Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?

How connecting with animals has enhanced my spirituality

Welcome to Being Animal. This newsletter explores the intricacies of human-animal relationships. Through personal stories, commentary on current events, and thought-provoking debates, I hope to challenge your assumptions and deepen your understanding of how animals are treated in our society. How we treat animals matters— for our own health, for our planet, and for our sense of morality and humanity.

I want to make the world a better place for animals. To do this, we have to change how we think about animals. This week, I write about connecting with nonhuman animals as a way to enhance our spiritual connection to the world around us. This is the first installment in a series on Christianity and animals.

My wife and my dog on a wintery beach walk.

Religion is a huge part of my life. My grandfather was a minister, and I have early memories of him standing at the pulpit with his booming voice and commanding presence filling the sanctuary of his church. My mom followed his footsteps, and became a minister, too. I grew up in her traditional, New England, protestant church. We went to church every week as a family, and I sang in the choir and volunteered for the community’s events. When I went to college, I even ended up studying comparative religion.

So for as long as I can remember, Christianity has been a core piece of my life, academically, socially, and spiritually.

Christianity means many things to many people. At its core, its teachings and beliefs focus on God and His son, Jesus. Jesus was born as a divine-yet-human child. He was executed before resurrecting and ascending to heaven. Jesus’ journey has inspired millennia of Christians, offering people an ideal example for how to go through the world. People I grew up with wore bracelets and tee shirts emblazoned with the core question guiding our lives: What would Jesus do?

The teachings of Christianity focus on the redemption and forgiveness of the human soul. They explain God’s love for his creation, including us, and offer guidance for living our lives through goodness and grace. So much of the emphasis is on our souls, our individual relationship with God, and our internal spirituality.

But just as much as religion has been a huge part of my life, so too have animals been important to me. My grandparents had a horse farm, and both of my parents grew up with horses and other animals. My grandmother was a veterinarian. I was always taught that animals deserve our respect and consideration, and even our love. As an adult, I have become an animal advocate and a proud vegan.

It can be hard to understand how those two things—human-centered religion and animal-centered advocacy—can harmonize. So many people see these truths as opposed: humans are special; animals are other.

In fact, many Christian traditions assert animals do not go to heaven, because they are not endowed with the uniquely-human life force: our souls. Only humans are ensouled; Jesus was a human, and he saved humanity, not all creatures; God made humankind, not creaturekind, in His own image. All of these lines of theology hold one core principle to be true: humans are special. Only we have access to God, to salvation, to eternal life.

The idea that humans are spiritually set apart can be seen throughout the Bible. In Genesis, God gave humanity dominion or stewardship over animals. God created Adam and Eve, the culmination of creation, and breathed life into humankind, created in His own image. The incarnation of Jesus in the body of a human further solidified the special place of humans: Jesus, by becoming human, became one of us. And when he resurrected, he opened the Kingdom of Heaven for all of us. Us humans, that is.

But I’ve never been convinced by this human-centric reading, by the exclusion of animal-kind from the existential and spiritual realm.

Instead, I see animals as part of creation, ensouled and unique and worthy of love.

The easiest way to see this potential is in our companion animals. When my family gets together around holidays, we usually have three or four dogs running around the house. Each dog undoubtedly has its own personality—mine, a loving bully who doesn’t know his own strength but wouldn’t mean to hurt a fly; my sister’s, an anxious but brilliant dog who is too smart for her own good; and my parents’, an adorable counter surfer who wants so badly to play with the others, but is often too shy. Their personalities shine as individuals. They aren’t just different iterations of the same species, any more than humans are; they are unique.

When I put my cat down a few weeks ago, I was overwhelmed at the sense of loss of this particular creature. Sammi was here, but in the next moment she was not. Her soul was gone from this world, the light extinguished from her eyes. In her death, I felt so acutely the absence of her. Not the absence of a cat, but the absence of Sammi. She was special.

Humans often have trouble extrapolating this sense of individuation beyond our pets, though. Few people think this way about fish, or sea turtles, or birds, or cows. It’s harder to imagine them as individuals with souls.

As I write this, I’m sitting near a window that overlooks an osprey nest. Two parent ospreys return here, year after year, to mate and breed. In the fall, they separate and fly an unfathomable distance to South America, before returning next Spring to find each other again. Now, they have three babies in the nest with them. They catch fish every day to feed to their young. Soon, all three babies will look less alien-like, and they’ll get ready to make their own journey, to build their own nest.

Watching these birds grow is always a highlight of the summer. To me, there’s something divine in this cycle of making and creating. It’s a reminder of the circle of life, of the absolute magic of procreation, and of the absolute beauty and stunning cruelty we experience on this planet. When I watch a fish wriggle in the osprey’s talons, I reckon with predation and suffering. When I watch a baby osprey grab a bite of food from its parent’s mouth, I marvel at the interspecies instincts of parenthood.

When the osprey looks right towards me, his yellow eyes seemingly piercing through my binoculars, I feel pinned down, seen, looked at. This is not a thing, this animal. This is an embodied soul, just like me.

Connecting with animals as ensouled individuals has helped me feel more spiritual. I feel connected to the earth, to the life force all around us, to the spirit that moves our bodies and animates our eyes. It’s all the same, but different. I’m a human, yes, but I’m also an animal.

Connecting with other animals helps me understand who I am.

What do you think? Do your relationships with animals help you feel more spiritual? I’d love to hear your stories and ideas.