Why Men Really Hate Going to Church

WMHGTC, by Alaska TV writer David Murrow, is the umpteenth try to understand the “feminization” of American Christianity,

The pro baseball player-turned-preacher Billy Sunday (1862-1935) was just one manly man who fought the same fight.

Murrow is a little shaky on pre-Reformation church history: he somehow blames this feminine influence on the rise of the worship of Mary in the 11th-12th centuries. Yet that is the era that saw not only the building of the great cathedrals (partly by male volunteers) but also the rise of the troubadours and the writing of some great religio-erotic poetry.

But he is dead-on–and even humorous–when he identifies the reasons why most men avoid church: the indoor confinement, the lengthy yackety-yack sermonizing, and church language that places heterosexual men in an uncomfortable role:

I saw a new book for Christian men: Kissing the Face of God. An ad for the book invites men to “get close enough to reach up and kiss His face!” Time out–this is a men’s book? Yikes! With the spotlight on homosexuality in the church, why do we increase [heterosexual] men’s doubts by using the language of romance to describe the Christian walk?

And then there is “praise music.” Here I could not agree with Murrow more: “Not only are the lyrics of many of these songs quite romantic, but they have the same breathless feel a Top Forty love songs.”

On a recent cross-country drive, I tuned into a “praise music” station for a while. Gods! It was like being slowly drowned in high-fructose corn syrup.

But there is one big problem that calling the pastor “Coach” won’t fix. Unlike Paganism, Christianity cannot being avoid the yakety-yak. In the words of Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist of religion, it is doctrinal rather than imagistic.

Today’s Pagan religions, by contast, are not “routinized” and do not require a lot of explaining. They are imagistic. They affect practitioners through what Whitehead calls “infrequent repetition and high arousal”–why one really knock-out ritual experience at a festival may stay with you for months.

Secondly, Paganism can wed the erotic and the spiritual. Eros is the force of life, but the monotheists want to build high walls around it. It sneaks back in though, as when they encourage the split between “good girls” (madonnas) and “bad girls” (whores) and then create a “ministry” to deal with it.

Good Pagan ritual can be erotic–which does not mean it must lead to personal promiscuity. But we must acknowledge and celebrate that force. Murrow realizes that a “Come hold me and kiss me, sweet Jesus” form of eroticism will not appeal to heterosexual Christian men. But he has no acceptable celebration of eroticism to set in place of that, and he never will.

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