We can attack religion all day long and not get anywhere with the general public. Here’s why: Your local church is entrenched in everyone’s community. And it can be a church or mosque or temple. It doesn’t matter. It is the center of the community in a whole hell of a lot of places.
The older I get the more I see this from family, friends and neighbors. None of them are hardcore religious fanatics, but these “regular” people are the ones who give religious institutions their power. Yeah, the really hard core religious people are the ones who get the headlines, but average parishioners who give their weekly donation and go to church a couple of times a month are the ones who fill the coffers of the various churches around the country and around the world.
Why do these people go? Again, most average people aren’t hard core religious fanatics. They aren’t trying to follow every last word of the Bible. But they also aren’t trying to push those ideas on peoples throat either. They aren’t the “bad” kind of religious people. But they go to church because ultimately life is hard. And boring. And lonely. And average people just feel the need to have a sense of community. It doesn’t matter where that place is, but people are social animals and need a certain level of human interaction once in a while. A community church gives them that. It gives them a place to get married. And to hold funerals in. There might be a local strawberry festival at the church where they see their aunt Mary or at service every few weeks where they see that cute girl they have been trying to build up the nerve to talk to. People don’t have a ton of those opportunities elsewhere. They really don’t. Once you are out of college, the number of friends you have drops dramatically and the opportunities to make new ones drops even more. You aren’t typically going to be going out to the bars every week past your 30s and asking someone out at a grocery story is creepy. Worse yet is trying to make friends or find partners at work. Your ability to actually socialize is incredibly limited after a certain age and church is a very easy way to do that.
But it isn’t just a way to socialize. When a flood hits or there’s a fire or some other disaster, a church is an easy location to organize these things. Some places use it as a voting location. It is an easy way for the church to embed itself into the community.
So why am I saying all these things? Because if atheists really want to rid the world of religion, it has to give people an alternative to the local church. Atheist groups should hold festivals. You don’t need to push the atheist-angle, but give people something to do and somewhere to go. If some building collapses and people are out of a house, try to organize shelter for them. Hold gathering celebrations for your town’s centennial or something along those lines. Make it a regular event that gives folks a sense of community that isn’t tied to a religious event.
I realize that very few people (if anyone) will actually read this, but as someone who has despised religion for a long, long time I see the uphill battle that atheists fight and unfortunately we fight the wrong people. The older I get, I realize that fighting the hard core religious fanatics is a waste of time. Giving the average people an alternative to going to church is the single best way to attack religion. No one event, no matter how heinous (i.e. priests and kids) will kill off a church, but a slow decline in attendance over the years will.
The need for community, I understand. We should build secular alternatives that help and support more people.
The need to feed inane questions about “destiny”, “purpose” and “afterlife” with magical beings pampering a part of you that doesn’t exist? Nah, I’ll pass.
The closest thing I can think of in the US would be a public library or a rec center/community center. I think these are vital offerings to provide the center for socializing, volunteer activities, public health outreach, youth mentoring etc in a non religious setting.
Surprise, surprise, Republicans have been attacking libraries for a few years now because the idea of free knowledge is their enemy.
But taking the politics out of this for a moment, to some degree, I agree that libraries and rec centers do offer some level of an alternative, but it definitely isn’t quite the same. If you still live in the town you grew up in, then chances are you might go to the rec center, but I honestly have no idea where it even is in the town that I live in now (nor in the town I lived in previously) probably because I didn’t grown up in these towns. Yet I know exactly where the closest church is. You can’t miss that!
Overall I just think atheists fight the wrong battles. The social aspect of religion is so much more powerful than the actual religious part of it, and we need to break that.
In the UK, Christianity is no longer the majority, falling below 50% of the country for the first time. Only 5% of those attend church.
In the US since 2007 Christians have dropped from 78% to 63% whilst atheism has gone from 16% to 29% of the population (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/)
xtians are in terminal decline already.
They will always cling onto the remaining percentages because there are few (if any) alternatives to the social events that I mentioned.
Where do atheists hold a funeral service? Even non religious people hold funerals at a church versus a funeral home.
I know that some people get married at a town hall or maybe at a beach or similar, but the vast majority of non-religious people (maybe not full atheists, but people that just don’t think about religion) still get married in a church.
