Take Me To Church

Church is good even if you don't believe in God

Christmas is coming very soon. If you’re an atheist, or a believer disappointed with the institution of the Western Church¹, you will probably spend it with your family, maybe watch some funny movies and enjoy the Santa Claus/Elves/Snowman vibe.

Yet, I think it’s worth to reconsider going to church, especially during this special time of the year.

Now, I’m a conservative, but I’m definitely not one of the “Christ Is King” guys. In fact, throughout the years I’ve bounced back and forth between atheism and weak Christian faith. I am a hard grounded rationalist and definitely not a spiritual person.

However, over they years I learned to appreciate the personal and social benefits of attanding church. Here, I’m trying to make a case that attending church is a good thing regardless of whether you believe in God or not.

It’s good for you

From a recent

Rob Henderson

’s post:

Poor people who go to religious services several times a week are happier than rich people who never go. Attending services has a bigger impact on your happiness than wealth. Money buys a fair bit of happiness but connection gives you more bang for the buck. (source: The Social Paradox by William von Hippel).

For a medieval European peasant, there was no greater experience than visiting the church. The great hall. The tall towers. The stained glass windows. The statues and paintings. The ornamentation. The sound of the pipe organ. All of this created a magnificent experience in a unique space, away from the mundanity of the everyday life and closer to divine harmony and perfection.

Modern churches are less grandiose and more minimalist, and protestant churches in general are even more modest due to the influence of early protestant iconoclasm. Yet, they are still impressive feats of architecture and a great sight to behold and space to be in.

As a kid, I was often bored at church, possibly due to lack of basic religious education from my parents. I simply had no clue what was going on. Yet, when you have a basic understanding of the church service, it can become a low-key fun experience.

I agree that it’s not “fun” fun like meeting friends, parties, TV or social media. But in our modern sensory overloading world, church might be the type of low key “fun” we might actually need.

More importantly, church provides several ways to become and feel a part of the community. In our evolutionary past, being part of the community meant safety and opportunity for reproduction, while being alone was risky and dangerous. The fact that being a part of a community is good for you is probably the most obvious insight from evolutionary psychology.

The most basic way you can experience the community is to simply be present together with a group of people. You get to see how they look like and infer their status, they also look at you and confer status to you - like in the Italian custom of passeggiata, everyone is playing the same status game together.

Today, we discuss the crisis of community and mourn the loss of local communities. But historically, the church was the primary institution binding the local community together. The Sunday service offers an opportunity to meet and talk to other people. Some types of church facilitate this with an agape feast, a coffee/juice/cookie social event open for everyone after the service.

In order to truly experience the community, you have to feel what David Robinson called the shared reality. It’s a powerful concept that explains why people like to talk about common beliefs and experiences and attend large events where they sing, dance or listen to live music together. Typically we have many shared community experiences in our youth, but then marriage and kids slowly make us retreat into our newly forming nuclear family.

The church is a powerful shared reality experience available for everyone for free. You get to meet people who share the same beliefs and know the parts of the ritual you all perform together.

The communal singing traditions are pretty much lost in the modern Western world - in my personal experience the only alive one is “Happy Birthday”, even singing Christmas carols with the family feels awkward most of the time. However, rituals based on communal singing, reciting together and call-and-response patterns are a major part of any tribal culture. For most of our evolutionary past we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes, so it’s quite possible that we still have parts of our brain designed to make us feel good when participating in such rituals and feel bad if we don’t.

A couple months ago I watched the Inside the Freemasons Netflix docuseries. I learned that the Freemasonry is a weird crossover between the rites of the Catholic Church and and a male hierarchical status game where men can level up and rise in the ranks like in the military or a corporation. Instead of a specific set of religious beliefs, Freemasonry rituals are based on a general belief in a Supreme Being (it is thus compatible with any major religion) and a vague set of moral values related to self-improvement. This made me realize that a church-like institution can provide purpose, meaning and satisfaction to its members regardless of the existence of and belief in a particular deity.

The top level church community engagement forms include various secular groups for praying, studying the bible, personal development and support, singing in the choir, playing in the band or other support of the church community and institution. It is also possible to join the clergy and enroll in the church-related status game. These options are for hardcore church-goers though, so I won’t go into details here.

Attending church is also a way to embrace seasonality in our lives. Prior to modern times, all human lives were seasonal and revolved mostly around the cycle of seasons and the agriculture. But now, we eradicated seasonality from our lives. In our modern climate controlled houses and workplaces, every day looks the same: a never-ending treadmill: work, kids, shopping, entertainment, sleep repeat. The seasons and major holidays in the liturgical calendar correspond to the seasons of nature.

Fasting and abstinence during Lent and Advent, the periods preceding the main holidays makes the holiday experience more meaningful and profound, especially compared to secular celebrations centered around the Santa Claus, elves and snowmen or rabbits, chicks and eggs.

In a way, our modern secular civilization got the holiday festive period backwards: we start celebrating Christmas and Easter a couple weeks before, as soon as the seasonal merchandise hits the stores, and end it just after the Holidays. But the proper way is to first prepare duirng a modest, restrained preparation period, then start your celebrations during the Holidays and continue in the following weeks of the festive season.

The church helps us preserve that proper way of celebration, and reminds us that the Holidays are about commemorating the birth and death of Jesus Christ - a person believed by some to be the Son of God, but also a great philosopher, who laid the foundations of our Western civilization.

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It’s good for the society

The Western Church morality might not be the best type of morality available among the vast moral philosophy body of knowledge. After all, it held Europe in the dark for almost a thousand years in the middle ages. But one can’t deny that:

• It’s at least a decently good type of morality

• The Western Church is very effective in terms of teaching and maintaining its morality within the society.

