Tag: the machine

The Mechanical Bride of Christ

In yesterday’s post we finished an exercise in description that spanned three posts where we describe the way the automobile, when it dropped into the ‘ecosystem’ of human life, re-wrote the physical landscape, and our experience of being human, and through these changes rewrought church community into something new, in ‘its image and likeness’ so to speak.

I’ve drawn quite a bit on Marshall McLuhan in the last few posts; one of my favourite McLuhan books is The Mechanical Bride, where he articulates the challenges and costs of life as a “mechanical bride” wedded to (or as) machines in the “absent-minded technological world” we have created where we become “the robots who are its very conscious victim.”

The idea that the technology we hold — or mediums we work with — shapes our humanity is not new. McLuhan was drawing on the Old Testament’s critique of idolatry in Psalm 115 — you become what you behold. He also observed this pattern working through human history — so that “in a pre-industrial world a great swordsman, horseman, or animal-breeder was expected to take on some of the character of his interests,” but he saw this amplified with people spending all our time and energy “using and improving machines” more powerful than ourselves.

He describes life ‘wedded to the machine’ as a mechanical bride as:

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods. Society begins to take on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and luxurious passivity. Each day brings its addition of silks, trinkets, and shiny gadgets, new pleasure techniques and new pills for pep and painlessness.”

And, finally:

“The human person who thinks, works, or dreams himself into the role of a machine is as funny an object as the world provides. And, in fact, he can only be freed from this trap by the detaching power of wild laughter.”

In what follows, I want to unpack some implications of the descriptive work from the last few posts, and why we might want to avoid being ‘the machine’s kept woman’, and embrace a heroically different approach.
You could probably just read the headings in this one…

Technology is ‘ecological’ and its introduction changes the habitat in which we are habitually human.

The car impacted the physical landscape of both city and country. It changed the architecture of the city street and the home; and the habits and routines of our lives. This change of habitat and habit (or actions), through repetition, shapes our character; it has a kind of feedback loop into our hearts and minds (I’m especially thinking of James K.A Smith’s work on the relationship between ‘liturgy’ and our loves here).

Cars, by changing our physical environment and how we live in it, change our “social imaginaries.” This is a $2 term from Charles Taylor to describe the physical and experiential ‘backdrop’ where we form our beliefs — it ‘frames’ what we can imagine. Social imaginaries — and the things in them — give us new experiences and metaphors and choices by which to think. So, for example, C.S Lewis’s inaugural academic speech De Descriptione Temporum calls the machine the ‘new archetypal image’ that separates us from all humans who came before:

“Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines… [The machine] alters Man’s place in nature. The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are. What concerns us more is its psychological effect.”

Once we have machines in the world, machines become part of our language and the fabric of reality in which we create metaphor and poetry and articulate ourselves.

A few years ago I was asked to speak on generative AI at a conference for young folks in Queensland; one of the things I did for my presentation was ask ChatGPT to rewrite a poem from the Song of Songs where the metaphor was not agricultural, but mechanical — specifically comparing the beloved to a car.

1.
How radiant you are, my love!
Oh, how radiant!
Your eyes behind your glasses are like polished headlights,
Your hair is like sleek carbon fiber,
flowing smoothly over your shoulders.

2.
Your teeth are like a row of pristine gears,
perfectly aligned and gleaming.
Each one meshes seamlessly with the other;
not one is out of place.

3.
Your lips are like the curve of a red sports car;
your smile, a flash of chrome.
Your cheeks behind your blush
are like the soft interior leather.

4.
Your neck is like a streamlined chassis,
built with precision and grace;
adorned with silver chains,
each one a testament to your elegance.

5.
Your breasts are like twin air intakes,
balanced and symmetrical,
like perfectly tuned components,
enhancing the engine of your heart.

6.
Until the dawn’s first light
and the night shadows retreat,
I will revel in your presence
and inhale the new car scent of your essence.

I share this now because this poem was the source of the generated image on this post — a kind of literal rendering of McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride — and because this sort of ‘poetry’ is not imaginable without cars (so comparing this to the original is an example of a changed ‘social imaginary’, and this vaguely nods towards the next point.

Machine technology (including the car) causes Secularisation

Following Charles Taylor’s Secular Age thesis (and descriptive work) one can mount an argument that technology — the machine — mechanisms — produce secularisation, both in the way they open up the landscape, and create autonomy (and the possibility of ‘not’ being in your local church on any given Sunday), and in the way they impact our imaginations, our habitats, and our habits.  

You can also get here via C.S Lewis, Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and more recently, Paul Kingsnorth.

The machine secularises.

Here’s some ideas from Charles Taylor that might unpack how this works; again, this is more descriptive work — though Taylor’s arguments around causation are a step more abstract than the description of the car’s impact on the landscape of our cities, and the shape of the church.

Taylor follows a thread from a Dutch philosopher Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, who describes the “mechanisation of the world picture”; tracking the way scientific thought developed from Pythagoras to Newton. Where once the cosmos was viewed as ‘God’s creature,’ shot through with supernatural meaning and perhaps subject to miraculous intervention, over time it became viewed as a “system” of “mutually affecting parts” — a mechanism — designed to “work in certain ways” to “produce certain results,” and we work out ‘God’s purposes’ by discerning “what ends a mechanism of this kind is well designed to serve.”

