"In other words, seating in churches didn’t really become a thing until parishioners got bored enough to wish they were sitting down—that is, about the time of the Protestant Reformation. In order to emphasize how not-Catholic we were, we began to jettison everything from our worship: confessions, creeds, communal prayer, a weekly Eucharist—basically everything except long, boring sermons."
https://christandpopculture.com/history-pews-just-terrible-embarrassing-youd-imagine/
@elsander Perhaps this is part of why many Western cultures see religion as something that ought to be private - because of the loss of the visible communal elements of the church, especially on Sunday gatherings, our cultural consciousness has lost the association between church and community, and church gatherings have become less accessible to outsiders.
