How to Replace Religion
Can we get the benefits of religion without the dogmatic beliefs? (Part 1: Community)
When I was ten years old, I went to Lake George in New York for one of my sister’s basketball tournaments. In the dingy motel where we were staying, my cousin Nate, then fifteen, asked me the most profound question I had ever been asked.
“Do you believe in God?”
At the time, I didn’t even think there was a choice. I was ten, after all. I was fresh off the realization that Santa wasn’t real. And I was starting to grow suspicious about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. If the adults were willing to lie about a fat dude in a red coat flying around the world in one night delivering presents to children undetected, why wouldn’t they be willing to lie about a bearded man in the sky who created all of mankind and had a son who could walk on water? Both seemed equally implausible, I’m sure I thought to myself.
I grew up Catholic, as all good Italian-muts in New England do. I went to church on major holidays when my mom made me, went to CCD, and even got baptized. However, my pseudo-religious upbringing wasn’t enough to make me pseudo-religious. If anything, it made me areligious, which is where I stand now.
As I became a teenager and then a college student, I couldn’t help but be hypercritical of religious people. And I didn’t discriminate. Muslims were extremists, Christians were homophobes, and Jews wore silly hats. And their dogmatic belief in their made-up God made them do weird, irrational things.
It was only the good atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Richard Feynman, that I could relate to. Their worldview made sense. Question the universe, don’t believe in anything, and be selfishly altruistic. Works for me.
But atheism, or a-religiousness, or secularism, or nihilism, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t working for everyone. America is a growingly secular society, with Pew Research telling us that almost a third of Americans are unaffiliated with a religion (Pew). And while secularism is on the rise, we also see increase rates in depression, decreased rates of marriage, and decreased rates of fertility. I’m not saying correlation is causation, but one must wonder.
The thing is, I don’t fit into the typical mold of your depressed, secular atheist who thinks kids are bad for the environment, marriage is an oppressive construct, and who is also confused about their purpose. I have deep purpose, am delusionally happy, am desperately searching for someone to marry, and I want four kids. Outside looking in, I’m the Christian-Trump supporter that the comment section in one of my blogs would expect you to believe. Which is also why all the Christian clients at my gym are trying to convert me by bringing me to Sunday mass and buying me Bibles. They think I think like them. They don’t want to see me burn in Hell because I haven’t accepted Jesus.
What’s Useful About Religion?
If you’re worried about the growing rates of depression, declining rates of marriage, and declining rates of fertility, and want to find the solution, you don’t have to look far: it’s religion. This might sound weird coming from an atheist. But people with religious practices are less depressed, get married more often (and have less divorces), and have more kids than your typical atheist. In “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland, he makes a valid point on religious practice.
“Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if [the benefits] came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water.”
I don’t see America going back to being a society with religion at its core. Knowledge is too democratized. There’s just too much easily accessible information that shows us how untrue all the stories in the Bible are. There was obviously no great flood that Noah had saved the animals from. Nobody birthed the son of God without having sex first. Adam and Eve were not the first two humans. And Jesus didn’t kill a fig tree by cursing it because he was hangry. And you won’t convince me by telling me these things happened because twelve, most likely fictional people, all told a similar story. Sorry, ain’t happening.
You might tell me that you can be a Christian without being a literalist. You can just believe in the morality that the stories describe without believing that these stories really happened. You can still believe in God, Heaven, and Hell, and the path towards these places without believing that Adam and Eve are the first humans and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or whatever.
But I don’t think this is true. I think you’re either in or out. You either take the Bible as truth or you leave it altogether.
Without literalism, you get yourself (and your family) on a slippery slope to atheism. This can happen fast. My grandfather was a Catholic literalist. My mother heard in Catholic school that the stories of the Bible were just fiction that teaches us a lesson. She told her father that her teacher said this to her. My grandfather said, “What kind of school am I even sending you to?” But his vehemence against this idea was not enough. The seed of doubt was already planted in her young mind. She raised me with a belief in God but that the Bible is a fictional story book. My cousin asked me if I even believed in God. Now I don’t. Nor do I even believe in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny anymore. Two generations later and the Catholic religion is now gone from a family tree. Sorry Pepe (my grandfather).
However, there seems to be a movement among atheists towards “Cultural Christianity”. Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins have both described themselves as “Cultural Christians”. This is essentially saying “I’ll take the values without the belief in God or the silly stories of the Bible, thank you.”
I would fit into this category as well (and as a side can I change out the homophobia for, well, not homophobia?).
How do you get here though? How do you get the benefits and values of religion without literalism or the government putting it in your tap water?
I’ve struggled with this question for years. Now I think I have the answer.
First, we must ask: how do religious people get the benefits of their religious practices? I think it comes down to four factors: community, strength of belief in the family unit, purpose, and ethics.
