They meet on Sundays in a squat building of uninspiring cinder block. The flat roof doesn't strain skyward like the spires atop the Methodist church down the street. There is no 25-foot-high stained-glass window like the Presbyterians have.
That's fitting, because their faith doesn't reach for the heavens. The congregation of the Washington Ethical Society takes inspiration from a more worldly source: human beings.It is sort of a non-church, without the trappings of religion, and some would say without the soul. It is a church without God.
"Ethical societies are founded on the belief that there is no God except the experience that people have in doing good," said leader Don Montagna, the group's cleric. "We would spell God with two o's."
G-o-o-d as its own reward. No heaven or hell, no one to watch over us - except each other.
It is one of the nation's smallest and most freethinking religions.
There are 20 congregations across the country under the umbrella of the American Ethical Union. The 3,050 members are encouraged to develop their own spiritual philosophies. Most are atheists or agnostics, but some believe in God and a handful also belong to mainstream churches.
What they share is faith in the value of human life and dedication to good deeds and social action.
"Our purpose is not to argue about the afterlife but to act in this life," said Jone Johnson, leader of the Chicago society. She calls it "an alternative religion."
The Washington group holds Sunday "platform meetings" in a plain auditorium with no altar or candles. There is uplifting music and meditation but not prayer.
The leader or a guest speaker lectures on topics ranging from the philosophical to the pragmatic to the political.
Church leaders also perform weddings and preside over celebrations of holidays - not Christmas and Easter but Winter Festival and SpringFest.
"The kind of people who come to us are people who, like me, found that our religions stopped being real for us one day," said Montagna, a former Catholic. "The idea of a man-god sitting on a throne in the sky just doesn't seem likely to us anymore."
The Ethical Cultural Movement was founded in 1876 by social reformer Felix Adler, a Columbia University professor. Adler and his followers were early supporters of labor unions and child labor laws.
Later, ethical culturists worked for desegregation and civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War. Membership peaked in the '60s at about 5,800.
Today they bring meals to the homeless, take poor children to summer camp, sponsor adult education classes and speak out for human rights and the environment, gun control and a nuclear test ban.
Members are generally college-educated and middle class, almost all with a strong liberal bent. There is an abundance of professors, psychologists and doctors, and a lot of senior citizens.
But ethical culturists may be doomed to small numbers and a narrow base, said J. Gordon Melton, an American religions scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
They have little appeal outside the intellectual elite, he said. And they no longer have a great cause, like the early labor movement, to help inspire fervor.