Jesus engaged Nicodemus at night. Will he engage the hesitant visitors in our age, that growing group whom surveys say are leaving religious traditions they were raised in because they have stopped believing in their teachings.

Charles Taylor in his book “A Secular Age” may have insights into the “Nones”. Some become unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most religions. Many leave a religion because “they think of religious people as hypocritical or judgmental, because religious organizations focus too much on rules or because religious leaders are too focused on power and money.”

It’s interesting to see, Taylor writes,  that “ far fewer say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that religion is just superstition.”

The theory that religion will disappear as science advances doesn’t hold up, Taylor says, because there’s a search for “human fullness” for a “higher world” that doesn’t go away. Surveys indicate that’s the case among the unaffiliated today

But Taylor also recognizes that people find religions difficult today.  In the western world, our secular age is an age of “expressive individualism;” people want reasons to believe and belong. They need religious places that meet them as they are. They’re looking for religious experience.

“Those who believe in the God of Abraham should normally be reminded of how little they know him, how partial is their grasp of him. They have a long way to go…Many believers (the fanatics, but also more than these) rest in the certainty that they have got God right (as against all those heretics and pagans in the outer darkness). They are clutching onto an idol, to use a term familiar to the traditions of the God of Abraham.”  (p.769)

Churches need to engage the world with reasons, not with condemnations.  Belief leads us to the mysterious Unknown, not sharp certainties. Jesus kept speaking to Nicodemus many nights, it seems. His story and the story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus says it takes time to believe. We’re slow learners. We have to keep talking to the “Nones” at night, praying they find him “in the breaking of the bread.”