- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.ca
Summary
Churches across the U.S. are grappling with dwindling attendance and financial instability, forcing many to close or sell properties.
The Diocese of Buffalo has shut down 100 parishes since the 2000s and plans to close 70 more. Nationwide, church membership has dropped from 80% in the 1940s to 45% today.
Some churches repurpose their land to survive, like Atlanta’s First United Methodist Church, which is building affordable housing.
Others, like Calcium Church in New York, make cutbacks to stay open. Leaders warn of the long-term risks of declining community and support for churches.
Unfortunately the internet is now the new 3rd space.
Religion advocated for bad policies in government which dug their own grave.
I don’t feel bad they’re closing down.
The internet isn’t a third place! Not only do you have to pay to access it, but more importantly, it isn’t a physical place. None of us are people here. We’re strings of characters on a screen behind pseudo-anonymous handles. You can’t help me, I can’t help you.
This is not community. It can’t be.
Welcome to the capitalist process of dematerialization, substituting a shitty simulacrum for an authentic experience. You want a nice meal? You get McDonalds. You want to have a sexual relationship? You get online porn. The real thing you thought you wanted has been transformed into a caricature, offering symbolic signifiers where there once was something real. And advertising trains you to believe the fake experience is the distilled essence of the real one.
Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse were writing about this as long ago as the late 1930s. Doctorow’s rant about enshittification is a modern refinement of this sort of analysis (with less Marx).
Reminds me of Gramsci. In the first instance we have the object: sex. In the second instance we have a reflection of the object: porn. In the third instance we have a reflection of the reflection: pornographic art. Then in the final instance we have a reflection with no object as a reference: AI porn. In this last instance the real thing has been replaced entirely by a simulacrum.
“Grandma, what was it like when people had sex? Before we all lived in the Metaverse?”
A third place has nothing at all to do with what is and isn’t paywalled. If I rented a Boeing 787 to take day trips with my friends every day for the next month, that’d still be a third place. It has everything to do with the first place being home and the second being work. It also has nothing, therefore, to do with “community” or “not community”.
Even if we work under your (completely wrong) definition of third places as inherently fostering tight-knit community and not just being a place for you to exist around other people, smaller communities absolutely have the opportunity to do this. Roblox was one of my main third places when I was a kid, and it was a better third place than I could’ve had in real life. I met actual, real friends who I talked to daily for years and who accepted me. Right now I work on Wikipedia, which if you spend long enough there unambiguously has a community among the more experienced editors. I’m even in a Discord server where I joined for the project, ended up joining the team, and now feel like I’m good friends with the people there. Even Lemmy I’d say is small enough to start seeing a lot of familiar faces over time.
The Internet isn’t inherently bad at fostering community. It’s just that the modern Internet places a fuckload of emphasis on being in gigantic, uninteractive pools of people like Twitch chats that fly at a million miles a second and require you to spend $500 for a streamer to blink in your direction; a shitty short-form video service where you can comment and like but aren’t seriously befriending anyone outside of extreme edge cases; a gigantic link aggregator where what you say is almost always drowned out immediately; multiplayer games that have new lobbies every match; etc.
I don’t think the people you meet on Roblox or Wikipedia can be community the way a church can. Even if you want to force the definition of community to include ephemeral, non-physical, and paid places then you have to accept that a church fills a far different kind of communal void than the internet. People at your church can come to your house and help you do stuff. That’s huge! You’d struggle to get any kind of real, tangible help from an internet place. Maybe some money, but that’s it.
That just doesn’t feel like community to me.
Real community is when people are in a cult whose authority figures systematically molest children. Got it.
Any other words of wisdom, oh one so ignorant of what a third place is?
Real community is when people can go to each other’s houses and help with difficult chores, or can cook food for each other and eat together, or can take care of one another when they are sick, or hide from government agents who come to kill their neighbors.
Death to Christianity. I am not making any defense of the church. In fact, I literally said we need to replace it. 🙄
Religion in general fosters these sorts of toxic power structures because it’s based on fucking nonsense.
The church kept me from being homeless as a kid and helped our family eat when we didn’t have food.
When the church is gone, some kids who were in the situation I was in will have nothing.
Letting private organizations fill roles that the government should be doing is one of the main reasons we have problems like homeless children that need to be solved in the first place. The church has tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that could otherwise be going toward programs which reduce childhood poverty (and this of course isn’t taxed). Moreover, churches prime people to believe and act on complete bullshit, which is exactly the kind of environment that fosters right-wing beliefs that are steeped in disinformation and rooted in a deficiency in critical thinking. Right-wing beliefs directly lead to poverty. Alleviating the symptoms of poverty via a cult instead of treating it at the source isn’t the right way to do it.
