Gongol.com Archives: November 2024
November 23, 2024
It has been noted for some time and by different surveys that Americans who regularly attend religious services have the highest rate of good feelings about Sundays, and rate Sundays the best day of the week. Theologians might point to the specifics of theology as the source of those good feelings, and they might be right; by nature, their claims are difficult if not impossible to falsify. ■ But it's also fair to consider that it may be enough simply that Sundays represent, for many, a day of voluntary belonging. Bonding between people happens mainly through the sharing of experience -- especially constructive experiences, though those constructive bonds can help to form a social glue for living through painful experiences, too. ■ With regular religious attendance on the decline in the United States, perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in our history is that Benjamin Franklin never got around to founding the quasi-religious movement he described in his autobiography as a "bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection". ■ Franklin effectively described a project to drive people towards moral improvement through self-examination and cooperation, but his "Society of the Free and Easy" never took permanent form. The name may have been clunky, but the idea probably had merit. ■ An enormous number of Americans have adopted "spiritual but not religious" as a substitute for established theology and the need for moral self-improvement has never dissipated. People will always seek those answers, and they will always gravitate towards places of belonging. Franklin was probably on to something well over 200 years ago when he wrote that there should be a distinctly American creed professing that "the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man." The question is where people gather to celebrate it, and if they're free to do it on Sunday mornings.
