Alice Robb visited the church for atheists founded by Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, known as The Sunday Assembly, when it recently passed through Washington, DC:
British comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans … are hipper, gentler, and less intellectual than your typical secularist preachers. And they’re working from a very different premise—that non-theists are missing out on the benefits of being part of a spiritual community. By providing skeptics with a non-religious place to sing, socialize, and discuss values—they’ve described the assembly as “part foot-stomping show, part atheist church”—they want to reach people who may be turned off by more strident or academic streams of atheism.
“We don’t really use many labels to describe ourselves,” Jones told me. “We do this in a way that appeals to normal people.” Unlike activists like [Manual for Creating Atheists author Peter] Boghossian, Jones and Evans say they’re not out to convert anyone. “We want to make sure everyone is welcome,” said Jones.
Sounds nice, but Evans and Jones are so wary of giving offense or excluding anyone that it’s unclear what, if anything, they do believe.
Robb notes that the group’s “lack of boundaries makes for a muddled, or even nonexistent, message”:
We sang songs by Queen and Bon Jovi. We closed our eyes for a minute of silent reflection. Jones talked about gratitude. Upon command, we introduced ourselves to our neighbors and played an awkward clapping game. My partner, who found the event on meetup.com, told me he wouldn’t be coming back. A fan of Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, he said he’s looking for something more cerebral.
Jones told the assembled they were witnessing the birth of a local community, but I’m not so sure. Religious institutions breed communities because their members share a background or at least some core beliefs and values; they perform rituals together and define themselves in opposition to other groups. The only thing the people sitting around me agreed on was that they’re all human. They had diverse and sometimes incongruent beliefs. One woman identified herself to me as agnostic, while a middle-aged man called himself a “praying atheist”; a recovering food addict, he said he invented a female deity to help him through his 12-step program. It was all very inoffensive, but is a shared belief in being human enough of a foundation for a community? Why congregate if there’s nothing to bind the congregation but our membership of the same species?
Previous Dish on the Sunday Assembly here.
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