Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the "Divine Liturgy", expressing thereby the liturgy's independence from human control.
-Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy
From Gracy Olmstead’s “Why Millennials Long for Liturgy” in The American Conservative:
America’s youth are leaving churches in droves. One in four young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion, according to a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute poll, and 55 percent of those unaffiliated youth once had a religious identification when they were younger. Yet amidst this exodus, some church leaders have identified another movement as cause for hope: rather than abandoning Christianity, some young people are joining more traditional, liturgical denominations—notably the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox branches of the faith. This trend is deeper than denominational waffling: it’s a search for meaning that goes to the heart of our postmodern age.
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Nelson believes a sacramental hunger lies at the heart of what many millennials feel. “We are highly wired to be experiential,” he says. In the midst of our consumer culture, young people “ache for sacramentality.”
“If you ask me why kids are going high church, I’d say it’s because the single greatest threat to our generation and to young people nowadays is the deprivation of meaning in our lives,” Cone says. “In the liturgical space, everything becomes meaningful. In the offering up of the bread and wine, we see the offering up of the wheat and grain and fruits of the earth, and God gives them back in a sanctified form. … We’re so thirsty for meaning that goes deeper, that can speak to our entire lives, hearts, and wallets, that we’re really thirsty to be attached to the earth and to each other and to God. The liturgy is a historical way in which that happens.”
The millennial generation is seeking a holistic, honest, yet mysterious truth that their current churches cannot provide. Where they search will have large implications for the future of Christianity. Protestant churches that want to preserve their youth membership may have to develop a greater openness toward the treasures of the past. One thing seems certain: this “sacramental yearning” will not go away.
One of the greatest advantages of sacramental religion is that it is religion which seeks to make the eternal, not the day’s concern, its focal point. The words of the Catholic mass are recited by the priest day in and day out the world over without change. While that might seem unnecessarily stiff prima facie, a closer look reveals the brilliance of such a sacramental way of doing things: The mass stands apart from the secular world of Heraclitean flux to point towards God set above that constant churning.
Sacramental religions also have the great advantage of being religions of dogma. The word “Dogma” is more often than not a word that is immediately off-putting for people who are used to the changing standards of the secular world. However, we must never forget that a world of religion is a world of truths. That can never be forgotten. Although the norms of society may forever change, the teachings from God are infallible and shall always remain a constant. An unchanging God implies unchanging truths about that God. Without dogma, we would never be able to orientate ourselves towards that being, and liturgical religion understands that point so far as to implement it into its mundane habits of worship. Those of the liturgy are a means by which a believer can orientate herself towards the divine within a hectic world of change, and thus come to friendship with God.
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
-Matthew 10:34-38 (Revised Standard Edition)
Doxastic (from the Greek word δόξα -“Doxa” - meaning “belief”) commitment, a steadfast allegiance in action to the beliefs one holds, is an intrinsic precondition of honor. After all, one of the fundamental demands of honor is the condition of skin in the game, that the person in question be exposed to the costs of her actions. When an honorable human beings acts, she does so in a fashion that exposes her to not only the benefits, but also all of the costs, no matter how bitter, of that action.
The honorable person is thus fully exposed to all of the harmful consequences that result from her behavior. Just as she has her skin in the game when it comes to her ventures in the world exposing her to the harmful effects of those ventures going belly up, she has her soul in the game when it comes to her moral beliefs exposing her to being hurt by them. Nevertheless, doxastic commitment demands that we put our full soul into the game, and be willing to take whatever hurt that follows.
No one likes being hurt, and no one especially likes consciously opening himself to harm in the future. Soul in the game exposes the very fiber of our ethical being and identities to wounds, uncertain in their severity, so it should be no surprise that so many want to avoid identifying themselves with clear-cut moral propositions that doxastic commitment requires. As Cicero noted in On Duties: “From the beginning nature has assigned to every type of creature the tendency to preserve itself, its life and body, and to reject anything that seems likely to harm them...” Our animal nature thus expresses itself when we hedge on our believes and remove our whole soul from the game in order to avoid pain.
