Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed something, and I don't know if it's too much of a generalization but I see it a fair bit, so maybe it's generally true.

Generally speaking, non-religious people understand church to be a building. Whereas religious people understand that the people are the church, the building is just a building.

Now granted some of them are really nice buildings, and some are really old, and you can be both religious and really like the building, but the two concepts are still separate.

In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".

Whereas to the non-religious the idea of turning a church building into something else is some kind of desecration. (Obviously this isn't the case for this article, but I noted the first question as him getting that response, and also the immediate rebuttal that he's starting a cult.)

Anyway, I thought it an interesting, if tangentially observation. And as with all generalizations there will be lots of exceptions.

View on HN

> In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".

This isn’t accurate except for perhaps certain parts of Protestantism. To Catholics, Orthodox, probably portions of the Church of England etc, ie a majority of Christianity church buildings are holy and specially blessed. They hold the Eucharist in the Tabernacle which these Churches believe is the body and blood of Jesus under the guise of bread which is the most holy thing for them. In order for these buildings to be used for any other purpose all the holy things would need to be removed and the building specifically deconsecrated.

sure but a church building that hasn’t been used in years surely was already deconsecrated

You're kind of proving the point. The building is not the real thing, as any sense in which it is holy (which is a word that means set apart for a special purpose) can be readily undone. The church doesn't cease to exist when that happens. It moves. The same way the Tabernacle (the ancient Tabernacle) moved, which happened on a semi-regular basis. The place is less important than who is there.

Surely if the church was just the people such a ritual of consecration would have fallen by the wayside a long time ago.

Anyway, there are in fact many christians who view churches as sacred in themselves. Good luck painting christianity with any such a wide brush.

The inclusion of the word “just” makes this comment not so relevant to the discussion. Nobody is claiming that.

I'm afraid i'm missing the point of the entire conversation, then. Nobody was claiming church was just a building to begin with either.

It seems like this is confusing The Church with a church.

Notre Dame Cathedral is a church, but you could burn it to the ground tomorrow and it wouldn’t have hardly any impact at all on the persistence of The Church.

Such is claimed, but I suspect that this is a misleading truth. Christianity is an extremely successful religion, but if it were less popular and Notre Dame was one of only a few church buildings (even, just one of a few with that level of grandeur), then burning it to the ground would indeed have a profound impact on the persistence of The Church. For those religions with a single temple, the destruction of that building is more than merely traumatic, it is catastrophic. Christianity only avoids this by having so very many buildings, many of them as spectacular as Notre Dame.

In the NT and early history of the [Catholic] church it was explicitly the people and not the building.

Perhaps, but that was 2000 years ago and not necessarily identical to how people feel/believe today.

Your interpretation of "people and not the building" is pretty unique to Protestantism in the Christian belief, and arguably the central tenet of Methodism. It is absent in much of the history of Christian (and most other monotheistic) beliefs.

I recommend you look at (as an example), what the Catholic Church did since around the conversion of the Romans through to Vatican II. Even when I was a kid (some decades after Vatican II), attending Catholic school and regularly attending mass, the Catholic Church building was considered an incredibly special place by the congregations.

In my school, the chapel (which held a tabernacle), was once used by some well-meaning but incredibly ill-educated pupils to hold a palm reading booth for a school fete fundraiser. When the more traditional Catholics in the faculty found out, they burst in, soaking the pupils and chapel with holy water and latin prayer (first time used in the school since Vatican II! Showed their colours that day!), claiming that to engage in the occult near a tabernacle was an incredibly offensive thing to do, because the space held a tabernacle, end of.

The whole thing about Protestantism is to remove mystery. Research the early history from Luther through the English Tudors and the King James Bible, all the way through to the Mayflower and the reason why they were fleeing Europe to the New World, and you'll see that big and plain. It doesn't mean that a sense of mystery in terms of rituals and rites held in special designated spaces died and went away though, it just means it's less present than it once was.

For many, many people (billions on Earth today), "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not. And this is not limited to Christianity either.

As this was a Methodist Church, I suspect most people who used it would consider it "just a building", albeit one with sentimental memories (weddings, funerals, weekly worship), but sure, it's bricks and mortar and balconies and pews and a broken organ. shrug.

It's just that's actually quite an unusual viewpoint on a global scale, for most denominations.

Catholics abandon and sell church buildings all the time. Once you've removed a small handful of sacred items and done the de-consecration-ritual, it is "just a building" to them too.

