‘Can I go to church when I don’t believe?’

Plus: Anabaptism at 500 years, day-one promises, and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

‘Can I go to church when I don’t believe?’

(via)

Perhaps you’ve seen the headline on the New York Times advice column making the rounds among online Christians: “Can I go to church when I don’t believe?”

And perhaps you’ve seen it thanks to

Ryan Burge

, Substack’s resident religious math expert, who shared here and on X it with a brief argument that the answer, from “a purely pro-social, pro-democracy perspective,” is yes: Go even if you don’t believe, because you will make friends and learn to function in a society.

Of course, I understand this perspective. Church is a really good place to meet people—one of very few left in our Bowling Alone situation. When TikTok briefly shut down this past weekend, people were losing their minds about it on Reddit, and one of the more plaintive comments (since deleted, but it was in this thread) was from a zoomer expressing apparently sincere confusion about how to locate other members of the human species:

where are we supposed to go to meet people? My mom is gen x, and she said people used to hang out at malls, and fast food places, etc. now, you go to those places and there aren’t many young people like there used to be. We don’t have a physical “third place”. My town doesn’t really have any clubs or community events for things I’m interested in. TikTok (and i suppose Reddit) is/was the closest we had. And most people you do see, are busy doing their own thing. So tell me, what are we to do? Go up to random people in stores/coffee shops and be like “hey, I’m John Doe, wanna be friends?” Cuz that doesn’t actually seem like the best approach. When’s the last time you went up to a stranger, talked for a while, and then kept in contact afterwards?

For Christians, that last question is not a difficult to answer. It was at church—and, in fact, I didn’t even have to go up to the stranger. At church, strangers come up to you!

So at this level, I get Burge’s argument. But I want to push back on it, and I want to do it by teasing out the four responses I’ve see here:

1. No, religion is fake or worse.

2. Yes, religion is fake but useful and/or beautiful.

3. No, the church is not a tool for your social or aesthetic goals.

4. Yes, the church welcomes potential converts.