Say what you will about God, theology, and such - but a good church is far more a giant nest of social bonds than it is a cross or creed. And as the churches quietly die off, human society looses more and more of those.
It surely helps that here in Australia, private schools receive extensive government funding, roughly on par with what public schools get, which assists the Catholic Church in running lots of (relatively low fee) private schools. In effect similar to the idea of "school vouchers" in the US, although not actually implemented that way.
I note Methodists don't have as strong a tradition of running their own schools as Catholics do. In Australia, if you go back to some point in the 19th century, there were no public schools, only private religious ones, Methodist included (although Church of England was most common). Then, the Protestant churches made deals with the colonial governments, the colonial governments would take over most of their private religious schools and turn them into public ones, the churches would keep only their most prestigious schools (aimed at the upper classes)–the Catholic Church refused to take part, and then spent decades agitating for its schools to be publicly funded ("why do Catholics pay taxes to educate Protestant children but not their own?"), until finally in the 1960s the federal government agreed to fund them (in part because it really needed the Catholic vote, in part because the bishops threatened to close all their private schools, which would have completely overwhelmed the public system)
They are subsidized by the diocese, the "Annual Catholic Appeal" is mostly taken from parishes and sent to the parishes with schools.
The schools close usually from lack of kids not lack of funds.
Australia has much more of a private schooling culture than the US. About 36% of Australian children go to private schools, compared to only about 9% in the US. And slightly over 50% of Australia's private schools are Catholic. So Catholic schools closing from "lack of kids", I wouldn't say it never happens in Australia, but certainly a lot less common than in the US. Decline in Catholic religious affiliation doesn’t necessarily lead to school closure, because many Australian Catholic schools enrol large numbers of non-Catholics
I suspect funding is a big part of this-if the US introduced widespread school vouchers, the private percentage would likely creep up. But Australia has had publicly funded private schools for over 50 years now, so even with school vouchers, it could take decades for private schooling in the US to reach Australian percentages
The lack of kids is often because the school is in an older part of town, which has become "newly wed or nearly dead" and they don't have enough people willing to drive long distances to use the school. Others are rural in areas that are just depopulated now.
This happens less in Australia, because Australia has rather different population dynamics from the US.
Significant population decline in inland rural areas, especially in smaller towns, which leads to school closures (for public schools too)–something also happening in some parts of the US
But, the problem the US has with decaying urban areas (e.g. Detroit) just doesn't happen in contemporary Australia. Most of the population lives in a handful of big metro areas, which just keep on booming, due to runaway property prices, and absorbing a constant stream of immigrants (on a per capita basis, Australia's official immigration rate is almost twice that of the US.) Also, local government is a lot weaker, urban planning is controlled by the state governments, and they just won't let that kind of urban blight happen on their watch
State schools are meant to be mostly agnostic/athiest except they can run R.E. classes but local staff can (and do) proselytise, and State authorities do little about it.
R.E. classes are a factionalism nightmare and ecumenical teaching is scant. Satanists don't get much lookin.
Laws are in draft to try and settle a decades old battle around equal opportunity and human rights, teachers who are gay, students who are gay, to what extent a religious school can enforce belief and behaviour in staff and pupils and its a fiery debate.
There have been horrific historical and recent abuse issues in faith schooling here, bound up in state interventions for single mothers, Aboriginal displacement, reliance on nuns and monks, establishment refusal to confront abusive behaviour. A notorious instance was a Jewish school head who groomed students, got found out, absconded to Israel and was defended by politically astute religious to avoid extradition for years. She did finally get done. Anglican and catholic schools have also had significant problems.
I know there are Jewish and Muslim schools in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne, but not where I live. Where I live, your private schooling choices are basically Catholic, Anglican, Adventist, a couple of variations on non-denom Protestant, "vaguely Christian but super-expensive school for the upper class", Steiner, and some (mostly small) secular schools which focus on children with different needs (autism, disability, "just not fitting-in in a mainstream environment", etc)
My Catholic high school had lots of Protestants, and also a Jewish girl. I know the Catholic school we send our kids to has at least a couple of Muslim families. But, for Jews and Muslims, I think that is only really an option for some of the relatively secular or moderate; I expect many of the more strict would not agree to sending their kids to a school where their children are exposed (even just passively) to Christian prayer and religious services. Whereas, state schools, there is significantly less of that passive exposure (even if it isn't always possible to opt out of it 100%)
The Catholic schools have an "arrangement" with the Eastern Orthodox Church, according to which they officially give preference to Orthodox kids, after Catholics, but before Protestants and non-Christians. (I'm not sure if the arrangement is mutual, but there are so few Orthodox schools, that question only has practical relevance to a small minority.)
> State schools are meant to be mostly agnostic/athiest except they can run R.E. classes but local staff can (and do) proselytise, and State authorities do little about it.
