Churchless believers and Nones are finding community without church

One of the few remaining marketing claims Christians can (sometimes) use honestly involves the social and community-building functions of church affiliation. If someone was really intensely involved in their church, leaving it can feel like they’ve severed their entire sense of belonging and community! But even that claim is constantly being questioned and rejected.

Recently, NPR published an interesting interview between two people who have left church culture behind. One of them, Rachel Martin, misses some aspects of her former church community and wishes she could find a church that contains only the good stuff and none of the bad stuff. The other, Perry Bacon, has completely left church culture—and is now deliberately building a new community elsewhere for his daughter’s sake.

Related: How I deconverted back in the 1990s. See also: How the Faith Pool works.

The quickest guild-request withdrawal I ever saw

A couple of days ago, I was playing an online game. Someone in chat (a general kibbitzing channel open to everyone) had made me laugh at a joke, so we were talking about that. He mentioned that he and his wife were having a lot of trouble finding a new adventuring guild.

Well, I happen to be in a really good adventuring guild. I told him a bit about it while we chatted. As it happened, he and his wife were Gen Xers like me and my husband, as well as a lot of folks in that guild. For a few minutes, they seemed like a decent fit.

But suddenly, this guy began complaining about other gamers not sharing his opinions. I never asked what these were, but I gathered they were not shared by most players—so they were probably quite conservative in nature. Apparently, these opinions led him to constantly say really provocative things in group settings. To him, this was tellin’ it like it is, dammit, and jeez, whatta bunch of snowflakes who can’t handle the truth he slings. To everyone else, though, he behaved like an aggressive and un-housebroken stray animal.

When I heard his complaints, I immediately mentioned that my guild, like most of them, has rules about not talking about divisive topics in our public channels.

To my immense relief, he put on this macho show of being entirely too good for us, forget it, no way did he want to join us, hmph! We’re like all the rest! We can’t HANDLE the truth!

And with that, he flounced out of my awareness.

It really was his loss, not ours. If someone doesn’t know how to behave in a community and has no desire whatsoever to learn, communities are under no obligation to endure their presence.

As you might be able to tell, community was on my mind when I ran across that NPR interview.

Church culture: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Very few Christians regularly attend church these days. It’s gotten so bad that some religious researchers now call someone a regular attendee if they show up at least three or four times in eight weeks. And that shift in thinking came long before the pandemic. According to the Washington Post, COVID-19 did a serious number to churches’ already catastrophic slides in attendance.

Quite a few Christians end up becoming what I call churchless believers. They haven’t actually converted, nor have they abandoned church culture itself. Rather, they know of no churches that suit them, so they don’t attend any at all. Should such a marvel fall into their outstretched hands from the clear blue sky, they say they’ll resume attendance.

Among the ranks of churchless believers, we find Rachel Martin, the interviewer from that recent NPR piece. Of herself, she says:

The religion my parents brought me up with doesn’t fit anymore but I still long for a spiritual community.

In some ways, she fits perfectly into the paradigm that church leaders have put forward for years: That after a period of wandering, churchless believers would return after having children. Indeed, that’s what happened to her—though with an important difference:

. . . as a parent, I want other people to be involved in talking to my kids about right and wrong and the nature of forgiveness and humility.

From my point of view a church was an easy place to get that. Plus, some organized volunteer activities and you know, coffee hour where you meet your neighbors. It’s just like one stop shopping. And so my kids were really the impetus for me to find a church and, and I haven’t been able to.

She says she’d love to find a church like the one she describes, but she just hasn’t yet. And so she attends no churches at all. Nowadays, she describes herself as a None, as in “none of the above” religion-wise.

A Christian who did not so much ‘saunter vaguely downwards‘ as leave outright

The person Martin interviewed for NPR is Perry Bacon. Like her, he grew up in a very involved evangelical-sounding church. But where Martin sounds like she simply drifted out of church culture and then saw no compelling reason to return to it, Perry deliberately walked away from it.

Perry’s account sounds a bit more like the standard deconstruction story: Once he got to college, no churches in the area fit with his beliefs and cultural needs. So his attendance began to dwindle. After college, he moved from that town to Washington, DC. There, he attended a church with some of his old high school friends.

Though culturally the DC church felt like a good fit for him, Perry kept noticing off-notes about it that bothered him immensely. “I didn’t have to have the church breakup I was headed toward,” he tells Martin in the interview, but that seems to be exactly what happened.

One off-note involved evangelicals’ response to racism, which runs along the same lines as anti-LGBTQ bigotry. For decades now, evangelicals in particular have demonstrated repeatedly that they have very little desire to dismantle the social systems they’ve created that perpetuate racism. It’s been like this since at least the dawn of the Civil Rights era, as the classic book A Gathering Storm in the Churches tells us.

Another of those off-notes regarded evangelicals’ anti-LGBTQ bigotry. And I can see why. Every survey and story I have ever seen on this topic (like this 2014 survey and this 2022 article) indicates that this bigotry plays a prominent role in a large percentage of people’s decisions to reject church culture and disaffiliate with Christianity.

