The Distortion of Christian Ritual

Abstract

Although we normally expect christian liturgies to have benevolent effects on the participants, this may not always be the case. Christian rituals may not only fail to achieve their intended purpose, they may also suffer from distortion, with harmful results. Two kinds of distortion may be distinguished here: “recipient distortion”, which arises from defects in the recipients of the ritual action; and “symbolic distortion”, which arises from within the patterns of the ritual symbols themselves. We need to attend to strategies of detection and correction, particularly for symbolic distortion. The extensive footnotes to this article constitute a sub-text in themselves: this is a deliberate choice on the part of the author in order to separate basic argument from illustration, comment, and useful references.