No, no. No. Nope.
Wii is for Earnst Angley Cathedral [Jimmy] Buffet Pentecostals and Play Station is for The Frozen Chosen.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/images/oh/OHCUYangley09.jpg

The Wii, and its rival systems, still discourage real-world interaction with real people, and still discourage real, strenuous physical activity in favor of ersatz and less-intense activity.
In that regard, they are instruments of real, visible and proximate evil, and are best avoided by God-fearing people.
Your servant,
Lord Karth

That should have read: “avoided by God-fearing people of ANY theological stripe.”
Your servant,
Lord Karth

Perhaps the colloquial “Protestant work ethic” is the embodiment of Protestant religion, no? Physical practice is not absent, but merely relocated outside the church. Given the diminished emphasis placed on sacrament and ritual among Protestants, it only makes sense that the whole-body experience be located more “in the world” than among their Catholic forbears.

Odd – I just read and forwarded two articles on America’s philosopher for all seasons, William James, under the header The Cambridge on the River Charles, or, Harvard or Robust. One reviewed in 1997 a book discussing the conflicted turn-of-the-C20 cult of manliness centred round James-era Harvard and Theodore Roosevelt (hey, toss in Nietzsche while we’re tossing around the period medicine ball, with a dash of The Way to Will-Powe by Henry Hazlitt, in his youth apprenticed in inspiration to the Williams James Gang). The other, a piece called “Variety”, just appeared in Britain’s New Humanist, “the magazine for freethinkers” (“The American philosopher William James died a hundred years ago. Jonathan Rée calls for a return to his humane example.”).
For a historical do-over on the Cartesian mind-body split, we need, as my friend the libertarian firearms ethicist Jeff Snyder suggested to me back in 2004, to go back to his junior near-contemporary the gadflying Dutchman Spinoza. Not surprisingly, the above-mentioned Antonio Damasio devoted two of his signature books, respectively, to those very two thinkers, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza. Precisely for their shared commitment to an active, dynamic, organic, wholist approach to the connections between thought and action, in contrast to the dissecting rationalist approach of the long-reigning scientistic orthodoxy, Spinoza and James make fruitful bookends on our philosophical shelves.

Music may give Protestants a physical experience that satisfies.
Somewhat related: If we don’t have anything like our present physical bodies in an afterlife, can we really be “all there” in Heaven (or elsewhere)?

none of this should be taken as a personal attack on Protestantism
So you don’t see that it’s insulting to Lutherans, for example, to posit “sacramental” Christianity against “Protestant” Christianity?

When I was reading Lauren Winner’s book, Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity, I was struck by her comments regarding the physically active being more chaste than even religious teens. Being involved in sports and dance keeps people chaste better than church does. What does that say about our bodies?

Connie Connie,
Thanks for the observation- I wasn’t aware of the Lutheran position on these things (though I had some idea) but as an Episcopalian I certainly do believe that my church is a sacramental one- I believe in transubstantiation for example, and we certainly do genuflet, kneel, etc.
I wasn’t aware that genuflection is supposed to be toward the reserved sacrament however- I’ve always done it in the general direction of the cross above the altar. We sometimes genuflect during one part of the Creed too.
Regarding video games (which was more the original topic of the thread then about sacramental Christianity) I’m afraid to say that I agree with Lord Karth for once. I don’t plan on having any video games (wii, Play Station, or I don’t know what else) in the home when I have kids. I have a rather dim view of video games myself and I hope to pass that on to my kids as well. I plan to teach them that life is too short, and every moment too precious, to waste them on video games.
Captcha: ‘poniards aware’. Classic. (Poniard is an old term for a dagger, btw).

