Week 7: What is the Value of a Church Community?

"And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." -Ephesians 6:4

Let me begin with baptism, since it is the symbolic beginning of a child’s participation in a church community. Baptism creeps me out. (Baptism of infants, that is.) The child is completely oblivious. He or she is deemed to be part of a church community without having any say in the decision.

Would Jesus or God love the child less if it had not been baptized? Well for 7 centuries the concept of limbo existed as a place to put those children who die without baptism, but the Catholic Church officially decided it didn’t exist in 2005 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1145257,00.html). The elimination of a hypothetical supernatural realm of existence surprisingly didn’t get much attention in the media. Anyway, I don’t think that most people really considered getting to heaven the true purpose of baptism. Rather, it is a symbolic gesture that the church will welcome the child as a Christian. The cynic in me says that it is the beginning of the child’s indoctrination.

The baptism was followed by a practice I’d never seen before. The pastor held the baby, then paraded it down the center aisle, showing it to each pew, saying that this is their new Christian brother. (Richard Dawkins writes about the flaw of referring to a “Christian child” or “Muslim child” since children are not yet old enough to choose for themselves.) Then, at the end of the aisle, she handed the baby to a random congregation member to carry back to mom and dad, saying that it was symbolic of how the whole church would raise the child.

It is fitting that I saw a baptism at this week’s outing, and consequently thought about how I was raised in a church, because I was there with my parents. Visiting my parents for the holidays gave me the opportunity to attend church with them right after Christmas. This was a highly uncomfortable experience for me, since my newfound atheism, still a secret from them, is in such profound conflict with their beliefs and lifestyle.

It’s like for the first time I’m a fish trying to understand the water. Since I was raised with those beliefs and lifestyle, since I was raised in a church community, my entire worldview is shaped by it. And here’s what’s weird—I think I’m better off for it. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I had a weekly prompting to think about life, to consider how I might live better, to give money as an act of selflessness, to learn about how the world works, and so on. I participated in youth group activities that had a variety of social and intellectual benefits, and were often fun as well. I made many friends, and the group of friends my parents made 30 years ago is still part of our lives.

For all these reasons and more, I recognize great value in having a church community, in following through on that promise made to the baptized infant.

But I cannot, as an atheist, accept the underlying reason for it all. My parents are aware that I’m not particularly religious anymore, but they continually stress the importance of being part of something. “How will you raise your kids?” they ask. For them, the many benefits of the community are perhaps even more important than the beliefs themselves. They think that only through a church community will children grow to be completely moral, well-rounded, good, stable people. Churches may indeed help to nurture children in those respects. But if, in doing so, churches connect all that good social nurturing to false claims, dogmatic teaching, and a worldview that discourages free thought, it may not be worth it.

The real question is this: is a church community the only way by which parents can raise good kids? This is a really tough one, because I must admit that young people I know who attend church are often better people for it. Will I deny my children (if/when I have any) that opportunity? What would we replace church with?

Character education comes primarily from the home and the parents. Sure, a weekly trip to church can reinforce things, but character education, I think, depends much more on the manner in which parents behave. But this is an incomplete answer. Children need social outlets and community environments that teach them in ways their parents cannot. I believe arts programs can be part of that. Athletics often foster sportsmanship, diligence, teamwork, etc. Summer camps that include academics or arts are available to parents who don’t want their kids to have to pray or be taught about the Bible.

A side note: I would like to say that youth organizations like the Boy Scouts are also great, because I had a great experience there, and it helped me to become who I am. Unfortunately, the Boy Scouts exclude atheists. That’s their right, of course, but that doesn’t make it right. They also exclude homosexuals. These two beliefs may help perpetuate good old, small town, Sarah Palin-style American values, but they are closed-minded and offensive. It pains me, but I am tempted to reject the Boy Scouts because it is a prejudicial organization. Does that negate all the good that came from it in my life? No, but it certainly taints it. I hope that eventually they’ll wake up and change, choosing to teach kids that people can be good even if they don’t believe in invisible, mind-reading, all-powerful friends who love them (but not if they’re gay).

Unfortunately, youth programs, arts, and athletics would not provide the same kind of stability that a church would. Those are temporary things, with transient social groups. The members of a church may change, but the entity will always remain, a rock in people’s lives. It’s very easy for me to say I don’t need that rock. I have a job, a loving family, a house, and a good group of friends. I am lucky to have a stable life. I hope some day I can introduce children into that stable life and raise them without relying on a church. I don’t want them to be part of a social institution that preaches unscientific nonsense, encourages conformity, draws its values from an ancient tribe of desert nomads, and, at times, propagates hate towards those who are different. I’ll take my chances finding and creating a community for myself and my kids elsewhere.

