This is excellent, as far as it goes. It does not address the spiritual hunger that I am sure drives many of these people to find themselves within the Church, but I would not expect it to. With regard to church decorations, here, FWIW, is something I wrote some years ago in a booklet on the matter:
Stained glass windows have been used for over a thousand years to adorn churches and to illustrate the faith. Far from being a means solely to instruct the illiterate (as some iconoclasts would have it) such windows illuminate more than just the stories they depict and the chapels they adorn. They touch us on a fundamental, physical level as they dapple us with color, reminding us that our Lord is God incarnate, and lived in the same world, was warmed by the same sun, and enjoyed the same beauty as we do, the very colors proclaiming the glory of God.
I teach high-schoolers. They're desperate for meaning, purpose, telos. In them, I hear the echo of John Savage from Brave New World: "I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." As it's built on nominalism, few Protestant strains can provide them that.
Is Protestantism built on nominalism? Methodism with its crusades for holiness? Calvinism commanding people to live their entire lives solely based on the strength God gives you, because there is no other good in this world but him. Conservative Evangelicalism with its hyper-focus on the need to have a lasting relationship with God that forms your life toward spiritual growth?
There are nominal protestants. But I think its no coincidence that it was a protestant, William Wilberforce, who popularised the term in a book on the topic.
The Church of Rome views the highest form of communion with God as being the Sacraments. Protestants view the highest form of communion with God coming from listening to and being shaped by his word. I don't think its a coincidence therefore, that many Roman Catholics think it enough to attend mass as the sum total of their Christian expression.
That spiritual hunger that drives young people to investigate and, hopefully, embrace a nurturing spiritual center, for having been neglected by our society for so long now also leaves them vulnerable to being misled into darker visually enticing places and I don't mean simply pornographic, but technologically and "scientistically" aspiritual or outright anti-spiritual attractors that require more than simply visual experience to dispel. Words will always matter more than pictures for as long as we can read.
I can only speak about my own case, but I think I’m fairly representative of men gaining an interest in Christianity. I’m not particularly knowledgable about the various denominations, and only had a vibe to go off. Smaller denominations are more difficult by default, so one is left with the “big three” of Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy.
For me, high church stuff appeals. I like the tradition, the doctrinal observance and procedural nature of things. I’m ex-army so perhaps this is part of the same personality trait. The Church of England was the first place I thought to go, but the CofE has become such a parody of itself it’s almost impossible to take seriously as a… beginner I suppose. My partner is Irish, and she grew up going to mass and very much in the Catholic tradition, so when Christmas came around it was easy to agree to go to the Catholic mass, and I just found the whole thing deeply moving. There’s an impression of timelessness about it that scratches the itch of wanting to be part of a tradition going back thousands of years. It probably helped that the young man next to me could see I was new and went out of his way to show me the ropes, without any condescension whatsoever.
So, I grant that it’s all a bit superficial, but when trying to connect with something timeless, modern churches don’t really do it for me. Anglicanism just seems like, to hijack a line, “the LibDems at prayer” and Catholicism seems to pass the vibe check for something I want to spend time learning about and being a part of.
I like to say we Protestants have mistaken the "word of God" (lower case - the Bible) for the "Word of God" (upper case - Christ). If that's true, I would expect a post-literate world to fall away from a faith that centers the written word.
Oddly though, with the proliferation of AI photos and video, (digital) images can no longer be trusted. But stained glass windows? Those can be. It can be proven that the glass is 800 years old and thus has a weight that anything on a screen lacks.
This really just amplifies your own point, but as I'm sure you're aware the structure of the Mass that you refer to is that of the "new" Mass, introduced around 1970, which traditionalists criticize for being too left-brain and verbal. The older form has two readings per Mass (two, not three) and a shorter lectionary of Sunday Mass readings which repeats itself every year rather than every three. And of course the readings are not "read" at all, in the sense of being read to people for the purpose of intellectual comprehension, but are chanted in Latin by the priest, towards the altar, as an act of worship directed to God. People have compared the used of Bible readings at the traditional Mass to the burning of verbal incense.
