There’s a pub in Petersham, a suburb in Sydney’s inner west, called the Oxford Tavern. It was once an iconic strip club, but far as I’m aware there hasn’t been a pair of bare breasts in there for a while. Last year it was transformed into a strip club themed yuppie gastropub, with craft beers on tap and tasting plates on offer.

“Because it was such an icon of Sydney, we tried to pay a bit of a homage to the place, so we’ve tried to recycle as much as we could from the old venue,” licensee Steve Forbes said of the new fit-out. “So the original stripper poles are still in the front bar ... and the neon lights out the front have changed from ‘Live Hot Girls’ to ‘Live Hot Barbecue’.”

The Sunday Assembly, an atheist church founded in London last year, has set up shop a few stops up the train line from the Oxford Tavern, in Redfern. They swap out hymns for pop songs, motivational speeches for readings, and celebrate “the one life we know we have”. I attended their last service, and found myself disagreeing violently with co-founder Sanderson Jones’ characterisation of the gathering as “all the best bits of church, but with no religion.” That’s like saying the best part of the old Oxford Tavern was the poles.

Enjoyable or not, both the new Tavern and the Sunday Assembly are part of the long, inglorious march of gentrification. The pub’s new clientele tries to access some of the old strip club’s charm, drinking cocktails like the “swinging tit” and the “banana hammock”. In a similar way, the Sunday Assembly attempts to recreate an imagined moment when vibrant church communities were a real thing, but with none of the obligations. In order to operate, both have had to kick out the original tenants, the reason for visiting in the first place: the strippers and, in the case of the Sunday Assembly, God.

Jones and his co-founder Pippa Evans held their first service in a deconsecrated Anglican church in Islington, a London suburb described by the UK Fabian Society as undergoing “super-gentrification” over the last 40 years. As such the Sunday Assembly isn’t much deeper than consumption, dressed up as community, for yuppies who want to feel good. That would be fine, if gentrification didn’t relentlessly displace communities that don’t share the same pleasures of middle class workers. Because of their superior wealth and cultural capital, they can demand that the market provide them with more meaningful lives - and this usually happens in “authentic” inner city spaces, free of suburban drudgery.

Holding the service in a church wouldn’t have been seen as a provocation by the founders, but it is. It’s a flexing of the muscles to show the young atheists have arrived, disposable income and all. It’s not that there’s no demand for God in the inner city, but that in an environment that sees the ironic appropriation of religious signs or places as not only acceptable but also fashionable, those who do believe will end up being forced, humiliated, to the periphery.

What religion remains in inner-city areas tends to be docile, and is often relegated to caring for the surplus human waste – the homeless and unemployed – that gentrification produces. I can’t see the Sunday Assembly, despite its motto of “livebetter, help often, wonder more”, performing even this secondary function of organised religion. This is what struck me about the Sunday Assembly, and why I can’t see it as any more than a new trendy outpost: it can’t perform any of the functions of religion – including the maintenance of an organic community – but will end up displacing those groups that do.

Punters who attended the Oxford Tavern before it was retrofitted told the Telegraph that the pub had a real “community spirit”. Tamara, one of the strippers, said “it’s like the loss of my second home”. Two demolition workers would come from across Sydney to have lunch there every Thursday. “There goes my social life,” a third bloke joked of the takeover. This was in some sense a religious place, and now it’s gone, without even having been paid the compliment of a bit of violent iconoclasm. No, the sketchy places, the sacred places, are slowly being ground out of the world by a force that sees them as neither holy nor profane, but as novelties to spice up the next round of drinks or the next sing-along.

“I don’t expect much objection from religious communities. They are happy for us to use their church model”, Jones told Salon magazine in 2013. Only someone who already feels entitled to the Christian “model”, and who doesn’t understand why it might be a sacrilege to appropriate those forms and gestures, would assume as much. The churches should think very carefully about how they will relate to the growth of organised atheism. At the very least, they should not collaborate in their own desacralisation.