Maybe Y'all Really Do Need Jesus

Without religion enforcing the bonds of marriage and family, it's much easier to drop off into solitude.

Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash

If you are living in the US, and reading my work on Substack, you probably (important: not definitely) live in a relatively secular world.

That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily an atheist. I would describe myself as secular, although I believe in God. Long story that I’ll probably write in more detail about another time, but I was baptized as an Episcopalian at the age of twenty-five after about fifteen years of being “Christian-curious,” if there is such a thing.

I was raised without any religion at all. My dad was raised Jewish, my mom was raised Episcopalian, and both were agnostic and basically never discussed religion with me growing up, outside of “you can choose whatever you want.” All my friends at school (all three of them) were Catholic, and I felt vaguely left out by all their stories about hating Sunday school. I wanted to hate Sunday school too, dammit! Eventually, my desire to join a Club transformed into genuine curiosity about faith, made stronger by a student’s mother at my school pulling me aside at a mother-daughter brunch and handing me a mini Bible, seemingly at random. I remember reading a few of the passages, and immediately bursting into tears. For a while, if I went to church, I would feel the urge to cry, even if I felt fine. I wasn’t sure exactly what this feeling was, but I felt like I needed to explore it further.

Point is, my entry into the Episcopal Church was an entry. I wasn’t born into that community (and from the age demographics of my previous church, I’d say almost nobody is) nor was I an Episcopalian because I didn’t know anything else. I would also venture that 99% of people raised like me just wind up being atheists or agnostic. For me, faith is an ongoing journey (one tinged with many spells of doubt and agnosticism!) as opposed to the air I breathe and the rituals that people like me perform. I also think a great deal of it has been inspired by a bout of religious scrupulosity OCD, which I still can’t fully untangle. Ergo, no matter what my faith is, it’s my choice, because I live in a secular world. And that’s not surprising. Generally, the more affluent a country, the less religious it is.

But one other thing that goes along with this affluence (and associated secular society) is that without religious norms forcing people to abide by particular social conventions of connectedness—marriage, parenthood, community, or even having a relationship with your own family of origin—it’s increasingly easy for people to abandon these things. Put a different way: without a religion binding you to a social convention, it’s much harder to argue for its importance. And not to go all “let’s bring prayer back in public schools,” but maybe a religious society—with all its downsides, I admit—was the main thing keeping people enmeshed and connected inside the communities most people no longer have, as we enter a seemingly-unfixable loneliness epidemic.

Let’s take marriage, for example. I’ve always bristled at the idea that “marriage doesn’t mean anything anymore” because it means something to me, but while writing this I allowed myself to really examine the question and be uncomfortable just a bit longer. Does marriage mean anything anymore? If marriage is secular now (and it largely is) and understood to be something that often doesn’t last forever (something many would say is good—if you’re not happy, leave) then how is it really any different from cohabitation? Maybe there are a few legal protections thrown in there, but your average person doesn’t choose to get married for the tax benefits. We marry because it emotionally “means something,” but in a secular world….does it?