The Trouble with Church

I went to church with my wife the other day. We’ve been to this church a couple of times in the past, and I’ve always been impressed with its facilities. Services are held in this sort of cavernous gymnasium-looking sanctuary, with rows of bleachers facing a big stage under a huge television screen. They’ve got a live band and a stable of pleasant-looking apparently well-adjusted preachers, and the lobby has a bookstore and various “stations” manned by people ready to attend to your every spiritual need: if you’re wavering just outside the realm of Christendom, if you’re in the Kingdom but wondering whether you should be anymore, if you’re a teenager trying to sort out the intersections between your faith and your chronic hormonal imbalances, then there’s someone to talk to you about it. The people there were friendly and pleasant and apparently genuinely happy to see us.

So I was impressed, and everything seemed cool. Until the sermon started.

First of all, there was the singing. I have some serious problems with this whole mandatory hymn thing, at least the way it’s done at the few churches I’ve visited recently. First of all, there’s too much of it. I know you need to warm up the crowd before the main event, get their juices flowing, but this place forces you to spend, no joke, about forty-five minutes raising your voice in song. It’s intolerable, and mind-numbing. Which is, I think, the point of the whole affair, and brings me to my second complaint: the quality of the songs themselves. The music is “inspirational” in the canned, uninspiring sense of the word; soaring melodies and loud, insistent refrains that serve as little more than simple conveyances for the lyrics. And the lyrics. Good Lord. Endless variations on the “we are vile sinners” theme, repeated ad-infinitum until the poor rhymes, the nonexistent scansion, the general shoddiness of the words themselves drive you absolutely up the wall.

Now, I realize that I’m probably missing the point here: you could argue that criticizing hymns on their merits as songs is like criticizing pre-school children’s choirs on their merits as choirs. The hymn is a means to an end, and as long as it serves that end, it can do it as badly as it wants to.

Ok, fine. I disagree, but fine. It seems to me that, if 50% of what a viral meme like religion does is bring in new recruits, then it ought to spare no expense in making the tools of that recruitment as good as they can be. This church certainly spends a lot of dough on the trappings. I just think it should look a little bit closer at the content.

But all that’s minor compared to my real beef with these songs: the horrible, endless repetition. You are a sinner. The only way to heaven is through Jesus. You are unworthy. You are weak. You are a sinner. Over and over and over and over again until the words are bouncing around in the echo chamber of your besieged mind even after the music stops and you’re in your seat staring numbly into space. It’s a transparent attempt to bludgeon you into some sort of an enlightened Jesus catatonia, and it freaks me out almost as much as it irritates me.

So that’s a bad way to start. But it gets even worse when the sermon gets going. The preacher spends an hour telling me that I’m worthless, that the only way to salvation is through self-abnegation, through prostration to a wholly theoretical deity, that I am wicked and I need to admit it and hurry up and come to the Lord or I’m going to hell, end of story. What bugs me most about this is the claim that we are not capable of running our own lives, that we are somehow empty unless we surrender ourselves to some invisible force that doesn’t feed us, or shelter us, or do anything beside make us feel guilty about not forcing our lives down the narrow paths outlined for us in a bunch of ancient, much-redacted texts. He droned on about my culpability and weakness and general unsuitability for heaven for almost an hour, and by the time he was done I was so pissed off I could hardly speak. I left angry, and vowed (yet again) never to come back. That doesn’t seem like much a business plan to me.

And it’s not the religion itself that’s making me so angry. The little I know about the moral underpinnings of Christianity seem pretty sound to me (on this side of the New Testament, anyway). Nor do I necessarily have a problem with people who try to foist their religious beliefs on me. Nine times out of ten, they’re doing it with the sincere conviction that I’d be a happier person if I just stepped over the line, refocused on the magic eye portrait of the world until I can see God hiding in its details.

But the exclusionary mindset of the churches I’ve attended, and the whole notion of trying to scare people into believing in their deity, rubs me the wrong way. I just don’t want any part of it. It seems to me that they’re built on this whole us-versus-them ethos that masquerades as acceptance, but isn’t: acceptance is reaching out to people who don’t agree with you and folding them into your presence. It’s not telling them that you can join the club as long as you agree with everything they say.

Aaaargh. The truth is, there’s a large part of me that wants to believe there’s a Benevolent Entity out there looking after my interests, but I don’t want to have to deal with the trappings of worshipping It, at least not as they’re presented in these places. The standard line (as I understand it) is that God gave us free will as a sort of a test, to see if we’re wise enough to chuck it aside and surrender to His plan. But … as long as we’re not killing people or selling drugs to children or whatever, why not just accept us as we are? Why threaten us with eternal damnation if we don’t happen to believe in the resurrection? Why force us to sing ourselves numb every Sunday? It just doesn’t seem like something a Friendly Wise New-Testament Deity would do; really, it’s more like a Mean Controlling Old-Testament Deity thing. I can see being afraid of a god like that. I can’t see liking Him.