Once there were priests

It’s not only possible, but easy, to live an entirely secular life in many contemporary societies. Although people of faith are part of the mix; one’s religion, or lack of it, is usually considered a private matter. On the one hand this religious indifference allows us to function in reasonable harmony as a multicultural democracy. On the other hand, it means that our public institutions pay little, if any, attention to helping us turn outward – beyond our personal or narrow collective interests and towards, well, everyone and everything else; a task religions take seriously. And I think this matters. So, in 2021, I set out to try and understand what we lost when we lost religion, and if any of it could, and should, be retrieved.

Once there were priests outlines my year exploring what the secular world can learn from religion. I am an atheist – that is, the concept of God or gods, as something “real” is not part of my lexicon – and I was brought up that way. My exploration consisted of both investigation and a field-experiment. In terms of investigation, I attended a Christian church, immersed myself in Christian literature and podcasts, interviewed people with formal roles in Christian settings, and had numerous informal conversations with Christians about their faith. I focused on Christianity as the religion most accessible to me, a woman of European descent, living in New Zealand.

My field-experiment involved setting myself up as a secular “priest” with bespoke vows, and offering services, ceremonies and personal conversations. I wanted to put what I was learning from religion into practice as I went: could this or that be plucked out, any intellectually troublesome aspects brushed off, and it then be recreated with whoever was willing to experiment with me?

As becomes clear in the book, my experiment didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped. A lot of my secular peers stayed away from my priestly offerings, especially the environmentalists I thought could do with what I was trying to offer. Religion is a touchy subject, and many people have deliberately turned their backs on it for a variety of reasons. I was also an upstart, although the people of religious faith I feared would be most offended by my
presumption, were amongst the most open.

But my inkling that secular communities have lost something important in abandoning religion was born out over the course of the year. Gradually I developed a more nuanced sense of what it means to regularly turn towards humility, the unknown, reflection, listening to and care for the other, and awareness of the world as it is rather than as we wish it was.

Something I started to say to people when they asked, “How is your year as a secular priest going?” was, “Everyone should do a my-year-as-a-whatever if they can.” Aside from what I learnt about religion and its lessons for the secular world, it was wonderfully liberating to have a year of deliberately constraining and directing my actions and choices. A year does not last forever, but it is still a long time. It’s long enough to get a sense of what it is to see, and live in, the world differently from the way you did before.