Saturday, October 07, 2006

Calling Richard Dawkins ...

... who, according to his latest book, thinks he can be considered religious, even though he doesn't believe in God: Megachurches without God.

If memory serves, in one of his early novels, Peter De Vries for all practical purposes invented the drive-in church. It was a sort of mall filled with all manner of concession stands and other distractions, "with a small worship area toward the rear."

Rapid update: Memory did serve, but as is usually the case, imperfectly. Here is De Vries's own inimitable original:

"Our church is, I believe, the first split-level church in America. It has five rooms and two baths downstairs -- dining area, kitchen and three parlors for committee and group meetings -- with a crawl space behind the furnace ending in the hillside into which the structure is built. Upstairs is one huge all-purpose interior, divisible into different-sized components by means of sliding walls and convertible into an auditorium for putting on plays, a gymnasium for athletics, and a ballroom for dances. There is a small worship area at one end. This a has a platform cantilevered on both sides, with a free-form pulpit designed by Noguchi. It consists of a slab of marble with four legs of four delicately differing fruitwoods, to symbolize the four Gospels, and their failure to harmonize. Behind it dangles a large multicolored mobile, its interdenominational parts swaying, as one might fancy in perpetual reminder of the Pauline stricture against those 'blown by every wind if doctrine.' Its proximity to the pulpit inspires a steady flow of more familiar congregational whim, at which we shall not long demur, going on with our tour to say that in back of this building is a newly erected clinic, with medical and neuropsychiatric wings, both indefinitely expandable. Thus People's Liberal is a church designed to meet the needs of today, and to serve the whole man."
- Rev. Andrew Mackerel describing his People's Liberal Church of Avalon, Conn., in The Mackerel Plaza (I found this at a blog called Sobering Thoughts.)

Here, by the way, is the "small worship area" up close: "… a free form pulpit … consists of a slab of marble set on four legs of four delicately differing fruitwoods, to symbolize the Four Gospels, and their failure to harmonize. Behind it dangles a large multi-colored mobile, its interdenominational parts swaying, as one might fancy, in perpetual reminder of the Pauline stricture against 'those blown by every wind of doctrine' ..." (This I found in "Images of Protestant Clergy in American Novels".)

3 comments:

  1. Actually, I think Robert Heinlein invented the concept, back in "Stranger in a Strange Land," with his depiction of the Fosterites sect. (Holy-roller showmanship post-Mormon types.)

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  2. We discover the limits of my education: I have not read Stranger in a Strange Land. I'm sure you're right.

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  3. Anonymous5:57 PM

    And I think Walker Percy depicts such a place in one of his novels, or perhaps in an essay. In the South, it isn't so far-fetched....(I'm from the South, so not dissing the region, just making the point!)

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