Evangelical Churches and Noise (Trivial)

I'm tempted to make fun of Paul Krugman for his blog post complaining about how noisy restaurants are these days:

Noise (Trivial) - NYTimes.com

For the record, though I'm younger than Krugman's 98 years, and was born after the Great War, I also often find restaurants too noisy, particularly the one in my hotel here in Kampala, which, from my hotel room three stories above, always sounds like a nightclub after 8, even though there is no dancing, nobody is ever at the bar, and there are rarely more than two people in the dining room.

My room faces out on to a sort of interior courtyard that carries noise up from below, including the bass from the hotel restaurant sound system, trucks pulling in and out of the loading area down on the ground floor (the first two floors of the building are filled with shop spaces occupied by mattress, used shoe, and suitcase distributors), and the evangelical church services that happen on the third floor just about every night.

Actually, the church services are pretty mediocre, meaning that I can tune them out fairly easily.  Which is a pleasant change from evangelical services in Latin America, particularly in Guatemala, where the music is hilariously bad and very, very loud.  The Guatemalan evangelicals also start going to church at about 6:30 in the morning, and often don't stop until about 1AM.  And of course, the evangelical community is highly decentralized into many small congregations, so you will often be staying near several churches and really have to listen to evangelical services all day long, from early to very, very late.

These days, the Latin American Catholic church isn't much better.  It's not exactly Chant down there.  But at least the Catholics, who have had a couple of hundred years to allow their passion for faith to cool, constrain their church-going to reasonable hours.

In addition to my preference for the African evangelicals, I also get a kick out of the street preachers you see here in the city.  They range from pathetic (a girl in rags, preaching up by the University, who was struggling to read her dirty, dog-eared bible) to the well-rehearsed and very dramatic (two guys carrying on a dialogue on Christ in loud, gravelly preacher voices).  The other day, an angry-sounding preacher gave me a nasty look when I smiled at him.  "Okay!  I repent!  Please don't hit me!"

Although I kind of wish you would see them more in the areas around my hotel, giving sermons against pick-pocketing and thievery.  Or child exploitation, since you see these little kids (as young as two, it seems) begging on their own, and presumably being forced to give the money to some patron.

By no means take this as a diatribe against evangelicals or religion in general.  I view evangelical churches (and others) as important parts of civil society.  Evangelical churches are much more democratic than traditional, "mainstream" Christian religions, and they really do good work out in the countryside.  They call it "missionary work," even though it often doesn't look vey different from the work done by aid groups like Doctors Without Borders or the Red Cross.  And they're not living off the backs of the peasants like the Catholic and Anglican churches (among others) did for a thousand years or so.