The Trouble with Atheism

So I am investigating this college the other day, due to the fact that it is relocating near me. It turns out to be a very explicitly and intentionally christian university and thus one I would likely be uncomfortable attending due to my own atheistic beliefs.

But it got me to thinking. The school has services every weekday morning. Services where students can join their friends and colleagues in prayer and "worship" (that generally means highly affected singing).

Then I remember this documentary I saw a few years back which basically argued that religion was a way of binding communities together. It created not only common beliefs, but a common identity, and a common experience of the spiritual. Which arguably was a mass hallucination but if you can have a deeply moving experience as a community wouldn't that bind you closer together even if it was a completely invented experience.

So I got to thinking imagine how closely knit a college community would likely become if most of the students regularly attended some of these services rather than just going their own way as they might at a standard secular school.

Atheism while it can bring people together to a degree has no real means of offering that sort of experience and community bonding. This may or may not be a good thing, however I find myself wondering if popular religions did sink into obscurity would we find ourselves needing some sort of cultural replacement?

Secular mass, group chanting, yoga (lol)? The other question that bugs me is would it be better to create a secular religion that incorporated atheism as a core belief or given the problems so inherent with religions would it be better to discover a means to disconnect our social bonding and social rituals from religion entirely, and let it fall by the wayside as a relic of our past?