Why Church?
A Secular Argument for Why Organized Religion Matters
In fairness, probably a lot of people could have had on their 2025 bingo card something like “Ross Douthat writes a book defending faith as a rational decision.” Mr. Douthat is open about his religiosity and has done a great deal (along with Tish Harrison Warren and now David French) to make belief palatable—or at least less weird—to the Times often secular readers. What probably zero people had on their 2025 bingo card, however, was “Jonathan Rauch—a self-described atheist liberal gay married Jew—writes a book proclaiming that Christianity is a ‘load-bearing’ wall in US society and points specifically and at length to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an exemplar of how to have churches balance adhering to the tenets of their faith while living well with those around them.” But that is precisely the book Rauch has written and just released. Add to this the fact that the most recently released Pew survey shows that the increase in the “nones” has now apparently plateaued and it seems possible that we are approaching an inflection point in the evolution of religiosity in US society.
In effect, every generation responds to the trends and problems bequeathed to it by the generation that came before, and I think that one way to read the advent of books as disparate as Douthat’s and Rauch’s is this: for twenty years or so, society grappled with and took seriously the polemical and often radical arguments of the new atheists who reached their zenith just after the beginning of the new millennium, and now we have been left to see that following their prescriptions did not yield the panacea they seemed to expect or hope for. As the New York Times recently dryly observed and wryly asked: “We’re More Secular Than Ever. How’s That Going?” (hint: from the point of view of the NYT, not especially well).
With all of this, it seems like a good time to step back and ask: “Why does religion matter?” and “Just what is it we hope religion can do?” I have thought a great deal about these questions over many years. So much so that, starting a few years ago, I began teaching about the answers in a class I teach at the medical school where I work. Three years ago, a colleague and I started a podcast to explore the loss of a sense of shared meaning in the practice of medicine. What has surprised us in the resulting 150+ hours of conversations we have recorded is this: One key element of the burnout crisis in medicine seems to be a collective loss of the ability to sense and honor the sacred in medicine. Thus, starting two years ago, we began teaching an elective called “Meaning in Medicine.” In that class, we talk about how to find meaning in our professional practice, but also about how to build a meaningful life.
As part of the answer to that latter question, I have begun explaining to my students—most of whom I assume are not religious—that I think it would behoove them to “find a church.” But to say this to a group of largely secular medical students at a secular university, I felt like I needed to be able to articulate exactly what it is I think organized religion uniquely offers. My conclusion is that there are three key offerings we can find “at church” that are difficult, if not impossible, to find anywhere else in 2025. None of this is to imply that joining a church can really boil down to some sort of Cartesian choice where you weigh the benefits and risks like you’re choosing whether to move or buy a car. At the end of the day, the decision to embrace religion will always be, at least in part, a matter of the heart and a move into mystery. Still, the rational analysis also matters and, as the full-on embrace of the thinking of the new atheists and their ilk fades, it’s worth talking about why “finding a church” might constitute part of building a beautiful life. Thus, when I tell my students to “find church,” I say that in order for a group to “count” as a church, it has to meet three criteria, which are also the three elements that explain just why a church is so valuable. Below, I explain why these criteria matter in 2025 and how I see them instantiate in the church I know best. I imagine members of other faiths could tell similar stories about their own traditions, but here I speak to what I know.
1) To count as a “church,” an organization must grapple with life's existential questions.
Those who grew up in the church learned very young to consider questions like: “Who am I?,” “Why am I here?,” “What is the meaning of life?,” etc. To church members, these questions are so common as to seem rote or even boring—and, in fairness, we often answer them cursorily and perhaps too quickly.
That all said, however, I believe the first two-and-a-half decades of the twenty-first century have demonstrated society’s deep need for places where these questions can be meaningfully and rigorously examined. In this vein, I am brought to think about an exceptionally bright medical student, who, after hearing my invitation to “find a church,” said to me plaintively in a subsequent private conversation: “It had never really occurred to me that life might have a bigger meaning than just achieving all the best things. I genuinely wonder what it would be like to live a life if I believed in some larger meaning.”
To be clear: I admire this student’s humility and clarity. What strikes me about his observation, however, is that it suggests to me a striking observation: in 2025, never mind answering the universe’s biggest questions, society has largely forgotten that the questions even matter in the first place. This is not to say larger society never grapples with such queries—with or without religion there will always be classes on philosophy, public lectures, and groups or clubs for people who really care about this stuff. But most of these modalities are evanescent—kind of like the calculus classes I took and worked very hard in 25 years ago, but from which I now remember virtually nothing.
As church members, however, we may gently roll our eyes at what often feels like the rote exercise of going every week to listen to often boring and repetitive sacrament meeting addresses only to go afterwards and sit in also not-usually-scintillating Sunday school classes. We add on top of this a whole host of firesides and chats around the campfire that often turn to spiritual things, and we won’t even get into the ten hours we spend every six months listening to the spiritual but also often much-more-boring version of church TED talks. But the point of all of this—again, the trees that make up the forest—is that we get together in all sorts of forums, all the time, to think and talk about the meaning of life, the purpose of the Earth, the nature of God, and all the rest of it.
