I never expected to write this sentence: last weekend, I invited a friend to church with me.
Yeah, I know, I feel a little weird about that too.
When I left church, and Christianity itself, I was tired and worn down and ready to stop. Although there are things I miss about my old faith, I could never go back to it.
These days I find spirituality through music, nature, art, reading, and conversations with friends. But after years of practise and indoctrination, there’s still something special for me about Sunday; and no matter how miraculous a Sunday morning lie-in can be, every now and then I feel that familiar desire to get up and go to some kind of spiritual place.
Recently this came up in conversation with a friend who felt the same way, so I invited her to visit our local Unitarian church for a traditional Sunday morning service.
I don’t know about any other ex-Christians out there, but going to church these days can feel a little bit triggering for me. It brings up some irrational fear and stress in my belly, and to be honest it took a bit of courage to get through the doors. But once I was there, I was pleasantly surprised. This was different to my old experience of church; very different.
For starters, the service opened with a reading from the Quran. Instant bonus points there.
This was followed by a story about a Muslim imam, who said that there were only two days in life: one for you, and one against you. Whichever day you’re experiencing, the other will soon be along, and both have something important to teach you. Beautiful.
There were stories from mystic thinkers, Jewish rabbis, English poets and even the Bible. There were moments of silence, where we simply sat and focused on our breathing. There was an interlude where we listened to a pianist play two beautiful classical pieces of music. There were hymns, but unlike any hymns I had sang before, with words that went deep. My friend took a photo of some of the lyrics:
The service was also notable in what it lacked: there was no appeal to give our lives to God, or receive salvation; there was no sense of effort, or drama, or striving; in fact, it felt gentle and natural, two words that I would never have associated with church before. There was no five-minute message about the importance of giving money to the church, no sense of having to give anything in fact; and there was a complete lack of an emotionally-charged atmosphere.
I don’t mean there was no emotion; actually, as the minister spoke about the power of lost-ness, and about finding ourselves here, exactly where we are right now, I was deeply moved. There was real feeling in the service, but it didn’t seem manufactured or manipulative. It was a different kind of emotion to the one I was used to, where we all stirred ourselves up through shouting and singing and loud music and lights, until the atmosphere carried us into high altitudes of group-emotion.
Here, it felt effortless. I didn’t believe in God, and I didn’t feel like I was expected or encouraged to. I was just there, as I was, welcome to sit and contemplate and take what I wanted from the experience.
It occurred to me afterwards that the service had really felt like a service, in the deepest sense of the word; an offering of support and help and understanding, a space that simply provided the quiet and reflection I needed in that moment, without expecting anything from me in return.
In comparison, my old experience of church felt more like a product. It often felt like we were selling our Christianity to people, offering them a better life and eternal bliss in exchange for taking on our beliefs and behaviours. Every one of our meetings ended with an appeal: a call for people to put up a hand, and accept our product for themselves. We measured our success by how many people joined us, how many attended and converted from week to week.
This all made me wonder: maybe the whole problem with my old experience of religion was that we treated it as a product to sell, rather than a service to offer.
We put on great performances, helped out in the community, and welcomed people into our church buildings as often as we could, because we wanted them to like us. Our churches were built around image: we had the right branding, we had modern buildings that didn’t look old-fashioned and imposing, we had live music and flashy lights, we had welcoming people and kind faces, and everyone seemed so happy! None of these things are bad in themselves, of course. But everything we did was about crafting that image, in order to attract more people to our product.
Sure, we would often talk about service, preaching that we were here to help the community and offer our love and support to the people around us; but underneath our well-intentioned words was that ever-present motive to convert people to our form of spirituality.
Did we do good in the world because we genuinely wanted it to be a nicer place, or because we wanted to seem like the kind of people who wanted to make it a nicer place, in order to win more people over to our side? That’s a complex question, and I’m sure there were mixed motives at work in each person; but we constantly talked about the importance of our ‘witness’, and how our actions and attitudes were intended to draw people to God, to the Truth, and to the church, so that they could be saved and become just like us.
I felt that pressure on a personal level constantly. When I spoke to ‘non-Christians’ I felt a responsibility to try and find a way to sneak in a mention of God, or an invite to church. I hated this feeling. When I was younger, I did my best to follow it, and be a good witness to others, as my leaders encouraged me. But during the final years of my Christianity, I began to lean the other way. I didn’t want people to think I was trying to trick them into religion, or that I had ulterior motives; I became less and less comfortable with the entire thing.
No matter how kind-hearted and well-meaning we were, people could smell our hidden purpose a mile away. Humans know when other humans are trying to sell them something; and I was so tired of always having to sell.
All advertising is built around showing people an image of who they could be.
First you create a gap, a problem they may have been unaware of; then, you show them the solution: the life they could have, the happiness they would experience if they simply bought this particular product. Whether it’s better friends, a sense of security, or a healthier lifestyle, advertising tells us that we are currently lacking something, and then sells us the answer in the form of a product: deodorant, a new TV, a gym membership, faster internet, whatever.
