This is something that I’ve been hyper-exposed to as an adult. My first ten years in the Navy, I moved eleven times. I’m single, and so all that taken together makes it extraordinarily difficult to establish and maintain close ties in real life. As an added bonus, I spent six of those ten years overseas, not all at once, and not even in the same overseas location.
Then, when it comes time to do something like renew my security clearance, they want me to list contacts from each of the places I’ve lived so they can investigate my background. Not just work contacts, but social.
Seriously? You think I befriended even two non-Navy people the six months each I lived in Charleston? Ballston Spa? San Diego? God forbid Yokosuka and Bahrain? And don’t even get me started on Iraq…
And then there’s the inevitable (when you lead that kind of a life) trip to the psychologist, when they want to try and divine meaning from your lack of social network, as if having gone ten plus years without close friends means it couldn’t possibly be that you have PTSD, because your lack of a social network predates your claim of PTSD. You must have a personality disorders—yeah, that’s it! A *personality disorder, because NORMAL people would have more friends after ten years.
But then “normal” people don’t get forced to move eleven times in ten years.
So much of what we assume as “normal” is, I think based on out-moded assumptions.
*No, they didn’t actually diagnose me with a personality disorder, thank god (figure of speech), but it’s clear that there are certain assumptions made about what constitutes “normal” and those assumptions seem to be more in line with the experiences of a Vietnam-era draftee than a long-serving (and long-suffering) 21st century volunteer force that maybe doesn’t go home right away (or maybe doesn’t even really have a home in the usual sense, but lives a nomadic existence where they move around every couple of years on average).
Don’t know if this has been said yet, but the internet makes it easier for doubters to hear the other side. Once you start questioning religion, it’s easier nowadays to find people who will affirm—rather than belittle or shame—your growing skepticism. Pre-internet, that was hard to do, especially if you lived in an echo chamber of believers. In the past, you were stuck with only the norms that were in meatspace.
One of my earliest experiences with message boards was on a small forum where atheists and believers would debate each other. I was in my early 20s and still called myself a Christian even though I was more of a believer of Jesus’ teachings than his divinity. Just the process of putting to words my thoughts and ideas forced me to confront my own belief system and realize that I was too empirically-minded to lump myself in with people who believed in God.
In the absence of the internet, would I have had this epiphany? Maybe. But it’s likely I would have not. So then I would’ve
continued to affiliate myself with a religion I only half heartedly believed in, I would’ve felt obligated to go to church, and then later I would’ve raised my kids to see the church as just one those things you gotta do.
Millennials, unlike the previous generations, don’t really remember a time when they couldn’t access opinions outside the bubble of their meatspace community. The internet has always been there for them. When they get old enough to start doubting what they’ve been raised to believe, all they have to do is google and they will find plenty of well-written texts, from well-respected people, explaining the flaws with religion and how religious thinking has hurt people.
The church used to be able to control how people thought. It can’t do that very easily now.
Well, I’m surrounded by Old Order Mennonites. (Nice people, and good neighbors, IME.) So I would say that it looks pretty healthy from here.
The area’s also full of other types of Mennonites and assorted types of more mainstream Christians. Most villages have several active churches; while one sometimes closes down, others appear. I don’t know how religious all the people are who attend them – some of it may be more community than faith; but a lot of community things are still organized through the churches. You don’t have to be religious to benefit from, donate to, or work at the food pantry, for instance; but it’s hosted in a church.
I’m 68. My parents are dead. Many of my friends’ parents are dead – two of them in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been diagnosed within the past year with a couple of major health problems; neither expected to be fatal in the short term, but a definite wake up call that hey, I’m nearly threescore years and ten; and one of them carrying a strong recommendation for a medical procedure to be done soon that I find definitely scary. A number of my friends are also now in and out of doctors’ offices with considerable frequency.
Nope. I’ve thought nearly all my life that it would be nice to believe some of that stuff, especially some of the things about afterlife (definitely not all of them. Would not be remotely comforting to believe in hell, for instance.) But that’s not remotely the same thing as actually believing it.
I think you would be wrong. You are presuming that the very worst characters reveling in the very worst aspects of the very worst denominations are the norm. They are not.
The norm, as I have personally observed it in nearly 30 years of church-going, is that ordinary people generally enjoy going to church because of their need for spiritual uplift, for comforting meaningful ritual, and for a society of mutual aid and support.