This shift was aided by the development of mechanisms — like clocks — that allowed God to be conceived of as a “watchmaker”… Here’s Taylor again arguing that mechanistic theories about the universe didn’t just undermine the idea of ‘ideal forms’ (Plato) or ‘inbuilt purpose’ (Aristotle), but the idea of ‘enchantment’ or Spiritual reality surrounding us, “making the presence of God in the cosmos something which was no longer experience-near… God’s power was no longer something you could feel or see.” It now:

“[God’s power] had to be discerned in the design of things, the way we see the purposes of the maker or user in some artificial contrivance, a machine—an image which recurs again and again in the discourse of the time, particularly in the simile likening the universe to a clock.”

Our metaphorical model of the human brain and body has followed this approach to the universe; where once we described them as ‘machines,’ it became popular to describe the brain as a computer… this 2017 Wired article suggests ‘Tech Metaphors Are Holding Back Brain Research,’ noting:

“In ancient Greece, the brain was a hydraulics system, pumping the humors; in the 18th century, philosophers drew inspiration from the mechanical clock. Early neuroscientists from the 20th century described neurons as electric wires or phone lines, passing signals like Morse code. And now, of course, the favored metaphor is the computer, with its hardware and software standing in for the biological brain and the processes of the mind.”

Taylor observed this shift involved no longer simply “observing” God revealing himself through signs and symbols — but becoming participants in the systems and purposes we discerned in nature — his world, and in his Word — “we have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively,” which ‘disenchants the universe’ and so secularises. This process happens through an exchange where we “trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent machine”…

Taylor calls this a shift from ‘cosmos’ to universe.

The cosmos had spiritual and material realities where material things had “undeniable meanings”; pointing beyond the material, revealing “higher and lower kinds of being,” while the universe itself is unresponsive, or indifferent, like a machine, “even if we held that it was designed as a machine for our benefit.”

Taylor describes God’s voice becoming “inaudible… against the din of machines,” against a changing backdrop as the nature of society shifted; where the skyline is no longer framed around a Cathedral, but “individual great buildings each monumentalize some corporation or triumphant entrepreneur, while on the other, vast areas of the city form a crazy quilt of special purpose constructions—factories, malls, docks—following each some fragmentary instrumental rationality.”

Ooft. As the young people say.

The technology we surround ourselves with infiltrates our thinking and experience — and tends towards making us think and act ‘mechanistically’ — one can observe the way the automobile has done this in the description of its reshaping of urban and church life, and sense of being human ‘uprooted’ from location in ‘one space’ for our lifetime, and free to pursue our autonomous individual goals and preferences.

Part of how the machine secularises is by creating consumer choices — and shaping us as ‘consuming machines’. The human temptation, since the Eden story, has been to ‘become like God’ via objectification, extractive commodification, and consumption (seeing, desiring, and taking).

We become what we behold. What we habitually hold — living in a machine world — shapes our habitats and habitats; our cities. Our technology rewires us as consumers who ‘imagine’ life via machine metaphors, forms us to be machine-like. This is not the ‘end’ of the church — which is to habituate us into Christlikeness.

Machine technology, after ‘disenchantment’ offers alternative enchantment through ‘magical idols’ that shape us (and our communities) in their image

The other catch is that these machines don’t just alter our ‘altar moments’ — by shifting our imagination and our habituation, machines end up becoming idols; symbols that themselves have quasi-religious, or actual religious, significance. The spiritual world abhors a vacuum. They don’t just secularise; but paganise — with their own mythology, ritual and eschatologies.

An author named Erik Davis makes this case in a book titled TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, he says:

“By appropriating and re-visioning communication technologies, the spiritual imagination often fashions symbols and rituals from the technical mode of communication it employs: hieroglyphs, printing press, the online database. By reimagining technologies in this way, new meanings are invested into the universe of machines, and new virtual possibilities emerge.”

I’m not suggesting we consciously worship the car — but the shift in values, and architecture, and habits, observed in our descriptions suggest this shift has already taken place at a subconscious level.

Davis saw this ‘TechGnosis’ — a sort of technological religion — being pretty closely linked to what Kingsnorth calls the Machine — also drawing on Lewis Mumford.

“For well over a century, the dominant images of technology have been industrial: the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, the mechanization of work through the assembly line, and the bureaucratic command-and-control systems that large and impersonal institutions favor. Lewis Mumford called this industrial image of technology the “myth of the machine,” a myth that insists on the authority of technical and scientific elites, and in the intrinsic value of efficiency, control, unrestrained technological development, and economic expansion.“

If life ‘mediated by machines’ disenchants, we should consider what happens when church life is mediated to us by machine (the car… or the screen)

If our description was correct — that the car (and the way cars were sold) produces radical neo-liberal autonomous (auto-mobile) individual who values “speed, fun, personal freedom, and individual mobility” plus “choice and identity” in ways not before seen (or possible), this seems at odds with a Gospel that says ‘you are not your own, you have been bought at a price, therefore honour God with your bodies” and encourages us into a life of mutual submission and belonging to Jesus and one another in embodied, gathering, community.

