Submitted by Clark on Thu, 08/23/2007 - 18:36 –
4 comments
ReligionWriter takes an example from economist Tyler Cowen's new book and applies it to attending religious services. Tyler approves.
The corollary example acknowledges that religious services can be extremely boring. In my experience, this is often an unspoken fact among attendees. No one likes admitting to making mental lists during church for fear of looking less than holy. Of course, if we were to embrace the idea that church is often boring, then we could do something to fix it. The economic lesson is to create self-incentives for yourself to encourage paying attention. This involves moving past the guilt that you need an incentive to pay attention and coming to grips with your inner economist.
Interesting… The
Interesting... The commentary on "Pray each prayer as if it were your last" is a curious addition. To some extent, the trickiness lies in the fact that Christians (at least the flavor we discuss a lot here) believe that the purpose of church is not entertainment at all, but the fulfillment of a spiritual obligation. There are other aspects of it, of course, but when those incentives fall away it gets down to brass tacks: You're supposed to.
Once the 'supposed to' is removed, I'm not really sure why I would even want to provide myself with incentives, you know? I'm not being snarky about his article, but to some extent it presupposes that the goal is the creation of a particular self-perception. Is church even an efficient way to do that?
I agree with you that
I agree with you that Christians do not believe that Church is entertainment, and that ultimately it is something you are supposed to do. But I'm not sure article is trying to remove the 'supposed to' from church going.
It seems premised on the idea that there is something of value in a Church service. You could hate art or get bored at the art gallery--neither of which changes the value of the pieces on the wall. It just changes whether or not you find that value.
Christians often believe that sermons are influenced by God, or at the very least, through preparation and prayer, the pastor is bringing something to the church that is of value. The point of the incentives are not to create value where there is none, but rather to motivate yourself to seek out the value instead of letting it pass you by.
That is my interpretation anyways.
Christians often believe
True, true. I suppose this is where it gets tricky using the language of markets talking about belief systems. A lot of concepts are analagous, and translate well, but often the terminology has some mismatches...
Two things, from the
Two things, from the professor's corner of the room:
(1) There is a desperate and necessary thing for those of us who run our mouths for people's benefit (and I fall into this camp - after all, I'm an evangelist for physics as well as an evangelist for Jesus) to recognize when what we're doing is fruitful and necessary and when what we're doing is completely full of suck. Given the importance many of them ascribe to their work, pastors are full of suck a LARGE measure of the time. And surprisingly few of them place any measure of importance on delivering their message in a way that doesn't bore the tar out of the populace.
Maybe it's the professionalism that has been shoved down my throat in higher ed, but I really have come to believe that burden is on the pastor to communicate their message effectively. Yeah, I know pastors have a whole lot of pressure on their plates and this is one more thing I'm adding to it, but the truly concerned pastors I've come across put a TON of work into this regardless of the other pressures, and it pays off.
(2) If the only reason I had for going to standard mainline church was the fact that I need to hear decent teaching and need to be seen doing my Christian duty once a week, I'd quit going right now. I've long since decided that "Christian duty" is absolutely worthless and is going to have nothing to do with transforming my life. Frankly, my continued attendance in that church is down to three or four families with whom my family has built up relationships. We know how difficult it would be to build up new relationships with people of even remotely like-mind (and like-weirdness).
If I ever lapse into any kind of advocacy around these parts, it's going to be directed towards the benefits of real, honest fellowship. Too often we do look at church as obligation and not as someplace we can draw real, unforced benefit.
(Or, to steal something else from Brant Hansen: maybe we ought to throw this church thing decidedly out of balance.)
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