I have a lot of trouble with this romantic notion of the Latin Mass, especially in light of the knowledge that churches traditionally were full of people who couldn't read. Combine inability or unwillingness to read the Bible with a church service full of chanting in a language the people don't understand, and you have a building full of blind, ignorant obedience. I'm sure this works out great for the people at the top, but I just don't see the benefit for everyone else.
That may be—excuse me—a very Protestant take. You take "chanting in a language the people don't understand" and "blind, ignorant obedience" as bad things, but what if they're not? My inclination is the same as yours, but I'm a massive introvert, verging on the autistic, albeit with an inclination for watching people and I've concluded that the majority of people quite like that. I can go on at quite spectacular length on this, and I'll try to contain myself.
I read a piece in, I think, the Guardian, once, about watching England in the World Cup in a pub. The writer said that there were quite a lot of people who didn't seem to be following much of the game, but would bounce around when a goal was scored. This is it: a lot of people, a lot of the time, don't want to be doing "the current thing"—they want to be around other people doing something. It can't be a random thing; there has to be a feeling of purpose, but people love that.
I hate being in crowds, and when I worked in an office in a multi-storey building I'd run up (and down) the stairs rather than share a lift, but there are far more people who love concerts at Wembley and crowded sports stadia.
People seek this out. They like singing the choruses to songs. I do too. So do you, probably. What is that if not obedience?
We're programmed for this. There's a book about it, by a noted atheist Protestant, called "The Selfish Gene." Thus Spake Richard Dawkins—God is dead, but you do like playing "Simon says."
The Latin Mass and is a massive rabbit hole in itself and the internet is festooned with people's thoughts about it, but without going into that too much it is worth remembering that for Catholics the Mass (wherever the details of the rite) really is not about educating people in an intellectual way: it is a ritual sacrifice offered at an altar by a priest, who by offering it opens up something rather like a wormhole connecting that particular altar with Calvary. This turns the church into one of those "thin" places people refer to, where the visible and the invisible are closely connected and people's prayers are particularly efficacious. The stuff about the Latin and the fancy vestments being there to wow the peasants and enforce a hierarchy has some use sociologically but it doesn't content with that older, more mystical idea of what the liturgy is all about.
I might argue that the real distinction is not spectacle at all, because the contemporary Protestant world has shown repeatedly that it can produce spectacle in industrial quantities. There is not shortage of light rigs, smoke machines, stadium acoustics, even the choreographed ecstasy of the worship set. The difference is embodiment... The question is whether worship is something enacted by bodies in continuity with memory, gesture, kneeling, fasting, crossing, kissing, standing, repeating, receiving or whether it is something primarily consumed as intensity, however sincere the feeling may be. Spectacle can be generated anywhere modern production exists; the entertainment wing of evangelicalism proved that years ago. What cannot be improvised so easily is a form of life in which text, image, ritual, and the body are braided tightly enough that meaning is carried not just by what is said, but by what is done and remembered together. That is why the attraction is not finally to “Catholic drip,” which made me laugh by the way, but to a tradition dense enough to survive the collapse of literacy because it was never addressed to the disembodied reader alone.
I actually went to the Prestonwood Christmas celebration a few years ago right before it went viral. the first half was how I would imagine Christmas being celebrated on Gidi Prime in David Lynch 's Dune.
The protestant reformation went too far in its iconoclasm. That's for sure. But it was reacting to a very real problem of a drifting in attention from Christ, the Grace of his atonement for sin on the cross, in those days. Just read contemporary literature like Piers Ploughman or Chaucer who lived long before the Reformation, but see many of the problems to which it provided an answer.
A helpful and interesting take on things. My own, admittedly simplified, view is that these young people may prefer Catholicism because it is less demanding of them; an easy inroad to a vast and complicated field. Well, that and the perception that Catholicism is somehow the "real deal", taking you back to where things started. In my own view, that is not really true, but I do think that is the perception. Same as with Orthodoxy.
Yes. For many, it's just going through the motions. No intellectual engagement required or expected. Can be the same in other types of churches too, mind you.