When church becomes a consumer product that people ‘choose’, and ‘belonging’ becomes about what you get ‘as you consume’ — or what you can give in order for the machine to grow and attract (and extract) more from other humans in order to keep feeding itself; you end up with something more like Moloch, Marduk, and Babylon, than like Eden or the New Jerusalem. And a church more like the ‘whore of Babylon’ in Revelation who loves the economic value and power on offer from the beastly military and economy of Rome, than the bride of Christ.

Our task as the bride of Christ is not to be ‘mechanical brides’ who represent the values, practices, ecology, and idolatry of our machine cities; which function as extractive, objectifying, consuming, dominion machines built on perpetual desire and promises of ‘heaven on earth’ arriving through our power; our technologies and techniques — through the machine — our task as the church — the bride of Christ — is to be working out how to be united to him and so mediate his presence and way of life to the world, as a ‘holy priesthood’ — this is what priests do.

We should engage technology and technique critically; not as defaults or norms or ‘inevitable’ goods

If machines — like the car — change our habitats and habits, captivate our imaginations, and can lead to ‘secularisation’ and a mechanical view of the universe; we should critically, not uncritically embrace them into our lives and our experiences — and work at being conscientious and conscious observers of the way the ‘machine’ values of the world infiltrate our lives, our churches ‘ecologically,’ including the ways in which we access and participate in life with God.

We are conditioned, by the prevailing culture, to love technology and technique and pragmatism and the ‘instrumental stance’ in ways that disenchant.

This feels abstract until we consider how faithfulness to God can sometimes feel like it is reduced to ‘serving in a production or program in a Sunday event with well-oiled precision.’

Or, until we consider how we might be made to be ‘located’ and limited in time and space — to participate in the ‘fruitful’ mission of God stewarding (cultivating and keeping) our selves and the space we occupy as places where heaven and earth are meeting, but instead are prone to creating ‘black box’ “non-places” of transience (with sufficient car parking), where artificial lighting amplifies what is happening on stage, and darkness amplifies what happens on screen; as we consume — where we could be ‘any where’ and ‘any when’ — in a drive-in, or at home engaging via a screen.

And, maybe we could also consider that the sacraments — in the Reformed tradition — are not simply ‘pedagogical techniques’ but a participation in reality as it is, anticipating what it will become. They are means of grace, and the elements — the water of Baptism, or bread and cup, teach us about the shape of heavens and earth — and the meaning, significance, or purpose of material reality by doing and being something. While also, the event, or practice orients us — where, for example, ‘discerning the body’ in communion is not just about what’s going on in the bread but recognising who you are connected to spiritually and ‘in the flesh’ in the body of Christ around you and participating in an act of spiritual unity. The physical elements are a picture of the way creation itself is oriented to, or has a telos, aligned with worshipping the creator. Churches are not ‘opt in’ events you drive to; but an organic network of flesh, blood, and Spirit, you belong to — with obligations and commitments beyond consumption; where you have a role to play in the gathering, and as the gathered people ‘in the world’ (not just in an event, or for a corporation).

There’s a risk that church can become about consumption of information produced by workers in the machine (content generators and the ‘evangelical industrial complex’), in programs tailored to attract and retain consumers (sometimes crassly called ‘giving units’) who will fuel the perpetual pushing beyond limits. The machine then exists to create more trinkets and shiny gadgets — church apps — and techniques — to maximise engagement with ‘the machine’ that is the church via our mechanical and digital technologies.

Seeing these patterns invites us to conceive of discipleship differently; as oriented away from extractive, objectifying dominion (the ethos of the machine) towards life-giving, fruitful, generativity as image bearers of the living God. I’ll unpack more of the way ‘auto-mobile’ or ‘machine’ church views discipleship and formation (as tied to ‘serving in, or fueling, the machine’) in a future post. Seeing the way we have become subject to machines — without even noticing — to their mythology and allure — does invite us to unplug; and perhaps some of this requires laughter.

A way to resist involves cultivating a different kind of ecology through different habits, and limitations, around our use of machines

We’re already used to thinking about how we limit the impact of things like smart phones on our psyche (and our bodies). What do healthy limits on cars and ‘auto mobility’ looked like (and indeed, as we’ll see, the use of digital technologies in church communities and gatherings too)?

What happens if our churches take on the principles, practices — the technologies and techniques — of the objectifying and extracting, all consuming cities we exist in?

What does it look like to plant gardens and build houses — little Edens where God dwells with his people — in mechanised Babylon? In an automobile city?

Automobile cities and automobile churches are expressions of the logic of ‘the machine’ (and “the Machine” is Babylon)

Here it’s time to bring back some Kingsnorth Against The Machine… to remind ourselves what it is he observes animating the modern city and the modern citizen (that I’m suggesting animates the modern machine church too). Here’s, again, the animating logic of the machine:

“The ethos of the Machine is expansion, the busting of limits and the consumption of whatever can be sold to us to meet the ‘needs’ of the individual self which the Machine constructed for us in the first place. But all of nature’s functions operate within limits. They rely for their continued operation on a healthy balance of the complex and delicate systems that the living planet brings about.”

His take on the myth of progress is pretty much exactly what C.S Lewis spoke about in his lecture… and what Taylor observes in his secularisation thesis built on ‘mobilisation,’ and ‘disenchantment’ of space and time through the rise of a mechanised concept of the universe.

“Here is where we find ourselves: in a world in which all of our desires, needs, projects and even attempts at resistance end up furthering the progress of the Machine. The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative.”

