All my life I've struggled to find somewhere to belong. I'm a shy and introverted person and I find it hard to reach out to people. I've always felt kind of different. My mother taught me that difference is a wonderful thing, and she's right - it is far more valuable to be and do something original than to repeat or mimic the choices of others. I've been a proud non-conformist all my life, in my quiet little way. But if conformity were an entirely negative trait, it would have been discarded through natural selection long ago. There is value in likeness - it helps us to connect and engage with one another.
Speaking of conformity and other things I violently resist, they say that religious people are happier people.
Study after study, survey after survey. Go to church, get happier. Why? Well, it's not that complicated. There are your basic reassurances like "death is not the end", "cosmic justice never goes unserved", and "God is watching over us". But those are all big conceptual things, and the typical human being spends a vast majority of the time thinking about the small, fussy, physical world they navigate every day. And in that fussy little physical world, religion does one useful thing: it brings people together.
Every week, congregations congregate. Churchgoers gather and share time to worship, focus, and think about their direction and purpose in life. They become as one in song, in prayer, in ritual. If you see it like I see it, it's not "something greater" in a woooooo spiritual sense. But it is something bigger than any one person among us. It's a community.
The glue that holds a religious community together is faith. If you attend a church, you will be surrounded by people who believe the same essential things about the spiritual world, the nature of God and the purpose of life. If you too believe these things, then you are likely to feel a powerful sense of belonging with those people. They won't all be your buddies, but they are in some sense your family. You share an understanding with them.
But church attendance is way down. Here in Australia, I know almost no one who attends a church, synagogue or prayer group regularly. So what about the believers who don't engage with a faith community?
Well, they simply don't reap the benefits. It's not enough to say you're a Christian - you have to go to church regularly to reap the benefits. It's not even enough to just turn up to church and listen. You have to connect with the people there. You have to make friends, reach out, help out, become valuable.
Here's one of many studies analysing the link between life satisfaction and religious engagement. Note the table showing that weekly churchgoers who have no church friends were just as likely to be happy with their lives as people who don't go to church at all.
The salient point here is that belonging to a community fosters greater happiness in people's lives. Religions have historically been an outlet for this. They're adapted for it. They provide a meeting space, a shared point of focus, a regular schedule of attendance, and many teachings that are effective chiefly because they breed community and belonging (for instance the call to charity, or the singularly Christian call to
convert everyone you meet to the worship of the Son).
Religious activity is one way of achieving community. But for some of us, it's just not an option.
There's no reason that non-religious people should miss out on belonging to a community. The trouble is, in a world of privacy and personal computers and single-bedroom apartments and long-distance commuting to work, there's a lot of us who have no real connection to a community anymore.
If you've watched a lot of French movies, you'll notice how the local coffee shop or pub is a place where the many quirky characters in the village gather together regularly, not for the purpose of a big formal meetup, but simply to riff and chatter and become absorbed in the bustle of local existence. I've never gone to a cafe on my own simply to absorb the atmosphere. People do it down in Oakleigh - middle-aged Greek men who sit about shouting happily at one another and sipping tiny cups of espresso. But people my age don't go anywhere unless they're going with someone. If you by yo'self, you stayin home.
A growing kind of community, however, is the online sharing community. I'm not talking about Facebook, though it does have the power to keep us connected with people we'd otherwise forget and lose. I'm thinking specifically of
Reddit, which I started using a few months ago after a blog of mine got reposted on the
TwoXChromosomes forum and I got a bunch of hits from it.
Reddit is a site divided into many different categories of interest - TwoXChromosomes is a forum for lady things;
Gaming is a forum for gamer things;
Trees is a forum for stoner things. There are mountains of different subreddits and users of the site can subscribe and read content just from their specific areas of interest. People post links, images, thoughts, questions. But the important part of Reddit is the comments. It's not about saying "read this". It's about reacting, engaging and listening to different points of view.
Without physical proximity and personal identifiers like faces and voices, Reddit cannot be a community in the same way as your local cafe or synagogue. But it is a community. If you follow discussions in the same forums for long enough, you begin to recognise the local celebrities and connect with the same members again and again. You can voice your opinions and engage in satisfying debate that would be too confronting to occur in a real-world interaction. There are designated moderators, but most of the moderation is done by the community itself. Inappropriate, unhelpful or offensive comments are quashed; trolls are starved and vulnerable people are defended.
Surprisingly, I haven't seen much bad grammar in the forums I've been following. And fair's fair, there are arseholes out there, but what I've observed is that the arseholes are far outnumbered by the compassionate and the valiant. Mean people are quickly expelled.
A side effect: outsiders, too, are rejected as "trolls". I follow the
Atheism subreddit (which has, by the way, twelve times more readers than the
Christianity subreddit, so ner) and I occasionally see religious people contributing to the discussion. It does depend on what they're saying, but they are often treated with suspicion and doubt. I think that the Atheist forum is incredibly valuable for thousands of atheists living in areas of America where lack of faith is tantamount to thought-crime. These people struggle to find each other in real life, so it is a deep comfort to belong to a community that understands the intellectual dilemma of being forced to attend a church preaching a faith they cannot believe and witnessing the moral hypocrisy of those preaching it. But a community is an "in-group", and this necessitates an "out-group".
The other subreddit I'm following lately is the
Depression forum. This might seem like a negative place to be, but it has shown me the restorative power of compassion and outreach. I haven't posted any cry for help, but I have made it my goal to read other people's stories, share my experiences and try to offer support and solutions to people who come looking for them. I'm no professional, but I don't need to be. People just need somewhere to go, and they need to know someone hears them when they call for help.
I had an awful week last week, and this is actually what helped me pick myself back up. Feeling lonely, tired, hopeless, purposeless and angry at the world, I hadn't been getting out of bed 'til after noon. But I went searching for a way to drag myself back up, and I decided the best way to refresh my positive cognition was to apply it to other people.
I thought about, and researched, the possibility of volunteer work. But I couldn't find anything that I felt comfortable with. I'm not good with people face-to-face. I don't want to join a Christian charity because I'm afraid of feeling at serious odds with the people who run it. I have no experience with children, with disability, with tutoring, with the elderly. Everything sounds scary.
I'm not saying I'll never volunteer. But I don't know what I would do. So I tried the one thing I could do right away - log onto Reddit, talk about mental health, empathise with the suffering, and offer stories, suggestions and digitally-transferred hugs.
