why i shouldn't go to church anymore

even though sometimes i want to

This is the seventh in my series of short, quickly written, weekly philosophy essays.

I grew up going to church, and continued to think of myself as a Christian until about fifteen years ago. But this piece isn’t going to be about why I stopped being a Christian. It’s going to be about why I don’t go to church anymore.

Perhaps this seems like a strange thing to write about. Perhaps you think, “Of course Rebecca doesn’t go to church anymore, now she’s no longer a Christian!” But the truth is that sometimes I have a strong desire to go to church. And when I mention this to my Christian friends, they tend to say, “Then go!”.

So I’ll start by explaining why I sometimes still have the desire to go to church, and then I’ll get on to why I don't act on these desires. This will give me the chance, along the way, to sketch out some thoughts on desire, belief, and their interrelation.

I miss the aesthetic experiences

First, and most pressingly, I sometimes have the desire to go to church because I miss its aesthetic dimension. Particularly, I miss the music and the language of the services I used to attend. I miss this music and this language not for the theological messages they convey or represent, but for what I think of as their overwhelming and particular beauty. (I’m pretty sure I can separate out these things!)

I’ll save my niche philosophical views on beauty for another time. But one of the aesthetic experiences I’ve valued the most — something I’ve experienced maybe 40 or 50 times — is singing or listening to the text of compline, a late-night Christian service, in a dark quire. Consider the phrase “Keep me as the apple of an eye”, its final word all stretched out, the vocal line building and building up and down in both pitch and volume. Then, place this phrase among many other such phrases, sung in related patterns of elongation and contour. It’s just so beautiful to me, in many ways.

I have a similar reaction to certain hymns. Take the carefully prepared and resolved suspension between the soprano and alto lines in the third section of each verse of the Vaughan Williams harmonisation of Deck thyself my soul with gladness — all sinuous and satisfying after the opening heavy block-chordal texture. I’ve even felt similarly about the imagery offered in a sermon. When someone once spoke about how hot the Calvary sand must’ve been to touch, for instance — hot under one’s feet, hot against one’s face.

On the rare occasions that I do go to church these days — in the sense of attending a service, that is, as opposed to ‘visiting a church’ in order to spend time exploring its architecture or contents or history — it hits me hard how much I miss this aesthetic dimension. I feel it when I go the midnight service in my hometown with my mother on Christmas Eve, and I feel it at weddings and funerals. I felt it last week, when I went to a service with some friends during a conference in a hotel with a chapel.

This brings me to the second thing I miss about going to church. This thing is harder to clarify, and harder to separate out from the more nebulous idea of ‘wishing I were still a Christian’, which is something I don’t wish for some reasons I’ll give below.

I still feel intellectual interest and moral admiration

This second thing pertains to the intellectual interest I generally derive from going to church, and the moral admiration I often feel while doing so, even though I’m no longer a Christian.

In the case of the intellectual interest, the best example I can give is the fantastic metaphysical challenge posed at the beginning of the sermon during the service at the conference hotel: “Imagine yourself Solomon, alone in the darkness, asleep.” This sentence continues to make me shake my head in wonder! First, there’s the idea of imagining yourself as somebody else. Then, you’ve got to try to discard yourself from the mix. And then, wait for it… the kicker comes that you also have to imagine yourself (no, sorry, himself!) asleep. Have you ever tried to imagine being asleep? How would you go about it? That’s my favourite part. But the whole thing made me think so hard that I missed the rest of the sermon.

Okay, perhaps you want to say that this isn’t an example of me being intellectually interested by a Christian idea, per se. That I could’ve found this example at a philosophy conference. But my point is that going to church makes me think about all kinds of intellectually interesting things. That it’s not just that I remain intellectually interested in Christian theology, but that I also find church services — and particularly, the philosophical seriousness of their texts and liturgy — a valuable and particular source of non-theological intellectual stimulation.

Then, we come to the moral admiration I sometimes feel during church services — admiration, that is, for the Christian values and principles expressed. I’m happy to admit that Christian morality coincides with much of what I think is good and right. Not all of it, for sure. Both ways! And okay, quite a lot of what I think is good and right within Christianity can also be found in some other religions, albeit typically not so much in the same place at the same time.

But Christianity seems broadly on track to me, morally. Indeed, I think this to the extent that I believe the world would be a much better place if more people were Christian, even though I think this outcome would be less good for the individuals in question, because I think it’s bad to believe untrue things. This brings me to why I’m no longer a Christian.

I stopped being a Christian because I came to accept that being a Christian entails believing, or trying to believe, things that have been reliably concluded as the kind of thing that cannot be true. Okay, not everyone agrees with me that you need to believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection to count as a Christian. And technically, my view is specifically that these are two of the things that I, myself, would need to believe to count as a Christian.

In other words, I’m open to the idea that not every Christian believes those things. That someone who’s been taught a confused version of one or both of these central events could possibly count as a Christian, for instance. But, for me — with the experiences and evidence I have had access to — I cannot be a Christian as long as I believe that virgins cannot give birth and men cannot come back from the dead.

Beyond all that, I’m aware that not everyone shares my conception of what it is to believe something — regarding the particular relation that I think holds between belief and truth, for instance. As it happens, I’m currently trying to refine my views about this kind of thing. But again, I don’t see myself moving much away from the formulation that I’m not a Christian because I can’t help but conclude, on the extremely reliable-seeming information available to me, that the virgin birth and the resurrection never took place.