And this really matters.
It matters because without vision, a people perish. Without vision, we are, I would argue, more likely to heed the siren song of demagogues. Or to be led carefully astray by passing philosophical fads. Or, perhaps most worrisome of all, to lapse into an initially unobtrusive, even comforting, but eventually deeply corrosive, form of societal nihilism and collective individual narcissism.
2) To count as a “church,” an organization must require that you participate, usually in person, in a regular form of community.
This, again, is something that strikes me as almost impossible for a lifelong church member to appreciate. The continuity provided by a church community is so regular and so enveloping, that those who grow up knowing it virtually never understand just how remarkable it is.
But gobs of recent demographic data demonstrate that the continued thriving of “wards” in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints constitutes an island of social sanity in a society where community—both as an idea and as an embodied reality—is too often coming apart. Starting at least as far back as the publication in the year 2000 of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, demographers have widely recognized that the decline of communitarianism in the United States is one of the twenty-first century’s most salient societal trends.
Indeed, in a chilling culmination of the problems foretold by Mr. Putnam and his colleagues, over the last many years, it has become clear that in many demographic groups the most concerning public health trend involves the rise of so-called “deaths of despair.” Likewise, loneliness has become such an endemic public health crisis that it now constitutes the centerpiece of the United States Surgeon General’s most urgent and important current public health initiative—it is as if loneliness is the tobacco of the twenty-first century. Amidst all this, it is both shocking and somehow unsurprising to learn that in a recent Wall Street Journal poll, not only do many citizens of the United States not think we are doing a good job of creating community, but, for the first time ever, a majority of respondents said that they did not think that community even matters—or at least that it is not worth prioritizing. And now, even more recently, the cover story of Atlantic suggests that what is most worrisome of all is not loneliness—because loneliness suggests longing for connection—but, instead, self-isolation, where we no longer even want to be connected.
Now, to be clear: the communities created within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints feature all of the same problems that have plagued communities throughout time. Just like any others, our communities can be riven by racial and classist divides. Interactions within a church community can feature snubs, jealousy, gossip, mistreatment, unkindness, and even abuse.
Nonetheless, what remains clearly true is that the art and science of creating, cultivating, and continuing a community are skills that are increasingly being lost in twenty-first-century America. In this sense, what remains most remarkable about many LDS congregations is not that the people who make them up are in any obvious way different from or better than the people that you find in any other walk of life. Rather, what remains remarkable is simply the fact that the people show up. And, often, it’s not just that they show up at the chapel but that they show up for each other in genuinely remarkable, and sometimes transformative, ways.
Members of the faith have inside jokes about the Elders Quorum setting up and taking down chairs or assisting with moves. We’ve all heard gentle teasing about funeral potatoes and green Jell-o. And all of us have probably rolled our eyes to hear the Elders Quorum or Relief Society presidents make yet one more plea to go work at the Bishop’s storehouse or make ministering a meaningful part of our lives.
But much of that teasing and eye-rolling precisely demonstrates the point that because all of this has become so normal for us, we simply no longer recognize just how remarkable all of this is. Indeed, I would argue that the deeply and spiritually and thoroughly communitarian impulse of Latter-day Saints will likely always constitute one of our greatest potential gifts to the world. Indeed, one entirely secular study from the University of Pennsylvania showed that church members are the most civic-minded group in the United States, and recent Pew data show that church members contribute much more time to community service than almost any other group.
In this sense, I often think that what most distinguishes us is not the initial curve of community, if you will, but rather its derivative. That is to say: even those who choose to leave the faith—and, to be clear, I honor and respect those who make that decision, including many people I deeply know and love—often take with them this devoted impulse to build and sustain community. It is as if, while growing up in the LDS faith, the urge to organize as a community is somehow imprinted on your psychological DNA. It becomes an impulse whose depth and importance very nearly seems to abide somewhere on the genetic level. And, given current societal changes, I would argue that this impulse towards communitarianism matters deeply.
3) Finally, to count as a “church,” an organization must push you to be better than you would otherwise be.
To be clear, in my medical school class I give no suggestions as to what this push might look like. My point here is not that a church should push us to do or not do particular things, but simply that it should push us to escape ourselves, to be better than we would be if left to our own devices, to assure that we do not come to occupy the seeming center of our own self-centric solar system.
A brief perusal of twenty-first-century culture demonstrates that the abiding ethos of much of popular culture really cannot be described in any way other than as being deeply and thoroughly narcissistic. The catchphrases of our current cultural moment are things like “you do you,” “find your own truth,” “learn to be yourself,” and “be your best you.” What each of these catch phrases reveals is a deep societal concern—some might even use the word “obsession”—with discovering and then demonstrating allegiance to your “self.”
