Opinion | Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?
Perry Bacon, a columnist for The Washington Post, has an essay about his experience with Christianity titled “I Left the Church — and Now Long for a ‘Church for the Nones.’” The “nones,” as this newsletter’s readers probably know, are the growing share of Americans who don’t identify with any religious tradition, and the sense that we’re losing something when churchgoing lapses has shown up in recent essays by my colleagues Jessica Grose and Nick Kristof.
Bacon is a case study for this postreligious angst: After decades spent attending first charismatic and then nondenominational Protestant churches, he has drifted into the no-religion camp, and he doesn’t particularly like it. He has a young daughter, and he misses the social and ethical benefits of churchgoing, but at the same time, he feels alienated from moral and theological conservatism, even the attenuated form in the churches he recently attended, and he doesn’t have specific Christian certainties to keep him in the pews. So what he’d like — well, here’s the quote:
I can easily imagine a “church for the nones.” (It would need a more appealing name.) Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional postchurch brunch.
During the week, there would be activities, particularly ones in which parents could take their kids and civic-minded members could volunteer for good causes in the community.
I don’t expect the church of the nones to emerge. It’s not clear who would start it, fund it or decide its beliefs. But it should.
As is often the case on social media, I encountered this passage before I read the essay as a whole, and it filled me with frustration. Doesn’t Bacon know that people have been trying this kind of thing for generations and it always fizzles out? Hasn’t he heard of the Society for Ethical Culture or the Unitarian Universalists? Does he really think you can sustain an institution on vague appeals to tolerance and brunch? All the usual conservative complaints about the angst of semibelieving liberals, in other words.
But then I read the whole essay, and it’s more subtle than just the fragment above in isolation might suggest. Bacon has an accurate sociological sense of what churches and church life have often offered to America: not just a generic form of community but specific kinds of class mixing, intergenerational bonding, dating markets, cross-partisan solidarity and really good music. He has interesting things to say about how he’s reinterpreted his own professional ascent — from a miraculous, God-granted leap and the perspective of his religious family members to a more conventional story of a hardworking family boosting a smart kid up the ladder — and how he’s been affected by the secularizing arc of African American intellectual life in the Black Lives Matter era. And he has, of course, heard of the Unitarians and appreciates what they’re trying to do; he’s just found their churches to be aging and undiverse and lacking in “the wide range of activities for adults and kids found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.”
Reading Bacon’s lament, I recalled a column I wrote six years ago called “Save the Mainline,” a somewhat puckish call for lapsed Protestants on the secular left to return to the country’s declining liberal churches and reinvigorate mainline Christianity. The interesting thing is that Bacon basically endorses my various arguments but still can’t quite bring himself to actually be the change he seeks:
I know I could be a member of a congregation if I really wanted to. I could attend a Christian church on Sundays and teach my daughter about other beliefs the rest of the week. Or make churchgoing something I do alone. …
I’ve also thought about starting some kind of weekly Sunday-morning gathering of nones, to follow in my father’s footsteps in a certain way, or trying to persuade my friends to collectively attend one of the Unitarian churches in town and make it younger and more racially diverse.
But I’ve not followed through on any of these options. With all my reservations, I don’t really want to join an existing church. And I don’t think I am going to have much luck getting my fellow nones to join something I start. My sense is that the people who want what church provides are going to the existing Christian churches, even if they are skeptical of some of the beliefs. And those who aren’t at church are fine spending their Sunday mornings eating brunch, doing yoga or watching Netflix.
Again, I have my default conservative reaction here, which is that of course you can’t expect to fully garner the benefits of church without some kind of real commitment, some actual dogma or belief.
