Do I have to believe in God to go to church? I used to think so.
Americans are less likely than ever to attend religious services: According to a recent Gallup poll, just 30 percent of American adults attend religious services weekly or nearly weekly, down from 42 percent in the early 2000s.
This rapid secularization has profound effects on American community building. After all, as Americans leave their churches, synagogues, and mosques, they aren’t compensating for the time they lost in religious rituals by participating in secular community organizations. Instead, we’re spending more time alone than ever before.
Young people in particular appear to be leading the charge: 34% of Gen Z (those born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s) identify as unreligious, the highest percentage of any generation.
“Younger people, who are falling away from religion more rapidly than older Americans, are also seeing the greatest decline in social activity,” Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic. “At no time in American history have young people been less likely to attend religious services, nor have they spent more time alone.”
For a long time, this represented me.
I grew up regularly attending religious services, from my grandparents’ Southern Baptist church, to the progressive local church my parents attended, to the occasional Catholic mass with my mother, but I stopped participating around high school.
I simply lost, or never developed, the strong spiritual faith I thought I needed to participate in a religious community. For most of my youth, I was a staunch atheist.
Although I was grateful for the Christian ethical values I was raised with, I just couldn’t believe that any god existed, let alone an all-powerful, all-loving one. I wanted faith but just couldn’t find it. I could embrace agnosticism, but complete spiritual certainty seemed impossible, and so did the idea of me belonging to a Christian community.
That began to change during my senior year of college, not surprisingly for an English major, as I took a medieval mysticism class that exposed me to the moving and beautiful works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and my favorite, Julian of Norwich. A revelation of God’s loveThe event ended with a flood of criticism online.
In the spring of my senior year at the University of Virginia, I published a controversial guest essay for the New York Times about college students’ experiences with self-censorship in the classroom. The article went viral, and within hours, my life changed forever. I went from an unknown college student to the subject of a multi-day Twitter storm, my name was trending at one point, and I was denounced by a number of prominent journalists.
I had the support of loving family and friends, and of course, enthusiastic online advocates, but experiences like this can be upsetting for even the most well-supported person. As the days went by, I spent more time than I would like to admit, alone in my tiny dorm room, scrolling through my phone, reading cruel personal comments that I knew I should ignore.
I felt myself being drawn into self-centered despair and wanted to get out, so impulsively I tried praying in the simple, conversational style I had learned as a child attending church.
Forcing myself to pray was extremely calming, especially for those who would say the most cruel things about me. It brought crucial peace of mind during a time of emotional weakness. Despite the relatively short depression, I managed to escape my time as an internet “hero” relatively unscathed. Moreover, the experience helped me realise that I no longer I was considerate Is God real? The question was no longer interesting. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that an internet smear campaign was what led me to find religion, but, man, weirder things happen.
When I moved to Washington, DC after graduation, I began attending an Anglo-Catholic parish. I was initially drawn to the parish by the rituals, especially my admiration of Anglo-Catholic traditions and “scents and bells.” But I fell in love for a completely unexpected reason: the community.
A few hours after attending my first Sunday Mass, I was added to two group chats, agreed to join our next happy hour, and exchanged phone numbers with a young woman who would soon become one of my best friends. It was an almost instantaneous group of friends, one that formed based on shared values (and a shared interest in Gregorian chant).
At a time when Americans, especially young Americans, are more divided than ever, it’s becoming harder to have real community beyond just personal friends. As Gen Z writer Rona Wang puts it: Humorously put it“[S]Your social life after college will consist of texting someone a few times a month to meet for coffee and spending $600 to attend someone’s wedding.”
While these personal social interactions can be valuable, they can’t replicate the reciprocity that formal community groups provide. It’s harder to isolate yourself during difficult times if you have dozens of parishioners who look forward to seeing you on Sunday. It’s also much harder to lose contact with your girlfriend if you know for sure that you’ll see her again on Sunday.
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Being part of a religious community also allows members to step outside of their own age-segregated groups: After Mass, they can chat with older parishioners and listen to the sounds of babies and toddlers, something that rarely happens in a bar or concert.
Religious groups force you to be: AppearsThere will be new rhythms in life and new obligations. For example, at weddings in my church, all members are invited to the ceremony, and I don’t think this is a coincidence.
While there are many secular alternatives to religious communities (a classic example in Washington, DC, is joining an amateur softball or soccer league), non-religious organizations cannot offer the sense of shared moral priorities and clear moral guidance that religious communities convey.
For me, this moral element is one of the biggest reasons I joined a church rather than a football club: I want to feel responsible to something other than my own conscience, and the hour and a half of meditation the church offers each week is hard to replicate elsewhere.
But I have yet to develop an unshakeable faith, even though I have been attending church regularly for nearly two years. twitterOn my best days, I believe in God only about 30 percent of the time. My ambivalence sets me apart from most of my friends at church, including several seminarians. But it doesn’t stop me from coming back.
How common is the path I’ve taken? I’m not sure, but it seems pretty rare. While more and more Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious,” being religious but not spiritual is far more unusual. According to one Gallup poll, only 3 percent of Americans who identify as atheist or agnostic attend church weekly or nearly weekly, though that’s probably an undercount if you exclude agnostics and atheists who are labeled as religious.
As church attendance declines, so do our connections with one another. But with a growing number of Americans feeling spiritually ambivalent, there may be an unusual solution to the loss of community: It may seem counterintuitive, but more agnostics should give religion a try.
