UnMute Yourself: Musings on the Obstacles of Worship’s Impact on Ethics

While studying for my Master of Divinity, one of the concepts that drew me to the field of liturgical studies was the idea that what we did in worship shaped our ethical lives. I wrote my master’s thesis on how the storied nature of the liturgy should help insert us into the story of God, and I relied heavily on the virtue ethics approach promoted by thinkers like Don Saliers, Alasdair MacIntyre, Sam Wells, and Stanley Hauerwas (among others). With the zeal of a new convert, I believed if we could just get our liturgies right (whatever that means!), we could and would fundamentally change the foundational narrative out of which worshipers make their day-to-day ethical decisions as humans. While I still believe there is a strong connection between liturgy and ethics and find the work of these thinkers invaluable, the last decade of divisions and destructive behaviors in our churches and nation have tempered my initial enthusiasm. I have both grown more suspicious of any simple one-to-one correspondences I formerly drew between the way we worship and the way we live our lives, and I have lost the convert’s enthusiasm that believed if we just crafted historically grounded and theologically rich liturgies, they would somehow work ex opere operato (in the simplistic and corrupted sense of the phrase) on the ethical lives of the worshiper. It now seems much more complicated than that. So, I want to use this edition of “Unmute Yourself” not to propose a bold new theological or liturgical framework, but to suggest, with the help of various thinkers, what I believe are a few of the obstacles that limit the ethical impact of the liturgy on the average worshiper. First, some necessary caveats. Save a time machine in which you could make the same congregation the control group and the experimental group, there is no way to prove the ethical impact of worship. Thus, even liturgies that appear to the outside observer ineffectual in shaping the ethical lives of the average congregant may very well be forming the worshiper on a deeper level than our superficial observations can register. In a similar vein, the Spirit of God is not limited by the forms of our worship. God’s Spirit has, is, and will continue to draw people to the life of Christian discipleship through even the most shoddy and ill-performed liturgies, if only to remind the liturgist that worship is first and foremost an intrinsic good rather than an instrumental one used to shape the ethics of our congregation. We do not worship to create good people; we worship to glorify the God who is worthy of worship. So, the obstacles that I suggest may inhibit the ethical impact of worship might be analogous to the way the Roman Catholic Church describes the grace conferred through the sacraments: validly performed sacraments will always confer grace because they are the gift of God (the true meaning of ex opere operato), but we can place obstacles between ourselves and the grace conferred that limit their efficaciousness on our lives. In the same way, I suggest