I left the bright, whitewashed walls of the southern Presbyterian church feeling guilty. My parents were thankful—almost giddy—that I had chosen to participate in that community with them rather than sleeping in during the holiday vacation. That guilt, which for years has been eating at me on Sunday mornings, still will not go away, despite my best efforts. I am confident in rejecting the idea of God, but not confident in rejecting all the rest of it.

Postscript: Baptism doesn’t give children a choice. However, I do appreciate that most churches place value on confirmation, which is the time when a youth can decide to remain part of the church or not. Unfortunately, by that time, the child has been trained to remain part of the community, so it’s not really a fair situation. I recall participating in my confirmation, and I was surprised that some members of my class chose not to join the church. Looking back, I realize that those young people had greater ability to think for themselves than I did at the time.

Week 5: Is the Catholic Church…

…capitalized? To write this blog entry, I begin to type this question into Google. Wanted to make sure I capitalized the right words. But Google tried to predict my question, based, I presume, on the most common phrases typed into Google that begin like that. So before I got to “capitalized,” Google’s options were:

1) Is that Catholic Church a cult?

2) Is the Catholic Church the True Church?

3) Is the Catholic Church evil?

4) Is the Catholic Church the antichrist?

Allow me to answer these questions for the benefit of the world, since apparently a lot of people are wondering these things.

1) Defining “cult” is very slippery. Where is the line between a “mainstream religion” and a “cult”? The word cult has a negative connotation that members of mainstream religions like to give to people they find weird. As an atheist, I don’t see much difference between believing that David Koresh is the reincarnation of Jesus or believing that a divine power sent his only son to be murdered so that we could somehow be forgiven for things that god doesn’t like. Really—is it stranger to believe aliens are hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet or that Jesus will return to earth to yield a judgment sword? Improbable though it is, I’m inclined to think the Hale-Bopp comet “cult” had a better chance of being right. So the bottom line is, yes, the Catholic Church is a cult, but no more or less so than any other religious system that requires belief in the supernatural.

2) The True Church? What does that even mean? There are apparently a lot of people wondering if the Catholic Church was the first church, i.e. the church that began in the first century right after Jesus’s death. Well, there’s no doubt that it grew out of that initial community of believers, but so did every other church. More to the point, though, the answer is No because the Catholic Church that exists today probably looks absolutely nothing like the churches did in the first years after Jesus. Read the book of Acts for a sense of that first church. That and Paul’s letters in the New Testament are as close as we can get to knowing what it was like, and the Catholic Church’s emphasis on ritual, music, priesthood, and liturgy are drastically different from the charismatic, impassioned, spontaneous, spirit-driven worship of the first Jesus-believers. I heard once that the evangelical churches today are probably much more similar in nature to the first churches than Catholic or protestant churches are.

3) Yes, because it knowingly lies and shamelessly acquires wealth by deceiving people into giving them money. In my humble opinion.

4) No, because there is no such thing as the antichrist.

Now that we’ve got those big questions answered, allow me to pose my own questions about the Catholic Church. Is the Catholic Church…

…alive and well? Most certainly. This week the Churchgoing Atheist project took me to a Catholic Church, a place unfamiliar to me, a lifelong-protestant-turned-atheist. Of course I’d seen Catholic services in movies (like The Godfather, when all the murders happen) and I’d been to Catholic churches for weddings and funerals, but never had I been to the average run-of-the-mill service. I was amazed to find so many people there. 200? 300? There were more people at this service than had been at all the services of the previous four churches combined. My impression of the Catholic Church is that of a church lots of people belong to in name only, begrudgingly remaining Catholic because of lingering childhood guilt, and that prejudgment had led me to expect an empty church. I thought of Catholic Churches as dreary and dark, full of stodgy old people. I couldn’t believe the number of young couples, children, even teenagers. Everyone looked happy, or at least content. People were kneeling, praying with their eyes closed before the service began, something one rarely sees in protestant churches. I just didn’t expect the enthusiasm for a church that most Catholics I know don’t attend or attend only out of a feeling of obligation. This church was legitimately vibrant, and I was witnessing only one of the three services they hold each Sunday morning.