But as I often point out to my students, this leaves unanswered a number of important questions: First, what is a self? And how does one know when they have found it? More to the point, though, even if you find your “self,” what are you then to do with it? And, to the same point, what if that self is natively a jerk? Are you then to be true to your jerk-y self? And, if not, why not? The questions go on and on.
Again, none of this is meant to suggest that the church offers perfect answers here. Nor do I suggest that church members are “better” than other people. Those questions, however, are actually entirely beside the point. What I’m getting at here is simply this: churches have something to say about capital-T truth. About questions like “How should I behave?” and “What does a good life look like?” Church is a place where we are taught, in a way that is situated deeply within a meaningful theological context, that: it matters how we treat the members of our family; honesty is important; integrity matters deeply; all people are children of the same God; money must be treated carefully; a large portion of our income should go to charitable purposes; we should live within our means; we should treat others with kindness.
And the list goes on and on.
True enough, many of these reminders to be better come as mundane Sunday school classes of prosaic addresses in sacrament meeting. But, again, that’s actually quite to the point: these lessons and talks and discussions act like drops of water, any of which on its own is virtually weightless and entirely meaningless but which, in aggregate, can facilitate something like the erosion that over eons carved the Grand Canyon.
As demonstrated in the UPenn study above: members of our church showed up to do the boring but hard stuff of citizenship. We volunteer (and, yes, that still obtains even if you subtract out the hours devoted to church service. Though, as implied above, those hours really should not be subtracted out.) We donate money to charity. We know our neighbors. We are often kind and abiding friends. This is not a statement of boast, rather, it is the finding and of an objective and entirely secular study that corroborates what many church members intuitively know: All of our failures, and faults, and blind spots notwithstanding, membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches us that how we act matters and that we have a responsibility to try to know and do what’s right.
In all of this, I believe I align with Jonathan Rauch and Ross Douthat in simply articulating that religion has important work to do in society. As a doctor, I would be open to other forces or organizations that would offer these same benefits but, so far, in spite of invitations to my students every term to present me with any other organization that would offer even one—let alone all three of these features—in any regular or meaningful way, I have never received any alternative response. Partly for this reason, I have concluded that two things are true: the first is that I believe society would do well to recognize the merits and virtues of spirituality in general and organized religion in particular. And the second is that I believe that the societal decline of organized religion is leaving in its wake a powerful vacuum and that, as a society, we have no good sense how to fill it.
In this sense, organized religion reminds me a bit of water. If you begin to list them, you will soon find that water has myriad uses—and, furthermore, while we can come up with alternatives to replace water’s function in some of those cases, it would be dizzyingly difficult to replace all of water’s various roles. We could think, for example, about how to replace water’s ability to facilitate cleaning ourselves, or about how to substitute something for some of water’s vital physiologic functions, or about how to find an alternative for water in terms of providing a home for aquatic flora and fauna. But finding individual replacements for all these use-cases, let alone a single substitute that could do all of them, is virtually impossible.
Likewise, what substitute would we offer for getting people together to discuss the meaning of life—a philosophy club? Have you ever known a person who has attended one of those regularly? What about building community? It is ironic that even John Dehlin, a dedicated critic of the organized church, has admitted that, try as he might, he has never been able to create anything like the church’s community magic for those who are “post-Mormon.” And, finally, on behavioral striving, we seem unable to provide a program that quite matches religion’s ability to foster such discussions organically—the problem is not that no such programs exists, the problem is implementing them regularly, yes, even faithfully, into our lives.
This is all to say: we as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints perhaps do not recognize just how great is the value of that Pearl of Great Price we all claim to know. Again, without skating over or dismissing the ways in which the church can be hard and can even harm especially those who find themselves on the church’s margins, I nonetheless feel quite strongly that we can recognize and more strongly affirm the meaningful, beautiful, and abiding ways in which membership in an imperfect church, led by striving but imperfect local and institutional leaders, nonetheless allows us to meaningfully grapple with life’s most important questions, to belong to imperfect but thriving and vitally nurturing communities, and to engage in the process of bettering ourselves by devoting ourselves to becoming the people that God wants us to be.
In the final analysis, perhaps the problem comes back to us as a society, having simply asked the wrong questions. Perhaps we have wanted to ask something like “Is religion close to perfect?” Or, at least, “Does religion have any major flaws that would want to make us pull away?” If the answer to the first question is “no,” or at least if the answer to the second question is “yes,” then we feel increasingly justified in withdrawing from a life of faith, confident that religion was a sort of comforting wive’s tale—something we’ve outgrown. But, instead, perhaps the question we should ask is: if we, as a society, largely leave religion behind, with what will we replace it? Increasingly, I fear the answer is “We really don’t know.” And that leaves me deeply worried.
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Art by Emma Taylor. Gather Around and The Gathering. @emmataylorfineart and emmapaints.com.