Three Sunday Assembly Members

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist (Unpublished)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/11

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s do some Sunday Assembly talk. Let’s start from the top like a superhero origin story or set of them. What was religion in terms of early life, Steven?

Steven: For me, not a big part. Normally, it was church of England, so it was just something to put on a questionnaire taken from my mom’s instructions but we didn’t go to church. I prayed a little bit I was a kid. So, it was a normal part of my life until I got to about…and then I thought a lot about religion because I start getting…

Interviewee 2: I was a Catholic up until the age of 16.  My whole life, my whole community; everything that I did, involved around the church and everything we needed to do including all the music.

Jacobsen: And also, your father was a leader of what in that community?

Interviewee 2: Choir.

Jacobsen: What happened at age 16?

Interviewee 2: I changed schools away from a Catholic School to normal state school and my eyes were just opened. I suppose my world just grew; it was tiny before…

Jacobsen: Do you think that’s a common experience for those that went to strongly religious school such as some of the Catholic ones and then switched?

Interviewee 2: I think I was a bit behind. I have, funnily enough, loads of siblings being a Catholic and they all realized a lot sooner than I did. So, my younger siblings were pretending to go to church when they were 12 and going down the park and hanging out. I didn’t do that

Jacobsen: And Linda?

Interviewee 3: I was pretty much the same as Sam but with Evangelical Christianity. As I said, my mom converted when I was about six and suddenly the whole family got dragged into it except for my dad who has devoutly remained an atheist all this time but it was very big part of social life. Church several times on Sunday and other things during the week and I gave it up when I discovered I didn’t believe any of it. I think it hinged around finding out that the Christians didn’t think my hamster would go to heaven and I discovered boys and that was much more interesting. 

Jacobsen: For question two; how did you find a non-religious community or more properly secular community in earlier life, Steven?

Steven: I suppose we didn’t. I would never have thought there was such a thing. So, my extended family was a battleground of people who forced to be together but didn’t like each other very much. My parents really didn’t have a big social life. So, these concepts about community; I didn’t really think about it until started thinking about Sunday Assembly itself. So, obviously my earlier life was secular but I would never use the word.

Interviewee 2: I didn’t understand the question.

Jacobsen: Oh yes. So, in other words you’re coming out of Catholic School, transitioning at 16, and then having your eyes opened and following from that when did secular community become more of a reality for you or something that you realized as a possibility. As Steven was noting, it was only in the period of first discovering Sundays as Sunday Assemblies, which are in fact quite new.

Interviewee 2: Yeah, the same for me. I think that once I stepped away from the… then everything dropped away and there is a period of separation. Actually, it’s quite difficult because if your whole life revolves around one thing that’s your character, your personality, your identity, your friends, and everything that you normally know. More than that actually the singing is important because there was no place for me to sing or buy instruments because we don’t really do that in secular society, it doesn’t really happen unless you are part of something formal which I wasn’t and that was the thing for me that was really missing. And I didn’t find that until I found the Sunday Assembly four years ago. So, that’s a long period.

Jacobsen: Linda?

Interviewee 3: I think my sense of community after that came from school and then University but after that I moved to London, got a job and found it really hard to meet other people. I tried all sorts of things; evening classes and this, that, and the other and it was always very grim and desperate and always seemed to be full of really strange old people who I didn’t really want to be friends with. That’s been my life all the way through until I discovered Sunday Assembly when I found some people that really resonated with me and I went, “Hey, I like these people.”

Jacobsen: What’s the feeling when you say the word “resonate?”

Interviewee 3: Resonate; it’s hard to explain but I just had a feeling that I belonged to this sort of place and that they were the right people for me, maybe the ones I’ve been looking for all this time or people like what I’ve been looking for all this time. You have decent conversations with them.

Jacobsen: And leaning on that point right; Steven, what do you notice as a distinction between some of the practices and waste process in a traditional religious service compared to a Sunday Assembly service?