There are several things wrong with this (in the excerpt as well as Rod’s comments), but I will limit myself to the idea that sacramental Christians feel religion more (in their bodies) than Protestants because there are more physical movements associated with sacramental Christianity. As someone with a PhD in cognitive and developmental psychology, I feel that my two cents might add something important. Most simply, more movements do not mean stronger feelings or drawing closer into the worship. Emotions and somatosensory are intertwined because they grow that way. Why do many adults cry when confronted with emotional pain? They do so because they have learned from instinctual responses to physical discomfort in infancy that pain and crying go together. What does this have to do with Rod’s comment on religion? Well, if we didn’t have that learned connection (that physical discomfort is analogous to emotional discomfort) then we probably wouldn’t cry in response to emotional pain, and crying might seem an odd response to someone who didn’t somehow make that connection. The deep feeling of divine presence (I can’t think of a better term that doesn’t sound like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism or whatever it’s called) that Rod didn’t get at the Baptist wedding is evidence that he has learned that those particular physical movements are part feeling a divine presence. On the other hand, for me and my Protestant self, I do not get that divine feeling when I go to a Catholic wedding and have to do all of that standing and sitting and kneeling because my experience of feeling God’s presence throughout my life has not involved those things. Nor is it easy for me to get that wonderful feeling when I go to a Pentecostal service with all of the jumping around and outbursts and things like that. I get that feeling when I sing (this includes specific physical movements and posture), when I sit in prayer (ditto), or when my pastor says something that helps me to understand God more (not so much in terms of physical requirement). Those additional elements in Catholic and Pentecostal services probably interfered with my feeling God’s presence, much like doing jumping jacks in time to prayer would likely interfere with Rod’s feeling God’s presence or feeling more involved with the act of worship, even though jumping jacks likely involve more physical demands than what usually happens. I’m not saying that those elements will interfere with everyone’s worship experience, indeed my claim is that those whose worship experience has long included those things (*and they have felt moved when they’ve done those things*) would not feel as moved when those elements were not part of worship.
For what it’s worth, a very recent study tested people before and after they got Botox for brow furrows and found that afterward, the people had inhibited processing of negative emotional stimuli in both behavioral and neurophysiological measures. The idea was that brow furrowing is an important component of the physical expression of emotions. Semi-related, but it would make me think twice about Botox.

Quiddity,
We will have real bodies in heaven. They won’t be like the ones we have now, but they will be better in every way. There won’t be anything about them that we _lack_ in heaven, rather they will be improved in every way over what they are now.

I began to write a comment, but then saw that “My Name” has largely beaten me to the punch.
However, I would like to address Rod’s comment about the physicality of Orthodox worship being about repairing the world’s fallen condition, with the related implication that various stripes of Protestantism are, by comparison, overly cerebral.
In my personal experience, this may be true for worship within the walls of the church, but I’ve found my Calvinist inclinations manifest themselves very physically outside of the church building. To cite a small example, I earnestly believe in keeping myself in excellent physical shape in a manner quite typical of the “Protestant Work Ethic.”
It’s very possible that people of the different traditions of Christianity all express the physical aspect of their faith, just not all inside a church.

What got me to come back to church as an adult was the familiar smell of this particular Protestant church, in this case a Reformed church. It smelled like the pine oil used to polish the pews in the tiny Methodist church where I was baptized and went through confirmation.
It was that smell and physical reaction that I had, the body memory associated with it that re-opened the worship experience for me and started me on my spiritual journey as an adult.
I would say that Rod, you are substantially right about the body being crucial to spiritual and religious experience, but your idea that this is less true for Protestants than for Catholic/Orthodox is wrong. The physical experience is just as deep, but different. (I’m talking generally low church Protestants like Methodists, RCA, etc.)

Nintendo realized a long time ago they would no longer be able to compete in the graphics department. So they focused on inputs/controllers.
of course, there are exceptions, but on the whole Catholics focus more on physical movement than Protestant churches.
Catholicism = practice, Protestantism = belief.

mm beat me to it on this. Anyone who has ever attended a Pentecostal service will immediately recognize that the Wii is decidedly Pentecostal, not simply Catholic/Orthodox.
In support of that I offer these two YouTube videos.
Pentecostal worship: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYuj0RF5nsM
Wii Just Dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTXYIvzLxWs&feature=related
I rest my case.

I love our Wii and think as far as any video games go, it is the best because it does involve the whole person (at least to a degree). And it’s simpler – I could never begin to figure out all of the buttons etc. on the other gaming systems. I think the Wii is more intuitive.
The Catholic/Protestant thing is silly to the point that I thought you were joking. It is a generalization that doesn’t hold up under even the slightest scrutiny, and it is just mildly insulting since it betrays ignorance.

I’m with John M. When I returned to church as an adult (after 20 years away), what “got to me” most – made me feel God’s presence – were the familiar hymns, creeds and prayers I’d been raised on in the Methodist church. I’m now at a Presbyterian church, but it’s very similar. My sister, who returned to the church before I did, recently described attending a friend’s wedding at a Catholic church. She’d been so looking forward to the experience, but came away extremely… disappointed. (Maybe that’s not the right word?) She said that everything about the service left her cold. Unmoved. The music, the liturgy, the look of the church… everything. I have to believe that’s only because it was all so unfamiliar. To a longtime Protestant, it just didn’t feel like “church.” As for me, I’m quite drawn to the Catholicism intellectually, and have considered converting, but I worry that the visceral experience would be unfulfilling, much as it was for my sister.

