{"id":44539,"date":"2023-04-09T05:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-04-09T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=44539"},"modified":"2025-05-28T08:03:41","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T14:03:41","slug":"adventures-in-visiting-other-religions-services-with-rowdy-boys-memories-and-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2023\/04\/adventures-in-visiting-other-religions-services-with-rowdy-boys-memories-and-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventures in Visiting Other Religions\u2019 Services with Rowdy Boys: Memories and Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

“Gothic church & Islamic mosque architectures combined.” From Midjourney v5<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a strong believer in the educational value of visiting religious services other than one\u2019s own. However, you need to do it right so that you\u2019re respectful and it doesn\u2019t come off as a \u201clet\u2019s observe the natives in their natural habitat\u201d kind of voyeurism, and that can be tricky.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we lived in Philadelphia we visited the historic Unitarian Church in downtown Philly as a family and realized too late that other churches usually have some kind of Sunday school for the kids while the parents watch the sermon, making the main hall as quiet as a single\u2019s ward. Suffice it to say a rowdy group of Utahns hushing their kids throughout the sermon on global warming was probably a bit of a two-way educational experience. Everybody was nice and understanding at the coffee and cookies afterward even when I had to drag our second-born out as he shouted that he \u201chated this church.\u201d So with that experience we learned that you should probably do some basic background research before you just show up at a service.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One more sidebar on this: at the Unitarian Church there were several “visibly queer” individuals, and I felt grateful that religious options exist for people in same-sex relationships (saying this as somebody who is not only 100% orthodox on the hot-button sex and gender issues in the Church but has also gone out of my way to publicly defend the Church’s stance thereon). Sometimes I get the sense that liberal religion is just used as a trump card to attack conservative religion by people who don’t ever actually go to church, and it was refreshing to see the former in action instead of just being trotted out as a counterfactual.<\/p>\n

During our time in Philadelphia we also visited a Church of Scientology. There was a handful of people there; I was kind of expecting some spit-shine, well-rehearsed tour but I could tell that they were short staffed. The person who gave me the spiel seemed very interested in what sensational things I had heard about the Church, and I could tell they were trying to get into a discussion about Xenu, psychology, or some other controversy Scientology has come to be known for. Seeing things from the other side informed my own perspective on apologetics issues in our own Church: making your faith about the sensational, critics vs apologetics debates is kind of a turn off. I knew this intellectually before but it was educational to experience it viscerally from the other side. It would have been much more effective had they given their spiel about what was important to them on their own terms, and kind of in passing alluded to the more sensational stuff and pointed to other sources and references that address those if I was interested.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I taught introductory sociology at Baylor I would assign students to attend one religious meeting that they normally did not, and the majority chose \u201cThe Church under the Bridge,\u201d a neat little service put on by volunteer pastors in Baylor for the homeless in the city. (Of course nowadays they could upload the materials for the Church and just get Chat-GPT to write a response paper about their moving experience\u2014I\u2019m still waiting to hear how teachers will figure that one out or whether they\u2019re so demoralized at this point that they don\u2019t even care).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While at Baylor I also had the opportunity to join Gordon Melton, the Godfather of New Religious Movement research in the US (who worked up the hall from me), on a trip to celebrate Halloween with Neopagans at Fort Hood. There was a prayer-circle type ritual where people passed around a drinking gourd; upon imbibing they would offer a few words of praise to their chosen deity and there would be a sort of call-and-response where everybody in the circle would chant \u201chail [the name of their deity].\u201d They seemed pretty ecumenical about it, as some people\u2019s chosen deity was Jesus. (They graciously allowed us to observe outside the circle.)<\/span><\/p>\n

When we moved to DC and our kids were old enough (we thought) we took them on the tour of the Catholic National Basilica. However, after turning my back on him for a moment one of my younger ones stole away to one of the chapels and horrifyingly started trying to climb up onto one of the altars. Once again, make sure your children are old enough to understand the concept of reverence and sacredness around people\u2019s beliefs (even if they don\u2019t understand the concept during our sacrament meetings).<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, I have had the opportunity to take my children to the National Mosque<\/a> a number of times. While they were old enough at this point to be well-behaved, the first time I took them it was the morning of the Christchurch shootings (it was morning for us, with the time change I\u2019m not sure how long it was after the actual shootings). I was vaguely aware that something had happened but I wasn\u2019t expecting the Mosque to be packed and surrounded by cameras. It might not have been the right decision, but it had been quite an effort to get there with DC traffic being what it is, so I thought it would be okay if my very not Muslim-looking family slipped in for a moment. I think we pulled it off without drawing attention to ourselves or in any way disrupting what was clearly a moment of mourning for that community, but we were still approached by several reporters on our way out, who I brushed off when I made it clear that we had been planning to visit for a while and were only vaguely aware of what had happened. We have been back several times, and the National Mosque is used to respectful outsiders, so it is highly recommended for a Washington DC trip itinerary.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other services I would like to attend at some point:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A synagogue service<\/strong>: This is one I\u2019d like to do with a Jewish associate. We have several Jewish friends in the area but we haven\u2019t imposed on them yet about this.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Buddhist temple<\/strong>: I\u2019ve tried doing my background research on this, but I\u2019m still not sure I wouldn\u2019t look like a gawking idiot if I visited.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hindu temple<\/strong>: Ditto.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

American as apple pie Protestant service<\/strong>: Ironically I\u2019ve still never been to one of these. I kind of want to experience a small town rural church service \u201cwhere everybody knows your name\u201d before they\u2019re gone, as well as a megachurch service since those are the shiny new things in US Christianity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Gothic church & Islamic mosque architectures combined.” From Midjourney v5. I\u2019m a strong believer in the educational value of visiting religious services other than one\u2019s own. However, you need to do it right so that you\u2019re respectful and it doesn\u2019t come off as a \u201clet\u2019s observe the natives in their natural habitat\u201d kind of voyeurism, and that can be tricky. When we lived in Philadelphia we visited the historic Unitarian Church in downtown Philly as a family and realized too late that other churches usually have some kind of Sunday school for the kids while the parents watch the sermon, making the main hall as quiet as a single\u2019s ward. Suffice it to say a rowdy group of Utahns hushing their kids throughout the sermon on global warming was probably a bit of a two-way educational experience. Everybody was nice and understanding at the coffee and cookies afterward even when I had to drag our second-born out as he shouted that he \u201chated this church.\u201d So with that experience we learned that you should probably do some basic background research before you just show up at a service.\u00a0\u00a0 One more sidebar on this: at the Unitarian Church there were several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":44540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comparative-religion"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/zuknegyhz2fa1.png.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44539"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50188,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44539\/revisions\/50188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}