Recently, while walking through the newly expanded galleries at Crystal Bridges, I came across Ben Shahn’s Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers. I had already been admiring the scale of the new spaces and the decision to arrange much of the collection thematically. The galleries felt less like a procession of isolated objects and more like a series of conversations. Works made in different periods and under different circumstances had been placed near one another, allowing meaning to emerge through proximity.
Then I encountered Shahn standing outside a church.
The painting is not dramatic in the conventional sense. No singular action dominates the scene. Several figures occupy the same stretch of pavement, but they do not appear to inhabit it in the same way. The churchgoers seem absorbed in the ordinary business of attendance. Shahn stands among them while remaining perceptibly separate. He belongs to the scene compositionally, yet his attention is directed elsewhere. In his hands is a camera.
That camera was what first held me.
Shahn was known for using a camera fitted with a right-angle viewfinder. The device allowed him to appear to face one direction while photographing something located to the side. The people he photographed were therefore less likely to compose themselves for the lens. He could preserve postures, gestures, and expressions before awareness transformed them into performances.
Erving Goffman observed that when individuals appear before others, they often attempt to control the impression they create. The presence of a camera intensifies that instinct. We straighten, smile, avert our eyes, or arrange ourselves into the person we wish to be remembered as having been. Shahn’s unusual viewfinder attempted to evade that moment of self-presentation. He wanted to see people before they became conscious of being seen.
Yet the camera also announces Shahn’s own position. He is not merely another person outside the church. He is watching. He is physically present among the churchgoers, but his relationship to the gathering has become observational. The camera allows him to remain near while establishing a distance.
I recognized myself in that posture.
I often think about going to church on Saturdays. The thought usually arrives without urgency. It is not a crisis of conscience or the reawakening of some suppressed belief. I do not find myself wondering whether Christian doctrine has suddenly become persuasive or whether I should return to the faith of my childhood. I have not considered myself a believing Christian since my early twenties, more than twenty years ago.
Still, Saturday sometimes retains the faint anticipation of Sunday.
For many years after belief had receded, I continued to attend church. Doctrine was never the only thing holding me there. There was ritual, repetition, music, architecture, language, and the familiarity of gestures performed so often that they no longer required conscious consideration. There were prayers whose words remained meaningful even when I no longer believed a supernatural listener received them. There was the liturgical calendar, with its seasons of preparation, celebration, deprivation, mourning, and renewal. There was the ordering of time itself.
Henri Lefebvre wrote that rhythm emerges wherever place, time, and the expenditure of energy come together. Church joined all three. It was a particular building entered at a particular hour, but it was also a sequence of bodily actions: arriving, greeting, sitting, standing, kneeling, singing, listening, receiving, and departing. Worship organized space, time, and movement into a repeated pattern. Even after belief departed, the rhythm continued to carry me.
Religion is often discussed as though it were primarily a matter of propositions: whether one believes that God exists, whether Jesus rose from the dead, whether Scripture possesses divine authority, or whether a sacrament conveys grace. These questions matter within Christianity, but they do not explain the whole of religious participation. People also remain because religion supplies calendars, communities, identities, habits, memories, and places in which life becomes temporarily ordered.
My departure from church did not occur through a decisive rejection of those things. There was no final sermon that offended me, no doctrinal dispute that drove me through the door, and no sudden intellectual discovery that rendered the sanctuary unbearable. My disbelief was already old. What changed was the web of relationships and routines that had allowed me to remain.
My grandpa Chuck died in 2019.
His death was not a theological event in any simple sense, but it altered the world in which religion had been situated. Religious traditions do not exist only in books, doctrines, and buildings. They live through particular people. We inherit prayers through voices, customs through households, and sacred stories through those who tell them. A ritual may formally remain unchanged after someone dies, yet its emotional geometry is permanently rearranged.
Maurice Halbwachs argued that people acquire and preserve their memories socially. We remember within frameworks provided by families, communities, institutions, and relationships. My memories of church were not mine alone. They were attached to particular people and to the versions of myself that existed in relationship with them. Grandpa Chuck belonged to that framework. When he died, the memories remained, but one of the people who helped hold them in place was gone.
Then came 2020.
COVID interrupted the physical habit of gathering. Churches closed their doors, services moved online, and congregations were dispersed into living rooms and computer screens. The interruption revealed how dependent religious life is upon bodily repetition. Christianity may describe faith as an interior conviction, but religion is practiced by bodies assembled in common spaces. We speak together. We hear one another breathe. We rise and kneel in response to shared cues. We exchange signs of peace, receive bread and wine, and move through architecture whose design directs attention toward particular objects and meanings.
When gathering stopped, more was lost than the weekly service. The convergence of place, time, and physical action was broken. The rhythm was no longer available to carry those whose participation depended less upon conviction than upon continuity.
That same year, my wife moved out.
Our divorce would not be finalized until 2023, but the marriage had already entered its long period of separation. The lived ending preceded the legal one. This is true of many relationships. Their outward structure may continue after the internal relationship has changed beyond recognition. A person can remain married on paper while already learning to live as someone who is alone.
The same was true of my relationship with the church.
I stopped attending before I fully understood that I had left. No formal act marked the departure. No congregation expelled me. No priest removed my name from a register. No ritual acknowledged that a relationship once central to the shape of my week had ended. I simply stopped returning.
Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss offers a useful vocabulary for such experiences. Some losses resist closure because what has been lost is neither wholly present nor wholly absent. The church still existed. Its doors remained open. The prayers had not disappeared. I could, in theory, return at any time. Yet the relationships and habits that had once carried me through those doors were no longer intact.
There was no final Sunday to mourn because I did not know it was final when it happened.
In 2022, Fr. Steve Wilson died.
