Crystal Cathedral had its day

Harriet Baber of the Guardian looks at what happens when religion is reduced to a collection of gimmicks. It's a picture of the US Evangelical church that I used to come in contact with on TV in Oman. Even back then I couldn't understand why people were attracted to it. Now I'm even more certain that when compared to the true inner dynamism, wonder, and beauty of the Catholic faith - this type of theatrical religion really does seem like a dull fad. This is why we're being very short-sighted when we, Catholics, try to shape our faith along these lines. Firstly we're not good at such spectacles, secondly it's counter-productive, and it detracts from our true, tried-and-tested-for-two-millenia Catholic way.

On 18 October 2010, Southern California's landmark Crystal Cathedral, the prototype of all late 20th Century American Megachurches, filed for bankruptcy. I drove up the following Sunday to get a look at the place while it was still in operation.

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The campus and decor are the culmination of a high-church revival in American Protestantism that began in the 19th century. It was then that evangelical Christians, who had traditionally assembled in meeting houses and preaching halls, constructed faux-Gothic edifices, dressed their preachers in gowns, and "beautified" their services, exchanging tedium for vulgarity. By the mid-20th century, they had appropriated all the "potent symbols of cinema secularism" theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described in his rendition of an evangelical Easter service conducted, as was not uncommon, in a movie theatre:

The service began with the house in darkness and the gradual lighting of the stage, symbolising the Easter dawn. The organist appeared with the spotlight upon him as his console emerged trickily and automatically from its cubicle to full view. The choir was for some obscure reason gowned in a symphony of colours from deep blue on the outside to bright red in the centre… Here was a church service with so little of its own to go on that movie technic could dominate the spirit of it completely.

The walls of the Welcoming Center were covered with words – with optimistic platitudes, rendered in raised metallic lettering, like Arabic calligraphy decorating a mosque. Words were not vehicles for conveying new information. They were icons to be gazed at, sacraments to be consumed – over and over again. Bible verses were talismans, working their magic; slogans were mantras.

...Of course we don't expect popular entertainments to last. Fashion is arbitrary. There was no particular reason why hip-hop replaced disco or why the 1970s favoured earth tones while the 1990s featured violet and teal. We look in vain for some underlying social circumstance to explain why at a particular time and in a particular place popular culture takes the form it does: fashions change because they are fashions and so have nothing to recommend them but their relative novelty.

Fashion dominates the world of evangelical Christianity and its therapeutic penumbra. The Crystal Cathedral, that glitzy architectural marvel, has become a 1980s nostalgia item. Now Rick Warren is the anointed leader of America's "People of Faith" and, for the time being, Orange county crowds are flocking to Saddleback's dull preaching halls.

But there is nothing new under the sun. Saddleback and the Crystal Cathedral, Willow Creek and all the other evangelical megachurches that have had their time in the sun sell the same product: mind-power through talk-magic, which in secular packaging is just what all the innumerable therapies and self-help programmes on the market promise.

...So if you wonder why Americans are, anomalously, religious it is because we have evacuated religion of all content. There are of course theological doctrines on the books, which church members tick off, in the way that they agree to accept screenfuls of conditions for installing new software. But most have no serious interest in these theoretical matters. Whether signing on for a new therapy or self-help programme, trying out a new diet or a new church, they are looking for a bag of tricks, a collection of gimmicks and recipes that will get them the material prosperity, perfect health, beautiful bodies, ideal relationships and complete happiness to which they believe they are entitled.

I never understood the appeal of these programmes, whether religious or secular: they claimed to produce plain empirical results but were never empirically confirmed. For all the cheerful platitudes and possibility thinking, the Crystal Cathedral was bankrupt.

Beyond that, as a religious believer I was disheartened. Was this all religion was: Cheerful platitudes and advice for successful living? Recipes for doing well in this world and the next? A pleasant place to pass an hour or two: an uplifting programme, brunch in the Welcoming Center and a stroll through the grounds?

I thought religion was a window into heaven, into another world of power, glory and intensity, to the contemplation of divine beauty. When I got religion, I never imagined this flat, dull evangelicalism.