Those of us who grew up as Evangelical Protestants were told that, unlike Orthodox or Roman Catholic Christians, we Protestants worshipped God in spirit and in truth. That is why, we were told, we needed no liturgy or "empty rituals" to help us to worship God. We did not need to study church history because our personal salvation histories were all that mattered. We did not need the Holy Tradition because we had a direct personalized relationship with Jesus. If we felt spiritual, then we were. What we did or how we worshipped had nothing to do with our salvation, which we understood to be a one-time, almost magical, predestined occurrence, not a journey. We believed in the Bible, but no in the Church. We did not need to confess to a priest, to celebrate the Eucharist, let alone light a candle, venerate an icon or say a written prayer. We were taught that we were free of all such "new-pagan superstitions." How other Christians had done things for millennia, or what they had believed, or how they had come to believe was no concern of ours. We needed no interpretation but our own in deciphering the meaning of the Scriptures.

No bishop, apostolic or otherwise, had any special authority over us regarding the true meaning of Scripture. No Father of the Church or Council had any special wisdom to which we should hearken. In fact we were told that our Christianity was like the rest of life in our pluralistic, free society-up to the individual, a personal choice, a question of individual "leading." Our Christianity was, in fact, anything we wanted it to be, though perhaps we never admitted as much. We said that what we believed was biblical. But it often turned out that the Bible said anything we wanted it to. We tended to reject the ancient Christian idea that the Holy Spirit had led the Church. Yet we readily enough claimed the Spirit's "leading," on a personal subjective level, as proof that we were correct about matters theological and "doing the Lord's Will" in matters personal. If we disagreed with the teaching of one denomination or minister, we would shop for a new "church" until we found one we liked.

Ironically, claims of freedom from tradition and the Church's authority notwithstanding, we doggedly stuck to our "free" habits of worship. Our order of self-styled church services rarely varied within any given denomination. We always prayed the same repetitive way whether we read our prayers or not, ("Dear heavenly Father, we just this, we just that..."). If we were Reformed Presbyterians, we stuck to our Calvinist tradition -- church consisted of four white walls and a lengthy sermon -- and "worship" was the feeling you got if the sermon was good. If we were Southern Baptists, then baptize we did -- adults only. If we happened to be in a so-called charismatic denomination, then our chaos of worship, tongues, prophesy, signs and wonders and the like was an organized chaos that, in its own extroverted way, was as repetitive and predictable as filing a tax return. It was not really a question of Protestant freedom versus ancient Holy Tradition, but rather of choosing which tradition, ritual and liturgy to follow.

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A study of Church history shows that Protestant worship, as it is usually practiced today, bears almost no resemblance to the sacramental liturgical worship of the entire Church for the better part of two thousand years in both the East and West. This is not a theological opinion, much less a moral judgment, but simple a statement of historical fact. The Church's practices are well documented.

So entertainment-oriented, even trivial, has the majority of Protestant worship become that even the fear of God, according to the teaching of the Church, the most basic prerequisite for individual repentance, seems to have been largely lost. The mystery of faith has been replaced with rationalistic theology on the one hand, and frivolous, internalized, "touchy-feely," entertainments on the other.