What do Billy Graham and
Stanley Fish have in common?
According to most assessments of the ongoing culture wars the answer would be
an emphatic "not much!" With the exception of a few demographic
details — both are older white men living in North Carolina — little seems to
unite these two figures or the movements for which they have become
figureheads. Graham is, of course, the patron saint of America evangelicalism,
the one who as an object of admiration or scorn determines what it means to be
an evangelical. And Fish, professor of English at Duke University of
deconstructionist, post-modernist fame, has become one of the principle
cheerleaders for efforts within the academy to make the literary canon
specifically, and the humanities more generally, more inclusive and less
oppressive. Identified in this way, the constituencies to which Graham and Fish
speak would appear to be about as far apart as Newt Gingrich and Hillary
Clinton.
James
Davison Hunter, for instance, argues that evangelicals are a large part of the
orthodox constituency which defends the traditional family, opposes political
correctness and multi-culturalism in the academy, and supports efforts to cut
federal funding for objectionable art. This explains why they have lined up in
bookstores across the land to buy and read to their children William Bennett's
Book of Virtues. Thus, evangelicalism, at least in the common configuration of
the ongoing culture wars, is the antithesis of the cultural left.
Why is it, then, that when
evangelicals retreat from the public square into their houses of worship they
manifest the same hostility to tradition, intellectual standards, and good
taste they find so deplorable in their opponents in the culture wars?
Anyone familiar with the so-called "Praise & Worship" phenomenon
(so named, supposedly, to remind participants of what they are doing) would be
hard pressed to identify these believers as the party of memory or the
defenders of cultural conservatism. P&W has become the dominant mode of
expression within evangelical churches, from conservative Presbyterian
denominations to low church independent congregations. What characterizes this "style" of
worship is the praise song ("four words, three notes and two hours")
with its mantra-like repetition of phrases from Scripture, displayed on an
overhead projector or video monitors (for those churches with bigger budgets),
and accompanied by the standard pieces in a rock band.
Gone are the hymnals which keep the faithful in touch with previous generations
of saints. They have been abandoned, in many cases, because they are filled
with music and texts considered too boring, too doctrinal, and too restrained.
What boomers and busters need instead, according to the liturgy of P&W, are
a steady diet of religious ballads most of which date from the 1970s, the
decade of disco, leisure suits, and long hair. Gone too are the traditional
elements of Protestant worship, the invocation,confession of sins, the creed,
the Lord's Prayer, the doxology, and the Gloria Patri. Again, these elements
are not sufficiently celebrative or "dynamic," the favorite word used
to describe the new worship. And while P&W has retained the talking head in
the sermon, probably the most boring element of Protestant worship, the
substance of much preaching turns out to be more therapeutic than theological.
Of
course, evangelicals are not the only ones guilty of abandoning the treasures
of historic Protestant worship. Various churches in the ELCA and Missouri Synod
have begun to experiment with contemporary worship. The traditionalists in
Reformed circles, if the periodical Reformed Worship, is any indication, have
also begun to incorporate P&W in their services. And Roman Catholics, one
of the genuine conservative constituencies throughout American history, have
contributed to the mix with the now infamous guitar and polka mass. Yet, judging on the basis of worship
practices, evangelicals look the most hypocritical. For six days a week they
trumpet traditional values and the heritage of the West, but on Sunday they
turn out to be the most novel. Indeed, the patterns of worship that prevail in
most evangelical congregations suggest that these Protestants are no more
interested in tradition than their arch-enemies in the academy.
A
variety of factors, many of which stem from developments in post-1960s American
popular culture, unite evangelicalism and the cultural left. In both movements, we see a form of
anti-elitism that questions any distinction between good and bad (or even not
so good), or between what is appropriate and inappropriate. Professors of
literature have long been saying that the traditional literary canon was the
product, or better, the social construction of a particular period in
intellectual life which preserved the hegemony of white men, but which had no
intrinsic merit. In other words, because aesthetic and intellectual standards
turn out to be means of sustaining power, there is no legitimate criteria for
including some works and excluding others.
The
same sort of logic can be found across the country at week-night worship
planning committee meetings. It is virtually impossible to make the case —
without having your hearers go glassy-eyed — that "Of the Father's Love
Begotten" is a better text and tune than "Shine, Jesus, Shine,"
and, therefore, that the former is fitting for corporate worship while the
latter should remain confined to Christian radio. In the case of evangelicals,
the inability to make distinctions between good and bad poetry and music does
not stem so much from political ideology (though it ends up abetting the cause)
as from the deeply ingrained instinct that worship is simply a matter of
evangelism. Thus, in order to reach the unchurched the churched have to use the
former's idiom and style. What is wrong with this picture?
