Throughout the 20th century seventy percent of all Americans belonged to a local religious body. Between 1999 and 2021 that number dropped to forty-seven percent, a decline of twenty-three points in just twenty-two years. Some say organized religion is dying, and the four horsemen of atheism (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) certainly thought that was true. But proclamations about the demise of organized religion are premature, to say the least.

Charles Darwin said all natural selection evolved at the individual level and at the group level. Groups with more virtuous members survived and replaced those with more selfish members. There has never been a culture that did not have thriving religions, because religion has, on the whole, been good for the species.

E. O. Wilson, the late sociobiologist from Harvard won a Pulitzer Prize identifying that the key social unit for the human species was not the nuclear family, but the tribe. We did not take off as a species until we moved to a tribal, community level. That is when we started creating civilizations and moving rapidly forward.

What caused us to create tribes? Many assume it was the desire for safety in numbers. Evidence points elsewhere. What brought us together was man’s search for meaning. Think Stonehenge, or the carved bodies of Rapa Nui, or burial mounds of native Americans. One of the pillars of religion is addressing man’s search for meaning.

Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, said humans are 90 percent chimpanzees and 10 percent bees. Humans have a selfish gene, like all other species, but we also are one of only nine species that also has a “hive” gene. (Wilson called these eusocial species.) We will sacrifice ourselves for the sake of the hive.

Haidt says humans have a hive switch that can be turned on. It is the space of the sacred, where self disappears and group interests dominate. It is a space of collective joy, love, mourning, even survival. It can be found by participating in team sports, singing in choirs, playing in marching bands, rooting for a sports team in a stadium, hallucinogens as group ritual, or joining together after a natural disaster, anything that turns on the hive switch.

Turning on the hive switch can even come via awe, a universal human experience, most often arriving when we see the expansive universe in all of its beauty. Think the first images from the JWST telescope or standing over the Grand Canyon. Anything that places us in perspective in nature moves us toward oneness with other humans.

Through history the hive switch has very commonly been turned on via religious community and its rituals. The religions that survive make groups more cohesive and cooperative. They unite members into a moral community. Such is the appeal of Jesus’s simple but not easily practiced command to love God, neighbor, and self.

We even come into the world wired for moral community. Morality in children is innate, meaning organized in advance of experience. It is self-constructed by children on the basis of their own experience with harm. At six to ten months of age, babies will choose a puppet who helps others as opposed to a puppet that hurts others. Morality also comes from childhood learning, which often takes place in religious community. Virtually all religions have rituals for children as they grow into adulthood. The loss of those rituals has hurt adolescents in the western world.

Religions also promote cooperation and trust within a group. Utopian communities in the 19th century all eventually failed, but those that were religious were seven times more likely to survive for much longer periods of time than those that were not religious.

Four out of five studies of religion (79 percent) have found that religion and well-being have a positive correlation on mental and physical health and longevity. Religious Americans are better neighbors than secular citizens. They also give seven percent of their income to all charities (not just religious ones) while secular people give only one and a half percent. It is not keeping rules and regulations that causes this kind of altruism. It is being in community with others of like mind.

There are broad benefits to organized religion. As mentioned, it is the place in which we search for meaning together. In spite of rugged American individualism, our species has always thrived when we work in community to search for meaning.

Jonathan Haidt says humans do change our minds, but not unless information comes to us in a non-threatening way. Religious communities provide a safe place in which to hear new and challenging ideas. They can create a secure environment in which we will be open to change, if encouraged to do so. Unfortunately, they can also be a place that creates hardening of the categories when a “protect the gates” mentality emerges.

In a polarized environment, the best way in which to truly see and hear those unlike you is via proximity and narrative. I speak at educational institutions all over the world, and am paid handsomely to do so. I go to Christian universities pro bono, because I know if I can get in close proximity to those students, and they can hear my story, their tendency to classify me as “other” is greatly diminished. They realize I’m normal, or at least as normal or abnormal as they are.

Religious communities are where we learn to be human together. They are messy, and they are supposed to be messy, because it is where we learn to work through conflict, our shared humanity, and our search for meaning through the various boundary conditions of life.

Religious communities also historically have done amazing amounts of social good in the world. They provide more than one half of food programs and one quarter of housing programs in the United States. Fifty-seven percent of faith based organizations participate in health programs. Working together in religious community, the total is greater than the sum of the parts.

It is also good to remember that fifty-two percent of Christians are supportive of marriage equality. We hear from the vocal minority that is not supportive, but ignore the majority that is supportive.

Religious communities have always been with us, and always will be with us. They change forms, with those surviving having more virtuous members and those dying having more selfish members, but religious communities are baked into the DNA of the species. And that is a good thing.

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And for those I saw at the pre-session to Theology Beer Camp today, here are the words we used at Left Hand Church:

We strive to love the God who burst on the scene 14 billion years ago in all of God’s complexity, mystery, and ever expansiveness, rooted in relationship and grounded in love. We strive to love our neighbors, particularly those who do not look like us.  And we strive to love ourselves, because if you can’t do that, you cannot do the first two.

In the first sentence we are defining God as the Big Bang and more. Quantum physics teaches us that the ultimate building blocks of the universe are not made of matter, but of a pattern of relationships between nonmaterial entities. If the ultimate building blocks of the universe are relationships, then is it much of a stretch to say the most powerful force in the universe is love? Therefore, “the God who burst on the scene 14 billion years ago in all of God’s complexity, mystery, and ever expansiveness, rooted in relationship and grounded in love.”

And so it goes.