The heyday of “New Atheism” around 2009 or 2010 featured a strain of millennial humor that has since been consigned, mercifully, to history’s dustbin. I’m referring of course to the “epic bacon” strain of combative atheism, which gave us the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the United Church of Bacon. (The latter boasts the vapid motto: “Bacon is our god because bacon is real.”) Many of us rolled our eyes at this when it started, but we had to wait over a decade for the world to roll its eyes with us.
By the end of the Bush years, the New Atheists believed they were fighting a vast, dominant American evangelicalism—a literal theocracy! Some of them still feel that way. Yet so much has happened in the intervening years, and the tone and tenor of unbelief has generally changed. Sunday Assembly, a “church” for non-believers recently profiled on CBS, exemplifies this metamorphosis.
Despite the fact that it was founded in 2013 by two British comedians, Sunday Assembly lacks the anti-religious mockery of the Flying Spaghetti Monster crowd. Its tone is more therapeutic and upbeat. With sixty chapters globally, its motto is “live better, help often, and wonder more.” Services feature “a TED Talk-style talk” along with sing-alongs (“pop songs mainly” according to the group’s website), inspirational readings, and the sharing of personal stories. Coffee and donuts are served afterward. “We release a lot of endorphins,” Amy Boyle, one of the group’s leaders, told CBS.
Members of Sunday Assembly invoke the word “community” like an apotropaic gesture to explain their interest in attending. But real community always coheres around something. It does not exist for its own sake. So, what is the central fire around which the Sunday Assembly congregates? A shared commitment to releasing endorphins? Or to the vague admonition to “live better, help often, and wonder more”?
Secular alternatives to organized religion have popped up throughout the modern period, from the French Revolution’s Cult of Reason to the “Ethical Culture” movement to New Age and modern Unitarian Universalism. None have managed to overcome the howling void at the center of their communities; consequently, the imagination and intention manifest in their creation diminishes with each iteration. Sunday Assembly might represent the series’ terminus: You sing a bunch of Taylor Swift songs, eat some cookies, feel your endorphins surge, and go home.
What one most notices about Sunday Assembly is its distinctly “low church” feeling; it is clearly modeled on American evangelicalism. Some of the assemblies are held in former churches, but even in these cases, the decor and atmosphere appear decidedly in the manner of a small non-denominational evangelical church, with folding chairs instead of pews and projectors displaying the title of the talk on a screen behind the stage. In many of the congregations, the sing-alongs are led by the secular equivalent of an evangelical-style praise band; in one of the group’s videos, the members sing and dance along to a band playing Jesus Jones’s “Right Here, Right Now.” The sermons are essentially TED talks given by, for example, “a poet, a scientist, or a philosopher.” (TED Talks are clearly an important source of inspiration for the group, as some of Sunday Assembly’s leaders and founders have given actual TED Talks.)
Apparently, no one here has thought of, say, trying to create a secular tradition, a coherent set of rituals and texts that might be carried through time. Because of how hollowed-out and distrustful of the past Western secularism has become, this seems to be impossible. Every past authority is problematic. Yet the creation of such a tradition was once the goal of Auguste Comte, the French positivist thinker who founded the “Religion of Humanity” in the nineteenth century.
Say what you will about Comte, but he was ambitious, imaginative, and understood the aesthetic appeal and binding power of ritual. His religion involved a system of seven sacraments and the worship of a trinity comprised of humanity, the earth, and cosmic space. It was, as Thomas Huxley observed, “Catholicism minus Christianity.” Comte also designed a calendar that renamed the months of the year after great figures from history, including Archimedes, Johannes Gutenberg, and the French anatomist Xavier Bichat. His religion included a priesthood, whose members were required to train for fourteen years, marry, and learn dancing and singing.
The problem with Comte’s secular religion is that, in the words of John Stuart Mill, it “could have been written by no man who had ever laughed.” Still, it left a significant historical imprint: It had a major influence on the Young Turks and in Brazil, where Comte’s church endures. The motto on the Brazilian flag, “Order and Progress,” is derived from Comte’s teachings. His most lasting contribution may have been coining the word “altruism.”
The non-believers to which Sunday Assembly caters seem disinterested in such bizarre and amusing forms of creativity. Their project is terminally decadent, imitating the transient aesthetics of dumbed-down, seeker-sensitive evangelicalism—aesthetics that are themselves conscious derivatives of popular culture. What one is left with are insipid platitudes, such as these from the group’s website: “Why do we exist? Life is short, it is brilliant, it is sometimes tough, we build communities that help everyone live life as fully as possible”; “Sometimes bad things happen to good people, we have moments of weakness, or life just isn’t fair”; “Hearing talks, singing as one, listening to readings and even playing games helps us to connect with each other and the awesome world we live in.” Religion as brought to you by ChatGPT.
No one will be content with such a pale simulacrum of “community” for long. The dramatic failure of New Atheism to provide any vital culture or source of meaning is well-established; Sunday Assembly invites us to walk—and “live” and “wonder”—among its ruins. Meanwhile, former New Atheist figureheads such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have turned to Christianity, and even Richard Dawkins remarks fondly on the sound of church bells.
Nonetheless, religiously unaffiliated people have grown to nearly 30 percent of the American population. Whereas numerous New Atheists gave the impression that they were rebelling against an evangelical upbringing, many of the religious “nones” have had truly secular childhoods, totally unconscious of religion. And with the cultural and political weakening of Christianity, and the fading of the specter of radical Islam, there’s little to rail against. Atheists have largely traded smarts and aggression for indifference. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has retreated into the abandoned sanctuary of the United Church of Bacon. There has been a softening.
The fuzzy vacuity of Sunday Assembly suggests an opportunity for evangelism. What people really want isn’t a pop music sing-along with cookies and punch served afterward—a lesson mainstream evangelicalism has been learning the hard way. What they want is contact with timeless reality, something that withstands the constant mutability of life. Only an authentically sacred tradition can grant contact with the transcendent, refreshing the desert of the temporal with the living waters of the eternal. How to meet this thirst for the eternal? Here’s an idea: Consider Sunday Assembly, and then do the exact opposite in every respect.
Sam Buntz writes from Chicago.
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Image by Rainer Sax, from Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
