Worship looks more like entertainment, and entertainment looks more like worship.

In Worship and the Reality of God, John Jefferson Davis (yes I checked, and he was never president of the United States) describes three ordinary scenarios: Shopping in a mall, driving your car on the highway, and watching a movie or TV show.

Totally normal, right?

You’d never stop and ask a question like, SHOULD I be doing one of these things? because they’re all so incredibly normal.

And you probably wouldn’t ask the extension, How is this action shaping and forming my spiritual life? My desires? etc.

But it gets real weird when you stop and realize that none of those things existed in their current iteration 100 years ago. Only the rich had cars, movies were barely a thing, and shopping was primarily for necessities. The first mall didn’t open until 1956, so the idea of ‘shopping’ as a social or meaningful activity, as opposed to buying some goods to survive at the marketplace, was not a thing 100 years ago.

And these things definitely didn’t exist 200+ years ago.

Writes Davis:

“When I go to the mall and enter the movie theater or surf the Internet at home, I may be consuming not material goods, but experiences and simulations. As I surf the net or watch the ads for the coming attractions in the theater, I am drawn into the commercial nexus that connects driving in my car, a trip to the shopping mall and the world of entertainment. All three worlds of everyday life are interlocking and mutually reinforcing. When I walk through the doors of the church, I need to change my mindset and consciously remind myself: This is not like driving my car; I am not in control; I will go where God wants to take me; this is not a trip to the mall; this is not about “consumption,” this is not about “entertainment,” but about the praise and presence of God—the God who is more lastingly real than the car in which I drove to get here.”

Look at just how manufactured all these experiences are by people who want to profit off of us with them. Not one of those three things exists apart from swarms of people and corporations trying to make a FAT stack of money off of us using and consuming them.

And how I’ve spent full days (or weeks) of my life doing just those three things back to back. My friends and I may plan a fun and lazy shopping day on a Saturday, capped off with a movie either in the theater or in a home. We literally only do the three things described above for an entire day (driving to and from the stores and theaters and houses of course).

And again… not one of them existed 200 years ago.

Maybe shopping in a marketplace, but it definitely didn’t look the way it does now and looking at the perfected models on the posters didn’t have the same sort of transcendent religious quality. You didn’t think your life would radically be altered by buying a shirt or pair of shoes because of the life portrayed by the models in the ad. They’re the new religious icons on the walls of our modern sanctuary: The shopping mall.

James K.A. Smith and Donald Fairbarn both have expounded on the re-modeling of modern life as replacements for the places churches and religion used to occupy. They describe how, for 2,000 years, one would step into a cathedral and immediately feel transported to a space or feeling that was inherently different from the spaces they inhabited the rest of their week. They’d feel higher or, maybe even, holy.

Embedded in every cathedral is vivid and ornate imagery, typically of Jesus and the saints. And what were they doing? Playing out certain acts from their lives which were selfless, righteous, and again…holy.

And what would the congregants glean from being in the cathedral week-in and week-out? They’d eventually want to model their lives after the habits created by the worship service and the lives they saw on the walls: the selfless and sacrificial saints.

But the mall is the new cathedral, and models are the new saints.

And churches today are so modern and refined that they just look like malls or concert halls. No different ‘feeling’ than the rest of your week. You don’t feel transcended or disoriented as you should; as you would when you went into a cathedral and felt like you were nearer to God.

The point of cathedral architecture was to notably shake up your week and draw your attention upward, so it didn’t FEEL like everywhere else you’d go in your week. Worship was formational and both dis-orienting and re-orienting.

Dis-orientation is important for the worshipper. To orient oneself is to point yourself in a direction. If we spend our lives in malls and before screens, these things are orienting us in a certain direction, despite how much we tell ourselves they aren’t.

Going to church, up until about the 1800’s, was all about disorientation in order to re-orient one toward God, toward the things that truly matter, toward becoming more like the saints on the walls.

But now, our routines and practices are so modernized that we have daily liturgies we go through without thinking. A liturgy is simply a routine or practice, and every routine, over time, forms a person in a certain direction. Even secular people like James Clear, best-selling author of Atomic Habits, know that our habits form us.

And Christian worship has become more about entertainment than formation. If one just shows up to church to be entertained watching the show, rather than participating with the presence of God in the worship service, they will never be formed by it. They’re not pursuing God, they’re pursuing dopamine.

And why do we prefer it to be ‘that way’? Because this is how we’ve wired our brains the other 6.5 days of the week, by overdosing on television, social media, movies, porn, etc. In this way, even podcasts and music (even Christian ones!) can be more about distraction and entertainment than actual, re-forming worship or being present in reality, here and now, with God.

“Wired” could be substituted for “formed” which is the job of Christian worship. In other words, our entertainment is forming us more than our worship is. It’s pointing us in a direction. And therefore, our entertainment is forming our worship. And so much worship today is as good as useless.

So THAT is why our entertainment has become dangerously normalized. It’s why our daily routines should not be gone through without serious examination.

Maybe you’re the type who spends your 17 waking hours with an AirPod in one ear, simply because that’s the normal thing, and why wouldn’t you?

Maybe our relationship to our technology and our daily routines should be re-examined rather than just swallowed wholesale because today, ‘that’s just normal.’

How is your daily liturgy, your routines, habits, practices, consumption, et al. forming you? What direction is it pointing you in?

And is your church offering an antidote to all of this wiring? Is it pointing you back to what really matters, or is it merely entertaining you? (This could be both the ‘fault’ of the church, or of you, depending on one’s approach to worship)

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