I know you’re getting dragged in the comments / downvoted, but the premise that the internet is not a fully reasonable ‘third’ place has some rationality, as does the premise that churches have been this ‘third’ place for many. And I think ‘third’ places are where leftist community-engagement thrives, even in religous settings.
I mention leftist simply because many here are commenting from leftist Lemmy instances, myself included. Historically – and for a moment, consider this outside the typically nonreligious, leftist approaches to community building – churches have occupied a helpful, physical ‘third’ place like this for centuries.
When they are healthy, churches have been relationship hubs of solidarity and mutual aid. They have also been regularly used platforms from which to mobilize for social justice and collective action – even today, I know of some churches that are engaged directly in social justice and collective action for queer communities, debt reduction / removal, resource sharing, and more. Liberation theology is gravely leftist, as well, and comes from Latin American churches with leftist clergy and non-clergy at the helm of both theory and praxis. The Civil Rights Movement was borne out of black American churches, and suffrage movements met in churchhouses as much as anywhere else. This list goes on.
Liberation / radical inclusivity activities can spring from any setting where people gather regularly and talk about change. While the internet can make that sometimes easier, it has been historically in-person, where folks gather, that these movements find momentum time and again. ‘Third’ places are historically and functionally physical.
Theory is great for the internet, and even some community-engagement through internet discussions on theory is great. Some, but not all.
Praxis happens offline, though, in anti-technofeudally controlled arenas.
I don’t know how people can insist “the internet is a community!” then then use downvotes as if that shit isn’t toxic to community.
I think it counts as a third place. All it really takes to be a third place is not being home or work. Whether physical or not is definitely debatable and I think physical third places are a must, but I don’t think a third place being paid disqualifies it.
For one, a lot of folks don’t have to pay for internet. I can go to my local library or community center and be online if needed. There are also some government programs that may provide free internet. But even if it is paid, typical third places have traditionally included settings like cafes, bars, the gym, bookstores, theaters, etc. which are also all pay-to-use environments.
Pay-to-use can not be the basis of community.
Why’s that? Any enthusiast hobby is the basis of community, and that typically includes some degree of material investment into said hobby.
I used to take martial arts classes, which was a great way to meet new people. And we’d have opportunities to get together and meet outside of our regularly scheduled classes, but the unifier that brought everyone together was the class that we were each paying to attend.
I mean, even in the church example, you get guilted for not donating when they pass the collection box around. What difference is there with a community that shames you for not paying?
Sorry, I meant “can not” in the sense that we can’t let that be the basis of community.
Commodified spaces and hobbies alienate people who can’t afford to pay. The church, at least, allows the poor to attend.
I’m not sure if the church “allows” the poor insomuch as they simply need the poor. The vulnerable members of society are really the church’s only vehicle for growth, and so they take advantage of the needs of marginalized people to spread their ideology. Indoctrination masked behind charity. It’s more of an exploitative relationship in that regard.
Secular meeting spaces with no cost would be preferred, and they definitely exist, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a sort of standardized approach across environments and demographics without the dictatorial voice of god (or the state) demanding compliance to the degree the church does, which makes it an institution.
As another example, I also used to be part of a local Cantonese language practice meetup that would meet once weekly at our local mall. It was a small group, but we’d just sit at the food court and practice basic conversations. No barrier for entry, all welcome, but not the sort of thing that would have broad appeal, you know?
That’s a distinction without a difference.
Commodified spaces do not need the poor, and in fact, they want them to go away.
Another public space that’s disappearing as malls close.
Should also add that malls are not public. It may be something that can be typically accessed without paying, but they’ve made it quite clear in the past that it is not a forum for public use. Malls do plenty to kick the “undesirables” out.
There are other public venues we could have used like parks or plazas but it’s hard to accommodate for cold winter weather where everyone wants to be indoors. A library might have worked if it wasn’t social etiquette to not talk in libraries.
I don’t think that’s the case. Every scam needs suckers, that dependence doesn’t make it a good thing.
Unfortunately we have to pay monthly tribute to our landed lord to be in any community.
You pay for nearly every third space.
Bars,bowling alleys, sports leagues, internet, and even churches.
In every space you are a name with a personality
Of course there are no people online. We’re all dogs using the internet while the humans are at work.
Yall are dogs to right?