Please Me, O Lord
S. M. Hutchens on the Roots of Romantic Worship
After the collapse of the Episcopal Church our family returned to the Evangelicals whence we came. During our years away, however, they had been undergoing their own changes. An electrotheatrical liturgy seems now to be the common and expected manner of worship—spectacular when the budget can manage it, and imitation-spectacular when it cannot.
On a recent visit to a fairly typical Evangelical church, we were treated to one of its regular features. A handsome young woman, attractively dressed, stood before the congregation with an eight-inch microphone, the head of which she held gently to her lips while she writhed and cooed a song in which she, with closed eyes and beckoning gestures, begged Jesus, as she worked her way toward its climax, to come fill her emptiness. The crowd liked it.
Her song had a different effect on me than I suspect she thought it would. It did, perhaps, bring me closer to Jesus, but by bringing me closer to the sinfulness of my own heart, the kind of heart that would be excited to lust by a pretty woman begging to be filled, and that would be instructed by its conscience to avert the eyes until she was done with her performance.
It also made me wonder if her husband, sitting by while she went through her show, was doing his duty by her, since she seemed to have a large surplus of the sort of womanly energy that husbands like to see. (One can only account for these displays by Christian wives and daughters by the unquestioned acceptance in Christian homes of feminist assumptions about obedience not owed to husbands and fathers.) These are not particularly pious thoughts, but I rather doubt that I was alone, and as I write am in no humor to pretend otherwise.
The Next Phase
Upon reflection I had to conclude that the song was not un-Evangelical, not foreign to the tradition. It was the “In the Garden” tryst of the old hymnbooks carried into the next phase of intimacy and excitement. Jesus has been walking and talking with the revivalists and telling them they are his own for many years now, and it is not surprising that, given his romantic propensities, they should be expecting him to move to the next phase of the courtship ritual.
Many of Evangelicalism’s most beloved verses are off-putting to men (at least those who are paying attention to the words) because they seem to be proper to women, or even homosexuals—or because they force them to lie to God about their intentions or state of mind as though they were under the influence of some kind of religious excitement. These hymns are largely the products of a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminization of American religion (see Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture ), of an era that has borne most of its fruit in the last hundred years or so, when evolving Christianity in the West (Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative) has come to be regarded by a great many men, and not without reason, as an almost exclusively affective domain—something for women, children, and unmanly men. Much of the new Evangelical music—and I have heard the same in Catholic churches under the influence of “liturgical renewal”—is of the same ilk.
The display that provoked this writing is the product of development shared by the mainline and the Evangelicals. The latter, still largely in the feminized stage, have not yet moved wholly into the emasculations of the mainline. The Evangelical academy, while for the most part egalitarian now, has managed to avoid the bleak, militant feminism now in unquestioned control of the mainline schools. The influence of the academy is further mitigated by Evangelicalism’s congregationalism and its strong populist and anti-intellectual streaks. The professors have influence, to be sure, but they do not become bishops who can force their will on congregations, or fill commissions having the power to change a church’s lex orandi over the course of a few years.
Nor do churches that may elect their own pastors without interference from the denominational intelligentsia favor the women that have been forced on mainline congregations. The Evangelical churches, in accordance with their tradition, can remain “merely feminized”: “soul-winning,” now in the sense of gravid with “seekers,” full of the warmings sought by Evangelicals, and marked by preaching and music that present no particular challenge to the mind or tastes of a child of ten—a child that in traditional cultures has not yet, as Leon Podles observes in The Church Impotent, left the society of women. The church feminized is not only the church demasculinized, but inevitably the church infantilized as well.
The excuse for this is that to “reach” people, the churches must operate on this level, but this becomes suspect when it appears that nothing deeper is available in these congregations for those who have for many years been “reached.” There is no move from soft rock or campfire chorus to Bach or Mendelssohn, from melody-line singing back to the four-part harmonies from which most of these congregations have fallen in a single generation. (Children in the Evangelical church where I was raised learned to read not only their Bibles, but also soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, from singing the parts with Mom and Dad. Now they just accompany, singing melody only, the principal musicians, which they once themselves were.)
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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