Living
Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 11, Number 1
Summer 2006
What is the Tie That Binds?
What
is the Tie That binds?
What
Do We Hold Together?
What
Holds Us Together?
A
Sociological Perspective
R. Stephen Warner
Introduction:
I
am a Christian sociologist. (My conviction that that juxtaposition is not an
oxymoron is something we can discuss later.) I am a member of Immanuel ELCA in
Evanston where Frank Senn is my pastor. I joined the
church some ten years ago to be nurtured in the naive faith I increasingly
experienced in my life, but I was not raised in the Lutheran church and in no
way can claim to speak for it. I speak as a sociologist of religion.
My
task today is to share with you some of what we sociologists know that bears on
the theme of this discussion. Sociological knowledge is in the form of
generalizations based on surveys of individuals and of congregations as well as
on ethnographic case studies of individual religious communities. But I will
also use my observations from visits to many churches in Chicago and elsewhere
in the U.S.
Church,
Sect, and Denomination
By
way of background, here is a sociological take on denominations in general.
Denominationalism is an American invention. Europe knew, and still knows, the
tension between “church” and “sect,” the church as a social institution
ministering to the whole society, inclusive and privileged, and the sect
as a religious social movement enlisting the commitment of a
self-conscious minority, exclusive and insurgent. In the process through which
the Thirteen Colonies became the United States, it was clear that there could
be no established church for the new nation, what with the Congregationalists
established in New England and, until the revolution, the Anglicans in
Virginia. Thus, religious pluralism was written into the constitution.
Disestablishment at the Federal level allowed the few state establishments to
continue, and with them the idea that religion could be a settled institution
privileged by the state, but federal disestablishment also encouraged the
furiously competitive process by which sectarians—especially Baptists and
Methodists—successfully enrolled the unchurched,
especially on the frontier.
As
is the way of sects, most of these dynamic movements evolved over time into
settled institutions, the Methodists being the paradigmatic example. Without
representing or ministering to the whole society in the manner of the European
state church, accommodating themselves to the sector
of society that they had enrolled, these formerly dynamic movements lost their
sense of insurgency. Eventually, they combined the exclusiveness of the sect
with the settled nature of the church, in a combination called “the
denomination.” As an institution among other social institutions, the
denomination, like the church, presupposes that its constituents, its members,
have other commitments in civil society—to their families, their occupations,
and their communities activities—that stand alongside
their religious commitments. Their religion is acknowledged to be part of their
lives, not all of their lives. Each denomination also recognizes that there are
other denominations that have places in the society deemed equally legitimate
by their own members.
In
response to the accommodation to society of fellow believers, some sectarians,
devoted to the founding vision, broke away to create new, purportedly purer,
communions sharing the same name—“Methodist,” “Presbyterian,” and the like.
Over time, many of these latter-day protestants
themselves accommodated to denominational status. Thus the term “denomination”
is ambiguous as between a common confession and a common organization.
So here today, we “Lutherans” are at once members of one “denomination” and at
least two.
In
this way, the religious world, specifically American Christendom, came to be
divided into social segments each of which was accommodated to its limited but
accepted place in the society. This pattern was both brilliantly analyzed and
scornfully disdained by the sociologist and theologian H. Richard Niebuhr
(1929), but it persisted for the better part of a century, from the Civil War to
the New Frontier. By the twentieth century, its leaders, as well as its
detractors, eventually came to feel that the Protestant denominational order it
represented a new kind of establishment, with a guaranteed, socially privileged
position in the society. By the middle of the century, many of these leaders
increasingly asked themselves why they should be so divided. In the 1950s and
’60s they (I am thinking of such leaders as Eugene Carson Blake) invested a
great deal of their personal and organizational energies in demolishing the
symbolic boundaries that had once been their raison d’être but
increasingly served to divide what they felt ought to be the united voice of
American Protestantism.
The
World After 1965
Things
changed drastically in the 1960s. 1965 is the year that the growth that all of
the oldline denominations—especially the Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Episcopalians—had experienced for decades, growth that
funded the offices that planned their cooperative efforts and mergers, peaked
and reversed. After 1965, only the sectarian groups like the Assemblies of God,
the Southern Baptists and the Mormons continued to grow. (See
Dean Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, as well as Hoge and Roozen 1979.)