When church culture fails to live up to its own hype, people leave

Because his new church seemed progressive on so many fronts, though, Perry simply assumed it was also gay- and bi-inclusive. Imagine his shock when he found out that it wasn’t—from a gay churchmate who’d apparently found out the same thing the hard way:

He [the churchmate] told me that he wanted to be a small group leader but the church said he couldn’t because he’s gay. He was told he could be a member but couldn’t lead a group unless he wasn’t in any kind of same-sex relationship.

When I heard that I was surprised. I honestly hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about the church’s policies on gay rights because it was a church that was very pro-immigration, pro-refugee, you know the pastor would talk about how Black Lives Matter is important. So I hadn’t really noticed.

Perry adds that it can be difficult indeed to figure out where a nondenominational church, in particular, falls out along those culture-war lines. He had to actually flat-out ask one pastor where he and his church stood:

At one point I went to go ask another pastor what their views on the issues were, because I had tried to find it on the website and couldn’t.

He actually said to me, “Well we’re welcoming of everyone but we would not do a same sex wedding. Is that good enough for you?” So he seemed to know exactly what I was asking. He actually said we would not put that on a website. So the goal is obscure.

By the way, this accusation is 100% True. I’ve found that it can be almost impossible to suss out exactly what a given evangelical-sounding church believes and practices, especially about culture-war stuff. This obfuscation exists because church leaders try hard not to drive away any potential future tithes-payers and pew-warmers. Similarly, years ago the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) discovered that if a member church stated their SBC affiliation anywhere, it dissuaded a great many potential visitors from even bothering with them.

See also: Preston Sprinkle, a standard-issue evangelical culture warrior who seriously thinks he can enjoy endless “coffee dates” with LGBT people and their allies before dropping his bigotry on them and demanding they change to suit King Him—err, he means Jesus. Yes. Totally. Ahem.

After leaving church culture behind, what happens next?

For Rachel Martin, leaving church culture left her with a community-sized hole in her heart. She still hasn’t figured out how to fill it. For Perry Bacon, though, he began seeking out other ways to meet his family’s need for community. Like Martin, he wanted his children to experience a strong, cohesive community. Also like Martin, he was open to a church fulfilling that need. He just wanted one that was “very low on the beliefs of Jesus and very high on the community part.” Indeed, he says that “about 15” churches in his city have emailed him in the past month or two saying they fit that bill.

But unlike Martin (as far as I can tell in this interview, at least), he was willing to look outside the church-shaped box for what he needed. And he actually found his community among the good folks at his local farmer’s market.

That warmed my heart as well as made perfect sense to me.

Farmer’s markets can be really tightly-knit communities. Their personal and professional ties often transcend generations. For instance, my mother-in-law runs a fantastic farmer’s market. All of her vendors know, trust, and love her. And she knows, trusts, and loves them right back. She studiously keeps bad-faith actors like multi-level marketing (MLM) schemers out, and her vendors know they can bring their best stuff to the market every weekend with confidence. Every time her son and I visit, we are treated like family by every vendor we encounter there.

Yeah, I can absolutely understand why Bacon saw his farmer’s market as a great way to teach his daughter what a good community looks like. Plus, the products are incredible. It’s a win/win for everyone!

Community-building in an age of Christian decline

Years ago, I lived in a tiny little Kansas town. It used to blow my mind to see how even dread enemies treated each other there. At 2am on a Monday night, a guy could knock on the door of the now-ex-fiance of the girl he’d screwed last week and ask for the loan of a computer part. And that presumptuous guy could feel certain that not only would this request and its timing not cause a fistfight on the spot, but that he’d go home with the part tucked under his arm. (<– True story.)

But back then, I didn’t understand the power of community. The folks in that town didn’t know quite how to teach me what they were doing, either. I always felt a little out of step with them.

For years since, though, I’ve studied how people build and maintain communities. When I realized Christianity’s grand age of social dominance was coming to an end, I wondered what would happen in the wake of that decline.

In response, many church leaders try to sell their church communities as essential to people’s well-being. They don’t actually try to change their communities to appeal to potential new recruits, though. They just say that people must join up if they hope to experience community love. But Martin, Bacon, and millions of other people in similar circumstances refuse to allow these church leaders to claim a monopoly on community. If they are to join a community, it will be one that is safe, fun, meaningful, and worth the resources requested of members.

I just don’t think evangelical church leaders in particular are ready for their new normal. Nowadays, they compete against other groups on their own merits. I don’t think they enjoy knowing they have little-to-no power to force people to affiliate.

It just takes a few minutes to get the process started

That said, humans are social creatures. Give us half an hour, and any bunch of us can figure out common points that we can build at least a temporary group around. Sure, lots of dividing points exist, too (many of them, I am persuaded, artificially provoked and designed to be divisive). But community’s about forging something good on shared ground.

When I’m with my friends in the online game we play, I don’t care what their politics are or what god(s) they might worship in their spare time. Often, a guild’s rules forbid those topics. We’re there to play a game together, not argue endlessly. It makes me smile every time when someone on the other side of one of my opinions realizes where I stand—and then refuses to let it divide us in the game.

Related: Penguins, grief, and meaningful community

Similarly, there are probably a lot of vendors at my mother-in-law’s farmer’s market who would find a lot of my opinions intolerable. I’m sure the reverse is true as well. When I’m at her market, though, they show me only love. There are plenty of other places where we can be at loggerheads, after all.

As Christianity continues to decline, I’ve no doubt we’ll see a lot more communities like that. And I look forward to it.