There are vast numbers of repurposed churches in Catholic countries. Just walk the streets in an Italian city.

I'm not familiar with the specifics for catholics, but it is conceptually not too different from how protestants do it.

With the caveat, best repeated in every post under this article, that of course very strong sentimental feelings can be attached to a church building. You could put a religious dimension on the morality of hurting peoples feelings by destroying or changing a beautiful thing I guess. But, it is not the house itself that is holy in a holy house.

The piece you're missing is de-consecration. A consecrated space is holy whether the people are in it or not, within the Catholic tradition. Yes, you can deconsecrate it, and then it's just a building. However a loaded tabernacle makes it a holy space in the eyes of Catholics even if it's an empty space. It is conceptually very different to Methodism: the entire point of Methodism is to abandon such mysteries.

I think we agree, because I did mention the de-consecration as a crucial step.

The Lutheran churches where I'm from do a similar thing.

I'm eastern orthodox so not part of one of the groups you're talking about but we share a lot with catholics so maybe close enough.

The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle? I mean I doubt they would have been pleased about this without it but lay catholics I know take the tabernacle extremely seriously.

I don't particularly, aesthetically, like to see churches used for secular purposes but if they've been properly desacralized I don't have any strong religious objections.

> "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not

This is true but it implies a causality that is backwards I think. Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years. If they stop doing that the church doesn't immediately "lose its holiness" or whatever but it does change: it becomes a shrine or a relic or maybe just a building.

> The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle?

Yes, I think the tabernacle was the crux of the issue here.

> Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years.

That's a more modern, and dare I say, Methodist view of the church. If a space has a tabernacle in it with the body of Christ in it, within the Catholic tradition, that space is holy and consecrated even when there isn't a human soul in the place, because by definition there is a belief that the soul of Christ is in that space.

You can deconsecrate that space and remove that blessed sacrament and then it's just a building, but in the eyes of most Catholics the space itself has a mystery even in the absence of worshipping congregations.

Like I said I'm orthodox and have never been much exposed to protestant theology other than it just being sort of in the air in western secular culture.

I think you'd get interesting answers if you polled lay catholics with a question like "which is more holy, a consecrated but never-used church, or a parish recently desacralized after centuries of regular use."

There's definitely one "correct" answer if you asked a bishop or a catholic theologian. But I have noticed that there is often a big difference between lay religious experience and hierarchically controlled official dogma. A poll a few years ago had less than half of american catholics believing in transubstantiation, for example.

In the spirit of Father Ted (watch it if you've never seen it, it's fantastic), I think we are heading into the reaches of an ecumenical matter... :)

Yup I'm gonna second this one. I grew up in Cologne and Christians here generally don't think the Cologne Cathedral [1] (which holds among other things, according to the Church the bones of the three magi) is "just a building" and if you wanted to argue to turn it into a mall next week you'd probably get a pretty strong reaction from members of the church

[1] https://www.wandererscompass.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/...

If you wanted to turn the cathedral of cologne into a mall you’d get a pretty strong reaction from _me_, who’s neither religious nor has ever been to Cologne!

>if you wanted to argue to turn it into a mall next week you'd probably get a pretty strong reaction from members of the church

Even us atheists should hope that the building would get a little more love and respect than that.

Growing up Methodist, we learned it via church camp singalong:

A church is not a building

A church is not a steeple

A church is not a resting place

A church is a people

I am the church

You are the church

We are the church together

All who follow Jesus

All around the world

Yes were the church to-clap!-gether.

I don’t believe in any of it anymore, but it’s still a nice sentiment - the only thing I really miss about Christianity is the community.

same -- maybe you should look into the Quakers, they're basically a denomination that is only community and sans doctrine, is my understanding. I only haven't followed this advice for bad reasons

The Church building is only considered Holy when Christ is considered present for Eucharist. Should it be removed along with the Altar, it only becomes a building, to Catholics at least. This is why abandon Churches can be converted to other things, in Montreal there are examples of these buildings.

OP is correct here by saying that the Church is the people. It’s just that the word has two meanings, the church building and the Church of Christ.

It’s also why sometimes you hear Christians say things like “your family is also your Church”

According to canon law, a Catholic church must be desacralized (or deconsecrated) in order to be licitly used for other, though not just any, purposes[0].

[0] https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/when-a-church-is-de...