Babylon’s creation story, the Enuma Elish gives an account of the birth of the city of Babylon, where the God, Marduk, creates the world out of the bodies of the other gods he violently dismembered; he makes humans to serve the gods, and they make a ‘tower of Babylon’ (from bricks) that reaches the heavens, where the gods will feast, attended by their human slaves.

Babylon’s king at the time of Judah’s exile — Nebuchadnezzar, liked to make young men from captured nations into Eunuchs who would serve the royal court; he built towers to the heavens from bricks stamped with his name (there are examples in the British museum). He feasted on wealth he extracted from the world through his grasping, all consuming, power; his city extracted life from the surrounding nations. The book of Daniel describes him building a golden image (using the same word as the ‘image of God’) and demanding all people “of every language and nation” worship him (a reversal of the tower of Babel). The logic of Babylon is violent extraction — the objectification of others, and commodification of nature, fuelled by the desire to consume. This is how Paul Kingsnorth describes the ‘city’ built according to (or shaping) the logic of machines — the kind of city that begins being ‘the norm’ once cars, roads, and suburbs reshape the landscape and our urban architecture:

“The lesson is old and growing more obvious daily: a city, unlike a village, can never be self-sufficient. A giant city is a kind of micro-empire: it cannot exist without enclosing and harvesting lands and peoples elsewhere to provide for its own growth. One of the great myths of the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure. A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves. A city dweller exists to serve the city. If she is lucky, the city will also serve her. If she is unlucky, she will end up juggling three jobs and trying to scrabble together enough pennies to feed her children.”

This is how the Book of Revelation describes Rome — first century Babylon… in Revelation 18…

When the kings of the earth who committed adultery with her and shared her luxury see the smoke of her burning, they will weep and mourn over her. 10 Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry:

“‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    you mighty city of Babylon!
In one hour your doom has come!’

11 “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore— 12 cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; 13 cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and human beings sold as slaves.

14 “They will say, ‘The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your luxury and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered.’ 15 The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from her will stand far off, terrified at her torment. They will weep and mourn 16 and cry out:

“‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    dressed in fine linen, purple and scarlet,
    and glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls!
17 In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin!’

“Every sea captain, and all who travel by ship, the sailors, and all who earn their living from the sea, will stand far off. 18 When they see the smoke of her burning, they will exclaim, ‘Was there ever a city like this great city?’ 19 They will throw dust on their heads, and with weeping and mourning cry out:

“‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
    where all who had ships on the sea
    became rich through her wealth!
In one hour she has been brought to ruin!’

Oh yeah, and:

Your merchants were the world’s important people.
    By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.
24 In her was found the blood of prophets and of God’s holy people,
    of all who have been slaughtered on the earth.”

Rome; Babylon — and, in Revelation, ‘that great city where Jesus was slain’ — Rome/Jerusalem/Egypt — the archetypal city of Cain; of refuge for the rebellious — the city extracts resources and wealth, so the rich get richer — it pulls people of all nations away from God with its pomp and ceremony; its golden images and towers — and it slaughters those who will not bend the knee to its extractive power. You’re on the bus or under the bus, so to speak. People exist to feed the machine; life is created by dismemberment, objectification — turning folks into cogs who plug in and serve, until they are discarded — who enjoy the spoils and trinkets while they can.  

Kingsnorth says:

“This is the modern Machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart.”

I fear this could describe the ‘machine’ church — the mega church; geared around consumer satisfaction and consumption; around what will cause an individual to hop in their car and drive to an experience that is ‘fast, loud, and individuating’ with great bells and whistles — differentiated from the other machines, like auto-mobiles offering optional extras or choices of colour.

Kingsnorth describes Plato’s concept of a ‘human scale city’ by contrast. Here are a few quotes,

“As so often, this is a question of scale. Plato, according to Mumford, ‘limited the size of his ideal city to the number of citizens who might be addressed by a single voice’. Everyone should be within hailing distance of that voice in order to ensure human-scale living. Some ancient cities were indeed built on almost this scale, at least initially. There are towns, and city centres, across Europe and Asia today which are beautifully organised, stunning to look at and in some cases thrilling to visit or live in.

Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The twenty-first century city exists mainly for one purpose: profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end. You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations.

The pre-modern city and the contemporary metropolis are different not just in scale, but in essence. The city itself ‘becomes consumable, indeed expendable: the container must change as rapidly as its content. The latter imperative undermines a main function of the city as an agent of human continuity. The living memory of the city, which once bound together generations and centuries, disappears: its inhabitants live in a self-annihilating moment-to-moment continuum.”

Machine churches operate with the logic of machine cities — they create dependency, remove agency, promise we will find ourselves but ‘deskill’ and demotivate us, so that faithful discipleship is reduced to participation in the services and programs — and, if you are lucky, they will also serve you. They promise abundance but deliver scarcity and perpetual grasping for more as the machine tries to expand its reach.

Kingsnorth’s treatment of the city — and the human scale — provides an antidote to Babylon, or the machine — a bit like the humble ‘planting gardens, and building houses’ was God’s call to Israel through Jeremiah while they were in Babylon; we are — like Daniel — called to faithful presence and differentiation; to not bow the knee or enjoy the ‘meat’ on offer on the city’s menu.

