The Religion-shaped Hole

I am not religious. I was raised in a religion. I left it, quietly, in my twenties. I do not think I am coming back.

But I have noticed something about the time I grew up in and the time I live in now. When I was small, most people around me shared, more or less, a religion. They disagreed about the details. They fought about which version was truer. But they shared a language. What was right. What was wrong. What was owed to neighbours. What was owed to the dead. What marriage was for.

They did not always live up to the language. Nobody does. But they had it. When something difficult happened — a death, a scandal, a birth — they knew, without having to decide again each time, what to do.

Most of that is gone now. For most of the people I know, the shared religious language is no longer there. We have to decide each time, from scratch, what to do.

The hunger religion used to feed has not disappeared. The hunger for meaning. For community. For something larger than yourself. For a sense that your life has a shape and the shape matters.

The hunger is still there. It is just being fed by other things.

It is being fed by politics, which now works for many people the way religion used to. The enemies are clear. The righteous are clear. The cause is larger than yourself.

It is being fed by wellness, by diets, by workouts, by the optimisation of one's own body, which has become, for many, a full substitute for a spiritual life.

It is being fed by online tribes, where the community is found and the belonging is instant.

It is being fed by causes which take the form of religion without the containers religion had developed over centuries. The moral intensity is as high as any religion ever had. The sense of moral community is thinner. The tolerance for doubt is lower.

None of these feed the hunger well, over time. They burn hot and then burn out. They create enemies faster than they create friends. They do not know what to do with the old, or the dying, or the quietly unhappy. They were not built for these things. Religions were.

I am not saying we should all go back to religion. I do not think we can. But the hole religion left is not an empty space. It is a space that is being filled. And the things filling it are feeding us badly.

Notice the hole. Notice what is filling it.