Against Emotionalism
I think I would describe myself as an anti-emotionalist. Emotions are a phenomenal thing, and full expression of them in their great and varied range is part and parcel with the human experience properly lived. My stance, however, is in the over-use and over-reliance on a purely emotional experience to judge the value or quality of something.
You can find this in certain unhealthy relationships, where one party (or both) are so over-invested in the powerful and explosive energy between them that they can’t bear the quiet or more contemplative moments in relationships, i.e., most of it.
See also the thrill-seeker or entertainment-maximizer. These are the people who jam pack every excursion or vacation or weekend trip with friends and family so full of events and things to do that no one has time to actually relax or decompress. Go! Go! Go! No time for boring rest and relaxation.
Yet I feel the most offensive source of over emotionalism is in the world of religion. There’s a popular TikTok video which was reposted to Twitter (where I found it) of a young woman who thought she loved going to church, but realized she just loved live music after having gone to one Harry Styles concert. It only makes sense to me that church can be replaced by a live concert if there was no soul-nourishing substance actually present in church, and that it actually was just a regular concert of middling quality. Music and communal singing are integral and ancient to the Christian tradition, but the songs themselves are not the reason congregants come together.
It concerns me how many so-called “contemporary” services exist today. As if there was any great need to make church more palatable for modern tastes. In this great arms race of bringing in ‘the youth’ it would appear that many churches compromised on their message, and their reverent nature. Fog machines, multi-colored stage lights, projectors with the song lyrics pasted over looping videos of rain falling (why are all new worship songs so wet?). John Mulaney meant this as a joke when he first said it, but many of today’s new contemporary worship songs do have the same effect as “The Bread of God is Bread, is God, is Bread.”
T-shirts, ripped jeans, goatees, and far too many people on stage singing into a microphone. Many church services truly are just bad concerts. No wonder one could easily replace such a church with a highly competent and well organized multi-million-dollar touring pop concert. There is something good and truly powerful about a great concert. Singing in unison with those around you can produce an internal response that lets you know you’re in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. But that still isn’t the main point of church services. Any church that makes concerts their unique selling point (which is hardly unique at this point) is setting themselves up for failure the moment their congregants find any truly good musician on tour. Find a better anchor. Stop placing one’s subjective emotional responses to stimuli as the point of being at church.
During college I briefly attended a small group one semester. In many ways it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life. I was introduced to a number of incredibly intelligent and loving people who entertained and tried to answer my many theological questions. One such man gave me his copy of “Practice in the Presence of God” by Brother Lawrence, which I’ll have to write about some other time.
However much I enjoyed our small groups though, I was never taken in by this group’s actual church service. I went a handful of times merely to placate my friend who kept inviting me – I couldn’t come up with any more polite excuses, frankly. Each time I went it was as I described above: generic praise and worship band, projector with song lyrics and water graphics, lights, and an uninspiring message to cap it off. One thing that greatly disturbed me was the frequency and fervor with which practically each member was holding their hands up and out as if their life and salvation depended on it.
I asked my friend who invited me what everyone’s hand gestures meant and he answered that if you place your hands up high, palm out, then you’re giving something to God. Conversely, hands low down and palm out, then you are receiving from Him. Pick which one suits you best in the moment, I was told.
It was so surreal to be surrounded by hundreds of other people my age who appeared to be experiencing nothing short of apotheosis and divine ecstasy. That is, if one believed their faces. People whom not five minutes prior I had been making crude jokes with in the truck on the way in and in the hall outside immediately switched into the most emotive expressions man is capable of. Groups were huddled together, heads bowed. Silent sobs heard off in the distance. Laying down prostrate on the floor. I felt like I had missed something. I didn’t really understand what was happening. I don’t seek out emotional labor when I don’t have to do it. I did briefly try to have the same outward appearance as my companions but couldn’t hold it up. It felt like an incredibly sinister lie, to pretend to have an intense emotional experience when I was just fine.
What is church for? It is for the worship of God. We do ourselves no favors when we place subjective emotional experiences in the forefront. One’s relationship with God can be intensely emotional – even frequently so – but it is not the standard or basis of that relationship. Far more of one’s faith journey is going to be quiet, contemplative, monotonous, and normal. Exciting things do truly happen, and for some more often than others, but that is not what we ought to expect from a pious life. Brother Lawrence was known for praising and praying to God through his everyday affairs: washing dishes, sweeping floors, mending clothes. Not intense and tearful outbursts of emotion.
We need to cultivate a better and more sturdy sense of what a pious relationship with God truly is, lest we be swept away by a powerful whim of emotional experience.