A Kite Without Wind

On the challenges of trying to run a “church of the nones”

Photo by Rh Ridoy Rhaman on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read.)

A few months back, columnist Perry Bacon Jr. wrote a provocative piece for the Washington Post that elicited considerable attention from the religious community. Entitled, “I left the church—and now long for a ‘church of the nones,’” Bacon detailed his journey out of faith in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his subsequent longing to experience some of the benefits that religious life provides.

Raised in an evangelical home, and the son of an assistant pastor in a predominantly Black charismatic congregation in Louisville, Bacon wasn’t quite sure he ever fully bought into belief in God in general and Christ as savior specifically. Nevertheless, throughout his youth and young adult years, he remained connected to the church, faithfully attending most weeks.

Everything began to unravel in 2016, however, with the election of Trump, and then the pandemic in 2020 provided the knockout blow. Through a convergence of factors—some personal, some political—he decided to disconnect from church altogether and sideline a faith he never really seemed to have to begin with.

He thus became, as so many others Americans have lately, a “none.”

The problem is, he misses church.

He misses the singing, the sermons, the solidarity and connection. He misses the sense of collective purpose and mission.

He strangely finds himself on the opposite side of the fence from so many other people in America—where 70% of the population says they’re religious, but only 30% regularly attend services. He’s the “reverse” of such people, he notes, “a person without clear beliefs about God who wants to go to something like church frequently anyway.”

And it’s a strange place to be.

And yet he sees this “church-size hole” increasingly growing in American life, where more and more people are disaffiliating from religious communities. And it’s unhealthy, he feels.

“Kids need places to learn values such as forgiveness,” he urges. “Young adults need places to meet a potential spouse. Adults with children need places to meet. Retirees need places to build new relationships, as their friends and spouses pass away.”

Furthermore, he continues, “our society needs places that integrate people across class and racial lines. Newly woke Americans need places to get practical, weekly advice about how to live out the inclusive, anti-racist values they committed to during the Trump years.”

So Bacon longs for a “church of the nones,” as he calls it, and tries to paint a vision of what it could look like:

Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional post-church brunch.

In short, have a church service without the God-stuff.

The challenge with such a vision, Bacon seems to acknowledge, is that it’s unlikely to gain much traction.

He points to an organization called Sunday Assembly, started in Britain in 2013, that tried to start nonreligious congregations around in the world, including in the US, that has failed to really get off the ground.

He also notes Unitarian Universalist churches, which promote the types of left-leaning values he celebrates (“justice, equity and compassion in human relations,” without a “firm theology”). And yet the few times he’s attended their services, he’s noticed they were “overwhelmingly” comprised of “White and elderly” people and lacked socio-economic diversity—thus calling into question their viability to truly achieve what he envisions.

Thus, for all these reasons, Bacon is reticent to launch out on his own, ultimately wondering if such a vision could ever get off the launchpad.

And I think there’s good reason for that reticence.

While I’m incredibly sympathetic to his critiques of American Christianity in the twenty-first century, and I wish he could know that my own congregation tries to be a “church for the nones,” there’s nevertheless a specific ingredient that is critical to the success of any community that tries to organize itself as a “church” (religious or otherwise).

That specific ingredient?

God.

Indeed, when it comes to truly forming lasting social community, God is, I’d submit, the “secret sauce.”

Missing the God we don’t believe in

Bacon’s reflections remind me of a quote philosopher James K. A. Smith shares in his book, How (Not) To Be Secular, which is a distillation of philosopher Charles Taylor’s framework in his magnum opus, A Secular Age. The quote is from English novelist Julian Barnes, who opened his own memoir with these haunting and yet revealing words: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”

I’m also reminded of a podcast I recently listened to which discussed the political and social climate in Canada, which has, to some observers, become more and more zealous in its commitment to a specific form of social activism and its intolerance for anyone who diverges from that vision.

The situation led the podcast host, who’s a secular Jew from Toronto, to conclude that Canada has a huge “God-shaped hole” it’s trying to fill through extreme political and social activism.

After all, even the term “woke,” which Bacon seems to eagerly embrace, has religious overtones, conjuring up images of the great “awakenings” that took place in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This is because, as James K. A. Smith would say, as he said of Julian Barnes, our “secular age,” which has largely tried to expunge God from its consciousness, can’t quite “shake the ghosts of transcendence,” try as we might through other means and social causes.

I largely agree.

Despite our best efforts, humans can’t quite escape the pull of the transcendent and the eternal. We are meaning-making people who need to feel connected to something beyond our finite selves and our little planet.

Each person does, indeed, in the words of Blaise Paschal, have an “infinite abyss” which can only be filled by an “infinite” God.

This is why I’d thus propose that “church without God” never really works—and probably never will.

It’s great to sing songs together and to hear a sermon that encourages us to be better people. It’s also awesome to have a social consciousness and to passionately work for the betterment of those around us.

Such experiences are all well and good and even necessary.

But they are incapable, I’d submit, of fully binding hearts together in ways that transcend our finitude, giving us a connection with each other on a level that has an eternal context.

This is not to say that gathering apart from God can’t create meaningful bonds or deliver moving highs. It’s just that they can’t deliver the ultimate, lasting high.

In my experience—which admittedly has many psychoanalytical factors that affects how I process them—there’s nothing quite like connecting with people in a spiritually-transcendent way. I’ve been in sports stadiums, screaming with 70,000 other fans, and I’ve been to “secular” concerts where 2,000 people are singing together in unison about human love or social causes. These are powerful and moving moments.

But they still fall short of instilling the sense of euphoria and connection that meeting together with a group of God-minded people does.

Indeed, I truly believe that the connection that gives us the greatest “buzz” is the one that is placed on an eternal, transcendent basis.

In other words, a connection that goes through God.

Truly, there’s something about connecting with others through God that supercharges the experience, allowing us to transcend the moment. God converts a 120-volt experience into a 240-volt one.

This is not to be flippant or dismissive (though it might seem that way to some ears). As I said above, I’m very sympathetic to the critiques of Christianity that Bacon—and others like him—offers.

Neither is it to imply that people of Bacon’s ilk would even be conscious of this “God-shaped hole,” and to suggest so may come across as patronizing.

It’s simply to say that a “church” without transcendence is like a kite without wind. It will have a hard time getting off the ground.

Thus, to whatever degree they can, and to whatever degree they can find a spiritual community that has tried to rid itself of the toxic religiosity Bacon rightfully rejects, I’d continue to invite people to plug into the wind—the Spirit, the pneuma—that can truly lift them off the ground.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.