Secular, godless "churches" are dying

Explains The Atlantic: "They Tried to Start a Church Without God. For a While, It Worked. Secular organizers started their own congregations. But to succeed, they need to do a better job of imitating religion."

For religious communes, the more sacrifices demanded, the longer they lasted; however, this connection didn’t hold for secular communes. The implication, Norenzayan said, was that challenging rituals and taxing rules work only when they’re part of something sacred; once the veil of sacrality is removed, people no longer care to commit to things that demand their time and dedication. “If it’s ‘Come and go as you wish,’ that’s not going to work,” he said. Even if secular congregations could create a sense of the sacred, they tend to attract people who are explicitly looking for a community without costly rituals—one that lets you do what you want.

They will never imitate religion enough to compete on Sunday morning with league sports for children and teens, even though sports for minors is rapidly becoming the exclusive privilege of richer and mainly white families.

Update: Longtime friend and retired Marine infantry officer David H. emails,

Akin to "secular churches" that lose any imperative nature without a compelling underpinning, it is always amusing to see business, social, sports, or other groups attempt to adopt military trappings to recreate the commitment and sacrifice of actual military organizations...but always fall short of evoking similar commitment. Unless the very real price for not equaling the standard is, ahhh, DEATH, it is hard to sharpen the focus of the wannabe participants.  

Which helps explain why, for example, environmentalism is a religion in its own right, though godless, because extinction is the preached consequence of non-adherence. Remember, according to AOC, we have only 12 years to save the planet!

In that, environmentalism does have a god, though: Gaia, Mother Earth. But Gaia is not a god who saves us, but a god whom we must save. Environmentalism is an inversion of religion in its usual sense, in that it makes us gods, and conveniently, some of us are "woke" gods and therefore must take charge. All humans are gods, but some are more godly than others, to paraphrase Orwell.