Examining the Non-Evangelicals
Everybody knows Jesus helped win the 2004 U.S. election for Bush. Last November, I had no idea—like most of my Daily Show watching demographic—how conflated church and state really is in the States. I wanted to know more. As the first anthropologists were intrigued by economic systems or matrilineal kinship, I was curious about these evangelical Christians who had incredible political clout.
Ian Brown of The Globe and Mail shares this curiosity. The last of his features on the evangelical U.S. wrapped up this weekend. What struck me was not only the size of some of the “churches”—arenas that can hold 20 000—but the level of sincerity held by parishioners that doesn’t seem like it should belong to adults.
Filled with visions of mega-churches and twelve-step program religion, I found myself at Catholic mass this Easter. I’m not even an official “twice a year” Catholic. I was in church out of anthropological curiosity.
If churches like the Willow Creek Community Church are the Wal-Marts of modern Christianity, then my parent’s humble church is a Home Hardware. The little church feels the influence of the big ones—sermons have that twelve-step feel, hymns favour sunny guitars to the ominous organ. Yet, this “little guy” is still far removed from the Church-Marts. You can see it in the faces of the congregation.
In the Whitby church, the parishioners didn’t look rapturous, nor bored. No one raised up his or her hands to pray, but everyone observed the right moves. A person’s attention would vary from attentive to lost in some other thoughts. From many, there was the sense that they were at mass out of a sense of duty.
I’m sure some may see ‘duty’ as a baser motivation than ‘faith,’ but the former is one that I can identify with more readily. The nature of duties are more open to debate than the closed circle of faith. Where faith is a source for inner strength, duty isn’t always so pleasant and, as some faces showed, it can be a drag. Duty can switch-hit for the religious and secular-humanist camps more so than faith. The fatalism of duty, while less comforting, is far less triumphal, and therefore safer.
So much from still faces.