When Damon Garcia was growing up in a Pentecostal church, there was a strong focus on figuring out your spiritual gifts and God’s plan for your life. With this came a lot of anxiety. “You would wonder: Am I following God’s path, or am I being disobedient?” he says. “Or even worse, am I following the devil’s path for my life, and being tricked?”
Over time, he started to feel like that way of pursuing purpose in life fell short of what God wants for each of us and for the world. “I started to see this larger collective calling and purpose that I get to be a part of, and that everyone is a part of, together. That took off so much of the pressure around needing to figure out my individual calling,” he says. Ultimately, through loosening his grip on certainty, he found more peace and purpose in navigating life as a young adult.
But his new book, You Don’t Need a Calling: An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto for a Life of Purpose (Broadleaf Books), isn’t just meant to encourage young people to have a bigger view of calling as they try to figure out what to do with their lives. “I see a lot of older people really discouraged and afraid that they missed their calling,” he says. He wants to encourage everyone to see that our call from God is bigger and more beautiful than the individualized approach behind that feeling, because life is so much bigger and more beautiful than what we accomplish on our own.
Through his studies and work in ministry, Garcia has found that a broader, more collective perspective on spiritual gifts and God’s plan also better aligns with foundational teachings of the Christian faith. And he suggests that perhaps God’s call for each of us has been rooted in community all along.
Where does the idea that we each have a specific calling from God come from?
Biblically, when we read about calling and purpose and God’s plan, it is always collective. Scripture talks about God’s plan for a community or a whole nation of people. Even what Paul talks about in First Corinthians is about the church, the community, having spiritual gifts.
As individualism grew over time, specifically in capitalist, Western societies, our religion also grew more individualistic, and all of that spiritual language became individualistic, too. It became about a person’s need to figure out the individual calling and spiritual gifts that God planned out only for them.
So do you think we actually have individualized spiritual gifts?
Growing up, there were ways people encouraged me when they saw things I was passionate about, and things that I cared about building skills in—like speaking, writing, and teaching. When I started to get into ministry, I interacted with people who were told they had the exact same spiritual gifts as me. But they didn’t have the same support system I had. Because I had a support system, I was able to volunteer, write things online, and make videos about what I believe and the messages I want to get out there for people.
The angle I grew up with believes that I had these opportunities because God wanted me, specifically, to cultivate these gifts. But I feel like that’s ridiculous now, especially thinking about my peers who had the same gifts as me and didn’t get the same opportunities, especially women and queer people, who have a much harder time getting any opportunities to do ministry and are demonized in a lot of church spaces when they try to lead. I don’t think that’s God.
Now, I see spiritual gifts more as: God gives us life as a gift and God gives us love and a desire to connect. And there are all kinds of ways we can connect with ourselves, with one another, with our community, and with God. Those connections will be built in different ways depending on what community you’re in. To think that only one way is from God is a small view of God and what God does in our lives.
When you look beyond capitalism’s idea of a calling or gift—which is just finding a skill you can monetize and then climbing the ladder of success until you die—you start to realize there are many ways God has given us to connect and love the world that aren’t monetizable at all.
When my peers in ministry said they received the same kind of calling and gifts as me, but did not have the same opportunities to work in those gifts as I did—that was because of capitalism. As people try to figure out their passions and what they like to spend their time and energy doing, they feel called toward certain activities. But they either have to sacrifice those passions in order to get a job to make money in order to survive, or they have to morph their passion into something profitable in order to earn a sustainable income. That is so much more limiting than what God calls us to and what our families and communities call us to.
God’s calling for us is bigger than just finding the right career or the right vocation. It looks more like being lifegiving wherever we can, being loving wherever we can, and bringing justice to a situation wherever we can. When it comes to the details, that will always look different for each of us and also vary at different points throughout our lives.
The type of calling I’m rejecting is one that says you must become some better version of yourself in order to be lovable, valuable, and worthy of community. You are already all these things. When you live from that perspective, you see all these small, simple callings all around us, instead of needing to narrow your idea of calling to what capitalism demands of us.
If we broaden our understanding of calling beyond capitalism’s demands, what sort of things might we consider?
I grew up in the ’90s, in the midst of the so-called culture wars, and there was this constant binary between Christian things and worldly or secular things. Christian music and secular music, Christian movies and secular movies, Christian activities and worldly activities, even Christian friends and worldly friends. Now, it’s funny to think the friends I had at school would be categorized as worldly friends, as if God didn’t intentionally include them in my life.
