Hear that sucking sound? That's the sound of megachurches-non-Catholic Christian churches whose Sunday services regularly draw between 2,000 and 30,000 worshipers-subduing the earth. Their number has doubled in the last five years. North America is now home to more than 1,200 of these remarkable and disquieting institutions. Why "disquieting," you ask? Isn't the theology most megachurches offer considerably softer-edged than that proclaimed from fundamentalist pulpits? Aren't megachurch members markedly less likely than other evangelicals to mix religion with politics? Yes, but there's still plenty to worry about. The Megachurch Phenomenon In 1970, North America had just ten megachurches. By 1990, there were 250. In 1994, Robert Wuthnow of the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion wrote that these ecclesiastical Goliaths were "beginning to alter American society." By 2003, they numbered 740; another 470 opened their doors in just the next three years (see Table 1).
Sixty percent of megachurches are located in the American Sun Belt, especially in the suburbs of the fast-growing "sprawl cities," including Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, and Orlando (see Table 2). A third are nondenominational. A quarter are Baptist, Southern or otherwise. (The physically largest 1 percent of Southern Baptist churches claim as members 15 percent of all Southern Baptists!) As for theological orientation, over half of megachurches call themselves evangelical, dwarfing the numbers employing any other descriptor. According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the average megachurch has a Sunday attendance of 3,857, twenty full-time paid ministerial staffers, twenty-two full-time paid program staffers, and 284 volunteer workers giving five or more hours each per week. Budgets range from the millions to the tens of millions of dollars per year. America's largest megachurch-Lakewood Church, headed by superstar pastor Joel Osteen-serves 30,000 worshipers on an average Sunday in what was formerly Houston's NBA basketball arena. But it's not the size of megachurches that worries me, or their upbeat, intricately choreographed worship services with Broadway-blockbuster production values and audiences of thousands. I'm more concerned about what goes on in members' lives the other six days of the week. Something for Everyone
Most megachurch members will tell you that the Sunday service isn't the core of their membership experience. Intensely active congregational communities sponsor a startling range of activities, on and off church grounds, every day of the week. There's a cornucopia of outreach ministries, alongside activities that few might think of as "ministries" (see Table 3). One Virginia megachurch with more than 10,000 members sponsors more than 700 small, special-interest groups that meet throughout the week, mostly in members' homes. It's been estimated that 25 percent of all Americans now belong to at least one such church-based group. With this, we're getting closer to the reason why today's megachurch explosion has me worried. The most important difference between megachurches and ordinary churches isn't pure scale. It's the Goliaths' knack for turning congregations into total communities, marked by powerful levels of fellowship and intimacy.
Journalist Bart Hinkle noted in The American Enterprise that community appears in the names of big churches more frequently than any other words except Baptist, Christ, or Christian. Further, many megachurch members even seek out "services such as career advice or soccer games from a church, when secular society provides these things in abundance." Aye, there's the rub.
Too Much for AnyoneBeing an active megachurch member means much more than Sunday worship. Membership dominates many congregants' loyalty, attention, and time. Regular churches also fill the entire private lives of some of their members, but few, if any, regular churches can match the Goliaths' offerings in putatively secular areas of life. If you were a megachurch member, you might not only worship and do charity work with fellow church members, you'd play sports with them, get marriage counseling alongside them, learn to change your own oil from them, study martial arts with them, send your kids to camp with theirs, and maybe fill your shelves with books and CDs from your church's own publishing house and record label. If that's how you're living, when do you get to be you?
Megachurches may seem benign because most teach less threatening doctrines than the hellfire-preaching fundamentalist churches. Yet, as the grids of megachurch activity calendars impress themselves onto congregants' lives-increasingly, as they form the boundaries that circumscribe those lives-we can see that the Goliaths are simply achieving domination by oth- er means. Catering to every imagin- able aspect of their members' personal needs, megachurches are achieving monopolies over their time and attention on a scale normally seen only inside totalizing cults.
If it walks like a cult and quacks like a cult but has parking for six thousand cars, it must be a megachurch.
The Opposite of MegachurchesThe megachurch stands in harsh contrast to an ideal that I wrote about in this space a few issues back ("Secularism . . . Plus," February/March 2006): "exsularism." It is a principle of emancipatory individualism-in matters of church, state, and moral liberty we call it "secularism"-applied to every aspect of life. It encourages free individuals to forge the largest possible number of the most direct possible contacts between themselves and the social institutions that matter to them, while reducing their reliance on intermediary establishments over which they have little control. The word exsular may be unfamiliar, but for many people, secular and otherwise, the principle is almost instinctive. For a prosaic example, think of parents who encourage an active youngster to join a community-based sports league rather than securing all of his or her athletic opportunities at school. Ask them why they do it, and they'll probably say, "Meeting new people, building new avenues of contact . . . it's just healthier." Those parents are on to something.
It is precisely this exsular ideal that most megachurches so effectively squeeze out of their congregants' lives.
Advice to the LifelornI'm sure few megachurch members read Free Inquiry, but, if I could write for them, I'd offer the following exsular advice. I'd begin with a rule of thumb: If you're turning to any single institution for more than a third of the content of your personal life, you're relying on it too heavily. Branch out! Get your career counseling at a community college. Line up some soccer games at the Y.
If (to strain a metaphor) life is a buffet, don't fill your plate at a single station. Wander around. Sample an unfamiliar vegetable. Try something spicy. Check out the sushi. Mix things up! Take time to be you, to establish life-option channels that don't pass through the doors of your church. Do it while you still can.
I don't expect that message to get through. I anticipate that many megachurch members will go on withdrawing, pulling further beyond the reach of publications, activities, and people that don't pass muster with the charismatic, often-authoritarian senior minister who stands at the apex of almost every megachurch.
Make no mistake: megachurches represent something genuinely new on the cultural landscape-a class of outsized institutions that enjoy broad cultural acceptance despite exerting the sort of dominion over many members' lives that is normally seen in marginal cults . . . and which hold in their sway not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of Americans.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
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