There are a lot of ways this could flop. For starters, atheists might not like it. “One challenge in the discussion that’s occurred on the rise of atheist churches so far,” explains Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, “is that it tends to overlook the fact that the majority of involved atheists and humanists aren’t actually interested in personally being involved in a congregation atmosphere.”
Even amongst followers, it could be that the Atheist Church model is only palatable when it is decentralized and hyper-local. I wonder if the original Assembly’s draw was, in part, its rookie vibe: its mistakes, its silliness, its earnestness, its East London-ness.
There are lots of fun ways to play this out. Imagine that Sunday Assembly Everywhere does take of with rip-roaring success. Will London become secularism’s answer to Vatican City? Might the Atheist Church subdivide into Orthodox, Conservative and Reform branches of godlessness? Will Atheism have its own Great Schism? Its own Martin Luther, touting a new and better way to not believe? Or might the Sunday Assembly go the way of the American megachurch: migrating from young urban centers to prefab suburban main streets?
Either way, Sanderson Jones is confident that the model will spread. “We have the most natural human urge to do this,” he insists: to organize ourselves around institutions of meaning. I am inclined to agree that “Live Better, Help Often, and Wonder More” is a lovely motto to build around.
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