We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 1

Humans living in the modern world need institutions that promote community, transcendence, and personal growth, and we don’t have any institutions that can do all three. That’s the most concise way I can state the problem that I want to help solve. Obviously from the title of this post (which I’ll expand into an essay someday), the solution I have in mind is the Post-Church Church.

Many people have been searching for their own solution. Some try to find it in religious institutions like churches, synagogues, or mosques. Others try to find it through personal development retreats and practices like psychedelic therapy. But I’m going to argue that they’re all doomed to fall short.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to flesh out this argument, so please forgive me in advance for not adhering to my usual emotional health content. I promise there will be emotional health nuggets in these posts, but there’s also going to be some evolutionary history, anthropology, developmental psychology, and sociology. I promise it won’t be academic though! My aim is to make it as easy-to-read as possible.

To make it quick to decide whether you want to read each newsletter, I’ll provide a brief summary at the top. I hope you choose to follow along, however, because I think the idea I’m going to lay out is one that is important to every single person on the planet. It’s about how we got to the world we’re living in today, and how we might build a new type of institution that can support the better world we know is possible. 

For the time being, I’m going to refer to this new type of institution as the Post-Church Church, or PCC for short. I’m going to lay out a story, as concisely as possible, suggesting that humans living in WEIRD (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) parts of the world are suffering from a lack of at least one of three essential human needs: community, transcendence, and adult psychological development (aka personal growth). For most of human history, we just had the first two needs, and we met them quite easily through the rituals and myths of our communities. There was no need for adult personal growth because our tight-knit childhood communities provided everything we needed: roles, values, worldviews, and meaning. 

Starting in the 1500s and 1600s, a totally new way of living began to emerge. Some academics call this new way of living “modernity,” and use a bunch of concepts to describe everything that’s changed since the 1500s: industrialization, capitalism, globalization, the rise of science, nationalism, bureaucratization, urbanization, and secularization. There’s probably a few “isms” and “izations” I’m missing, but you get the idea. Instead of wrapping all of this under the term modernity, I’m going with WEIRD: Westernized, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) because it has a few of the important qualities of modernity tucked into its acronym. 

What I will argue over the next several weeks, is that human life has changed in fundamental and profound ways for anyone touched by the WEIRD world. We lost the unquestioned, immersive community of the pre-WEIRD world; we lost the old rituals and mythological framework that supported moments of transcendence; and because we now live in irreversibly diverse, dense, and dynamic societies, we have a new need that is largely unmet: the need for for adult psychological development. 

I will go on to argue that churches (synagogues, mosques, etc) served as community-and-transcendence-promoting institutions that bridged the old and WEIRD worlds. But they were always doomed to fail in the WEIRD word and now we’re at the point where they’ve become obsolete. We need new institutions that can promote community and transcendence in ways that are also aligned with diversity, authenticity, and intellectual honesty. But we don’t just need community and transcendence; for the sake of building a better world with 8 billion people on it, we need these institutions to also promote mental and emotional healing and personal growth, or what I’m calling “adult psychological development.”

In other words, we need a Post-Church Church.  

Tune in next week, as I paint a picture of our current WEIRD problem and how we got here.