Those who have found their local places of worship sadly lacking in the entertainment and luxury aspect and are tired of getting down on dirty floors to pray to plain wooden ceilings can now turn to the ultra modern and hyper branded megachurch in their hour of need.
Creeping up on the outskirts of towns and following business models by the likes of Wal-mart these churches were rooted in the 1950s with a few small venues mostly located in the United States. With humble beginnings catering for only a few thousand, there are now over several thousand megachurches dotted around the globe with the Yoido in South Korea which has the dubious honour of being the largest ‘Disney church’ in the world and is capable of seating over 830,000 people (since 2007). The alarming growth of these typically non-denominational churches has not gone unnoticed even among other churches who have criticised the megachurch’s lack of depth, its reliance on entertainment as evidenced by their concert style shows with even the ‘smallest’ of these types of churches having a mixing and sound desk to cater for their contemporary Christian acts and perhaps the biggest criticism has been that the ministry of these massive churches focuses more on personal gain and individualism rather than social justice in any meaningful way. By building in wealthy urban areas to boost donation and merchandise sales the church has ‘gone Las Vegas’ to quote one of its detractors with only tokenistic concern for people whose last refuge was the church community centre. The megachurch like any other business destroys free space and environments leaving a wreckage of plastic packaging and spiritual alienation in its wake so it can broadly cater to its vast number of attendees, placing itself as a source off faith and hope in a secular world despite cynical marketing tactics.
In spite of the estrangement felt by some church goers thanks to the vast expansion of these places with their incessant revenue generation and their messages of ‘wealth creation’ and ‘Christian prosperity’ this is only symptomatic of the far reaching tentacles of capitalism and its ability to subsume all that it sees fit. McChurches practice a doctrine of ‘Religion Lite’ choosing to place greater emphasis on promoting the consumerist and hollow ideals of capitalism.
Although this megachurch movement is still relatively new it is one that should be strongly opposed along with all the other hideous aspects of capitalism and is a perfect example of how organised religion and religious beliefs can easily be adapted to indoctrinate followers to blindly subscribe to an all pervasive system of greed and globalisation; branding and active ignorance under the banner of faith where all the sinister aspects of the corporate church can be explained away. We as anarchists and anti-capitalists should together seek to take back our lives, our space and our minds from the influence of the church and all its various off shoots like the megachurch and build spaces that are truly social and decentralised. The social centres movement is vital in encouraging personal and societal development advocating instead of the corrupting structures of the church which preys on (among many others) working class people in their weakest, desperate times to keep them invested in the chains of capitalism by tapping into their natural way of thinking and destroying or disfiguring that thought process with promises of salvation and riches in ‘heaven’. What is important are spaces where one can truly feel individual growth and growth in their community without having to succumb to the pressures of religious faith. We must fight for spaces that are determined by the needs of the people and not any hierarchal institution which has systematically failed those who rely on it. We do not need church whether it be mega in size or whatever, we need a new mode of engagement, mutual aid and non coercive co-operation by continuously celebrating and agitating for these spaces and resisting the expansion and development of corporate institutions on our common ground.