All these factors are taught dogmatically in the Bible. The bible tells you to live life this way. However, without it, secular society loses their way. We need to somehow get people these aspects of life without the Bible to preach it. Because once the modern American reads that there was a flood which covered all of Earth and that one dude on a boat had saved two of every animal, you’re going to lose them when they have all human knowledge shoved into a tiny metal rectangle in their pocket which tells them otherwise.
For most of the rest of this piece, you’ll see me reference the Bible and Christianity, because that’s what I know best. But I’m pretty sure the foundation of what I’m saying translates across religions and religious practices.
Humans Are Communal Creatures
Community, I think, is the most important thing that religious practices share for human happiness and societal stability. It’s also the easiest one to replicate without religion. This is because community is built on shared interest. A religious person’s religion is one of their interests. And they go to church (or synagogue, or wherever else a religious person goes) on a regular basis to be around a whole bunch of people that think like them. Here, they make friends, keep up relationships, and engage in activities they enjoy (talking about their God) with people they like.
Religion is not the only place that people find community, obviously. People who have an interest that they share with others often meet with them to engage in those interests.
The problem is, without a built-in community that comes from childhood, like religion, people have a hard time seeking community on their own. Religion makes it easy. Show up to the same place at the same time with the same people. We will be here every week and engage in the same activity. It’s predictable, which helps people build up the habit. The predictability also decreases the barrier to entry. If someone moves to a new town, they know they can just find their local church and go there on a Sunday at nine in the morning and there will be this very similar ceremony going on that they’ve seen before many times. The people at this new church will be very similar to the people in their previous town’s church. Instant friendships will be formed.
And communities make people happy. Humans are deeply social creatures. Without social interaction, we don’t enjoy life. As much as it seems nice to go off the grid in the woods, it’s not all that fun. Just ask any contestant on the History Channel show “Alone”. A few days in and the contestants, after having built a shelter and killed enough animals to feed them for months, start bitching about how they miss their friends and family and want to go home. How pathetic. How human.
Without a religion that offers a place to go to practice religion in a consistent way, the barrier to entry for community is high. You must decide what you’re interested in, which hopefully you know. Then you must find people who are interested in that thing, which hopefully there are. And then you must find where these people meet, if there are such places. And then you must meet there with these people at this place, at the same time until it becomes a habit.
If that doesn’t sound hard enough, good luck doing it if the thing you guys are interested in doesn’t have a strong reason to do it. At least religion tells you that if you don’t go to this place, at this time, with these people, you’ll burn in Hell for eternity. If you don’t place disc golf with Dave at two in the afternoon this Thursday, you’ll probably be fine. Dave might be upset. But Dave isn’t the Creator of The Universe.
But here’s the deal, community doesn’t have to come from a shared belief in morality and the creation of the universe. Community simply comes from shared interests. And shared interests can be anything from the books that you like to read, the sports that you like to play, or the gym.
An interest in fitness is actually one of the best ways to find community. A gym that does group training usually has set times that people go and do their workout. The people there have a shared interest in something incredibly important: their health. And when you move to a new town, you can probably find a gym like the one you went to in your previous town. In my biased opinion as a gym owner, this should be the first place where a secular person should find community.
Another important community that you’ll find is at the place where you work. You and your coworkers are all working on a similar mission for your company. You guys show up at the same place on the weekdays (fuck WFH, btw), and work on the mission. You all probably have similar interests, because you’re in this specific industry together. And it’s how you get paid, so there’s a strong incentive to show up consistently. Probably an even stronger incentive than burning in a mythical Hell.
Apart from family, which will get its own dedicated section in this piece, all the other communities you build or join will be more arbitrary. They will be the sports you like to play, the games you like to play, the books you like to read, or maybe the art you enjoy making or appreciating. The internet makes it easy nowadays to find people who share the same interests as you, no matter how niche. But it’s important to find the activities that you deeply enjoy and can find others that deeply enjoy them too. If you only kinda-sorta like bowling, the percentage chance you join a bowling league and show up consistently is low. God will bring you to Heaven if you go to church every Sunday. That’s a strong incentive to be a part of the Christian community. Being moderately enthusiastic about throwing a ball down a narrow piece of hardwood is not enough for you to go to The Lanes every Saturday night.
You don’t just have to join communities. You can build them. For me, I have built the major communities I’m a part of. I own a gym and have cultivated my client base to bring me a lot of joy. I also dance salsa and am building a community of friends that want to take their dancing to the next level. I’m sure I’ll also build a community of friends who write together.
Building a community is like playing on hard mode. It takes years, because the strength of personal relationships is a compound curve. But, for some, being the leader is more fulfilling than being the follower.
To summarize, if you want to replace the community that religious people have, you’ll want to find or build a community that:
· Has strong conviction in that interest.
· Has a predictable time and location to meet.
· Is based on an interest that you really like.
· Has a presence in many places, so if you move, you don’t lose your community.
But the most important community that you’ll ever be a part of is your family unit. And you can only have one by building one.
Read Part 2: Morality Without Myths
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