Perry Bacon, a columnist for The Washington Post, has an essay about his experience with Christianity titled “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 New York Times colleagues Jessica Grose and Nicholas Kristof.
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.”
Reading Bacon’s lament, I recalled a column I wrote six years ago called “Save the Mainline,” a somewhat puckish call for lapsed Protestants on the secular left to return to the country’s declining liberal churches and reinvigorate mainline Christianity. The interesting thing is that Bacon himself basically endorses my various arguments but still can’t quite bring himself to actually be the change he seeks:
I know I could be a member of a congregation if I really wanted to. I could attend a Christian church on Sundays and teach my daughter about other beliefs the rest of the week. Or make churchgoing something I do alone […]
I’ve also thought about starting some kind of weekly Sunday-morning gathering of nones, to follow in my father’s footsteps in a certain way, or trying to persuade my friends to collectively attend one of the Unitarian churches in town and make it younger and more racially diverse.
But I’ve not followed through on any of these options. With all my reservations, I don’t really want to join an existing church. And I don’t think I am going to have much luck getting my fellow nones to join something I start. My sense is that the people who want what church provides are going to the existing Christian churches, even if they are skeptical of some of the beliefs. And those who aren’t at church are fine spending their Sunday mornings eating brunch, doing yoga or watching Netflix.
Again, I have my default conservative reaction here, which is that of course you can’t expect to fully garner the benefits of church without some kind of real commitment, some actual dogma or belief.
But the individual life isn’t just a sociological generalization; there’s no reason Perry Bacon personally can’t buck these trends, can’t turn his yearning for church into a provisional reality, reservations and all. Nor that some others couldn’t make the same leap with him — especially because on the evidence of trends in mental health and happiness, he’s wrong that most nonreligious Americans are simply “fine” with the current post-Christian modes of meaning-making, even if they don’t see churchgoing as a natural solution to their distress.
For Bacon himself, the key obstacle to a return to churchgoing seems to be the fear of a kind of intellectual inconsistency or hypocrisy, for himself but especially as a parent. “I don’t want to take her to a place that has a specific view of the world,” he writes of his daughter, “as well as answers to the big questions and then have to explain to Charlotte that some people agree with all of the church’s ideas, Dad agrees with only some and many other people don’t agree with any.”
To which I might respond: Why not? The desire to bring up your child inside a coherent world picture that parents and schools and churches all mutually reinforce is an admirable one; it speaks to the natural human desire for wholeness and integration.
But if that kind of environment doesn’t exist for you, if you yourself don’t have a world picture that fully integrates the political and the moral with the metaphysical, then introducing your kids to a multiplicity of experiences and values, and acknowledging upfront that people have different answers to the big questions and you can value institutions without fully agreeing with them — all this seems like an entirely responsible way to parent. (I hope so, at least, since thanks to various accidents of ancestry and geography and professional life — their father is a conservative-leaning New Englander living in a liberal-academic town, etc. — my own kids will live with a version of this pluralism throughout childhood, and no matter how solid their Catholic faith, they’ll always know their dad wrote a book criticizing the pope.)
Obviously, you don’t want to lay too much ambiguity on a 3-year-old. But if you’re going to raise your kids with some metaphysical ambiguity no matter what, then “We go to a church that believes X because we think church has a lot to offer you, even though Dad only believes in some of X” seems like an entirely honest thing to tell children. And any difficulty they have in handling it seems better than the alternative of just leaving what Bacon feels is a hole in his family life where religious community is supposed to fit.
But the challenge does run a little deeper if the only parts of church that Dad believes in are the secondary goods of religion (community and morality and solidarity and choral music), while the primary good — communion with God and the integration of human life with divine purposes — is assumed to probably be so much wishful thinking even before the specific dogmatic questions get involved.
And that does seem to be (maybe?) where Bacon has ended up. In his account of his own life journey and intellectual progression, he seems to cast the religious stage as the unsophisticated, not-fully-developed phase, while the more secular phase is the serious, realistic one, whatever its deficits of community and meaning. In which case the problem with churchgoing isn’t just that Bacon would have to tell his daughter that her dad doesn’t agree with a particular dogma or moral teaching at their hypothetical church. It’s that to be honest, he’d eventually have to tell her that he thinks the primary theory for why the church exists at all is probably just a pleasant fancy, and in their quest for community they’re free riding somehow on other people’s faith.
Even here, though, especially if you’re talking about a nondenominational church where there aren’t issues of sacramental Communion to wrestle with, I think this “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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