• Modern Western countries with culture based on the Western church tradition provide the best quality of life in terms of freedom, happiness and economy

Let’s discuss these one by one.

The Morality

The Western church’s morality has been most often criticized by Nietschean vitalists. However, it’s modern implementation provides everyone with the default slave morality, yet it also allows unique and powerful individuals to adopt master morality, provided that they still respect the dignity of other individuals.

In terms of male and female morality, the Western church provides a healthy mix of male and female morality. Men often think about the Roman Empire, because the Roman moral system, with slavery and a rigid class/caste system, was fully based on male morality. The Western Church emphasizes the male morality aspect of being a productive member of the society, but also implements female morality with the idea of individualism.

Joseph Henrich’s famous book The WEIRDest People in the World describes how the Western Church drove the rise of individualism and nuclear families, as opposed to kin cultures with family clans led by aging patriarchs pulling all the strings and hoarding all resources.

My biggest takeaway from Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is that implementing individualism and human rights was the greatest success of the Western civilization - a hard-won success that took almost 2000 years, until the abolition of slavery in the US in the late 19th century.

The idea that all human beings have an innate basic level of dignity that needs to be protected at all costs led to all sorts of different human rights that form the backbone of the modern Western society: from children and workers’ rights, to civil rights, trans rights and even wokeism.

The System

Jarosław Kaczyński, a Polish right wing political leader once said: “There is no moral teaching in Poland except for the moral teaching of the Catholic Church”. When I was more skeptical towards church, I used to say that unfortunately, he was right.

In one of the greatest movies ever made, Good Will Hunting, the protagonist famously dismisses the idea of academic education, saying:

You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

One can argue that Will Hunting was right, and the thousands of dollars in tuition fees is the price of credentials, social connections and high status. However, some time ago I read a great essay (unfortunately I can’t find it anymore) about why college education, while not perfect, is still way more effective than simply reading a textbook . It went something like this: college/university provides a complete framework for learning that includes textbooks, lectures, practice classes, rituals and customs, rules and social norms, a status hierarchy and a status game where you get rewarded for scoring high, and punished, up to and including dropping out, for negligence and scoring low.

The Western Church provides that sort of framework for its moral system: a textbook (the Bible), a community, public spaces, education, weekly events that include readings from the textbook and lectures from the teacher, 1-on-1 consultation and tutoring (the confession) and a system of transitional events and rites of passage related to major life events like birth, entering adulthood, marriage, having children and death.

None of the secular morality systems has anything like that - all they have is a textbook.

Hence, Jarosław Kaczyński was right.

The unparalleled effectiveness of the Western Church moral education should be especially important for those who are, or are planning to become parents. Everyone wants their kids to become highly moral adults. But it’s very difficult to do it if you choose something else than the default moral operating system of the Western society. If you do, all you have is the textbook.

As a parent, you practically have two choices when it comes to teaching your kids morality: it’s either Western Church morality or moral nihilism. But once you install the default moral operating system, it’s easier to use it to download Linux or Chrome, rather than start over from a bare machine.

My personal experience and other advice about nonconformism from

Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)

and

Chad Of Arabia

shows that first, you need to learn the rules, and how to play by the rules, before learning how to break the rules. This is what sets apart a jazz pianist from a person cluelessly pressing the keys of the piano, an avant-garde artist from a child randomly smearing paint over a sheet of paper, and a chess grandmaster from a kid playing with the chess pieces.

Being a pickup artist shaped my values and my self-improvement mindset in my early adulthood, which set me on a path towards a successful career, relationship and family. But none of this would have probably worked without my deeper moral foundation formed during my adolescent years I spent attending a Catholic middle school.

The Culture

Eventually, we arrive at the cultural Christianity argument:

The "cultural Christianity" argument says that atheists might not like Christianity, but they like a culture which depends on Christianity. They like open, free, thoughtful, liberal, beautiful, virtuous societies. Unmoored from a connection to Christanity, a society will gradually have less of those goods, until even atheists are unhappy.

Therefore (continues the argument), atheists should be cultural Christians. While they can continue to privately disbelieve, they should support an overall Christian society, which they can dwell contentedly on the fringes of.

I personally support the cultural Christianity argument. I read Scott Alexander’s recent rebuttal of this concept, but I believe it’s stretched and weak.

The first thing Scott disapproves in this concept is the need to assert of false things. However, this cognitive dissonance can be resolved by applying an additional metaphorical layer to all moral teachings of the Western Church and the Bible.

God, Satan, Angels, Heaven, Hell, Sin, Redemption, Resurrection, The Kingdom of God, The Last Judgement, Eternal Life - all of this can be treated as symbols and metaphors that guide us towards our end goal: a perfect human society, the Paradise, or Heaven on Earth. In our modern Western world, we are actually closer to this utopian vision than ever before.

Everyone in the Western Church except for the Young Earth Creationist idiots agrees that the stories from the Book of Genesis were disproved by science and as such, can only be interpreted in a mythical and metaphorical way. Hence, I think it’s possible for atheists to learn to treat and understand the entire Bible the same way.

I personally believe in practicing what you preach: if you think that the society will be better if people go to church, you should go to church yourself.

But if my arguments in the first section didn’t convince you that going to church is fun or good for you, yet you agree with the cultural Christianity argument and believe that the society will be better if more people went to church, the least you can do is to like and share this post.

Let’s spread the Good Word together.

1. In this essay, by “church” I am referring to the Western Church (catholic and protestant), as described in Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World.