Religions create communities around shared worship, annual observances and festivals, and with calls for deep relationship grounded in sacred texts. They create rites of passage for births, coming-of-age, marriages, and deaths that not only tie members of the community to one another but also to believers in past centuries, and thus the past itself. Secularism cannot produce any of these things and has therefore not forged the kind of tight communities that can comfort and console people during times of grief.
