As Religion Declines, Non Profit Steps in

The Rev. Lori Whittemore has watched her congregation dwindle for years. A Unitarian Universalist minister in Saco, Maine, Whittemore is realistic about everything that keeps people from the pews on Sunday morning — from youth sports games and sleepy teenagers to loss of faith and religious trauma. But Whittemore is also acutely aware of all that is lost when people don’t have regular, meaningful contact with others.

“Church used to be the center of where you got your social services — certainly where you got spiritually fed,” she says. Pastors helped parishioners grapple with grief and make meaning of their lives. Members looked after each other, dropping off food to sick parishioners and forging social ties that enhance well-being.

Research has linked regular religious practice with high rates of happiness, volunteerism, and charitable giving. Sociologists have studied how religious affiliation leads to stronger social ties, broadening people’s support networks and grounding them in a community. As more houses of worship close, Whittemore wonders where people will turn when they need help.

Today, 47 percent of Americans say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque; in 1999, that share was 70 percent. All across the country, houses of worship — especially Christian churches — are shuttering. A 2019 study found that more churches were closing than new ones were opening.

These closures are happening at a time when many people lack strong social ties. This year, the U.S. surgeon general issued an advisory naming loneliness and isolation as serious threats to public health. Just 39 percent of U.S. adults described themselves as very connected to others, according to a 2022 study. That disconnection can have a profound impact on health, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, a 2017 study found.

Something, it seems, is missing from American life.

Even as fewer people attend religious services, many are still searching for meaning in their lives. Angie Thurston studied this trend in young people as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. Fascinated by the uptick in millennials who called themselves spiritual but not religious, Thurston and a co-researcher mapped where they went to find community and meaning. Often they went to nonprofits. Thurston and her colleague spoke to the people heading those organizations. “A consistent refrain amongst those leaders was that they were being treated like pastors.”

Nonprofits are increasingly filling a spiritual void — whether they’re ready to or not.

Company on the Edge

At the height of the pandemic, Whittemore and other chaplains called 1,200 Mainers who had tested positive for Covid and lacked emotional or spiritual support. They called people two or three times during the course of their illness and offered them a listening ear. The chaplains wanted those suffering alone to know that people cared about them.

That care, Whittemore realized, would be needed even after the virus waned, so in 2021, she founded a nonprofit, Spiritual Care Services of Maine.

“So much of suffering today is not about tangible needs so much as it is the need for recovery of souls,” she says.

Whittemore estimates some 600 or 700 people requested a call from SCS Maine chaplains from January to October 2023. After a gunman killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, in late October, the nonprofit launched a 24-hour hotline to help people grieve, cope with shelter-in-place orders, and reckon with the question of “How could this happen here?” Seven people used the hotline, all of whom had close ties to those killed, according to Whittemore.

“They all wanted to share their own personal connection to the situation with someone who would be safe and confidential,” Whittemore wrote in an email to the Chronicle. “They didn’t feel like they could talk with friends or relatives because everyone was suffering so much.”

The hotline had to shut down after it ran out of funding on November 30.

SCS Maine accepts referrals from government service providers and other groups that serve people in need. Many clients are grappling with substance-use disorders and mental-health challenges. Others are experiencing homelessness or domestic violence. Chaplains also offer training for social workers on how to care for people facing moral or existential questions.

For most clients, spiritual care — which addresses a person’s ability to create meaning and cope with loss — complements other services they receive, like therapy, housing, or food assistance. Chaplains fill a gap, Whittemore says.

“A social worker offers fixes and resources, but a chaplain just offers a listening presence,” she says. “The chaplain will sit on the edge of the abyss with them. We don’t have a fix, but we don’t want them to walk alone.”

Hospitals and universities have had chaplains for generations, but it’s becoming more common for other kinds of nonprofits to partner with chaplains.

The American Red Cross includes chaplains on its teams of volunteers that support people who have survived disasters. The San Francisco Night Ministry deploys groups of chaplains and faith leaders to walk the city’s streets and attend to unhoused people’s spiritual needs and distribute hygiene kits. With the help of the nonprofit Faith Matters, chaplains are embedding in social movements.

“When we look for the places where there are daily bridges being built across pain, across difference, across challenge — I think chaplains are doing some of that bridge-building,” says Wendy Cadge, a sociologist and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University.

She argues that chaplains are uniquely suited for a distributed approach to spiritual care because they’re trained to support anyone who asks for it. Most often, they support people through grief and loss. Chaplains hail from a range of spiritual and religious backgrounds and even include athiests and humanists. They offer empathetic support rather than religious tenents and work to guide people through the fog of pain.

By partnering with nonprofits and other institutions, chaplains are reaching people where they naturally gather. That’s essential in a moment of heightened polarization, when existential questions feel particularly urgent and old ways of offering care aren’t working, Cadge says.

“None of us go to Blockbuster anymore to rent a movie, but we all watch Netflix,” she says. “So we’re not going to a congregation, we’re not going to an institution, but we’re going to find another way to do this thing.”

