Spectacle Seekers

Christmas without snow

Millions of Americans spend Christmas in shorts. Palm trees, ninety-degree afternoons, lights wrapped around a cactus. And yet ask almost any of them what the “Christmas feeling” looks like, and you’ll hear about snow, sleigh bells, and a fire in the hearth.

Kind of odd, isn’t it? Most of us have never actually lived the snowy Christmas we picture. We carry a feeling we’ve attached to a season, and that feeling came from somewhere: songs, store windows, movies.

That isn’t evil by itself. God made us to feel. But somewhere along the way the moderns figured out that if you can play with people’s emotions, you can make them feel something on cue. Hollywood has gotten so good at it that we forget we’re watching a set. The danger is that we start preferring the staged thing to the real thing.

So here’s a question worth sitting with, and it’s one we all have to answer for ourselves: Do I go to church to feel something, or to get fed?

So nobody gets the wrong idea

The Spirit still moves. Plenty of believers know what it is to be overcome, to sit there with nothing left to do but weep as the love of God comes over them. This isn’t an article against that.

But a moment when God overtakes someone is a different thing from shaking and lurching every Sunday, on schedule, where everybody expects it. There are people who seek the spectacle, and there are people whose attention simply gets stolen by it. Either way, the eyes end up somewhere other than Christ.

A woman who was overcome (and stayed in her right mind)

One of the best examples is Sarah Edwards, wife of Jonathan Edwards. In January 1742 she went through days of being overwhelmed by the love of God, so much that her body couldn’t hold it at times. Jonathan described her experience (without naming her) in Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1743), and her own account was later published in Sereno Dwight’s Life of President Edwards (1830).

Here’s what matters: she didn’t come out of it chasing the next one. She came out more humble, more at peace with God’s will, and more useful to the people around her. Overcome, but still in her right mind. That’s the fruit.

What Edwards actually said

Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) right in the middle of all this, and he was careful in both directions. In Part II, section II:

“It is no sign that affections have the nature of true religion, or that they have not, that they have great effects on the body.”

Read that twice. Shaking doesn’t prove it’s God. Not shaking doesn’t prove it isn’t. The body is not the test.

So what is? Edwards’s twelfth sign (Part III, section XII):

“Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice.”

He wraps up that section calling Christian practice “the chief of all the signs of saving grace.” In plain terms: what happens on Monday tells you more about Sunday than Sunday does.

The history mirror

No need to point at anybody living. History hands us plenty of mirrors, and compared to some of what goes on today, these can even look tame. But the patterns are the same.

Cane Ridge, Kentucky (August 1801). A camp meeting drew a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands. There was real preaching and, by many accounts, real conversion. But there were also the “exercises”: falling, rolling, dancing, barking, and the famous “jerks.” Barton Stone, who hosted the meeting, and the Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright both wrote about them later. Even some who defended the revival worried the exercises were becoming the point.

Edward Irving’s London meetings (1830s). Irving was a gifted Scottish preacher. Starting in 1831, tongues and prophecies broke out in his meetings, and over time the “utterances” began directing the congregation. The prophecy started steering the preacher instead of the Word steering the prophecy. Irving was removed from his pulpit in 1832, deposed by his presbytery in 1833, and died in 1834 at just 42.

The Millerites (1844). Followers of William Miller came to fix the Lord’s return on October 22, 1844. Many sold farms and left crops in the field. When the day passed, it became known as the “Great Disappointment.” The thrill of a date had replaced the patience of watching.

Oneida (1848–1881). John Humphrey Noyes taught that believers could reach sinless perfection and built a community around himself in upstate New York, including “complex marriage.” Everything ran through Noyes. When he fled to Canada in 1879, the community soon came apart.

The signs that keep showing up

Line those up and the same marks keep appearing:

• The experience becomes the product. People come for what happens in the room, not for who is preached.
• The leader becomes indispensable. Take him away and it falls apart.
• The novelty has to keep climbing. Last week’s thrill isn’t enough this week.
• Doubting the show gets treated as doubting God. Ask a question and you’re “quenching the Spirit.”
• The Gospel slides to the side. Christ crucified becomes the warm-up act.

That’s what a reverse Religious Affections looks like. Edwards wrote to help people tell real fire from painted fire. Spectacle trains people to prefer the paint.

Turning the mirror around

This is the hard part, because it isn’t about “them.” It’s about us. Any of us can chase a feeling. So, honestly:

• When we leave on Sunday, do we remember the text that was preached, or just how the room felt?
• Would we still go if nothing “happened”?
• Are we traveling to catch fire somewhere, or meeting Christ in His Word at home, where nobody’s watching?
• Is our faith any different on Monday, at work and at the kitchen table?
• Do we want God, or what God does to our emotions?

Here’s the good news: nobody has to manufacture anything. The real thing is better than the staged thing. Christ is real, His cross is real, His empty tomb is real, and His Word is right there on the table. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17, ESV). When the Spirit stirs the affections, He stirs them about Him, and the fruit shows up in ordinary life.

So go to be fed. If God overwhelms you along the way, praise Him. Just don’t go hunting for the snow when He’s already given you the Savior.