What Replaces Religion?

Good riddance to patriarchal authority. But where can we cultivate what's lost when we lose our faith?

Photo by Christian Garcia on Unsplash

Americans are losing our religion. Jessica Grose is writing about this incredible shift away from religiosity in the New York Times, and the numbers are stunning: Forty percent of Americans say religion is not important to them; more than half of Americans say they are either not religious or not very religious; between 6,000 and 10,000 churches closing every year; and when asked “how often do you attend religious services,” the most common answer was “never.”

I am one of those people whose religious service attendance is “never,” and for whom religious faith is not important. I was raised as a twice-a-year Christian in a liberal household; now, as an adult, I see religion as a comforting fantasy at best, and more often as a force of social control, patriarchal oppression, and profound manipulation. Do I think all religious people are gullible or misogynist? Of course not. Do I firmly support the right of every person to practice their religion as they see fit, provided it doesn’t negatively impact other people? Yes. Can I point to hundreds and hundreds of instances of religion having a positive effect? Indeed I can. But do I think we would be vastly better off if religion were a more private endeavor, and if American society were more aggressively secular? Absolutely.

But while I want religion pushed out of politics and frankly largely out of the public sphere, I worry that these radical decreases in attendance at religious worship are in some ways the worst of all worlds. Yes, Americans are also becoming less religious, which I think is probably good. But in a conversation with the brilliant author Monica Potts the other day — you’ll get that Q&A in your inbox soon — she pointed out that church attendance is not, and has never been, a perfect metric for measuring religiosity. When religiosity — and in most of the US, that means Christianity — is steeped into the culture of a place, and particularly when conservative Evangelical versions of Christianity are not just belief systems but a whole-life systems premised on a personal connection to God, a lot of people may not go to church, but they still hold the same reactionary, conservative views that (white) Evangelical church attendance suggests.

What they don’t have are the good things church brings: Community, cooperation, a space to talk about and seek answers to big life questions. So they have all the bad ideas, coupled with lonelier lives and fewer spaces to find themselves challenged.

In her Times series about waning religiosity in America, Jessica Grose asked readers what has replaced religious worship for them, and the answers are telling: Meditation, long walks, time spent in nature, physical activity. These are all good things, all with proven benefits for one’s mental and / or physical health. You should definitely meditate. You should definitely take a walk. You should definitely marvel at the beauty of the natural world. You should definitely do something physical that challenges you and makes your body feel good.

But none of that is a replacement for community and in-person connection, including with people who come from different backgrounds, see the world a little differently, and are in different places in their lives.

I’m not here to extol the virtues of church (or temple or synagogue or mosque or wherever it is one might worship in a group). But I will extol the virtues of meaning-making spaces that bring together people who share a general philosophy — religion, in this case — and who live near to each other, but who may otherwise be living very differently. A half-century ago, church attendance brought together the very old and the very young; families with new babies found support from community grandmas; adults spoke and worshipped with others they may never have chosen as friends, but learned how to at least tolerate in a shared space. Religious leaders offered food for thought, a weekly idea or lesson for people to reflect one.

A lot of these ideas were bad, to be clear. And the overwhelming majority of these leaders were men. I cannot emphasize enough how great it is that millions of people are no longer sitting in pews hearing about gendered submission and being steeped in learned helplessness and fatalism. I cannot emphasize enough how great it is that people are rejecting the institutions that were founded in the pursuit of white supremacy and now make their reactionary misogyny more than clear. Please reject these institutions, they are awful!

But I want something better to take their place, and it doesn’t seem to exist yet.

Where do we come together across at least age, class, and educational lines to mull over big ideas and offer mutual support? My answers are all insufficient. There was college. There was work. There was my yoga studio. None offer quite what has gone missing with the end of religion.

I don’t have answers here. There is much to celebrate about patriarchal delusions losing their hold. But there is much lost, too, when we lose spaces for community gathering, mutual support, and the interrogation of the big ideas that have long shaped human life: Why are we here? What does it mean to live a good life? What do we owe others?

And so, I am wondering: Where do you address these questions in community? Where do you find community apart from people who you choose as friends or family? How do you think we might invite back in some of what we lose when we lose houses of worship, while continuing to excise all that must go?

xx Jill