The
traditionalists are of no help here. Rather than trying to hold the line on
what is appropriate and good in worship, most of those who are devoted
full-time to thinking about liturgy and worship, the doorkeepers of the
sanctuary as it were, have generally adopted a
"united-colors-of-Benetton" approach to the challenge of contemporary
worship. For instance, a recent editorial in a Reformed publication says that
the old ways — the patterns which used Buxtehude rather than Bill Gaither,
"Immortal, Invisible" rather than "Do Lord," a Genevan gown
instead of a polo shirt — have turned out to be too restrictive. Churches need
to expand their worship "repertoire." The older predilection was
"white, European, adult, classical, with a strong resonance from the
traditional concert hall." But this was merely a preference and reflection
of a specific "education, socio-economic status, ethnic background, and
personality." Heaven forbid that anyone should appear to be so elitist.
For the traditional "worship idiom" can become "too refined,
cultured, and bloodless. . . too arrogant." Instead, we need to encourage
the rainbow coalition — "of old and young, men and women, red and yellow,
black and white, classical and contemporary." And the reason for this need
of diversity? It is simply because worship is the reflection of socio-economic
status and culture. Gone is any conviction that one liturgy is better than
another because it conforms to revealed truth and the order of creation, or
that one order of worship is more appropriate than another for the theology
which a congregation or denomination confesses. Worship, like food or
clothes, is merely a matter of taste. Thus the logic of multi-culturalism has
infected even those concerned to preserve traditional liturgy.
Yet
when one looks for genuine diversity in worship, multi-culturalism — again, the
great leveler of tradition and cultural standards — offers up a very thin band
of liturgical expression. Advocates of diversity don't seem to be very
interested in the way "the people" have worshipped in the past. Is
there, for instance, any real effort among the various experiments in worship to
recover the psalm singing of the Puritans, the simple and spontaneous meetings
of Quakers, the hymnody of German pietism, the folk traditions of the Amish,
the revival songs of Ira Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, or the spirituals of
African-American Protestants? The answer, of course, is no. For these
expressions of Protestant piety, even though originating from some groups which
would hardly qualify as elites, are no better than the liturgies from the
Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed establishments. What the P&W crowd really
want is a very narrow range of musical and lyrical expression, one which
conforms to their admittedly limited worship "repertoire."
Indeed,
contemporary worship — and church life for that matter — depends increasingly
on the products of popular culture, from its musical mode of expression, the
liturgical skits which ape TV sit-coms, and the informal style of ministers
which follows the antics of late night TV talks show hosts. Thus, just as the
academic left advocates including Madonna and "Leave it to Beaver" in
the canon, so the evangelical champions of contemporary worship turn to popular
culture — primarily contemporary music and television programming — for the
content and order of worship. This is remarkable for a Christian tradition
which once found its identity in avoiding all forms of worldliness and which
continues to rail against the products of Hollywood and the excesses of the
popular music industry. Yet, as in the case of the cultural left, we are seeing
a generation which grew up on TV and top-40 radio stations now assuming
positions of leadership in the churches. And what they want to surround
themselves with in worship, as in the classroom, is what is familiar and easily
accessible. Rather than
growing up and adopting the broader range of experience which characterizes
adulthood, evangelicals and the academic left want to recover and perpetuate
the experiences of adolescence.
In
fact, what stands out about P&W is the aura of teenage piety. Anyone who
has endured a week at one of the evangelical summer youth camps that dot the
landscape will be struck by the similarity between P&W and the services in
which adolescents participate while out of their parents' hair. The parallels
are so close that one is tempted to call P&W the liturgy of the youth
rally. For in the meetings of Young Life, Campus Crusade for Christ, or Bible
camp are all the elements of P&W: the evangelical choruses, the skit, and
the long talk by the youthful speaker calling for dedication and commitment to
Christ. While these youth ministries are effective in evoking the mountain-top
or campfire-side experience, they rarely provide the sustenance upon which a
life of sacrifice and discipline depends. Yet, P&W is attractive precisely
because it appears to offer weekly the spiritual recharge which before came
only once a year. Consequently, many megachurches which follow the P&W
format thrive because they help many people recover or sustain the religious
experience of youth.
Some
may wonder what is wrong with assisting adults to perpetuate the emotions and
memories which sustain religious devotion. The problem is that such experiences
and the worship from which it springs is concerned primarily with affect. One
searches in vain through the praise songs, the liturgical dramas, or the
sermon/inspirational talk for an adequate expression of the historic truths of
the faith. It is as if the content of worship or the object which elicits the
religious experience does not really matter. As long as people are lifting up
and swaying their arms, tilting back their heads and closing their eyes then
the Spirit must be present and the worship genuine.
