When Did Church Start Looking Like a Nightclub?

For centuries, humans have gathered in Canterbury Cathedral to pay homage to the Madonna. On August 15th, they gathered again... this time, for Madonna herself.

Hundreds of people packed the nave of the historic cathedral to spend the summer Saturday night dancing to 1980s pop music.

There was a bar, and in addition to Madonna the DJs spun Prince, Kylie Minogue and other chart-toppers. The medieval cathedral was washed in colored light as dancers wearing glowing LED headphones switched among three different music channels. The second session ran until midnight.

Some Christians were horrified.

“The church no longer believes in the attracting power of the gospel, and resorts to secular music instead,” wrote Tim Dieppe of the conservative Christian publication Christian Concern. Another commentator called the event “the desecration of a sacred space.”

It's easy enough to understand the reaction. Canterbury is not an abandoned church somebody turned into an entertainment venue. It remains the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion (ever heard of the Archbishop of Canterbury?), with services still taking place daily.

But take away the Madonna songs and glowing headphones, and some of the offending imagery starts to look surprisingly familiar.

Colored lights. Giant screens. A darkened room. Music pounding through an expensive sound system. Performers on a stage. Hundreds or thousands of people standing together, singing, swaying and raising their hands.

In many American churches today, that's just Sunday morning.

Does This Look Like Church?

Consider Lakewood Church in Houston, one of America's best-known megachurches, led by one of America's best-known pastors: Joel Osteen.

Its sanctuary seats roughly 16,000 people inside what was once the arena where the Houston Rockets played basketball. Instead of stained glass and a pipe organ, worshippers encounter enormous video screens, professional theatrical lighting and a sophisticated concert-quality sound system.

Lakewood is hardly alone. Contemporary evangelical churches across the United States employ production departments responsible for lighting design, cameras, video walls, livestreams, moving lights and even theatrical haze.

Haze, incidentally, is not some rare extravagance reserved for unusually flashy churches. Church Production Magazine recently described it as a “weekly necessity” for many congregations. Church production consultants openly discuss how to use moving lights, color and haze to create atmosphere during worship. One 2026 industry guide advises churches to coordinate lighting with the “emotional arc” that worship leaders hope to create.

How Churches Learned All the Right Moves

This didn't happen accidentally.

Religious historians Kate Bowler and Wen Reagan have traced much of today's worship style to the rise of American prosperity megachurches and televangelism. Beginning in the 1990s, they argue, large churches increasingly modeled their music on arena rock, aided by enormous sanctuaries and increasingly sophisticated audiovisual systems.

The result was what Bowler and Reagan call a “liturgy of timing, lighting, volume and performance.”

Hillsong, the Australian Pentecostal church network whose Hillsong Worship and Hillsong United music ministries are now international forces in contemporary Christian music, helped export that model around the world. Worship songs have begun to sound like contemporary pop and arena rock, sanctuaries have begun resembling concert halls, and worship leaders have become recording artists, touring performers and celebrities in their own right.

Religious-studies scholar Katja Rakow spent time studying worship at Lakewood Church and found that the technology there does far more than make the service look impressive.

Lighting, video, music and sound deliberately change as worship progresses.

The goal, Rakow argues, is to make a 16,000-seat arena feel simultaneously enormous and intimate, creating conditions in which an individual worshipper can experience personal closeness to God.

In that interpretation, the spectacle isn't competing with worship... it's producing it.

Holy Spirit or Production Cue?

That idea makes some Christians deeply uncomfortable.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, who has worked as a worship leader, described in Christianity Today what happened when she performed at a large Christian conference. Through her earpiece, a production manager told her: “Bigger!”

She was instructed to raise her arms higher, move more and encourage the audience more energetically. Hymns had even been assigned numerical energy levels to help construct the emotional progression of the event.

The difficult religious question is what happens when the person experiencing that crescendo attributes the resulting tears, goosebumps or euphoria to God.

Did the Holy Spirit move them? Or was it the well-timed beat drop? Can it be both?

Some Christians working in church production reject the idea that using technology to shape an experience makes that experience counterfeit. At a recent Churchfront conference, Nathan Finochio defended elaborate production in explicitly theological terms: “Production matters because worship matters.”

Is the Club Also a Little Bit Like Church?

And as it turns out, this road could be traveling both ways. Scholars have spent decades studying the strange spiritual vocabulary that appears in nightclub and rave culture.

One Harvard Divinity School examination of rave spirituality notes that clubs have repeatedly been called “churches” by the people who inhabit them. House music pioneer Frankie Knuckles is often credited with calling Chicago's legendary Warehouse nightclub “church for people who have fallen from grace.”

Church Has Always Been a Sensory Experience

Modern megachurches did not invent church production, they only electrified it.