Steven: Oh, this is really difficult for me to answer because it’s something I never participated in, in a religious aspect. The hall we use was Reading’s Irish Center. There’s a black Evangelical Church that follows us, the same space and their priest came in and we were like really happy because of having some diversity in the audience. So, I chatted with him and found out he was the priest and he come along to see what we were up to and he was really shocked that we were effective doing the same thing with the same goal as him but leaving God out of it. So, there obviously must be quite an element of similarity in what people are getting out of it but it’s very hard for me to say. We quite often record what we do in Sunday Assembly or making videos etc., and I left a sound recorder in the ceiling by accident. So, I recorded the whole of his service and for me what he was doing was incomprehensible. I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about but he saw similarity in what he did. 

Jacobsen: How did he comment on it? How did he make the contrast or comparison?

Steven: I think he was expecting us to be anti-religious and that would be the message but because the message of Sunday Assembly isn’t anti-religious, it’s all about we’re all in this place, we’ve all got this one life and perhaps we can make it better for each other, love and harmony and all that sort of stuff and that’s what he recognized. I think he was expecting something he would raise against that we would be against him and I think that’s what the surprise was.

Jacobsen: …have guest appearances of John Cleese going to be playing Life of Brian. You have on the organ playing Every Sperm is Sacred. 

Steven: Yeah, for him there was nothing to be offended by apart from the absence of Jesus. He wasn’t there.

Jacobsen: I’m told that’s the joke, that that’s the crux of the issue.

Steven: Yeah.

Interviewee 2: And no talk of the afterlife, I suppose, That’s the most important thing. That’s what they’re doing their good for but we don’t do that. 

Interviewee 3: Same to me, the difference is okay, I have a lot of experience of services in Catholic masses. I guess because Sunday Assembly is what we the organizers want it to be, there’s a kind of loose structure that’s come from the main assembly that we’ve followed more or less which is great, you need something to stick stuff on to but we can change the rituals. We can change them according to what works for the individuals in our congregation. We never know whether to call our people in congregation, it feels wrong but they are because we congregate. 

So, something doesn’t feel right, we don’t do it again. There’s a moment of silence that we call it moment of contemplation which is something that’s come from the main assembly. I think we often talk about that as how it works, how it should work or whether people are really buying into it or not. Within church service, these things are not questioned; they just are; you stand up, you sit down, you kneel down here, pray at this point, and we are always messing or tinkering around with it according to the theme that we’re looking at, the energy in the room, and we can improvise around what needs to happen in the moment. So, that’s the differences but I suppose the similarities are in terms of the way the music holds it together for me. I think that without these four songs, without those we wouldn’t have a structure. I find that they’re the structure of our assembly. That’s how we know how it moves and what happens next and how to change the energy and to get people uplifted.

Jacobsen: If I may ask real quick just as a point of clarification for the audience and also for myself. For instance, I made a mistake of saying humanist chaplain rather than humanist efficient because some or many humanist efficients would bark at the foot term “chaplain” So, with regards to Sunday Assembly, the congregants; what other terms should people be using in place of standard placeholder ones that would be used in a in a standard religious traditional service?

Interviewee 2: We don’t know.

Steven: No, we really don’t, we struggle. So, the person who controls that particular assembly, we call a host. Because I’m the chair, sometimes they will out of mockery, they might refer to me as the pope or the priest or a leader but it is never done seriously and we would never have an assembly and say, “Oh, here’s Steven, he is your priest. Take him aside and you can confess to him.” [Laughs] So, we might just say members of Sunday Assembly … rather than the congregation members.

Interviewee 3: Loosely members because people don’t sign up for it. 

Steven: We would always call an assembly not a show and I think that’s the only terminology we would be strict on but all the assemblies when you talk to them, they have difficulties describing what they want to be because they don’t want to use religious terminology because there is a weakness in the name because the word Sunday sounds Christian and the word assembly sounds Christian. So, Sunday Assembly; you’re a Christian organization. So, we do our best not to use religious termination especially those assemblies in North America where the religious and secular divide is so much stronger and painful. So, yeah, we flounder; what to do? What words to use? What rituals to use? 