It's possible that this is generally true, but that's definitely not my perception. Growing up I remember hearing about stories like this [0] where people camped out in a church for over a decade to try to stop it from being closed. As someone who isn't religious, I still can't understand the level of attachment to the building itself, and it's hard to imagine that this would happen from people not ascribing some sort of religious significance to the building itself. That said, I know that there are some notable differences between Catholics and other Christians in terms of veneration, so maybe this perception is just due to my growing up in an area where other types of Christianity weren't as common, and elsewhere in the country where Catholics aren't as common, the generalization would hold more true.

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/massachusetts-church-protest-11...

I wonder if it is similar to people who camp out in trees to keep them from being cut down. Maybe it is the same sort of veneration in both cases?

“No, stop, this important.”

> Generally speaking, non-religious people understand church to be a building. Whereas religious people understand that the people are the church, the building is just a building.

The word "church" itself is used to refer to the building in several languages; some of the buildings get some fancier word like "cathedral" or "dom church" or just "dom", like the Kölnerdom or Nidarosdomen. It's a type of building the same way that you expect certain things of a Rathaus or office building or detached house.

Of course, it is also used to refer to what in secular contexts would be called a club or organization, like "the church of $country". E.g. if you want Norwegian waffles abroad, Sjømannskirken (literally "The seamen's church") is very likely to have them. Norwegian churches-as-organizations run partially on coffee & waffles.

The only other group I can think of off the top of my head that get called the same as a building is parliament? While with churches it's kind of as if we used just one word to describe a football field, the football team, and that football team's supporters. Homonyms can trip people up.

So for people who aren't in the organization, but know that people associated with that kind of organization take umbrage at a lot of things that they can't easily predict, it's no wonder that churches-the-buildings have mental priority because that's what they actually experience in their daily lives: Buildings that exist in their vicinity, that often represent a sizable investment, and that they might even get invited to for some rituals like marriages and funerals. The … Jesus club is about as visible to them as a local role-playing club, or indoor sports club.

> The word "church" itself is used to refer to the building in several languages

Including English, for that matter.

> Whereas religious people understand that the people are the church, the building is just a building.

Many (most?) religions invest enormous amounts in those buildings, some with staggering displays of wealth. Even in many/most towns, the religious institution is the nicest building around.

You're a bit off here.

First, everyone (faithful or not) understands that "church" could mean physical structure or the body of people who attend. The word was frequently used both ways in my Southern Baptist youth, for example, and I'm familiar with similar use patterns from the Catholics I've known.

HOWEVER it IS true that some flavors of Christianity DO see the physical building as blessed, consecrated, or whatever, and somehow important in and of itself. It varies WIDELY by faith; neither position is universal at all.

My sense is that GENERALLY this distinction maps to the adherence to/belief in actual sacraments -- ie, rituals written out and led by specific clergy that lead to desirable spiritual goals.

The Roman church, for example, has a number of these that are considered important to your spiritual life. For a faithful Catholic, Communion involves actual transubstantiation, and requires the priest. You're probably not truly married unless you're married in a Catholic ceremony by a priest in a church. Confession matters. Etc.

By contrast, most mainline protestant churches don't really have any of these. Your relationship to God is between you and God; the pastor leads the church, but is not seen as someone with a hotline to the almighty.

Many or most of them DO things that look like Communion, but it's entirely symbolic; the act itself has no special spiritual power, and there is no expectation of transubstantiation. It's done maybe quarterly largely because the Gospels say Jesus said to "do this in remembrance of me."

Most protestant sects don't think a church wedding has any additional spiritual weight, and certainly don't require one. Marriage is between you, your spouse, and God. I went to a Baptist wedding on a golf course last fall where the officiant was the groom's nonclergy (but devout) uncle. That's normal.

There are many meanings. Off the top of my head:

1. church meaning a building 2. church meaning an organisation - e.g. "Roman Catholic Church" 3. church militant - all Christians on earth 4. church triumphant - all of redeemed humanity. If you are a universalist (someone who believes all of humanity is saved) this would be synonymous with all of humanity.

I am sure I have missed things out, and there are lots of shades of meaning and different levels with regard to organisations.

Is it the difference between a church building and a temple? The Romans would put a wall (or it could have been a ditch) around some ground. The wall was called a fanum. That which was outside of the fanum was called the profanum (pro = before) or profane. Inside the fanum was sacred or holy ground where the sanctuary was situated. We see this kind of think in Greek Temples, Egyptian Temples, the Temple of Solomon, etc. Perhaps some people view their church buildings similar to how ancients viewed their temples.