That binary made it hard to figure out: What is God luring me toward and what is not God? I was afraid of following the world instead of God. There’s a quote from Jesus in John’s Gospel about being not of the world. But I don’t think Jesus means we should isolate ourselves from the world; instead, Jesus wants us to recognize that we live differently when we follow him, but we don’t push away the world.
When we look at the ways people in the Bible were called by God for special activities, they were always lured back to the world. Moses got a call from God to help free the enslaved Israelites from Egypt. It wasn’t a special calling to be in a relationship with God; it was a calling for Moses to pay attention to what was happening in the world.
Jesus was constantly calling people to direct their attention to people in need. All the people that everyone passed by every day and ignored, Jesus saw them and stopped. He told his followers to see them as well and to understand that our faith isn’t pushing some high and holy calling that directs us away from the world, but a calling that gets us to pay attention to the world in a way that nobody else is.
From that perspective, I started to notice the times when I am paying attention to the world and noticing God’s small, simple callings to do something in the world: to love people and not see them as worldly or not worldly. To do something about injustice in the world, to care for others, to listen to others. That’s all part of what God is calling us to all the time in every single moment.
I am no longer afraid of this idea of following the world. I see it as all together with what God is calling us toward all the time. The way we figure out God’s calling often looks like paying attention to the world.
Why are people drawn to an individualistic idea of calling, despite its shortcomings?
A lot of us wrestle with loneliness and insecurity and fear of not being good enough. Then, when we practice certain gifts or display certain skills, we feel a validation from people that makes us feel not so lonely and not so insecure. Typically, it doesn’t last. We find ourselves needing to accomplish something else in order to keep getting that temporary feeling back.
In the church, there’s a version of this encouragement for success that looks more like becoming a really devoted, faithful person. And then from there, building a family that you help become really devoted to the faith or becom ing a minister and being highly revered and respected.
But success isn’t a substitute for healing. We may say we want success, or the attention and love that comes with suc cess, when what we really want is an emotional transformation. What we really want is for those feelings of insecurity and fear to be healed. But healing is a completely separate project than your work, your career, and your success. You can have healing now.
What else could our ideas about work and purpose look like?
Capitalism has only been around for about 500 years. It won’t be here forever, just like feudalism (the economic system that preceded capitalism) wasn’t here forever. In a capitalist system, the resources that God put on this Earth for all of us to share, as well as everything we use to make and distribute products made from those resources, are privatized and owned by a small group of capitalists whom the rest of us have to then work for in order to buy back those resources.
Another system would be social ownership instead of private ownership, where communities own and control the resources and the making and distribu tion of the resources, and workers own and control the places where they work. From that understanding is where we get the word socialism.
That’s why a lot of anticapitalists advocate for socialism. Before Karl Marx, there were Christians advocating for socialism and for the abolition of capitalism. At that point, it was more of a moral argument that God gave us this world to share, and God is against exploitation of other humans, so God wants us to build a world where we can practice the kind of love that God calls us to.
Over time, you get a lot of socialists having a more scientific, materialist argument for why capitalism will inevitably lead to its own destruction and theorizing about the kinds of systems we could build afterward.
I think what we can all agree on is that the world changes and continues to change. I believe God is the one who empowers us to change things in a way that further embodies the kingdom of God on Earth. Unfortunately, a lot of churches frame God as the one who’s standing in the way of change and who wants to preserve everything and bring things back to the way they used to be. But there’s been a stream of Christians since the beginning who have been empowered by God to stick up for the marginalized and fight for a more just and loving world. That’s the God I encounter in life.
If you don’t need a calling, what do you need for a life of purpose?
A common misunderstanding in our increasingly individualistic society is that we must earn community by accomplishing things. If I get really good at something or become successful, high status, or wealthy, then people will gather around me and love me.
A TikTok trend we see with some teenage boys is this thing called looksmaxxing, which is about prioritizing your attractiveness level over everything else. But the logic of that is trying to skip over building community. It’s trying to skip over learning how to socialize and listen to others and be a good friend. The same goes for a lot of the messages we see about getting rich and building your own business, or becoming famous and getting a lot of followers. All of that is just trying to skip over the process of learning how to be in community.
I want people to see that we don’t need to earn community; we don’t need to become some better version of ourselves to be deserving of community. We just need to do what we can to find community around us, starting with the people we love and that love us and building from there.
As communities grow, they form connections with completely different communities. That’s how you build networks. And networks will build with other networks, which is how you build a movement to actually change things. You don’t need a calling—you need community.
