Recovery Board
: RfM
Recovery from Mormonism (RfM) discussion forum.
It works as a refuge in hyper-religious areas -- but not so well in secular, less religious areas...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/
"Secular congregations such as Sunday Assembly and Oasis—a similar group started in 2012—seek to offer a solution. Both were founded by faithless seekers hoping to carry on certain aspects of religious life: the community, the moral deliberation, and the rich sense of wonder. When they were growing so rapidly in their early years, these congregations were heavily covered by media outlets. “The Hot New Atheist Church,” gushed a 2013 Daily Beast headline about Sunday Assembly. HuffPost noted that the number of assemblies had doubled in a single weekend in 2014. The media coverage emphasized the new community’s high-energy services, its celebratory message, and the top-of-your-lungs group renditions of pop anthems such as “Livin’ on a Prayer.” For those uncomfortable with the level of overt spirituality even within relatively liberal denominations, such as Unitarian Universalism, secular communities offered a different option.
But even as the growth of “nones” has revved up in the intervening years, the growth of secular congregations hasn’t kept pace. After a promising start, attendance declined, and nearly half the chapters have fizzled out—including the New York one that Walford joined. Building a durable community of nonbelievers, it turns out, is more complicated than just excising God.
If the sudden emergence of secular communities speaks to a desire for human connection and a deeper sense of meaning, their subsequent decline shows the difficulty of making people feel part of something bigger than themselves. One thing has become clear: The yearning for belonging is not enough, in itself, to create a sense of home."
"Sustaining any kind of new congregation—indeed, any new group activity at all—is hard work. But religious groups have more tradition, history, and institutional support behind them, and these factors can stand as a kind of safety net behind religious start-ups. “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,” says Sanderson Jones, one of the founders of Sunday Assembly. “You could buy training videos, there’d be conferences you could go to—there are all these different preexisting structures.” But for secular congregations, there are no training videos. There are no “Church planting” experts to help them grow roots. They’re starting from scratch.
Even more challenging than the logistical barriers are the psychological ones. Linda Woodhead, a scholar of religion and culture at Lancaster University in Great Britain, told me that structured communities just aren’t easy to form. “Meeting in a building with the same group of people every week … I don’t think there’s any natural need for that,” she said.
Woodhead believes that communities can be hugely important to people, of course—but you can’t just meet for the sake of community itself. You need a very powerful motivating element to keep people coming, something that attendees have in common.
Some congregations have that. That Salt Lake City is home to one of the most successful Oasis chapters may not be a coincidence. The chapter has become an important hub for ex-Mormons; these members are bound by the shared experience of leaving the denomination they grew up in and feeling isolated in a hometown over which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looms large.
For many nones, however, their lack of religion is not a strong part of their identity. Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at Pew Research Center, says that about one-third of nones fall into the category of “principled rejecters” of organized religion or “principled embracers” of atheism or humanism. But the majority of nones are just indifferent to religion. “On what basis would you pull them together?” Cooperman asked. “Being uninterested in something is about the least effective social glue, the dullest possible mobilizing cry, the weakest affinity principle, that one can imagine.”
Robert P. Jones, the CEO and founder of PRRI, told me that 93 percent of unaffiliated Americans say they’re not searching for a religion that would be right for them. “One appeal of a secular congregation is to be an alternative but familiar way to fill social and spiritual needs that have historically been filled by Churches and other religious congregations,” he said. “But the overwhelming number of people who were raised religious but now have left report being pretty content.” To hear all these experts talk, the surprise is less that Sunday Assembly and Oasis have shrunk than that they grew so quickly in the first place.
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. “If it’s ‘Come and go as you wish,’ that’s not going to work,” he said. Even if secular congregations could create a sense of the sacred, they tend to attract people who are explicitly looking for a community without costly rituals—one that lets you do what you want."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/
"Secular congregations such as Sunday Assembly and Oasis—a similar group started in 2012—seek to offer a solution. Both were founded by faithless seekers hoping to carry on certain aspects of religious life: the community, the moral deliberation, and the rich sense of wonder. When they were growing so rapidly in their early years, these congregations were heavily covered by media outlets. “The Hot New Atheist Church,” gushed a 2013 Daily Beast headline about Sunday Assembly. HuffPost noted that the number of assemblies had doubled in a single weekend in 2014. The media coverage emphasized the new community’s high-energy services, its celebratory message, and the top-of-your-lungs group renditions of pop anthems such as “Livin’ on a Prayer.” For those uncomfortable with the level of overt spirituality even within relatively liberal denominations, such as Unitarian Universalism, secular communities offered a different option.
But even as the growth of “nones” has revved up in the intervening years, the growth of secular congregations hasn’t kept pace. After a promising start, attendance declined, and nearly half the chapters have fizzled out—including the New York one that Walford joined. Building a durable community of nonbelievers, it turns out, is more complicated than just excising God.
If the sudden emergence of secular communities speaks to a desire for human connection and a deeper sense of meaning, their subsequent decline shows the difficulty of making people feel part of something bigger than themselves. One thing has become clear: The yearning for belonging is not enough, in itself, to create a sense of home."
"Sustaining any kind of new congregation—indeed, any new group activity at all—is hard work. But religious groups have more tradition, history, and institutional support behind them, and these factors can stand as a kind of safety net behind religious start-ups. “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,” says Sanderson Jones, one of the founders of Sunday Assembly. “You could buy training videos, there’d be conferences you could go to—there are all these different preexisting structures.” But for secular congregations, there are no training videos. There are no “Church planting” experts to help them grow roots. They’re starting from scratch.
Even more challenging than the logistical barriers are the psychological ones. Linda Woodhead, a scholar of religion and culture at Lancaster University in Great Britain, told me that structured communities just aren’t easy to form. “Meeting in a building with the same group of people every week … I don’t think there’s any natural need for that,” she said.
Woodhead believes that communities can be hugely important to people, of course—but you can’t just meet for the sake of community itself. You need a very powerful motivating element to keep people coming, something that attendees have in common.
Some congregations have that. That Salt Lake City is home to one of the most successful Oasis chapters may not be a coincidence. The chapter has become an important hub for ex-Mormons; these members are bound by the shared experience of leaving the denomination they grew up in and feeling isolated in a hometown over which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looms large.
For many nones, however, their lack of religion is not a strong part of their identity. Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at Pew Research Center, says that about one-third of nones fall into the category of “principled rejecters” of organized religion or “principled embracers” of atheism or humanism. But the majority of nones are just indifferent to religion. “On what basis would you pull them together?” Cooperman asked. “Being uninterested in something is about the least effective social glue, the dullest possible mobilizing cry, the weakest affinity principle, that one can imagine.”
Robert P. Jones, the CEO and founder of PRRI, told me that 93 percent of unaffiliated Americans say they’re not searching for a religion that would be right for them. “One appeal of a secular congregation is to be an alternative but familiar way to fill social and spiritual needs that have historically been filled by Churches and other religious congregations,” he said. “But the overwhelming number of people who were raised religious but now have left report being pretty content.” To hear all these experts talk, the surprise is less that Sunday Assembly and Oasis have shrunk than that they grew so quickly in the first place.
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. “If it’s ‘Come and go as you wish,’ that’s not going to work,” he said. Even if secular congregations could create a sense of the sacred, they tend to attract people who are explicitly looking for a community without costly rituals—one that lets you do what you want."
Uh oh ...
I did something similar to Sunday Assembly. I became Unitarian. It's not the same, probably, but the music and coffee were great. And the people, of course.