Yearly festivals or weekly bingo night.I see it in a lot of the people that I know. They aren’t pushy with their religion and these are the folks that could easily be convinced to simply stop going if only there was an alternative. But they enjoy the social interaction. A weekly gathering to see long time friends and family. They wouldn’t see these people otherwise. Atheism just don’t offer an alternative and religion will cling to these events for a long, long time and remain a part of everyone’s community.
Crematoriums in the uk are non denominational. If youre religious, then a priest officiates. If not, a humanist or whatever.
I think you might be seeing American xtianity as representative of the whole. But even in America, a time will come in the next 60 years or so when xtians aren’t anything but a minority. Services will change, things will move on. Its inevitable.
I am not nearly as hopeful as you in thinking that it is an inevitability.
In fact, I see things like this working like a pendulum. Throughout our history (in the US, but elsewhere as well) you swing from a time of a lot of religious support to times of low religious support. And back and forth.
Much of it tied to the things that are happening in the rest of life and society. For instance, the cold war brought renewed faith in the US as the evil communists were sold as being unreligious (so being their enemies, we had to do the opposite). On the flip side, during the Enlightenment when new scientific discoveries were being made left and right, religious power was greatly diminished. Then of course when we are having difficult times like the Great Depression, people tend to look for some kind of help and religion is part of that for many. Again, I think there has been a downward spiral in religiosity in the US overall, but the pendulum can easily swing the other way with the rise of these fascist fucks who are trying to radicalize people and one way is to manipulate religion.
Sure, there’s always periodic swings, but overall the graph is heading steadily downward for xtians. Over 90% of US citizens identified as christians in the early 90’s. It’s now 63% and at the same time, atheists have risen from practically zero to nearly 30%.
Globally, the same pattern is seen and whilst they’ll always be periodic swings up and down, overall the global trend is still going down and there’s no real reason to suppose that will reverse.
Islam on the other hand, is growing. It’ll probably outstrip xtianity worldwide sometime in the next 25-30 years and atheism will probably decline overall as Islam increases.
There’s also the non-denominational magical bullshit, but I don’t have numbers on that.
Where do atheists hold a funeral service?
In the case of my grandfather, at my dad’s house.
There’s a really wild reason why the church has been so durable and pernicious in the US. That’s because what you’ve described, OP, is a third space. Third spaces are those places that are neither home nor business, but strictly places meant for social activity. In other countries, they have pubs, parks, and cafes, among other things, that also fulfill this role. In the US, due to seventy years of low-density car-centric urban design and forty years of Reaganomics, the only real third spaces left are the churches. There were malls, I guess, but the internet pretty much nuked them. You want to loosen the church’s grip? Advocate for more walkable and bikeable towns and cities, which will support more third spaces. Another good place to start is demanding reform on parking minimums, which are, by and large, based entirely on bullshit and put otherwise usable land to waste.
Third spaces are those places that are neither home nor business, but strictly places meant for social activity. In other countries, they have pubs, parks, and cafes, among other things, that also fulfill this role. In the US, due to seventy years of low-density car-centric urban design and forty years of Reaganomics, the only real third spaces left are the churches.
Church membership is also falling.
The US also has pubs, parks, and cafes, among other things. I suspect the death of the third place here has more to do with increased socialization online, more affordable alternative entertainment options, poor urban planning, and a lack of available time due to our work culture and lack of labor protections.
These are also factors, yes. Church membership is falling, yes, but it’s being replaced with nothing. I think it’s the lack of community ties and lack of third spaces that’s helping to drive these waves of spree murder we keep experiencing.
Those are probably contributing factors, I imagine most mass shooters feel stuck and squeezed and angry about it to the point of violence against (usually) unrelated parties. Community, opportunity, just feeling like one’s society gives a shit about them, would all make a big difference. Unfortunately when this desire gets filled with something irrational and toxic like religion, it can lead to other problems long-term.
Making sure the average person has enough economic freedom to not feel stuck or exploited would go a long way to preventing this, so would meaningful public mental health resources and gun control.
I’m largely agreed, though I think the erosion of in-person community has been the larger factor. Communities tend to have a psychological anchoring effect, and as communities have gotten weaker and third spaces have dried up, you’re seeing more and more spree violence. I’d wager that it’s no accident that the UK is seeing an uptick in spree violence lagging behind their pivot to more sprawling, car dependent US-like urban design.