Wii and other forms of so-called ‘entertainment’ are actually the training ground for the conscious-rational CHOOSING of Neurotic and other Deviant Behaviour Symptoms, due to its high distractive value for ignoring real-life challenges and problems. I’ve come to see this NOT ONLY through religious ethics and so on, but through RCTN — The Rational-Choice Theory of Neurosis and its application in Rational Insight Therapy. If people are increasingly accustomed to seek DISTRACTION they will increasingly CHOOSE their symptoms — and in our society they are all on the upswing!! more cases of anorexia, OCD, panic and phobias, etc, etc… the games and other ‘cultural’ phenomenon run hand in hand to the death of our economy and civilization’s roots (which are, even for the athesits, etc, in religious values).

“As for me, I’m quite drawn to the Catholicism intellectually, and have considered converting, but I worry that the visceral experience would be unfulfilling, much as it was for my sister.”
It really depends on where you attend mass. I’m not a fan of suburban catholic churches for some of the reasons you listed. As a result I choose to attend mass at an old church downtown which is more traditional.
I really do think there is sort of a revolution going on in the Catholic Church. The younger priests are much more traditional than those retiring who came of age during the 1960′s. Hopefully with time, it’ll get better.

This is a great post, and though I am an outsider to Christianity, I would like to defend Mr. Dreher’s point as an idea of serious merit, notwithstanding previous commenters who denigrate it. It is not merely that Catholicism includes more theatrical RITUAL action (which some forms of Protestantism have worked quite hard to avoid), but also that Catholic theology (as it has been explained to me) holds “works” at a higher theological value relative to “faith” than does Protestantism. (Please correct me if I am wrong; I have not studied Christian theology.)
But forgetting all that, and even if I misunderstand Christian ideas, I still like the post because it resonates with my own Orthodox Jewish experience. We believe that our very physical observance of God’s commandments represents a grand spiritual drama which both expresses and cultivates a kind of visceral devotion which a purely abstract faith cannot offer. By the Dreher-James Video Game Theory of Theology, PlayStation is Reform/Conservative Jewish, and Wii is Orthodox Jewish.

Connie Connie, perhaps it would be as well for you to abandon the designation “Protestant” if, like me, you are an adherent of the Lutheran Confessions.
Indeed, there was a book 15 years or so ago by a Lutheran pastor, comparing three traditions: it was called Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant.
Here in North America, at least, “Protestant” does suggest “non-sacramental” worship.
The fact that the largest denomination with “Lutheran” in its name has pulpit and altar fellowship with other mainline Protestant denominations doesn’t help to show that the Lutheran Confessions and churches that adhere seriously to them are sacramental.

My initial exposure to an Orthodox church was quite visceral. It was completely outside of the realm of my experience in terms of sights and smells, and it was stunning to me just how far afield it was from what I was used to and yet still recognizably Christian. In many ways, that’s exactly what I found so moving — it wasn’t familiar, but the function of all of this form was not to make me feel at home. The function was to turn all within its walls towards the worship of God. It was irrelevant whether or not I or anybody else found it familiar. This church (the ROCOR cathedral in Seattle) presented itself as an absolute, and it was I who needed to adjust to it, not the other way around. That said, to say that this made it somehow “inaccessible” doesn’t strike me as accurate; I was still able to light a candle and pray, just as anybody else might have, for example.
Since then, it’s been fascinating to see and hear the reactions, often hostile, of Protestant and Catholic family and friends. My mother-in-law, a Catholic and definitely a product of the reforms after Vatican II, was visibly enraged after a Divine Liturgy, saying that she felt like she was in a “pre-pre-pre-pre-Vatican-I Mass”. My Evangelical mother came away saying that it was clear that God was in the service, “but I felt like I was being kept at His feet rather than being in His arms.” There was the wedding of a couple of friends of mine, both converts, who by necessity had to invite enough of their non-Orthodox family that there were like ten Orthodox Christians at the wedding who knew what was going on, and of those, the ones that weren’t part of the action at the front stood in the back. We’ll just say the experience didn’t inspire any of the non-Orthodox to come to Divine Liturgy the next morning.
For a lot of us Orthodox converts, it’s the very fact that the Church doesn’t bow and scrape to the expectations and paradigms we bring in the door with us that gives it its authority and authenticity. I expect that there are a lot of converts to Roman Catholicism, particularly in parishes that might try to stay informed by the traditional aesthetic (however you wish to define that), who would be able to say something similar. As MargaretE observes, though, what it does to a lot of people is just leave them cold, or at best maybe such people say, “That’s nice if it’s your thing, but I don’t think it’s mine.” I suppose the argument about the aesthetic of the heavenly worship is going to be hard to have carry any weight when our cultural assumption of what worship looks like is more informed by Saddleback Church than Agia Sophia.
Richard

