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10.29.2024

Belonging and Shared Agency: What Religion Still Offers Society

  • Michael Wear

Summary: 

  • While religion is not a perfect solution for fostering belonging and agency, it remains a significant source of meaning and community for many people.
  • The essay cautions against assuming that secular alternatives can replace the benefits of religious participation and suggests that religious communities still offer valuable insights for building meaning, belonging and shared agency in our society.

Religion remains a significant source of meaning and community in our society. We must not impose our assumptions about the future of religion or our own personal experiences with it, on questions about the role of religion in promoting belonging and a sense of shared agency in society.

Religion as a sociological phenomenon is certainly no panacea when it comes to belonging and agency. We can point to examples, often from our own histories, of how religiously influenced environments led to profound experiences of isolation, social conflict, the disintegration of community, and a loss of agency. Yet religion remains a significant source of meaning and community in our society. We must not impose our assumptions about the future of religion or our own personal experiences with it, on questions about the role of religion in promoting belonging and a sense of shared agency in society. 

There is a growing consensus that we are losing something valuable socially and civically with the decline of religious affiliation and church attendance. We should and must be attentive to the consequences of this decline on social capital and questions of agency and belonging. Yet, we should also recognize that we are making a particular and unnecessary assumption when we move from a recognition of relative religious decline to an assumption that the benefits of religious participation should be replaced with secular alternatives, rather than revitalizing or renewing those religious sources. Merely recognizing those benefits is often viewed as an act of magnanimity itself, rather than what it is: an objective, hard-nosed assessment of human history and experience.

There are at least two reasons why we should not assume the future irrelevance of religion to questions of belonging and shared agency. First, there are millions and millions of Americans, not to mention millions and millions around the world, who gain a profound sense of belonging and shared agency from religious resources and community. What are we saying about them–what do we suggest to them about their children and children’s children–when we assume the diminishment of the very sources of meaning that so enliven their sense of self and community? 

Second, we should question whether the desired social benefits of religion can be so easily parsed out, programmatized, and recreated if they are separated from their source. To be clear, I am not saying that we should hesitate solely out of polite deference to the feelings of religious people or an aversion to inconvenient realities regarding the negative associations some have with religion. Rather, by seeking to parse out the benefits associated with religion from religion itself, we might be the ones avoiding inconvenient facts, and missing out on knowledge that religious communities and religious sources themselves have to offer to us and to public decisionmakers. 

For all the narratives of religious decline in America, there are few things Americans share in common more than religious commitment. Religion still motivates a tremendous amount of prosocial behavior in America. It is within religious contexts that many Americans have their most formative experiences negotiating differences, speaking in public, serving others not like them, providing leadership, building intergenerational relationships, receiving help and care from people outside their families, and cultivating many other vital skills, experiences, and social norms.

In film and music, we can see how religion relates to these ideas of belonging and shared agency. In the films of the actress Saoirse Ronan, especially Lady Bird, Little Women, and Brooklyn, there are honest, powerful examples of the role of the Catholic Church and faith in her protagonists’ sense of place and duty. They also show the motivations and decisions of the characters, almost always made not as isolated individuals, but as part of a broader community and social fabric. 

Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin’s original song, “I’m Walking in Authority,” performed with a children’s choir, includes the following lyrics:

My mother may not be a queen 

But my Father’s king of everything

I’m adopted into the family

So I guess that makes me royalty. 

It continues: 

I’m walking in authority

Living life without apology

It’s not wrong, dear

I belong here

So you might as well get used to me. 

This song is emblematic of the basic structure of religious communities as sources of meaning, identity, and purpose, which open up possibilities for shared action and mutual commitments.

Everyone must bring their best to the work of building communities of belonging and agency. We should want people to progress as far as they can using the resources they feel are available to them. I believe there is much to learn from the ways that people have sought to build communities of meaning through religious traditions, communities, and knowledge, which may not only be a part of our past, but our future as well.

Michael Wear is President & CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life and author of The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.

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