As far as gun control goes: it is true that nobody’s going to pull off what the Vegas shooter did with a sword or a baseball bat. That said, the gun violence is the symptom, not the cause; you still see spree murder in countries without access to guns, it just takes other, less deadly forms. So, addressing gun control, imo, shouldn’t be the spearhead of addressing spree murder. It does need to be done, but prioritizing it sort of imperils other, more effective reforms that could be made because it’s such a stupidly political issue.
They aren’t the “bad” kind of religious people.
What makes someone a “bad” religious person? In my opinion it’s irrationality. The anger, hatred, bigotry and oppression that religions often exhibit grow from this, from believing that men can speak for God(s.) Without any sort of rational basis and with ever-changing divine mouthpieces, it’s just a matter of time before, “God wants you to love thy neighbor,” becomes, “God wants you to kill the heathens.”
But they go to church because ultimately life is hard. And boring. And lonely.
The universe is incredible and mysterious! There’s always more to learn and discover. If it seems boring that just tells me that one needs more experience and stimulation, to learn about human knowledge and its limits, to explore different environments and cultures, to do something other than provincially sitting at home steeped in ignorance, tithing and being pious.
Life becomes less hard when we band together and make this one life we get as good as we can for everyone, systemically, rather than living it as though it were just a prelude for something better. It becomes harder when we leave the social safety net to religious organizations who offer it with strings attached and gaps in coverage.
And average people just feel the need to have a sense of community. It doesn’t matter where that place is, but people are social animals and need a certain level of human interaction once in a while. A community church gives them that.
So does Kiwanis, Rotary, Elks, Toastmasters, Masons, etc., There are many social organizations that are more secular. There’s tons of events online at any decently sized population center. Churches don’t have a monopoly on social gatherings.
It gives them a place to get married. And to hold funerals in. There might be a local strawberry festival at the church where they see their aunt Mary or at service every few weeks where they see that cute girl they have been trying to build up the nerve to talk to. People don’t have a ton of those opportunities elsewhere. They really don’t.
Banquet halls, funeral parlors, and festivals can all be secular! You can run into relatives and cute girls in many venues that don’t require professing irrationality. I suppose it depends on where one lives but in a big city I could probably attend a street festival type event every day of the week, not sponsored by churches.
Once you are out of college, the number of friends you have drops dramatically and the opportunities to make new ones drops even more. You aren’t typically going to be going out to the bars every week past your 30s and asking someone out at a grocery story is creepy. Worse yet is trying to make friends or find partners at work. Your ability to actually socialize is incredibly limited after a certain age and church is a very easy way to do that.
- Not necessarily, but after college it is up to the individual to put in the energy to meet people, it won’t happen as automatically just going about your life.
- There’s nothing wrong with asking someone out at a grocery store as long as the interaction is wanted and you aren’t harassing them.
- I agree that socializing at work can be a bad idea depending on where.
- What about dating apps? Events and festivals?
I agree with your thesis that churches provide a lot of these services, especially in small towns, but that does not mean there are not viable alternatives that already exist. I’m certain we could craft vibrant social lives for ourselves without having to play pretend.
There’s a lot of smarts in what you’re saying, thanks.
I don’t have any science to cite, but I’ve certainly known LOTS of people who attend church more for the socializing than any spiritual reason.
Hell, I’m basically anti-social, but give me a ‘club’ to attend once weekly and listen to a mini TED-talk and then chat with like-minded people afterwards, and I might be there.
Public library’s book clubs.
Hackspaces.
Quilting shops all frequently have quilting nights
Yarnshops too.Virtually every hobby has this.
People still go to church. Largely I suspect out of social obligation and familiarity. that is the core of religion right there. Nobody goes to church to get blabbered at about how they really should be better… but they do anyhow because of social obligation.
Even if you provide spaces, most people will still go. Not because they want to, but because they’ve been indoctrinated into believing they have to.
It’s still vital to provide community spaces- that’s how you build communities, after all- its just not going to kill religion.
Much of what has been said by OP is not necessarily a switch that simply has to be turned and everything changes, because it’s just a irreligous community-building effort and not an anti-religious campaign.
Honestly, I don’t even really care to end religion.
I’d like to see a world where religion didn’t matter, sure, but like…we have bigger hurdles to take first.
