Why Lifeless Rituals Are Better Than None

You Might as Well Attend Church, Pray, and Not Skip Your Bible Reading Plan

Audio voiceover available here for paid subscribers!

Awhile back, psychologist David DeSteno researched the effects of the Vatican II Council (1962-1965) on church gatherings.

For those who don’t know, Vatican II (and the New Order Mass) revamped the average church service. Whereas the priest and the congregation used to face in the same direction, symbolically turning themselves toward God, the priest would now face the people. Though the traditional service was conducted almost entirely in Latin, churches were now allowed to use the congregation’s mother tongue. And while the liturgical song was once in Gregorian-style chant, churches now had permission to integrate influence from pop-music.

On the surface, these changes seemed great—especially considering that congregations could now hear Scripture and liturgy in a language they understood.

But DeSteno noted something interesting:

While such changes brought Catholic ritual up-to-date, the abandonment of practices that had been honed over centuries reduced some of their psychological power. With less chanting, less incense, and less separation between the pulpit and parishioners, many Catholics felt that the Mass’s ‘magic’ had disappeared.¹

photo from Vatican II

Humans have a complex relationship with rituals; like friends that move away, sometimes it seems like we only come to appreciate them once we miss them.

But regardless, we need rituals—even the ones that feel like dead routine. They’re not a magical panacea for all our problems, but they’re critical for living the good life.

Discipline Burnout and The New Spiritual Formation Movement

I recently got interviewed by a journalist for an article she’s working on about John Mark Comer. She wanted to know of any downsides I’ve seen to Comer’s “Rule of Life” paradigm of spiritual disciplines.

As someone who works with a lot of young adults, the issue that immediately came to mind is “discipline burnout.”²

The trajectory is: a 20-something picks up a book or podcast from someone in the “New Spiritual Formation Movement”³ (unofficially but ostensibly, John Mark Comer, Jon Tyson, Mark Sayers, Josh Porter, Rich Villodas, Tyler Staton, Strahan Coleman, and others), they’ll feel rightly inspired to build a rhythm or schedule of spiritual disciplines (fasting, prayer, Scripture memorization, etc.), and then they hit some resistance and drop the schedule within 1-4 weeks like a New Year’s resolution.

Now, I’m not interested in criticizing Gen Z’s work ethic; I’d much rather criticize the felt need for everything we do to feel “authentic” or “unforced.”

These ideals are a byproduct of living in an “age of authenticity”⁴—an era where our moral purpose in life is aimed toward being true to ourselves.

It’s a flawed but pathologically normalized worldview. And it’s more or less the basis for why many moderns find disciplines tough to stick with.

Since many rituals don’t provide immediate returns (either internally, as in a dopamine boost, or externally, as in a boost of social media followers), it’s depressingly easy for a schedule of disciplines to eventually feel forced, perfunctory, and inauthentic.

Which is sad, because the commitment to stick with rituals—especially when we don’t feel like doing them—is partly what makes them worth doing. To explain, let’s discuss

The Science of Rituals

The social scientist Dimitris Xygalatas calls ritual the

true human universal. Without a single exception, all known human societies—whether past or present—have a range of traditions that involve highly choreographed, formalized and precisely executed behaviors that mark threshold moments in people’s lives.⁵

Most rituals are intertwined with sacred sets of beliefs; but believing in God isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for practicing rituals. We might not pray a Psalm each morning, but we might meditate, make the kids breakfast, do the morning crossword, or follow the ancient liturgical practice of starting the coffeemaker.

These patterns are soothing because they provide predictability; for a brief moment, they make the strange, mercurial, impulsiveness of life feel manageable. Rituals impose “order on the chaos of everyday life, which provides us with a sense of control over uncontrollable situations.”⁶

As such, even though we only have something like 5% of control over our lives, rituals allow us to make the most of that 5%. To show why, let’s bring in the West’s most popular reason for picking up new habits: weight loss.

i didn’t need to include this graph, but I wanted the reader to take a breath before the next paragraph; so feel free to ignore this and take a mental pause. How are you?

