Mega Church Spectacle, Mega Vapidity

Posted on December 19, 2008 in Folly Watch Myths & Mysticism

How much more simple could it be? Husband and pregnant wife must go to a strange town thanks to a Roman rule. Trouble is all the accomodations have been filled. They go from door to door but with no luck until one fellow says “You can sleep out in the stable.” And there the Christ child is born. Amen. Wazoo. End of the story.

But this isn’t good enough for modern Christians. Conditioned, perhaps, by Mel Gibson’s ((I almost write Mel Brooks here, apt because of the sick comedy)) Passion, they want special effects, action. No simple posada for them: they want to be comfortable in their chairs while they watch a spectacle. And the result, for one young woman, is this:

Keri Shryock, 23, of Sylvania, Ohio, joined the non-denominational megachurch in August. She was performing an aerial acrobatics routine with two other actors on the opening night of the production “Awaited,” a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story, when suddenly she plummeted from the rope into an aisle. She died this morning at University hospital.

The whole thing stings of that American pseudo-religion that pretends to be substance when it is merely theatrics. I doubt if any Christmas pageant will be cancelled because of this, but if they are, they are still missing the point. This has been building up ever since Christians came out from the sewers of Rome. Churches graduated from mere auditoriums to cathedrals with their great vaults that made worshippers feel they were witness to the glory of heaven.

American Protestants could not rest with Catholic architecture. Sure they tore the saints’ images off the wall. But in their place they introduced pageantry which was a sort of graven imagery of a more fleshy consistency.

“The Glory of Christmas” is the name of the production they put on at the [[Crystal Cathedral]]. Angels fly across the stage, blowing their horns. There’s a sound and light show. God isn’t a meek little baby born of destitute parents: He blasts his way into reality. The elders of the Reformed Church in America believe that they have advanced religion when what is true is that they have fallen into the same pagantry that Paul spoke out against at Ephesus.

The participants at this shows undoubtably come away dizzy with the imagery, but does a message get across other than “Gosh-gee-whiz-what-an-amazing-spectacle-that-was?” Religion is no longer something you take upon your shoulders to live by but something to be watched. The theater is the heady recreational drug of Bigger, Better, Faster that gets us exactly nowhere in our consciousness of where we stand in relation to others or to the world.

We only stop to think when someone is hurt and then we go on doing the same old things.

Hail Great Diana of Ephesus — er — Jesus.

This is the real war — not just against Christmas but against meaningful existence.