Jul 3, 2023 03:21 AM
(This post was last modified: Jul 3, 2023 05:17 AM by C C.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opini...=url-share
EXCERPT (Jessica Grose): . . . I asked every sociologist I interviewed whether communities created around secular activities outside of houses of worship could give the same level of wraparound support that churches, temples and mosques are able to offer. Nearly across the board, the answer was no.
Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College, put it this way: “I can go play soccer on a Sunday morning and hang out with people from different races and different class backgrounds, and we can bond. But I’m not doing that with my grandparents and my grandchildren.”
A soccer team can’t provide spiritual solace in the face of death, it probably doesn’t have a weekly charitable call and there’s no sense of connection to a heritage that goes back generations. You can get bits and pieces of these disparate qualities elsewhere, he said, but there’s no “one-stop shop” — at least not right now.
That doesn’t mean Americans can’t or don’t cobble together their own support networks and senses of meaning without organized religion; clearly, many do. But the group of Americans who are moving away from religion in the most significant percentages may have the hardest time building community from scratch, because they are often shortest on time and resources.
As I noted in part four of this series, every demographic group in the United States is becoming less religious, but groups that are overrepresented among people with no religion in particular are those without high school diplomas, who are single, who don’t have children and who earn less than $50,000 a year.
This trend complicates, if not contradicts, the commonly held notion that religion is most deeply rooted among everyday working Americans and less among the chattering class. But as Ryan Burge explains in “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going,” data from the comprehensive Cooperative Election Study show that in America, “those with the lowest level of education are more likely to say that they have no religious affiliation than those with the highest level of education.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT (Jessica Grose): . . . I asked every sociologist I interviewed whether communities created around secular activities outside of houses of worship could give the same level of wraparound support that churches, temples and mosques are able to offer. Nearly across the board, the answer was no.
Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College, put it this way: “I can go play soccer on a Sunday morning and hang out with people from different races and different class backgrounds, and we can bond. But I’m not doing that with my grandparents and my grandchildren.”
A soccer team can’t provide spiritual solace in the face of death, it probably doesn’t have a weekly charitable call and there’s no sense of connection to a heritage that goes back generations. You can get bits and pieces of these disparate qualities elsewhere, he said, but there’s no “one-stop shop” — at least not right now.
That doesn’t mean Americans can’t or don’t cobble together their own support networks and senses of meaning without organized religion; clearly, many do. But the group of Americans who are moving away from religion in the most significant percentages may have the hardest time building community from scratch, because they are often shortest on time and resources.
As I noted in part four of this series, every demographic group in the United States is becoming less religious, but groups that are overrepresented among people with no religion in particular are those without high school diplomas, who are single, who don’t have children and who earn less than $50,000 a year.
This trend complicates, if not contradicts, the commonly held notion that religion is most deeply rooted among everyday working Americans and less among the chattering class. But as Ryan Burge explains in “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going,” data from the comprehensive Cooperative Election Study show that in America, “those with the lowest level of education are more likely to say that they have no religious affiliation than those with the highest level of education.” (MORE - missing details)