Nebuchadnezzar demanded people of every tongue and nation participate in the extractive nature of the city; recognising him as the embodiment of Marduk; bowing down and worshipping — on threat of death. Jesus, the lamb who was slain who is seated on the throne of heaven invites people of every tribe, tongue and nation, to come before his throne and join with him as the bride of Christ as he lays down his life for us — the logic of our communities has to be different to the logic (and practice) of those wedded to “the machine,” we cannot simply uncritically employ machines and the logic of the city (or empire) to ‘reach people for Jesus.’

We are not mechanical brides.

May 20, 2026 Add Comment

The auto-mobile church

In the last two posts unpacking Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine as it relates to what I’m calling ‘machine church’, we’ve started building out a bit of a case study looking at the way church, as we know it, is a product of a technology — the automobile — which is embedded in the architecture of our cities, and the structure (and thinking) underpinning our lives — not just urban, but modern (in that this is perhaps even ‘truer’ in rural and regional areas).

We’ve unpacked the car’s impact on cities, and the psyche — now I’m going to unpack the traceable and observable impact the car has had on how we approach (literally as well as figuratively) church (both as the gathering people of God in a discrete community, and the ‘places’ these gatherings meet).

Just to recap, to save you reading those now month old posts, modern cities evolved around roads (and carparks), and have changed shape — and the shape of our interactions with and in them — based on the kinds of cars we invent and drive. The suburb and the ‘CBD’ are both functions of transport technology (and industrialisation); and this reordering of the physical structure of life impacted what Charles Taylor calls the ‘social imaginary’ — shaping the background conditions of our beliefs and habits (our habitats shape our habits, which shape our character).

In the second post we explored what Taylor calls the ‘age of mobilisation’ — the way the incredible increase of ‘personal choice’ and ‘individual expression,’ brought by the automobile, has shifted the religious and political landscape as people live in a more connected world, freed from previous social orders/hierarchies/inherited career paths in family businesses. We considered that ‘auto’ is the word for ‘self’ — and the overlap of the literal ‘mobilisation’ that is extended by a car, and this change in social order — and how ‘consumer choice’ becomes a factor in modern life and the way institutions cater to ‘auto-mobile’ individuals — hinting that this might be a factor with church, and religious belief and practice (Taylor is explicit about this).

In this post I’m going to unpack a history of the modern (machine) church as it relates to the car — but my argument is not that the church is exclusively a product of the car (or the suburbs and conditions of choice created by and around the car), but a product of (often uncritically) embracing machine technologies (and accompanying philosophies, practices, and anthropologies) like a Trojan horse that end up shaping our habitats (‘ecology’ and ‘economy’) and habits — and our ‘ecclesiology’ and ‘missiology’. In a future post I’ll consider implications of this descriptive work, and then how digital technology is reshaping churches in the present the way cars did in the past, but in this one we’ll land on my hypothesis that a ‘church will grow to the size of its carpark.’

In all this, I’m essentially following Neil Postman’s observation in his essay Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change:

“What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.”

I’m not yet convinced that there is ‘nothing good’ about the kinds of technology harnessed by ‘the machine’ — but rather, that unless we see the forces (powers and principalities) using the technologies and shaping the technologies through idolatrous humans who want to ‘be like God’ — we can’t possibly treat technology as ‘neutral’ or ‘plunder Egypt and use it to preach Christ’ (to slightly misquote Augustine).

Neil Postman was Marshall McLuhan’s successor in the field of media ecology, McLuhan, wrote:

“Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

So. In this series of observations about the car and the church, we’re trying not to be idiots.

Here’s a passage from McLuhan’s Understanding Media, drawing on Lewis Mumford (quoted in the ‘car-city’ post), and noting the way he (in the 1960s) saw the wheel and combustion engine being replaced by ‘electronic’ technology and screens.

“The automobile, followed by the airplane, dissolved this grouping and ended the pedestrian, or human, scale of the suburb. Lewis Mumford contends that the car turned the suburban housewife into a full-time chauffeur. Certainly the transformations of the wheel as expediter of tasks, and architect of ever-new human relations, is far from finished, but its shaping power is waning in the electric age of information, and that fact makes us much more aware of its characteristic form as now tending toward the archaic.”

This quote resonates a bit with one from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which, with Mumford, formed something of the basis of Paul Kingsnorth’s metaphor of ‘the machine.’

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”

This is to say, cars are a form of the machine that begin to rewrite our experience of being human — and our social structures and architecture — including the nature of church communities.

The Auto-Church

So. Let’s talk about the ‘age of mobilisation’ and the car — the annihilation of space — and the impact this has on the modern self, via the impact it has on the modern church.

Now. I like being able to drive (and fly) places. I like choice. I enjoy international food that I would not have discovered but for global connectivity. I am happy to do the ‘Michelin restaurant’ thing (from the previous post), seeking out drinking and dining experiences by car.

And, when it comes to church, I love my church family — and recognise that people in our community, if you plot them on a map of greater Brisbane — live up to an hour’s drive away from one another and the car (and other technologies) mediate genuine ‘unity-in-the-Spirit’ communion between people who have chosen to be part of the same expression of the household of God.

