According to a Pew Research poll, the share of Americans who claim no particular religion went from 7% in the 1990s to 20% in 2012 (and 33% within the 18-30 demographic) [1]. This massive trend away from religiosity in America’s youth poses an interesting challenge for civics. In America, religion has always been about more than God – the church (used here and for the rest of this post in the metonymic sense) has been the center of American communities since the founding of the country and the primary place where moral norm-setting and intergenerational interactions occurred. If we look at some of our proudest civic movements in the history of America – the abolition of slavery, the passage of the nineteenth amendment, the civil rights movement – the church seems to have played an integral role as a center for community organizing and political debate around social issues. So what happens in an America where the church no longer exists as the center for social, moral and political discussion?
The Sunday Assembly appears to be a promising attempt to fill that void. A movement started in 2013 by two London-based comedians, it has since grown to 28 assemblies consisting of thousands of people across the world. According to their website, The Sunday Assembly is an organization “dedicated to helping the people that attend, and the folk in the wider community, to make the most of this one life that we know we have.” In essence, they are all of the aspects of a church community minus God. Church hymns are replaced with pop songs, bible verses with science, philosophy and poetry. All of the content of The Sunday Assembly’s services fits into one of their broader themes: to live better, to help often and to wonder more.
Source: http://sundayassembly.com/
It is still too early to tell how successful this movement will be. Alas, the first service I would have gone to was cancelled due to the absolutely beautiful weather we’ve been having here in Boston so I have yet to experience a service for myself.
Yet the core tenets of The Sunday Assembly – community, celebration, a sense of altruism – are all intentionally identical to the core tenets of the prototypical church community. So the question then becomes do these components need God to function? Do they function because they are inherently valuable? Or do they rest on the fact that the church already has a group of people who have a strong commitment to each other and an assumption that they share deeply intimate characteristics in common?
Perhaps I’m overly optimistic, but my hypothesis is that God doesn’t have to be involved in the building of such a community. The group of people who would potentially be members of The Sunday Assembly actually does have a lot of deeply intimate characteristics in common and those traits will come to the forefront in such a setting. The act of being interested in such a community likely means they have rejected the formal religious institutions that have surrounded them for the majority of their lives. It also means they have likely spent much of their life dealing with the societal and social consequences of making such a choice. They are the people that sometimes envy the religious communities of others when they gather to celebrate religious holidays. They are the people that worry their children may feel left out during holiday season, and question whether or not they are depriving their children of a life experience by not introducing them to religion simply because of their own personal convictions against it.
There are deep emotional commonalities among the target audience for The Sunday Assembly. For that reason I believe the Sunday Assembly model will be successful and will become an important replacement for the church community in an age of decreasing religiosity. And in doing so, I think it will also take the place of the church as the center of community and, by extension, civic discussion and social change.
References:
[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/19/event-transcript-religion-trends-in-the-u-s/