In my experience nothing has been able to replicate what religion does for communities. Every Sunday hundreds of people get together and chat over coffee before service. This mass gathering offers the opportunity to find other people with similar interests which in turn leads to small groups. Some will say, "That's what meetup.com is for.". I agree, meetup.com is great, but it doesn't have that central core of hundreds of people before splitting up into smaller groups. Meetup.com cuts out the larger group entirely and pushes people into smaller groups automatically. That's an important thing that gets lost.