‘Like Looking in a Mirror’

When Lennon Flowers was 24, she was new to Los Angeles and grieving alone. Her mom had died of lung cancer three years earlier. Whenever people asked Flowers about her family, she felt guilty telling them that her mother was dead.

The facts of her life were uncomfortable and unfamiliar to other people her age; her life felt painfully different from those of her peers. But when Flowers met Carla Fernandez, she felt her world open up. Fernandez, then a colleague, was 22 and had lost her father to brain cancer six months earlier.

Fernandez invited Flowers and three other young grievers she knew to a potluck dinner at her house. Meeting peers — some who became close friends — with shared experiences helped Flowers navigate her grief and find a community where she felt people knew her intimately. She and Fernandez founded a nonprofit, the Dinner Party, to share that model with other grieving young people across the country.

“We understood from the very beginning that grief wasn’t a thing to solve,” Flowers says. “It’s the loneliness and isolation that attends it that actually we can do something about.”

Now a national nonprofit with a staff of eight, the Dinner Party serves people in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s who are grieving the loss of a loved one. Since June 2020, it has launched more than 300 small groups, or ‘tables,’ across the country. The tables meet in person, often over dinner, or virtually, and are led by a trained host. The tables meet in person, often over dinner, or virtually. There are no professional facilitators or grief counselors — only young people who have experienced loss firsthand.

“There’s a myth in the world that community builds itself, and it doesn’t,” Flowers says. Her team helps hosts navigate tricky interpersonal dynamics, like a participant who talks over others, and offers resources, such as interfaith grieving rituals.

Jackie Marks joined a Dinner Party table soon after her mom died in 2020. Everyone in the group had lost a parent. It was during the Covid lockdown, and the group met on Zoom with participants across the country. Even though she was connecting with others through a screen, Marks says her first call was a turning point in her journey with grief.

“I remember feeling so light after my first call because I was talking to people in a way that I had never talked to anyone before,” she says. She listened as participants shared feelings and experiences that she’d gone through herself. “It felt almost like I was looking in a mirror.”

The Dinner Party attracts people who are looking for connection. When Ryan was 34, his father died after a brief illness. Ryan grew up in small town in Iowa. While his family was very involved in local parish activities, Ryan never felt that same connection to the Catholic church. “It wasn’t a huge support for me,” says Ryan, who asked that the Chronicle not use his last name out of concern that his comments could damage his mother’s relationship with the church, where she is still a member.

Grief made Ryan take stock of his support networks. He valued care from his wife, close friends, and a therapist, but he felt like something was missing. There was a difference, he thought, between having people listen to your experience and having people deeply relate to it.

When a friend who had also lost a parent suggested the Dinner Party, Ryan seized on the idea. Within a month, he had completed training to be a host and recruited a table of fellow grievers in D.C. Minutes into their first Zoom call, Ryan knew he had found the community he’d been searching for. “I felt such a visceral connection. Everyone was crying at different times, even when they weren’t telling their own stories,” he says. “It was so powerful.”

Ryan was stunned by the openness among people who were only just getting to know each other. In November, Ryan hosted the group for dinner at his apartment and felt that connection grow stronger. Participants each brought a dish or beverage that reminded them of a person they’d lost. Ryan made his grandmother’s noodle-soup recipe — which he had grown up eating at home. The group plans to meet in person again in December and January.

Sacred Spaces

The Dinner Party is a relatively young organization — it was founded in 2014 — but long-running groups can help young people make sense of life’s meaning, too.

“I’m sure there’s a lot of nonprofits who haven’t necessarily thought about the work that they do or the work that they’re supporting as spiritual practice,” says Angela Patterson, head writer and editor for Springtide Research Institute, a nonprofit that studies religious affiliation and expression among Gen Zers.

In 2022, Springtide surveyed 4,546 young people ages 13 to 25; 56 percent said they engaged daily or weekly in art as religious or spiritual practice. More than half — 54 percent — said the same about spending time in nature.

Patterson encourages nonprofits — especially in the arts or environmental causes — to consider the spiritual experiences Gen Z volunteers, participants, and employees could have as they engage. “How might nonprofits work alongside young people in having that sort of discovery?” Patterson asks. “Young people are having these experiences, our data absolutely supports that.”

But it’s important that nonprofits — old and new — recognize that offering community can come with far more serious challenges than they anticipated.

Thurston, who studied where religiously unaffiliated millennials find meaning and community outside of houses of worship, says, “People were showing up with their whole lives to these spaces.”

In some cases, they were grappling with serious personal problems. The leader of a nonprofit makerspace told Thurston that someone who came to the space used it as a stop-gap measure, working on welding projects when they felt a desire to harm themselves. Another nonprofit leader told Thurston she struggled to find the right way to support her community after someone involved with the nonprofit died by suicide. “I know how to put a Band-Aid on,” she said, “but this is open-heart surgery.”

