture wars, at their core, are an argument about thriving. Everyone thinks they know how to thrive better. Everyone is fighting for the right to define it.
But here’s what I think most people are actually fighting against: the feeling that someone else is defining it for them and getting it wrong.
Religion as a pseudo-parent says: if you just do X, you’re fine now and you’re fine for eternity. The formula. The guarantee. The insurance policy.
But eternity is incomprehensible. And the formula keeps failing us. Not because faith itself fails — but because the system that packaged it was built by humans with human agendas, human hierarchies, human blind spots.
So what do you do when the system fails you?
You don’t throw away the impulse toward the sacred. You reclaim it. You do the work of discerning it for yourself — without the guarantee, without the insurance, without someone else telling you whether you’re good enough.
You ask the question at the end of the day: Was this good?
And you answer it honestly.
That’s the whole practice. That’s the whole thing.
What This Has to Do With Work and Money
I know. You might be wondering what any of this has to do with income sovereignty and cacao blends.
Everything.
The same pattern that lives in religious outsourcing lives in professional outsourcing. We hand our sense of worth to a job title.
We hand our financial security to a company that can eliminate our position in a quarterly restructuring.
We hand our daily reality to a system that was not built to steward us — it was built to extract from us.
And then we’re surprised when we feel betrayed.
The work I do — the income sovereignty work, the career transition work, the building-something-of-your-own work — is the same as reclaiming your discernment from a system that was never designed to honor it. It’s saying: I am not a fish. I am not going to be sold fish. I am learning to fish.
The cacao in the tin on my table is the same. It’s something I make with my hands from a plant my ancestors knew, in a kitchen in Fairfax County, sold at a farmers market to people who want to know where their food comes from. It’s not outsourced. It’s not extracted. It’s mine — all the way down.
That’s what sovereignty tastes like. Whether it’s spiritual, financial, or professional, or embodied.
The same.
A Few Things We Didn’t Resolve (And That’s the Point)
This episode didn’t tie anything up neatly. Neither does this essay.
We didn’t settle the question of whether faith requires a community or can be entirely personal. We didn’t resolve the tension between the genuine good religion has done — the cathedrals pointing eyes upward, the radical inclusion of Jesus walking with women when no rabbi did, the genuine comfort of a story that says you are not alone — and the genuine harm.
We didn’t fully reckon with what it means to be the children of the ones who outsourced our spiritual formation, not out of malice but out of exhaustion, out of survival, out of the limits of what they had access to.
What we did do is name it. Sit with it. Let it be complicated.
And I think that’s close to what any honest religious practice might hope for, too: not certainty, but the willingness to keep asking.
Listen to the full Capacity Conversations episode wherever you get your podcasts, or in the audio section of this Substack.
If this finds you at the right moment, forward it to one person; it might find someone else.
And if you’re in Northern Virginia, my first market day is May 23rd at the Eat Local Farmers Market in Reston. Come find me. There will be cacao.
About the Hosts:
Raquel Sands is a clarity and work strategist supporting deep feelers and purpose-driven individuals to create and sustain their peace, purpose, and prosperity on their own terms. Find her work at [your website].
Sarah Liljegren [https://open.substack.com/users/24801367-sarah-liljegren?utm_source=mentions] is a real estate professional whose passion and purpose is to rewild space and bring it into more connection with nature and our natural cycles. She works at the intersection of housing, community, and ecological restoration.
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