I recognise that there are complex economic forces driving a diasporic experience of ‘household life.’ This includes that ‘affordable housing’ is increasingly available in outer suburbs or satellite cities, and that entry level jobs in various careers requires being uprooted. This ‘diaspora’ fragments communities (and families) across suburban, regional, state, and international borders, so technology (whether mechanical or digital) sustains connections across that fragmentation.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), when wired telephony, television, and radio waves were precursors to the Internet and the mobile phone, McLuhan coined a phrase to highlight how these ‘mediums’ recreate “the world in the image of a global village.” This is part of the ‘ecology’ and the competing effects of different technologies — I simultaneously can feel a room-to-room, screen-to-screen connection with family across the country, while needing to drive an hour to see members of my church community in their distant suburb.

I will almost always choose to drive and park rather than walk, or catch public transport — because — I, dear reader — have grown up in a world, and a church, shaped by the machine.

It is true that at various points — both in my childhood and early teenage years, and then for a short period in my early 20s, I have experienced the joy of living on the same block as the church I attended — and that proximity is beautiful to me, but my normal practice is to drive to church, and in doing so, to drive past other churches and through other suburbs — and people drive to our church by choice because of the ‘service’ we offer and a kind of affinity or preference for that service, not simply to maintain pre-existing relational connections (though also often because the housing constraints in modern life force people to affordable fringes and away from their established geographic roots).

Your normal practice is probably to drive to a church you like too.

It is simply the case that this is a very new phenomenon. Historically speaking. And that it changes the nature of church — both as a gathering people, and our relationship to church as autonomous ‘consumers’ who choose, rather than ‘being given’ a family, community, and story we belong to ‘rooted’ in time and place.

These changes are not all negative, but they are a picture of the symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship between the church and the machine; and our modern obsession with eradicating rather than embracing the comforting discomfort of limits.

In what follows I am going to give an historical account — a description — of the modern machine church — the ‘automobile’ church. I’m going to initially draw on historical sources and an essay, ‘Effects of Auto-Mobility on Church Life and Culture’ by Craig Van Gelder, published in the journal Word and World in 2008, and give an account of the modern ‘mega church’ — a church designed for consumers in the machine age — that again is demonstrably a piece of modern church history (and technological dependence).

We covered the shifting architecture of life around the development of cities and suburbs alongside road and rail — we’re going to pick up the story of the impact of this shift on the church from the late 1800s, when Van Gelder notes “electric streetcar systems” and their stops and stations led to the “formation of thousands of city-neighborhood congregations” serving “a well-defined, three-generational neighbourhood” that “required the development of little or no parking space, an unintended consequence that would later come back to haunt them.”

At the moment I am responsible for two suburban Presbyterian congregations in inner-city Brisbane — one has a carpark the other does not. There are all sorts of ways that inherited church spaces reflect the transportation habits, or choices available, to congregants of the past that do impose certain limits on how churches use those spaces now. In one of these churches, to seek to change how we use the building, our options are severely limited in terms of local government zoning, because we have no designated parking.

My experience in ‘machine church’ is also instructive here; our mother ship is a large suburban church with a large multi-purpose facility, and an exceptionally large carpark — we planted in an inner city theatre with limited on-site parking, moved to a temporary location with no on site parking (and only expensive paid parking nearby) and immediately almost halved in regular attendance, before relocating again to a rented ‘warehouse conversion’ — a black box auditorium operated by a local Pentecostal church who hired another nearby shed as parking space.

The earliest automobiles — available in various (expensive) forms from the late 1890s — did not influence urban church communities; however there is some influence the automobile reshaped regional and rural churches — where communities who had previously shared ‘itinerant’ pastors they might see semi-regularly could now share a preacher who drove from town to town delivering the same sermon multiple times on a Sunday (interestingly this produced a corresponding increase in workload on the pastor; who now had to write a new sermon every week, rather than one a month, and drive from location to location).

Henry Ford began mass-producing the affordable automobile (the Model T) in 1908, through a mechanised assembly process — machines making machines. The rapid uptake of this technology reshaped the city, Van Gelder notes “State highway departments were organized across the country, and road construction, especially paved-road construction, became a boom industry. The first networks of both state highways and U.S. highways were well in place by the early to mid 1920s,” he also notes the uptake produced the “values of personal mobility and individual freedom, which led to the automobile beginning to reshape the social geography.” People were still using public transport until (according to Van Gelder) General Motors bought up and demolished over 100 electric street car systems, before selling buses to those cities.

Van Gelder notes cities like Los Angeles, California, were pioneer ‘automobile cities,’ where physical and social geography was shaped around the car. The re-organisation of cities — whether overtly organised ‘automobile cities’ or not — changed the physical architecture of church spaces (and the land used), so “congregations began to set aside increased space for parking and as newly forming congregations secured locations not tied as directly to fixed-rail systems of transportation.”

Here’s a collection of written responses to the changes wrought to ‘modern life’ by the car from people living in the 1920s. Two articles from ‘The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science’ in 1924 examine the impact of the automobile in this era in rural and urban churches.

In ‘What the Automobile Has Done to and for the Country Church,’ Warren Wilson noted that young people enjoying the ‘speed and vivacity’ provided by the car were suddenly afforded the option ‘not’ to be at their local church. He suggested that unless the preacher could “attract and hold the young” they would “yield to the temptation to go somewhere on Sunday,” while the church could demonise the car in “deploring” the irreligion of the young; while if a pastor was “of fertile spirit and contagious religious purpose” cars would bring a “new throng of young people,” coming as a result of this newly available consumer choice.

