How to Make a “Church”
what it takes to create secular community
When you can’t find what you need out in the world, you can try to make do without it or you can make it yourself.
One need I have — a need I think most people have — is a place to go where I feel at home but that also inspires me to think beyond myself. In other words, church.
The problem is I don’t believe in God. Which means that unless I want to be pretending all the time,1 most “churches,” of whatever religion, don’t suit.
So I do what I counsel readers of We of Little Faith to do: recognize the church-like spaces already in our lives. For me it’s my public library, with an occasional pilgrimage to Camden Yards or the Whitney Museum. But it could be anywhere that is both ennobling and inviting, that makes you feel like you’re part of something larger. Find that place, treasure that place, in place of church.
You see, my book’s mission was (partly) to show how easy it is to be an atheist.2 Certainly, it’s a whole lot easier to appreciate a place that stands in for church than to build a new one.
But there are people who take the same problem — need “church,” can’t find one that suits — and decide, “Let’s make one from scratch.”
On a sunny Sunday morning this fall, I declined brunch in favor of attending one of the weekly gatherings of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, at the Meeting House just west of Central Park at 64th Street. The Meeting House is one of the most famous, most impressive-looking, secular churches in the country: a five-story, white-stone edifice adorned not with crosses, spires, stars, or saintly statuary but with the following inscription:
Dedicated to the Ever-Increasing Knowledge and Practice and Love of the Right
Balloon bouquets bounced in the breeze at the entrance, where cheerful young greeters were ushering congregants up a short set of stairs. I was two steps up when I realized my mistake: This was a service of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which gathers on Sunday mornings in the 800-seat Adler Hall, while the Society for Ethical Culture itself meets in the smaller Ceremonial Hall on the fifth floor. Whether or not you believe, you have to respect God’s power to draw a crowd.
At the correct entrance (no balloons), another non-church-goer held the door for me and a friendly woman pointed us to the elevator.
The hall hummed with people arriving, chatting, and finding seats at tables topped with office supplies. Our task was to assemble care packages with messages of support for libraries fighting book bans across the country. The mood was buoyant.3 We shared scissors and markers, and at some point we sang (with the help of a pianist) an energetic rendition of “Lean on Me.” It sounds cheesy — it was cheesy — but so was gathering for an hour in New York City to write letters to librarians in Texas. I would have felt silly doing that on my own. But together with my new friends and my new sense of purpose in this light-filled room, I loved it.
Back home, I called Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association, to ask about that feeling — that cooperative joy — and whether you need a building to get it. Stark travels around the country speaking to secular organizations and looking for ways to support them. He told me that “there’s something about being in an environment that is designed for a specific purpose that enables people to become different versions of themselves.” That, he said, was why summer camp kids could be so different from the way they were at home. Even if you managed to gather the same people at your local Panera, that same feeling would be harder to come by.
That purpose-specific place need not be as grand as a 150-year-old Meeting House. The Secular Hub, in Denver, Colo., is comparatively humble: one story, flat-roofed, and fluorescent-lit. Formed by members of three different local secular organizations, the Hub opened in 2013, then purchased its current building in 2021. Barb Sannwald, the president, told me it’s convenient to have a place of their own where affiliate groups can hold events. But it’s more than that: It’s inspiring. “People feel this sort of pride of ownership of this place,” she said, “especially because ours needs a little bit of fixing up.” Members look around, she said, and they see walls they painted themselves. She also told me membership is booming.
I’ve been seeing a lot of articles lately about how we tried secularism but it didn’t work.4 “Americans simply haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion” declared one the New York Times published in April.5 “More than a billion people globally and about a third of Americans have tried to live6 without religion,” writes the author, Lauren Jackson. “Studies in recent years have offered insights into how that is going. The data doesn’t look good.” Jackson argues7 that religion makes people healthier, mentally and physically. But the data she cites pits “actively religious people” or “women who attended religious services once a week” against, well, people who aren’t and don’t.
What about people who are actively nonreligious? Or women who attend secular programs weekly? Turns out, for them, the data do look good.
I am not surprised. When We of Little Faith came out, I spent two years meeting humanists, atheists, freethinkers, and just plain nonreligious or questioning people, and they were purposeful, engaged, and — despite the growing power of Christian Nationalists — even hopeful.
