Will religion make a comeback in secular America?

Organized religion has faded, but secular community hasn’t shown the staying power to replace it. Where will nonreligious Americans find a home?

Two titles illuminate the competing impulses tugging America back and forth. The first is the headline of a recent New York Times article; the second, the name of a book published just a few days earlier.

“America Wants a God.”

“Why Religion Went Obsolete.”

Both can’t be true. But together, the titles’ contradictory claims shed light on the confounding zeitgeist: Religion has receded in the West, as we all know. Yet society doesn’t yet have, certainly not on a wide scale, the whatever-comes-next that can provide the practical benefits of religion.

This much is clear, however: A mass return to theism and traditional religion is not the right or realistic way forward for the secular ranks that have become such a sizeable segment of the population. And it is, most likely, not going to happen.

Has secular life flunked the test?

The Times article is written by Lauren Jackson, an ex-Mormon who spent her 20s “worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well,” as she writes in a related piece. Yoga, Crossfit, SoulCycle, supper clubs, meditation, sound baths, energy healing, astrology—post-church people have turned to these and more, Jackson notes, in the search for post-religion soul-sustenance.

These secular pursuits flunked the test, Jackson writes—for her and for many other Americans who left traditional religion or were never part of it. Citing polling data and the extensive interviews she conducted, Jackson reports that many are lonely and unhappy. “It’s not just secularism that’s to blame,” she says, “but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace, and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.”

The metrics are what they are. The problem is where Jackson takes them: to God, belief, and other pursuits that are decidedly religious. People, she avers, “are looking to heady concepts—confession, atonement, forgiveness, grace and redemption—for answers.”

She left religion, but religion clearly did not leave her.

If one were to ask the acclaimed sociologist of religion Christian Smith for a reality check on Jackson’s assessment, he would respond: not valid.

Smith is a professor at Notre Dame and director of its Center for the Study of Religion and Society. He is the author of several books on the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. adolescents: Soul Searching, Souls in Transition, Youth Catholic America, and Lost in Transition.

In his new work Why Religion Went Obsolete, Smith uses survey data and hundreds of interviews to explain the causes of the decline in religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God. The answer can be found, he says, in large-scale social forces that have made religion less compelling to the masses, including the internet; changing ideas about sexuality and gender; the scandals that have beset religious organizations; distrust in institutions of all sorts; and the end of the Cold War.

In an article for Church Life Journal, Smith writes:

We should not be surprised if religious obsolescence leads to increased mental health problems—which is already reported to be happening in “epidemic” proportions among younger generations. Sociologists have demonstrated that religion has numerous prosocial effects, so other socially deleterious results will also likely follow the declining vitality of American religion.

Having said that, it would be futile… to try to bolster traditional religion just to sustain these benefits. Embracing such instrumentalist ways of legitimizing itself is part of what set religion up for obsolescence in the first place.

As for yoga, supper clubs, and the other non-church group activities Jackson finds lacking—all contribute to well-being in their own ways, and I recommend them to anyone who finds them intriguing and is tempted to check them out. Same for book clubs, discussion groups, and—to cite something mostly absent from Jackson’s culture scan—communal service activities and meaningful engagements with nature.

Benefits of community

Personally, I found it enormously beneficial when I joined a hiking and mountaineering group after moving to a new city and experiencing the pangs of loneliness and isolation. I learned that going on adventures with other people in beautiful, natural settings is good. And when it leads to deeper friendships and meaningful conversation and connection—which in my case it did—it’s even better.

Despite that, and despite the fact that many of the excursions took place on Sundays, the mountaineering club was not at heart a church substitute, and it did not purport to be. On the other hand, when I moved back to the East Coast and joined the new Yale Humanist Community, I found the house-of-worship analogues too conspicuous to miss. The gatherings unfolded with a welcome, announcements, a reflection, a featured talk, and an appeal for donations. All on Sunday. (We laughed out loud when an ex-religionist in our group joked he was “triggered” by the ask for donations.)

I valued the experiences and looked forward to the learning and social connections every other Sunday. They didn’t last long, however. Our primary donor gradually withdrew his support, and our organization had to fold.

That sad development is part of a wider pattern in organized nonreligion. Remember the proliferation of Sunday Assemblies and Oasis gatherings back in the 2010s, and the excited media coverage they generated? You don’t hear as much about them now, and it’s not merely because they lost their status as the hot new cultural trend. The movement failed to take off the way it seemed poised to do. Religion News Service reports that roughly half the 70 Sunday Assembly chapters founded in the United States and Europe are now closed or dormant.

Some of the people with whom I discuss such matters are sharply critical of the secular community (if you can call it that) for failing to meet the needs of the nonreligious. I’m more realistic. Religion had millennia to develop the practices and institutions that made it such a dominant force until recently. Is it fair to expect secular institutions to take form and fill the vacuum in such a relatively miniscule amount of time? In a time of rampant distrust of institutions?

No. But it’s even less realistic to expect secular masses to rush back to houses of worship if or when they find nonreligious life lacking. The primary barrier still stands: the requirement to profess belief in a deity and other supernatural phenomena—less literal in more progressive churches and synagogues but present nonetheless.

Despite the growing pains of organized nonreligion, the charge remains the same: to build robust, science-compatible opportunities to be with others in meaningful ways and enjoy religion’s pro-social benefits, without requiring belief in the unbelievable.

Not for all secular people, but for many, there’s still a yearning to be part of communities that sing and tell epic stories together, that tap into greater wisdoms together, that serve their fellow humans together, that provide solace for the grieving and celebration of life’s high moments, together.

Can it be done? On a wide scale? We are in the process of finding out.