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How to lead a religious life without God

Some ‘Nones’ navigate spirituality, community without theistic beliefs
The number of people who have an ambivalent connection to religion is growing. Dubbed “Nones” because they do not have a religious affiliation, they grew from 15 percent of the U.S. population in 2007 to 20 percent in 2012. Almost a third of them are younger than 30.

NEW YORK – When I tell my socially progressive, atheist friends that I’m “culturally Christian,” they’re momentarily concerned that I have a latent preoccupation with guns and the Pledge of Allegiance. Using the term with devout believers gets me instructions that I just need to read more sophisticated theology to come around.

I’ve tried hard to accept my fully secular identity, and, at other times, I’ve tried to read myself into theistic belief, going all the way through divinity school as part of the effort. Still, I remain unable to will myself into any belief in God or gods – but also unable to abandon my relationship to the Episcopalian faith into which I was born and to the ancient stories from which it came.

And though I am without a god, I am not alone.

‘Nones’ on the rise

The group of nonbelievers dubbed “Nones” in the media – because they don’t mark a religious affiliation on demographic surveys – grew from 15 percent of the U.S. population to 20 percent between 2007 and 2012; almost a third of them are younger than 30. These are the people who identify with ambivalent, ambiguous statements like “I’m spiritual, but not religious”; “I’m kind of agnostic”; “Now I’m an atheist, but I grew up Catholic”; or “I believe in something, but I don’t know if it’s God.”

There are those of us, too, who still feel a profound connection to the Christianity we grew up with but who can no longer – or never could – connect those feelings to theistic belief. Some miss the ritual of singing in unison or wishing peace to their neighbors in a pew. Others miss feeling grounded in a community where they can celebrate life’s milestones and heartbreaks. Some find secular life lacking in sufficient ethical frameworks and systems of accountability to reinforce them. For many, it is a combination of all three.

All those severed connections, though, mean a new opportunity to create spaces for the “culturally Christian” nonbeliever and to examine how churches lost them in the first place.

Christianity is the dominant religion in the United States, but the cultural experience of Christianity here varies at least as widely as its practice does across denominations, families and individuals.

Despite the persistence of “Catholic guilt,” only a third of people who identified as Catholic in a General Social Survey in 2014 were actually practicing the faith. Polls conducted by the evangelical research firm Barna Group found that young people leave because of factors such as the church’s views on sexuality and science as well as its failure to acknowledge “the problems of the real world.”

Their liberal counterparts don’t fare much better: “Liberal Protestant churches, which have famously lax requirements about praxis, belief and personal investment, therefore often end up having a lot of half-committed believers in their pews,” writes Connor Wood, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Boston University.

Cultural ties to religious history

But not belonging to a religious institution doesn’t mean you don’t have a cultural attachment to your religious history. Just look at the more familiar concept of cultural Judaism. Among younger American Jews, cultural ties are increasingly the basis of their connection to their faith; 32 percent of Jewish American millennials told a Pew survey in 2013 that their Jewish identity is based on ancestral, ethnic and cultural connections rather than religious ones.

Rabbi Miriam Jerris of the Society of Humanistic Judaism says cultural Jews and cultural Christians who celebrate their religious traditions have a lot in common (though they’re not completely analogous because Judaism has a long history as both a religion and an ethnicity).

“These people are looking for communities and for memories from their background, but they want to do it in an intellectually consistent way,” Jerris says.

The decline in religious affiliation has Christian churches worried, but they aren’t alone in their concern.

“The big question I have is: Where are they going in times of crisis? Where do they go to celebrate life’s joys?” says Chris Stedman, the executive director of the Yale Humanist Community and the author of Faitheist, which argues that atheists can find common ground with born-again Christians. “There are people looking for centralized ways to organize their communities around moral identities that they might be missing.”

The “New Atheism” of the early 2000s gave us firebrands like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, but as scientists rather than philosophers or organizers, and many believers thought that they misrepresented religion and, thus, failed to give people much to rally around beside anger at their loved ones.

The Sunday Assembly, a self-described “godless congregation,” has made the news lately for its growing numbers, and it is good that people find community there. But its motto of “live better, help often, wonder more” and its mission “to help everyone find and fulfill their full potential” leave something to be desired for those who feel the moral stakes are higher in the Christian narrative. Even people raised without religion can be fatigued by this feel-good focus on the self. People don’t just want to feel good; they want to be good.

Believers alongside nonbelievers

Some Christians who do believe in God are trying anew to reach those of us who don’t. One is Pope Francis, whose invitation to atheists to seek peace alongside believers, along with his many critiques of structural inequality, suggest a potential readiness to broaden what it means to be a Christian.

Marquette University professor Daniel Maguire, a theologian and former Catholic priest, makes the case in his book Christianity Without God for reclaiming the Bible’s epic moral narrative and leaving behind its theistic elements.

“When believers and nonbelievers are working together, the God thing doesn’t matter a bit,” he told me. “It is just a backdrop to the issues in the real world.” Cultural Christianity has already emerged in practice, even before it’s become a self-professed identity.

But why should cultural Christians bother trying to reconcile with churches?

“People very understandably associate religious institutions with very real harm and danger,” Stedman says. “But, institutions are also places where people share ideas and where they organize, and heal and hold each other accountable.”

As Maguire points out, the biblical metaphor for society is a household, not an institution but a dwelling place for a family. Though families will quarrel over what they don’t have in common, they are meant to come together for what they do: an ancient story of a new family formed in a place most of us will never go and a call to peace in the world that none of us can ever entirely live up to.



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