Poolside Christianity Is Losing Ground. Psychotherapy Is Taking the Chair!
People are not leaving because they stopped wanting God. Many are leaving a religion that stopped teaching correct principles — and the research on the “nones” already said so.
By Galen E. Cole, PhD, MPH, LPC
A reel from @innertune.affirmations, posted around October 2, 2026, says the quiet part out loud:
Gravity doesn’t care how much faith you have. And neither do the laws behind your results. God isn’t randomly choosing winners and losers. Whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap. Stewardship produces increase. Generosity produces multiplication. Diligence produces promotion. Prayer is powerful, but it was never designed to replace the principles God already established.
That is not a new idea. It is an old one that a large part of American church life stopped teaching in a form people could actually use.
I call the substitute "Poolside Christianity." You are near the water. You have a chair, a towel, a testimony, and a verse. You can talk about the pool for an hour. You are not in it. And then you are surprised that evidence-based psychology — which is unromantic about feelings and ruthless about practice — is doing more for people’s minds than the religion that promised to renew them.
People are not walking away because they are bad. Many of them are walking away because the religion in front of them stopped teaching correct principles.
The lounge chair
Poolside Christianity has a recognizable shape.
You make a decision. You say a prayer. You are told you are saved by grace, and that the saving event is the profession, not the life that follows. After that, change is optional fruit. If the fruit does not show up, the explanation is usually spiritual rather than practical: you need more faith, more worship, more surrender, a stronger altar call. Rarely does anyone hand you a method and say, do this every day until the pattern moves.
That version of faith feels kind. It is also unfalsifiable. If your marriage gets kinder, grace did it. If your marriage stays cruel, you are still saved and the cruelty is a separate issue. If anxiety runs your week, pray harder. If prayer does not change the week, do not question the model. Question your sincerity.
Psychology does not get to talk that way. A method either changes what a person does under pressure, or it does not. Cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation, exposure, rehearsal, and skills practice are boring on purpose. They assume that what you repeat becomes what you are. They assume that insight without execution is a hobby. They assume that a feeling is not a fact, and that a profession is not a practice.
A person who has sat in both rooms can feel the difference in a month. One room asks what you believe. The other asks what you did on Tuesday when the old story showed up. The second room is winning, not because it is holier, and not because God lost. It is winning because it teaches operable principles and then makes you practice them.
This is not a moral failure
I have sat with enough conscientious people to retire the lazy explanation.
The man who stops going is often the man who did go. He served. He gave. He meant the songs. What he could not find was a clean account of cause and effect. He was told that God is not a vending machine, which is true, and then told in the next breath that the right belief would still rearrange his nervous system, his marriage, and his habits. When that did not happen, he was left with two bad options: blame himself, or blame God.
A third option is available. The system he was handed was not teaching the principles that actually govern a mind.
You cannot think in contempt and feel at peace. You cannot rehearse injury all week and expect Sunday to undo it. You cannot call yourself forgiven and keep the same scoreboard with your wife. You cannot outsource stewardship to a prayer and then call the empty account a mystery. Gravity does not grade on sincerity. Neither does a household. Neither does a nervous system.
That is not atheism. That is the sermon on the consequences.
People lose faith in a religion that will not say this plainly. They do not, by that fact, lose the desire for God. Many of them are looking for a God who tells the truth about how a life is built.
The research already named them
Survey researchers have been calling this group the “nones” since at least the 1960s. The name is not a theology. It is what people say when a form asks for a religion and they answer none.
The rise is not small. In Pew’s tracking, the religiously unaffiliated share of U.S. adults went from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014 to 29 percent in the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, while the Christian share fell from 78 percent to 62 percent. About 28 percent in Pew’s January 2024 report on the nones. Growth has slowed since about 2020. It has not reversed.
Pew’s own belief questions say the same thing in plainer numbers. In the 2024 report, 70 percent of nones said they believe in God or another higher power. Thirteen percent said they believe in God as described in the Bible. Fifty-six percent said they do not believe that description and do believe in some other higher power. About three in ten reject any higher power. Only 19 percent were strict nonbelievers across the board — no God, no soul, no heaven, nothing beyond the natural world. Most were raised in a religion, usually Christianity, and then let go of the institution.
