The first religious service I ever attended was at Beaverbrook Music Camp – where I got religion, decided to be a musician, and then decided that I wanted to do philosophy. Beaverbrook was in Pocono Pines, a plebian resort that had been in the recent past named 'Lutherland'. It catered for older German-Americans who liked their um-pa band concerts on the green on Sundays and Beaverbrook supplied the band. The service was in a room above the Casino, a shop that sold sundries and housed pinball machines, and it was Lutheran. I went with Jan H., the choir director's daughter. I was a little disappointed because it was like a school assembly.
But that was not where I got religion. I got religion in my first year at Beaverbrook singing the Schubert Mass in G in camp chorus. We studied it in musicianship class. We had translations of the text, learned about the mass as a musical form and how the music expressed the theology. I loved it! It was a grand cosmic vision. The Credo was the first theology I'd ever encountered. Belief was completely beside the point – I just plain liked it. We sang lots of sacred music in Latin: I remember Haydn's Te Deum and Mozart's Regina Coeli. We also sang profane music in Latin: Carmina Burana.
After that I started investigating religion, in books from the local public library, which was meager, and paperbacks from the mall bookstore. I read Kierkagaard who referred to the book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. So I read the Apocrypha, which was out in paperback, and an assortment of other literature. I also investigated whether it was possible to join a church because I liked the music and the metaphysics, and I wanted to be entitled to visit church buildings. I discovered it was. And after graduation, at music school in Philadelphia, I almost did.
Three weeks into my music school career I had decided that I wanted to quit music school and go to college to do philosophy. So, I quit practicing and more or less quit eating so that I could use my allowance to buy books. I cashed my mother's checks at a bank on Chestnut south of Broad and hit the bookshops walking north on Chestnut to the apartment I shared with Judy S., a 'cello student.
One week, at the corner of Chestnut and Broad I saw a large table covered with various pamphlets and went to investigate. It was religious stuff, so I started poking through it. The guy who was manning the table opened a conversation with me. He was Catholic, he said, and these pamphlets were about the Faith. Then what he said knocked my socks off. He said that he was a math teacher in one of the suburban high schools, and did I know that the world, not just earth but the universe, was finite but unbounded: finite, but you could never get to the end. And what was outside it was God. This was the biggest metaphysical thrill of my life! I took a couple of tracts and went home to think about it. It kept me up half the night. How could it be finite?
The tracts had forms on the back to fill out and send in for further information about the Catholic Church. So I did, and by return mail got a letter from a monsignor with a small pamphlet containing theological information, and a quiz on the material to take and return. I returned the quiz and then got another letter, another pamphlet, and another quiz. I went 2 or 3 rounds until I was finally kicked out of music school. Then I knew that I would be going to college and would be doing philosophy so I threw the booklets away announcing to myself that since I would have philosophy I didn't need religion. My idea was that philosophy was a more respectable way of satisfying my interest in metaphysics, in the supernatural, and in what it could be to be finite and unbounded. I only realized later in retrospect that the pamphlets I'd been getting were installments of the Baltimore Catechism.
Since then, agonizing over the collapse of the Episcopal Church and the Church's refusal to do anything about it, I thought about that evangelistic effort. Why didn't churches set up tables with information about the church and forms to fill out for more information? Why didn't they, before the internet, advertise in the newspaper with forms interested readers could clip and send in?
A few years ago, I want to the Earth Day event in Balboa Park. There was more than a square mile covered with booths representing every conceivable organization and business selling clothing, pictures, jewelry, knick-knacks, pottery, and every sort of food. Only two religious organizations had booths – the Humanists and the Hari Krishnas, who had a large display with cookbooks, incense, bells, and candles. The Christians were segregated in an area off to the side with warning signs at the entrance saying that the displays could be disturbing. The Christians were displaying pictures of aborted fetuses and milling around holding up yellow signs with Biblical texts on them. This was what the world saw of the Church – not Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert but aborted fetuses and people with axes to grind.
The next year, when Earth Day was in the offing, I emailed the diocese, mentioned this and asked if they were planning to get a booth. They brushed me off. There were no plans, it wasn't part of their work in San Diego. The next year I investigated the cost of booths. The cheapest was only $850, so I emailed the cathedral, which was just across the street from the park, and said I would contribute $850 designated for a booth at the Earth Day event. They took me up on my offer and at the next event the dean was manning the booth. If you pay, you play. I don't know if they did it again. I still don't understand why churches don't do obvious things like advertising at public events like this one, where there were booths selling everything from solar panels to polish sausages and every conceivable cult and New Age product.
Why didn't churches advertise? When I was on the diocesan evangelism commission, we looked at books and 'materials' on church growth, all in the genre of business boosterism, describing how to grow a church into a 'corporate size parish' by organizing programs for church members of every demographic classification with every possible interest. But there was no hint of how to get people into the church to participate in these programs. At one meeting before Christmas, again in the days of paper, I suggested that the diocese take advantage of economies of scale by taking out a full page spread in the San Diego Union-Tribune advertising Christmas services with a large Christmasy picture in the middle and small ads around the sides with information about Christmas services at every church in the diocese. As things stood, only 3 or 4 churches advertised Christmas services and surely Christmas was prime time for getting people to church. No one even took my proposal seriously.