James Coale wrote a corresponding piece on the ‘Influence of the Automobile on the City Church,’ he was more optimistic about the impacts of the car — seeing it ‘giving and taking away’ — while people might go on road trips out of the city, rural folks might come to the city at the same time; and “good church members” would attend wherever they were — even in “another city a hundred miles from home.” He believed the car would “be an instrument of blessing” — making very similar points to those made about screens during a pandemic — “it makes possible attendance on the part of the invalid and the aged, who without it could not attend public worship. It facilitates the work of the church in caring for the sick and the indigent.”

Back to Van Gelder — his ‘phase 2’ of the impact of the car spans from 1930s to the 1960s — reflected an expansion of the ‘core values’ produced in the age of auto-mobilisation. Phase 1 included the values of ‘speed, fun, personal freedom, and individual mobility’ — phase 2 added “choice and identity.” It’s interesting that this corresponds with a rapid uptick of the use of the word identity in the fields of psychology and sociology documented in this article in my archives.

His account dovetails with McLuhan’s observations canvassed in a previous post — where ‘mass produced automobiles became increasingly personalised’ with more models, and accessories, and the “personalised automobile culture” described in the 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders.

As the city and the psyche shifted — becoming decentralised from the streetcar network “in all directions” on roads and highways constructed primarily for cars, that connected so-called “automobile suburbs,” where peoples homes were in separate locations to their places of work — “a whole set of new institutional forms was generated to serve these suburban communities, including shopping centers, suburban (one-story) schools, and suburban congregations.” Van Gelder notes:

“The massive migration of population from both the central cities and the rural areas into this new type of housing community generated a lifestyle and set of values that dramatically reshaped both congregational identity and the primary practices for carrying out congregational life and ministry. The suburban success of the churches was quite remarkable, with thousands of new congregations developed to serve the expanding systems of suburban communities.”

This new ‘automobility’ meant membership was transient; according to Van Gelder’s research, seventy percent of a suburban congregation cycled out of the community within ten years, and “this transience required the development of a new logic for fostering congregational identity—a logic that became known as the “program church,” where a shared set of programs and activities under the administrative oversight of a “professional minister” became the norm,” he cites Gibson Winter’s The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, which describes “the commodification of personal identity around the automobile, the suburb and the suburban church epitomized the commodification of the American dream.”

The next ‘epoch’ Van Gelder charts covers a period from 1965 (around the time McLuhan, Mumford and Ellul were writing) to 1995, where we see the rise of the ‘megachurch’ (especially, but not only, in America). Hillsong’s development in the ‘hills district’ of Sydney in the early 80s also tracks with the description in the US.

The megachurch — and its correspondence with the ‘church growth movement’ launched by Donald McGavran, who published Understanding Church Growth in 1970 — are, to my mind archetypes of the ‘machine church’ where technology and technique are embraced as opportunities to maximise the reach of the Gospel in the cultural conditions described, in part, by Van Gelder with the values of auto-mobility “speed, fun, personal freedom, individual mobility, choice and identity.”

None of this analysis of the changing nature of church through this period is particularly new, and in a large part we’re still engaged in the task of ‘description’ — Van Gelder notes that megachurches are typically located in the suburbs, “on large-acreage tracts in close proximity to major freeways, and they usually serve a large regional constituency. Most of these congregations provide “seven-day-a-week” ministries, with scores of programmatic opportunities for participation.” This is, amongst other things, a description that fits my experiences of machine church here in Queensland.

We’re going to detour — or take an off ramp — for a minute and consider the way the automobile was literally at the centre of the development of what many consider to be ‘the first mega church’. And we’re going to use some quotes from an episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Boomers, The Big Sort, and Really, Really Big Churches, to unpack this history.

It’s a church in California, 40 minutes drive from Los Angeles (the ‘automobile city’), in Garden Grove; a church planted in 1955 by Robert Schuller.

Schuller’s first iteration of what would become the Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove Community Church began in a Drive In Movie theatre — parishioners could come to church and stay in their cars. A Time Magazine article from 1967 describes a Sunday service:

“As the choir sang Holy, Holy, Holy, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller mounted the pulpit of his new $3,000,000 church in Garden Grove, Calif., and pushed a button. Two 25-ft.-high sections of the glass wall before him separated slowly, leaving only open air between the preacher and nearly 1,500 worshipers in 500 cars parked below him.

Schuller’s nondenominational Protestant parish, as its newspaper advertisements state, is a “walkin, drive-in” church—one of more than 70 now operating across the nation.”

It ends with a pastor joking that he “worries that he will one day mount the pulpit and absentmindedly intone: “Will the autos of the congregation please rise?”

A congregation of cars.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill featured an audio clip from Schuller, describing the strategy to provide “seating in the sanctuary and drive-up speakers in the parking lot for people who wanted to continue to worship in their cars.”

“I started because we didn’t have property. I went to the Orange Drive in Theatre… unchurched people came safely in their cars… we had 50 cars that first Sunday and here 53 years later, we had a nice church.”

