The church ladies of 1969

My lovely wife recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of her 30th birthday, which occasioned a good friend giving her a copy of the Ladies Home Journal from her birth month, March 1969. It has an advertisement for Palmolive dish detergent on the back, with the unflappable Madge insisting that a client soak her hands in it. Inside are ads for other products that no longer seem so innovative: Breck hair color, Beautyrest mattresses, and Betty Crocker's fancy new one-step, angel-food cake mix. The articles range from recipes to an interview with Elizabeth Taylor on mothering to an article by Mama Cass Elliot explaining that the diet on which she lost 110 pounds is ill-advised. No wonder people in my generation have such a finely honed sense of irony.

Nestled amidst these gems is an article reporting that a great many women surveyed report dissatisfaction with their churches. What fascinated me was how similar the complaints were to what we hear today: "The sermons aren't relevant to my daily life." "We compromise too much with the secular world." "We care too much about social justice and not enough about the Bible." "We don't do enough to combat societal evils." Then, as today, churches are too much and too little, inadequately separated and overly engaged, too hot and too cold. In this view the average parishioner is Goldilocks, desperately seeking the church that will be just right.

It's to be expected, I suppose, given the diversity of sects and disparities of belief and passion among leaders within those sects. It's unsurprising, as well, in light of the fact that 74 percent of these women reported that the most important function of religion is to "offer comfort and peace of mind." If that's what they were after, then perhaps it was good they were disappointed. After all, the same Lord who promised a peace that surpasses all understanding spoke of death and of suffering, of a sword dividing mankind, and of a great fire coming to the earth. The real question unanswered by this survey was how so many people raised in Christian churches could have come to such a wrongheaded conclusion about why those churches exist.

Fast-forward 40 years and some things make more sense now. A good many churches heard their customers and set about offering comfort and peace of mind in the form of platitudinous sermonizing, health and wealth heresies, and an amusement-park mindset. Others took to the business of "making things practical," pouring forth sermons and seminars on how to improve your marriage, your kids, your self-image, your workplace, your community. Some of this has been wondrously therapeutic, but some has sent too many of us careening away in pursuit of self-improvement at the expense of sanctification. Whatever your view of developments in American Christianity over the past 40 years, it's hard to argue that our churches have been unresponsive.

A professor of mine used to say that the problem with Congress is not that it isn't responsive enough to the people, it's that Congress is too responsive. I wonder if the same couldn't be said of some churches. After all, the one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church guards the truths and mysteries of Christian dogma, and it can only contort itself so much before it begins to betray these sacred things. The bitter irony is that in giving people what they want, churches can repel them, in the same sense that giving a child candy on demand will only make him sick.

It's worth noting in this regard that 71 percent of respondents in the 1969 survey said their children were likely to believe in God. However, how churches are supposed to help accomplish that when they are bent on giving everyone comfort and peace---as opposed to the discomfiting Gospel that sets the world on fire---is a mystery to me. I, for one, am hoping churches start making more people uncomfortable. It's an unpopular idea today, just as it was in 1969, just as it was in 33 A.D. But the Church, thank God, needn't concern itself with opinion polls.