When I was on vestry at St. John's, before the internet was in operation, I suggested that St. John's take out ads in the local newspaper's church directory, which was the way then that people found out about the location of churches and times of services. They wouldn't do it. Too expensive. At the time, taking a class on church planting at a local branch of Bethel Seminary and reading about evangelism, I learnt that on the average evangelical churches spent 12.5 percent of their budget on evangelism. St. John's, like most Episcopal churches, spent zero and made no effort.
Churches not only made no effort to attract people – they made it difficult to get in. It was almost impossible to get into St. John's. When the church was rebuilt, with a huge insurance settlement after an arson fire, the building was designed in such a way that it was impossible for anyone who was not in the know to get in the church. Facing inward towards a courtyard there was no sign of an entrance. The entrance was far from the street, halfway down the carpark, in the courtyard past an iron gate, and invisible even from the gate. If anyone managed to find their way down the carpark they couldn't get in anyway. The gate was kept locked because the other buildings around the courtyard housed a school and later a HeadStart center. Visitors had to ring the bell and pass muster with the gatekeeper. When the church was first built, I managed to get in to show a friend around. While I was pointing out the stained-glass window over the choir section a woman who was doing the flowers noticed us and said, 'Can I help you?' in a tone of voice conveying 'What is your business here?' I said that we were just looking at the new building. She looked us up and down and when she had concluded that we, two middle-aged women, were unlikely to vandalize the place, said 'OK', giving us permission – an internal gatekeeper.
Even when there was no good reason, church buildings were locked – and locking churches was not a response to high crime rates during the 20th century. Cromwell started it to prevent people from engaging in superstitions practices. Churches were preaching houses. Visiting churches, like going on pilgrimage and venerating relics, was superstitious. To reinforce the point, Cromwell had horses stabled in cathedrals and banned the celebration of all holy days, including Christmas. No thing, place, or time was holy: only the Word was holy. We still live with that Calvinism in a secularized form, as described by Santayana in the early chapters of The Last Puritan, before it degenerates into a homoerotic fantasy.
Why didn't the church make it easier, and less embarrassing, to get in? Why was there no official route into the church? Calling the Church of the Holy Spirit to ask for an appointment with M.T. was difficult. I had never heard of anyone joining a church rather than being born into it or married into it. I didn't know whether it was a done thing to make an appointment to see a priest to ask about joining the church or what kind of reception I'd get. I didn't know that a large proportion of Episcopalians had joined the church when they were in college. I felt the way I imagine gay adolescents felt thinking that there was no one else who shared their sexual orientation. Why didn't church advertise in the school newspaper or put on events for students? Why couldn't the church at least send the message that joining the church was a normal thing to do, that other people did it all the time, and that I was not alone – that I was not crazy.
Even before the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s it was a theme in the mainstream media and popular culture that Christianity was pressing in from every side and that to protect Americans' freedom of religion, and from religion, it had to be reined in. School prayer was ruled unconstitutional and displays of religious objects in public places, including mountaintop crosses and Christmas creches in public parks were prohibited. After 25 years of litigation and political wrangling to remove the Mount Soledad Cross the case was finally resolved when a group bought the land on which it stood from the Department of Defense, which had maintained it, they claimed, as a war memorial. The Freedom From Religion Foundation continues the fight to liberate Americans from the press of religion, which I never experienced: I was excluded.
Mainline churches and liberal theologians agreed. To address Modern Secular Man, a logical construction that figured prominently in the literature I read, the Church had to agree with him. Bishop Pike ridiculed the Trinity as 'a sort of Committee God'; Thomas J. J. Hamilton and William Hamilton announced that God was Dead and made the cover of Time Magazine; Bishop Spong declared in the first of his 12 Theses that 'Understanding God in theistic categories as “a being, supernatural in power …is no longer believable. Most God talk in liturgy and conversation has thus become meaningless'. And churches pulled out of campus ministry because clergy viewed churches as community facilities for young families and activities centers for the elderly that had nothing to offer students. After over two decades of proclaiming that religious belief was untenable and that churches had nothing to offer but secular goods and services mainline churches, predictably, collapsed during the 1990s – the official Anglican Decade of Evangelism – when I was trying to get ordained.
I was interested in evangelism – and my aim in evangelism was not to save souls but to save the Church. I didn't say that, of course, and tried to make the right noises and, after long experience of the Church, I knew the noises. But they saw through me. I think one reason why I was turned down for ordination repeatedly was that the gatekeepers couldn't fathom my motives. A priest I knew online, one of my advisers, conjectured that since I taught at a Catholic college, they might think I was trying to get ordained for professional advantage.
It tore my heart out to see churches boarded up or turned into condos, skate parks, or restaurants. I loved the Church. I loved the history, the music, the liturgy, and architecture that embodied the grand cosmic drama I discovered singing the Schubert Mass in G at Beaverbrook Music Camp. What brought me to the Church was the Church. It was dying, and as a layperson I couldn't do anything about it.