Back in 2013, CNN reported a rather unusual trend: Church. But not just any church. The Church of Humanism/Atheism. Like churches and congregations who gather regularly to worship our Lord, encourage and edify one another, pray for one another, and to (hopefully) receive instruction in the Word of God, the CNN article said that certain Humanist church, around which the article centers, which was founded and operated by Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain of that church, in Cambridge Massachusetts, reported that like any traditional church, "music is played, announcements are made and scholars wax poetic about the importance of compassion and community" [1] the distinctive difference between they and a conventional church is that their church is not founded upon any deity. It is godless.
The intended message of Epstein and his intent behind his godless church:
We decided recently that we want to use the word congregation more and more often because that is a word that strongly evokes a certain kind of community - a really close knit, strong community that can make strong change happen in the world...It doesn’t require and it doesn't even imply a specific set of beliefs about anything. [2]
And as the CNN article stated, he was not alone in establishing such a caricature:
Epstein is not alone in his endeavor. Jerry DeWitt, who became an atheist and left his job as an evangelical minister, is using his pastoral experience to building an atheist church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
This Sunday, DeWitt's congregation will hold its first meeting as a "Community Mission Chapel."
"When you become a part of this congregation, this community, you are going to become part of a family," DeWitt told CNN. "There is an infrastructure there for you to land in. There is going to be someone there to do weddings and to do, unfortunately, the funerals." [3]
Dewitt denied that his church was founded to compete with Christianity or that his congregation is anti-religion:
If you are a religionist and you come and sit in our pew, the only way you can leave offended is because of what you don’t hear and what you don’t see. We won’t be there to make a stance against religion or against God. [4]
According to Epstein, these godless churches at that time seemed to be a growing trend among the irreligious:
Epstein said he gets e-mails daily from people founding atheist meet-up groups.
“Tulsa, Oklahoma; North Carolina; London; Vancouver, Canada; Houston, Texas,” Epstein said, listing the sources of the most recent e-mails. [5]
But now, at present, according The Atlantic, that trend has seen a sharp decrease with several congregations closing down due to a lack of commitment in comparison to conventional congregations whose gatherings are centered around a higher authority. What made these congregations successful at first was that they drew in secularists who were wanting to retain certain aspects of religious life but without the God upon whom those religious aspects were founded but, as The Atlantic went on to state, the failure of the atheist congregations to sustain themselves with committed members was because they could not offer a way to achieve a purpose and goal greater than one's self. [6]
Atheism is, at its core, self-centered. Purpose and meaning are foreign to it.
But The Atlantic further listed a number of other different possible reasons for the failure of these counterfeits.
1. Cost and difficulty in collecting donations:
…the basic mechanics of keeping a congregation running have proved difficult. To hire musicians and speakers, buy refreshments, and rent out a venue takes a lot of money. A traditional Church has tithings—but leaders of secular communities have found that attendees are highly suspicious of any plea for donations. Many lapsed believers harbor strong negative associations with the collection plate. [7]
2. Divisions amongst secular congregants:
Beneath the surface were other rifts. Even within the community of nonbelievers were different groups with different priorities: Some ardent atheists wanted to rail against religion, for example, or have heated debates. But at Sunday Assembly, the point wasn’t to put down faith or even to celebrate being faithless, per se—the point of being there was being there, together. [8]
3. Inexperience with forming and maintaining a congregation in comparison to those founded upon a belief in a higher authority.
Sanderson Jones, founder of the secular congregation, Sunday Assembly explains:
If Sunday Assembly was a Christian community that suddenly had brand recognition, a flock of pastors would come and bring all their skills and experience…You could buy training videos, there’d be conferences you could go to—there are all these different preexisting structures.” [9]
With The Atlantic adding:
...for secular congregations, there are no training videos. There are no “Church planting” experts to help them grow roots. They’re starting from scratch. [10]
But as The Atlantic comes around to acknowledging, the root of the ultimate failure of secular congregations is that people cannot simply have weekly meetings as an end unto itself. [11] There has to be something more binding and about more than just about the people who gather together; something to motivate a lasting commitment, further noting:
Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist studying religion at the University of British Columbia, told me that secular communities might have trouble getting members to inconvenience themselves, as people of faith routinely do for their congregations. He cited a study by Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who studied 200 American communes founded in the 19th century. Sosis found that 39 percent of religious communes were still functioning 20 years after their start, but only 6 percent of secular communes were alive after the same amount of time. And he determined that a single variable was making this difference: the number of sacrifices—such as giving up alcohol, following a dress code, or fasting—that each commune demanded of its members.
For religious communes, the more sacrifices demanded, the longer they lasted; however, this connection didn’t hold for secular communes. The implication, Norenzayan said, was that challenging rituals and taxing rules work only when they’re part of something sacred; once the veil of sacrality is removed, people no longer care to commit to things that demand their time and dedication. [12]
But secularists are not giving up:
Sosis’s point is that while costly sacrifice might not be present in these communities—and they may be suffering for that reason—they have other tools in their toolkit. They already have collective singing and live music, for example, which sets meetings apart from everyday experiences. And he believes they can and will adapt over time, evolving into something closer to conventional religion, even if no deities are involved. Secular congregations can become as meaningful as religious ones, he said, “but there has to be a sense of transcendence … Transcendence is what gives the community a higher level of meaning than going to Johnny’s Little League game.” It might mean developing more rituals, or sharing more stories. It might mean that ideals they already espouse—such as helping others, or finding wonder in nature—get elevated to a sacred level. The irony is that to get away from religion, they may need to re-create it. [13]
Left to their own devices. Creating their own rituals. Finding wonder in nature while closing themselves off to the source of that wonder. Attempting to make sacred ideals they already hold to while yet excluding the source of sacredness. Retaining a set of virtues while rejecting the source of virtue.
As Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis states:
..these Sunday Assemblies are just counterfeiting the real thing. They are an attempt to fill the human longing for meaning, purpose, and connection, because, apart from God, there really is no ultimate meaning, purpose, or hope. The atheistic worldview—which believes that this life is everything there is and when you’re dead, that’s it—doesn’t offer ultimate meaning, purpose, or hope. But the human heart yearns for these things because we’ve been created for eternity. [14]
These secular assemblies are a joke and will never be able to fill the spiritual void that was designed only for our Lord and Savior to fill.
End Notes:
1. Dan Merica, "Church without God--by design," CNN Belief Blog, June 22, 2013
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/22/church-without-god-by-design/
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Faith Hill, Assistant editor (not to be confused with the CM singer), "They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a while, It Worked,"
The Atlantic, July 21, 2019
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. Ibid
10. Ibid
11. Ibid
12. Ibid
13. Ibid
14. Ken Ham, "Church Without God--Does It Work?" Answers In Genesis, August 1, 2019
https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/climate-change/church-without-god-does-it-work/
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