That is the finding that poolside preaching keeps missing. The largest share of the nones is not “atheist.” It is “nothing in particular.” They did not fail a moral test. They declined a label that no longer matched a life. A religion that cannot teach a usable principle will keep producing people who still want God and no longer want the chair by the pool.
Paul was given the microphone
Here is the part poolside Christianity does not like examined.
The sentence many evangelical pulpits treat as the whole gospel is not a sentence from Jesus. It is Paul’s: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Romans 3 and 4, Galatians 2 and 5, and the “not by works” lines in Titus are the same stream. They matter. They are in the New Testament. They are not the voice that walked the Galilean road and said, in public, what the kingdom requires.
Jesus did teach mercy. He did forgive. He did say, more than once, “your faith has saved you.” The tax collector who could only say “God, be merciful” went home justified. The thief on the cross was promised paradise without a résumé. Anyone who says Jesus was a moralist with no mercy has not read Luke.
What Jesus did not teach is the formula that took over the evangelical tent: that a person is saved by grace apart from doing the principles, and that the doing is an optional thank-you note.
Read him.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). The next verses are worse for poolside religion. People prophesy, cast out demons, and do mighty works in his name, and he says he never knew them. The dividing line is not volume. It is whether the life was built on what he said.
The close of that same sermon is the house on rock and the house on sand. Both men heard. One did. The storm did not care which man had the better worship set.
“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46).
“Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down” (Matthew 7:19). Fruit is not a mood. Fruit is what the life produces when no one is grading it.
In Matthew 25 the separation is not between those who said the right creed and those who did not. It is between those who fed, visited, clothed, and those who didn’t. The astonished question on both sides is the same: when did we see you? They were judged by the pattern, not the announcement.
James, who is inconvenient in this argument and therefore rarely the main text, says the same thing without Paul’s softening clause: faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.
The evangelical settlement was to let Paul interpret Jesus until Jesus could no longer correct Paul. Grace became the chair.
Obedience became the optional swim. Once-saved-always-saved became the towel that never gets wet. And then the church wondered why a generation that can Google a randomized trial stopped trusting a pulpit that could not explain a changed Tuesday.
Correct principles are not legalism
To be clear, “legalism” is a made-up name. It was built to soothe the conscience of a person who wants to play instead of work. Say it, and the practice starts to look like the problem. A principle starts to look like pride. The chair gets a cleaner name than the water.
At the same time, the fear underneath this debate is real. People worry that if you talk about doing, you have smuggled in earning.
That fear made a real pastoral point and then overran it. Jesus was hard on performative religion. He was harder on the people who tithed mint and dill and neglected justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He was not hard on the idea that a principle, practiced, produces a result. Display is not the same as doing. A person can work for an audience and still refuse the principle. The word “legalism” is useful when it names the display. It stops being useful when it is used to retire the doing.
The sermon on the mount is a principles document. Anger nursed becomes murder in the heart. Lust rehearsed becomes adultery in the heart. Oaths are unnecessary if your yes is already yes. Enemies are loved on purpose, or the love is no different from the tax collectors’. Treasure follows attention. Anxiety is handled by a change of focus and a decision about what the day is for. The wise life is the practiced life. None of that is a show. None of it is optional for the person who calls him Lord.
None of that is a ladder you climb to make God like you. It is a description of how a human being is put together. Contempt costs you the relationship whether or not you are elect. Rehearsed resentment costs you your sleep whether or not you were sincere at the altar. Generosity loosens a fist. Diligence compounds. Stewardship is how increase happens in a world with rules. Prayer that replaces the principle is not faith. It is a request that the rule be suspended for you.
Paul himself, when he was not writing the slogan, knew this. “Whatever one sows, that will he also reap” is Galatians 6:7 — Paul’s sentence, aimed at people who had already heard his grace sermon. The Innertune reel is quoting Paul to make Jesus’ point. The tragedy is that a lot of preaching quotes Paul to avoid Jesus’ point, and then calls the avoidance grace.