By
the 1970s, partly in response to the experience of decline, tensions within the
denominations became endemic, and internal liberal and conservative pressure
groups sprang up within each denomination.
Sociologists
have contributed significantly to the analysis of these developments. One of
the best books, still in print after almost 20 years, is Clark Roof and William
McKinney’s American Mainline Religion (1987). Based mostly on survey
data, Roof and McKinney found that loyalty to denominations had declined since
WWII, and that there were more “switchers” than ever. Those who did switch
seemed to be motivated less than previously by social mobility, the proverbial
Baptist shoe salesman becoming the Presbyterian Vice-President for Marketing,
and increasingly by attitudes on the social issues of the day, like the civil
rights and feminist movements.
But
just as people seemed increasingly interested in the churches’ social teachings
and less in the churches’ former status-conferring role, Robert Wuthnow in The Restructuring of American Religion
(1988) found that denominations were losing their coherence. Wuthnow coined the term, “the declining significance of
denominationalism.” Denominations were less salient to people as part of their
identities. An individual’s denomination was not a very good predictor of his
or her attitudes and behaviors. Each of the denominations was internally
besieged by caucuses of the right and left, and they were increasingly
incapable of representing one side or the other in the religious partisan
divide between conservatives and liberals that increasingly characterized white
American Protestantism. What Martin Marty had earlier called the “two-party
system” in American Protestantism increasingly cut across, not between, the denominations. So Wuthnow
concluded that denominations aren’t where the religious action is. Instead, it
was religious “special purpose” groups, both federations (e.g., the Christian
Coalition) and collegia (e.g., Promise Keepers) that
were enlisting commitments and pushing for social change in society. Wuthnow said that these entities, often called “parachurch” agencies, have to a large extent taken the
place of denominations.
My
own voice entered this discussion in 1988 with the book New Wine in Old
Wineskins, which was based not on social survey data but on long-term
ethnographic research in the small town of Mendocino, California. My book
depicts the countercyclical case of the rapid growth of a single Presbyterian
congregation in the 1970s that defied the demographic trend of its parent denomination,
the PCUSA. I found that people flocked to Mendocino Presbyterian church not
because it was Presbyterian but because its pastor spoke to their common
experience of having chosen small-town life. I said that they exemplified a
social process that the journalist Frances FitzGerald identified metaphorically
as a key to the way our society was changing: She said that Americans were
increasingly caught up in a series of “social centrifuges” that spun them
around and deposited them into assortments based on newly significant
identities and convictions: in Mendocino, they were what I called “elective parochials.” Elsewhere, they were suburbanites, yuppies, Bobos, gays and lesbians, Bible believers, home-schoolers, the young retired, cyclists, and what have you.
There is a flourishing market research industry that identifies scores of such
lifestyle enclaves into which Americans have sorted themselves.
The
Mendocino book led me to focus on the congregation, not the special purpose
group, as the basic dynamic unit within American religion. I found that
congregations often go their own way, sometimes in order to make a particular
public witness, sometimes but not always to the benefit of their membership and
financial growth. I like to cite the example of two flourishing congregations
that face each other across the town green in the middle of my home town,
Evanston. Lake Street Church, formerly First Baptist, has distinct Buddhist
leanings and is the most liberal congregation I know of within the American
Baptist Churches. First Presbyterian is a self-described evangelical church
within the dominantly liberal PCUSA. The pattern extends to Catholics. About 15
years ago, one of my students at UIC did research on the lay Catholics she
called “floaters,” the increasing population of Catholics who, despite the
stress on territorial parishes within canon law, choose which parish they will
attend, on the basis of the priest’s style, the music program, the schedule of
masses, and a host of other considerations. This is now recognized, even within
the church, to be a widespread pattern.
In
1994, I introduced the concept of “de facto congregationalism” into the
vocabulary of my field. All over the United States, local churches were carving
out their own religious courses. Many congregations proudly declare themselves
“non-denominational.” Other churches that maintained denominational
affiliations for organizational reasons, decided to subdue those denominational
connections in their names, as does “Lake Street Church” as well as many
“Houses of Prayer” and “Christian Centers” in the U.S. In such places, the
visitor has to work hard to find whether the church is affiliated with the
Southern Baptists or the Assemblies of God. Church leaders obviously think that
the denominational affiliation is unimportant at best, and counterproductive at
worst as an appeal to the public.