Many years ago, a friend and I had supper with a Baptist gentleman who headed up the religion division of a national organization serving people with cognitive impairment. He informed us that liturgical churches are often much more accommodating to people with cognitive impairment because of the visual richness of the environment and services, and the movement and predictability of the ritual. As a person who grew up in a Protestant environment, and has a child with developmental disabilities, I have been forced to do a lot of re-thinking over the years, experiencing the truth of his words. Choosing Life will necessarily lead a person along unexpected paths.
This is a really interesting comment. I'd never considered that before, but it makes a lot of sense. In light of Christ's command that we "have the faith of a child", perhaps we could all learn something from it.
I have noticed and thought about this. I am in an Eastern Orthodox church and have many of these types of children in attendance. I particularly thought how the ritual of venerating a series of icons when entering and exiting the church, which includes crossing oneself, making a series of bows, kissing of icons, must be a great embodied practice that I imagine is very grounding for kids with disabilities. Also, the predictability of the Liturgy, which is also embodied to a large degree. It is also participatory, as the Orthodox Church communes children, unlike the RC church.
Personally I have just started to read Marshal McLuhan and Neil Postman, And they have heavily influenced my ideas of the medium heavily affecting the message it communicates, or even in some cases becoming more important. there is a Paul Washer bit where he says that whenever a medium becomes more important then the truth it seeks to convey, then its useless. I feel that the same would happen, or does happen with a culture of a church trying to have a popular online presence, or trying to attract the youth, as if keeping them indoors for two hours id the real goal. I am admittedly pessimistic about social media and megachurches though. Once I went to a youth conference on the dangers technology poses to Christians, and in between lectures, they had everyone post pictures on Facebook to promote the event. All i am trying to say is that the draw to Catholicism because of its drip, is real, but not genuinely christian.
This is excellent, as far as it goes. It does not address the spiritual hunger that I am sure drives many of these people to find themselves within the Church, but I would not expect it to. With regard to church decorations, here, FWIW, is something I wrote some years ago in a booklet on the matter:
Stained glass windows have been used for over a thousand years to adorn churches and to illustrate the faith. Far from being a means solely to instruct the illiterate (as some iconoclasts would have it) such windows illuminate more than just the stories they depict and the chapels they adorn. They touch us on a fundamental, physical level as they dapple us with color, reminding us that our Lord is God incarnate, and lived in the same world, was warmed by the same sun, and enjoyed the same beauty as we do, the very colors proclaiming the glory of God.
I teach high-schoolers. They're desperate for meaning, purpose, telos. In them, I hear the echo of John Savage from Brave New World: "I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." As it's built on nominalism, few Protestant strains can provide them that.
Is Protestantism built on nominalism? Methodism with its crusades for holiness? Calvinism commanding people to live their entire lives solely based on the strength God gives you, because there is no other good in this world but him. Conservative Evangelicalism with its hyper-focus on the need to have a lasting relationship with God that forms your life toward spiritual growth?
There are nominal protestants. But I think its no coincidence that it was a protestant, William Wilberforce, who popularised the term in a book on the topic.
The Church of Rome views the highest form of communion with God as being the Sacraments. Protestants view the highest form of communion with God coming from listening to and being shaped by his word. I don't think its a coincidence therefore, that many Roman Catholics think it enough to attend mass as the sum total of their Christian expression.
You’re confusing nominal as in lukewarm, with nominalism that says telos and formal causality isn’t real and is mind dependent
Ah, as in William of Ockham. I go to a Reformed Protestant College where we were taught that William of Ockham was a heretic.
That spiritual hunger that drives young people to investigate and, hopefully, embrace a nurturing spiritual center, for having been neglected by our society for so long now also leaves them vulnerable to being misled into darker visually enticing places and I don't mean simply pornographic, but technologically and "scientistically" aspiritual or outright anti-spiritual attractors that require more than simply visual experience to dispel. Words will always matter more than pictures for as long as we can read.
I can only speak about my own case, but I think I’m fairly representative of men gaining an interest in Christianity. I’m not particularly knowledgable about the various denominations, and only had a vibe to go off. Smaller denominations are more difficult by default, so one is left with the “big three” of Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy.
