"This is the day the lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."
-Common expression to open church services
"Little Darlin', it feels like years since we've been here."
-The Beatles
Waking up on Sunday mornings is pretty alien to me, at least recently. 8:30 seems ungodly early for a weekend. But I am intent upon suffering so for my first trip to church in two years. It would not be church if it didn’t feel like a chore, right? But as I wake up, I get this unusual feeling—I’m looking forward to church. Weird, I know. I begin the drive to church, and it’s a beautiful fall morning. The air is fresh. I see neighbors walking dogs, raking leaves, talking to one another, and they seem happy. The sunlight is coming from a strange direction, lighting the trees into a blaze of orange and yellow. I turn on the radio, and the Beatles are singing “Here Comes the Sun.” The world is conspiring to make me happy about church.
One cannot help being tempted to see God’s hand in this beautiful morning. It’s as though he is thanking me, welcoming me, approving of my decision to attend church again. Or perhaps he just made such a beautiful morning in an attempt to prove his existence to me, an unbeliever.
If there were a God, he would know that I’m attending to church in order to look at it with atheist eyes. He would be offended that I will sit and pretend, sing along, read the prayers, listen to the sermon, and not believe a word of it. But I’m not worried about an imaginary God being offended and striking me down for unbelief. I will pursue my project: I will attend a different church every Sunday and write about it from an atheist’s perspective. Simple as that.
But where to begin? I want to ease into this project—nothing too crazy yet. So I choose a mild and liberal Baptist church near my house, and a church that will probably be similar to the Presbyterian ones I spent so many Sundays at earlier in my life. It will be nice to start with something familiar.
Approaching the church, I begin to worry about the empty parking lot. And where is the front door, anyway? I end up circumnavigating the building looking for a front door, but there are only about 15 cars in the parking lot, and no obvious influx of people. My plan to blend in and observe inconspicuously will not be easy if there are only a few people here. Not finding the front door, and feeling pretty stupid about it, I make my way in through the church office, and find the sanctuary. I must be early.
I'm not early. It's 9:55, and there are still only 10 people in the congregation, and I’m feeling pretty conspicuous, but at this point I’m committed. Five people in the front row. Not wanting to be too rude sitting in the back row, and I take a seat a few rows behind the crowd at the front, thinking I can hide behind them. 9:59. The five in the front row get up and relocate to the choir’s bench, leaving me in the very front of the congregation, right as the music begins. Awesome.
As the service starts, though, I’m oddly relaxed. Who cares if there are 10 blue-hairs wondering about the random guy in the front row? I do a half-turn and get a quick glance at the crowd behind me as the service starts, and I realize I’m attending a dying church. There’s almost nobody here.
It’s a strange mix of emotions I feel. There’s something comfortable, familiar, and almost joyful about being here. I spent so many hours in church growing up that it’s like returning home, or seeing an old friend again after many years. The comfort to be found in church is real. But I’m conflicted because the premise on which it’s all founded is nonsense. I’m angry I spent so many hours praising something that was never there. The people sitting in the rows behind me draw inspiration and guidance from a system that is a lie. So why am I depressed to see so few people here?
But when the pastor speaks, I like him immediately. He’s wearing a bowtie. He begins, “So the hated Yankees have won the world series,” and proceeds into a discussion of sports. Interesting, but it doesn’t seem like a sermon. I look at the bulletin and realize this portion of the service is the children’s lesson, and then it really hits me—there are no children here.
What do I really believe about the church? If I believe there is no god, and I believe religion is an enormous delusion, then should I be happy that there are no children to hear this lesson? Certainly church is not going to disappear anytime soon, if ever, but this one is—that is a near certainty. A church without children is doomed.
Growing up, I never used to listen to the sermon. But this one is good. The pastor touches on one of the best aspects of religious belief: charity. I cannot deny that religion makes people more selfless and compassionate than we are naturally inclined to be. The pastor builds his sermon around the passage from Mark in which a woman pours expensive oil on Jesus, and the bystanders protest that it could have been sold to give money to the poor. The pastor attempts to make sense of this strange action and Jesus’s approval of it. It is a perplexing section, and the pastor weaves it together with stories of charity and transformation from the local Rochester community. He focuses on Foodlink, an organization that provides huge amounts of free food to hungry families all over western New York. He asks the questions: will there always be destitute people? Will it always rain in our lives? Will there always be suffering around us? He answers those questions by saying that there will always be suffering until the kingdom comes and everyone is called back to god again. In the meantime, though, in our lives, god will rain blessings upon us in unexpected ways, as Foodlink does for the Rochester hungry and the woman in the gospel does for Jesus. People can give of their deep passion as expressions of charity, and others can be transformed by that.
A beautiful message, and artfully delivered. I wholeheartedly approve of his message of charity, and I believe the congregation, small though it is, follows through on this message with their actions. But do we need the Bible to inspire this? No. In fact, I do not believe that the gospel passage he analyzes conveys this message of charity. Though it was a passionate sermon, it was based on an illogical interpretation of the passage. If Jesus really believed in charity, he would not have applauded the woman for her kind act of anointment. The bystanders were right; the woman’s action was foolishly wasteful. I’ve been to Foodlink to volunteer*, and they have pallets of food as far as the eye can see, and each day we’d move a different food item. One day I was there, it was bananas. The Foodlink analogy doesn’t work, because the modern day equivalent of the woman’s action would be a Foodlink worker taking a pallet of bananas, turning them into a giant banana milkshake for Jesus, and then pouring it down the drain after he tasted it. Those bananas might be given to Jesus out of her deep passion, it may be a beautiful gesture of appreciation, but it removes food from the destitute who need it. The bystanders were right to protest. As far as I can see, this Bible story doesn’t make any sense in a 21st-century context, and maybe not in any context. Unfortunately, every Sunday religious leaders must attempt to explain and find relevance in Biblical texts that sometimes defy logic. Jesus was dead wrong here, if we read the story from the perspective of the hungry.
I believe human morality has its basis outside of God and religion. We do not need to play games of logic in order to find moral messages in a biblical text that may contradict what we know to be right. The church's minister, in his message of charity, was right, and Jesus was wrong. But the logical gymnastics are a sad necessity of religious belief, and one that most believers choose to ignore.
As I leave the church, I shake the pastor’s hand and thank him for having me as a guest. I genuinely liked the service, the sermon, and the people. Still, I feel like a liar and a snake, because I’m pretending to be a believer but I’m secretly there to dissect and criticize. Those few people in the congregation will stay to discuss their charity work, and I will go home to type up an arrogant critique and then watch football.
This church is dying, and it does sadden me. Though I am sure belief in god is wrong, I’m surprised that I find myself thinking the world will be slightly worse off if this congregation dissolves. I realize that I should approach this project with a spirit of intellectualism, but also with humility and an open mind. I have much to learn.
*Incidentally, I can’t claim to be a particularly charitable person. Saying I volunteered at Foodlink makes me sound much better than I am. The volunteer work at Foodlink was part of my college fraternity’s charitable work. We figure that a few days of volunteering balances out four years of reckless drunkenness.
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