In regards to church, I am attracted to the communal expression of love and acceptance, and to the opportunity to reciprocate the same; singing, conversing, aesthetic expression; imagination and meditation on the extraordinary.
I am repulsed by the constant and insistent transformation of the extraordinary into the banal; by what J.D. Vance has called the "projection of complex problems onto simple villains"; by cults of personality and the thousand ways the communal attention is needlessly concentrated onto one or a few leaders; by the shameless way in which churches band themselves out from the population by skin color and class.
In addition there are repulsing forces that probably have more to do with me than with church: my own reluctance to go out of my way (it's much more relaxing to stay home than to get up early and wrangle children). Also I feel that I have nothing to offer that others need or want from me; my absence leaves no real gap in the community.