Atheism starts its megachurch: Is it a religion now?
Katie Engelhart ("Salon," September 22, 2013)
Yesterday, The Sunday Assembly—the London-based “Atheist Church” that has,
since its January launch, been stealing headlines the world over—announced
a new “global missionary tour.” In October and November, affiliated
Sunday Assemblies will open in 22 cities: in England, Ireland, Scotland,
Canada,
the United States and Australia. “I think this is the moment,” Assembly
founder Sanderson Jones told me in an email last week, “when the Sunday
Assembly goes from being an interesting phenomenon to becoming a truly global
movement.” Structured godlessness is ready for export.
The Assembly has come a long way in eight months: from scrappy East London
community venture (motto: “Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More;”
method: “part atheist church, part foot-stomping good time”) to the kind of
organization that sends out embargoed press releases about global expansion
projects. “The 3,000 percent growth rate might make this non-religious
Assembly the fastest growing church in the world,” organizers boast.
There’s more to come: In October, the Sunday Assembly (SA) will launch a
crowdfunded indiegogo campaign, with the ambitious goal of raising £500,000
(or, about $793,000). This will be followed by a second wave of openings. “
The effort reads as part quixotic hipster start-up, part Southern
megachurch.
Like any attempt at organized non-belief, the Sunday Assemblies will
attract their fair share of derision from critics. But the franchise model
might
dismay some followers too. For a corporate empire needs an executive board;
a brand needs brand managers; a federation needs a strict set of guiding
tenets—and consequences for those who stray from the fold. And isn’t that
all wholly opposed to Freethought?
That’s not to say that Assembly founders are moving forward blindly. What
should not be overlooked is that as the “atheist church” becomes more “
Church” than ever, it is working to downplay its Atheism—opening itself up to
a broader kind of irreligiosity.
As of now, Jones is still tweaking the message. But he’s confident in the
model: “It’s a way to scale goodness.”
Amen.
*
I went to my first Sunday Assembly last April. Then, we were a crowd of
several hundred heathens, gathered at a crusty deconsecrated church in East
London. The Assembly had a wayward, whimsical feel. At a table by the door,
ladies served homemade cakes and tea. The house band played Cat Stevens. Our
“priest” wore pink skinny jeans. Many attendees were modish
20-somethings, and pretty obviously hungover.
I did not need to be sold on the idea (explained nicely here by philosopher
Alain de Botton). Like the Sunday Assembly’s founders, stand-up comics
Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones, I don’t think religion should have a monopoly
on community. I like the idea of a secular temple, where atheists can
enjoy the benefits of an idealized, traditional church—a sense of community, a
thought-provoking sermon, a scheduled period of respite, easy access to
community service opportunities, group singing, an ethos of self-improvement,
free food—without the stinging imposition of God Almighty.
Evidently, I was not alone. A few months later, SA was boasting 400-600
regular attendees. As the hype mounted, Evans and Jones began receiving emails
from all over the world from would-be Sunday Assembly founders.
Jones admits that he had aspirations to expand from the get-go. Eventually,
the founders opted for a controlled unfolding, choosing to personally
license and launch 22 Sunday Assembly branches within a 2-month period.
One new Sunday Assembly will launch in Los Angeles, in December. “We’ll
have a godless congregation in the city of angels,” laughs Ian Dodd, a
53-year-old camera operator, and one of the chapter’s founders.
For a number of years, Dodd—a lifelong atheist, apart from “a brief period
as a young adult when I went looking for that something more”— had been a
member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church in Santa Monica. And
for a while, he liked that well enough. “The Unitarian Church has this
idea of ‘radical tolerance.’ It respects everything. It’s all good. Well that’
s fine on one level, but at some point it becomes a little diluted.” Dodd
was looking for a more robust secularism. In January, he caught word of the
Sunday Assembly. A few months later, he was sitting across from Sanderson
Jones at a pub in Hollywood, plotting the Assembly’s LA debut.
“The church model has worked really well for a couple of thousand years,”
Dodd muses. “What we’re trying to do is hold on to the bath water while
throwing out the baby Jesus.”
*
Organized Atheism will require paperwork.
A recent article by the newly-minted Sunday Assembly Everywhere (SAE)
network outlines the SA affiliation process: Interested groups must apply for
a
Sunday Assembly charter and license agreement, “which will give you the
right to use all the Sunday Assembly materials, logos, positive vibe and
goodwill.” The next step is to form a legal entity, probably an
“unincorporated
association… which allows you to have a bank account.” And then, training
from SA HQ, either in the UK or via “webinars and telecals worldwide.” If
all goes well, aspiring founders will be invited to sign “A SAE Stage I
Charter. This is a ‘provisional license,’ which gets you running your Sunday
Assembly using our tried-and-tested formats and themes.” This is followed
by a peer-review process and evaluation by other SA chapters. Nailed it? A “
Stage II Charter” will be issued, granting full SAE membership. The model
is inspired by TEDx.