Jacobsen: Part of this may reflect the new and exploratory nature of secular community but that would be the two notes then; host and then the assembly, but as Linda was telling, it’s not like people are coming in and then signing their names on something. It’s not a membership, it’s something like semi semiformal clothing. 

Interviewee 3: I was going to say that I think one of the differences between us and religion is that people come for different reasons probably. I think with a church, people get the sense of community as a kind of side effect of going there to save their souls whereas for us people would need to come along directly for the community because that’s what we offer and I don’t know that everybody feels comfortable doing that. I think a lot of people think that the idea of community groups and so on is a bit pathetic, “Oh I don’t need that sort of thing, I’ve got lots of friends,” and blah blah blah and actually sort of getting our message out, getting ourselves seen as something valuable is really difficult because as Steven said, we fall into so many different slots in people’s perception and it’s actually not a lot nicer and much more fun than it sounds in my experience anyway.

Jacobsen: And it’s also as was noted, it’s not one size fits all and the services can be changed based on the needs that would better suit the assemblies that are present at that service or that are typically regulars and so that does stand out in that it’s not a one- size fits all; you can come if you want or you don’t have to keep coming if you don’t want to. So, I guess that leads to another set of questions. One of them would be; how do you go about developing a secular service?

Steven: Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans started Sunday Assembly six years ago. Last weekend, I think it was in London, it’s basically an experiment to see how they could mimic a Christian Church and so as Sam was saying we took their framework which worked for a large congregation, London is very big. It’s in Conway Hall, it holds 400 people. So, it’s a big congregation and when we try to use that same format at Reading’s, it was a smaller congregation; it doesn’t work. So, you’ll find that all the Sunday Assemblies have a slightly different format depending on their size. Now, how do we develop it? So, it’s very incremental in what we develop as Sam was saying, it changes nearly every month. We add something and we take something away. Very few of us have got any training in that area. We have people like Sam who has an artistic performance background. So, we have number of people who sort of now understand how to manage a show or manage people but most of us don’t. I’m a computer programmer.

Interviewee 3: I’m the treasurer and a bookkeeper.

Steven: So, we’re coming at it from very different backgrounds and skill sets and we do struggle to find where that balance is. So, when Sunday Assembly was first marketed as an atheist church that work well for publicity but… send really badly. So, you have the spectrum of people who are hardcore atheists, they won’t come to Sunday Assembly because this is what they’re trying to get away from. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum, people who are very religious. We do have a few religious people that come along to assemblies but wouldn’t say they were very religious; they’re practicing but they were certainly not on the conservative side of any church. The vast majority are sitting in that area of they are non-religious but they’re not the angry atheist as people would say. So, even though Sunday Assembly want it to be a broad church, it’s actually not that. It’s not super broad because you can’t appeal to everyone. So, it’s taken us years to work out where those lines are. 

Interviewee 2: I don’t know if I can answer that.

Interviewee 3: Yeah, I haven’t got much more to say on that particular question.

Jacobsen: What topics are covered in a service? 

Interviewee 2: In one service? Because we have a theme per assembly.

Jacobsen: If you’re taking an individual service recently, what would be the theme but also if you were to think of an arc of an overarching thematic kind of stream of themes; what would they be or it be?

Steven: So, typically how we start an assembly is as a generic thing; people arrive maybe half an hour early and they have teas and coffees, they may fill in a question of the day, there’ll be some posters there, they will pick up badges so they can write their name on them. The badges are color-coded saying like I’m an organizer and another badge might mean I really want to talk to people but I’m not sure how to start a conversation, please come and talk to me, that sort of thing. So, there will be people assigned to be greeters, conversation starters; that sort of thing. Then at about 11:00 they all move into a different space and that is the main congregation space and there’s a stage and there’s a band kicking away on a song while people come into the room. 

