Why Do People Go To Church? A thought experiment for all believers
ROD DREHER DEC 13

Here’s a deeply thoughtful and searching essay from the Catholic magazine The Lamp, a piece written by Matthew Walther, who asks: “Why do people go to mass?” Keep in mind that he’s writing as a Catholic about the Catholic Church, and that I’m going to ask all of you why you think people still attend your church’s (synagogue’s, mosque’s) services. Walther quotes Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York asking why people no longer go to mass. The more important question, says Walther, concerns why people still do.

One reason is that some people are involved in some busy work in the parish. A second reason is because it’s just “what one does” — in other words, habit. More:

This brings us to the third reason one might attend Mass on Sunday (and on other days of precept), what one might call the “normative” reason, though I prefer to think of it as “the juju”: because the Church commands you to do so, and because you understand that the Mass is the one sacrifice of Calvary, offered unto the remission of sins. The juju is (in my experience anyway) overwhelmingly the reason why Catholics aged forty and under attend Mass. Ours is a generation for whom the faith has been more or less voluntary, subject to few if any meaningful social pressures after the onset of adulthood, often the result of something—an intellectual crisis, a countercultural sensibility, the spontaneous irruption of grace into individual human hearts—that is more or less beyond the bounds of what I have discussed above. Absent individual crises of faith—or episcopal interference with celebration of the old Rite—you are unlikely to lose this crowd. (Their children, who will have the interesting chance of experiencing the faith more or less the way some of their great-grandparents did, and bear the social costs of ersatz recusancy from mainstream American culture, are a different question entirely.)

Walther says that he’s spent a lot of time talking to Catholics who fell away from the Church at some point, and the answers always center on how something — usually in the 1960s or 1970s — happened, or failed to happen, that caused people to lose faith that the Catholic Church is what she claimed to be. Walther goes on:

In each case the pattern is more or less the same. Various ill-considered changes gave an impression of total rupture that could not be counteracted by two generations of prelates banging on about the “hermeneutic of continuity” (or whatever it was called before 2006). For the sort of Catholic I have in mind here the insistence that nothing had really changed is an abstraction, at odds with the testimony of their senses, and one that has in any case arrived far too late, long after they were solemnly assured by their pastors that something had. And they were right, of course. Something had changed, whether one wants to pretend that it was significant or essential or what have you. And what that change suggested was that the rest of it was bunk. One might render it in the form of a syllogism:

1) If this can change, anything can change

2) If anything can change, the Church’s authority is arbitrary

The author concedes that this isn’t strictly logical, but this is what it felt like to very many people. He says that by now, it wouldn’t make a big difference if the Church returned en masse (heh) to the earlier liturgical disciplines; it might even hasten the decline. You can’t pass a rule change and recover what it took decades to throw away by bad decisions by the church’s managerial class. In fact, says Walther, “Mainly, I think, that there is very little the Church can do to encourage attendance at Mass one way or the other … .”

Walther concludes by offering a list of things he would suggest for Catholic bishops who want to make a bad situation less bad, somehow. He concedes that for many of his readers (he is on the theological Right within the Catholic faith), they will seem like pitiful half-measures, though for other Catholics they might sound scandalously strict. “Why bother then?” he asks.

Mainly, I think, because unlike so many of the planning documents that issue forth from chanceries these days, these rules concern themselves with spiritual questions, ones that touch upon the actual care of souls.

Please read the whole thing. One virtue of this essay is that Walther is not seeking or offering easy answers, just honest ones — and that, he appears to believe, is not something many people in the Church are interested in these days.

It’s impossible to read this essay without thinking about one’s own church. I would like to ask you all to do the same, and share your thoughts in the comments section. Ask hard questions of yourself, as Walther has done. I don’t know him, but I know that he’s fairly conservative theologically, and if given the chance to reform the Church’s liturgical practice, would do things that conservatives and trads would welcome. But he’s honest enough to recognize that the decay has gone far beyond measures like that. It’s not that these things should necessarily be off the table, but that even if implemented, it probably wouldn’t change the trajectory of decline.

When I was a Catholic, even before the scandal, I went mostly because that was where the juju was (to use Walther’s formulation). The mass itself was rarely an occasion of spiritual intensity or uplift (except for the Maronite liturgy, at least for me), and the homilies were almost always depressing in their banality. I went because I believe that Jesus Christ was mystically present in the Eucharist. Period, the end. If you believe that, then you need to be there on Sunday, because it’s the most important thing that can happen to you. It took a lot to drive me away from that, but it happened.

No need to rehash that here, but I do keep pondering it because I remain fascinated with the phenomenon of how people come to believe, and how they lose their capacity to believe. The farther I get in time from that traumatic event in my life, the more aware I grow of the fragility of belief — in God, and in anything. I say “fragility” to mean our capacity to perceive and to hold on to truth. In his essay, Walther quotes a famous English historian’s sudden awareness that the entire metaphysical structure in which he had believed suddenly vanished, like a bird taking flight. It didn’t happen that way to me, but that it happened at all was one of the foundational experiences of my way of seeing the world. If, as some say, I “can’t let go” of it, it’s not because I’m obsessed with the Catholic Church per se; it’s because the aftershocks of losing my ability to believe as a Catholic still reverberate in my life. After all, if I once believed so strongly in the Catholic faith that I thought I would be able to die for it, who’s to say that I will be able to hold on to Orthodoxy until the end? Or to Christianity at all? Or to anything?

You see what I mean. Between that, and discovering the ugly truth about my Louisiana family, then losing my marriage, I have been well and truly blackpilled about the world. At least it has made me determined never to take my faith for granted. When I hear people speaking arrogantly about the faith, even if I agree with the point they’re making, I get a chill. I think, you have no idea how precarious things are for you, and for all of us. Come to think of it, this probably has a lot to do with why I’m so passionate about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies.

