3/30/2024
This past month, I went to a church for the first time. For context, I’m agnostic, but I’ve always wanted to know what millions of Americans are up to every Sunday. What is this experience, this lifestyle, that a decreasing amount of my peers are engaging in generation after generation? Why is it that people are so skeptical of religion? I’m curious why people continue to practice their faith diligently.
The Service
Walking in, I really had no idea what to expect. Church service was a mixture of periodically singing hymns along with the choir, listening to a pastor speak, and praying together. The pastor spoke on how we could resolve everyday anxiety by observing the outside world and turning our attention away from self-focused worry to the concerns of neighbors, family members, strangers. He concluded by stating that we should ultimately seek and trust in the kingdom of God to alleviate our greatest worries. I sat towards the back, at times glancing to see how others were taking the sermon in. The audience was an older, predominantly White / Korean, demographic with the occasional kids sprinkled in. There was some coughs here and there, but for the most part, it was silent; the pastor’s voice consumed the whole room, filling every last corner and crevice. The attention Christians give their pastors is so unlike college classrooms where students are glancing away at their phones and laptops every other minute. At a church, it feels like someone—maybe God—is watching you, and you’d best at least put on a good show of attention. You feel a little stiff.
After the sermon ended and the mumbled prayer verses completed, I stuck around to chat. Most church members I met were raised Christian. One woman said how she was raised in a conservative household where her parents portrayed God as punishing and authoritative, and it was only until her teens that she saw Him as a loving, compassionate figure. Having Him added light and warmth to her life. For most people, while the belief framework of Christianity was obviously important, it was more-so the community component of the church that kept members coming back. One girl said that she appreciated that the church was inter-generational (the ages ranged from 5 to 70) and welcoming of everyone. I also felt it, even as a total non-believing stranger pulling up. People recognized that I was new and immediately welcomed me into their circles.
At times, it felt uncomfortable to be in a space where righteousness was painted all over the walls—a space of rainbows and sunshines and “eternal” light. It felt like I would be swept up into a dreamland, devoid of true reality and away from the present moment. It was like I were wearing cloudy glasses and would be deceived, exploited, and crushed while I was caught up in this great illusion. It’s like how you’ll hear a great, motivational speech (akin to the hymns and choir singing their inspirational music), walk away feeling amazing—the world suddenly so bright and so happy and so beautiful—and come back to your regular life without changing a thing. It felt like a big lie, like these sermons put you in a happy, numbed, ignorant state where your problems weren’t problems. It seems like Christians invent an all-powerful figure just to make you feel less alone and save you from the darkness. But the world is crushing, and you need all the help you can get—is how Christians might reply.
The Workshop
I think it would be apt to describe church as a weekly lesson on general morals. There was a workshop after service where we talked about the skill of listening deeply to others, and people shared vulnerable experiences from the past where they had failed to: arguments with their children, their parents, their loved ones. I was honestly expecting that workshops at church would be centered around theological questions, such as if God controls everything in your life or the key events of Jesus’s life. I’m sure these discussions exist, but I can also see a world where people are simply talking about everyday issues. In this case, we read a passage from the Bible that related to the art of deeply listening, but the discussion was centered around people’s concrete experiences. I think that church offers its members a shared space to be vulnerable and honest with yourself. Sure, you won’t be sharing your deepest, darkest secrets. But I think about people who don’t have the opportunity to just talk about their feelings out loud with others, and I imagine how these circles might help.
I think it is common to be skeptical of “Christian” morals as an agnostic / atheist. After all, it is these same morals that have been used to justify many ugly events of the past, such as the forced conversion of Native Americans, or conservative, restrictive beliefs of the present. Although these teachings will inevitably involve God and religious talk a non-believer might be skeptical of, they also teach people about forgiveness, compassion, charity, self-sacrifice, and humility. I would argue that Christian morals undermine many of the widespread, moral principles most secular people subscribe to today. From this lens, it is more understandable why we hear conservative commentators worry that the decline of Christianity—and the loss of these “weekly moral lessons”—will lead to moral degradation within western society.
The Promise of Religion
I should probably explain my real motivations for trying out church. I grew up in a household with a devoutly Buddhist father and a devoutly atheist mother. My mother would criticize religion just as much as a pastor might preach about the love of God. She would fiercely exclaim how Christianity was the cause of countless wars and persecution in the past, and I think it (understandably) offended her the idea that an all-powerful God was fundamentally responsible for the food on the table and the blood, sweat, and tears she had spent raising her three children.
My dad exposed me to Buddhism early on. I grew up sneaking out with him—under the guise of a “boy scout leadership camp”—to retreats at a local Buddhist temple in Fremont. I started meditating at a young age, joined youth classes, and learned about concepts like “no-self” and “no-mind” later on (including many amusing enlightenment stories) [1] Pulled between these two worlds, I came to understand not only the distrust in religious ideologies but also the power and beauty behind wisdom shared through theological texts and experiences.
Today, I don’t identify as Buddhist. However, my experiences with meditation and reading through Buddhist scripture have definitely helped me. They’ve taught me a method that’s helped keep me calm in tough situations and be much more present to each moment. The promise of religion, it seems, is just to help you become a better person. Better in however you want to define it—how you treat others, how you approach hard situations, how you view life itself. I have found that not attaching to a specific religion certainly alienates me from the community to some degree, but it has still helped my day-to-day as a non-believer. I continue to believe that learning about religious beliefs is valuable even for non-believers. Taking notions of God and supernatural events of the past aside, the Bible is fundamentally a story of us, of people. We read it to learn about what our humanity means, just as we might with our favorite memoirs or great bodies of fiction. We can read scripture with the open attitude that what it says has truth and wisdom for us. In the process, maybe we’ll discover what exactly this promise of religion is all about.
Footnote
[1] As a side note, Buddhist retreats are very different from churches. At retreats, you’re often supposed to remain silent to observe “noble silence” because talking with people is seen as a distraction that hampers your own meditative and spiritual practice. At church workshops, people were discussing passages from the Bible, sharing vulnerable experiences, and learning about each other’s backgrounds. Community and social interaction is much more emphasized.