The assembly will start with the host and then we go straight into the game. That game will be interactive maybe more than likely there’s no chairs out with that point. This will get people mixing and talking. After we play the game, we all move to two songs. All the songs are, we hope, well known very… It’s a sort of karaoke, brand’s brilliant because they sound pretty good. Then we will do a more formal welcome; we’ll ask who’s new, those new people, we all go and high-five them. We ask how many people have been three times and we’ll congratulate them, then we’ll explain very briefly what Sunday Assembly is; it’s a secular congregation that celebrates life. We will go through the various mottos live better; half often wonder more. We will briefly then say what the rest of the assembly is going to be like and then from that point onwards there may be someone who will come up and speak for a few minutes about doing their best. So, maybe they’re having troubles in their life and they they’ve been facing them or they have something they’ve always wanted to achieve, there will be someone who will do a reading. Typically, that’s a bit poetry, there will be at least another two songs and then there will be the main section which will be a guest speaker and that subject could be about storytelling, it could be about satellite technology being used to stop illegal fishing and burning down rain forest. It could be a talk about grieving and death. 

So, any subject is there that we think in 20 minutes and… or it has to be suitable for a wide variety of age groups as well. There will be a collection, there will be announcements about other assemblies and other things we may be doing in the community. We do social things and we do… things.

Interviewee 3: We have a book group and a sort of coffee morning and things like that once a month and other things outside the assembly.

Jacobsen: As a bookkeeper what things do you get pro bono and what things cost like finances? I think this would be an important point for those who might be looking at this now or sometime in the future if they themselves want to start up a Sunday Assembly, just in terms of cost.

Interviewee 3: Well, we’ve been self-supporting so far and our money comes basically from two things; from collection in the assembly and from selling tea, cakes and coffee. We have a few people who give monthly by direct debit and we’re hoping to increase that and we sort of make just enough to pay for the venue and cover the costs of a few bits and pieces and have a small amount reserved for emergencies. That’s about it. We very much hand to mouth.

Steven: Yeah, this is one of the big weaknesses of Sunday Assembly; it doesn’t have vast amounts of proxy, thousands of years of looting money or being given money. If we were the Church of England, we would have a building that specifically have been designed to create the right atmosphere. We would have paid priests. Many Sunday Assemblies fail because the financial model isn’t there.

Jacobsen: You could also have the host in the House of Lords as well.

Steven: Yeah, there are so many advantages traditional churches have over us. So, the Sunday Assemblies that survive tends to be lucky in that they will have someone like me who has a bit more spare time than most people or there’s in America I think, there’s a few assemblies that have secret benefactors or you happen to be in a very large city such as London and you can raise enough from donations to employ people to do it but the financial model for a Sunday Assembly is the hardest thing to maintain. 

Interviewee 2: And the fact that a lot of the input isn’t money; it’s people’s time and all these people are doing busy jobs and all that are doing things in their spare time is very time consuming.

Jacobsen: What are the demographics of the assembly in general?

Interviewee 2: I suppose between the ages of 35 to 60 and then we have a few children, not enough really. I don’t know why because to me, when my children were younger this is exactly what I would want to take them along to; to have that sense of community and belonging. We struggle to maintain those families that come in now and again. There are a lot of people coming and going. There are more female than male, if I can be binary about that. I don’t know why that is.

Jacobsen: That matches two data points for me. One is, women are the vast majority of congregants in religious services probably because they cater to basically the social lives that older women are more keen on getting and older men typically more tend to isolate or have their emotional lives solely with their wives or their drink. The other one is in the Pew Research surveys they find internationally that as a general heuristic, women in general are more religious although I take a small caveat to that with H. L. Mencken in In Defense Of Women where he noted that the religiosity of men are the ones that kind of go off in these flights of fancy and in women it’s a little bit more grounded and he was noting in that reasonably accurate text that women are “the supreme realists of the species.” So, those are two things that come to mind with regards to that. They’re probably a reflection of general trends.