Well, you might argue, that’s a highly selective and nonrepresentative group. Yes! Thank you for making my point! Every single group I spoke to was, by definition, people who’d traveled for a national convention or driven to hear a speaker or made time once a month for a book and a book group. Whatever they believed, they all took action.8
Having a building makes secular gathering easier, sure, but easier isn’t necessarily better.
Once I drove to Raleigh, North Carolina, to speak to the Triangle Freethought Society and was dismayed to arrive at an empty room in a storefront community center.9 I checked the posters in the window — yep, that was me. I sighed and wished again for a church with, I don’t know, a parking lot and a social hall and . . . a congregation.
And then like magic, people started to arrive. They unstacked towers of chairs and arranged them in a semi-circle six rows deep; they wheeled in A/V equipment and a podium. The stacked my books on a folding table for signing and assigned someone to take payment. The energy in the room for that talk was incredible. It wasn’t the energy of people who had just drifted away from or given up on religion. It was the energy of people who were working together for the common good.
“Space or no space,” Stark told me, “the chapters that are growing the fastest are the ones that are doing some kind of hands-on service and activism work in their community.”
The New York Society for Ethical Culture was founded in 1876, by a young man named Felix Adler, who, instead of becoming a Reform rabbi like his father,10 started a new, nontheistic religion with the unofficial motto: “Deed before creed.”
For more than three decades, there was no building. Society members focused on putting ethics into action: They helped create a nursing service, a free kindergarten, a children’s hospital, and a summer camp; they worked to improve conditions in tenement houses; and they provided a platform for speakers like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
When Adler spoke at the dedication of the Meeting House in 1910, he disagreed with those who called the building a dream come true. He said, “that would be a poor and meagre dream, indeed, which could be realized in any house, however beautiful.”
Yet we rejoice none the less in the work that has here been done, not because it means fixation of any sort, but . . . because a center has here been provided from which invigorated action may go out in the most manifold directions.
A building can invigorate, but it’s the action that matters. When I visited this fall, society staff told me that, not unlike religious congregations, they have trouble getting people to become members. But they never have trouble getting volunteers: People rush to answer the call to act. I thought of that — and of my own elation that morning in the Ceremonial Hall — when I came across this reflection by William Salter, an Ethical Culture leader:
the happiest years of my life have been spent in the service of the movement [Adler] gave birth to. There has been strenuous labor, but also great rewards . . . the sense of striving for the highest, of living out from one’s best.
Service, strenuous, labor, striving.
Happiest.
It is easy to be an atheist — I wasn’t wrong about that. But it’s hard to be happy. For that you need a sense of meaning and purpose, and for that you can’t just sit at the back of a secular (or religious) gathering space, however beautiful, and watch other people sing. You have to do something — make something — for and with other human beings. You have to act.
Tried it, didn’t love it, long story.
Popular discourse makes it seem like to be an atheist you have to be able to explain the Big Bang and vanquish believers in a theological debate. In fact, you can just say, “No, I don’t think there’s a supernatural being in charge.” Simple as that.
A possible contributing factor: Zohran Mamdani had just won the mayoral election.
These strike me as inaccurate from both a historical perspective (how long have we tried, in the grand scheme?) and the current one (72% of Americans identify as a member of a religious group; 88% believe in God or a higher power of some sort).
See also: “Secular Stagnation” by Shadi Hamid, “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust” by Derek Thompson, and Believe by Ross Douthat.
So hard to get through this without commenting on every slanted word choice. “Tried to live”?
Sorry to interrupt; just one more thing. Jackson’s piece treats atheism like it started with Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and when she asks Dawkins what secular people might do for community, he offers, “Play golf.” If you’re looking for an answer to this question, perhaps try someone who leads a secular organization? On the other hand, if you’re looking for someone to say something lightly dismissive, Dawkins is your man.
I count 27 events so far on the January calendar of the Central Florida Freethought Community. These people (led by the evidently indefatigable Jocelyn and David Williamson) do not stop.
In 1873, when he was 22 and just home from his rabbinical studies in Germany, Adler was invited to deliver the sabbath sermon at his father’s synagogue, Temple Emanu-El. His sermon, titled “The Judaism of the Future,” did not mention God. Instead, it declared that Judaism — indeed, all religion — was in ruins and could only be saved by “laying its greatest stress not on the believing but in the acting out.” He was not invited back. (See Toward Common Ground: The Story of the Ethical Societies in the United States, by Howard Radest, for more of the story.)
fractalnyc.com related
You had me at, “For me, it’s my public library,” but the rest was interesting too! ❤️