There is a historical reason for this. At least in New South Wales (and I believe other states too), the public school system started through a deal between the colonial government and the major Protestant churches – the Protestant churches handed over their schools to the government, in exchange the churches would retain the right to do religious education in them. Although the deal was made almost 150 years ago, the churches involved insist the government stick to it. (It isn't legally binding, so the government could legally break it if they wanted, but politically they aren't going there.)
> A notorious instance was a Jewish school head who groomed students, got found out, absconded to Israel and was defended by politically astute religious to avoid extradition for years.
A lot of that was due to a belief in Orthodox Judaism that it is a sin to take Jewish community issues to non-Jewish courts – I think most Orthodox Jews do not think that rule should apply nowadays, at least not to serious crimes, but this school was ultra-Orthodox/Haredi, a community in which some still seem to think it should. I don't think that specific issue is really applicable more broadly, since even though you'll read some rather similar stuff in the New Testament, mainstream Christian churches have long chosen to ignore it.
The really conservative ones, like Opus Dei or SSPX schools, arguably do a much better job of indoctrinating their pupils (although even for them, there are plenty for whom it doesn’t stick)-but I assume they are not on your menu. Even if you were willing to consider them, they probably wouldn’t be willing to consider you.
I think anglosaxon world religious schools are much different, and I have the impression that people in USA collate creationism and catholicity, while it's a strongly held belief in their country, across all faiths.
I'm an atheist now, so I don't think the indoctrination was so good.
I've noticed this as well. It's kinda weird, since the Catholic Church has officially held that it has no conflict with respect to evolution for around 75 years now (they basically take no position on the subject), and some of their scholars were pro-evolution for many years before that.
Nowadays, it's generally just fundamentalist Protestant churches which insist on literal creationism.
> while it's a strongly held belief in their country, across all faiths.
It's actually a minority belief in the United States, although a substantial minority.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
Jobs are no longer life-long. Families are smaller and increasingly dispersed. Churches aren’t what they used to be.
And online communities are often toxic and radicalized in the name of profit and division.
History has shown different. Martyrs relied more on cross and creed (and indeed a specific person the cross & creed spoke of) than social bonds. 'Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also' is a sample from a specific slice, but representative of a larger concept.
Of course a martyr may die wrongly, but the point is that a definition of a 'good' church should include considering concepts of before birth and after death, in addition to life. In my experience, that leads to the social bonds.
The lack of this care for cross and creed in many churches I've visited seems to be the precurser to a dying church. There is little to attract new generations if little things are at stake.
The thing is, a Meetup doesn't ask very much of its members, which leads to loose ties: "I'll go until it stops being fun, or I get busy, or I get a better offer." People take their religion much more seriously than that.
And that, in turn, leads to a different social dynamic: when you expect everyone around you to still be there in 5 years, you treat them differently.
YMMV though; I had better experiences with it in the past in a different city.
I don't know anything about the Elks except my aunt lived down the road from a lodge.
After that, maybe kids’ schools if you have the energy.
OTOH...the Moose are a pretty religious organization, in many ways.
My take is that it's a familiar social institution and we haven't yet formulated the social protocols to reproduce a secular version. You mention a variety of semi-institutionalized social groups. To me they are associated with older folks, which naturally leads to the question: why aren't young people[1] making their own formal groups? why do young folks communities tend to be anarchic? And what would empower young folks to form their own formal social institutions?
1. We're talking about a rather wide swath of 18-50 yearolds, but that doesn't necessarily mean specific groups must correspondingly be as age-inclusive
In game theory terms, cooperative behavior is rewarded from outside the observable system! That's the faith part of faith communities. Even if only a relatively small fraction truly hold these belief, those communities naturally get pay-it-forward dynamics.
I'm not sure how game theory can lead to the same result in non-faith communities (i.e., closed systems). Someone has to pay the cost of "redeeming" the effects of cheaters / defectors.
Unitarian-Universalists aren't growing, they are shrinking. Most denominations are shrinking, but on the whole, conservative denominations are shrinking rather more slowly than liberal ones, including the super-liberal UUs. I remember, when I was younger, I tried out a few different churches. I saw more than one conservative Protestant church overflowing with young families. I also went to a Unitarian church (only one, but there aren't many around here), and I was the only person there under 50.
In general, religious communities without afterlife reward doctrines, struggle to survive and thrive in the long-run. Their members tend to defect either to secularism or to religious communities which make bigger promises
Look at the Quakers for a really admirable but ultimately pessimistic illustration of it. A long and almost uniquely sound history of true dedication to causes of human freedom, safety, comfort, and thriving, but with no shared creed per se. At times united in their activism and influential because of it (abolition, prohibition, civil rights). Now generations removed from any unifying cause, they are fragmented into an entire continuum of irreconcilable beliefs; fewer than half a million left globally. And the only thriving, growing communities among them are in africa, with belief and worship virtually indistinguishable from the local main stream of evangelical christianity.