In college, I ran marathons, so I never really had to think about not gaining weight since a deleterious weight loss method was already embedded in my schedule. After college, I got a job where I was either sitting at a desk or sitting in a car from 9-5. But I didn’t change my eating habits from my marathon days, which created a surplus of calories, fast.

So I started trying some diets—paleo, keto, Adkins, etc. But sadly, these methods are built to fail. They’re trendy quick fixes that prove successful for a couple months, but soon after breaking the habit, we’re usually reintroduced to whatever weight we lost.

Now sub out weight loss for spiritual practices and you’ll find a similar trajectory. We feel convicted after a sermon, so we start a prayer rhythm or Scripture reading plan. And since spiritual disciplines, like diets, actually yield results, we’ll soon notice that we feel more confident and at home in the world. Then once we arrive at whatever blend of joy and non-anxiousness we were hoping for, we assume our progress is etched into stone.

But then one day our prayer rhythm feels a little stale or we hit the wall of Leviticus, and so we get a little lax with our ritual. Eventually, we drop the habit altogether, which inevitably winds us back in that origin of conviction that inspired us toward change in the first place.

It’s a pattern we’ve all seen a million times.

Yet, surprisingly, the best method for sustaining spiritual rituals has a lot in common with the best methods for weight loss: rather than committing ourselves to radical, over-the-top diets, we should instead simply integrate long-term, sustainable changes.

For example, cutting off all carbs and sugars is neither fun nor easy, so we could instead start by cutting off junk food incrementally. Similarly, when trying to integrate a rhythm of fasting, it’s smarter to start skipping breakfast a few days a week than jump into a full week of consuming nothing other than water.

Yet, unfortunately, even these small habits will still feel tough at times. So the perennial issue for our authenticity-focused generation is figuring out how to stick with rituals despite how inauthentic they might feel.

To explain why a sense of stick-to-it-iveness really will help, let’s look at

a coupla studies.

In one study, researchers rounded up a group of subjects who were trying to lose weight and split them into two groups. Before eating a meal, the first group was told to think about their food in a thoughtful way before taking a bite. The second group was instructed to cut all the food into several pieces, rearrange all of it into a symmetrical pattern, and then tap their fork on each bite three times before eating it. Over the five days of the experiment, the second group consumed 224 less calories per day than the first.⁷

Next, one group was asked whether they’d prefer carrots or chocolate and given only a few seconds to respond. The other group was told to take deep breaths, close their eyes, and knock on a table a few times before responding. The latter group was 25% more likely to choose the carrot than the no-ritual group.

photo from last thanksgiving

Plenty other studies show that small, superfluous rituals can boost self-control, gratitude, and productivity.⁸ Point is: even when rituals feel like a drag—or even when we don’t consciously understand them—going through the motions still yields results.

Now, any kind of ritual can lend an extra boost of self-control. But when it comes to big character changes, like turning from a cranky grump into a warm presence, rituals aren’t enough on their own.

For example, in another study, researchers tried to see if prayer would influence whether someone would cheat on a test.

Each subject was left in isolation and took the test on a computer with easy access to a web browser. However, the researchers were secretly monitoring their screens to check if they googled any answers. And to up the incentive for pursuing the best grade possible, they promised a $100 gift to the highest scorer.

As the results showed, prayer didn’t seem to change much—lots of people still cheated.

But there was one noteworthy finding: the prayer didn’t affect subjects who didn’t believe in God; but the prayer greatly affected the subjects that did believe in God. They were by far the least likely to cheat.⁹

Now, one study doesn’t prove much. But it’s a decent anecdote for how prayer has a stronger effect when the pray-er believes in the God they’re praying to.

