CLASSICAL EDUCATION AND THE CHURCH: Virginia Postrel argues that many suburban churches now offer little more than pap:

[N]obody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.

Now I'm not a Christian, let alone an evangelical. If megachurches want to play bad-to-mediocre rock instead of great hymns, that's their business. But the spread of Christian pap does have spillovers, not the least of which is that devout Christian faith no longer brings with it a deep familiarity with what's actually in the Bible, as opposed to a few verses from the preacher's PowerPoint. Unless the person is over a certain age, Biblical literacy, when you do find it, rarely means acquaintance with great English. Forget theological or philosophical sophistication. I'd settle for the ability to comprehend complex sentences.

Hmmm. I cannot testify to what's going in those churches, but I do have quite a few acquaintances who come from American evangelical mainstream, and it was the International Church of Prague, a non-denominational body of believers led by a Protestant pastor, where I discovered the art of sermon.

Plus, people do read KJV, especially those who attend Bible study meetings and enjoy comparing verses from different translations. But that's beside the point.

What Ms Postrel fails to recognize is that Christianity is a religion for both the elite and the rest of us, and churches have to accomodate everybody. Perhaps it's offensive to her highly refined taste, but there are people out there who need a short, "dumbed-down" message, a bulleted list of the basics; not everyone can read St. Augustin. The point of coming to church, after all, is not to listen to a self-glorifying orator with a Yale degree in literature but to worship God - using whatever means are available.

I, too, lament the demise of classical art forms and the spread of pap - and downright crap - in the media, churches, everywhere. That's the side effect of technology and the falling costs of communication. The plus side is, if I wanted to build a church where only people with IQ > 150 would congregate, one with a real choir and organ and Bach concerts every Sunday evening, I could. (A silly example, I admit).

Ms Postrel's real argument seems to be that today's mega-churches are making people even dumber than they had been before they started attending services:

The rhythms and rhetoric of the Bible have given America its greatest political rhetoric, from Abraham Lincoln's to Martin Luther King's. Today's Christianity produces...George W. Bush.

Well, I've heard other arguments: TV will make you stupid, video games will make you stupid, smoking will make you stupid. But this one is a winner. I had no idea what kind of risk I am taking by going to church.