What
is ironic about contemporary worship is that its form is almost always the same
even while claiming that older worship is too repetitive. Another standard
complaint about "traditional" worship is that it is too formal.
Evangelicals believe that God is never limited by outward means. Believers who
rely upon set liturgies or who repeat written prayers, some criticize, are
merely "going through the motions." Real faith and worship can not be
prescribed. Yet, for all of the attempts by the practitioners of P&W to
avoid routine and habit, hence boredom, contemporary worship never seems to
escape its own pop culture formula. Again, the songs are basically the same in
musical structure and lyrical composition, the order of the service — while
much less formal — rarely changes, and the way in which people express their
experience demonstrates remarkable unity (e.g., the arms, the head, the eyes).
This hostility to form and the inability to think about the ways in which
certain habits of expression are more or less appropriate for specific settings
or purposes is what finally puts evangelicalism and the academic left on the
same side in the culture war. For the idea that the autonomous individual must
find his own meaning or experience of reality for himself ends up making such
individuals unwilling to follow and submit to the forms, habits and standards
which have guided a community or culture. Besides the fact that the radical
individualism of modern culture has bred as much conformity as human history
has ever known, evangelicals and the academic left continue to buck tradition
in the hope of finding the true self capable of experiencing religion or life
at its most genuine or authentic.
What
evangelicals who prefer P&W to older liturgies share with academics who
teach Louis L'Amour instead of Shakespeare is an inability to see the value of
restraint, habit, and form. Evangelicals and the academic left believe that we
need to be liberated from the past, from formalism, and from existing
structures in order to come into a more intimate relationship with life or the
divine. This is really quite astounding in the case of evangelicals whose
public reputation depends upon defending traditional morality. Yet, the effort
to remove all barriers to the expression and experience of the individual self
is unmistakably present in the efforts to make worship more expressive and spontaneous.
This impulse in evangelical worship repudiates the wisdom of various Christian
traditions which, rather than trying to liberate the self in order to
experience greater intimacy with God, hold that individuals, because of a
tendency to sin and commit idolatry, need to conform to revealed and ordered
patterns of faith and practice. The traditions which Presbyterians follow, for
instance, are not done to throttle religious experience but rather as the
prescribed means of communing with God and his people. These means were not
arbitrarily chosen by John Calvin and John Knox. Rather Presbyterians have
conducted public and family worship in specific ways because they believe
worship should conform to God's revealed truth. But just as the academic left has
abandoned the great works of Western civilization because of a desire for
relevance in higher education, so evangelicals have rejected the various
elements and forms which have historically informed Protestant worship, again,
because they are boring to today's youth.
Anti-formalism
also explains the stress upon novelty and freshness so often found in P&W.
The leader of worship planning at one of the dominant megachurches says, for
instance, on a video documenting a P&W service, that she is always looking
for new ways to order the mid-week believer's service so that church members
won't fall into a rut. She goes on to say that people are often tired, having
worked all day (an argument for worshipping on Sunday) and need something which
will arrest their attention and put them in a proper frame of mind. This
perspective, however, fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between
form and worship. C. S. Lewis had it right when he said that a worship service
"'works' best when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about
it." "The perfect church service," he added, "would be the
one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every
novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and
thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping. . . . 'Tis mad
idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.' A still worse thing may
happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the
celebrant." But this is precisely what has happened in P&W where the
service and elements are designed to attract attention themselves rather than
functioning as vehicles for expressing adoration to God. Lewis knew that
repetition and habit were better guides to the character of worship than novelty
and manipulation. In fact, one doesn't need to be a professor of liturgics to
sense that the idiom of Valley Girls is far less fitting for a believer to
express love for God than the language of the Book of Common Prayer. Such an
instinct only confirms the wise comment of the Reformed theologian, Cornelius
VanTil, who while preferring Presbyterian liturgy, still remarked that "at
least in an Episcopalian service no one says anything silly."
But even to criticize contemporary worship,
to accuse it of bad taste or triviality is almost as wicked as smoking in
public. Arguments against P&W are usually taken personally, becoming an
affront to the feelings of contemporary worshippers. Which is to say that the
triumph of P&W, like the ascendancy of the cultural left in the academy, is
firmly rooted in our therapeutic culture. The most widely used reason for
contemporary worship is that it is what the people want and what makes them
feel good. Again, just as
there are no intellectual standards for expanding the literary canon to include
romance novels, so there are no theological criteria for practicing P&W.
