Our decreasing religiosity should not be feared

It no longer requires the skills of a social scientist to conclude that religious life in the U.S., and the rest of the world for that matter, is decreasing.

We see it all around us. Society’s increasing distaste with organized religion is evident in virtually every sector.

There are a number of factors involved. But primarily it is the bad name that much of organized religion has increasingly made for itself, especially over the last 50 years. Of course, not all spiritual or religious groups that could be classified as “organized” add to these negative impressions. But those who do, in their zeal to protect and expand their own religious ideas amid a world of shrinking interest, have made grave errors that directly work against the faith ideas they claim to promote.

For instance, so-called Christians who directly work against immigration reform and the welcoming of refugees are doing so in direct contradiction to scripture. Those who support capital punishment, sexism, discrimination of any kind, retributive justice, these are all highly anti-christian ideas. Promoting them, while claiming their faith has authorized them to do so, steadily paints them into a corner where nothing but extinction exists.

It is a problem they have invited upon themselves. And they have no one but themselves to blame for it.

Further, clinging to old ideas about how God functions in the world incrementally alienates one former believer after another. Mid-century revisions to the Bible regarding homosexuality, for instance, have revealed themselves to be utterly false and not based upon the lived reality we have experienced since the legal recognition of same-sex marriages. The world has not fallen apart over it.

I’ve heard the far-right’s religious arguments which claim that the problems visited upon our world today are God’s punishment for the welcoming of the LGBTQ community into wider society. If that’s true, where was God during the Holocaust? Where was God’s wrath over the abuse of thousands of children at the hands of Catholic leadership? Where is God’s punishment over the systematic destruction of our planet, which they claim is God’s creation? If God had a mind to punish us for things, It has a slipshod way of approaching it.

If there is a God, It is certainly not to blame for the decline of religious life. It is the religions themselves.

However, I still contend that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We are still a communal species that relies upon studied practices of cooperation, mutual support, and social equity among us in order to thrive and function.

We are still in need of much of what religion has to offer. Namely, spiritual community, emotional support, a place to explore our existential concerns.

If these are all things that we still intrinsically need, yet find no home in religion, are we getting them somewhere else? One could argue that all communities, tribes, clubs and organizations hold the potential to address these concerns without an overt theological mantle to gird them. Are they filling the gap left by a decreasing interest in organized faith?

Over 80% of people still believe in the existence of a higher power of some kind. That much is statistically true, though it continues to decrease over time. Yet this percentage of people are not uniformly attending a church, synagogue, mosque, or other forms of traditional religious life.

It may be that humanism ultimately replaces religion entirely. Will that be a bad thing? There are plenty who would say yes. But humanism has a high moral standard that increasingly supersedes the so-called moralism of contemporary religious life.

Humanism is a belief independent of theological ideas that stresses human dignity, ethical practices, and the need for shared community and social support. Much of humanism rejects the metaphysical or supernatural, but they are not mutually exclusive. One can derive their ethical standards from humanist beliefs, while still exploring the notion that there is more to us than us.

Perhaps religion was merely laying the groundwork for a greater understanding to come. Perhaps religion was the appropriate and reasonable precursor to even greater understandings of God’s creation.

Regardless, we are outgrowing religious life on this planet. Yet our desire for social justice continues to expand. The decline in religious life has not resulted in a decline in interest for equality and fairness and compassion. What does that tell you? Maybe religion will prove itself to have been the training wheels we needed in order to gain our own balance.

My advice here is to fear not. The world is not crumbling, it is experiencing the growth pains of advancement. We are dispensing with old standards, and they are not going quietly. Comfort them. It is ironic that we should seek to comfort the very things which appear to strive for our disquiet. But that is the lesson inherent within the very scriptures they so assiduously seek to ignore.

Wil Darcangelo, M.div, is a Unitarian Universalist minister at the First Parish of Fitchburg and the First Church of Lancaster. Email him at wildarcangelo@gmail. com. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok @ wildarcangelo. His blog, Hopeful Thinking, can be found at hopefulthinkingworld. blogspot.com.