We can attack religion all day long and not get anywhere with the general public. Here’s why: Your local church is entrenched in everyone’s community. And it can be a church or mosque or temple. It doesn’t matter. It is the center of the community in a whole hell of a lot of places.
The older I get the more I see this from family, friends and neighbors. None of them are hardcore religious fanatics, but these “regular” people are the ones who give religious institutions their power. Yeah, the really hard core religious people are the ones who get the headlines, but average parishioners who give their weekly donation and go to church a couple of times a month are the ones who fill the coffers of the various churches around the country and around the world.
Why do these people go? Again, most average people aren’t hard core religious fanatics. They aren’t trying to follow every last word of the Bible. But they also aren’t trying to push those ideas on peoples throat either. They aren’t the “bad” kind of religious people. But they go to church because ultimately life is hard. And boring. And lonely. And average people just feel the need to have a sense of community. It doesn’t matter where that place is, but people are social animals and need a certain level of human interaction once in a while. A community church gives them that. It gives them a place to get married. And to hold funerals in. There might be a local strawberry festival at the church where they see their aunt Mary or at service every few weeks where they see that cute girl they have been trying to build up the nerve to talk to. People don’t have a ton of those opportunities elsewhere. They really don’t. Once you are out of college, the number of friends you have drops dramatically and the opportunities to make new ones drops even more. You aren’t typically going to be going out to the bars every week past your 30s and asking someone out at a grocery story is creepy. Worse yet is trying to make friends or find partners at work. Your ability to actually socialize is incredibly limited after a certain age and church is a very easy way to do that.
But it isn’t just a way to socialize. When a flood hits or there’s a fire or some other disaster, a church is an easy location to organize these things. Some places use it as a voting location. It is an easy way for the church to embed itself into the community.
So why am I saying all these things? Because if atheists really want to rid the world of religion, it has to give people an alternative to the local church. Atheist groups should hold festivals. You don’t need to push the atheist-angle, but give people something to do and somewhere to go. If some building collapses and people are out of a house, try to organize shelter for them. Hold gathering celebrations for your town’s centennial or something along those lines. Make it a regular event that gives folks a sense of community that isn’t tied to a religious event.
I realize that very few people (if anyone) will actually read this, but as someone who has despised religion for a long, long time I see the uphill battle that atheists fight and unfortunately we fight the wrong people. The older I get, I realize that fighting the hard core religious fanatics is a waste of time. Giving the average people an alternative to going to church is the single best way to attack religion. No one event, no matter how heinous (i.e. priests and kids) will kill off a church, but a slow decline in attendance over the years will.
There’s a really wild reason why the church has been so durable and pernicious in the US. That’s because what you’ve described, OP, is a third space. Third spaces are those places that are neither home nor business, but strictly places meant for social activity. In other countries, they have pubs, parks, and cafes, among other things, that also fulfill this role. In the US, due to seventy years of low-density car-centric urban design and forty years of Reaganomics, the only real third spaces left are the churches. There were malls, I guess, but the internet pretty much nuked them. You want to loosen the church’s grip? Advocate for more walkable and bikeable towns and cities, which will support more third spaces. Another good place to start is demanding reform on parking minimums, which are, by and large, based entirely on bullshit and put otherwise usable land to waste.
Church membership is also falling.
The US also has pubs, parks, and cafes, among other things. I suspect the death of the third place here has more to do with increased socialization online, more affordable alternative entertainment options, poor urban planning, and a lack of available time due to our work culture and lack of labor protections.
These are also factors, yes. Church membership is falling, yes, but it’s being replaced with nothing. I think it’s the lack of community ties and lack of third spaces that’s helping to drive these waves of spree murder we keep experiencing.
Those are probably contributing factors, I imagine most mass shooters feel stuck and squeezed and angry about it to the point of violence against (usually) unrelated parties. Community, opportunity, just feeling like one’s society gives a shit about them, would all make a big difference. Unfortunately when this desire gets filled with something irrational and toxic like religion, it can lead to other problems long-term.
Making sure the average person has enough economic freedom to not feel stuck or exploited would go a long way to preventing this, so would meaningful public mental health resources and gun control.
I’m largely agreed, though I think the erosion of in-person community has been the larger factor. Communities tend to have a psychological anchoring effect, and as communities have gotten weaker and third spaces have dried up, you’re seeing more and more spree violence. I’d wager that it’s no accident that the UK is seeing an uptick in spree violence lagging behind their pivot to more sprawling, car dependent US-like urban design.
As far as gun control goes: it is true that nobody’s going to pull off what the Vegas shooter did with a sword or a baseball bat. That said, the gun violence is the symptom, not the cause; you still see spree murder in countries without access to guns, it just takes other, less deadly forms. So, addressing gun control, imo, shouldn’t be the spearhead of addressing spree murder. It does need to be done, but prioritizing it sort of imperils other, more effective reforms that could be made because it’s such a stupidly political issue.