The podcast ep notes that because people were driving half an hour to work, or half an hour to the shops, they didn’t think twice about driving past 30 churches to the ‘megachurch they wanted to associate with,’ while ‘everything was getting bigger’ — houses, shops, and box stores. Growth enabled by changing “infrastructure, technology and industrial advancement… Cars, highways and interstates, audio amplifiers and sound systems, air conditioning, a staple of the suburban experience in new homes and shopping malls.”

Again, this is simply description — and not new — a Christianity Today article from 2014 argued that the car created the mega church.

“Not only has car culture nurtured an emphasis on affinity, but it has also altered ecclesiology (our beliefs about the church). How pastors preach, what they preach about, worship experience, and church governance are all affected. Cars have put church “consumers” in the driver’s seat like never before, and church leaders are forced to buckle up for the ride…

For many pastors and church leaders, an attractional model of church becomes almost a necessity—subject to forces beyond any one pastor’s control. When parishioners can drive anywhere, pastors are forced to think strategically about how to attract and retain them.”

Van Gelder’s next description also fits my experience as a ‘campus pastor’ within such a machine; we even had ‘multisite consultant’ Wade Burnett do a day workshop with our ministry team articulating the need for campuses to have a clear model, and multisite churches to be both ‘attractional’ (with strong attractors around teaching, worship, community and kids programming) and ‘missional’ (with strong connections to place).

“…most have attracted large numbers of members from other congregations, usually the older city neighbourhood and suburban congregations. Second, those seeking to plant new congregations, apart from the effort to build a megachurch, experienced difficulty in knowing how to develop a ministry and locate its life. Target-focused ministry around affinity networks became increasingly the pattern for starting new congregations, and most of these were started by renting space for their first years, often in schools.”

This is the pattern here in Australia — and the ‘driver’ behind both small affinity churches (like ours) that attract people from across suburban Brisbane, and ‘megachurches’ — is the automobile, and appealing to consumer choice. At least in the first instance — even if this is the choice ‘not to be part of a machine’ (that’s still product differentiation). This description from Van Gelder also fits my experience.

“Constructing a congregational identity around an affinity-based constituency that is regionally dispersed has also placed new demands on pastoral leadership, emphasizing certain leadership personality traits and focusing increasingly on pastoral persona.”

The CT article makes the same point that the ‘auto-mobile’ (self-mobile) centres personal preference, whether choosing ‘big’ or ‘small’:

“Affinity doesn’t apply only to megachurches or only to shallow, selfish churchgoers though. The fundamentalist church down the road and the lifestyle-affirming church in town both play into it. Even the most doctrine-driven Christians likely choose their churches based on that personal value. They don’t really have an alternative.”

Van Gelder’s article also describes my experience coming in to assist a suburban congregation in a property without car parking…

“The older, city-neighborhood congregations fell on even harder times as a result of significant racial and ethnic changes in their communities over more than forty years. Those that continue to survive with some dimension of their original identity, whether based in ethnicity or social class or both, usually have memberships with an average age of over sixty. In addition, almost all of these congregations face the steep challenge of being able to provide anything near the parking required for their drive-in membership.”

His whole article is worth reading as an exemplar of how our habitats shape our habits. Church architecture matters — so does the shape of urban and suburban life — and technology — including the automobile — shapes our interactions with space in ways we sometimes take for granted or assume to be ‘normal’ or ‘good’. I wonder if there’ll be a workshop on church carparks at this year’s Reach Australia conference?

The Car Park Theory of Church Growth

While we’ve stuck as closely as possible to description — both of the reshaping of community (rural, regional and urban) life, and church life in the west in the last 150 years, I’m going to tease out some implications in the next post (don’t worry — I’ve already written it — I just excised 3,000 additional words from this one…).

The one implication I want to land on in this contribution to the discussion of machine church is that while it is popular to locate ‘church growth’ in the hands and efforts of a visionary leader who ‘attracts’ with personality, and programs that are spectacular (ie the ‘attractional model’) the dependence on the automobile has created a natural limit; one that serves as a significant push/pull factor in church attendance.

The car park.

I have a pretty solid theory that much like Douglas Adam’s ‘puddle will always grow to the size of its hole’ idea that ‘the way things are account for the way things are’.

You can be the most compelling leader in the world, but if people can’t park at your church — if this is how we’ve conditioned (or discipled) church goers — if they can’t park, they won’t come. And, conversely — if people’s church habits are in part technological, they will come if they can park; and this might be less about your abilities or programs than you think.

A modern church will not grow to the capacity of its programs, ability of its leader, or number of seats in the building — though these are all limits — but the number of car parks. There are, of course, outliers — destination churches that attract people because they are located near transport hubs (especially CBD churches, but some of these historic churches have also invested in car parking via property developments).

And that once it is inconvenient to park, or more convenient to drive a few more minutes for a park close to a different building, people will do that — if all things are equal travel time and carpark wise, then people might decide about other things. It’s simplistic — but it’s also true that it is very difficult to grow beyond the size of your carpark.

My own experiences support this theory. Well, it could simply and legitimately be that I am incompetent and our church is not a product people want to consume — we began with a car park, and grew to its size; we were forced to move locations to a site where parking cost $23 an hour — we shrank. We moved to a location with a car park, and grew, and then moved to our now home, where, we have, once again, grown to the size of our carpark.

This anecdata supports my theory even if I am incompetent — in that people were willing to put up with that incompetence until the parking was impossible.

May 19, 2026 1 Comment