Early this week, Emma Camp, an assistant editor at Reason, published a provocative piece in America: “The case for showing up to church—even if you don’t believe in God.”
Camp sets the stage for her poignant and personal essay by observing current sociological trends — trends with which I am sure the National Review reader is familiar:
Just 30 percent of U.S. adults attend religious services weekly or nearly weekly—down from 42 percent in the early 2000s. This rapid secularization has resulted in serious consequences for American community-building. Young people in particular seem to be driving this trend. Thirty-four percent of Generation Z (born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s) are religious “nones,” the most of any generational cohort.
For Camp, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, she too fell into this pool of Gen Z “nones.” While she appreciated Christian values, she just couldn’t bring herself to believe that God was real. That was, until she encountered Augustine, Aquinas, and Julian of Norwich in her senior year of college — and discovered the psychological benefits of prayer in a crisis. Faith became a live option — although not yet a firm belief.
After her time at UVA, Camp moved to D.C. She began attending an Anglo-Catholic parish, ultimately drawn there by the community she encountered. In Camp’s words,
Within hours of my first Sunday Mass, I was added to two different group chats, had agreed to attend an upcoming happy hour and had swapped numbers with a young woman who would soon become one of my best friends. It was almost an instant gang of friends—one formed around shared values (and a shared interest in Gregorian chants).
While Camp found a great community through her parish, her argument cannot be boiled down to “go to church, and you’ll make great friends!” Inverting the eternal and the fleeting is always tempting — because oftentimes, it works. Outlining the sociological, financial, or emotional benefits of religious practice is a good way to get a skeptic’s “foot in the door,” so to speak.
Daily prayer has been marketed as a meditative exercise that produces psychological benefits. Highly religious married couples are said to have the best (and most frequent) sex. Married couples who attend religious services are about 30 to 50 percent less likely to divorce than those who do not. Regular religious-service attendance is associated with a lower risk of depression and loneliness.
The results-focused argument, however, can also be applied in the opposite direction. If tight-knit community can be found elsewhere, what’s the need for church community? If therapy and Zoloft have successfully treated your depression, why muscle through regular church attendance? If yoga under the trees provides the same psychological benefits as daily prayer, why bow your head each morning when the downward dog suffices?
A New York Times article about the “Great De-Churching” of Americans, published last year, analyzed the view of Americans who had stopped going to church in recent years.
Some people, usually self-described atheists and agnostics, said they didn’t miss anything and were happy to be rid of anything resembling worship. Unsurprisingly, those groups had the highest rate of dechurching of all: 94 percent for atheists and 88 percent for agnostics.
But many said they did miss aspects of traditional attendance, and often these people still believed in God or certain aspects of their previous faith traditions. They’d sought replacements for traditional worship, and the most common were spending time in nature, meditation and physical activity — basically anything that got them out of their own heads and the anxieties of the material world.
As many different activities and organizations can produce such experiences as “a sense of peace” or “belonging in a community” or “a feeling of wonder,” one’s motivating reason to attend church must run deeper. Prayer and worship are irreplaceable human needs — not merely healthy lifestyle choices.
As Camp writes, there is a positive feedback loop between church attendance and faith. Willing yourself to be part of a community — i.e., showing up — means that you will, over time, be shaped in the likeness of that body.
A religious community forces you to become the kind of person who shows up. Your life gains a new rhythm, with new obligations. . . . And while there are plenty of secular alternatives to religious community—the classic D.C. example is joining an amateur softball or soccer league—nonreligious groups cannot provide the sense of shared moral priorities and explicit moral instruction that religious communities impart.
Camp’s personal story is beautiful and poignant. I think the key to her essay is the recognition that church attendance provides benefits of another order altogether — and that faith is oftentimes just showing up.