When I began the slow unraveling of my faith, one of the hardest threads to pull was love. Not just romantic love, but compassion, empathy, self-sacrifice—the very things I had been taught were gifts from God. It was unsettling to imagine that something as profound as love might not have a divine source. But as I stepped back and examined it with clear eyes, I saw something different: love wasn’t created by God—religion simply claimed it.
Love is older than any religion. Evolutionary biology tells us that the capacity for attachment, affection, and care evolved to ensure survival. Mothers nurturing infants, communities protecting one another, bonded pairs cooperating—these behaviors made us more resilient. What we call “love” is deeply embedded in our biology. It’s not limited to humans, either. Elephants mourn their dead. Dogs show loyalty. Primates comfort each other in distress. Love, in many forms, is part of being alive and social.
Yet religion tells a different story: that love is a divine gift, and that without God, we wouldn’t even know what love is. But this is backwards. It’s like taking a mountain that’s always been there and building a temple on top of it, then claiming the mountain was built to hold the temple.
Religion has appropriated love—not out of malice, but out of narrative necessity. To keep people loyal, religions anchor morality in divine will. Love becomes not just a feeling but a commandment. You must love others because God says so, or because Christ first loved you. This framing strips love of its natural roots and makes it contingent on belief.
But love doesn’t require belief. I’ve felt love in deeply secular moments: the quiet joy of helping a friend move, the intensity of grief at a funeral, the small kindnesses exchanged with strangers. No one needed to invoke a god for those experiences to matter. In fact, some of the most loving people I know are agnostic or atheist—because love is human, and always has been.
What happens when we reclaim love from religion? We stop treating it like a moral obligation and start seeing it as an invitation. Not something handed down from above, but something we build from the ground up—through understanding, patience, and empathy. We begin to love not because we’re told to, but because we recognize ourselves in each other.
Religion didn’t invent love. It organized it, branded it, and too often used it as bait. But love existed long before anyone named it sacred. And in reclaiming love as a human emotion, we’re not diminishing it—we’re finally giving it back to everyone.