But there are plenty of reasons which say that if we give people what they are
familiar with, whether sitcoms in the classroom or soft rock in church, they
will feel comfortable and come back for more. As David Rieff has noted, the
connections between the therapeutic and the market are formidable. So if we can
expand our worship or academic repertoire to include the diversity of the
culture we will no doubt increase our audience.
This is why P&W services are
also called "seeker-sensitive." They are part of a self-conscious
effort to attract a larger market for the church. Yet, while evangelicalism may
have a large market share, its consumer satisfaction may also be low,
especially if it deceives people into thinking they have really worshipped God
when they have actually been worshipping their emotions. Thus, once again,
evangelical worship turns out to be as deceptive as the academic left which
tells students that the study of Batman comics is just as valuable as the study
of Henry James.
Of
course, anyone who knows the history of American evangelicalism should not be
surprised by P&W. In fact, Billy Graham's recent inclusion of Christian Hip
Hop and Rap bands in his crusades is of a piece with evangelical history more
generally. (It also differs little from his efforts in the 1970s, seldom
remembered, to appeal to the Jesus People. With lengthy locks, an inch over the
shirt collar, and long sideburns, Graham said, playing off Timothy Leary's
famous psychedelic slogan, "Tune in to God, then turn on. . . drop out —
of the materialistic world. The experience of Jesus Christ is the greatest trip
you can take.") As R. Laurence Moore argues in Selling God, since the
arrival of Boy George in the American colonies, George Whitefield that is, evangelicals
have been unusually adept at packaging and marketing Christianity in the forms
of popular culture. The intention of Protestant revivalism was "to save
souls, but in a brassy way that threw religion into a free-for-all competition
for people's attention." Revivalism, in fact, according to Moore,
"shoved American religion into the marketplace of culture" and became
"entangled in controversies over commercial entertainments which they both
imitated and influenced."
Seldom have evangelicals recognized
that this commitment to making the gospel accessible deforms and trivializes
Christianity, making it no better than any other commodity exchanged on the
market. As H. L. Mencken perceptively pointed out about Billy Sunday,
evangelicalism "quickly disarms the old suspicion of the holy clerk and
gets the discussion going on the familiar and easy terms of the barroom."
Mencken went on to remark that evangelicalism is marked "by a contemptuous
disregard of the theoretical and mystifying" and reduces "all the
abstrusities of Christian theology to a few and simple and (to the ingenious)
self-evident propositions," making of religion "a practical, an
imminent, an everyday concern." Thus, the pattern of evangelical practice
shows a long history of being hostile to the more profound liturgies, prayers
and hymns which God's people have expressed throughout the ages.
The
reason for this hostility, of course, is that these traditional forms of
expressing devotion to God are not sufficiently intelligible to outsiders. But
in an effort to reach the unchurched, just as the university has abandoned its
mission in order to reach the uneducated, evangelicals have reversed the
relationship between the church and the world. Rather than educating outsiders
or seekers so they may join God's people in worship, or rather than educating
the illiterate so may join the conversation of the West, we now have the church
and the academy employing as its language the idiom of the unchurched and
undereducated. In effect, through P&W the church is becoming dumber at the
same time that multi-culturalism is dumbing down the university. In the case of
P&W the church, by embracing the elements and logic of contemporary
worship, has abandoned its task of catechesis. Rather than converting and
discipling the seeker, the church now uses the very language and methods of the
world. So rather than educating the unbaptized in the language of the household
of faith, the church now teaches communicants the language of the world.
Hugh
Oliphant Old in his fine study of worship concludes with a reflection about
mainline Presbyterian worship that applies well to what has transpired in
contemporary evangelical churches. "In our evangelistic zeal," he
writes, "we are looking for programs that will attract people. We think we
have to put honey on the lip of the bitter cup of salvation. It is the story of
the wedding of Cana all over again but with this difference. At the crucial
moment when the wine failed, we took matters into our own hands and used those
five stone jars to mix up a batch of Kool-Aid instead." Such is the state
of affairs in contemporary evangelical worship. The thin and artificial juice
of popular culture has replaced the finely aged and well-crafted drink of the
church through the ages. Aside from the merits of the instant drink, it is
hardly what you would expect defenders of tradition and the family to choose to
serve at a wedding, or at the banquet supper of our Lord. And yet, just as
evangelicals in the nineteenth century substituted Welches for red wine, so a
century later they have exchanged the superficial and trivial for the rich
forms and elements of historic Protestant worship.
Author
Darryl Hart is
Librarian and Associate Professor of Church History and Theological
Bibliography at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has
recently authored books on J. Gresham Machen and a Short History of the
Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
______________________________________
Copyright ©
Calvin Theological Journal, Nov. 1995, vol. 30, no. 2. Used with permission
by PREMISE magazine
Volume III, Number 1 / January 31, 1996