Maybe Church Isn’t the Problem. Maybe We Haven’t Figured Out What We Actually Need.
• 14 min read •
Every now and then, you have a thought that makes you pause for a moment because, the more you sit with it, the more complicated it becomes.
I had one of those thoughts recently about church.
I’m not a believer, at least not in the conventional religious sense. I don’t necessarily look to religion for answers about life, morality, or the universe. But the older I get, the more I observe people, and the more I think about how we live, the harder it becomes for me to dismiss religion entirely.
Because, when you really think about it, church isn’t all that bad.
Hear me out.
For some people, church is the only place they feel genuinely loved. It’s where they find friends, build relationships, receive counsel, learn to forgive, find a sense of purpose, and feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves. For some, it is the only community they have. For others, it is the only place they know to turn when life becomes too heavy to carry alone.
And honestly, I find it difficult to look at that and say there’s nothing valuable about it.
You don’t have to believe in the God being preached about to recognise the human needs being met in the process.
Think about it. We all need somewhere to belong. We need people who care whether we’re doing well or falling apart. We need a reason to get out of bed when life feels pointless, someone to talk to when we don’t know what to do, and occasionally, someone to remind us that we are not the centre of the universe.
Some people find these things through friendships, philosophy, family, books, or simply by spending enough time reflecting on life. Others find them in church.
And maybe that’s okay.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that people go to church. Perhaps the problem begins when we assume that the thing that works for us must necessarily be the thing that works for everyone else.
Because I don’t think that’s how human beings work.
The useful things aren’t always supernatural
One thing I’ve come to notice is that a lot of what gets preached in church isn’t necessarily new or mysterious wisdom.
Forgive people. Be patient. Don’t let greed consume you. Treat people with kindness. Be grateful. Don’t allow your anger to control you. Give to those who need help. Learn to live with others.
You can encounter versions of these ideas in philosophy, psychology, literature, and the accumulated experience of ordinary people who have spent enough time living to learn a thing or two.
You don’t necessarily need a Bible to understand that holding on to resentment can destroy your peace. You don’t need a sermon to realise that selfishness can ruin relationships. And you don’t have to believe that a particular piece of wisdom came from God before you can recognise its usefulness.
Of course, not everything preached from a pulpit is wise, and not every biblical story provides a straightforward moral lesson. There are difficult passages, troubling ideas, and interpretations that deserve serious scrutiny. That’s a conversation of its own.
But the point is that religious spaces can contain genuinely useful lessons, even for people who don’t accept the supernatural explanations attached to them.
And that raises an interesting question: Does the usefulness of an idea depend on where it comes from?
If a pastor tells you to forgive someone, and a philosopher arrives at the same conclusion through years of reflection, is one person’s advice inherently more valuable than the other’s?
If a believer becomes a kinder person through faith, while an atheist becomes a kinder person through empathy and reason, does either person’s morality automatically count for less?
I don’t think so.
Perhaps human beings, despite our differences, keep discovering some of the same truths about living together. Perhaps certain lessons are simply part of what it means to be human.
And if that’s the case, we ought to be able to appreciate those lessons wherever we find them.
That doesn’t prove religion is true. It doesn’t prove it is false, either. It simply means that we can recognise value without automatically accepting every claim attached to it.
Which brings me to something I find even more interesting.
What if the real problem is our insistence on one way?
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that the religious are right. Let’s suppose there is a God, that some form of salvation is necessary, and that believing in God is somehow central to obtaining it.
Even then, I find myself wondering: why should we expect every human being to arrive at the same understanding, practise the same way, or experience faith in precisely the same manner?
Look at us.
We are different in almost every conceivable way. We grow up in different cultures, speak different languages, have different temperaments, experience different kinds of suffering, and develop different ways of making sense of the world.
Some people are naturally drawn to spirituality. Others are sceptical from childhood. Some find comfort in certainty; others find certainty difficult to accept without evidence. Some people need community to make sense of life, while others need solitude. Some are moved by stories, rituals, and symbols. Others want arguments, explanations, and proof.
We don’t even experience love, grief, happiness, or fear in exactly the same way. Why would we assume that every one of us must approach the biggest questions of existence through the same door?
To me, there is something strange about the idea that an intelligent creator would make human beings so varied and then expect them all to respond to the world in one prescribed way, under the same conditions, with the same conclusions.
But I should be careful here, because there is a hole in that argument.
I’m assuming that if such a God existed, this God would design a system according to my understanding of what fairness and intelligence should look like.
A believer could reasonably respond that human diversity doesn’t necessarily contradict divine purpose. Perhaps, they might argue, everyone has a different path to the same truth. Perhaps the differences are intentional. Perhaps we simply don’t understand the reason behind them.