For me, high church stuff appeals. I like the tradition, the doctrinal observance and procedural nature of things. I’m ex-army so perhaps this is part of the same personality trait. The Church of England was the first place I thought to go, but the CofE has become such a parody of itself it’s almost impossible to take seriously as a… beginner I suppose. My partner is Irish, and she grew up going to mass and very much in the Catholic tradition, so when Christmas came around it was easy to agree to go to the Catholic mass, and I just found the whole thing deeply moving. There’s an impression of timelessness about it that scratches the itch of wanting to be part of a tradition going back thousands of years. It probably helped that the young man next to me could see I was new and went out of his way to show me the ropes, without any condescension whatsoever.
So, I grant that it’s all a bit superficial, but when trying to connect with something timeless, modern churches don’t really do it for me. Anglicanism just seems like, to hijack a line, “the LibDems at prayer” and Catholicism seems to pass the vibe check for something I want to spend time learning about and being a part of.
I like to say we Protestants have mistaken the "word of God" (lower case - the Bible) for the "Word of God" (upper case - Christ). If that's true, I would expect a post-literate world to fall away from a faith that centers the written word.
Oddly though, with the proliferation of AI photos and video, (digital) images can no longer be trusted. But stained glass windows? Those can be. It can be proven that the glass is 800 years old and thus has a weight that anything on a screen lacks.
This really just amplifies your own point, but as I'm sure you're aware the structure of the Mass that you refer to is that of the "new" Mass, introduced around 1970, which traditionalists criticize for being too left-brain and verbal. The older form has two readings per Mass (two, not three) and a shorter lectionary of Sunday Mass readings which repeats itself every year rather than every three. And of course the readings are not "read" at all, in the sense of being read to people for the purpose of intellectual comprehension, but are chanted in Latin by the priest, towards the altar, as an act of worship directed to God. People have compared the used of Bible readings at the traditional Mass to the burning of verbal incense.
I have a lot of trouble with this romantic notion of the Latin Mass, especially in light of the knowledge that churches traditionally were full of people who couldn't read. Combine inability or unwillingness to read the Bible with a church service full of chanting in a language the people don't understand, and you have a building full of blind, ignorant obedience. I'm sure this works out great for the people at the top, but I just don't see the benefit for everyone else.
That may be—excuse me—a very Protestant take. You take "chanting in a language the people don't understand" and "blind, ignorant obedience" as bad things, but what if they're not? My inclination is the same as yours, but I'm a massive introvert, verging on the autistic, albeit with an inclination for watching people and I've concluded that the majority of people quite like that. I can go on at quite spectacular length on this, and I'll try to contain myself.
I read a piece in, I think, the Guardian, once, about watching England in the World Cup in a pub. The writer said that there were quite a lot of people who didn't seem to be following much of the game, but would bounce around when a goal was scored. This is it: a lot of people, a lot of the time, don't want to be doing "the current thing"—they want to be around other people doing something. It can't be a random thing; there has to be a feeling of purpose, but people love that.
I hate being in crowds, and when I worked in an office in a multi-storey building I'd run up (and down) the stairs rather than share a lift, but there are far more people who love concerts at Wembley and crowded sports stadia.
People seek this out. They like singing the choruses to songs. I do too. So do you, probably. What is that if not obedience?
We're programmed for this. There's a book about it, by a noted atheist Protestant, called "The Selfish Gene." Thus Spake Richard Dawkins—God is dead, but you do like playing "Simon says."
And don't get me started on Martin Heidegger.
The Latin Mass and is a massive rabbit hole in itself and the internet is festooned with people's thoughts about it, but without going into that too much it is worth remembering that for Catholics the Mass (wherever the details of the rite) really is not about educating people in an intellectual way: it is a ritual sacrifice offered at an altar by a priest, who by offering it opens up something rather like a wormhole connecting that particular altar with Calvary. This turns the church into one of those "thin" places people refer to, where the visible and the invisible are closely connected and people's prayers are particularly efficacious. The stuff about the Latin and the fancy vestments being there to wow the peasants and enforce a hierarchy has some use sociologically but it doesn't content with that older, more mystical idea of what the liturgy is all about.