heh, I thought Margaret was pointing out that her sister didn’t appreciate how the Catholic wedding she attended was NOT traditional.
So perhaps she might appreciate a more loose mass at a suburban church (I think it’s ultimately the further you travel from where the bishop resides, the more non-traditional masses you get).

Chiming in here to clarify! I think my sister found the Catholic church TOO traditional. She attends one of those big Saddleback type churches, and actually sings in their band. But her (Protestant) church is absolutely NOTHING like my (Protestant) church. I attend a mainline Presbyterian church that is QUITE traditional, from a Protestant point of view. The church is beautiful and formal, people dress up for services, we say the Apostles Creed, pray the Lord’s Prayer, sing the Doxology and a range of traditional hymns… We have a chancel choir (I’m in it) that wear robes and sing everything from Bach and Handel to John Rutter and his ilk. This is the kind of church my sister and I both grew up in, and I think she was expecting something more along those lines. Because she’s been attending the aforementioned “rock band” church, she was looking forward to something more like what she grew up with. But I think what she got was the Latin mass, music that was unfamiliar, etc. etc. It was just culturally jarring. (But then, her “rock band” church is a bit jarring to me. It’s all relative!)
captcha: starchy spectacle (How apropos!)

MargaretE, I really do get the sense that for some reason, conservative protestant churches simply do a much better job with music than Catholic churches. I don’t know why. There must be an explanation out there.

thehova: There *is* an answer out there. The book is called Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste, by Thomas Day.
Richard

I haven’t been inside enough Catholic or Orthodox churches to be impressed in any way other than negatively. The last time was at my wifely aunt’s funeral. It seems she went off to that weird place in Bosnia and was so blessed by the experience that she came home and was hit by a bus and killed.
Anyway, I suffered through the funeral service and I will be honest, if for some reason I had ever entertained the notion of becoming Roman Catholic that thing would have cured it and the bouncing up and down certainly did not help, even though I decently refrained from joining the communal calisthenics. My liberal Protestant upbringing was working very hard to bring up my breakfast at sight of it and when the time came when everyone was shaking hands and saying peace, I really really wanted to bellow at my sister-in-law the traditional Italian mercenary response, “May God take your alms away!”
But I didn’t.
Anyway, any tendency to respect Catholic ritual practice having been again cured, we went home to do the laundry and forget the whole tawdry, and no doubt expensive, affair. At least it was forgotten until the annual family Christmas party a few weeks later when my sister-in-law asked me what I thought of the funeral and I could not help myself. I blurted, “I thought that they would never shut up and bury the damned woman!”
Ok, aside from having once again been given an opportunity to tell a favorite story, to be serious, different people react to physicality in different ways. I dislike physical exercise. You would not catch me dead playing with a Wii or whatever it is called. And if I were ever to find myself praying it would not involve any bouncing up and down. I would feel more foolish than spiritual and there is no way I could find the presence of the divine in such things. But that is my background and at my great age I am unlikely to find a reason to change. Someone from a different background, where physical activity was not looked down on as inferior to the life of the mind and not just in religion may respond exactly the opposite. Generalizations in such matters are worthless and as in the end the intelligence that is capable of creating and organizing a universe probably could not care less how he is importuned, it really does not matter very much.

Richard, that book looks funny and interesting. It doesn’t surprise me that the bad taste in music came from the Irish. If only American Catholics were more influenced by the southern Germans and Italians.
No doubt that the ritual aspects of Catholicism often seem strange to outsiders. But I love the literalness of the Catholic faith. Saint Peter is (probably) buried under the altar in Saint Peter’s basilica. He is literally in the foundation of the Vatican. He is the rock that the Catholic Church is built upon.
The same goes with the Eucharist. Yes, it’s hard for even us devout Catholics to come to terms with, but the bread literally becomes the body of Christ. It’s quite an awesome and radical thing to wrap your mind around.

Well, this Lutheran thinks that’s nonsense. Button inputs are as fine an abstraction as letters or pictures. I’d love to see how you transfer your logic to fine art, poetry, or film.