Support | Community | Hope
For current and former religious professionals without supernatural beliefs.

Our Mission

The Clergy Project’s Mission is to provide support, community, and hope to current and former religious professionals who no longer hold supernatural beliefs.

Within Our Online Community ~

The Clergy Project centers on a private, safeguarded, and multifaceted Online Community of Forums. Our founders first conceived of this online safe space as a platform that would allow post-belief religious leaders around the world to gather in support of one another.

It is here within this Online Community of Forums where the TCP Mission finds its primarily fulfillment. It is here where our airtight security and anonymity tools allow our Project participants to truly let their guards down as they share and discuss their deepest of worries, frustrations, and perspectives. Interacting with their peers, it’s here where a sense of true community is cultivated and a network of practical support is developed. And in so doing a breath of real hope is discovered as participants encounter hundreds of other post-belief clergy on similar journeys as their own. Here our Project participants discover above all that they are not alone. 

Within the context of this Mission, our Project seeks to provide additional support in the most tangible of ways. One prominent example of such opportunities is the Transitional Assistance Grant (TAG)provided by the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.

Beyond Our Online Community ~

Our Mission is then extended to the wider TCP community by furthering this same spirit of support and hope to closeted post-faith religious professionals who yet remain outside The Project and therefore without access to our Online Community of Forums. This extension takes place through such avenues as the following:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Partnerships with Likeminded Organizations
• Our Presence at Secular Conventions
• Our Speaking & Interview Schedule
• ClergyProject.org’s Our Stories blog
• ClergyProject.org’s Secular Resource Center

In all these ways and more, The Clergy Project seeks to reach out to a whole world of post-faith clergypersons who desperately need it, thereby extending support, community, and hope to a rising demographic that needs it most. 

If this is you, we invite you to join The Clergy Project!

The Clergy Project was launched in March 2011 to create a safe and secure Online Community of Forums composed entirely of religious leaders who no longer hold to supernatural beliefs. Many of our project participants have deep privacy concerns, and for that reason, we place your security among our top tier of priorities. Identify yourself with a pseudonym and an avatar image if you prefer. And our private-access website is held secure with air-tight features to make sure your anonymity is in the best of hands. 

In our Online Community of Forums, participants come from a wide range of religious and cultural backgrounds, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, and more than thirty different segments of Christianity. Our participants reside in forty-nine states in the USA and more than fifty different countries around the globe. We come from varied perspectives of culture and lifestyle. Approximately one-fourth of Clergy Project participants are currently employed in their religious vocation with approximately three-fourths having transitioned out. 

In The Clergy Project’s Online Community, forum discussion includes everything from practical concerns like finding a new career path and discerning when and how to come out as a non-believer to one’s spouse to more philosophical conversations centered on ethics and humanism. Services are also available to participants regarding career development and the opportunity for subsidized counseling sessions offered through The Secular Therapist Project.

Through it all The Clergy Project exists to offer you support, community, and hope. Hope for a better day, for a next chapter far surpassing anything the previous could have offered. So welcome. Welcome to The Clergy Project. 

Just wanted to share a post from fellow Clergy Project participant Bart Erhman’s blog. I am very privileged to be a part of The Clergy Project. As the death of religion continues to accelerate, the need to support and encourage religious leaders who no longer hold supernatural beliefs will only increase.