Steven: I’ve also considered it, if you are a female and you’re an atheist. I think women are less reluctant to want to dive into those online conversations and fight against religious people had that confrontational space where a lot of guys are very keen to get in there. So, if you want to find community, I think Sunday Assembly fits that non-confrontational or less confrontational mindset.

Jacobsen: There have been issues though within the international discussion and groups of the secular of simply asking questions where are the women and the response from women in general has been a lack of respect or a lack of in inclusivity of them. So, I guess they’re called the new atheist movement; Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett, three of which are alive, two of which of the alive have had heart problems and the fourth is heading into latter middle age. They’re basically reflective of their following as well which tends to be educated white European Heritage and 18 to 35y old males. That’s a large hunk of that population and they tend to be the ones that are given a term. They’re seen as abrasive or as vitriolic, similar to what you were saying before, Steven. So, it’s a convergence of different trends likely.

Interviewee 2: In terms of ethnicity, we are horribly White despite some efforts. In terms of where we… is a really culturally diverse town nearly city. I can’t remember what stats are but we really ought to have more non-white people in our congregation but that’s a longer process. Socioeconomically, I guess we tend to be around the middle class or lower middle class probably, more or less. 

Steven: Going back to ethnicity, Sunday Assembly once a year as an international gathering we all come together. Last year it was in Edinburgh, I think there were more Americans there than there were Brits and there’s one black American and he did a workshop on how to increase diversity and the best attended workshop there and the room was packed with maybe 40 white people. He gave a little talk about diversity in America, the effects of the slave trade, how laws were created that cemented that division in society. We’re all listening very attentively waiting for some nuggets of how he’s more inclusive and he said, “I know 10 other black atheists and I met them all through Sunday Assembly, I have no answers for you,” and we all went silent. We thought he was going to give us the answer.

Jacobsen: If you go to America, there are people like Sikivu Hutchinson who’s a cultural commentator, there is Mandisa Thomas who founded Black Non-Believers which maybe the largest secular African-American organization in the United States. In Nigeria, there’s Dr. Leo Igwe who founded the Humanist movement there. There’s Calistus Igwilo, also Nigerian, it’s a big country a population for that continent, and he founded Atheist Society of Nigeria, ASN. So, they’re around but I think right now there’s probably some very implicit questions happening of how do you integrate these different secular groups together because it’s not a marginal force globally; it’s about 16% according some older Pew research that would just be having no formal religion.

What music is played?

Interviewee 2: Pop and rock songs. What we try to do is choose songs that relate to the theme of each assembly and then Steven spends a long time working at all the suggestions that come through because we are democracy. You look at how many have listened to each song so that we can work out the likelihood of the congregation knowing it and being able to join in. Most important thing is that it’s about everyone singing together not being sung to because I suppose we’re a little bit older than other assemblies we find that anything from 1950s up to 1990s works for us.

Steven: When I was younger in the UK, we had Talk to the Pops. I assume Canada has something similar. So, that was once a week TV pop program, the top 20, top 30 hits, and regardless of what your music tastes were; you all watched it, you all knew the best songs and the worst songs but now because of the diversity of platforms, everyone’s listening to very different music in their own little bubbles. So, this makes it quite difficult to do modern songs. We did a massive hit song, Uptown Funk. In Spotify, billion listens to a month and in the room… there was about five people in the room that recognized it but if you go back to 1970s, do a bit classic David Bowie or ABBA, or Beatles; everyone in the room is going to know it. So, it’d be a mixture of slow songs and fast songs. We will do things like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” even though that sounds like a very religious song but it actually isn’t. 

