why i shouldn't go to church anymore - by Rebecca Lowe
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why i shouldn't go to church anymore<br>even though sometimes i want to
Rebecca Lowe<br>Aug 03, 2026
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This is the seventh in my series of short, quickly written, weekly philosophy essays.
I grew up going to church, and continued to think of myself as a Christian until about fifteen years ago. But this piece isn’t going to be about why I stopped being a Christian. It’s going to be about why I don’t go to church anymore.<br>Perhaps this seems like a strange thing to write about. Perhaps you think, “Of course Rebecca doesn’t go to church anymore, now she’s no longer a Christian!” But the truth is that sometimes I have a strong desire to go to church. And when I mention this to my Christian friends, they tend to say, “Then go!”.<br>Thanks for reading the ends don't justify the means! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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So I’ll start by explaining why I sometimes still have the desire to go to church, and then I’ll get on to why I don't act on these desires. This will give me the chance, along the way, to sketch out some thoughts on desire, belief, and their interrelation.<br>I miss the aesthetic experiences<br>First, and most pressingly, I sometimes have the desire to go to church because I miss its aesthetic dimension. Particularly, I miss the music and the language of the services I used to attend. I miss this music and this language not for the theological messages they convey or represent, but for what I think of as their overwhelming and particular beauty. (I’m pretty sure I can separate out these things!)<br>I’ll save my niche philosophical views on beauty for another time. But one of the aesthetic experiences I’ve valued the most — something I’ve experienced maybe 40 or 50 times — is singing or listening to the text of compline, a late-night Christian service, in a dark quire. Consider the phrase “Keep me as the apple of an eye”, its final word all stretched out, the vocal line building and building up and down in both pitch and volume. Then, place this phrase among many other such phrases, sung in related patterns of elongation and contour. It’s just so beautiful to me, in many ways.<br>I have a similar reaction to certain hymns. Take the carefully prepared and resolved suspension between the soprano and alto lines in the third section of each verse of the Vaughan Williams harmonisation of Deck thyself my soul with gladness — all sinuous and satisfying after the opening heavy block-chordal texture. I’ve even felt similarly about the imagery offered in a sermon. When someone once spoke about how hot the Calvary sand must’ve been to touch, for instance — hot under one’s feet, hot against one’s face.<br>On the rare occasions that I do go to church these days — in the sense of attending a service, that is, as opposed to ‘visiting a church’ in order to spend time exploring its architecture or contents or history — it hits me hard how much I miss this aesthetic dimension. I feel it when I go the midnight service in my hometown with my mother on Christmas Eve, and I feel it at weddings and funerals. I felt it last week, when I went to a service with some friends during a conference in a hotel with a chapel.<br>This brings me to the second thing I miss about going to church. This thing is harder to clarify, and harder to separate out from the more nebulous idea of ‘wishing I were still a Christian’, which is something I don’t wish for some reasons I’ll give below.<br>I still feel intellectual interest and moral admiration<br>This second thing pertains to the intellectual interest I generally derive from going to church, and the moral admiration I often feel while doing so, even though I’m no longer a Christian.<br>In the case of the intellectual interest, the best example I can give is the fantastic metaphysical challenge posed at the beginning of the sermon during the service at the conference hotel: “Imagine yourself Solomon, alone in the darkness, asleep.” This sentence continues to make me shake my head in wonder! First, there’s the idea of imagining yourself as somebody else. Then, you’ve got to try to discard yourself from the mix. And then, wait for it… the kicker comes that you also have to imagine yourself (no, sorry, himself!) asleep. Have you ever tried to imagine being asleep? How would you go about it? That’s my favourite part. But the whole thing made me think so hard that I missed the rest of the sermon.<br>Okay, perhaps you want to say that this isn’t an example of me being intellectually interested by a Christian idea, per se. That I could’ve found this example at a philosophy conference. But my point is that going to church makes me think about all kinds of intellectually interesting things. That it’s not just that I remain intellectually interested in Christian theology, but that I also find church services — and particularly, the philosophical seriousness of their texts and liturgy — a valuable and particular...