The religion itself often ends up being quietly secondary to the community building, and I still don’t know what replaces the Church for the non-religious.
What can act as community hubs are very dependant of the community, but really don’t need to relate to religion. Especially if they serve as hub for people from different religious backgrounds
Aside from the places linked to religious activity, from any religion, the places that come to my mind, partly from my own experience, are:
- Local dedicated community centers, where they exist.
- Associations & clubs (the sport of school kind, not gentlemen’s clubs)
- Sometimes shops.
- The best community hub I used to go to was actually a “booksshop” dealing in mangas, anime, video games, and tabletop games. They often organised nocturnal tabletop gaming events. The shop served as a social hub even outside of these events, and the community was a safe place for some us not “misfits” (special interest nerds, LGBTQIA+ teens and adults, etc).
In other words, any community driven or community focused place or organisation can serve as a meaningful cosmopolitan social hub. People will gravitate naturally toward the hub·s centered around their interests. (Be it a religion, a sport, a social cause, a subculture, etc.)
Wall of text incoming.
What make claim this general statement ?
Yes, but what’s your point?
I don’t know enough about the sociology behind this. However, this sense of obligation can also apply to gatherings not related to any christian church. Peer pressure and other social norms are not reserved to religious groups from the christian family of religions, nor to any religious or ideological group.
Are you sure? I agree that not usual regarding a comic shop specically, but it still can happen. If not parents, other family members or friends can force someone into the forceful one’s favourite gathering evenet/place. The place can be a comic shop. I actually have been pressured by someone to participate to a very private cultural club regrouping a fraction of the community I talked about. That “someone” was a member of the club, but didn’t even ask other members consent before shoehorning me in. The club session didn’t take place in the shop, but in some members’ homes. Most accepted me, but still… others and I were forced to interact in this situations, and the only thing that helped is that we already interacted spontaneously and positively at several previous encounters.
Parents do indeed drag their kids to non religious social hubs and make them hang out with people :
Friends or relatives from the same generation can also do the same, to the same kind of hubs, plus others like nightclubs and their afterwork equivalent (that matches “events with friends or colleagues”, but the noise and the mass of people adds much stress for some.)
I’ve personnally experienced most of that when I was a child / teen, and still experience part of it. And although I was a roman catholic as a child, the only times this forced socialisation happened linked to church activities were linked to marriages, communions, baptism or funeral. I never took part in catechism, nor in periodic masses, or any parish event. That didn’t prevent me from finding a community. Actually, social norms and obligations were and still are one of the biggests obstacles preventing me from participating in significant way in a community. The others are social fears/anxiety, and poor mental health. (Due to working and living conditions degradation, as well as to the socio-ecological context, and the economics and politics that cause all of this. I hate the greed for any kind of domination, and the oppression and exploitation this greed encourages.)
Anyway, I don’t understand your point about the “obligation” incentive, and the forced participation. It wasn’t part of the discussions when I first answered, so it’s not a point I discussed either.
Communities and social interactions, wether linked to any religion or not, can and will happen without external constraints.
The absence of pressure is even better. Forced social interactions are at best awkward and tiring. I usually find these abusives. They also implies power dynamics that will probably lead to further suffering, toxicity, or (potentially very serious) abuses. We should not encourage the use of religion as a domination system (or any such system really) to force and structure social interactions and community.