Jacobsen: I sent requests for interviews to several Sunday Assemblies, whatever’s on contact info. So, my curiosity stems from the rapidity of the growth in part in only as you’re nearing six years. So, if you’re looking ahead, where are you hoping to take not only your own Sunday Assembly but kind of in coordination with basically the larger community of Sunday assemblies? What are you hoping to kind of drive things towards, more or less as its trajectory, if any conscious efforts towards them?

Interviewee 2: Well, I guess we want to get more people to come and just make it more of a thing that people have heard of, give it some solidity in comparison to all the other things that people know about and do. It would be great if people heard of Sunday Assembly and knew what it was but there’s a lot of work to do because we’re so small. 

Steven: Marketing is a very big problem, it’s really hard. If you’ve got a traditional church, there are aims as Sam said, one of those aims is salvation and the other aim maybe to praise your particular God. So, you know what you’re going for but when you talk about a Sunday Assembly and what you’re aiming to do; there isn’t something concrete, there isn’t a set of dogmas for working towards, there isn’t a common belief. Maybe with Sunday Assemblies, the strongest belief is that we will in the space not argue about things. We agree to disagree and that’s much hard to sell. One of the people who helped found Sunday Assembly, a great person called Jones, still with us. He is a practicing Christian and I find him really great to talk to. He was a much more Evangelical Christian and he’s moved toward Sunday Assembly. I was a much harder atheist coming from Hitchens-Dawkins and come toward Sunday Assemblies. So, we sort of met in this space and so we talk very well on the nature of religion, the nature of assemblies and he was saying that Sunday assemblies will never have a big core of young adults because in the Christian Community those young adults want a really strong message. So, they want to go on to a church say here are your answers, this is your direction. Sunday Assembly doesn’t do that and he says that’s one of the reasons we don’t appeal. We appeal to people who tend to be slightly older when they’re not so much looking for answers and how to move their life, they’re looking for community. 

If you just say that Sunday Assembly is about building communities, people will then think well I could go to a church, I could join this club, that club and then to talk about Sunday Assembly what it gives you which is something different, which is not a community based around a shared hobby but something much broader. It’s quite hard to do a tag. It’s quite hard to find that phrasing that doesn’t make you sound like a religious organization and on the other hand doesn’t make you sound like an anti-religious organization or some kind of cult.

Interviewee 2: The thing is, going to Sunday Assembly, it gives you a real buzz and you come away from it thinking I’m really glad I went, I had a great time.

Steven: Get people through the door, they understand what it is. You can’t get them through the door, they have lot of misconceptions. I can’t often have a conversation with people really like the idea of Sunday Assembly but can’t get there because the kids don’t want religious stuff. Sometimes you will see a post on Facebook and someone says “Hey, you got your own Sunday Assembly” and I think “Oh we’ve been here four years and you’re someone who’s enthusiastic about Sunday Assembly and hasn’t noticed it’s in the town.” We can’t afford to put Billboards up. We spend 15 pounds maximum advertising a month on Facebook. 

Interviewee 2: We keep trying but I think we want to get more of a foothold in the community. So, anything that’s outside of what we’re doing. So, there’s a thing called… often which is one of our… we do get together as a group and help in lots of… like after the Reading Festival which is huge here, we went and cleared up some of the thousands of tents to be given to refuges. We do things like that but there’s another message around on the assembly which is about mental wellness and well-being and fighting against loneliness and we need to make more steps into doctors or other community groups or health social well-being groups to let them know to send their people to us because we will… There are a lot of people who come to Sunday Assembly who have anxiety issues and socializing anxiety issues and like that, there’s a lot of them. We find it a good place once they get there, we know it works from that point of view.

Steven: Yes, that’s one of things that opened my eyes to Sunday Assembly because it attracts people who are lonely or suffering from social anxiety or whatever, meet this group of people and suddenly they all talk about these things and suddenly you’re having conversations… people their identities and their struggles in their lives. So, it is a rather unique space for that. Like, if you went to London, my mountain biking group; you wouldn’t ever know anything what sort of tires they like to use, it’s a very different space and we have one person who comes along and sometimes he has a male name sometimes she has a female name and mostly that’s the only time that person takes on that second identity. That’s the comfortable place that Sunday Assembly is, that nonjudgmental supportive place. So, creating that sort of space is something to be proud of. 