…subject to such strange questions on Google for good reason? I can understand people asking if the Catholic Church is the true church, because many people (like myself) question what they are told. It is perfectly reasonable to observe that there are hundreds if not thousands of variations of Christianity and wonder how that could be. Is it not strange that such disparate rituals and belief systems claim the same origin? Should we not ask what our belief in one of those systems implies about the truth of the other 99%? I can also understand the question about evil. History shows that the members of Catholic Church—in the name of the Catholic Church—have perpetrated war, murder, rape, theft, and so on. I do not wish to dwell on the evils that churches have historically done, because that subject gets a lot of attention from atheists already. Suffice to say, though, it’s a fair question. Is that Catholic Church a cult or the antichrist are nonsensical questions that I suspect get typed into Google by people who are taught to be prejudiced against Catholics. Who that might be, I can only speculate. (Mike Huckabee, I'm looking in your direction...)

…mindless? I would like to explore my protestant/atheist bias here—I don’t claim total neutrality in this project. My impression of Catholics is that they value mindless ritual over serious engagement in critical thinking. This impression comes from history class, in which we learned about the Reformation, from Catholics that I know, and from things people in protestant churches would tell me about Catholics. I believe protestant denominations, in general, encourage individual thought more than Catholics. Today’s service certainly reinforced this belief. To begin, there were no Bibles to be seen. There were books of liturgy—that is, choral responses, prayers, songs, etc.—on each pew, but no Bibles. If someone wanted to read for himself the day’s scripture, he could not. Second, the service consisted primarily of stock sayings that would be sung or spoken aloud by the congregation with no text or prompting. This suggests that the service follows the same pattern each week, and rote memorization or mindless parroting of responses allows one to participate. The sermon consisted of 10 minutes of meaningless platitudes about how God is present in our lives and brings joy to us even when we are unhappy. It did not refer to any book (other than the Bible), current event, or personal story. It did not challenge the listeners to contemplate. It merely reassured them that God was everywhere and his presence should make us happy. It was completely devoid of intellectualism. I admit that ritual has psychological value, but it seems that the Catholic Church places emphasis on ritual at the expense of critical thought. But I am open to having this belief disproved over the course of the project.

…charitable? Tough one. I believe the answer to be yes, because the hundreds of people who came to this service today brought Christmas presents for the poor. There was a huge stack of them. During the offertory, nearly everyone donated, and a second offertory was immediately held to raise money for a specific individual. This church must have raked in the cash. On the other hand, this church had the most beautiful interior I’d ever seen in an American church (I have seen cathedrals in Europe). I was struck by how a fairly bland-looking church in an urban neighborhood could have such ornate beauty inside. The wood paneling, the stained glass, the golden ornamentation, all suggest enormous cost. I can understand why people during the reformation got angry when they saw their hard-earned money contributing not to charity, but to the beautification of a building, the sole purpose of which was to make people so struck with awe that they would be more likely to give money. Still, I am sure the Catholic Church in general and this one in particular give away huge amounts of money to people who need it. This is a topic I’m interested in pursuing further, but not today.

…purposefully using guilt to control people? I just have to comment on this, since the notion of “Catholic guilt” is so prevalent. To what extent does the Church knowingly employ guilt to control people? Probably a lot, but no more so than many other denominations. I still get the guilt call from my mother, in which she expresses “disappointment” that I’m not in church on Sundays. (Why? Why disappointed? Would you prefer falsehoods and piety to truth and thoughtfulness?) I went to the Catholic Church today hoping to get some good juicy guilt preaching, but I didn’t. There were only two moments when the priest played the guilt card: the people weren’t “joyous” enough during the first hymn, and since the topic of today’s service was joy, he wanted to see them really get joyous on the second hymn. (They did not.) The second instance of the guilt card was during the children’s sermon, when he asked the children if they had all gotten their Christmas trees from this church’s Christmas tree sale. When one said no, everyone laughed, and he said, “It’s OK, there are a lot of good trees out there, but the best ones are here.” It was a subtle and harmless plug for the church’s Christmas tree fundraiser, not to the children but to the parents. Still, guilt card.

My call to Catholics: do not feel guilty for not going to church. I have spent many Sunday mornings feeling guilty for not being in church. Even if you believe in God, the notion of a God who actual cares whether you are “worshipping” him enough should be offensive to you. I tend to waste a lot of time checking fantasy football stats and drinking beer, so I sometimes feel guilty that I’m wasting my time, but I don’t feel guilty for missing a morning of being indoctrinated.