How does anyone grieve without God? Like an atheist whose mother is devoutly Christian died in augustI can answer this question readily: we cry very well.
By “good” I mean that we run the same gamut of emotions as anyone who believes in heaven and hell. Grief is a deeply human experience that unites people, whether or not they live with the security of an afterlife or a loving God. Simple acts of empathy from those around us help move the process forward.
Perhaps, then, the question really should be: how does one grieve without God's help? people? In other words, how do we get back to our lives without the integrated communities that churches, temples, and other places of worship almost always provide?
This question deserves serious reflection as younger Americans leave their parents' religious congregations in droves. In my experience, it's difficult in ways I hadn't imagined.
We can debate the implications of America's growing irreligiosity and whether religious institutions brought about their own decline by protecting their leaders at the expense of their followers. But we still must deal with death and pain wherever they find us, and until recently, they found most of us inside those temples, churches, and other places of worship.
No more. This year, a Pew Research Center survey found that 28% of Americans identified as non-religious and, for the first time, formed the largest “religious” group in the country.
Even in the midst of this secularization, with church attendance drops almost as fast as the circulation of a printed newspaper, I found one of the most eager comforters like my mom lay dying being a pastor of the Lutheran church that he had not attended in over 15 years. In the struggle to plan my mother's memorial service at church, the nicest, most reassuring voices belonged to the women who taught me Sunday school long ago and knew exactly what memories to bring up. It was like I had never left.
This brief reunion with my former religious community helped my family navigate the dark weeks after my mother's death, but it lasted only until the end of the memorial service.
I had a markedly different experience growing up in the church.
About 30 years ago, my grandfather, who put down roots in the church after emigrating from Norway in the 1950s, died under tragic circumstances. Then, it was like someone gave the bat sign and a group of humble Lutheran superheroes sprang into action.
This meant more than just the priest offering a service and the parishioners politely giving their condolences.
It meant being surrounded by people who didn't need to be told what we were going through; They just knew it and were trying to make our lives a little easier.
It meant people offered to bring us dinner and help take care of my brother and me.
It meant comforting scratches on the back of the neck from some old ladies in the pews, rare moments of tenderness from people who normally frowned at kids like me for acting restless during church.
It meant getting out of our sadness for as long as it took.
Now that kind of wraparound support is harder to find. I worry about how this affects my three children and, for the first time in their lives, I wonder if raising them without a religious tradition is a disservice.
As with anything else, non-religious parenting comes with trade-offs. My children never had to worry, as I did, about displeasing God or the eternal destiny of their unbelieving loved ones. But in this life, here and now, they grieve like I did when I was their age, but without the support of religious communities.
And so are many others who experience ancestral trauma outside the local institutions that once helped guide them. For me, losing those people has been more profound than losing God.
