Give me that old-time religion

As I've said many a time, my feelings about my fellow man and woman can be summed up thus:  People stink and they are stupid.

I say that with love.

Whenever I hear of some change in the zeitgeist heralded as a sign of our collective cultural and spiritual and intellectual growth and enlightenment I generally conclude that all that's happened is that people have exchanged one set of vices and hypocrisies for another, "cooler" set of vices and hypocrisies.

Take this Pew Study of religion in America that shows that more and more of us are "unaffiliated" with any particular religion and which has been cheered and applauded here and there on the Liberal side of the bandwidth as a sign that the country is at last growing up and shaking itself free of the superstitions and nonsense of the old-time religion.

Horse hockey.

Likely all it's a sign of is that more people are too lazy to get themselves out the door in time to go to meetin' on a Sunday morning.

If it means anything more than that it means that more people don't get their weekend's entertainment from keeping the Sabbath anymore.

Sentimentalists who mourn the passing of that good, homey, church-going America full of good, homey God-fearing Christian men and women forget that in the past people didn't go to church just to worship and give thanks.  They went there to have fun with their friends and neighbors.

In small-town, rural America, the church was usually the one and only center of the local social and cultural life.  You went there because God's commandments told you you had to, sure, but you often got to hear a rousing sermon and sing some rollicking hymns and after service there might be punch and cookies or even a pot-luck picnic.

Revival meetings were a combination of circus, Shakespearean drama, and hootenany.  Of course you were there to praise the Lord and come to Jesus if the Spirit moved you, but there was always the hope that joining you on the mourner's bench might be an attractive young couple who'd loudly confess to having pleasured themselves in the barn till milkin' time, and in detail too.

Church-going was about entertainment and social networking and combating loneliness as much as it was about prayer.

It's still that way.  Ever visit a shiny-new suburban mega-church and check out the state of the art multi-media facilities, the bulletin boards papered with announcements for this week's various workshops and counseling sessions, the bookstore/gift shop?  Easy to lose track of the fact that you are in a house of worship and start thinking you are in a combination theater, concert hall, boutique, and mental and spiritual wellness-center.

If fewer and fewer believers are showing up at the church door on Sunday, it's because more and more recently-minted epicureans are getting their cheap entertainment and doing their socializing and getting their psycho-therapy elsewhere.

It's easier and often more fun to spend your Sunday morning in bed, drinking coffee and reading the papers, and watching the NFL pre-game shows on TV.

In fact, I'd bet that the rise of a sport-addicted population has more to do with the decline in church-memeberships than does any sort of enlightened rejection of religious superstition.

If you have tickets to the game and want to drive out to the stadium, find a good parking space, do a little tailgating, claim your seats, and buy your beer and hot dogs before kickoff, you have to leave the house before the 10 o'clock mass, if not sooner.

And I'll tell you something, I don't think the country is better off for having a whole lot more people who paint their faces blue and red on Sunday instead of putting on their best clothes to go to meeting.  I don't think we're better off for having a whole lot more people who can tell you the winners of the last 42 Super Bowls than can name the books of the Old Testament or remember all the lyrics of Down by the Riverside.

Then of course there's the problem of our now living in a 24/7 world that requires a great many people who'd rather be in church, or anywhere else, for that matter, to be standing behind cash registers and waiting tables and pumping gas on Sunday morning instead.

There are still full-service gas stations.  Honest to God.

And if more young people are identifying themselves as "unaffiliated" it's probably just the case that their parents were too busy or too distracted or too comfortable in their beds, drinking coffee and reading the papers, on Sunday morning to instill in them the habit of going to church.

Otherwise, it's the case that they know their friends wouldn't think it was cool of them to want to go to Mass.

People stink and they are stupid, but sometimes they stink and are stupid collectively in ways that result in an accidental change for society's good.

If this means that fewer and fewer bodies are in the pews to listen to fundamentalist preachers and Right Wing priests spout their inanities, great.  But I doubt it means we are all that wiser or smarter or more civilized as a people.

Annotative:  Maha delivers a more sober, more thoughtful take on the study.  Key chapter and verse:

But I think there are other factors. The time crunch experienced by two-income families with children might make “going to church” just one more burdensome thing on an already full plate. The breakup of communities possibly makes church attendance seem less compulsive. After years of televangelism, maybe people just expect church services to pack more of an emotional wallop, or at least be entertaining.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

If your preacher/priest/deacon/whatever can't be a better entertainer than the clowns on The NFL Today he/she isn't trying very hard.

However, I take your point. When I was a teenager and my family still attended St. Michael's I hated it, because I'd gotten up at 0500 to deliver the Sunday Washington Star and crawled back into bed about 0700, only to have my father come in at 0830 to get me up to shower and put on my shirt and tie. I nodded off during Father Scannell's sermons.

[Ken Muldrew]

I wonder if people who watch preachers on TV go to church. Do the televangelists get them fired up and keen on going to meeting, or do they replace the need? I guess I'm wondering about this because so much of television is directly aimed at satiating the human need for social processing. We get simulated human communities that allow us to engage in gossip, peer evaluation, blame-fixing, and general busibodiness without ever leaving the comfort of our home. Is *televised* religion the ultimate opiate of the people?

[Or....]

Let's just try this on...maybe more people have lost patience/reverence/faith with organized religion. Maybe the appearance of books explaining atheism on the bestseller lists, the recent admission of a Congressman that he is an atheist, the broad-based trend in survey after survey that atheism and agnosticism is growing in numbers...maybe it all fits. Maybe, just maybe, people are choosing unaffiliated due to thoughtfulness and not laziness.

[Apostate]

I agree that part of the falling away from church-going is because of impossibly busy working lives -- not much time or energy is left over for proper socializing, let alone socializing with a dose of morality thrown in.

But I think part of it is also, religion's claims, especially with respect to sexual morality, have been losing traction since the 60's. It really is simply absurd to believe that an Almighty God cares whether and whom you fuck in the ass, especially if they're the same gender as you, and will send you to hell for it.

It's absurd. I'm glad more people are seeing that.

But whatever the reason for it might be, it's not a negative trend if the end result is that people believe in fewer idiotic things.

[actor212]

I'd lay odds that, in keeping with Maha's point, if you tracked the viewership of Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar with church affiliation, suddenly, you'd see this neat little inverse proportion at work.