The gap left in society by religion, and its consequences
Written by an atheist
For a while now it has been clear that religious belief and practice is a minority interest in the Western world. Pew research surveys found that in Western European countries, only 22% of people attended some religious ceremony on a weekly or monthly basis, and a majority said that religion is not important in their lives.
What is also clear more recently is that the current generation of young westerners is desperately trying to plug the gap left by religion, with meditation, yoga, reams of self-help books (and yes, Medium articles), crypto-maximalism and meme-stonks, the worship of populist “strong”-men/Navy Seals/‘critical-thinkers’, internet communities, and many more which I’m sure you can think of closer to your immediate community. All of these represent, to different degrees, attempts to fill in the gaps created by the move away from organized religion as a central pillar of our societies.
Let’s break it down in to three dimensions; community, morality, and spirituality.
Community
I live in a predominantly migrant Muslim neighborhood of a Protestant Christian/Atheistic European city. The main street is mix of Turkish bakeries, Moroccan cafes, and a discreet mosque. Every day as I go about my lunchtime stroll, I walk past as the men emerge, putting on their shoes and chatting. Young, old, rich, poor, they discuss current events, inquire as to each others’ well-being, wheel and deal, and arrange plans. From asking the one who is a plumber for a favour, to inviting another to a child’s birthday party, it is clear that this is a real community. This used to be the norm in Western cities, as many communities were built around the church and local congregation.
Nowadays we have very few such spaces — places where people from all walks of life habitually gather for a shared non-transactional reason. Some semblances exist, such as sports teams, parents groups and the workplace. But most members of such groups will be of a similar age, socio-economic background and personal disposition to each other. Probably many folk will sprint off home as soon as the meeting is over. And many more members of the wider community will be absent.
TikTok-ing Alone
Over 20 years ago Roger Putnam noted the decline in participation in civic groups, especially religious and voluntary organizations, and the associated decrease in social capital and trust in democratic institutions (which we see clearly the legacy of now). Following from this there has been a concomitant increase in loneliness (an ‘epidemic’ even) and the mental and physical suffering that comes with it.
We should note the obvious point that religious communities have not all been good — many people have been rightfully repulsed from church groups due to child abuse scandals, excessive social control and corruption. But the main point is that we lack communal spaces where all strands of the community can mix and co-support, without the influence of work or other transactional motives.
Morality
Dostoevsky’s great novel The Devils (aka Demons, The Possessed, and a few other names), represented his feelings towards the young generation of ‘Nihilists’, those who had turned their back on religion and were dealing with its consequences. It is clear from his novels and notes that Dostoevsky himself grappled and struggled with the contradictions of believing in god, while also being one of the world’s most clear-eyed thinkers and a believer in science. However, what he saw in those who had fully disavowed the system of morals provided by organized religion, horrified him to the point of becoming what many saw as a treacherous conservative reactionary. What he depicted was mindless murder, rampant suicide, political subversion, madness and spiritual despair. Summed up in the key refrain:
If God is dead, then everything is permitted
While the changes in our present times are not quite as dramatic as the particular events depicted in The Devils, it is clear that our current society has also suffered from the lack of a shared moral code. It is important to note that I am not going to argue that we are more or less ‘moral’ as a society than before, but rather that there are (mostly negative) consequences to not having a clearly articulated set of shared moral principles to aspire to.
We see this expressed in narratives of social media which celebrate ‘going it alone’, personal independence, and hustle porn, at the expense of misleading, screwing people over, and ultimately sacrificing our own mental health. We see it at the extreme sides of the left, where certain groups push a kind moral relativism that makes right and wrong contingent on your identity group membership; and on the right with its cynical and confused melange of post-modern anti-scientism, ‘greed is good’, pseudo-Darwinism and the worst parts of religious bigotry.
The almost universal moral precepts of all religions (“treat others as you wish to be treated yourself”) find themselves easily pushed aside when they interfere with the secular call to make more money, consume more and prioritize the ego over all else.
Spirituality
This is probably the trickiest one to nail down and quantify. In most of mainstream secular culture, ‘spirituality’ has fallen in symbolic value as an object to be mocked or dismissed as ‘woo-woo’, bringing associations of ‘new age’, tye-die, crystals or a genre in a neglected corner of the local book shop. Alternatively it is the preserve of the western minority who are active religious believers. In other words, it is not something to be taken very seriously - in contrast to tech, science, finance, politics, and physical health. Even spectator sports are treated with more solemnity and rigorous discussion that spirituality in mainstream culture.
Yet, most of us can’t help but feel a sense of something important which transcends our daily physical reality. Anyone who has taken psychedelic drugs or listened to especially moving music that truly resonates with us, knows of experiences and truths which are not easily explained by rational-technical descriptions. When we investigate the scope of the universe we reach the limits of what science can explain — around creation, consciousness, around or multiverse implications of our current model of physics, and we are left with more questions than answers. Sam Harris, in his rather poorly book “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion”, attempts to grapple with some of these questions but has few satisfactory conclusions to make. What is clear is that there is something which we try to define as spiritual, that we feel is big and important, but struggle to express in our modern age. Even mediation is mostly offered as a stress reliever and productivity aid, rather than a way to access our spiritual side or explore our own consciousness.
In his “Civilization and its Discontents”, Freud discusses the description from a colleague of:
A feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded — as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling … is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurances of personal immortality … One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.
Freud being Freud of course ascribes this feeling to an unconscious memory of an infantile state, before the development of the sense of self where ego is indistinguishable from the world around it. Nevertheless, this description captures something critical which ties together our other two dimensions of community and morality. When we dismiss this sense of connectedness — whether it is sourced from an omniscient god, karma, or something else — do we undermine the foundations of our innate altruistic sense of obligation to each other?
What can we do?
There is a lot to be said on how we might ameliorate these issues without a return to organized supernatural-based religion. In fact too much to try and summarize in a single article, yet too little of that is satisfactory. This is something I am spending a lot of time thinking about and will try to explore in a series of further articles. I have seen examples where some of these criteria are met, such as within voluntary organizations helping refugees or community support services, some forms of mindfulness practices, and in anthropological attempts to explore the origins of our sense of morality. But all only capture one or two of the three dimensions, never them all. If you have any thoughts or suggestion on these topics please reply in comments.