This is why, even though I’m a huge fan of rituals and habits, I don’t think they’re all that special when detached from a sacred set of beliefs. Which brings us to

“The Godfather problem.”

Even though rituals are a crucial part of transformation, the sad reality is that many people can carry out church rituals their whole lives and never change.

James K.A. Smith calls this “The Godfather problem.” Throughout the runtime of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, the viewer witnesses mafiosos participating in a variety of rituals. The film starts with a wedding ritual, shows the family attending church, and then ends with a baptism interspliced with scenes of their family slaying a rival gang. But not once is the cognitive dissonance between cutting off a horse’s head to plant it in an opponent’s bed and receiving the Eucharist discussed.

As Smith put it, “You can liturgically renounce the works of the devil and carry them out at the same time.”¹⁰

All of us know people who’ve gone through the motions of church but still seem just as malformed as someone who’s never taken the bread and the cup. Outward worship doesn’t guarantee inward worship. Without the Spirit, rituals easily become just another instrument for refining project self.

And yet, like Smith also says, “Ritual is the way we learn to believe with our bodies.”¹¹ God doesn’t just want us to worship with our minds. We’re not brains on a stick. As much as we might like, we can’t tiptoe around the need to offer up our whole bodies into our rhythms of worship (Rom. 12:1-2).

Which brings us to why it’s easier to

Become a Saint by Acting Like a Saint.

C.S. Lewis once said that if you want to become a Christian, but find its doctrines impossible to believe, the best thing to do is simply begin acting like a Christian. Start singing to God, reciting Scripture, and caring for the poor and powerless. You’ll eventually start seeing the world like a Christian, feeling compassion like a Christian, noticing breath enter your God-given lungs like a Christian. One day, you might find that you’ve stumbled upon believing in the God of the Christians.¹²

This is great example of the power of one the more under-appreciated Christian disciplines: repetition. Despite how burnt out we might feel about hearing John 3:16 again and again, a growing body of research might suggest that simple repetition helps us believe things at a deeper level.¹³

We’re more likely to think something is true when we hear it repeated. As tiring as often-posted, verse-of-the-day Scripture can feel, it does influence our pattern recognition; we carry it with us throughout our days, which allows us to apply it to present situations quicker because it’s grazing on top of our short-term memory.¹⁴

It’s not astrophysics; it’s easier to become a saint if you live a saint’s schedule.

How to Keep Going

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han warned that society’s loss of rituals would dissolve our experience of the world into bland cycles of nothingness.¹⁵ Rituals give our days, weeks, hours, and calendars a sense of meaning. They give occasions purpose. With no sense of ritual, our personal and communal lives get increasingly disordered.

The early church, coming out of Judaism’s strict Hebrew calendar, maintained a much higher view of rituals than most Protestants today. Now, there’s endless debate about how the early church prayed and worshipped. But out of all my research, I’ve found one point that’s rarely contested: early Christians stopped to pray and worship three times a day (morning, noon, and night).¹⁶

Regardless of the way the church prayed or worshiped, the sheer repetition of rituals was undeniably baked into their weekly, daily, hourly communal schedule. Going off of this, we might say that even though how we worship is crucial, perhaps the most crucial part of our worship is that we worship repeatedly, rhythmically, and sustainably.

It makes sense. No matter how much we love God or others, repeatedly reminding ourselves of that love through practices (i.e., intentional prayer, date nights, coffee hangs) helps rekindle that love.

While giving a homily at a young couple’s wedding, Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave this advice: “Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage. It can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.”¹⁷

Ronald Rolheiser comments on this quote:

Love and prayer work the same. The novice’s mistake is to think that they can be sustained simply through good feelings and good intentions, without the help of a ritual container and a sustaining rhythm. That’s naive, however sincere. Love and prayer can only be sustained through ritual, routine, and rhythm.¹⁸

He’s right. Love is certainly more important than the rhythms supporting that love; but like a plant without a trellis, it’s easier to let love flourish when we place strategic barriers that strengthen its roots and encourage it to bloom. We don’t earn God’s love by following through on rituals; they don’t increase God’s love for us, they merely make God’s love feel present and tangible to our perceptions.

