When Your Religion Is Toast

What to Do When Faith Stops Working

Jul 13, 2026

If you like this essay, please tap the ❤️ icon and subscribe. More about me, here.

My toaster was broken. It still toasted bread, more or less. But one of the rectangular buttons that connected to the levers that pushed down the bread basket was loose and would fall off if you pressed it with too much gusto or too little attention.

Also, the word “Bagel” that used to be printed on the little black button you press when you want to toast a bagel (duh), had been worn off after thousands of pressings. Not a big deal, unless you were a guest and wanted to toast a bagel—then you might miss the opportunity for precise toasted-bagel calibration.

ALSO… the metal basket on the right that held the bread as it was lowered down into the machine would not retract all the way back up when the toast was done. This caused the toast to sometimes get stuck—quite often, actually—in which case, I would reach for a knife to stick down into the toaster to pry the English muffin (or whatever) out, and just as I’m about to sink that metal electricity conductor into a live circuit, I hear that woman in my head who was in the kitchen at work one day months ago (what was her name?) saying, “Don’t ever do that!” Obeying her, I then have to unplug the toaster and stick my whole hand inside, pinching the bread to pull it out, typically tearing the crumb to pieces by the time I remove the whole thing. I’d have to put my English muffin back together on my plate like a jigsaw before applying butter and jam. Puzzle-muffin days always feel off to a bad start.

Come to think of it, even just the normal toasting cycle on this old toaster would not produce the desired result. Larger, flat pieces of sourdough were always unevenly browned. Lighter breads, like pain au lait or brioche would not only tear (the pinching again), but they would burn, even when the dial was on the lowest setting. In fact, I think the “light/dark” dials completely ceased to register mathematically: 2 was as dark as 5 and 1 as light as 4.

And then there was the build up of burnt crumbs that appeared to be infinite. When I would turn the entire toaster upside down, as you do, to shake it over the kitchen sink, crumbs would fall out, dotting the silver basin like black dandruff. As long as I continued “running fingers through my hair,” crumbs kept coming; endless flurries of old toasted morsels, from the roots of a bottomless stainless scalp.

Still, I was content to keep this toaster. There were other broken things in more urgent need of replacement (our dishwasher comes to mind). The toaster, as integral to my life as it is, could wait to be replaced.

Then my mom came to visit. She apparently overheard me lamenting about the old toaster, cause a week after she left town, we received a notification of a delivery from Sur la Table. I thought maybe it was more seasonally-themed dish towels, which she is very fond of giving. Fourth of July was coming up and we would need American flag dish towels to complete our collection of bunny rabbit dish towels, pink & red heart dish towels, orange pumpkin dish towels, and decorated pine tree dish towels.

Nope. It was a toaster. Did I need a new toaster? Yes, now that it was here, I think I did. Here’s a picture of it:

My new toaster: the Cuisinart CPT-640P1 4-Slice Custom Select. I do not have a good picture of the old one, but it was a Cuisinart CPT-180P1 4-Slice Classic Stainless Steel Toaster.

This whole toaster episode seemed to take up more of my time and brain-space than it should. Maybe it’s a metaphor? I’ve learned that whenever something takes up an inordinate amount of time and brain-space, it’s not simply the actual thing, but probably also a symbol of something larger.

Maybe, I thought, the toaster is a metaphor for religion? I decided to put it out there and see what others would say, so I posted this on the interwebs:

If religion is a toaster and your toaster stops working like it used to, what should you do? Throw it away? But then you like toast, so, maybe get a new one? (Your soul is the bread, by the way.) Or you could just keep making toast in the old one, accepting the uneven doneness and occasional burnt sides. What about a completely different toaster—trade the old slots for one with a mini oven door? Or perhaps go totally unconventional and toast your bread on a baking sheet in a conventional oven. That would be different.
What would you do?

I think this resonated because many people responded. Here are some of the things people said they would do if their “toaster” stopped working [my annotations in brackets]:

“Put the bread on a rock in the sun.” [Zen Buddism, maybe?]

“I’d probably use a frying pan.” [Amish?]

“I’d grab my significant other and together we’d make a sandwich.” [some kind of sex cult?]

“I’m thinking of going pure air fryer for my next metaphysical endeavor.” [‘90s Emerging Church?]

“I’d want to make sure [my toaster] is as close to the archetype as possible. It needs to make my toast the way I like it… [if not] I’m going shopping.” [seeking Orthodoxy?]

“I’d be checking if my toaster was working differently or if my view of toast had changed.” [Evangelicalism?]

“I would take a good hard long look at that toaster with brutal honesty in terms of how well it really worked.” [deconstruction?]

“[I would] become very disturbed by the sudden realization that all along I’d been eating my soul.” [cannibalism?]

That last one may be where the metaphor breaks down.

Then came time for me to answer my own question. If the toaster is religion and bread is the soul—and toasting the bread is what religion does for (or to) the soul—then what is the state of my toast? Basically, I decided that my toast is… toast.

I’ve been questioning the religion of my youth for sometime, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been hanging around here for a while. The short answer I’ve come to is: Evangelical Christianity does not work for me. It’s an ongoing process for me to analyze why exactly this is, but here are some reasons off the top of my head:

The present and historical fruit of Christianity is inconsistent, at best (and horrific, at worst).
The idea of Jesus as personal savior via substitutionary blood sacrifice no longer makes sense to my brain.
I find common Christian church meetings to be lacking in spiritual depth and they often wind up feeling like a waste of time. Not always, but mostly.
My latest assessment of the Bible is that it is not simply a book of wisdom, but a collection of writings that depict “the process of wisdom” being sought out and honed by some very particular groups of people, over many generations.
Important parts of orthodox Christianity, including Heaven and Hell, have significant “fairy tale” aspects that appear to have been shaped, in large part, by human hopes and fears.

I could go on, but I don’t mean for this essay to become a full assessment of the state of my faith. Instead, I simply want to illustrate that crucial parts of my Toaster are no longer working and require either repair or total replacement.

For the record, I think that this process I’m experiencing is healthy. Why wouldn’t I put my beliefs—especially beliefs as important as God-related ones—to the test?

I am grateful that my career is no longer tied to ministry. This untethering from formal Christian structures has freed my heart and mind to openly question the theology I have taken for granted most of my life.

And don’t we owe it to ourselves to question our theology? How sad that there’s a general acceptance of theological stagnation—especially among Christians, but also within most religious systems—when it comes to metaphysical beliefs. In this respect, the words of that 1980s rock anthem by U2 ring deeply true: “… but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for...” What an honest, yet difficult, faith-space to occupy!

Actual toasters notwithstanding, my continuing search for the best method to “toast my bread” continues. And despite others’ spoken (and unspoken) critique of my journey, my “bread” remains at peace with this open-ended process. Ultimately, this peace rests in the one idea I hold quite firmly: if God exists, God must be love. This idea doesn’t just come from the Bible, but also from other religions I’ve studied, and especially from my experience of the best of humanity. So far, I don’t think a purely evolutionary explanation of the existence of LOVE is very convincing.

I encourage everyone to do their own theology (‘thinking about God’) to discover what really gets them toasted. One responder to my question on the interwebs noted, in rather creative fashion, that the toaster quest will look different for seekers with different personalities, who come from different cultures, and who have inherited different religious traditions. Continuing the metaphor, he describes the way different people go about approaching to the problem of the broken toaster…