We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 2

Our current problem is that we’re no longer OLD; now we’re WEIRD

Suburbia by Dominic Piperata, edited in DALL-E 2 to add medieval peasant fields

Religious institutions give humans something they can’t quite get anywhere else: a large but tight-knit community infused with a sense transcendence. We’ve had versions of such institutions likely for hundreds of thousands of years. But something happened with the rise of the modern WEIRD (Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) way of life that eroded the power of religious institutions to do what they’ve done for all of human history.

This week, I want to describe a bit about what has changed and why it’s a problem. From the broad perspective of the history of homo sapiens, we live in very strange times. Several things happened over the course of 300 years, beginning sometime around 1600 and concluding with all the major features of the modern, WEIRD world by 1900. Of course so much has happened since 1900: world wars, nuclear power, computers, and now AI. But all of these (save maybe AI—we don’t yet know where that one’s going) are just logical outgrowths from the massive shifts that happened in the previous 300 years.

Some academics call this the “discontinuist” interpretation of history. This interpretation says that human history fundamentally changed (i.e., discontinued) with the emergence of the modern era. Before then, there was a pre-modern way of life based in the old-world village and kinship networks, where all of our relationships were infused with common beliefs and worldviews. Our personal identity and social roles were not up for questioning, debate, or development. They were simply given. 

I will refer to this pre-modern way of life as OLD: omnipresent, lifelong, and dependent. It was omnipresent in that, in its ideal form, it pervaded every aspect of life and there were no alternatives. The religion, political organization, gender roles, rites of passage, promoted and forbidden activities, and so on were simply facts about the world. One sociologist described this pre-modern omnipresence as the “sacred canopy.” It covered the entire community in all aspects of life. 

The pre-modern way of being was lifelong in that this pervasive, omnipresent “sacred canopy” covered people from conception to the afterlife. People didn’t grow out of it. People also didn’t want to grow out of it because there was no conceivable alternative. They were also utterly dependent on the sacred canopy of their community. It provided everything—from protection and sustenance to meaning and care—and without it an individual would have nothing. A lone gazelle is a dead gazelle, the saying goes. And it might as well be true for the OLD way of life.

There are many other features of pre-modern life that social scientists have highlighted but its omnipresence, lifelong nature, and the utter dependence people had on their pre-modern communities provides us with enough detail to understand a little bit of what that way of life was like. Bonus points for providing me with a handy acronym.

The point I want to make up front is this: humans lived in OLD communities for hundreds of thousands of years. Our bodies and brains are adapted to the OLD way of life. And we’ve been living in WEIRD ways for less than one-quarter of one-percent of our evolutionary history. The whiplash is so great, we have barely begun to take stock of what has happened. 

Next week, I want to focus on what we’ve lost and also what we’ve gained by becoming WEIRD. I want to do this to lay the groundwork for why religious institutions (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) are continuing to lose members, why they’re not the answer to our problems, and why we need a post-church church.