"Sin vs. Iniquity and Other Holy Topics"

I was a stand-up comedian for many years, but at the back of my mind, I'd always had this...

I thought, could you do something which was a bit like church, but which anyone could go to?

This is Sanderson.

He's based in London.

And these days, he spends most of his time planning and conducting ceremonies.

He does weddings and funerals, the kind of things that a priest or a minister might do.

Except that Sanderson isn't religious.

In fact, he's an atheist.

But this push and pull between faith and secularism, it's been part of his life for ages.

And it really started to coalesce in 2013 when Sanderson started hosting a weekly gathering that he called the Sunday Assembly.

I had this idea for something like non-religious church.

I bumped into another comedian called Pippa Evans, and she had had the similar idea.

And then we did it and we went viral straight away.

It turned out that people were really hungry for communal church-like experience, minus the God part.

And pretty quickly, Sunday assemblies started spreading beyond London.

New Sunday assemblies began popping up in other cities across Europe, and eventually it came here to the United States.

Sanderson loved helping people set up their own hyper-local congregations, and he felt like he was making a real difference in people's lives.

But eventually, the business model just stopped making sense.

I guess my insight would be that you can do church without God, but you can't do church without money, and people who don't believe in God find it harder to donate money.

So Sanderson decided it was time to make a change.

They stopped being part of Sunday Assembly after a few years, and that led me to making a podcast, which led to someone eventually stealing my podcast, which is what brings us here.

All right, let's rewind.

So in 2020, Sanderson decided to start a podcast.

The idea was to make something that would be like an extension of Sunday Assembly, kind of an atheist's guide to living well.

He and his co-host called it lifefulness, a play on the Buddhist idea of mindfulness.