There is a hole in the week where church used to be.
I am an atheist. Leaving religion behind was the right call. Church meal trains do not strengthen the arguments for God. But secular culture made a second decision that did not follow from the first: it treated the congregation as disposable along with the creed.
The mistake is the assumption that private choice will somehow produce public community. Friendship matters, but friendship alone rarely creates a standing weekly appointment, a shared fund for emergencies, a room full of several generations, or a duty to notice when somebody stops showing up. We rejected an answer about God and then acted as though we had also answered how to live together.
Gallup’s trend line shows how much has changed. The share of Americans reporting no religious affiliation rose from 2 percent in 1948 to 24 percent in 2025. In the same 2025 surveys, 57 percent said they seldom or never attended religious services. The decline in belief is progress. The disappearance of regular gathering is a separate loss.
A congregation did work
At its best, a congregation put the same people in the same room on a schedule. It introduced young people to old people and newcomers to families that had been there for decades. It kept a calendar, collected money, arranged meals, marked births and deaths, and gave people jobs that needed doing. None of this required a supernatural claim.
The schedule mattered as much as the sentiment. Modern social life asks each person to manufacture community from scratch: send the invitation, coordinate six calendars, find a place, keep everyone interested, try again next month. A congregation began with the room already booked and the coffee already brewing. You could arrive tired, boring, broke, or grieving. The institution did not need you to be entertaining before it let you belong.
That difference is easy to miss because we talk about community as a feeling. Community is also administration. Somebody has to keep the list, unlock the door, bring the food, call the absent person, and come back next week. A group that survives only while everyone feels enthusiastic is an audience with a short attention span.
Connection affects survival
The evidence for social connection is much stronger than the evidence for any god. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy Smith, and J. Bradley Layton combined 148 prospective studies covering 308,849 people and reported 50 percent higher odds of survival among people with stronger social relationships. The association was strongest in studies using fuller measures of social integration.
Research on religion points toward the same social mechanism. A 2010 panel study by Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam found that religious Americans’ greater life satisfaction was tied to service attendance and friendships inside the congregation. The authors found little independent effect from private or subjective religiosity.
Public health agencies now treat disconnection as a material risk. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says social isolation is associated with a 29 percent higher risk of premature mortality. The World Health Organization reported in 2025 that one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness.
Those findings do not prove that leaving religion caused a loneliness crisis. Work, housing, technology, family structure, and the collapse of other civic institutions all matter. The evidence establishes a narrower point: social connection is not a pleasant extra that appears automatically when enough individuals want it. It needs structure.
The godless test
Sunday Assembly tried to build that structure without asking anyone to believe what they could not believe. Comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans started the first gathering in London on January 6, 2013. Nearly 200 people came to the first meeting and 300 to the second, according to the movement’s own history. Its chapters sing, hear talks, share food, volunteer, and organize small groups. God is absent. The chairs still need setting up.
In 2018, Michael Price and Jacques Launay followed 92 Sunday Assembly members for six months. They found that more time in the Assembly’s small group activities predicted later increases on three measures of well-being. Members also rated the informal socializing and cooperation before and after the main gathering as the parts most useful for friendship and belonging. The researchers were explicit about the limit: this was a study of self-selected members, not a randomized trial, so it could not establish causation.
A later field study compared people attending four Sunday Assemblies with people at four Christian churches. Both groups reported increased social bonding after the gathering, and the size of the increase was comparable. That study had only 99 participants and measured an immediate change, not a transformed life. Still, it found that secular ritual could foster the same kind of short-term bonding as religious ritual.
These small studies cannot crown one model as the replacement for every church. They support a more modest conclusion: singing together, sharing a task, and returning to the same group can work without theology. The useful parts worked without God.
Clubs need commitments
Secular people already have running clubs, unions, mutual aid groups, libraries, hobby circles, and friends. Importing the shape of a church can sound like smuggling religion back into secular life.
That objection lands. A congregation is a function, not a floor plan. Any group can provide it if the group meets regularly, survives changes in enthusiasm, makes room for people who are not already friends, marks important moments, and accepts obligations beyond the activity that brought everyone together. Some unions and mutual aid groups already do this. Some churches never did.
Most affinity groups ask less of us. They gather people around a preference, and the connection often ends when the preference changes. That is fine for a book club. It is weak infrastructure for grief, illness, unemployment, or old age. The secular mistake was expecting a collection of optional activities to add up to a durable institution without asking anyone to maintain one.
Any praise of congregations must also face their record of coercion. In PRRI’s 2023 survey, 47 percent of unaffiliated Americans who had left a religion said negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people was an important reason. Another 31 percent cited clergy sexual abuse scandals. For many people, leaving was an escape. Any secular replacement that rebuilds hierarchy, shame, or enforced conformity has learned the wrong lesson.
That history rules out nostalgia. It does not give dogma ownership of recurring meals, mutual aid, ritual, or care. We can separate the machinery that helped people belong from the beliefs and power structures that hurt them. Sunday Assembly is interesting because it makes that separation visible.
Community needs an institution
Secular life needs places with calendars, budgets, organizers, shared meals, and duties that outlast a burst of enthusiasm. Some will look like Sunday Assembly. Others will grow through unions, libraries, neighborhood groups, or public community centers. The name matters less than the commitment.
That commitment costs time and money. If social connection is as important as the research says, it cannot depend forever on exhausted volunteers and whatever cash remains after everyone buys the things marketed as self-care. Paying organizers, keeping rooms open, and holding to a schedule are how membership comes to mean that somebody will notice when you disappear.
Nonbelief answers a question about what is true. It does not tell us how to bury our dead, welcome a child, carry a sick neighbor, or keep company with people we did not choose. Leaving something false is honest. Building something better is the work that honesty leaves us.