It is obvious that the churches, by and large, being repositories of tradition, have not been able to figure out how to serve the needs of people in the forefront of the most rapid and complete technological and cultural changes ever known to humankind. Nor are they being replaced with anything that fills the needs they did.
There is no meaningful ritual, no mutual aid and support, no spiritual uplift, in the secular world. Community, as once revolved around both church and communal work, does not exist except in the most attenuated forms.
You will probably say those things are pointless, outdated, pathetic remnants of a benighted past. I tend to doubt it myself.
My grandmother became an atheist in the equivalent of a foxhole.
She and her Christian best friend were at a demonstration against the Czar. Cossacks came through and rode them down. Her friend was killed, while praying for God to save her.
My grandmother was a vehement atheist for the rest of her life.
I expect plenty of people have lost their faith on battlefields.
I didn’t say that the Bible says killing is always wrong, I said most people I know that are against abortion say they are against it because the ten commandments say that thou shalt not kill and yet many of these same folks are strong proponents of the death penalty. This is the hypocritical thinking that can drive rational people from religion.
Yes in the bible god kills(or orders killed) more people then the worst human offender ever. The same people that support these actions by saying how great god is turn around and talk about god being all loving. I don’t think all loving and genocide are equivalent. When confronted with the differences the standard reply from most Christians I have spoken with is “God works in mysterious ways or we can’t know god’s reason.” What a cop out of an answer. It really means I don’t want to think logically about it.
These types of actions/thinking by believers and god in my opinion drive people away from from religion.
Many people who are against abortion for religious reasons are also against the death penalty. Catholic doctrine is an example. There are others.
Anyway, asking a garden-variety Christian about such questions will probably get you a vague and confused answer in any case. Being a theologian or ethics expert is not one of the requirements for baptism. Most Christian folks don’t think any harder than anyone else does. But they don’t think less, either.
Perhaps I went a bit overboard in using the word bulk. I should have said a higher proportion than in the past of those who remain in the more traditional churches are the judgmental types. I think it depends on church. Some, like the Southern Baptists and the Catholics, are probably becoming more conservative. Some of the people who have moved on from those types of churches have moved to nondenominational Christian type churches rather than atheism. It’s definitely a complex phenomenon.
As I said, I have spoken with many people who are against abortion and their stated reason is that the bible says thou shalt not kill. Many of them also happen to be pro death penalty despite the thou shalt not kill. In no way meaning it as a personal attack but I think religious folks do think less, that is how they are able accept all the contradictions with religion.
Off the top of my head, expending very minimal effort:
Meaningful ritual: Sports, patriotic displays, and the heavily secularized parts of a great many holidays, including nominally religious holidays like Christmas and Easter, but also those established by the government such as Thanksgiving, July 4th, Memorial Day, and so on.
Mutual aid and support: There are, in fact, secular groups, that get together, hang out, maybe even put on an hour or two long event each weekend. Some also do charity. The example I am most familiar with would be the Atheist a Community of Austin, which has been putting on a live (one-time local cable access, now strictly web-based) TV show each Sunday with an open audience—and they go to or host dinner afterwards. There are many others in the explicitly atheist or secular variety, at the local, regional, and national/international levels, some of which are specifically related to some of the things you or other seems to think secular individuals are incapable of dealing with outside religion, including Grief Beyond Belief and Recovering from Religion. But beyond that, are not a great many civic and community organizations like, say, the VFW and DAV, also examples of secular (non-religious) mechanisms for mutual aid and support?
Spiritual uplift: As I said, this depends on what you mean by spiritual. If you mean “that feeling you get when a choir starts belting out hymns” and like phenomena, then I dare say you could get those at a concert at your local high school even, to say nothing of the experience offered at pay for entry music festivals.
Do these examples (discounting perhaps the spiritual, depending on your definition) not fit the bill for lo those things you seem to think the secular world lacks?
I’m sure there are many reasons people’s attitudes to religion have changed.
Religion is becoming increasingly political. To be sure, it has been involved in politics for many hundreds of years — from the Papacy, the Lutheran and Anglican schisms, anything to do with Israel or India. But members may not agree with the political direction. Trump may not be an exemplar of Christian values, but has broad Evangelical support, for other reasons.
