An Agnostic Makes the Case for Church
As a writer myself, I’ve long admired the work of The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson—over the last decade or so, I’ve quoted him often in my books. He’s an agnostic who is perpetually drawn to writing about faith, the church, and the state of religion in America. He bemoans the scandals and “noxious politics” of the contemporary church, but he does not come to these spiritual topics cynically, as we might expect from someone who is curious about religion but remains staunchly uncommitted. His “outsider” observations are remarkably insightful and spot-on. And, in “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust,” he’s positively prophetic. Here’s a short excerpt from his much longer (and must-read) piece, followed by a few of my practical observations…
Imagine… a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.
I’ve come to believe that something like this story is happening, except with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.
And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his… book, The Anxious Generation, to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews daven. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.
A Few Practical Observations
- We are embodied people who experience a kind of starvation of the soul if our life patterns move us toward greater and greater isolation. In trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s iconic book The Body Keeps the Score, he explores the way our bodies “capture” the experience of trauma, and why it’s so important to develop self-awareness about our bodily responses to life and relationships. His insights are profound, and much broader than our experience of trauma. Van der Kolk is trying to emphasize our deep wiring as embodied people—we cannot experience wholeness in our soul, or true intimacy in our relationship with Jesus, if we ignore the importance of our presence with others. This means that every person we meet is starving for embodied contact with others—for those who long for the embodied experience of church, how many non-threatening entry points back into community can we offer them?
- Though Thompson (and Haidt) carefully maintain their distance from any form of faith commitment, there remains in them (and so many others who resonate with the underlying reasons for their distance) what Blaise Pascal calls our soul’s “God-shaped hole.” Deeper than Thompson explores here, we also have a hunger for community with God. We are all made in God’s image, and that means we are hard-wired to discover our true self in His presence. Of course, we can’t flip a switch and produce experiences that lead to awe and wonder, but we can create spiritual ecosystems that intentionally invite people into more intimate encounters with God. Often, we are too afraid of scaring people away by leading them into more direct experiences of God’s beauty, but under their crusty façades are souls longing to “taste and see” the goodness of God.
- Our liturgical practices are a two-edged sword… The more rote they feel to our congregants, the more deadening they are to the soul—no surprise there. But the more surprising, authentic, and wonder-infused they are, the more they locate our soul in the sacred spaces it longs for. At Vibrant Faith, we’re right now launching into a major new grant project in partnership with the Lilly Endowment—it’s called “Raising Faithful Kids,” and our aim is to help parents deepen their understanding of common worship practices, linked to fun experiments they can try with their kids. In addition, the churches participating in the project will be tweaking their worship-service liturgical practices to mirror what the parents are learning. We’re VERY aware that the phrase “tweaking liturgical practices” is loaded for most churches. But infusing a bit of creativity, experiential practice, and liturgical context into the normal rhythms of a church worship service can work like yeast in the dough—a small thing that affects the big thing. In short, what tiny tweaks could help your liturgy to be slightly more relational, slightly more surprising, and slightly more wonder-based?
- The further into the social wilderness we travel, the thirstier we get. Will those who’ve banished themselves from their religious spaces find in our church culture a social/sacred oasis that invites them to drink and be satisfied? As we are knee-deep in the Advent season—when so many feel a palpable need to reconnect to their religious roots or their religious curiosity or their buried religious longings—how are we authentically, warmly embracing the prodigals among us? Do they feel seen and enjoyed? Did they leave with a little aftertaste of invited belonging? Did they experience authentic care, and a sense that “this place feels real to me”? When they expected judgment, were they invited to a party instead?
Rick Lawrence is Executive Director of Vibrant Faith—he created the new curriculum Following Jesus. He’s editor of the Jesus-Centered Bible and author of 40 books, including his new release Editing Jesus: Confronting the Distorted Faith of the American Church, The Suicide Solution, The Jesus-Centered Life and Jesus-Centered Daily. He hosts the podcast Paying Ridiculous Attention to Jesus.