In the book, you talk about the parable of the talents and the parable of the workers. What are we typically taught about these stories, and what do you suggest we might consider instead?
The parable of the talents was taught to me as being about finding the gifts that God has given you and then using those gifts, or else you risk being punished by God. In the parable, servants are given talents (money) by their master and have to double their master’s investments. One of the servants decides to bury their talents instead, and then the master condemns him. Many people interpret that parable with the master as a symbol for God. What’s interesting is that people who find themselves in that kind of situation, where they see property owners exploiting people in order to get richer, have a harder time seeing that master as God.
In Solentiname, Nicaragua, liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal led a Bible study where a group of peasants read this parable. They said, “That’s a lousy parable. The master is clearly the bad guy. The guy who buried his talent—who was trying to stand up against his master and not use the master’s talent to further exploit people and got punished for it—is more like the good guy.”
Many people don’t realize the original historical context of that scripture passage. William Hertzog, in his book Parables as Subversive Speech (Westminster John Knox Press), tells us that during that time, in order to double the master’s investments, the servants would have had to take advantage of laborers and farmworkers, getting them to work for little to no pay in order to take what they cultivated and sell it for more outside of their region and then bringing back their profits to the master.
That story, for its original listeners, would’ve sounded different than how we hear it today, completely outside of that economic context. The original audience would’ve understood that kind of master is responsible for a lot of the exploitation they witnessed, especially like in the parable of the workers, where people are waiting to be hired by someone. The people used to work on their own land, relying on the crops to survive, but they were kicked off the land by Roman soldiers, and the land was given to landowners who paid low wages for labor and therefore got richer. That’s what we see in that parable: People are working for cheaper and cheaper labor. And a lot of them still don’t even get hired; that’s why they’re standing around all day.
In that parable, they also resist the master in the end and complain, “Why would you disrespect us like this, and pay everyone in front of us, then pay us the same even though we worked for so much longer?” And they get punished for it, too. Jesus is also someone who stood up to the authorities of his day, challenged the system, and was punished for it.
Parables are meant to be interpreted in all kinds of ways, in different contexts, and in different parts of our lives. We can see ourselves as different people in a parable and get all kinds of meaning from it. That’s the beauty of parables. And one of the ways to read these parables is identifying with the people who challenged their authorities and saw that the world can be more just and loving than it is. And then they get punished for it, just like Jesus was punished for it.
I think we could interpret those parables and find the meaning that we see in Jesus’ life by challenging the system we’re in, knowing that we’ll be punished for it and knowing that we probably won’t see the more just world that we’re fighting for in our lifetimes. But we can contribute to it, just like Jesus contributed to it and just like Jesus’ followers contributed to it. They didn’t get to see all the fruit of their labor, either. I believe that is all part of our collective purpose.
You talk about Ecclesiastes as a subversive text. Why is that?
When I was a teenager reading my New International Version student Bible, I found Ecclesiastes. It begins by saying, “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.” That seemed counter to everything they were teaching me at church.
When I asked my youth pastor, “What’s up with this book?” he said, “Keep reading,” which is probably the best Bible reading advice I’ve gotten. You find out a lot more when you keep reading beyond what the preacher says on Sunday or beyond one shocking verse.
I ended up finding more quotes of, “This is meaningless, and then this is meaningless, and this is also meaningless.” But the other idea I kept finding was, “All we can do is eat, drink, and enjoy our work.”
At the time I didn’t understand it. But as I studied the Bible more, I learned that the word that gets translated into English as “meaningless” is the Hebrew word hebel, which means something more like “vapor,” “mist,” or “smoke.” It’s impermanence. It’s here one second and gone the next. The teacher in Ecclesiastes isn’t writing a nihilistic book; he’s writing an honest book and helping people see the impermanence of everything and realize all we can do is enjoy. Everything is here one second and gone the next, and so are we. We can just enjoy this. And that’s grace.
The more I believe in the grace of God, the less I believe in calling, specifically the super-individualistic idea of calling. And I realize all of life is grace, everything is grace, and there’s nothing we can do to earn that gift and nothing we can do to pay back that gift.
I don’t believe that God has a script that we’re destined to follow, and if we go off script, then God is disappointed in us. I think God is experiencing all of this with us in real time and giving us all kinds of opportunities every day to live with purpose and respond to the grace that God has given us, instead of feeling like we need to earn that grace.
This article also appears in the July 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 7, pages 24-28). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash
