Dispatch Faith: Comfort or the Cross?, by Kevin D. Williamson:
Alpharetta, Georgia—No cross, plenty of parking. Welcome to North Point Community Church. … North Point is pretty much the model suburban evangelical megachurch. It doesn’t have worship, it has a “live experience.” It doesn’t have childcare, either, but a series of “environments” for the kids: something called Waumba Land for the little ones, Upstreet for the elementary-school kids, Transit for the middle schoolers, InsideOut for the high schoolers. There are bright colors and flashing lights and video screens and all that crap, but the real stuff is in there, too: There’s a lesson on what it means to be “slow to anger” underway. One must not make too much of the packaging.
Still, one notices certain absences—the name “Jesus,” for instance, or anything that would identify the building as one intended for religious purposes.
It is a very easy place—and phenomenon—to mock. … But, at the same time, this is—snooty aesthetic considerations notwithstanding—a slice of the better sort of American life, inasmuch as the people who actually get up on Sunday mornings and go to church with their families are, on the whole, a much more squared-away group of people than the ones who are still sleeping off a hangover at 11 a.m. and better-adjusted than a lot of the expensively miseducated types putting their breakfast on Instagram around the same time of day. …
There’s an impression out there—it might be better to call it an urban legend—that … evangelical megachurches are packed to the rafters with Trump cultists being whipped into a frenzy from the pulpit. It isn’t the case that that’s never the case. But that simplistic account doesn’t really get at the truth of the phenomenon represented by North Point and other churches like it. It is a lot more complicated than that.
Trumpism, like political populism of other stripes, results from the same forces that have shaped megachurch-ism, or whatever it is you want to call what’s been happening at places such as North Point. With all due respect to Max Weber, there’s an excellent argument that capitalism created Protestantism rather than the other way around. With the decline of the feudal system, particularly in England and in Holland, a class of people who previously had been almost entirely tied to the land, living lives almost entirely determined by the decisions of other people, suddenly had something they never had had before: choices. The return of things like trade and the money economy at the end of the feudal period left the people who had been serfs in a considerably better material condition than they had been as bound agricultural laborers, and—here’s the part worth remembering—they hated it. As Michael Oakeshott observed of certain of their modern counterparts, they experienced their newfound individuality and freedom not as a liberation but as a burden. What followed was a series of political and religious revolutions.
Our own case is roughly parallel. What we have all agreed to call, for lack of a better term, “globalization” has made us radically richer and more free—and we hate it. People who never knew the actual drudgery and depression of decades of unremittingly bleak and repetitious factory work nevertheless long for the days when that kind of career was an option, when they could go down to the factory, get a job, and, like their serf forebears, be relieved of having to think very much about that sort of thing ever again. In the more charitable reading, people with skills, education, and an entrepreneurial sensibility get a lot more out of globalization—and not only economically—than do people for whom working in 20 different jobs in 10 different cities over a few decades feels like torture however well it pays.
Our differences are less about economic theory than they are about sensitivity to anxiety, appetite for risk, and desire for social and geographic fixedness. There isn’t anything inherently inferior about preferring security to opportunity, or predictability to possibility. But there are economic and social costs associated with that kind of sensibility, and having to pay these costs has left a lot of people bitter and, beyond that, bewildered. The world seems to be out of control—which, of course, it is, and always has been, and is supposed to be.
Anxious people want to be comforted. They want something to hold on to. I know religiously conservative Catholics who enjoy listening to Joel Osteen’s sermons, not for the theology but simply for the encouragement. And if churches like North Point emphasize that part of the Gospel more than they do “take up your cross and follow me,” then there’s a good marketing case for that. Perhaps there is room in Christendom for that kind of project, too.
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