In 2018, Thurston and her colleagues launched a program to train leaders of community organizations in spiritual care. The Formation Project uses facilitated small-group discussions and reflective writing assignments to guide leaders in exploring spiritual meaning in their own lives.

Leaders learn language to discuss tough topics with the people who engage with their nonprofits and the skills to offer them a listening ear without judgment or doctrine. By the end of the free, yearlong program, leaders are prepared to sit with community members experiencing hardship.

Plato and a Place to Stay

Each month Philosophy Night draws people from across the San Francisco Bay Area to tackle existential topics like death and dying or to debate moral decision making.

Charlotte Ashlock went to her first meeting on a second date. “It was a romantic failure, but it was a community success, because I pretty much went to every Philosophy Night after that,” she says.

Middle Circle, the small San Francisco nonprofit that runs Philosophy Night, is all about community success. It’s the product of a research project on the question: “How might we create church-like community in progressive, urban areas?”

A small group of community members polled friends and neighbors, conducted qualitative interviews, and drew upon sociological research to create the community they missed: somewhere they felt they belonged and shared values with others who were different from themselves. The group defined “middle circles” as places where relationships are weaker than those with family and close friends but stronger than those with colleagues and other loose acquaintances.

“This is what churches have been,” says Anders Peterson, director of Middle Circle. “The difference is that they’re all bound to dogma, and what do you do when you don’t believe it?”

Middle Circle acts as the hub for “circles” for different activities, which have included improv, beer brewing, and community service. It also organizes events, such as a hygge night at a volunteer’s home this month, which celebrated the Danish practice of cozy comfort. Like churches, however, the nonprofit is challenged by limited funding and volunteers, and some circles have folded over time.

Anyone can start a new circle based on their interests. Ashlock, for example, has been developing an idea for a circle to explore how to build a more just world after the pandemic. “Having Anders as a source of support made me feel more courage to start this group because starting a group by yourself with no support is very vulnerable,” Ashlock says.

Peterson is an unlikely leader for the group. An ordained pastor, he has belonged to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America all his life. He had a crisis of faith after college, and his work as Middle Circle’s director and chaplain is informed by the questions that once shook his belief. Rather than leave religion, Peterson decided to enter divinity school. He’s dedicated his career to helping people explore life’s big questions. “We can wonder together,” Peterson says. “That’s my philosophy.”

Middle Circle was launched with a three-year grant from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s new-start ministry program, which builds ties with people who are new to the religion, such as racially diverse and multicultural communities. “We need something for this large group of people who are not going back to church,” Peterson said in his pitch. Today, Middle Circle earns revenue through ticket sales for its events as well as individual donations — often $10 or $20 but sometimes as much as $10,000 — and an endowment from First United Lutheran Church in San Francisco. This unique model works, Peterson says, because the San Francisco church is very progressive and willing to fund a program that isn’t aimed at spreading church doctrine.

At Middle Circle, Philosophy Night discussions have attracted as many as 80 attendees, although a typical one draws about 20. Participants take turns hosting them at their homes. Before each meeting, two facilitators research the discussion topic and develop questions. Participants discuss the questions and then break into smaller groups to drill deeper. Everyone gets the chance to speak in the small groups.

People get vulnerable, sharing personal experiences that led them to hold certain beliefs. Ashlock says that openness has helped her feel closer to people in the group than she normally would to people she sees only once a month. After attending a few meetings, Ashlock thought to herself, “This group feels like my church, but I don’t know why.”

She’d stumbled upon a community where people share values but don’t all think exactly the same. Connection — not conversion — is the goal of Middle Circle.

Peterson recognizes that some people have been harmed by religion or don’t find it meaningful. But he says it’s important to belong to something. “At some point you realize you’re alone, you’re trying to figure out what the meaning of life is, and you’re just doing it alone, watching YouTube videos,” he says.

Ashlock once brought friends to Philosophy Night, and they complained that the other attendees were too conservative. “You’re not getting it!” she responded. “I may be one of the most left-wing people who attend that group, but also they listen to me and they move closer to where I am — which, to me, is much more important and inspiring than where someone is in the first place.”

Ashlock says her own ideas have shifted after Philosophy Night, too. Listening to participants from other countries share their experiences during a discussion of national identity, she found herself thinking about national borders in a new way. That exchange of ideas thrives at Philosophy Night because everyone gets time to share their thoughts.

Because the conversation happens at such a low temperature, Ashlock has been able to build close ties with other participants — including those with whom she often disagrees. When a member of the group was searching for a new living arrangement, Ashlock let her sleep on her couch for a week. When Ashlock lost her job earlier this year, Peterson asked Philosophy Night attendees to help her find a new one.

“It was very comforting to feel like, Oh, my workplace community is not my only community,” she says. “I have lots of communities that care about me.”

Peterson wants there to be more organizations providing this kind of support across the country. Without them, he says, it’s too easy for people to live lonely lives in an echo chamber, cut off from the community and connection that make a life full.