It was the same with the Christianity I grew up in. We told people every Sunday that they lacked purpose, happiness, and meaning. We preached repeatedly about ‘the God-shaped hole’ in every human heart (an advertising slogan if ever I’ve heard one). Our whole message was based on the idea that we had the solution to every problem, whether addiction, loneliness, depression, bad finances, boredom, sickness or general discontent. God was always the answer, and He would solve it all, completely free of charge! His grace was freely given to everybody: you only had to give your entire heart and life and soul over to Him, believe everything that we believe, and become a committed member of the group.
And in many ways, we had a pretty great product! We offered security, community, forgiveness, relationship with the God of the entire Universe, a great weekly Sunday experience, the chance to feel like a part of something bigger, and plenty of space for personal development. If you worked hard, volunteered often, prayed every day and worshipped passionately, you could be leading worship, or preaching, or serving in the youth ministry; you could be the one who people listen to, the one sharing wisdom about God, the one that other people came to for advice.
Most important of all, there was the promise of avoiding eternal damnation. By purchasing our product, you were guaranteed a place in Heaven when you died; and you could avoid having to spend endless years of torment in Hell (which was really not a nice place at all). This afterlife-guarantee was a fundamental selling-point to our product; without it, there would be far less urgency to win converts and advertise our wares.
The idea of selling a product also carries with it the notion of competition. Advertisement is about standing out from the crowd, convincing people to go with us instead of the other options out there. You should buy OUR deodorant; all other deodorants are inferior, and will leave you sweaty and embarrassed, while ours will keep you fresh and confident all day long.
In the same way we placed our Christianity in opposition to all other religions, philosophies and perspectives. It was impossible for us to genuinely engage with and take wisdom from other traditions; because they were the competitor, the enemy, the deluded and misinformed others that led people astray from the truth. If you weren’t with us, you were against us, and so we always had to push our beliefs as the only real option. That’s the nature of selling a product.
This exclusivity is what finally pushed me away from church. I couldn’t live with the idea that we were the sole source of truth and knowledge in the world; that our form of Christianity was the only thing that really mattered, that our church was the most important place in the entire Universe. Our belief in a God who would send people to Hell, simply because they didn’t belong to our group, suddenly seemed ugly and manipulative. After a lot of deep investigation and honest soul-searching, this no longer made sense to me, and so eventually, I threw the product away.
Strangely enough, I found myself happier without it.
My experience of church last weekend carried a very different spirit.
There was no sense of competition, no sense of needing to believe certain things or behave in certain ways in order to be okay. There was no product to buy, no tribe to sign up to. There was just space, quiet, and thought.
Most importantly, I didn’t feel like I was being sold anything. I sat there, with no assumption of belief in any kind of God, and just enjoyed the uncertain space. The whole service felt more like poetry than advertising; like an offering, rather than a transaction. It was something to wonder about, and feel, and bring your own perspective and experience into, rather than something to simply accept and grasp onto as Truth.
It was beautiful, meaningful, impacting, and effortless.
So why am I writing about it? It’s not like I’m interested in getting more people to go to church; the days of witnessing are long behind me. And I know that my experience is not going to be the same for any other person. I’m not going to join that church, and I may not even go to a service ever again; but I do want to point to a more service-oriented expression of spirituality than the one I grew up with.
The problem with advertising is that when you look a little closer, you begin to realise how empty all those promises actually are.
The amazing new TV might make you happy for a few months, but eventually it becomes ordinary and out-of-date. The deodorant helps you to smell good, but it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to your relationships. The religion does wonders for a while, until you notice that all those pesky doubts and insecurities and problems are still right there with you.
As Don Draper said in the fantastic advertising-drama Mad Men:
“…what is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.”
When we turn spirituality into another promise of future happiness to come, we completely distort all the potential good that it has to offer. When we commodify and advertise faith as a product to buy into, we simply exacerbate the striving and straining that cause all of our unhappiness in the first place.
So much of our culture is built around the notion that we can be happy in the future, if only we achieve THIS, or buy THIS, or join THIS, or follow THIS. We are taught from a young age that we are consumers; we know how to purchase, and we know how to sell an image of ourselves. It’s so hard to escape the cycle of buying more, doing more, growing more, seeming more, in order to finally be happy and content.
When I look back at my life as a Christian, I realise how much of our religious culture was just a mirror of the larger world outside. We were always striving to be more, to do more and achieve more, and to sell ourselves as the only way to be happy and fulfilled; and yet, under the surface, we were as broken and confused as everybody else.
Our spirituality should not follow these same rules.
Spirituality should embrace uncertainty, pain, lost-ness, and faith in it’s true form. Spirituality can’t be given or sold to somebody, and belief can’t be forced on anyone, not in exchange for all the gifts in the world.
What religion can do is to provide a service to the world, based on a unique perspective, without expecting full belief in return. It can offer wisdom without expecting obedience; offer space without expecting agreement; and offer peace without expecting commitment.
I saw that kind of service in Christianity last weekend, and I came away with a powerful feeling of presence, peace, and acceptance.
It was the most refreshing and meaningful Sunday I’ve had in a long, long time.
