(This is the second in a series of posts that I am calling The Cultural Captivity of the Church. You can find the first post here.)
I recently attended a Sunday morning service where the sermon topic intended to answer the question, “why do we sing together during worship?” (Check out my series about the Biblical understanding of worship
vocabulary here.)
The message had three points. We sing “worship” songs together because it:
- Stirs our faith.
- Helps us to remember the truth.
- Connects our emotions to the truth.
At no point was there any discussion of the lyrics or the content of these songs; of the importance of understanding and reflecting on the words we are saying, and whether they are appropriate words; of how or why the words we repeat may help or actually hinder us in remembering and becoming emotionally connected to “the truth.” (The clear implication was that we simply trust our worship leaders and sing – with more enthusiasm and raised hands, no less – whatever we are shown on the big screen.)
Don’t misunderstand me. I do not begrudge the fact that each of these things may happen when we participate in well-planned, well-led, 
congregational singing with meaningful content. And I agree that they are three important experiences when song leaders lead well.
But notice the final outcome of this three-point outline.
From beginning to end, the message is entirely self-centered.
The clear implication is that we attend congregational worship and sing praise songs purely and simply because of what it does for us.
So, I should go to church because of what I can expect to get out of it. I worship my God because of the things that I expect him to do for me.
The further implication, then, suggests that I can determine whether or not a service “has been a good worship service” by how it makes me feel. Did it excite me? Did it make me feel happy, or elated, or boisterous, or whatever – fill in the blank here.
In fact, the message’s final application was a rather guilt-manipulating insistence upon louder singing from more people with many more hands
lifted higher into the air. Apparently, the outward measure of worship “acceptable to the Lord” is measured by our conformity to denominational traditions about public, physical gesturing and emotional elation.
I couldn’t help but wonder what a Roman Catholic visitor might say about the absence of their traditional kneeling benches and the fact that this church never provides time for a congregation of sinners collectively to confess their sins.
I am sorry, but devoid of any broader context reminding us of God’s holiness (see my series on holiness here), of God’s majesty and his worthiness of our adoration, such messages are nothing more than lessons in religious self-gratification. (Note – the speaker did offer a 30-second introduction about glorifying God. But it was so brief, so hurried and so undeveloped that the speaker left the impression that God’s nature was incidental to the things he had to say about music.)
Why do I offer this Sunday sermon as my first illustration of the cultural captivity of the American church?
In 1966 Philip Rieff, a professor of sociology at the University of
Pennsylvania, wrote an extremely insightful book entitled, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (check out the 40th anniversary edition, published by ISI Books in 2006).
Reiff was a keen social critic who observed a self-destructive trend in American society. According to Reiff, the public role of traditional, Western religion had been to function as a faith community that defended (and even enforced) moral standards and ethical expectations in society.
But American life after Freud had begun to shift dramatically.
In post-Freudian America, the purpose of all religion was purely
therapeutic; that is, religion is now supposed to cure our ills, not point out our wrongs. How will we know when that’s happened? The church will become a principle agent in teaching us to feel good about ourselves. Our spiritual, that is, egocentric, dreams will be realized.
Let me share a taste of Reiff as he first quotes and then critiques a British spokesman for this new “therapeutic Christianity”:
“’Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men [sic] do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience.’ Attached as [this writer] is to the word ‘Christian,’ the writer even seeks to make Jesus out to be a therapeutic…
“What then should churchmen do? The answer returns clearly: become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution – under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic. For the next culture needs therapeutic institutions…
“Both East and West are now committed, culturally as well as economically, to the gospel of self-fulfillment…Grudgingly, [church leaders] must give way to their Western laity and translate their sacramental rituals into comprehensible terms as therapeutic devices.”
Sadly, professor Reiff was a secular prophet. Though he lamented this social transformation (rooted in an American abuse of Freudian psychology) as the growth of an “anti-human” culture, his predictions have been realized.
Worse yet, American Christianity jumped on board this therapeutic railway, stoked its engines to overflowing and commandeered the controls.
Rather than challenging our culture, we have surrendered to it, replacing the glorified Lamb of God with a cosmic therapist whose greatest achievement is to help us ensure our emotional well-being.
Rather than proclaim the gospel of Christ which confronts a culture of self-centeredness, we float with the prevailing current wherever it takes us, as long as it helps us fill the seats, maintain the budget and grow the church.
And to add agony to agony, we are such inept students of our times, so unreflective, so lacking in self-awareness, and so ignorant of Biblical theology and church history that many evangelical leaders are dining happily with the devil while imagining they are exorcising the demonic.
