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The Church with the Soul of a Nation
By Richard K. Fenn

TWO recent books in the sociology of American religion, Gwen Neville's Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture and Robert Wuthnow's The Struggle for America's Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism, are both examinations of the place of the church in society and the nature of secularization. They take sharply differing positions on these matters, due in no small measure to their respective theoretical starting points.

Over fifty years ago Weber warned us that the spirit had left the dominant institutions of the church and nation and had retreated into the small, face-to-face gatherings of enthusiasts. The routines and the rational organization of work and politics, of education and even of the church have pushed the spirit to the margins of social life, on this view. It is a view shared by social scientists who, like Neville, assume that secularization is the dominant current in mainstream America: a current with eddies and backwaters in such places as the conferences and retreat centers where she has conducted her study.

Other sociologists owe more to Durkheim than to Weber. They are likely to assume that any collectivity has a spiritual life; the problem is how to find it in national symbols, public controversy, social issues, and in the repeated, patterned aspects of social life. Wuthnow's title appears to suggest that America indeed has a soul, although in the text he more cautiously writes "if America has a soul…." His focus, like Neville's, is also on Protestants, whose struggles, he argues, are paradigmatic of the nation's own internal conflict over its identity and mission. Who is right: Neville or Wuthnow?

The comparison of these two books is made somewhat difficult by their differences in method. Neville focuses on processes, while Wuthnow looks more closely at structures. Both texts claim to analyze the nation as a whole, but Neville's observations are more local, while Wuthnow's observations lack specific context and revert to more hypothetical situations like a devotee in front of a TV set. Neville finds something

Richard K. Fenn is Professor of Christianity and Society, Princeton Theological Seminary. A graduate of Episcopal Theological Seminary, Dr. Fenn spent eight years in India as a teacher, and he has been on the faculties of Trinity College, Hartford and the University of Maine. He is the author of Liturgies and Trials (1982), The Spirit of Revolt (1986), and The Dream of the Perfect Act (1987). He is here commenting on Gwen Neville's Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion of American Protestant Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) and Robert Wuthnow's The Struggle for America's Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1989).

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distinctive in the pilgrimages of Presbyterians, whereas Wuthnow focuses on the way that Presbyterians are becoming more like everyone else. Taken together, however, these two viewpoints may produce an image like that of the old stereopticon: two photographs side-by-side that appear on close viewing to be three-dimensional. Neville's approach is more anthropological and depicts the ties binding a people to a tradition and to a place; Wuthnow's is more sociological in its approach to trends, institutions, and the media.

One would expect an anthropologist to write the history of the Christian community and to chart its relationship to the tribes and clans, the local communities and the folk traditions that have been slowly, sometimes brutally, brought under the control of the state and the tutelage of the church. Such writing would focus on the encroachment of the state and of an established church on the practices of local communities, whether they were Celtic or, in the era of missions, the native traditions of peoples being evangelized. The account may be written in favor of the expansive tendencies of the church or the state; it can also be written in sympathy with the dreams of local communities and folk who continue to struggle for their existence against overwhelming forces. Neville's study of pilgrimage in the Protestant tradition is written in the latter vein: the nation's soul may be "lost," but it is still breathing in the rites of pilgrims. Wuthnow, however, argues that the expansion of the state may be taking the life out of the churches. Their spiritual legacy to the next generation would appear to be at risk. Which social scientist is right?

I

Let us begin with Neville's study of the way that Protestants have succeeded in maintaining their communal life and traditions in rural Scotland and, eventually, in the South and Southwestern United States. On the surface, she notes, there is a remarkable continuity between the outdoor gatherings of Scottish folk in churchyards and fields, from the fifteenth century until well into the nineteenth, and the pilgrimages that their Presbyterian descendants have continued to undertake in the United States well into the twentieth century. Like their Scottish forebears, the American Protestants are venerating kin who have died and celebrating their continued family life: some in old farms and fields, others in churchyards and revivals, still others in the conference centers like Montreat that have carried the tradition of pilgrimage up to the present and kept it within the faith.