The contrast of the top picture with the image of YouTube Christmas spectacular kind of says it all.
I might argue that the real distinction is not spectacle at all, because the contemporary Protestant world has shown repeatedly that it can produce spectacle in industrial quantities. There is not shortage of light rigs, smoke machines, stadium acoustics, even the choreographed ecstasy of the worship set. The difference is embodiment... The question is whether worship is something enacted by bodies in continuity with memory, gesture, kneeling, fasting, crossing, kissing, standing, repeating, receiving or whether it is something primarily consumed as intensity, however sincere the feeling may be. Spectacle can be generated anywhere modern production exists; the entertainment wing of evangelicalism proved that years ago. What cannot be improvised so easily is a form of life in which text, image, ritual, and the body are braided tightly enough that meaning is carried not just by what is said, but by what is done and remembered together. That is why the attraction is not finally to “Catholic drip,” which made me laugh by the way, but to a tradition dense enough to survive the collapse of literacy because it was never addressed to the disembodied reader alone.
I actually went to the Prestonwood Christmas celebration a few years ago right before it went viral. the first half was how I would imagine Christmas being celebrated on Gidi Prime in David Lynch 's Dune.
The protestant reformation went too far in its iconoclasm. That's for sure. But it was reacting to a very real problem of a drifting in attention from Christ, the Grace of his atonement for sin on the cross, in those days. Just read contemporary literature like Piers Ploughman or Chaucer who lived long before the Reformation, but see many of the problems to which it provided an answer.
A helpful and interesting take on things. My own, admittedly simplified, view is that these young people may prefer Catholicism because it is less demanding of them; an easy inroad to a vast and complicated field. Well, that and the perception that Catholicism is somehow the "real deal", taking you back to where things started. In my own view, that is not really true, but I do think that is the perception. Same as with Orthodoxy.
Curious how Catholicism is “less demanding”?
Yes. For many, it's just going through the motions. No intellectual engagement required or expected. Can be the same in other types of churches too, mind you.
“Post Literate Zoomer culture and the zoomer revival” is a subtitle that was generated using a table of topics Marys is intrested in and rolling 2d100
Many years ago, a friend and I had supper with a Baptist gentleman who headed up the religion division of a national organization serving people with cognitive impairment. He informed us that liturgical churches are often much more accommodating to people with cognitive impairment because of the visual richness of the environment and services, and the movement and predictability of the ritual. As a person who grew up in a Protestant environment, and has a child with developmental disabilities, I have been forced to do a lot of re-thinking over the years, experiencing the truth of his words. Choosing Life will necessarily lead a person along unexpected paths.
This is a really interesting comment. I'd never considered that before, but it makes a lot of sense. In light of Christ's command that we "have the faith of a child", perhaps we could all learn something from it.
I have noticed and thought about this. I am in an Eastern Orthodox church and have many of these types of children in attendance. I particularly thought how the ritual of venerating a series of icons when entering and exiting the church, which includes crossing oneself, making a series of bows, kissing of icons, must be a great embodied practice that I imagine is very grounding for kids with disabilities. Also, the predictability of the Liturgy, which is also embodied to a large degree. It is also participatory, as the Orthodox Church communes children, unlike the RC church.
Personally I have just started to read Marshal McLuhan and Neil Postman, And they have heavily influenced my ideas of the medium heavily affecting the message it communicates, or even in some cases becoming more important. there is a Paul Washer bit where he says that whenever a medium becomes more important then the truth it seeks to convey, then its useless. I feel that the same would happen, or does happen with a culture of a church trying to have a popular online presence, or trying to attract the youth, as if keeping them indoors for two hours id the real goal. I am admittedly pessimistic about social media and megachurches though. Once I went to a youth conference on the dangers technology poses to Christians, and in between lectures, they had everyone post pictures on Facebook to promote the event. All i am trying to say is that the draw to Catholicism because of its drip, is real, but not genuinely christian.