Picking and Choosing - Division and Unity

Where I live there are lots of churches, for every denomination, every neighbourhood, every style, every brand, every outlook, every set of opinions and every set of beliefs that I am familiar with. Between each of them there runs a line, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower, separating even churches within a denomination and beneath the same authority.

Here's one church: liberal, cerebral, reflective, catholic in tradition. Here's another: energetic, vibrant, evangelising, socially conservative.

And who goes? To the first: middle class families, older people, in their fifties and above, retired priests, a few ordinands. To the second: students, young people, young families.

My friend T, an atheist, loves the diversity. You can choose to participate in the religious outlook you believe in, to support the values you believe are true. Anything else is dictatorial, conservative and moralising, removing the free choice of the individual.

Here's what Screwtape thinks:

<<My dear Wormwood,

.... You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.... the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil....>>

If we choose the religious experience we like the best, as we choose our favourite brand of peanut butter from the shelf, wouldn't we be creating a market where:

<<religious institutions become marketing agencies and the religious traditions become consumer commodities>>

as, in fact, the economist Peter L. Berger describes contemporary society? The big, popular churches can hoover up worshippers from the small, local ones.

Could I remove myself from the market by choosing not the commodity which suits me the best but rather the one I am already living closest to? My local church is neither conservative evangelical nor liberal catholic. I would have a short walk on Sunday mornings. I don't imagine it teaches anything I would disagree with, or at least no more than any other place of worship. And, given that members of one outlook on Christianity don't tend to live together, it's probably a safe assumption that there would be a good mix of views and beliefs, and not a bad one of affluence and class.

But, says T, does this choice really exist? What if you lived next to a church you believed was fundamentally wrong? Now that we do pick and choose is it worth being a martyr to your local community when most of it heads off to the church they like the best on a Sunday morning? What about those churches where no one lives locally, such as in the centre of town, should they just fold?

We finished lunch and I told him I'd think about it.