Not your mama's religion

As we were grocery shopping at the new Jamboree Diamond Plaza last week, my mom abruptly said to me, "Religious people seem to be pretty nice, don't they?"

It was one of the first times that she had ever brought up religion; it seemed that she had been thinking about a topic that I suppose has long been a subject of contention, that is, the idea of religion correlating with the rather ambiguously defined sense of "morality." She brought to mind a few of our neighbors, and recalled how the church-going ones always seemed to be a little sunnier than their nonbelieving peers.

Well, I offhandedly told her that at least if we used incarceration rates as a nation-wide metric, atheists were somewhat "nicer" in proportion. Whereas estimates of atheists range anywhere between 5-14% (Gallup and ARIS, respectively) of the US population, they comprise only 0.209% of the incarcerated (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2007). (Catholics are disproportionately higher and Protestants are somewhat disproportionately lower in prisons.) Of course, that one statistic doesn't mean secular ethics trumps religious ones, for there are other correlates that must inevitably be taken into consideration (education levels, race, etc.), but at least it takes the legs out of the claim that a religious education makes Joe the lovely Plumber all the more moral.

My mom then asked, "so what if people sent kids to meet nice people and to be a part of that community-- and not necessarily for the religious education?"

That actually made me pause for a bit. What if they did? Is there anything necessarily wrong with that, so long as the kids like it too? What if people started seeing churches as purely social spaces, and their messages as supplementary? I doubt church leaders would mind, for their congregations would grow. Perhaps the more faithful churchgoers might feel less comfortable because of the influx of people joining for the social reasons-- but they could also welcome these new members as people they could potentially convert someday.

However influential religion may be in today's world, if looked at from a wider historical lens, its pervasiveness is waning. Value judgements on that trend aside, our communities will need to gradually fill the gap in civil society that churches currently (and used to) provide. So what if, instead of churches disappearing one by one, they were "converted" in a sense, to institutions that brought people together, and still taught morality, just in a secular setting? Something like the YMCA/YWCA or the Boys and Girls Club, so to speak, but with life lessons after school and on Sundays/Saturdays.

Then, people like my mom who wanted take their kids to an institution that did help with a moral upbringing, but framed it in a purely secular context, would have a place to go. "Preachers" would teach altruism, duty, service, charity, empathy, and other such ideas, and use current and historical figures as examples while doing so. From a young age, children would be introduced to the ideas of Aristotle, Spinoza, Plato, Kant, Comte, and Holyoake, eventually choosing their own palette of principles with time.

Of course, this is all hypothetical and very far into the future, but what if we eventually do need to fill the social and edifying gap of religious institutions? Would something like this work?