That’s possible.
But then we arrive at another question: How would we distinguish a genuinely divine explanation from a human explanation that we have learned to accept as divine?
Because people have been claiming to know what God wants for centuries, and they often disagree with one another.
One person reads a passage and sees a commandment. Another sees a metaphor. One sees an eternal rule. Another sees an instruction meant for a particular time and culture. One believes a particular practice is essential to salvation. Another believes the same practice is unnecessary, misguided, or even harmful.
And, quite often, all of them are convinced they are right.
So which version are we supposed to trust?
One truth, a million interpretations
Imagine that there really is one perfect, universal religious truth.
Now imagine that this truth must be communicated through human language, understood by people with different backgrounds, passed down through generations, translated across cultures, and interpreted by institutions with their own histories and interests.
Even if the original message were perfect, everything involved in transmitting and interpreting it would still be human.
Language is imperfect. Memory is imperfect. Human judgement is imperfect. And people do not approach information as empty vessels; we bring our assumptions, fears, desires, and experiences with us.
We tend to notice what makes sense to us, question what doesn’t, and interpret uncertainty in ways that fit what we already believe.
So, naturally, people modify and reinterpret religious teachings. Sometimes they do it consciously. Sometimes they genuinely believe they are preserving the original message. Sometimes the changes happen gradually, so that what was once a radical departure eventually becomes accepted tradition.
Over time, you end up with denominations, movements, disagreements, and entirely different ways of practising what is supposedly the same religion.
And here’s where my original thought gets interesting.
If everyone is expected to follow one divinely prescribed way, but practically everyone must interpret that way through their own human experience, what does it even mean to say that everyone is following the same thing?
Maybe some interpretations are more faithful to the original teachings than others. Maybe some disagreements can be resolved through careful study. Religious disagreement alone doesn’t prove that a religion is false; people disagree about plenty of things that have objectively correct answers.
But I think it does reveal a problem that deserves more attention.
The existence of a single truth does not guarantee that human beings will have equal access to it, recognise it when they encounter it, or agree on what it requires of them.
And if salvation depends on getting that truth right, the problem becomes considerably more serious.
But what if the confusion is our fault, not God’s?
A religious person might say that I’m looking at the problem from the wrong direction.
Perhaps, they would argue, God has already provided the truth. The message is clear enough. The problem isn’t the message itself, but our unwillingness or inability to follow it.
And again, that’s not an entirely unreasonable response.
We misunderstand things all the time. We ignore good advice. We convince ourselves that what we want is what we need. We twist rules to suit our interests and call it freedom. We find ways to justify things we would condemn in other people.
Why should religion be exempt from those tendencies?
Perhaps people have changed the message to make it more comfortable. Perhaps institutions have used it to protect their power. Perhaps some of the contradictions we see are products of human beings trying to reconcile what they believe with what they want.
That certainly happens.
But notice what this response does not resolve.
It tells us that humans can get the message wrong. It doesn’t tell us how an ordinary person, living an ordinary life, is supposed to know whether they have got it right.
If sincere, intelligent people can study the same scriptures, pray for guidance, and still reach incompatible conclusions, what standard should we use to decide who is right?
And if the answer is simply that the right interpretation is the one God has revealed, we are back to the same difficulty: people disagree about what that revelation is.
At some point, we have to ask whether a system intended for all humanity should be expected to account for the limitations of the humans who must understand it.
Especially if the consequences of misunderstanding it are supposed to be eternal.
I’m not saying that this disproves religion. I’m saying that it makes the question of religious certainty much more complicated than we often admit.
Maybe religion is doing something that we haven’t learned to replace
Let’s put the question of whether religion is true aside for a moment.
What if we looked at church not merely as a place where people gather to worship, but as a system that performs several important functions in human life?
It gives people community. It gives them rituals for marking important moments. It offers narratives through which they can understand suffering, death, hope, and responsibility. It gives them moral language, a structure for their weeks, people to turn to in difficult times, and sometimes a reason to believe that their lives matter even when their circumstances suggest otherwise.
In that sense, religion does more than offer explanations about the universe. It organises parts of human life.
And if that’s true, then rejecting religion without understanding the functions it performs may leave us with a problem.
You can tell someone that the beliefs sustaining them are unsupported. You can challenge their understanding of God. You can point out the contradictions in their religion. But if their church is also their family, their support network, their source of friendship, their weekly routine, and the only place they feel seen, what exactly are you asking them to give up?
And what are you offering in its place?
It’s easy to criticise people for relying on religion when you already have other things sustaining you.