Bowling
Alone
Certainly
the upshot of all these studies of the 1980s—Roof and McKinney’s, Wuthnow’s, mine, and scores of others—was that
denominations were in trouble. But a set of other studies done mostly in the
past decade, none more widely cited than Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone
(see also Wuthnow’s Loose Connections, Roof’s A
Generation of Seekers and Spiritual Marketplace and the 1985 book by
Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; see
also Nancy Eiesland’s A Particular Place)
makes it clear that the malaise that sociologists of religion located in
denominations were not at all confined to religion. Putnam showed that the
decline in commitment and participation that is seen especially in the mainline
Protestant denominations has affected nearly every kind of membership
organization in the U.S.–bowling leagues, service clubs, professional
societies, veterans’ organizations, Masonic lodges, the League of Women
Voters–and these other organizational declines are typically worse than those
involving religion (Putnam 2000). In all, the evidence amassed by Putnam and
others, including Robert Wuthnow (1998), suggests
that declines in church attendance and religious identification are part of a
broader organizational process, not aspects of a specific process of
secularization in the sphere of religion. Various analysts located the problem
in different places and attributed it to different causes. Putnam singled out
the advent of television, and said that watching TV was the single biggest
cause of civic decline. Robert Bellah and his
colleagues found the source of the problem in a long-standing but rapidly
growing culture of “expressive individualism,” which itself has roots in the
American evangelical tradition. In what might be regarded as a variation on the
same themes, Clark Roof (1993, 1999) surveyed and interviewed members of the
baby boom generation and found many for whom organized
religious involvement lacked meaning. Searching for sources of meaning outside
the churches, many Boomers called themselves a “spiritual but not religious.”
Based on a community study in suburban Atlanta, sociologist Nancy Eiesland (2000) portrayed a new mode of religious involvement
by which individuals continue to engage in meaningful and pragmatically
valuable activities in religious congregations but do not find all of the
activities they need within one congregation. They do not so much “shop around”
between congregations as stop into one after another for what the churches
offer, from youth programs to support groups. Unlike the case of most European
countries, religion in the U.S. remains popular, and very few people would
describe themselves as “religious but not spiritual.” But very clearly,
religion in its old-fashioned denominational guise is not what millions of
Americans say they want.
Much
of the work of the 1980s and ’90s was based on surveys of individuals, who are,
of course, the people who either do or don’t go to church. Individuals are the
ones we typically begin with when we want to depict what individuals do and
why. But individuals are not necessarily the best witnesses as to their own
behavior and motivations. Sometimes we’d like to watch them to find out what they
do, and correlate their patterns of behavior to figure out why. Nor do
individuals typically determine the range of options from which they will make
religiously relevant choices. The economic theory of religion, a subfield with
which I have an ambivalent relationship, focuses not only on the “demand” side
of religion, why people make the choices they do, but also on the “supply
side,” how does it happen that the choices are available or unavailable. To
answer that kind of question we need to talk to churches and their leaders.
Keeping
Members—The Liturgy
Very
recent work by Nancy Ammerman (Pillars of Faith
from University of California Press in 2005) and Mark Chaves (Congregations
in America from Harvard University Press in 2004) fills the bill nicely.
They surveyed congregations, not individual members, typically interviewing a
“key informant” (usually the pastor) in the many hundreds of congregations they
sampled. These informants were, not surprisingly, well informed about their
congregations such that they could give accurate answers. (Sociologists of
religion are well aware that many lay people exaggerate the extent to which
they go to church every week. We also know that people often do not know the
official name of the denomination with which their congregations are
affiliated; this is especially a problem among Baptists. It is also the fact
that lay people do not use the terms “religiously conservative” and
“religiously liberal” the way scholars do. Thus, relying on individuals’
responses to survey items may produce misleading interpretations of the sources
of church strength.)
