The Anti-Intellectual Movement or "This Disco (Used To Be A Cute Cathedral)"

Sunday needs a pick-me-up?
Here's your chance
Do you get tired of the same old square dance?
Allemande right now
All join hands
Do-si-do to the promised boogieland
Got no need for altar calls
Sold the altar for the mirror balls
Do you shuffle? do you twist?
'Cause with a hot hits playlist, now we say

This disco used to be a cute cathedral
Where the chosen cha-cha every day of the year
This disco used to be a cute cathedral
Where we only play the stuff you're wanting to hear

Mickey does the two-step
One, Two, Swing
All the little church mice doing their thing
Boppin' in the belltower
Rumba to the right
Knock, knock
Who's there?
Get me outta this limelight
So, you want to defect?
Officer, what did you expect?
Got no rhythm, got no dough
He said, "Listen, Bozo, don't you know"

This disco used to be a cute cathedral
Where the chosen cha-cha every day of the week
This disco used to be a cute cathedral
But we got no room if you ain't gonna be chic

Sell your holy habitats
This ship's been deserted by sinking rats
The exclusive place to go
It's where the pious pogo
Don't you know

This disco used to be a cute cathedral
Where the chosen cha-cha every day of the year
This disco used to be a cute cathedral
Where we only play the stuff you're wanting to hear

This disco used to be a cute cathedral
Where the chosen cha-cha every day of the week
This disco used to be a cute cathedral
But we got no room if you ain't gonna be chic

by Steve Taylor
On The Fritz
This Disco (Used To Be A Cute Cathedral)

Prophetic genius? Yeah, I would like to think so. Steve Taylor wrote this back in 1985 and looking back on it 20 years later, he could have composed this song yesterday. How is it that the modern Church has found itself so far removed from the Church in the 1st Century as depicted in Acts? When did we pull up anchor and start drifting? Did it happen all at once or was it a gradual process?

Not quite two centuries ago, the intellectual giants and leaders of the free world were, for the most part, Christians. We were the ones leading the charge in Philosophy, Science, Government, etc. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (p. 31), wrote "The Puritans were highly educated people (the literacy rate for men in early Massachusetts and Connecticut was between 89 and 95 percent) who founded colleges, taught their children to read and write before the age of six, and studied art, science, philosophy, and other fields as a way of loving God with the mind." Puritan Cotton Mather proclaimed, "Ignorance is not the Mother of Devotion but of HERESY." (Allen Carden, Puritan Christianity in America, p. 186)

When did we became skeptical of the skeptics? When did we allow ourselves to be marginalized and, in doing so, begin isolating ourselves from the world? In short, when did we start to leave the world saltless?

J. P. Moreland writes, "Our society has replaced heroes with celebraties, the quest for a well-informed character with the search for a flat stomach, substance and depth with image and personality. In the political process, the makeup man is more important than the speech writer, and we approach the voting booth, not on the basis of a well-developed philosophy of what the state should be, but with a heart full of images, emotions and slogans all packed into thirty-second sound bites. The mind-numbing, irrational tripe that fills TV talk shows is digested by millions of bored, lonely Americans hungry for that sort of stuff. What is going on here? What has happened to us?" (Love Your God With All Your Mind, p. 21)

By surrendering the battle field of the intellect, we vacate those places of influence and leave them to those who live by a much different worldview than us. Are we surprised by the state of the media, the government or the university? We are told over and over again that since faith and morals cannot be scientifically proven, then they are subjective and should be kept private. Intellect has taken a back seat in worship to emotions, feelings and experience.

But Christ quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 when he says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." (Mark 12:30 NIV) I think we tend to focus on 3 of the 4, but we often neglect the mind in our worship. Romans 12:2 says that we are transformed by the renewing of our mind. Paul tells Timothy to defend the faith delivered to the saints. He also tells the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

Christians from the 1st Century through the early 1800's had a much different view than we do now, about the role our intellect played in worship to God. They sought excellence in everything they did, their worship, their education and their vocation. If we wish to have an influence in our culture again, if we wish to reverse the trend in our government and in our educational system, we have to emphasize the importance the mind plays our worship to God. We have to strive for excellence in all we do and work as if we were working for the Lord.

Churches have traded in substance for flash, "altar calls...for mirror balls", intellect for experience. If we want to have an influence in the world then we must "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

Exiting the Past

Last Sunday, I delievered the talk to prepare us for the Lord's Supper. Most of the time when I am tasked with this I think back to the Israelite people and their period of slavery and deliverance in Egypt. That set me thinking all week long about the fact that they had to spend 40 years in wandering in the wilderness. But for what purpose? Was it just because the 10 spies returned with an unfavorable report and stirred up fear in the people? Was it because of the lack of faith the people had even after God had already done so much in bringing them out of Egypt?

I suspicious that part of the reason that they ended up spending the time wandering in the desert for 40 years was their attitude. The minute they hit their first setback on the path of freedom, they complained and longed to return to Egypt as slaves. Any crisis that occured, any obstacle that arose, they longed to trade freedom for slavery. They wanted to trade their future for their past. So much time spent dwelling on the past fostered an attitude among the people that, regardless of what miracles God displayed in their presence, they were not able to progress to a level of faith that would enable them to enter the Promised Land. Their backwards looking robbed them of what lay ahead. And so, they wandered until all those who had been slaves in Egypt had died in the wilderness.

Those left didn't dwell on their past slavery because all they had known was the desert. They knew the stories, but they didn't experience it the same way as their fathers and mothers before them. They could remember the past, but they weren't absorbed with it. They knew God took care of them for the past 40 years, feeding them, making sure their clothes didn't wear out, etc. So when it came time to enter Canaan, they were ready, both physically and spiritually. They believed that God would deliver the land to them because they had walked with him for 40 years.

Tonights Small Group was dealing with giving the past to God so that we are not dwelling on it. If we learn anything from the Israelites wayward wanderings, it's that longing for the past inhibits the capacity of God being able to fulfill our future to a certain degree. If we are so busy looking and dwelling on are past mistakes and longing for our past life, then what miracles are we missing out on that God is doing in our lives? How are we to appreciate what he is doing for us today if all we think about is yesterday?

I think Paul has the right attitude when we wrote:

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14 NIV)