Absolutely.
I’m just speaking about my experience. Here there is only one Catholic parish. If you don’t like the priest or the people, it doesn’t matter. Your only option is to tough it out or become Protestant.
I agree completely. I wish Protestants would do more toughing it. In one sense, it’s something we have to do but we don’t, and when we don’t, it’s a failure on our part. In another sense, it’s something we don’t do unless we really
have to, and that’s kind of rare.
People are the same whether Protestant or Catholic but the environment here, in my town, forces Catholics to be a little bit more … how should I say it? Mature? in their actions? Because instead of running to the next new and better thing (church) they have to stick with it and work out their issues.
I have far more experience with having a plethora of options, but I do know some Protestants from more rural areas that approximate that situation in some ways. They tend to act in ways that you could predict from the situation- they have to stick with it, so they do it.
Honestly I feel there are just way too many churches. It breeds a really lazy attitude when it comes to interpersonal problems.
Some of the best advice I got early on in college was from a college group pastor about church attendance through college. That particular suburb was a little bit like the American equivalent of Vatican City for Evangelicals. The townies weren’t necessarily overly religious, but there’s a ridiculous amount of churches there and about 2/3 of the people there on Sunday mornings would come in from outside the city limits.
The advice was that we should take advantage of the opportunity to explore beyond our first 18 years of church experience, but don’t drag it out too long, do pick one place to stick with, and then
get involved. He said that several times- anything from associate pastor to music ministry to Sunday School to youth ministry to children’s ministry, and see if you can find a place with needs that fit your abilities rather than the church that best serves your own needs. (Another attitude that lacks maturity and is all to common among Protestants). He also talked about how after college, we’ll definitely have more limited options, so it’d be good for us if we figured out ways to work through imperfections or conflicts of preference.
I wound up at another church where I could get more involved, and I think I had more problems to work through there than I did at the first one, but I took the advice with me and stayed engaged. It wound up leading to some bonding experiences with a number of people because we’d spend hours talking about different issues that were important to us- often while doing things that qualify as “getting involved,” too. That college pastor was right, too- I was able to use some of what I learned there after college at a different church. But that’s a little unusual, and even though it’s a good thing, it’s not something that comes naturally.
That said, I do think the condition of American denominationalism is something of a logical end to the process of separating church and state that has a lot to do with the overall narrative of US history. But the development of Protestant churches in America isn’t something that’s usually dealt with in a history class at most schools, so most people don’t have a good idea of why it developed this way. There are difficulties that we still have to work through and there’s ways in which certain unfortunate aspects of human nature are exposed, but it’s also a situation that came about in the course of dealing with other problems that we barely remember because we know so little about what they were or what we did about them.
I tend to see those things more as necessary evils within a system that arose in response to other kinds of needs. Currently, though, I think one of the greater needs for Protestants is more pastors like the first one I ran into at college.
He didn’t. He was trying to clean up the “Mother” Church of his time. His followers eventually coalesced into “Lutheranism.”