However, if doxastic commitment leads to a great chance of being hurt in the future, then would it not be rational to protect oneself against that pain by hedging one's beliefs? We need not abandon all of our moral commitment to do this; rather, we only need to be a bit wishy-washy on key matters that would bring up conflict. Our soul need not completely out of the game, but it could just play the game less intensely. However, this ignores the twofold importance of doxastic commitment. Not only is it a laudable trait for a human being to have, but doxastic commitment is conducive to the selection of the best moral practices across societies.
For one thing, fear of pain is never a virtuous motivation. It may illicit sympathy from an onlooker, but the impartial spectator would never applaud it. There is simply no honor in it. That being willing to accept great costs for one's beliefs is so important to honor is displayed in dueling traditions in history. Those customs demanded that a duelist be willing to sustain great bodily harm, and even death, to display their doxastic commitment and therefore their honor.
Another aspect of doxastic commitment is that it is much easier to keep people accountable for their beliefs in a community that adheres to that custom. Doxastic commitment thus allows for the efficient communication of desired moral conduct because a person with her full soul in the game is open to social cues that alert her to the desirability of her conduct. Why this is so can be understood in light of systems theory. In a complicated system in which paths of concatenation twist and turn this way and that, simple signals that illicit certain responses from the constituent parts of the system are a means of ensuring that the constituent parts of that system are operating as they need to ensure the health of that system. Thirst and hunger are two mundane examples by which an animal body, itself a system of many constituent parts, ensures that it is kept well fed and satiated. An animal need not take measurements of either hydration or nourishment to maintain its health; instead signals within the system provide controls that keep it acting towards the overall wellbeing of the whole system.
A moral community is also a complex, adaptive system since there is a constantly changing frequency of moral habits within it, and those frequencies can change based on the signals of approbation and censure they interact with. In order for the best patterns of conduct to multiply within the community, people need to learn what those best patterns of conduct are, and be put into a situation in which they are likely to actually go through with adopting them. Both are critically necessary. In order to discover them, people need to have their moral character open to critique. So much in human knowledge proceeds via the process of conjecture and refutation. This is especially true when all of the knowledge necessary to come to the final judgment is rarely at the disposal of any one person, which is certainly true in practical ethics. We may never have the knowledge to determine the judgment of the impartial spectator, but he social process of conjecture and refutation, of approbation and censure, can help us come close.
However, moral learning by approbation and censure can only function when there's soul in the game. When people do not put their whole soul in the game, they weaken the signals that they receive about the desirability and propriety of how they live their lives. When people choose to associate themselves with moral propositions that are so indefinite that they can be twisted to suit almost any situation imaginable, then they are unaccountable. Any attempt to criticize them is like trying to grip water: It will always frustratingly slip between one's fingers, ever in metamorphosis to accommodate the circumstances.
Worse, people are more likely to put their whole soul in the game when they are likely to receive praise than when they are to receive condemnation. So now not only is not holding to the habit of having soul in the game not only because it delays the process of the discovery of the best morals by conjecture and refutation, but it also corrupts that process because people will act so as to get a positive signal without truly having the trait that would bring that positive signal about. Not only do they not have their whole soul in the game, but the soul they put there is not their own.
As a result, doxastic commitment lends itself not only to personal virtue, but also the efficient operation of an ethical society in which everyone gets not only the benefits, but also the costs, of their moral beliefs, which in turn helps to weed out the least proper and least cleaved-to moral beliefs.
Doxastic commitment is thus not only a sine qua non for a human being's virtue, but also a rule that helps the efficient discovery of the best moral beliefs. Without soul-in-the-game, not only is an individual really incapable of standing for anything because he is incapable of being wrong on anything, but an individual is not accountable for what they have said before because they have not committed to it. A human being without soul-in-the-game is either too afraid of the pain that being open to the costs of one's beliefs or simply does not have any. The impartial spectator would certainly applaud neither.