But what about the person who has no close friends, whose family is difficult to live with, who cannot afford therapy, who has few opportunities to meet new people, and who spends most of their life struggling to get by?
What do we expect that person to turn to?
We sometimes talk about religion as though it were merely a set of intellectual propositions that people can abandon once they have been shown a compelling counterargument.
But for many people, it is woven into the fabric of their daily lives. It isn’t just something they believe. It is something they belong to.
And I think that distinction matters.
Perhaps human beings don’t necessarily need religion. Perhaps what we need are the things religion has historically bundled together: belonging, meaning, ritual, morality, hope, mentorship, and community.
But if that’s true, then secular alternatives must do more than tell people that God probably doesn’t exist. They must help create spaces where people can experience those things without needing to accept beliefs they don’t find convincing.
Otherwise, we may win an argument and leave a human need unanswered.
Of course, comfort doesn’t make something true
Now, here’s where I have to challenge my own argument.
Just because religion helps people doesn’t mean its claims about God, heaven, miracles, or salvation are true.
A belief can comfort us and still be mistaken. A story can give our lives meaning without accurately describing reality. An institution can do good things and still be built around claims that deserve to be questioned.
We wouldn’t normally decide whether a medical treatment works by asking how comforting it makes the patient feel. We would want to know whether it actually works.
In the same way, if a religion makes factual claims about the universe, those claims deserve to be examined on their own merits.
The fact that people find meaning in religion cannot settle the question of whether its supernatural claims are true.
But the reverse is also worth considering.
Even if someone concludes that a religion’s supernatural claims aren’t convincing, that doesn’t automatically make everything the religion provides worthless.
A person can reject the belief that prayer changes the course of the universe while still appreciating the quiet, reflective space that prayer creates for someone else. They can question a church’s theology while recognising that its members genuinely care for one another. They can disagree with a pastor’s understanding of morality while acknowledging that the pastor has helped people become more compassionate.
We don’t have to flatten everything into one verdict.
Something can be valuable in one respect and flawed in another.
Perhaps that’s a more honest way to approach religion: neither romanticising it because it helps people nor dismissing it because we question what it teaches.
We can appreciate its contributions while remaining critical of its claims. We can respect the people who find meaning in it without pretending that all beliefs are equally well supported. And we can challenge manipulation, coercion, and harmful teachings without assuming that every religious community is guilty of them.
Compassion does not require intellectual surrender. Scepticism does not require contempt.
So, where does that leave us?
I keep returning to the original thought.
Perhaps church isn’t necessarily bad. Perhaps, for some people, it is one of the few places where the basic needs of being human are met consistently.
Perhaps religious teachings preserve some genuine wisdom about how to live, much of which people can discover through other routes.
Perhaps religion is also capable of causing harm, especially when its authority is used to control people, discourage questions, or make others feel that their worth depends on conformity.
All of these things can be true at once.
And perhaps the bigger problem isn’t that some people believe in God while others don’t. It’s that we so often struggle to imagine that another person might arrive at a meaningful life through a different route from our own.
The religious person may assume that a life without God must be empty. The atheist may assume that a life shaped by religion must be intellectually dishonest. Both may be overlooking the complexity of the people in front of them.
Human beings are rarely as simple as the labels we give them.
Some people need faith. Some need evidence. Some need a community. Some need the freedom to question. Some find meaning in scripture, while others find it in philosophy, music, relationships, service, curiosity, or the quiet satisfaction of trying to live well.
And none of that automatically settles the question of what is ultimately true.
But it does make me wonder whether we have spent so much time arguing about which worldview everyone should adopt that we have neglected a more fundamental question.
What do human beings actually need in order to live meaningful, compassionate, and fulfilling lives?
And once we have a better understanding of that, perhaps we can stop assuming that everyone must answer life’s biggest questions in precisely the same way.
I’m not convinced that religion is necessary for everyone. I’m not convinced that its supernatural claims are true. And I’m certainly not suggesting that we should excuse the harm it sometimes causes simply because it offers comfort.
I’m just becoming more interested in understanding what it does for people, why they need it, and what that tells us about ourselves.
Because perhaps the most revealing thing about religion isn’t only what it tells us about God.
Perhaps it is what it reveals about human beings: our need to belong, our fear of being alone, our desire for meaning, and our constant search for something that makes life feel a little less uncertain.
And if that’s the case, then even those of us who don’t believe might have something to learn from the question.
Not necessarily about God.
But about us.
One final question worth sitting with: If a belief gives someone community, wisdom, hope, and a reason to live well, how much does its usefulness matter if its underlying claims aren’t true? And if those claims are true, how should we understand a world in which sincere people can search for that truth and still arrive at radically different conclusions?