Anyway, I know that if the Orthodox Church didn’t exist, I would either still be at mass, whatever kind of wreck I would have become, or I would be a bitter agnostic. For me, whatever faults the Orthodox Church has, the liturgy has always been a gift, has always left me feeling in my bones that that really is Jesus Himself in the consecrated bread and wine, and that the entire Sunday morning experience was in a real sense a communion with God. Yes, it’s juju, in the Walther sense, but unlike having to work hard as a Catholic to “feel” it in spite of the liturgy, it’s far more graspable because of the liturgy. This week I started reading Cardinal Ratzinger’s Spirit of the Liturgy, and Lord have mercy, it’s a great book, one that opens my eyes to why liturgy matters, and what it does.

And yet, Orthodoxy is not magic. People fall away from the Orthodox Church all the time, even as others who worship in different forms of Christianity hold on. There is no structural solution to this problem. In the end, it is you and God. I believe God has given us the church to make Himself manifest, and to help us on our pilgrimage to unity with Him, but there is no substitute for the existential choice we all have to make. Our Lord tells us that there are people who keep all the commandments, but who don’t know Him. There will be people who showed up at church every time the door opened, but who will find the Kingdom of Heaven barred to them. There will also be people who rarely went to church, but who God, in His infinite mercy, will recognize as one of His own. But that is no excuse to stay away from church!

So, to return to the point of this exercise, which I invite you to participate in: what should YOUR church (mosque, synagogue, etc) do in the face of rising disbelief? I will offer a general piece of advice, and then something specific to my communion, Orthodoxy.

In general, I believe there is no future for Christianity outside of an “enchanted” version of itself. To go back to Walther’s word, in a world in which nobody suffers any social stigma from rejecting religion, either passively or actively, the only way to hold on to people, and to bring in as seekers the kind of people who are likely to become disciples, is to emphasize the “juju” aspects of the faith.

A lot of you — especially Protestants! — are going to recoil at that. You shouldn’t. If there’s one thing I learned in all my research on religious enchantment, it’s that mankind’s religions emerge from a primal experience of awe; everything else is commentary. A highly intellectualized religion diminishes the experience of awe, and turns it into a moral and ethical system. Don’t misunderstand: morality and ethics are important, and should not be set in opposition to primal religious experience. But the point of religion is the encounter with God; anything less than that is a diminution of true religion. The way we in the West approach religion since the Enlightenment is an outlier on human experience — and, as we now see everywhere around us, a dead end.

A new Protestant friend here in Hungary asked to go with me to the Orthodox liturgy recently. I cautioned him that it will be in a foreign language here, but when he returns to America, he will most likely attend it in English (and by the way, Hungarian readers, we are having the first-ever liturgy in English at the cathedral on Christmas Day, 10 am; address is Petofi ter 2.) He told me that after a lifetime in Protestantism, he has grown weary of church-as-academic-lecture. He explained that he appreciates the intelligence and the teaching of the kind of sermons he has become used to, but as he gets older, his soul craves “enchantment” (the word he used) in faith. A learned discussion of theology and morality leave him thirsting for more — which is why he approached me to ask me about Orthodoxy.

This kind of thing is going to happen more and more, I believe, and for the reason Walther speaks of. Not everybody is going to end up Orthodox, granted, but everybody in the West who stays Christian once the Boomers and their habits pass into history will be people who believe at some level that church is where the juju is. It might offend you when I put it that way, because it sounds so primitive, but I assure you that our primitive ancestors knew things about the divine that our tenured divinity school professors have forgotten, if ever they knew them. Read Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane to get a basic sense of how religion works. Human nature has not changed.

So, my general recommendation for all the churches is to lean into enchantment, which is to say, to emphasize the numinous encounter with God. In other words, the juju. There are ample resources for this within the Christian tradition. A great place to start is with the Anglican theologian Hans Boersma’s great 2011 book Heavenly Participation, (only five bucks on Kindle!), which explains the sacramental principle, and calls for both the Catholic and Protestant churches to return to the older way of seeing the world — not just in theory, but in practice. In the book, Boersma, whose work deals with sacramental ontology, calls on all Christians in the West to return to “the Great Tradition” — that is, the more or less unified sacramental-ontological position of the Church of the first millennium. More from Boersma in this Touchstone article about Christian Platonism.

As for Orthodoxy, this is a hard thing for me to sort out, because my experience as an Orthodox Christian has been primarily within churches that are full of converts. And here in Budapest, it all happens in a language that I don’t understand, so I don’t know what’s going on. That’s not normal experience. I don’t know what to say about a congregation that is mostly “ethnic,” and has declined into a de facto worship of the community, of the ethnos. I know they exist. All I would say is to repent, and return to normative Orthodoxy. That’s not very helpful, though, is it?

Following Walther’s advice to his fellow Catholics, I would say that we Orthodox should focus more fully on the spiritual life — on practical spirituality. Most of the churches I’ve been part of are good at this. Some are so good at it that they err too much in the other direction, failing to connect the faith to the real world in key ways. I’m thinking, for example, about the parish I visited one Sunday a few years back, in which I spoke at coffee hour to a young mother who was afraid of gender ideology in the culture, and wondered what the Church had to say about it. I relayed this to the priest in conversation, and he all but panicked over “politics in the Church.” It is good and right for a priest to not want politics to infect his congregation! But he overcorrected for this, and left families confused and undefended from this malignant, anti-Christian ideology. In his diaries, covering the decade from 1973-83, Father Alexander Schmemann lamented how the Orthodox churches in America of his day were far too often lost in a cloud of incense, and failed to relate the living Gospel to the world in which we all struggled to be faithful.

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