wanna hear a joke?
some right wingers in the deep south who love the constitution got together and figured out how to change a law or something so that one of the mega churches could have it’s own actual police force. like campus police division of a municipal police force but instead of for a public university, for a church.
you get it? they love the consitution but they advocate for what has to be the most robust form of combining church and state.
K: actually most right winger/church advocates would love to turn America
into a theocracy, much like Iran… that would thrill them no end… and with pretty
much with the exact same rules…and given half the chance, they would
Kropotkin
exactly. the joke is that they want to do this while waving around a constitution that they clearly have not read or do not actually hold as meaning anything
Humanity didn’t invent religion anymore than it invented itself. Religion became manifest when homo sapiens emerged as a species.
The concept of religion as a belief and practice in contra-distinction to secularity is historically a Christian one. European “anti-religious” sentiment grew out of Protestantism which was influenced by Islamic iconoclasm. It would more accurately be termed anti-formalism.
Attending church services is categorially formal religion. The trend toward claiming to be spiritual rather than religious is anti-formal. Like agnosticism and atheism it’s essentially a continuation of the Protestant principle.
In a broad sense the culture war which is dividing America is a religious conflict. The political left is not necessarily any less religious or spiritual, as they might prefer to call it, than the religious right.
It is basically a human problem. There are people among supposedly non-religious groups who are just as evil as the evillest in religious societies. The religious have a set of moral ideals against which deviation is obvious straight away, whereas those without evident ideals are not so apparent.
The issue with religious practise, or formalism, is that the service is in many cases a contradiction to common experience. The enthusiasm of “charismatic” churches is seen as contrived and much of the sermon is moral teaching, which grates against the reports of abuse, and experience of cruelty.
Religious practise in the Christian sense is a partaking in the gospel story, a re-enactment of the myth, an identification with the persons portrayed, and reception of the forgiveness made available by the blood of Christ. This isn’t fully recognised and where it is, people shy away from the “scapegoating” aspect of it. People know it is wrong, completely and fully wrong, but that is what Grace is, and the better we understand how wrong it is, the more good it does for us.
An Am. native friend of mine said that people are leaving traditional churches and are going to new wave religions because the conservative churches have lost their emotional appeal. Aldous Huxley disparages emotional appeal in the Perennial Philosophy. So what do the latest generation seek? Emotional fire or pure logic for their religious preference? My father agreed with the Am. Native in being a minister who claimed that the so-called “modern” churches have grown cold.
I thought they stopped going to church due to covid.
To anyone considering Church attendance as a significant measure of religiosity, please note that I am not a member of a religious denomination. I have not attended church once a week or more since 1986. The last time I attended a service was about 5 years ago when I went to a funeral for a friend’s wife. Weddings and funerals are about the extent of my participation in the formal Church.
Yet listening to YouTube videos of Jonathan Pageau the symbolist icon carver, I have recently developed a new appreciation for liturgy as a purveyor of communal meaning. I have yet to step into a so-called church building because of it though.
And of course there is the effect of covid-19 on the willingness of people including myself to gather communally at this time. At the moment I find it interesting to ponder that I have even entertained the idea.
I believe that this is correct, plus the fact that we have no feeling for ritual.
T. S. Eliot converted to Catholicism because he found the rituals therein emotionally comforting. But we can be somewhat comforted by the waning of emotional appeals that resulted in witch hunts and inquisitions.
Nowadays politics claims that emotional appeal. Conservative religion is the bitch of current politics.
Of course, here in Europe, church attendance has been far lower over a longer time and COVID hasn’t been good for attendance. I think that the witch hunts and inquisitions have been superseded as a reason to avoid the church by the numerous abuse cases. It is particularly evil to misuse the trust placed in one, especially when you are talking about children. The numbers here in Europe have been depressing, and the long term suffering that was caused, partly because the victims felt they couldn’t speak out against popular figures, has been appalling. Obviously, the church has done its cause a large disservice by trying to hush up the issue.
I find that the simplicity and hopefulness that I felt in church services was ruined and my faith rocked by burnout - especially because I was working for the church, and there was no help forthcoming, just more responsibility and stress. It made me question what I was doing so left the church completely and sought employment elsewhere. It was then that I completely revised my faith and am still seeking a path that gives me the same assurance as I had. It is probably not to be found.
We have more witch hunts than ever in our wonderful internet age. It’s not even a rare occurrence any more.
The “witches” don’t get burned, hanged or drowned … they lose their jobs, get ostracized or get endlessly hounded.
The allegation of “witch hunt” has become a favorite rhetorical accusation of scoundrels like Trump and Matt Gaetz. It reflects a dark legacy of the church, and appeals to the widespread mistrust of institutional investigations today.
According to the Bible the church is one, like God. Yet we can’t see this. Our minds have been blinded by the nihilism of the modern world.
More generally, we are living in an era where the chaos of anarchy is destroying the order of institutions. Protestantism which I was born into was part of that movement.
William Butler Yeats captured the zeitgeist when he said “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” The center will hold though, as Isaiah saw when he announced “God with Us” a type of the principle of incarnation.
That of course is a vision of the spiritual reality which is the church. That is the church I wish to attend and to which I am attending in this discourse.
Christ envisioned the situation in his parable of the wheat and the tares. A tare I take to be a weed. In this context it would be an inauthentic sheave of wheat.
Does anyone think of themselves this way? As inauthentic? The inauthentic person is one who essentially and potentially authentic-- the Christ or Buddha waiting to be born, that is, realized.
When you commune with others, eating and drinking in a spirit of love, that is, in the presence of Christ, are you not attending church?
Please read Emily Dickenson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church. . .”
poetryfoundation.org/poems/ … he-sabbath going-to-church-236
An advanced expression of romantic Protestant anti-formal sentiment.
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –
I’m going, all along.
Here’s the Gallup report presumably referred to in the OP, which actually addresses church membership in the U.S not attendance.
K: thank you for posting this…my cut and paste skills are rather weak…
which is another way of saying, I am old…
Kropotkin
You’re welcome! The topic interests me for what it says and does not say. Here are the implications that the pollster sees in the poll:
What is religiosity? How would it be measured? What is its relationship to formal religion? Can religiosity be distinguished from spirituality and if so how?
It was nice to hear from a friend who is a Pastor after such a long time. The fact that we met again on a zoom church service was significant and had a meaning for me that people may not fully understand. We were in a church service for the first time in a long time, and we were encouraged by a friend after she noticed that we had distanced ourselves from the church. The reason was that when I was still working for the church I had been fully committed and had crashed into a burnout and received no support. After that, I struggled with depression until I finally could no longer work and retired.
Our presence at the service was, in a way, an attempt to start over. My wife and I shared afterwards and thought it was well done by dear people. However, we did not find ourselves in it. Perhaps it needs time. We agreed that we see Jesus as the embodiment of the meaning of life and think that love is the highest expression of that meaning. Well, if God is love, then perhaps we have arrived. I see a lot of meaning in the Bible, but does that mean that there is something supernatural who intervenes in peoples lives? The people on the zoom church service apparently thought, and so there was a long period of prayer.
I have a lot of time for loving-kindness meditation, considering those people around you, spreading outwards, loving all and sundry. I found it fitting somehow, more than intercessory prayer. Obviously, it is something I picked up from Buddhism rather than Christianity. It was a strange feeling to be doing something different to these people whilst they thought that we were part of what they were doing. But was it? Is there this difference, or are we all just guessing?
I think that the church has to encompass these thoughts as well, if they are going to get people back.