In his press release, Jones refers to “hundreds and, if all goes to plan,
thousands” of new SA communities.
Eventually, Jones and Evans hope their Assemblies will offer more
church-like services: Sunday school, weddings, funerals. Nicole Steeves, a
36-year-old librarian who is launching Sunday Assembly Chicago, told me that
since
becoming a mother, “I have keenly felt the absence of what I think are the
best parts of a church: friendships built on common beliefs; a built-in
network of helpers for child care, sickness, etc.” Stuart Balkham is launching
Sunday Assembly in Brighton, with his wife Anita. Balkham, a 31-year-old
trained architect who now works as a music festival organizer, was inspired
by his Church of England upbringing. “The Sunday Assembly is unabashedly
copying a lot of established Church traditions, but removing what many people
feel uncomfortable with if they aren’t religious.”
As the atheist church becomes more church-like, however, it seems to be
deliberately downplaying its atheism. Where the Assembly once stridently
rejected theism (at April’s Assembly, Jones poked fun at the crucifixion), it
is
now far more equivocal. “How atheist should our Assembly be?”, Jones
wrote in a recent blog post. “The short answer to that is: not very.”
“‘Atheist Church’ as a phrase has been good to us. It has got us publicity,
” Evans elaborated. “But the term ‘atheist’ does hold negative
connotations. Atheists are often thought to be aggressive, loud and damning of
all
religion, where actually most atheists, in the UK anyway, are not defined by
their non-belief.” At a recent assembly, Jones opined: “I think atheism
is boring. Why are we defining ourselves by something we don’t believe in?”
… Because that’s what atheism is?
Evans and Jones must clearly tread softly. Their model is not about
de-converting the religious, or bashing theists, or decrying the lunacy of
faithfulness. And indeed, their “radically inclusive” model was always going to
appeal to atheism’s cagier cousins: humanism, unitarianism and agnosticism.
Yet I wonder if the Assembly risks diluting its brand if it continues to
shed its muscular non-belief. Might it become McAtheism: a Secular Lite
version of its former self? The Sunday Assembly refusing the “atheist” label
seems akin to Ms. Magazine deciding that “feminist” is a bad word after all.
Still, the timing is certainly ripe. There is a growing openness to viewing
religion/irreligion as a spectrum, rather than a dichotomy—and to
institutionalizing faithlessness. Look at Harvard University’s wildly
successful
Humanist Community. Or Florida’s first public monument to atheism. Or efforts
to hire secular army chaplains.
Ronald Dworkin’s forthcoming (and posthumous) Religion Without God promises
to be an erudite commentary on this trend. “The familiar divide between
people of religion and without religion is too crude,” Dworkin wrote in an
excerpt published in The New York Review of Books. Dworkin argues for a more
religious irreligiosity, a “religious atheism.” To this end, he quotes
Albert Einstein, a noted atheist:
“To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself
as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties
can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this
feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this
sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”
*
There are a lot of ways this could flop. For starters, atheists might not
like it. “One challenge in the discussion that’s occurred on the rise of
atheist churches so far,” explains Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the
American Humanist Association, “is that it tends to overlook the fact that
the majority of involved atheists and humanists aren’t actually interested
in personally being involved in a congregation atmosphere.”
Even amongst followers, it could be that the Atheist Church model is only
palatable when it is decentralized and hyper-local. I wonder if the original
Assembly’s draw was, in part, its rookie vibe: its mistakes, its
silliness, its earnestness, its East London-ness.
There are lots of fun ways to play this out. Imagine that Sunday Assembly
Everywhere does take of with rip-roaring success. Will London become
secularism’s answer to Vatican City? Might the Atheist Church subdivide into
Orthodox, Conservative and Reform branches of godlessness? Will Atheism have
its
own Great Schism? Its own Martin Luther, touting a new and better way to
not believe? Or might the Sunday Assembly go the way of the American
megachurch: migrating from young urban centers to prefab suburban main
streets?
Either way, Sanderson Jones is confident that the model will spread. “We
have the most natural human urge to do this,” he insists: to organize
ourselves around institutions of meaning. I am inclined to agree that “Live
Better, Help Often, and Wonder More” is a lovely motto to build around.
And as for detractors? “I don’t expect much objection from religious
communities. They are happy for us to use their church model,” Jones muses. “I
think it’s more aggressive atheists who will have an issue with it.”
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