Is a Lack of Religion Changing Our Social Lives?

I love church, but I don’t believe in God. I love the warmth when people shake your hand, how socially acceptable it is for people with bad voices to sing, the sweetness of a room of people who acknowledge openly that they’ve not been perfect, but that they strive to be more generous and more loving. I just sort of tune out the parts about the dude who sacrificed stuff for us.

Part of me really wants to believe in any God. But I studied anthropology, and evolution clashes too much with their stories. As a result, I don’t go to church regularly because I’d feel like a fraud.

This didn’t bother me too much, until I started studying loneliness and connection. I delved into the dire health effects of loneliness, and the promise of connection. I looked at how American culture has become more self-obsessed. At some point, I explored the relationship between role of religion in our lives and connection. That’s when I understood that church-going people have a cleaner path to strong relationships and healthy lives.

Religion affects the world today in many of the same ways it affected the world hundreds of years ago. It enables people to share beliefs, to introduce yourself in a natural way, to see the same people weekly, to do things in synchrony, to volunteer.  Philosopher Alain De Botton explains, “A church...gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane”.

Then, people sing together at church. They kneel together. Susan Pinker notes that “synchrony is a well-known evolutionary trick.” When we do something at the same time as someone else, it helps us feel connected to them. It’s why it feels great to sing along to a song.

Religion has historically been an avenue to volunteering and other groups and connection through those as well. Volunteering provides the opportunity to give, which helps us feel like part of a community. We see, for example, that volunteering to help religious activities still makes up 34 percent of all volunteering. While some believe people aren’t as religious as we once were, religion affects the world today in strong, and sometimes very positive ways.

If religious people lead more connected lives, and connection leads to greater health, shouldn’t religious people be healthier? We do have evidence to support that. Inzlicht’s research shows that people with religious faith show sluggish activity in their ACC in the brain (the area that registers social anxiety). Some researchers even suggest that going to church more effective than Lipitor to treat blood pressure problems, adding 2-3 years to persons life.

The church can basically act as a gateway drug to community and health.

So, what about the rest of us? The wild atheists with no rules? While religion may not play a strong role in many of our lives, we still need alternative ways to reach connection. We can use politics to share beliefs, Meetups and friend circles to see the same people weekly, Soulcycle to move in synchrony with others, and good old-fashioned volunteer groups to volunteer. It’s more painful for us—we need to tend to isolated seeds of connection. It’s not consolidated like it is for people with religion. But it is possible.