James Abington is a successful businessman and a graduate of a major Midwestern university. His professional life has been built around a straightforward principle: claims should be supported by facts, assumptions should be tested, and conclusions should withstand scrutiny. Throughout his career, Abington built and managed enterprises in an environment where ideas are ultimately measured against results. Numbers have to add up. Strategies have to work. When evidence contradicts an assumption, the assumption—not the evidence—has to change.

Over time, that same analytical curiosity led him beyond business and into a subject that had fascinated him for years: spirituality and its origins. He became increasingly interested in why human beings, across virtually every civilization and period of history, have looked beyond the physical world for explanations of existence, morality, suffering, death, and meaning. Where did our concepts of gods, an afterlife, divine judgment, prayer, sacrifice, and salvation originate? Were they revelations of something beyond ourselves—or were they ideas that developed gradually as human beings attempted to understand a world they could not yet scientifically explain?

That curiosity led Abington to a broader examination of religion, particularly Christianity, and the extraordinary role religious belief has played in shaping civilization. Abington is not a theologian, minister, biblical scholar, or member of the clergy. He approaches these questions from a different direction: as a businessman, a student of human behavior, and an observer of how institutions develop, survive, and perpetuate themselves.

Christianity became a particular focus because of its profound influence on Western society. For nearly two thousand years it has helped shape our laws, customs, morality, politics, education, families, attitudes toward sexuality, concepts of right and wrong, and even our understanding of life and death. Abington began asking a question that ultimately became central to his work: Why should religious claims be evaluated differently from every other claim we encounter in life?

We demand evidence in medicine. We demand evidence in science. We expect evidence in a courtroom. Businesses make decisions based upon measurable results. Yet when the subject turns to religion, billions of people are asked to accept extraordinary claims primarily on the basis of faith, tradition, scripture, and teachings handed from one generation to another. That distinction fascinated him.

Why are children introduced to concepts such as God, heaven, hell, sin, salvation, and eternal punishment before they are old enough to independently evaluate those ideas? Why do religious beliefs vary so dramatically according to geography and family? Why have thousands of religions and gods appeared throughout human history, while followers of each tradition have frequently believed that theirs alone represented ultimate truth? And perhaps most importantly: What happens when the beliefs we inherit are subjected to the same standards of evidence and reason we use everywhere else?

These are the questions at the heart of The Great Disconnect: Where Truth Meets Faith, in which Abington examines many of Christianity’s fundamental claims through the lenses of history, science, logic, evidence, and contemporary morality. Abington does not ask readers to exchange one unquestioned belief system for another. His premise is much simpler: no idea should be immune from examination merely because it is ancient, sacred, comforting, or widely believed.

For Abington, questioning religion is not a rejection of the search for meaning. In many ways, it is an extension of it. His interest remains the same one that began the journey—the human search for spirituality, our desire to understand why we are here, and the remarkable stories mankind has created throughout history in its effort to answer questions that once seemed unanswerable.

James Abington lives in the Midwest.

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