Some people specifically join Oasis to find help in negotiating their nonbelief. When Mikayla Dreyer and her friend Guy Niederhauser, 29, arrived at Kansas City Oasis last fall, each was looking for some of what they’d had in the churches they left behind as adults: the community, the intellectual ferment, and an occasional sense of awe. What they found was good, but different. Oasis has taught Dreyer that there is a freedom in letting go of religious beliefs, but she said she has yet to find there the close-knit friendships she had at church. For Niederhauser, the talks are compelling, but the ambience of a basketball gym makes it hard to experience the kind of awe he felt sitting beneath mid-century stained glass in his childhood congregation. Even so, each maintains that having a place like Oasis has been valuable—much better than not having one.

Describing her beliefs, Dreyer used the language of pilgrimage; she’s “becoming atheist,” she said, and Oasis has given her strength to do so. But there is anxiety attached to the process, particularly when she anticipates the responses of her parents and church friends, many of whom don’t know about her transition. “This is still the Bible Belt, so this is unusual,” she said. She worries people will think she’s no longer the same person. “I know that was the way I thought about people who didn’t believe, or who left. So there’s a very real threat there.”

After eight years of being nonreligious, Niederhauser said, he’s told only one Christian friend that he no longer believes, and that was very recently. “It took me three of the longest minutes of my life to get the words out of my mouth: that I, was, an atheist,” he said. While he had atheist friends in college, he still isn’t sure how his Christian friends will react to his own atheism. His friend “had to literally stop me and say, ‘It’s okay, you can tell me,’” Niederhauser said. “He knew that the only thing that I could possibly be so worried to tell him was that I wasn’t a Christian anymore.”

While Oasis gives some people the courage to express their views in public, some secular people are still unsure about these communities. Speaking one Sunday morning, Bart Campolo, a 53-year-old former evangelical preacher, said he often encounters secular people who are “a little suspicious” of groups like these—anything organized. “Can I get a witness?” he asked the crowd, which gave a murmur of recognition. Campolo, the current humanist chaplain at the University of Southern California, said his friendships with Christians have taught him that communicating what it means to be secular requires more than telling; one must show. “You want to know what you need if you’re going to communicate with believers? You need a community like this one,” he said.

Secular and religious groups often interpret human needs and experience in similar ways, positing truths—such as the idea that being part of a group mitigates human weakness—that likely don’t make sense to everyone. In this respect, Oasis might be influenced by religious communities in ways that go beyond shared methods—indeed, it can seem to draw on characteristically religious patterns of thinking. This has often been a feature of secular movements in the past; visions of an increasingly secular modern society, popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were deeply informed by the eschatological optimism of evangelical Protestants of the time.