Jacobsen: If you look at some of the Freemasons, I talked to one of the grand secretaries for one of the provinces in Canada and he was noting that for them they have a situation where they have their fundamental things of you have to believe in a God you have to be a male. And so, for them, when they get together, they say you can’t talk religion and you can’t talk politics. So, they do their rituals whatever they are but they have this base ethic of nothing essentially would be considered controversial or typically lead to a certain aggressiveness just based on the subject matter for many people; the religion and politics. So, it’s also a harder cell because he was noting that there’s be 5 million members around the world and they’re having trouble finding ways in which to enthuse the membership because their membership is also aging akin to many churches and other organizations that kind of bring people together in one space and celebrate in some way. 

Do you have any final feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the conversation today? We’ll go with Linda first.

Interviewee 3: Well, what I’d like to say is we find it really hard to get it across to people. I think Sunday Assembly is an absolutely brilliant thing and it’s done such a huge amount for me personally. I was in a very lonely and depressed place before I discovered it and it’s really turned my life around, given me a sense of purpose and I’ve made lots of friends and I feel so much happier now and just seeing what that’s done for me, I want to tell other people about it. It’s really frustrating and difficult to actually try and publicize the thing, trying to come up with different ideas and ways to do that. We’re working on it all the time. 

Steven: One more thing about publicity. Periodically, I’ll get on the local radio as a representative of a secular voice. So, there might be a rabbi there and a priest or whatever. And the host of the radio show, what he wants is me to attack. It’s very difficult when you just say no, I think this person’s fine. What they’re trying to do on the whole… And so, trying to get away from that anti message is really difficult. So, we feel like we need to do something outrageous to get the publicity machine working like when we were using phrases like an atheist church but we don’t have that. 

Jacobsen: If one of you could come down on wires strapped in from like the ceiling and come down in in Conway Hall because I think there was a pastor in America recently who did that, he had himself on wires and he came from the back pews and ad landed in the stage and it was this huge, quite a large stunt. He didn’t take them off, he had them on I think the whole service and so it was like one of these Baptist congregation, I think. So, we’re talking a very let’s say, enthusiastic crowd. 

Steven: I think assemblies in America have a slight advantage in that the idea of a congregation that’s not religious, it’s more newsworthy but in the UK the average person doesn’t care so much about religion or non-religion, it’s not such a strong subject. So, we don’t have that push, something to push back upon; not that we want it. We don’t want the hassle that Americans have but it would be nice to have. 

Jacobsen: I think the North American Trend to a large extent with the internet era, as far as I can tell, is increasingly people choosing infamy over regular fame because they could not derive any sort of standard notoriety through traditional means; writing a book, assiduous work in producing original academic work, great works of art whether it be music or painting or poetry, and so on. These individuals are proliferating and learning from one another in terms of ways to spark almost anti- debate because they will deny fundamental truths about the world. People go what do you mean by that and so in other words, it’s a rise of infamy through being the grandeur of anti-intellectualism. So, to do that in a healthy way, to gain some sort of notoriety in respectful to the intelligence of the public way is much more difficult especially as you’re noting, Steven, there isn’t a necessary thing to sell a single item on the menu. We’re selling God would be, for instance, the New York tradition, Linda, of an Evangelical Church or we’re selling the oldest mother Church, the Roman Catholic Church, in your case Sam, this sort of thing. Or we’re just selling Jolly Old England with the church of England in your case, Steven. I see more roadblocks for the secular community in that regard than internet age not so secular community.

So, thank you all very much for your time. 

Interviewee 2: Thank you, Scott. Nice to talk to you.

Interviewee 3: Nice to talk to you too, take care. 

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