Consider the high point of the late medieval Mass: the Elevation of the Host, when the priest raised the consecrated bread for the congregation to see and adore. Churches developed an entire sensory apparatus around those few seconds. A bell announced that the moment was coming. Candles helped illuminate the white Host inside the dimmed church. An altar server might help lift the priest's heavy vestments so he could raise it higher. Some churches even utilized a dark backdrop behind the altar to make the Host even easier to see.

The bell could be heard outside the building, alerting people nearby that the moment had arrived. The spectacle became so important to lay worship that records describe medieval Christians hurrying into churches just to catch the Elevation, and even moving between simultaneous Masses to see it more than once. Medieval historian Miri Rubin puts it succinctly: at the Elevation, “all senses were called into play.” Bells sounded, incense burned, candles glowed and worshippers knelt before the object they believed had become the body of Christ.

In a world before rock stars, that bread was a big deal.

In modern language, this all sounds an awful lot like production. There were bell ringers, choristers, acolytes, vestments, incense, processions, lighting and carefully timed visual reveals, all employed to focus attention and help turn Christian belief into something worshippers could see, hear, smell and physically experience.

Canterbury itself offers an especially vivid example. Medieval pilgrims approaching the shrine of Thomas Becket climbed worn stone steps, sometimes on their knees. At the top they encountered an enormous shrine containing Becket's remains in a golden, jewel-encrusted chest. Shrine keepers were employed to highlight the jewels and tell the shrine's story. Stained-glass windows depicted people supposedly healed through Becket's intercession. Pilgrims could even leave with merch, departing with badges or tiny containers of “St. Thomas' water,” associated with the murdered saint's blood.

And Christianity's history of physical religious experience goes well beyond cathedral pageantry.

In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich traces a much older history of people pursuing religious ecstasy through dancing, feasting, rhythm and collective movement. Religious communities had been cultivating versions of it for centuries, even as church authorities periodically tried to restrain forms of celebration they considered disorderly or excessive.

American religious history supplies some wonderful examples. The "Quakers" literally got their nickname from the trembling and “quaking” that could accompany their early worship services. A more ecstatic Quaker offshoot went further: They sang, trembled and danced so energetically during worship that outsiders called them the “Shaking Quakers,” eventually shortened to Shakers. In early Shaker communities, spontaneous dancing was part of Sunday worship; it later developed into choreographed communal movement.

That makes the line from medieval cathedral to modern megachurch considerably less neat. Christians have worshipped through near-silence. They have also worshipped through bells, incense, spectacle, trembling, dancing, chanting, stained glass, organs, electric guitars and enough theatrical haze to make a fire marshal nervous.

The equipment may have changed, but there has always been a level of "showbiz" involved.

A Rave in the Nave

The cathedral has defended the silent discos as “missional.” Dean David Monteith argues that events like these bring people into Canterbury who might otherwise never enter a house of worship. He also points out that cathedral naves historically were not reserved exclusively for formal religious services.

There is real history behind that defense. Medieval church naves occupied a much less tidy boundary between sacred and secular life than many modern worshippers might expect. Historians have documented dancing, commercial trading and even judicial proceedings taking place in churches alongside singing, prayer and preaching. Other church records mention beer, games, bartering, courting and gossip all being enjoyed inside chapels. For centuries and across the faith spectrum, the community's house of worship could also be a space for just about every other aspect of life.

Even the Church of England's own rules leave some room for interpretation. Canon law prohibits secular uses “inconsistent with the sanctity of the place.” But official legal guidance on church wedding receptions specifically says that dancing and accompanying music are not necessarily impermissible inside a church.

American Catholics recently drew the line somewhere else. In 2023, Sabrina Carpenter filmed part of her “Feather” music video inside Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Brooklyn, dancing around the church in a short black dress and veil while pastel-colored coffins stood propped near the altar. In the aftermath, the Diocese of Brooklyn said it was “appalled,” and even held a Mass of Reparation to restore the church's sanctity. The pastor who approved the filming was later stripped of his administrative duties.

Carpenter, ever the wordsmith, offered a rather efficient theological rebuttal: “Jesus was a carpenter.”

A medieval pilgrim staring at a glittering shrine, a superfan screaming Taylor Swift lyrics in an arena, a Shaker moving rhythmically with fellow believers, a worshipper crying beneath Lakewood's stage lights, and a clubgoer disappearing into a dance floor can all experience some combination of awe, release, belonging and the feeling of becoming part of something larger than themselves. 

Churches have spent centuries learning how sound, light, movement and crowds can help people reach beyond themselves. Nightclubs learned many of the same lessons.

If carefully orchestrated light and music cues elicit similar emotions on the dance floor and during Sunday worship, does that make the religious experience less sacred? Or does it tell us something about how human beings have always reached for transcendence?