Alone in the Godless World

The more modern, the more alone.” The formulation is David Goodhew’s as he outlines the results of research into the strong correlation between unbelief and the collapse of community in the secular West. He reports, “In 1990, 55 percent of U.S. men said they had six or more close friends; by 2023, that figure had halved.” Apparently, the proliferation of Facebook friends isolates rather than connects us. Other metrics, such as civic involvement, also show decline.

As we know instinctively (and by the authority of Scripture), it is not good for men and women to be alone. It’s not good for us physically: “One study suggests that loneliness is as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” And it’s certainly not good for us spiritually.

Well-educated denizens of today’s postindustrial global cities have noticed the community deficit. Goodhew draws attention to the Sunday Assembly movement, “a self-styled ‘Church for Atheists’” that was launched in 2013, gathering people to sing, listen to inspirational talks, and enjoy fellowship. Designed to be a lot like a Protestant congregation, just without any talk of God, the Sunday Assembly saw some success, along with lots of fawning coverage in the secular press. But it soon petered out. Today there are only twenty-two branches worldwide. I’m not surprised.

Goodhew sees a pattern. “Without [a] doctrinal scaffolding, such communities have proved short-lived.” In the middle of the twentieth century, the Communist Party required doctrinal commitments, and it created a tight-knit community of true believers. The transformation of progressive politics into a self-referential, therapeutic project like today’s identity politics undermined Marxist doctrine, dissolving the old bonds. “Saying, to quote Bob Marley, that we can just ‘get together and feel all right’ is empirically untrue.” The same holds for putting signs in front of your home that declare, “Hate has no home here” and “No human is illegal.”

By Goodhew’s accounting, the greatest strength of doctrinally robust Christianity rests in its realism about sin, evil, suffering, and death—and the consolations it offers. The Sunday Assembly seeks to uplift: “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More.” Its gatherings promise to help people “live the lives they want to live and be the people they want to be” in “the awesome world we live in.” As Goodhew notes, everything is “achingly nice—and that is its biggest problem. It only works in a nice world.” Which of course is not the world in which we live.

One need but read 1 and 2 Kings to learn that Judaism and Christianity are not religions for nice people in a nice world. Our faith offers realism, but also hope and love. There is darkness, yes, in the world and in our hearts. But there’s also a thirst for transcendence—which is slaked, never completely in this life, but with a lasting sweetness, like honey from the comb.

After our son died, family, friends, and strangers cared for us. It’s love’s natural response to suffering. That love was profoundly deepened and focused by the theologies and rituals of church and synagogue. These theologies and rituals allow us to speak honestly about the darkest realities of our mortal lives and, in the flash of an eye, to testify to life’s undaunted wonder and promise. In our time of greatest anguish, a priest who is a close friend told us that the loss of a child evokes in others the most profound and literal condolence, the “suffering with” that binds hearts together, and that this suffering would be for us a painful but powerful grace. He was right.

We don’t believe in doctrines or participate in worship because doing so builds and sustains the kinds of communities we need in times of trouble and loss. We do it because we’re drawn to truth; we look to the Lord, not to each other. Secular modernity promises that we can have fraternity and solidarity without looking upward. We are to cast our gaze toward our fellow man, and that, we are told, will be enough. But as St. ­Augustine observed long ago, we turn either toward God—or toward ourselves. As Goodhew notes, modernity is animated by expressive individualism. A generous humanism of solidarity sounds good, but it gains no traction. Communities without transcendent loyalties, without the upward gaze, disintegrate into theaters of self-expression and arenas for self-interested transactions.

“There is a deep ache within Western culture for community.” We cannot confect solidarity for its own sake. Enduring communities arise to serve something higher than our worldly desires and needs. The strongest communities serve that than which nothing greater can be conceived: God.