A pastor is never merely the representative of an institution. At his best, a pastor becomes a human point of contact with something too large and abstract to encounter directly. The church becomes knowable through the person who speaks the prayers, remembers names, presides at funerals, visits hospitals, listens to confessions, and makes an inherited tradition feel momentarily personal.
When such a person dies, the institution remains, but the path into it may close.
Fr. Steve’s death removed another relationship that had connected me to the church as a lived community rather than merely as an object of intellectual interest. By the time my divorce was finalized in 2023, several of the human structures that had sustained my religious attendance had disappeared or changed beyond recognition.
None of these events alone caused me to stop attending. Together, they formed a sequence of disengagements. Grandpa Chuck’s death altered the familial world surrounding religion. COVID broke the bodily rhythm of gathering. Separation and divorce transformed the domestic context in which attendance had occurred. Fr. Steve’s death severed a personal connection to the church itself.
Each event loosened another thread until the old pattern could no longer hold its shape.
Some endings occur twice: first when the relationship changes, and again when we finally recognize that it has ended.
Perhaps that is why I still think about church on Saturdays. The old rhythm has not entirely vanished. My body continues to anticipate something my mind no longer expects. I can imagine getting dressed, driving to church, entering the familiar architectural vocabulary of nave, aisle, pulpit, font, and altar. I can anticipate the opening sentences and the rise and fall of communal speech. I can hear the sound of pages turning and service leaflets being folded. I know when to stand without being told and when a silence is intended to be filled.
None of this requires belief. Memory can preserve ritual after doctrine has lost its authority.
Georg Simmel described the stranger as someone who is “near and far at the same time.” The stranger is not simply an outsider who knows nothing of the group. The stranger is close enough to understand its customs and distant enough to see them differently. That paradox describes my relationship with Christianity more accurately than either believer or unbeliever.
I am near because the language remains familiar. I understand the rhythms of liturgy, the structure of the church year, the stories beneath the readings, and the theological assumptions hidden inside ordinary phrases. I remain near through family history, education, aesthetic attraction, moral vocabulary, and memory.
I am far because I no longer share the convictions that allow those practices to appear self-evident.
The church is not foreign to me, but neither is it fully inhabitable.
In 2025, I began writing the essays that became Religious, Not Spiritual. The title reverses the more familiar claim of being “spiritual but not religious.” I have little confidence in spirituality as a supernatural category, yet I remain deeply interested in religion as a human one. I am interested in religion’s objects, practices, institutions, stories, gestures, and psychological functions. I remain interested in what people do when they pray, even when I doubt that prayer reaches beyond the person praying. I remain interested in sacred texts, even when I do not regard them as divinely authored. I remain interested in ritual because ritual can communicate meanings that belief alone cannot contain.
The writing was not the beginning of my departure. It was the beginning of my attempt to understand what remained after I had departed.
Alasdair MacIntyre asks, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” When the events from 2019 through 2023 were occurring, I did not experience them as chapters in a religious departure. They were separate losses, disruptions, and transitions. Only later, through writing, did they acquire a shared narrative form.
Writing did not create the pattern, but it allowed me to see it.
In that sense, writing became my version of Shahn’s camera.
Through the essays, I could remain close to the church without pretending to reenter it. I could examine Christianity from an angle: near enough to recognize its internal grammar, distant enough to question what participation had once made difficult to see. I could turn toward art, psychology, philosophy, and history while religion remained within the frame.
The camera in Shahn’s self-portrait is therefore more than a tool. It is a way of inhabiting an unresolved relationship. He is among the churchgoers but does not appear to move with them. He shares their pavement without sharing their direction. He faces one way while looking another.
Yet his method also raises an ethical and philosophical complication. Shahn may have hoped to capture people more authentically by photographing them without their awareness, but no image is entirely innocent. He still selected the angle, determined the frame, and chose the moment. The churchgoers may have been unguarded, but they were not unmediated.
The same is true of memory.
I may believe that distance has allowed me to see Christianity more clearly, and in some ways it has. From outside, I can better recognize the fragility of institutional belonging, the dependence of religion upon personalities, and the degree to which practice is sustained by relationships rather than doctrine. I can see how quickly a rhythm that feels permanent can disappear when its supporting conditions are interrupted.
But distance does not make me neutral.
My view is shaped by affection, disappointment, grief, nostalgia, injury, and gratitude. I do not observe Christianity as an anthropologist encountering an unfamiliar culture. I observe it as someone formed by its language and practices. Even my rejection of Christian belief bears the imprint of Christian categories. The church influenced how I learned to think about guilt, forgiveness, death, service, sacrifice, and hope. Its concepts remain present even when I no longer grant them supernatural authority.
I am not outside in the sense of being untouched. I am outside in the sense of standing at an angle.
This is what makes Shahn’s title so precise: Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers.
He is among them. The phrase acknowledges proximity without claiming identity. It describes neither complete belonging nor complete separation. It names a threshold condition—the state of being present within the field of a community while no longer moving according to its central direction.
I understand that condition.
I am no longer one of the churchgoers, but I remain among them. I remain among them in memory, language, ritual knowledge, and aesthetic attraction. I remain close enough to recognize every gesture, yet distant enough to see those gestures differently. On Saturdays, I sometimes imagine returning, not because belief has revived, but because rhythm leaves traces.
The door remains visible even when I no longer walk through it.
Shahn’s camera allowed him to look without appearing to look. My writing performs a similar function. I turn toward art, philosophy, psychology, and history, but religion remains within the frame. I continue photographing in words the world that formed me, attempting to preserve its gestures before memory arranges them into something too simple.
Perhaps becoming an outsider does not mean that the church disappears.
It means that the angle changes.
