NY Times Op-Ed: Where Should Agnostics Go On Sundays?

New York Times Op-Ed:  Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?, by Ross Douthat:

Perry Bacon, a columnist for The Washington Post, has an essay about his experience with Christianity entitled “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 [What Churches Offer That ‘Nones’ Still Long For] and Nick Kristof [America Is Losing Religious Faith].

Bacon is a case study for this post-religious 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 post-church 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 semi-believing 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 un-diverse and lacking in “the wide range of activities for adults and kids found at the Christian congregations that I was a part of.” ...

I think ... “free riding” guilt shouldn’t be a fundamental obstacle to churchgoing. If you’re spiritually open-minded, an agnostic rather than a hard atheist, and you say “It would be nice if something like this were true” and then act (to whatever extent) as though it were true, I’d say you’re engaging in a sincere quest for God, the kind of quest that America’s many “seeker-sensitive” churches especially exist to cultivate. And I don’t see why you couldn’t tell your children, older ones especially, “I doubt that there’s a God, but I think it’s good to keep an eye out for him,” and feel like you’re being responsible and sincere with them.

But I also understand why this deeper sense that real belief just isn’t reasonable, that churchgoing’s social and communal benefits are probably founded on pleasant mythmaking, is a durable impediment to getting up on Sunday morning, getting your kid up on Sunday morning, doing the church thing week in and week out — to say nothing of actually starting something on your own, a church of the nones or any other spiritual enterprise. I think agnostic churchgoing would be good for Bacon, good for his daughter, good for America. But were I an agnostic, I’m not sure I’d be anywhere on Sunday morning except home.

Which means that the future of religion depends, in some way, on thoughtful people like Bacon coming around to the realization that this skeptical sense of things, this default to nonbelief, is itself just an intellectual fancy, a myth and a mistake.

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