I think religious ritual has beauty, tradition and value. But I agree there are many examples of ritual in society. Some have value.
Internet communities seem like a good substitute for social connections. Many people spend “too much time” on the Web. It has many pluses, and many negatives, poorly understood.
Religion is a sign of commitment and faith. Any worthwhile commitment takes time and effort. People think they have less time. They certainly have a lower attention span. Faith has value, but explanations are important too.
Peer pressure remains important. You are more likely to be religious if you live in a place where this is valued. But people are more mobile and may not know their neighbours.
frankly, they are all very weak sauce, with the exception of the older mutual aid/service clubs like the VFW, Rotary, Elks – all of which are losing membership for the same reasons as churches are.
The idea that watching professional sports is a ritual of the same meaningfulness as a Mass? Wow. Words fail me.
If you have never experienced anything of a spiritual nature, then there is really no point in discussing that particular function, as it isn’t one of the things that can be explained in words.
Thanksgiving, which has essentially three functions, eating together, family, and the evocation of gratitude, is I think on almost the same level in some ways.
I am not saying that secular activities cannot take up the functions that religion has always filled, I’m just saying that they haven’t, or at least, not very well.
I put minimal effort into coming up with examples precisely because I kind of figured you’d respond in this fashion—the examples seem quite obvious to me, to the point it strains credibility to think you couldn’t come up with them yourself. I’m not at all surprised you’d hand-wave them.
The decline may be part of a long trend spanning several decades, and partly due to increasing secularization as part of industrialization. But as the latter starts falling apart due to limits to growth, then we might see the decline reversed.
I’m on the younger end of Generation X and was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist. It was … stultifying, and at the time I had a great attention span (not like today!). I simply do not understand how some of my childhood friends are still going to the church. I’m glad that it only affected me one day per week (although significantly so that one day). While I had friends there, I had more friends outside, and when I left I simply lost touch with them. If smartphone had existed in those days, the church would have forbidden people from using them, and the same with ebook readers, eaudiobook readers, and the like… they would have lots of bored members.
I’m male, so if I see the church as sexist, I can only imagine it would be much worse for female members, who would notice slight directed at them that I would miss. (“Husbands and wives should be equal, but in the event of a disagreement the husband’s choice prevails.” So not at all equal, given a marriage consists of exactly two people. I wish I was making that up, but that’s a paraphrase of what the pastor actually said.) I wonder if churches today are better at hiding their sexism, but the women in the audience (at that time) did not act with outrage.
I’m straight, and did not know of anyone who wasn’t straight as a kid. (Of course, I later learned of a few people who I knew who aren’t straight. It’s not a “visible” minority, usually.) Generally I ignored the rampant homophobia. I do not ignore that today, even though that hatred is not directed at me. Millennials are far more likely to know gay people than people from my generation as children. I don’t know how a group that preaches literal hate speech against the friends of their own young members can possibly keep many of them.
I’m an older millennial and this is very true for me. My parents were devout Catholics, and I had to go to church and Sunday school and all that, but I never really believed. I realized I was an atheist shortly before my mother passed away when I was young, and despite her death and how much I wanted to see her again, I couldn’t fool myself into believing in an afterlife.
Growing up gay and trans pushed me even farther away from religion as I’ve heard so many “loving” Christians say people like me should be killed, or locked up, or sent to a deserted island so we won’t pervert the rest of society with our “wickedness”. This has caused me to live in fear for much of my life in the closet. I do respect some religions like Wicca, but ones like Christianity and Islam are just evil to their core.
And this here former Airman has “Athiest” on her old dog tags, so don’t tell me there aren’t any in foxholes.
Logistically, I don’t see how this trend could reverse unless society as we know it radically changes. Like,
something happens that completely disrupts the flow of information so that people no longer have access to diverse opinions, leaving us back in a kind of Dark Age v. 2.0. I really do believe information access is the single most powerful opponent to religious belief.
We’re not just talking about church attendance. We’re talking people rejecting the religious dogma that previous generations never thought to question. As this happens, new generations will be raised to see atheism and secularism as the default. How do you get a bunch of people to believe that have never believed before? You don’t have to do or believe in anything to be atheist, so there is no inertia to work against if you want to keep on doing or believing in nothing. Religious followers, in contrast, have to demonstrate adherence. This means work and effort and often sacrifice in time and money.