Where I grew up, in the non-evangelical, very mainline American Presbyterian tradition, the church was the building, and the Church was the congregation of believers, both those who worshipped in the church and those who shared their beliefs.

It's just two different words, I feel like most people recognize both.

Yes, the Word of God says the "church" is either the whole set of all believers in Jesus Christ or a local group of them. It's people who together make up His "body" while He is the "head." Example verses:

https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-the-church.html

False teaching that contradicts God's Word often tries to elevate specific people or buildings while the Word elevates Christ. Over time, more religions started focusing a lot on their buildings. They identified as Christian even though their practices were getting further and further from Biblical examples. This caused much confusion.

Our church would just call it an old building that used to house a church (group of people). Hopefully, the members are still gathering to worship God, read the Word, share Christ, and love each other. Those are what's important.

This depends greatly on the denomination. Pious Catholics care greatly about their church buildings.

I was only talking about Christians that put God's Word center. Catholicism is a different, church-centered faith that came later.

For example, in Christianity, they only venerate God and pray to God through Jesus alone. Peter and Hebrews says we are all priests who have direct access to God, coming boldly, as His adopted sons and daughters. Jesus also represents us before God with nobody else really needed.

Whereas, Catholicism taught people to venerate and pray to mere humans. They pray to Mary hoping she will represent them, too. That's idolatry in God's Word. It's also something we don't see Apostles or believers doing.

I noted below numerous such reasons that Catholicism is a different religion which Jesus and the Apostles call false teaching. That is, anything that contradicts their Gospel of justification by faith in Christ alone worshiping God alone.

https://www.gethisword.com/catholic

Deuteronomy requires testing any person or claim that allegedly comes from God. They had to have supernatural power and never contradict God's Word. The Pope's fail that test while Apostles passed it. To be obedient, I tested it myself above.

> In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".

Try that in a mosque please.

Also, a couple of years ago a French (Benjamin Ledig) youtuber/tiktoker/whatever was fined for filming himself dancing in a parisian catholic church.

As you said:

> And as with all generalizations there will be lots of exceptions.

> non-religious people understand church to be a building. Whereas religious people understand that the people are the church

"Church" is equivocal [0]. It can mean "a church" as in a building used for liturgical worship (and specifically, the sacrifice of the mass). It can mean the institution founded by Christ, a divine and universal (hence "catholic" [1]) society, in which case we tend to capitalize it in English. In this latter case, theologically, we can speak of the human and divine elements, where the human (here on earth, the so-called Ecclesia militans or "Church Militant") is afflicted by the ravages of sin, while the divine dimension remains indefectible. The totality of the Church also includes the Ecclesia poenitens ("Church Penitent", "Church Expectant", or "Church Suffering") and the Ecclesia triumphans ("Church Triumphant").

(As a footnote, people in countries with a Christian heritage sometimes commit fallacies of equivocation with respect to these two meanings. This leads to some absurd inferences. For example, proponents of secularism have sometimes called for the separation of "mosque and state" in Muslim countries in an attempt to mirror the liberal exaggeration of the Christian distinction between Church and State, but this is nonsensical. "Mosque" has only one meaning, namely, the building. There is no institutional "Mosque". Islam does not make a distinction between religious and secular authority (which has its roots in Matthew 22:21 [2]). In the Islamic worldview, there is only Islam - "submission" [3] - and the unconquered world of the infidels. Liberalism is, genealogically and as a matter of substance, a Christian heresy - something it shares with Islam - but one that is alien to the Islamic worldview. The secular/Islamic divide in the traditionally Islamic world is rather a result of Western geopolitical influence, an arrangement merely tolerated, for the time being at least, by devout Muslims.)

> to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".

Perhaps for some Protestants, but Catholic churches are not simply meeting houses, but the successors of the Temple of Jerusalem where the perfect sacrifice of the mass is offered (the liturgy itself has the structure of the liturgy used in the Temple). It is most certainly not a "shrug".

> Whereas to the non-religious the idea of turning a church building into something else is some kind of desecration.

I don't understand. To non-religious people who do not recognize a religion's truth claims, it appears that there is nothing to desecrate. Catholics/Orthodox most certainly would consider the illicit use of a church as desecration (example: the man who recently climbed onto the main altar in St. Peter's Basilica).

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03744a.htm

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/catholic

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022%3A...

[3] https://www.etymonline.com/word/Islam

Reply on news.ycombinator.com