Whatever it is that makes religions culturally impactful does not seem easily separable from whatever it is that makes them religions. People have tried over and over, not all of them completely unsuccessfully. But I don't know of any with the kind of durable cultural influence we see in the mainstream religions that don't value or attempt that separation.
> And the only thriving, growing communities among them are in africa, with belief and worship virtually indistinguishable from the local main stream of evangelical christianity.
To add to what you say, not just in Africa but also in the West, the branchers of Quakerism which seem to be in the greatest health, are at its evangelical Protestant end – whereas, the end of the Quaker spectrum which you are talking about, is the one in the worst health
Within about a generation, most Congregationalists became Unitarian Universalists, which is strongly linked to uncertainty over eternal blessedness/damnation. (Generalizing the history quite a bit, TBH.)
The VFW, Elks Lodge, Masons, Knights of Columbus, they're all old and mostly men.
If some churchgoer was saying, today, that the churches have some sort of monopoly on providing such spaces...my interpretation would tend toward "we have a monopoly, while we last, because every other provider is already gone".
(Yes, if you go further back, especially in Europe, the church had somewhat more of a monopoly. Partly that was because governments were rather authoritarian, and didn't want organizations to exist, beyond their tightly-controlled churches.)
The issue is, almost no secular thinker comes away from admitting those two honestly and then stays within the purely secular realm for very long.
It was very possible to be an intelligent introspective atheist when the consequences of that stance were not on display so readily. The "forward thinkers" who might have been capable of forming secular religions are instead embracing established faiths. Perhaps it's an issue like attempting to create life from scratch again. Hard to do when existing life just crowds it out. It would take dedicated committed atheists, admitting that they are intentionally attempting to establish a secular religion as a sort of memetic symbiote to fill the same space as religion, but when you're biggest rallying cry for converts is, "People don't need religion!" it's neigh impossible to do.
I'm not so sure about this, though it depends on what you mean by "purely secular". I don't know if there's any data on this, so I can only speak anecdotally - I know people who are sympathetic to religion and believe it can be useful (even one who's a fan of Jordan Peterson, the person who has made a career about talking about religion in a secular way. Aside - I think it's telling that Peterson continually says good things about religion but is still atheist and still doesn't go to church.), but still are within the purely secular realm.
To be sure, I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong about secular institutions not being able to fill the role that religious institutions can. But at the same time, it doesn't seem like getting people to agree on the benefits of religion gets them to accept the resurrection of Christ, existence of God, or anything like that. Which kind of makes sense, right?
(Another aside - I have always sort of felt like this emphasis on religions being useful over religions being true is a kind of implicit concession to atheism. It's as if religion actually is just a shared delusion, but that's ok, because it's a useful shared delusion. I have no trouble seeing why an atheist would not see this as a compelling case. But the case for religion being true isn't nearly as weak as this "pragmatic delusion"-style argument implies.
Not a criticism of what you're saying, it makes sense to say what you've said in the context of the thread. I'm just thinking out loud.)
To focus on Christianity (since you brought it up), religion not being useful would be a blow to the "Loving God" claim, as a God who (like a bad parent) gave lousy advice that harmed us wouldn't seem very loving. Similarly, if a utilitarian secular philosophy continuously failed to be useful based on its own utilitarian standards, it's self defeating.
Certainly faiths that don't assert a loving God, and secular philosophies that don't include utilitarian moral and ethical frameworks aren't effected. The usefulness of religion compared to secular philosophies doesn't PROVE one is correct, but if you can DISPROVE one or some of your largest competitors for mindshare, I get why the argument is so stressed.
Well.. of course that is what the religion you were born into, brainwashed by, and are currently paying crazy amounts of money to wants you to think. It is necessary for the churches survival.
People need to be careful about believing anything taught by an organization when that organization's very survival depends on you believing that thing.
I think you're off the mark here. Your brother-in-law doesn't believe what the church teaches. He believes in the effect he sees it having on his own life (and maybe also the effect that not having it has on his own life).
I think they are simply the ones that survived the most in our current era of narcissism and consumerism because they were bigger to begin with.
I mean I live in an old fashioned, traditionnally poor gipsy neighborhood. Most people around here don't go to the church, but this is a tight knit community. As a stranger, and for good reasons[1], it took me a long time to be accepted as part of it, and in a sense I will never be completely part of it. However I have already been shown that my neighbors are ready to give me a hand when I need it and even that they are ready to fight for me had I been in a situation that required it, no question asked. Which is funny because these are the same people that initially tried to rob me!
[1] first and foremost because the presence of expats working remotely for big corps like me is one of the reason the rents are ever increasing and becoming out of reach to