Nonetheless, it isn’t only that I continue to find church services aesthetically pleasing — I also often derive valuable intellectual interest and an encouraging sense of shared morality from attending them. So doesn’t this give me a range of reasons to continue going to church?

I don’t need to go

Well, for a start, I can get much of that elsewhere. My best friend is a priest. Two of my three oldest friends — friends I think of as sisters to me — are Christians. As are various of my other friends, including many of the closest friends I’ve made in America these past two years. And I talk with these people about theological and theologically-inspired philosophical questions a lot!

I’m also pretty keen on natural law theory, which isn’t Christian, per se, but has been dominated by great Christian philosophers from John Locke to John Finnis, who often reason in multiply interesting ways on Christian ideas. So, I’m happy to conclude that I don’t have to go to church to gain access to the intellectual interest that I often derive from doing so.

Then, there’s the moral admiration. Well, again, I can feel this admiration when I speak with my Christian friends, or read or think about Christian ideas. It also seems relevant that I feel this admiration because Christianity broadly tracks what I believe, morally, as a non-Christian. This is relevant because the value of admiration is contingent on the value of the thing being admired. But also, relatedly, because isn’t going to church in order to be satisfyingly reminded of some of my non-Christian beliefs a little like eating a strawberry-flavoured non-strawberry when I want to eat a strawberry!?

I should also probably note here my concern with the central Christian idea that the Christian god is the source of morality. Aside from anything else, I worry that this provides a flimsy grounding for moral truth. I sometimes ask my Christian friends, “If you suddenly learned that God didn’t exist, wouldn’t you still think there was a correct answer to whether you should ever torture a baby for fun?”. There are, of course, good responses to this implied criticism, and I'll save a fuller discussion of moral realism for another time, but you get the idea…

It seems, therefore, that I don’t need to go to church for the intellectual interest, and that there are some problems with the idea of me needing to go to church for the moral admiration.

The ‘aesthetic experiences’ idea seems much more compelling, however. After all, it seems likely that some of these experiences can only be accessed while attending a church service; the place and the practice seem central to these experiences. The musicians are to be found there doing these things, for instance. And listening to the Magnificat from Howells’ Coll Reg in a concert setting (good luck with that, even in England!), or on a recording, seems qualitatively different from waiting for the organ to edge in after the first lesson while anticipating the contrast with the quasi-shouted doxology you’ll soon hear bouncing off the wood and the stone.

And as for the suspensions in Deck thyself my soul, what am I going to do about them? Sneak into a church with a gang of friends in the middle of the night to sing hymns, unreligiously? Join a church choir, insisting I’m doing so solely to provide support for the soprano line, and ignoring the fact that I’m playing a part in a religious experience? After all, it wouldn’t be a religious experience for me, but it would be for the other people.

I don’t want to be a free rider

This brings me to the overriding reason I don’t go to church, now that I’m no longer a Christian: I don’t want to be a free rider.

Church services are aimed at certain Christian goals. Goals such as glorifying God, building belief in the glory of God, and sharing the experience of being a believer. And church services have certain constitutive Christian elements that attendees play a role in: certain practices, manifestations of shared belief, often some kind of sacrament. And the internal significance of these kinds of things means that if everyone attending the ‘service’ were like me — there only for the beauty of the music and the language — then it would no longer count as a service.

Why would I want to play a part in that? Why would I want to invade this community, as a member of a potential set of casual destroyers, simply to satisfy my aesthetic greed? It’s not even as if I’d be doing it because I wanted to be part of the community, beyond what was necessary for my instrumental gain! I don’t like organised group activities; the ‘we believe these things’ part of Christianity always bothered me.

It seems clear to me, therefore, that it would be bad to continue going to church. Wrong, even. Wanting to do something isn’t reason enough to do it. Wanting to do something is different from deciding to do it. Sometimes, you should choose not to act on your desires.

My Christian friends often push back against this position of mine. They claim to think it’s okay — or even a good thing — for me to go to church. But my guess is that either I haven’t stated my position strongly enough, or they’re straining their generosity, or they hope that going to church under these conditions will have the effect of getting me to believe again.

And when I think hard about the third of these ideas — the idea that I should go to church when I don’t believe, because maybe it will help me to believe again — I realise this gives me a further reason not to go.

I want to believe as the result of good reasoning

I’ve said to a few of my Christian friends that I’d be grateful if they could persuade me to believe again, and I meant it — on at least some level. After all, I badly miss the aesthetic dimension of going to church, and I think that Christianity represents a net good for the world. I also know it can be a source of solace and strength in hard times.

But more than I care about those things, I care about why I believe what I believe. I don’t think I can easily force myself to change my beliefs, in the sense of “hey, I’ll give you $100 if you believe there’s a yellow elephant sitting next to you!” And I’m happy to accept there are multiple routes to holding a belief. But I do think that at least some of my beliefs are the result of my good reasoning. And I want as many as possible of my beliefs to have been acquired that way, and as few as possible to have been acquired as a result of loose reasoning. I don’t want solace or strength, or anything else, at that kind of cost.

There’s little I value more than being persuaded away from being wrong. But it seems to me highly unlikely that the persuasion I will experience during church services will be the persuasion that I need in order to come to better conclusions about whether virgins can give birth and whether men can come back from the dead. And the truth about those events, for me, is crucial here. Sure, Christianity amounts to so much more than the truth about those events. But I cannot have any of the other things of Christianity, if I do not believe that those events took place.

I want to hear the music. But even more, I want to know the truth.