The Crystal Cathedral, home at one time to the “Be Happy Attitudes” has fallen into receivership. Apparently the ministry which was once such an influential voice in connecting the best of modern therapy with the teachings of New Testament, isn’t speaking to people any more.
Harriet Barber, writing in the Guardian sees a lesson in this for Christians across the theological spectrum:
“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.
In the US, where school psychologists are almost as common as school nurses, we are obsessed with talk therapies because they are in fact ecumenical and secularised versions of evangelical Christianity, our old time religion. Twelve-step programmes, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, appropriated the conversion scenario of revivalism, eliminating references to Jesus in favour of appeals to a generic ‘higher power’. Later self-help programmes and therapies dispensed with supernatural intermediaries altogether. Learning the right tricks and gimmicks, thinking the right thoughts and acquiring the proper attitudes would directly, by a law of nature, make good things happen for you.
Schuller, Warren and other new-style evangelical preachers, who focus on this-worldly improvement rather than otherworldly salvation, have not sold out Christianity in favour of secular self-help. They have simply reappropriated those bits of evangelical Christianity that cycled through the secularisation process and emerged as therapies, having in the process acquired the veneer of science.”
Read the full article here.
She ends with this thought:
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.
It’s a bit of a surprise to hear this sort of indictment of Evangelical fashion – buying into the culture wholesale is more often a charge that is brought against progressive Christians. But the dangers that Barber points out are real and probably subtle enough that all denominational groups have their own blind spots to the dangers.