It's not about religion per se, but about a common religion which has rituals that make people meet each other more, piercing their bubble of like-mindedness (smaller than the religion).
It's like going to a supermarket makes you see people more varied than your family circle and your chosen TV show characters. (It does not nudge you to talk to these people, though.)
I am not a religious person or church goer, but are the perspectives really that different? To me, it looks like a church is a self selected group of geographically proximate people who tend to look alike and dress alike. You don't usually see much ethnic diversity in a church photo.
It's more diverse than sitting at home, but I think exposure to a few TV shows has more diversity of thought, ethnicity, sexuality, etc., compared to going to church.
I'm not saying its bad for people to get together and talk. I see that church was an important mechanism for this in the past. However, I can't get past the negatives (supernatural belief, child abuse, kowtowing to authority, shame, ostracism) to believe it will continue to be a net positive.
What we need is more of what I think the Unitarians are after - non denominational community.
Right, but the context here is in people attending their local church. Your point is like saying that America is so diverse - it is, but how much do the different ethnicities actually interact?
Catholic churches are the most integrated denomination. And Catholics are the group most likely to intermarry between ethnicities. Speaking of my own family, my brother and I are both married to women of different ethnicities (and differing ethnicities at that).
> The only exceptions were Catholics. Catholics were almost twice as likely to be in an intermarriage and Catholics who attended services more frequently were slightly more likely to be in an intermarriage, the researchers found.
It's more than just your local parish though. When I visited Hungary, it was amazing to go to a church where I didn't speak the language, but still be able to feel totally 'at home', because it was a church, and they were saying mass. Even though it was in Hungarian, I understood exactly what was going on. Then when I visited India, which couldn't be further from Hungary, I had the same experience.
The takeaway from those articles seems to be that even the most integrated churches are still trailing average neighborhood integration numbers (which are broadly considered problematic). There has been progress, but there is still a ways to go:
> Despite progress in church integration, congregations remain far more segregated than the society in general. Dr. Dougherty, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, states that “congregations are looking more like their neighborhoods racially and ethnically, but they still lag behind. The average congregation was eight times less diverse racially than its neighborhood in 1998 and four times less diverse in 2012.”
The context here is whether churches are a good way for people of diverse backgrounds to engage and interact. I contend that they have unnecessary elements that make them worse than a non-religious community event (supernatural beliefs, explicit conformity of dress and thought, protecting predators, etc.)
I grew up in an Ahmedi congregation in suburban Cleveland. It was about 50% African-American and 50% post-60s Pakistani or Indian immigrants with the odd old-time immigrant family (mine) who intermarried or white converts. (My great grandfather famously had Elijah Muhammad to dinner on one of his visits to Cleveland.)
Later as I grew up I realized just how unusual that sort of integration was among any congregation, not just Christian or Islamic. When I read Vivek Bald’s book Bengali Harlem: The Lost Histories of South Asian America, I realized that actually this was the norm in the 20s-60s for South Asian immigrants of all backgrounds.
This has led to some befuddlement amongst others. A black City Councilperson in New Orleans egged a crowd on to call my cousin from Islamabad names based on his origin for trying to set up a tiny house village for homeless people in a residential neighborhood in Eastern New Orleans. I roared back at him that it pained me to see someone that looked like my grandmother beating up on my cousin, mentioned that my congregation met in a formerly AME church and kept the pews for years and shame on him for assuming we are all carpetbaggers. He turned to me and said “You are presumed to be what you look like.” I’ve never been happier to see someone lose an election.
Yeah I grew up in a Catholic church that was probably 30% vietnamese, 30% hispanic, and 40% white / everyone else. I guess my views are heavily influenced by that.
> To me, it looks like a church is a self selected group of geographically proximate people who tend to look alike and dress alike. You don't usually see much ethnic diversity in a church photo.
I agree any given local church in the US is unlikely to have a ton of ethnic diversity. And, for obvious reasons, it will have almost no religious diversity.
They do tend to have a decent amount of professional and socioeconomic diversity, though, which is also valuable.
I keep mentioning this video because it's just so good, but Roger Scruton argued that the world has turned selfish and with it we've lost beauty, which in turns means life has lost its meaning. It's a powerful, profound view and one that I can't shake off my head ever since watching it.
> Our language, our music and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centered, and offensive, as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives.
> One word is written large on all these ugly things, and that word is “me.”
> My profits, my desires, my pleasures.
> And art has nothing to say in response to this except, “Yeah, go for it!”
> I think we are losing beauty and with it there is the danger that we will lose the meaning of life.
The church I went in as kid was pretty tight socially and people in it were wery like minded. And by all I heard or read about, it is pretty much standard.
It's like going to a supermarket makes you see people more varied than your family circle and your chosen TV show characters. (It does not nudge you to talk to these people, though.)