Do Conservatives Drive People Away from the Church?

'According to some critics, the main causes of the decline in churchgoing are to be attributed to conservatives. ... [T]hat's ridiculous.'

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

According to some critics, the main causes of the decline in churchgoing are to be attributed to conservatives. Let's break down why that's ridiculous.

From what I gather on what is called, with irony that could only come from Hell’s own propaganda department, “social media,” the main causes of the decline in churchgoing are to be attributed to conservatives. They do not welcome people of the whole range of oddball sexual proclivities, they insist upon liturgies that put everyone off but themselves, and they are generally obnoxious and unloving.

Let me take these one by one.

First, it has been many years since the liberal Protestant denominations in the United States, Canada, and Europe have sung “Over the Rainbow.” Their precipitous decline continues apace. Here and there it is stalled by pockets of real resistance: I am thinking, for example, of Episcopalian parishes that have united themselves with African bishops, and of parishes in the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that hold the line locally. 

In general, though, things are as they were in the Church of Sweden when I went to the cathedral in Uppsala twelve years ago. The church was festooned with signs telling one and all that though the New Testament clearly forbids homosexual relations, still the law of charity is greater; begging the question, since if a thing is wrong, it will work its harm, and it is no charity to stand by while people poison themselves. The Church of Sweden is moribund. Only two percent of its members regularly attend services. 

If the acceptance of sexual indifferentism is the “good news” of our time, with “the Spirit doing something new,” as we are given constantly to believe, then there is absolutely no evidence of its bringing about revival in any church where it is preached. After all, if you are going to be pagan, why bother with all the jarring things you will have to read in Scripture, not to mention services whose language, taken literally, you do not believe?

Second, we must insist that beauty, by its nature, is attractive, and that we are a beauty-starved people. Go to the old center of an American city and let your eyes rest on a Faneuil Hall or Rittenhouse Square. Then turn them toward what has been built in the last sixty or seventy years: drab, dumpy, faceless, grim. If we cannot have beauty in the Mass, where among the works of God and man, as a regular part of our lives, are we going to find it, we who are seldom outdoors? 

I am not, here, going to get into an argument about the traditional Latin Rite and the Novus Ordo. I will say two things, which may end up pleasing nobody, but I say them because I want to bring good and beautiful things to as many people as are ready to receive them. One is that the Novus Ordo, as I have seen it celebrated in most places, is underwhelming. It features clunky or stupid or heretical lyrics sung to hippity-hop show-tune melodies, or, incongruously, to a genuine hymn melody dragged into service, as if you might fit a portrait of St. Ronald McDonald into Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment. The ambience is chatty rather than joyful, slightly bored rather than solemn. Much of the action is performed, as it were, ad lib, as if it did not much matter how it is done, or even if it is done at all.

I have also witnessed the Novus Ordo celebrated both reverently and intelligently and filled with beautiful music, solemn ceremony, and devout prayer. I will freely grant that a pastor must go out of his way to do so: for one thing, it means getting rid of both the bad music and the show-off way in which it is presented to the audience, I mean, the congregation. But here I warn the traditionalists that people starved for beauty may need more help than a series of Latin chants can give them.  Chant melodies are horizontally difficult, and you lose the effect of singing a fine poem in your own language to a melody you can remember exactly. 

We must try to approach people where they are; and we should keep in mind that at least one of the aims of sacred music is akin to that of sacred poetry, that it should enter the memory and make it fruitful; it may thus be more than what you have heard, or even what in a special setting you have sung, but what you can hear in your mind’s ear ever after, and sing out when the Spirit moves you. 

It is good that the traditional rite is not approachable as a deli counter is. But it is also good if what is sung is approachable, indeed memorable in the strict sense, as the Psalms were for any faithful Hebrew who wished, in the quiet of his mind, to pray by singing.

In general, though, the more sharply distinct the liturgy is from the mundane, the better. If you want lousy music, you don’t have to haul yourself to church to get it. It is readily available on the radio or the net. If you want superficial bonhomie, you can go to a park and get some sunshine and fresh air along with it. Eastern Rite churches are drawing people in droves, if for no other reason than that the rites are not like anything else in our usual experience, which, again, is singularly drab, even when drab comes in garish color.

Then there is the charge that conservatives are abrasive, cold, argumentative, and generally unpleasant to be around. Let us be honest. You will find such people in any group, and especially when they are despised by those around them, and when they secretly look out for it and enjoy it. Enough of that. 

It is imperative that we be more sociable than our critics. That will not be hard to accomplish. Ours is a lonely world, and Catholic parishes have yet to change their ways to meet the challenge. Catholic schools and parishes used to sponsor ball games and dances. Let us do so again, with the wise and matter-of-course supposition that we will be encouraging boys and girls to learn how to treat one another with real courtesy, that opening of the door to mirth. 

But people are united ultimately by what transcends them, and here the liberal ship is stuck fast in the shallows, precisely because of the tendency to reduce God to a granter of permissions to do as you please, to reduce the moral law to a set of bland political directives, and to reduce worship to a get-together for people who do not play golf. 

Read good books, sponsor lectures, set up co-ops for homeschoolers. And for people who have trouble in what is currently the sorest area of Church teaching, be gentle, keep the door open, try to give them milk if they cannot digest solid food; and do them the grace to heed their troubles, their longings, their confusions, and what they may take, mistakenly, to be their only hope of happiness in a world of isolation.

In other words, be stalwart, not obstinate; be mirthful, not glum; be more free-hearted than the liberal and more truly devoted to our Christian heritage in its fullness than is the merely conservative. Do you have cause to snarl? Even if you do, what good is it to emulate in this regard your worst critics? Sing, and people will notice. Love for love’s own sake, and the hard heart may soften. We are so commanded, and there is no alternative for those we want to reach—and for us.