According to a 2023 Pew Research Center report, 28% of American adults now identify as religiously unaffiliated, the highest share ever recorded in the United States.

That number stopped me when I first read it. Not because it surprised me, exactly, but because it raised a question nobody in the data seems to want to answer: if nearly one in three Americans has walked away from organized religion, where are they going to feel held?

When did you last feel genuinely held by a group of people who weren’t your family?

Take a moment with that. Not liked, not followed, not included in a group chat. Held. The way a congregation used to hold people, imperfectly and sometimes badly, but consistently, week after week, in the same room, with the same faces.

Her Name Was Mara, and She Didn’t Even Notice She Was Lonely

Mara Delgado, 34, a graphic designer in Portland, Oregon, hadn’t been inside a church in six years when she started noticing something strange. She wasn’t depressed. She wasn’t in crisis. She’d just… drifted. Sunday mornings were for coffee and long walks. She had friends. She had a career she loved.

But sometime in 2022, she found herself sitting in her apartment on a Sunday afternoon feeling an ache she couldn’t name. Not out of anger, not out of a dramatic crisis of faith. She’d simply lost the rhythm of showing up somewhere, with other people, for no practical reason at all.

“I didn’t miss God, exactly,” she told me. “I missed the room.”

Mara’s story is not unusual. In my years of research, the pattern I kept seeing was this: people leave religion and take the theology with them, but they accidentally leave the infrastructure behind. The calendar. The ritual. The faces. The room.

The Science Behind Why the Room Matters

The science is actually fascinating here. Co-regulation, which is the technical term for how one nervous system literally calms another through physical proximity, is not a metaphor. It is measurable physiology.

A 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that synchronized group activities, including group singing, communal prayer, and even shared breathing exercises, produced measurable reductions in cortisol (your body’s stress hormone) and elevated oxytocin levels in participants. The key variable wasn’t belief. It was presence. Being in the same room, moving in the same rhythm, at the same time, with other people.

Churches understood this intuitively for centuries before the neuroscience caught up.

Warning: Passive community, such as watching a service online or lurking in a Facebook group, does not produce the same co-regulation effect. Your nervous system needs physical proximity to other nervous systems. Presence is the point.

When you remove the doctrine but keep the structure, something real still happens in the body. Which is exactly what a new generation of secular gathering spaces is betting on.

What’s Actually Replacing the Pew

Have you ever walked into a CrossFit box or a running club and felt, weirdly, like you were in church? There’s a reason for that.

Researchers at Harvard Divinity School published a 2020 report titled How We Gather documenting the rise of organizations that fulfill what they called “the six needs previously met by religion”: community, personal transformation, social transformation, purpose, creativity, and transcendence. The spaces showing up in their data weren’t temples. They were CrossFit gyms, knitting collectives, grief support circles, and a secular Sunday gathering called Sunday Assembly.

Sunday Assembly, founded in London in 2013, now operates in over 70 cities worldwide. Their format borrows shamelessly from church: a weekly Sunday gathering, communal singing, a speaker, a time for reflection. No God required. Attendance is free. The tagline is simply “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More.”

Closer to the ground, death cafes, which are community events where strangers gather to discuss mortality over tea and cake, have hosted over 17,000 events in 82 countries since 2011, according to the Death Cafe organization’s own tracking data. They are not morbid. They are, by almost every account, oddly joyful. People leave lighter.

Pro Tip: If you’re not sure where to start, search “intentional community [your city]” or browse Meetup.com for groups that meet weekly and in person. Consistency of contact matters more than the group’s stated purpose. Show up to the same room, with the same people, on the same day. That repetition is the ritual.

Mara found her room at a weekly community choir in northeast Portland. No auditions. No performance pressure. Eighty strangers in a rented gymnasium every Thursday night, learning the same songs.

“The first night I walked in, I cried during warm-ups,” she said. “I didn’t even know why. I think my body remembered what it felt like to be somewhere.”

A 5-Step Settling Practice for Walking Into New Spaces

One of the biggest barriers to finding a new gathering space is the friction of showing up alone. Your nervous system will flag it as a threat before you even open the door. Here is a grounding practice, drawn from somatic therapy principles, that can ease that transition.

Step 1: Arrive five minutes early. Not on time. Early. Let your nervous system acclimate to the room before the room fills with people.

Step 2: Find your feet. Literally press them into the floor. Notice the pressure. This activates your proprioceptive system, anchoring your attention in your body rather than in the story your mind is telling.

Step 3: Name three things you can see that are not people. A chair. A window. A water bottle on a table. This is orienting behavior; it tells your threat-detection system that the environment is safe.

Step 4: Take one slow breath out before you take one in. Exhaling first activates the parasympathetic nervous system faster than inhaling first. This is a small trick with an outsized effect.

Step 5: Ask yourself quietly: what do I actually need right now? Not what you’re supposed to feel. Not whether you’re doing this right. Just: what do I need? The answer is usually simpler than you expect. Often it’s just: to stay.

Did You Know: A 2019 study in PLOS ONE found that people who attended any group activity weekly, regardless of its stated purpose, reported 19% higher life satisfaction scores than those who did not. The content of the gathering mattered far less than the consistency of showing up.

The practice doesn’t ask for belief. It only asks for five minutes and a little honest attention.

You Are Not Alone in This

If you’ve drifted away from a community and haven’t found your way back to anything yet, you are not alone in this. The loneliness epidemic isn’t a personal failure. A 2023 advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General identified social disconnection as a public health crisis on par with smoking, citing data showing that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26%. The need to gather is not sentimental. It is biological.

The room is still out there. It just might not have a steeple on it anymore.

Your Next 3 Steps

Step 1: Search “Sunday Assembly [your city]” this week and commit to attending one session before the month ends. No preparation required. Just show up five minutes early and press your feet into the floor.

Step 2: Identify one recurring group activity you already do, whether that’s a fitness class, a book club, or a neighborhood walk, and commit to arriving 10 minutes early for three consecutive sessions. Let your nervous system have time to settle before the room fills. Notice whether the experience changes by the third session.

Step 3: Text one person you’ve genuinely lost touch with this week. Don’t ask how they are. Propose something specific: “I’m looking for a standing monthly meal. Want to be my first yes?” One recurring meal with one real person is a ritual. Rituals compound.