Is Nothing Sacred? The Eclipse of the Holy in Contemporary Christianity

Abstract

Why does idea of holy play so diminished a role personal and institutional religion? That is a question quite a number of theologians and sociologists of religion are asking themselves, and they are joined by similarly large numbers of interested bystanders. Much of what I have to say will be based on intuition as well as my own observation of religious and devotional practices, drawn last decade from a variety of churches and places of worship. This lingering concern received a kind of epiphanic verification when a friend visiting a recently completed church a city not far distant remarked to me that building struck her as tasteful, spacious, and completely lacking what she called the sense of sacred. She is by no means a liturgical conservative and was most certainly not commenting on placement of tabernacle or paucity of imagery. It seemed to me that what she had observed was indeed case and symptomatic of a much wider problem which warrants attention not only of those professionally involved with institutional religion but those many more who are, to use a vulgarism beloved of our mercantile age, in market for faith. Where has idea, or better, experience of holy gone? Why, a time of astonishing religiosity, does sense of sacred seem so diminished? What do I mean by public religiosity? A trivial example: business section of The Columbus Dispatch a few days ago president of a local company was asked to describe nature of his