De-Instrumentalizing Liturgy
The ritual of the church’s liturgy is not just the means to the end of optimizing spiritual experience; it is itself the God-glorifying end of worship.
By Collin Slowey
I recently found myself embroiled in a contentious conversation about Roman Catholic liturgy. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, or perhaps it merely reflects my community’s atypical concentration of conservative, high-church Christians, but I wind up in such debates on a surprisingly regular basis. These days, the various arguments pro and con the Tridentine Latin Mass, the Novus Ordo, ad orientem, and versus populum (don’t worry if you don’t know the terms) are standard party fare.
This conversation, however, took a more than usually thought-provoking turn when one of my interlocutors, a genial debater of traditionalist bent, remarked: “We need to make the liturgy as transcendent and otherworldly as possible, and that is what will draw people in.” As a conservative Catholic myself and therefore a strong believer in the Mass’s supernatural power, I couldn’t bring myself to disagree. Yet something in the formulation felt off: something that went beyond our typical disputes about what language should be spoken in church or which direction the priest should face at the altar.
Simply put, it seems to me that reform-minded Christians, across denominational and theological boundaries, are increasingly tempted to try to instrumentalize liturgy. This side of the Tiber, the phenomenon might entail traditionalist laypeople seeking to optimize their worship’s aesthetic and psychological impact. Among Protestants, meanwhile, it might look like pastors and scholars hoping to shore up church attendance rates with more effective appeals to the sentiments. (Not having much exposure to Eastern Orthodox, I won’t try my luck at speaking to their experience.)
To my mind, this emphasis on worship’s utility, whether Catholic or Protestant in inflection, construes liturgy primarily as a tool for the purposes of conversion and formation.
In 2022, for instance, I attended a lecture by the conservative Presbyterian minister Carl Trueman at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. When asked about liturgy during the event’s Q&A, Trueman dismissed the high vs. low church dichotomy as a “sideshow,” then proclaimed that “what really matters is if the service captures the imagination of the congregation,” thereby deepening believers’ religious experience. To my mind, this emphasis on worship’s utility, whether Catholic or Protestant in inflection, construes liturgy primarily as a tool for the purposes of conversion and formation.
This is reasonable enough on its surface. Religious prayers, practices, and rituals are clearly pedagogical. If the more ancient understanding of the sacraments is correct, they may even be transformational. So why shouldn’t churches use them to draw in nonbelievers or fortify the faithful? The case for instrumentalization is especially strong when you consider our culture’s palpable desire for beauty and order. In a country hollowed out by materialism, it’s no coincidence that many deeply liturgical congregations are growing, while others, by and large, are not.
Still, there remains an immense problem with believers treating what is ostensibly an encounter with the divine as a means to an end, even one so noble as the sanctification and salvation of souls. In short, I would suggest that we only have two options: Either God is really present in the liturgy, in which case its transcendence flows from Him and can be at most channeled, but never controlled outright, or the sacrality of our worship is something we “make,” to quote my erstwhile interlocutor, in which case it’s actually accidental to God’s kingdom-building project.
Christians who thoroughly reject the real (i.e. more than merely symbolic) presence of Christ in the Eucharist are arguably bound to accept the latter option. Yes, human constructs can be captivating. Yes, the correct arrangements of music, movement, and prayer can reinforce one’s sense of belonging and lift one’s mind to higher things, a fact to which any good sociologist would attest. Nonetheless, isn’t it a massive overvaluation of the sentiments to indicate, as Trueman apparently does, that these ultimately superficial impacts truly are “what matters”?
The difficulty most modern Americans face is that they’re separated from God, not that they simply feel separated from Him.
The Witherspoon Institute’s R. J. Snell contends as much. “The malaises of modernity,” he writes in Public Discourse, “are difficult to inhabit and withstand, but we do not truthfully resolve them by concocting experiences. To do so treats the modern malaise as if it were a mindset or emotional tendency that is in principle resolvable by a different mindset or a different emotion.” In other words, the difficulty most modern Americans face is that they’re separated from God, not that they simply feel separated from Him. No human constructs, no matter how carefully calibrated, can bridge that gap on their own.
It would surely be perverse, meanwhile, to intentionally cultivate the impression of transcendence in liturgy while acknowledging its genuine absence. Such a reach would extend beyond sentimentality into the realm of idolatry. To quote Snell again: “Attempting to enjoy the sacramental imagination without believing in the sacraments…is nothing more than a mood toward the world without ontological grounding—it is the imagined form without the substantial form, meaning without truth.”
