Religion and Reinvention
How do you inspire compromise?
We ended up going down to my parents’ this past weekend1, and one of the topics of conversation was the last few years of changes in the local church. My parents have been attending the same Roman Catholic church for decades, and were active in the running of the parish— we have a bunch of pictures of SteelyKid as a little kid helping them count the money from the weekly collections— but some years back the parish was combined with another, and they’ve been splitting Masses between the physical church buildings ever since. The merger was part of a general trend of decay in Catholicism over the last few decades— the church my grandparents attended was merged with two others in the same neighborhood2 around the same time, for the same reason: there just weren’t enough people coming to Mass to justify those being three separate parishes, and there aren’t enough priests to staff them anyway. And the priests they do have don’t necessarily mesh well with the congregations they’re assigned, which was a big part of the conversation.
This sort of dropped neatly into the endlessly spinning rock tumbler of my brain, rattling around with a giant pile of thinkpieces about the “crisis of loneliness,” which have been accumulating for years, and a more recent landslide of stuff about the need to reinvent civil society in the wake of Trumpism (and the more general international swing toward populism). The connection between the first two is not terribly original to make— lots of people have noted the decline in organized religion as a contributing factor to the lack of a sense of community— but I haven’t seen as much stuff connecting it to the third item. I think it’s probably important to make that link; I’m not sure I’m going to get all that far with advancing it here, but I’ll at least think out loud a little bit…
On the first bit, I have to cop to being at least a small Part of the Problem— I haven’t set foot in a church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral in I don’t know how many years. Schenectady is richly supplied with Catholic churches if I wanted to find one— there are two at opposite corners of Union’s campus—but I’m professionally disinclined to belief in the supernatural, and at some point after the elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope Benedict, I had enough issues with their various appalling scandals that I couldn’t see directly supporting them any more. I retain a little bit of reflexive anti-anti-Catholicism, in an “Only we can do that to our pledges!” sort of vein, but otherwise keep my distance from the Church.
That said, I definitely recognize a bit of a hole where something Church-shaped might fit, in terms of community connection and all that. It was never my favorite branch of communal activity, but being a part of the local parish was definitely a Thing. It got me out of the house and interacting with other people approximately my age who I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to hang out with otherwise, and that was probably good for me. It made a vaguely positive connection to a lot of people in the community who I’d run into in other places, and gave us some basis for conversation if we needed to share space for a time.
At the same time, there were things about membership in that sort of community that were kind of a pain in the ass, and not just the implicit obligation to get out of bed on Sunday morning and shuffle through back yards to the church. It required a kind of negotiation of formal structures and quirky characters and preferences that didn’t always align. Every church has its Mrs Cake, and part of operating in that kind of community is learning how to placate them enough to keep things running smoothly without giving them free rein for their wildest ideas. And there’s also an element of going along to get along required both up and down the hierarchy, in terms of soft-pedalling various bits of personal behavior or institutional doctrine as needed to avoid major conflicts. You can’t bring in a priest who’s going to take a hard line against How We’ve Always Done Things Here, and if you’re going to hold together a geographically-based community, you need to find a way to keep the liberal Democrats from the teacher’s union and the Opus Dei wannabes on civil terms long enough to have a fundraising cookout.
And I think that’s the place where the crisis of organized religion and the calls for a wholesale restructuring of post-populist society collide. Connecting people to local communities in a way that creates meaning necessarily involves bringing together whoever happens to live there. Short of some kind of mental phase transition in which everybody suddenly condenses around a particular set of views, this is necessarily going to require accommodating some significant differences of opinion, and having some kind of system for keeping everyone in line. And I suspect that, at the end of the day, any formal organization that can work in that role is going to have to look a lot like the messy and imperfect structures of organized religion (at least the relatively chill versions thereof).
But those are structures and systems that some of the very same people calling for the reconstruction of society have in the past opposed very strenuously, and worked to dismantle. Those sorts of organizations require a level of buy-in to some common ideal that necessarily requires some subordination of individual preferences, and that’s in very short supply these days. The people who write thinkpieces calling for a new society do not seem at all inclined to compromise, and without that, I don’t know how you can hold together a community that already exists, let alone build a new one out of the wreckage of the past. Short of some commitment to the supernatural that would transcend mere human disagreements, anyway, and that’s in even shorter supply on the political left3.
And as noted above, I’m not exactly blameless in this sort of thing— I disengaged from the Church because I wasn’t bought in enough on the supernatural side of things to paper over my disagreements with their political stances. And I’ve absolutely stepped back from engaging with secular organizations when I found the people involved more of a pain in the ass that it was worth to be a part of the group. Which is a big part of how we’ve gotten to a place where all manner of organizations seem to be run entirely by crazy people— everybody who isn’t a wild-eyed ideologue has opted to stay home and avoid the aggravation4.
I don’t have a solution to this problem, alas, or I would be the one running everything. But I think this is an issue that needs to be considered very seriously, and isn’t. How do you inspire a level of commitment to some ideal of community that will allow people to tolerate the significant disagreements that are inevitable in location-based organizing?
So, yeah, that’s a bummer. If you want to see whether I ever come up with a constructive solution, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
The Pip was supposed to be playing in a baseball tournament on Long Island, but the team was a little short-handed, so they pulled out rather than make an expensive trip and maybe end up forfeiting games. We pivoted to going to visit family instead.
They were for three different ethnic groups— my grandparents went to the Polish church, the Slovak church was literally two blocks away, and I forget what the third one was.
The trad-right conviction that everybody is suddenly going to convert to their brand of religion isn’t much more plausible than the leftist belief that everyone will suddenly realize that they’ve been socialists all along, but it’s at least a mechanism…
As I was saying to SteelyKid recently, one of the big problems we’re facing is that the only churches that are growing these days are the wacky hard-line ones. All of the relatively chill denominations are in decline, either because the hard-line folks jump ship or because they take over and the normies flee.
One thing that's always struck me about the US is the absence of organised team sports competitions for adults. For lots of Australians, that provides a substitute for the social functions of church. Sporting clubs set up to support such teams (serving meals and drinks, and often supported by slot machines, sadly) are a major part of social life here
When I was growing up in the 1980s it seemed there were a lot more organizations with monthly membership meetings. I can remember my dad taking me to Audubon society meetings, and as an annoyingly precocious teenager I went to some of the local skeptics society meetings. And it seems my parents went to plenty of various other meeting as well. Usually there was a guest speaker and refreshments and socializing afterwards.
Now, not so much. There is somewhat a sense of parent communities around kids' activities but the problem there is that, once the kid loses interest or ages out, then *poof* there goes the associated adult socialization. But I also have to say, the thought of trying to run a monthly membership meeting terrifies me--having been roped into too many leadership roles, I'll admit to avoiding the monthly meetings of the one group I know that does hold them in large part to avoid getting roped in again.