Okay, everyone: It’s time to go back to church.
Both Gallup and Pew reported recently that church attendance, which dropped during covid lockdowns, has not bounced back and now appears unlikely to “revert to pre-pandemic levels,” as Gallup put it.
As someone who believes religion enjoys more than its share of public resources and cultural deference, I should be fine with that. But I’m worried about churches because I’m worried about all spaces where people come together in shared purpose. Meaning-full spaces. Like theaters.
Since covid hit, numerous theaters have closed or gone on hiatus or shrunk their seasons. The Post reports that, since the pandemic, 25 to 30 percent of theatergoers have not returned.
Churches and theaters are both places where people can feel what the Rev. Molly Baskette calls “the participatory transcendence that you get when humans are in the flesh together.”
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If that sounds vaguely unsanitary to you, you’ve been through a pandemic. It was right to press pause on these moments. But getting people to gather again hasn’t been as simple as pressing play.
Baskette, who is lead minister at First Church Berkeley UCC in California, tells me that when her church started meeting in person again in the fall of 2021, congregants simply weren’t reappearing. “I was talking to a lot of friends and colleagues,” says Baskette, and “everyone was at about half to two-thirds of pre-covid attendance.”
Capital Repertory Theatre, in Albany, N.Y., reopened in the second half of 2021, too, after being shuttered more than a year. But Producing Artistic Director Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill says that, like fellow members of the League of Resident Theatres across the country, Capital Rep had trouble reclaiming its audiences, especially subscribers — the patrons who are “at the heart of regional theater success.”
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I’ve been to packed Broadway shows this summer and a crowded Edinburgh Festival Fringe. But destination playgoing is the theatrical equivalent of a pilgrimage to Mecca or sightseeing at St. Peter’s Basilica. It doesn’t keep theater alive as a regular part of life.
And though stage adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” are apparently immune to the general malaise, seasonal performances are more like, well, Christmas or Rosh Hashanah attendance — a family tradition, not a sustained commitment.
People still need participatory transcendence. And they don’t seem to fear public spaces anymore. So what’s the problem?
Habitual churchgoing and theatergoing are exactly that — habits. Habits that covid broke.
Maybe some habits needed to end. Congregants who came to church “out of loyalty and positive inertia,” says Baskette, used “the rupture of covid to make the break.” Mancinelli-Cahill says that during the pandemic, some subscribers “asked themselves, what’s important in my life?” and subsequently moved closer to children or sunshine.
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When it took away our habitual obligations, covid gave to us a moment to reassess. What do I want to commit to? Where do I want to spend my time and money? What do I value? And yes, even what do I believe in?
I believe in the power of art, and in the sense of connection an audience feels — and helps create — at a certain play on a certain night in a certain place. As a young adult without much money, I always thought, “When I’m a grown-up,” I would be a subscriber.
But even though I can afford it now, I hesitate. I resist the very thing that Mancinelli-Cahill explains makes subscribers essential: “buying into the season as a whole knowing there’s probably one show they probably don’t like that much.” I mean, I know it’s statistically unlikely, but what if I don’t want to see “A Christmas Carol”? Why should I pay for it? A churchgoer who doesn’t agree with every sermon or policy might feel the same way.
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To some extent, of course, churches and theaters have to offer what people want. That’s a hard question these days. Churches are contending with the growth of the “nones” (people who claim no particular religious affiliation). Theaters are wrestling with issues of diversity and social justice both in how they are run and in what they produce.
Meanwhile, we have to remember that, yes, a theater or church offers individual shows or services that might or might not appeal. But it stands for something larger, too. It makes something larger.
If you don’t value that something larger — if you disagree with the politics of your church or no longer believe in the supernatural being that lends it authority; if you think another cause needs your support more than the performing arts do — I get it. I’m all for aligning your behavior with your beliefs.
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But if you do value it, you’d better get back to it, or it won’t be there anymore. For you or for anyone else.
Baskette and Mancinelli-Cahill have started to make that point explicit. Mancinelli-Cahill says she tells audiences now, “We love you for coming. We would love you more if you subscribed.”
Baskette says she finally said to churchgoers who were attending sporadically or on Zoom, “I’m asking you to put yourself in the room. We need you in this space.”
The immunocompromised get a pass. But for the rest of us, it’s time to start rebuilding our habits and reinhabiting the buildings that give our lives meaning. Go back to that meaningful space — or go find one — and keep going.
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