Things are different for Christians who revere the Eucharist as God’s Body and Blood. For if the divine is truly (albeit mysteriously) present in our midst, then we’re obliged to worship accordingly. On the one hand, this means perceiving and participating in the liturgy as something literally otherworldly, however strange this may appear to our low-church brothers and sisters, since anything less would be sacrilege. On the other hand, it also means keeping our attention and focus on God, rather than on our own or anyone else’s responses to His grace.
The Catholic phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand, a personal favorite of the late Pope Benedict, thoroughly explicates this dynamic in his book on Liturgy and Personality. Official Church ritual, as he puts it, “is not primarily intended as a means of sanctification or as an ascetic exercise. Its primary purpose is to praise and glorify God, to respond fittingly to Him.” On this account, liturgy isn’t a tool; it’s a charge. It may have a tremendous spiritual impact when fulfilled, but by its very nature, that impact can’t be directly aimed at.
Attending to congregants’ mental states for those states’ own sake would be bound to backfire in the end.
Hildebrand expands on his point by comparing the liturgy to romantic love, which “comes into existence only as a response to the value of the beloved, and which would cease to exist as soon as it became a pedagogical means for [the lover’s] own improvement.” He continues:
The deepest pedagogical effect is achieved through that which is not used as a pedagogical means: It is achieved through that which, independent of pedagogical action, dispenses it as a superfluum or gift of superabundance. Thus the deepest and most organic transformation of man in the spirit of Christ is found precisely in that point where we purely respond to values, in the giving up of ourselves to God’s glory, in the glorifying of God performed as divine service (emphases in original).
Sir Roger Scruton comes to a parallel conclusion in his (admittedly very heterodox) Soul of the World. There, God is identified as the pure Subject, Whom no creature may rightly objectify. Worship, meanwhile, is defined as the definitive I-Thou encounter, in which reality must be treated “not as a means to satisfy this or that need or appetite, but as an end in itself.” For Scruton, then, as for the Thomist Josef Pieper, religion is a prescriptive act of leisure.
If there’s any substance to this perspective, and I think there evidently is, it should make us profoundly wary of liturgical utilitarianism, however well intentioned. After all, no loving husband would view his marriage as a mere tool for individual growth. Similarly, no faithful wife would willingly manipulate her relationship with her spouse in an attempt to win converts to the faith. Just so, as long as we follow St. Paul in defining the Church as the Bride of Christ, we would be remiss to approach the liturgy with anything less than a full focus on the Bridegroom incarnate.
This is not to say liturgy’s impacts should never be considered. I sing in a liturgical choir whose director fervently desires that her craft give our church’s congregation and visitors a beautiful, uplifting accompaniment to their prayer, and I count this a great blessing, as do all the families who sit in the pews for Sunday Mass. Nonetheless, our music ministry’s final determinant for which songs we sing and how is what would “respond [most] fittingly to God,” and this is as it should be. Attending to congregants’ mental states for those states’ own sake would be bound to backfire in the end.
It seems to me that Bishop Barron, founder of the popular Catholic media organization Word on Fire, demonstrates the appropriate balance. In his retrospective on the 2024 National Eucharistic Congress, for instance, he praises the conference’s organizers and participants for “exud[ing] the spirit of the supernatural” through reverent acts “redolent of a mysteriously higher world.” But he then clarifies that said spirit was not a product of the attendees’ efforts, but of their obedience. It was the dutiful acknowledgement of God’s presence and authority, per the bishop, that allowed Him to really “breathe through the proceedings.”
This “breath” is what every Christian, and any person who sincerely seeks grace in the liturgy, should be after. I don’t expect my peers to stop arguing about the details, for offering right praise and thanksgiving to God is a worthy and necessary aspiration, and the prayers we say, the music we listen to, and the postures we assume all matter. But let’s stop trying to fabricate transcendence or instrumentalize otherworldliness. Let us, rather, seek first the kingdom and His righteousness, and we have it on good authority that these things shall be ours as well.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark,
from public domain images courtesty of Rawpixel
Collin Slowey is a writer living in Washington, D.C. He hails from Bryan, Texas and holds a degree from Baylor University, where he studied Political Science, Great Texts, and Film.
