In this sobering excerpt from Man the Dwelling Place of God, A. W. Tozer exposes a danger that is as relevant today as when he first wrote it: spiritual boredom with God Himself. Drawing from Israel’s impatience at Sinai, Tozer warns that when faith in the unseen God grows dull, people naturally reach for substitutes they can see, touch, and enjoy. What happened with the golden calf, he argues, has quietly repeated itself within modern evangelical Christianity.

Tozer’s concern is not merely about methods or styles, but about appetite. When God alone is no longer sufficient to draw His people, entertainment rushes in to fill the void. The tragedy, according to Tozer, is not that churches are full—but that they may be full of people who have never been called to true discipleship, self-denial, holiness, or wholehearted devotion to Christ.

This passage confronts us with an uncomfortable but necessary question: Are we gathering people around God, or around what we have added to Him? Tozer reminds us that any ministry built on distraction rather than devotion will ultimately produce shallow faith. His words call us back to a church life where God Himself is the attraction—and where reverence, truth, and spiritual depth are once again treasured above religious novelty.

Candy Striped Religion by AW Tozer

When Moses tarried in the mount, Israel became bored with the faith that sees the invisible and clamored for a god they could see and touch. And they displayed a great deal more enthusiasm for the golden calf than they did over the Lord God of Abraham. Later they tired of manna and complained against the monotony of their diet. On their petulant insistence, they finally got flesh to eat, and that to their own undoing.

Those Christians who belong to the evangelical wing of the church (which I firmly believe is the only one that even approximates New Testament Christianity) have over the last half-century shown an increasing impatience with things invisible and eternal and have demanded and got a host of things visible and temporal to satisfy their fleshly appetites. Without Biblical authority, or any other right under the sun, carnal religious leaders have introduced a host of attractions that serve no purpose except to provide entertainment for the retarded saints.

It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is God. One can only conclude that God’s professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.

This has influenced the whole pattern of church life, and even brought into being a new type of church architecture, designed to house the golden calf.

So we have the strange anomaly of orthodoxy in creed and heterodoxy in practice. The striped-candy technique has been so fully integrated into our present religious thinking that it is simply taken for granted. Its victims never dream that it is not a part of the teachings of Christ and His apostles.

Any objection to the carryings on of our present golden-calf Christianity is met with the triumphant reply, “But we are winning them!” And winning them to what? To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To nobility of character? To a despising of the world’s treasures? To hard self-discipline? To love for God? To total committal to Christ? Of course, the answer to all these questions is no.

We are paying a frightful price for our religious boredom. And that at the moment of the world’s mortal peril.

From Man the Dwelling Place of God, Chapter 30 “Religious Boredom,”