Even if I don’t feel emotionally enthralled by morning prayer, the song choices on Sunday morning, reading Obadiah, or sharing the bread of the cup, I know these rituals are worth fighting for. They place me in a narrative grander than my desire to fulfill my authentic self.

Like those pre-Vatican II parishioners from the intro, there’s something inexplicably comforting about ornate rituals, even if we don’t necessarily comprehend why. Rituals carry history that connect to our souls in a way that transcends conscious thoughts. When we pray, fast, memorize Scripture, we participate in the tried-and-true methods of every generation that came before us. They’re like inter-generational communal glue.

No ritual, no orthopraxy, is truly dead. Despite how it might feel at times, the Holy Spirit really dwells in you; prayer works; God meets us in our fasting; generosity really is the best way to use our money—even when no one sticks around to say, “thank you.” Rituals always affect how we live, even if they feel pointless, confusing, or strenuous.

So when I get discouraged—and I get discouraged a lot—the best advice I’ve tried to internalize for any given day is simply this:

Christian spirituality is essentially figuring out how to keep moving in God’s direction. If we keep going, we’ll inevitably stumble onto the wisdom that every past generation has already found: that life with God is simply better than any other kind of life.

1. David DeSteno, How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of. Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 187-188. I’m very thankful for my friend Stephen Weller’s advice on this portion, which I may have still fudged up a bit but hopefully have gotten most of the details at least somewhat accurate.

2. To clarify, I do not think this is John Mark or any adjacent public figure’s fault. As far as I can tell, John Mark and similar teachers to their darndest to try and warn about and prevent discipline burnout.

3. I heard Josh Porter use this term when describing this movement on Preston Sprinkle’s podcast. Maybe there’s a better name for it, but I’m happy with this one so far. Currently working on a longer project about this movement. It’s sort of a modernized continuation of the OG spiritual formation movement popularized by Willard, Foster, and (sort of) Nouwen in the late 20th century.

4. Charles Taylor coined the term, and you can read up about it in his Ethics of Authenticity and A Secular Age. For a more readable theological overview of Taylor’s work, see James K.A. Smith’s How to (Not) Be Secular.

5. Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022), 7.

6. Xygalatas, Ritual, 81.

7. A. D. Tian, J. Schroeder, G. Häubl, J. L. Risen, M. Norton, and F. Gino, “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114 no. 6 (2018): 851-876.

8. DeSteno, How God Works, 55-56.

9. Victoria K. Alogna and Jamin Halberstadt, “The Divergent Effects of Prayer on Cheating,” Religion, Brain, and Behavior 10 no. 4 (2020): 365-378.

10. James K.A. Smith, Awaiting the King (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 168.

11. James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), I can’t remember the page number because I copied down this quote before I entered my good note-taking era.

12. Quoted in Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 29.

13. Lisa K. Fazio, Raunak M. Pilla, and Deep Patel, “The Effects of Repetition on Belief in Naturalistic Settings,” PsyArXiv, January 4, 2021; Lisa K. Fazio, David G. Rand, and Gordon Pennycook, “Repetition Increases Perceived Truth Equally for Plausible and Implausible Statements,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 26 (2019): 1705-1710.

14. Norbert Schwarz, Herbert Bless, Fritz Strack, Gisela Klumpp, Helga Rittenauer-Schatka, and Annette Simons, “Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 no. 2 (1991): 195–202.

15. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topography of the Present, trans. Daniel Steuer (London, UK: Polity Press, 2020) 1-4.

16. My favorite resource on early church practices is Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014).

17. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “A Wedding Sermon from a Prison Cell,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 82.

18. Quote lightly edited to make phonetic sense. Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2022), 41.