This is the movement's founding proposition and it is a structural claim rather than a pious one: Adler argued that theological agreement had never actually produced ethical agreement, and that the reverse arrangement might work better. In practice it means an Ethical Society contains people who believe in God and people who do not, sitting together, with no mechanism for resolving the difference and no interest in acquiring one. Critics from both directions have called this hollow — religious critics say a congregation with no object of worship is a club, and secularists say the Sunday-morning architecture is nostalgia. The movement's reply is a hundred and fifty years of continuous operation, which is longer than most of the objections have been running.