We
could discuss details of Chaves’s and Ammerman’s respective methods later, but what is worth
noting first is that Chaves’s study, which is based
on the first truly statistically representative national sample of the more
than 300,000 American congregations, and Ammerman’s,
which is based on an intentional sample drawn from seven regions in the U.S.,
yield similar findings. With these findings, sociologists can offer some informed
answers to the question that brings us together here today.
These
studies provide variation in the news about denominational decline, which gives
religious leaders potential leverage to influence trends. For example, some
denominational traditions have a better record than others in holding on to
their cradle members. Not surprisingly, the “sects”—Mormons, Seventh Day
Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses—tend to do well. Despite their many
apostates, the Catholic church reproduces itself
across generations better than do the churches in the Reformed tradition. And
when Catholics leave the church, they tend to leave religion altogether, not
coming to believe that their native church is just one among many. The mainline
Protestant churches fare badly by contrast. Yet within the mainline, there is
variation in the extent to which denominational loyalty is eroding. As a
researcher in the field, one factor stands out to me in both Chaves’s and Ammerman’s studies:
Insofar as mainline Protestant denominations—a category that includes the
ELCA—hold together, it is especially their worship that provides the glue.
Let
us begin with Chaves: He is particularly concerned with what characterizes
congregations. What do they do? How do they differ? What are the sources of
their similarities and differences? He finds that congregations are
distinguished from one another primarily by their worship which, in turn, is
heavily (though not completely) determined by their denomination. Denominations
shape congregations, including their worship, by providing cultural resources,
not through command and control (p. 209). And denominations are more
distinctive from one another in their worship practices than in their
demographic composition (p. 164). Applied to Lutherans, that means that we
increasingly have in common our liturgy more than our social class, ethnicity,
or whether we live in cities or rural areas.
Ammerman’s interest was finding out who is doing
what she calls “religious work.” If indeed denominations are in decline, what
agents are replacing them? Are parachurches indeed
where the action is to be found? From whom do local churches get their Sunday
school curricula and their worship materials? Where do their children go to
summer camp? To whom do local churches send their benevolences? The patterns Ammerman found are complex. Downplaying denominational
identities and connections and using parachurch
resources seems to be a particular pattern among congregations in the
historically white Conservative Protestant (evangelical, fundamentalist, pentecostal) traditions, including
but not confined to congregations that call themselves “non-denominational.”
Congregations in the historic Black Church tradition have high levels of
denominational identity, even though they typically give to their
denominational bodies only a fraction of what white mainline churches do.
Within the Protestant mainline, rural churches with many lifelong members have
a better record than urban ones in affirming their denominational identities
and maintaining their cradle members. In Ammerman’s
data, this is a particularly Methodist pattern. But with respect to churches
like my own–urban congregations that are increasing filled with educated people
who are not “cradle members”–strong denominational identity is the result of
intentional effort on the part of the local church itself. Denominational
identity cannot be taken for granted in such churches, and many are not
strongly attached to their denominational identities. But for those who do want
to affirm their denominational identities, that must
be worked at from the ground up. Strong denominational identity is especially
correlated with the use of denominational hymnals. It is worth quoting Ammerman’s conclusion at length (pp. 244-245):
For
some denominations, particular ways of worshiping are central to who they are.
Episcopalians and Lutherans, for instance, have an order of service that still
bears marks of the Catholic tradition from which they came. The Book of Common
Prayer and the Lutheran Book of Worship set out beautifully crafted prayers and
prescribed ways of conducting everything from evening vespers to services for
holidays. Learning to use these books to make one’s way through a service is an
acquired skill, although one easier for the highly educated members who
disproportionately choose to join churches in these denominations. . . .
Churches that set prayer books aside as too intimidating to the host of
switchers who populate their pews do so at a cost. Not only do congregations
with more eclectic worship practices lose a strong sense of identification with
their denomination, but they may also lose more adherents to future
intergenerational switching.”
Summary
Let
me summarize some lessons from this literature:
• Strong central authority and bureaucratic
offices do not necessarily conduce to denominational identity. Black Baptists
tend to identify strongly with their denominational heritage, but their
national offices are barely visible. Instead, these denominations inculcate
loyalty through national conferences that bring ushers, Sunday school teachers
and other lay volunteers together from across the country for family-like
gatherings.
