Hell's Bells and Preaching to the Choir

 

Friend Xerxes laments, in a recent column, that churches are “echo chambers.”

“In most churches, you hear what you expect to hear. It’s easy, even expected, to talk about God as unconditional love.”

“But I wonder,” he continues. “how much unconditional love the survivors of the earthquake in Haiti, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the floods resulting from Hurricane Ida, are feeling.”

Xerxes is making the same point I have made here before: the superficiality and insensitivity of the “Hallelujah chorus” sort of Christianity, that pervades mainstream Protestantism and much of current Catholicism. This is a fallen world. If we are happy in it, there is something wrong.

Xerxes uses the analogy of a temple bell, played only inside the temple. 

The local topography allowing, Buddhist temples are built on hills—so that the sound of the bell is heard from far away. The idea is the opposite of an echo chamber: the idea is to draw you out of your day-to-day way of thinking, to something beyond. And note the core concept of Buddhism is “enlightenment”: that whatever you now think is wrong. You are living in darkness. You must see everything from a new perspective.

The same is true for temples of all sorts. The Greeks built their temples on the acropolis, the “higher city,“ overlooking the agora far below. You leave the marketplace, to find a new perspective.

A high point, if available, is preferred as well for Christian churches. Mount Athos; Monta Cassino; Mont St. Michel. The church in which I was baptized is on a cliff overlooking the harbor; so is St. Brendan’s in nearby Rockport. Regardless of location, the bells are in the high steeple, so that they can be heard from the greatest distance. They would be unpleasantly loud in the nave, and serve no purpose. 

As with Buddhism, the New Testament insistently tells us we must take a new perspective, not go on with our lives. One must enter by the narrow gate. Many are called, but few are chosen. The wisdom of the world is folly in Christ. “Let the dead bury their own dead.”

Religion is meant to be the utter opposite of an echo chamber. It is to draw us away from the echoes and the groupthink, the mass delusions and the madness of crowds. If it has become a matter of merely affirming the world as it is, and the congregation in what they already suppose, it is no longer a religion. It is an anti-religion, marching participants down the primrose path to hell.

This is the criticism often levelled against “mainstream Protestantism.” Pierre Berton wrote on the theme in “The Comfortable Pew.” Much of Catholicism has the disease; I’d say most. This is why, periodically, we have religious revivals.

I’d say we’re overdue for another.