The church of self-worship: Sunday morning with the atheists

I had always assumed that the one thing atheism had going for it was that you could have a lie-in on Sundays. For the past year, however, an atheist church has been meeting in London on Sunday mornings. Founded by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, the Sunday Assembly is a symptom of what Theo Hobson identified in this magazine as ‘the new new atheism’, the recognition that the new atheism of Professor Dawkins et al had, in rejecting God, gone too far in rejecting all His works. Churches, the founders felt, had much to recommend themselves — a space for inspiration, reflection, and a sense of community in an atomised city — and they found a willing audience. The Sunday Assembly now has branches in 28 cities across the English-speaking world, with more on their way.

But the sign that the atheist church had definitively come of age was its first schism. Three former members of the New York franchise broke away and formed a group called ‘Godless Revival’, complaining about the institutionalisation of what they had assumed would be nothing more than a parody church. The prophet of Godless Revival, Lee Moore, argued that Jones and Evans ‘are trying to get rich from their new-age religion… after all, we saw how well that worked for L. Ron Hubbard.’ (This is unfair — the accounts of Sunday Assembly are more open than Scientology’s, and show that Jones and Evans are only taking 12 per cent of their £500,000 fundraising target as salary — and besides, there is authority for the view that the labourer is worthy of his hire.) Moreover, Moore claimed, ‘The Sunday Assembly has a problem with atheism.’

The Sunday Assembly denies any backsliding or apostasy, and argues that, by not focusing on ‘the atheist community’, it is merely trying to be as inclusive as possible.