Grace, in the mouth of Jesus, looks like mercy that tells you to pick up your mat and walk. It looks like forgiveness that says go and sin no more. It looks like a father who runs toward a son who is already on the road home, and then expects the son to live in the house. Mercy opens the door. Principle is how you live once you are inside. Poolside Christianity keeps people on the deck and calls the deck salvation.
Why psychology is taking the ground
Evidence-based psychology did not steal the church’s people by being cooler. It took the ground the church left empty: a testable account of change.
A good clinician will tell you things a poolside sermon will not.
Trauma explains a pattern. It does not excuse the next choice. Most people already know what the next right action is. They are avoiding the repetition, not confused about the map. Nothing moves until execution moves. A lot of spiritual language is the aesthetic of growth without the repetition of change. Closure is less useful than a new practice. “Stuck” is often a routine that still pays. What you do not confront, you repeat. What you focus on, you feel. You cannot practice the old story all week and expect a new feeling on Sunday.
That list is not anti-gospel. It is what Jesus was already saying when he talked about trees, houses, and the difference between hearing and doing. Psychology simply refused to let the principle stay metaphorical.
Measure attention, and mood follows. Rehearse a different response before the trigger, and the trigger loses some of its authority. Tell the truth sooner, and the conflict gets smaller. Do the small stewardship today, and the promotion people pray for stops being a lightning strike and starts being a trail. None of this dethrones God. It refuses the idea that God set up a world of principles and then rewards people for ignoring them if they sing loudly enough.
The church that will not teach this will keep losing serious people to the rooms that will. Not because those rooms replaced God. Because those rooms respected cause and effect.
A faith that can stand next to evidence
I am not arguing for a godless self-improvement project with a cross on the cover. I am arguing for the recovery of Jesus’ actual order.
Here is my confession, and it will not take long. I am a psychotherapist. Prescribed: Jesus follower. Official: None! None of the substitute. None of the chair by the pool. None of the sermon that tells a person the principle is optional if the feeling was sincere. My credentials say PhD, MPH, LPC. The prescription is still his words.
The slogan I taught my kids is the one I still use on myself. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The teachings of Jesus — Yeshua, in Hebrew — are the main thing. Not the trailer before the teaching. Not the denomination’s favorite footnote after it. The main thing!
Mercy first, so shame does not get to run the treatment plan. Then principles, practiced, because mercy was never a substitute for them. Faith as trust that the principles are real, not faith as a request that they be waived. Prayer as alignment and courage, not prayer as a workaround. Community as the place you rehearse the new response, not the place you perform the old identity.
If the evangelical tent wants its people back, it will have to do something harder than another series on Ephesians 2. It will have to put the red letters back in charge of the Christian life. It will have to say, in public, that calling him Lord while ignoring what he said is the failure mode he warned about. It will have to teach anger, lust, money, enemies, anxiety, speech, and stewardship as trainable principles, and then stay with people while they train.
The ones leaving are not the careless. A lot of them are the ones who noticed that gravity still works. They would like a faith that notices too.
Have a great Sabbath. Or, since I am fairly certain he spoke Hebrew, I’ll let him close: Shabbat shalom.
References
Innertune Affirmations. (2026, October 2). Gravity doesn’t care how much faith you have [Instagram reel]. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dd_sp_QRa12/
Pew Research Center. (2024, January 24). Religious “nones” in America: Who they are and what they believe. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
Pew Research Center. (2025, February 26). Religious Landscape Study: Religious identity (2023–24). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-religious-identity/
Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2002). Why more Americans have no religious preference: Politics and generations. American Sociological Review, 67(2), 165–190.
Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2014). Explaining why more Americans have no religious preference: Political backlash and generational succession, 1987–2012. Sociological Science, 1, 423–447. https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a24
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless noted in the text: Matthew 7:19–21; Matthew 25; Luke 6:46; Luke 18:9–14; Galatians 6:7; Ephesians 2:8–9; James 2.
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© 2026 Galen E. Cole, PhD, MPH, LPC. All rights reserved. This essay is an original work first published at galencole.com. No part of this work may be reproduced, redistributed, scraped, or used to train commercial models without prior written permission, except for brief quotation with clear attribution to the author and a link to the original post.
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