• Because of their material and ideal
interests, leaders, especially clergy, are far more likely to be committed to
their religious institutions—both denominations and congregation—than are the
laity whom they serve. They are paid professionals, not paid enough to be sure,
but still it is in their job description to be stewards. They must remember
this when they think about the multiple commitment of their parishioners.
• Lack of deference to religious authority
is not, in itself, evidence of the erosion of denominational glue. In some
Chicago Catholic parishes, the archdiocese is spoken of, with a sigh, as
“downtown.” The pastor and parish council know they have to deal with the
chancery, but they don’t have to like it. Yet, nothing in this says that the
pastor or his congregation is anything other than determinedly “Catholic.” The
denominational identity is strong, but the feeling is that what the church
stands for is not what comes down from the top. This attitude is not
individualistic. It is congregational. It is also not necessarily heretical,
insofar as Vatican II defined the church as “the body of Christ.”
• Churches have lost much of their power to
confer status: People increasingly don’t know that they’re supposed to respect
the learning of the Presbyterians or the culture of the Episcopalians. They
don’t know what these labels mean. They may not even know that the Baptist
church may be open to you if your social pretensions are more modest. Although
Episcopalians and Presbyterians still have disproportionate representation
among socio-political elites (for example, among members of Congress), the older
religion/social class order has lost its hold. But this is not just a problem
for churches. UIC’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter has a similar problem.
• There is increasing competition between
churches and other organizations for the time of laity. Moreover, other
institutions don’t defer to the churches’ claims on Wednesday evening and
Sunday morning. (But this has been true in New York City for a long time.)
• Religious institutions can’t sail on
cultural winds: culture doesn’t routinely blow people our way (Ammerman p. 267).
• Religion can’t be taken for granted, if
it ever was. Mainline Protestant leaders would be well advised to take some
clues from religious minorities, including American Jews, Hindus, and the Black
Church. The mainline Protestant churches have been too reticent about their
religious identities, as if claiming to embody religious truth was somehow
offensive or intolerant. They must affirm their heritage if they are to survive
to do good work in the world.
• The “Lutheran” label has a decreasing
draw for outsiders. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have powerful,
attractive, distinctive practices and teachings, including our liturgy, our
music, our emphasis on education, our theology, and our family camps and youth
conferences. A long time before my wife and I joined Immanuel Lutheran, the
congregation had given up “Swedish” as a way of telling the world who were are. Even now “Lutheran” isn’t necessarily the way
to communicate the value of these ideas and practices to those who didn’t grow
up with them. We need to be assertive about what we have, but we must define it
for those who do not know what “Lutheran” means. We cannot just use the label. The
Lutheran Handbook: A Field Guide to Church Stuff, Everyday Stuff, and the Bible
strikes me as a good start. In our home library, it is classified along with
Leo Rosten’s classic book, The Joys of Yiddish.
• But it is emphatically not true that any
of these trends is evidence of a crisis of belief, as if religious ideas lack
“plausibility” in an age of reason and scientific understanding. There is no
evidence for that claim and lots of evidence against it. We do not face a
culture of unbelief; we face competition in the provision of meaning.
References
Ammerman, Nancy T. 2005.
Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bellah,
Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler,
and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and
Commitment in American Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Chaves,
Mark. 2004. Congregations in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Eiesland, Nancy L. 2000.
A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecolgy
in a Southern Exurb. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Kelley,
Dean M. 1977. Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, 2nd ed. San
Francisco: Harper and Row
Niebuhr,
H. Richard. 1929. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York:
Henry Holt.
Putnam,
Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual
Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Roof, Wade Clark, and William McKinney. 1987. American
Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future. New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press.
Roof, Wade Clark, Bruce Greer, Mary
Johnson, and Andrea Leibson. 1993. A
Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation.
San Francisco: Harper.
Warner,
R. Stephen. 1988. New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a
Small-Town Church. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Warner,
R. Stephen. 1994. “The Place of the Congregation in the American Religious
Configuration.” Pp. 54-99 in James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, eds., New
Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, volume II of American
Congregations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The
Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since
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Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. Loose
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