If Neville is right, these rites have acquired an element of protest against secularizing trends in American society. This form of gathering, whose origins go back well over a thousand years in Scotland, now has a meaning and a function quite different from similar gatherings of folk Christianity in the Middle Ages and the early modern era. Today individuals are protesting the erosion of family ties under the impact of modern society. In the last two centuries, it has not been the Established

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Church that has been threatening the continuity of local tradition and family ties; the enemy is the city, or industry, or mobility, or bureaucracy, and-of course-the continuing pressure on the individual to make his or her own way in the world.

Neville's argument suggests that the soul of America is in retreat. Whereas pilgrimage in the Middle Ages took the individual from the home and the local community in order to create a radical exposure to the world, the modern pilgrimage goes in the opposite direction, back to the world that once was so confining, to the family and the land, to the village or the farm, and to the obligations of kinship and tradition. When her lament for "the world-we-have-lost" gets into the text, Neville would appear to be announcing that soul-loss is the nation's disease, but is it not also the disease of its people?

Pilgrimage to the farms and fields, to annual family gatherings and open-air revivals, has always been an antidote to the formal, hierarchical, and strongly unequal facts of social life inside the church. There is one form of opposition that has not changed: the opposition of the outsiders to the insiders, of the people to their "betters" in the church and society. Where the church ranks people, and where the church separates the clergy from the laity, these tent-meetings and annual tribal gatherings, like the conference centers themselves, keep alive the ancient dream of equality and intimacy, of an undifferentiated world in which nature and society, the past and the present, faith and work, are as inseparable as one generation or gender from another. Whether this dream survives despite--or because of-the clergy-centered, commission dominated, bureaucratized and professionalized organization that is the contemporary church, it is still only the substance of things hoped-for, too insubstantial to be the popular "soul" of the nation.

To be fair, we should add that Neville also displays her critical talents in this work by searching for contradictions. She finds an apparent contradiction in that the ritual of return to family origins and pilgrimage centers is accompanied by a myth of heroic individuality: the family ancestor whose struggles in the wilderness have brought a new civilization to fruit. While the ritual is recreating a new heaven and a new earth, with nature and society, the past and the present, combined in a fruitful new unity, the myth is celebrating the one who subdued nature and the bestial in order to carve out a new community in the wilderness. So, the annual reunion "heals the cleavages while also prescribing additional tears in the fabric of the family": a contradiction that Neville traces back into Western Christianity's own conflicting values and themes, some emphasizing the individual's journey of faith and others prescribing solidarity. In a nation that has lost its soul, even traditional rites celebrate the individual's own progress through a complex and rational world. I would have preferred a different formulation, one that sees in the heroic struggle of the individual the asceticism that builds the republic and weaves the fabric of the social order.

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Ritual often holds up a mirror to a society, for example, when the old solidarities of land and kin, which used to be the point of departure, have become the goal of reunion and the focus of protest against an otherwise rational and competitive social universe. Ritual becomes a mirror-image that reverses the reality of a nation in which the family is no longer the dominant cultural institution but the source of countercultural protest, the "heart of a heartless world," as a Marxian critique would put it. But Neville is not willing to say that the solidarities offered through Protestant pilgrimage are merely a pseudo-Gemeinschaft, a substitute for the real solidarities and community once offered by the structures of clan and guild. Neither is she willing to say that the trip back to these meeting-places is in fact a spiritual regression, an attempt to recover a lost past that can only survive in fantasy rather than in enduring, long-term commitments. Nonetheless, she seems to imply both judgments if the world is as secular as she claims it to be: a world of short-term and limited obligations and commitments.

There is, thus, a contradiction in this work. On the one hand, Neville argues that the rites of pilgrimage reflect to the larger society what is missing in the nation's-and the church's-life. On the other hand, she argues that the reunions and retreats "are not merely escapes from daily life into fantasy worlds but significant signs of the daily world's inner meanings." The "inner meaning," then, of the individualistic and competitive world of everyday life is revealed as "the perpetuation of the idea of community." That is how she claims to read the "text" created in myth and ritual at these sacred gatherings, both as a protest against a secular world and as a revelation of what that world "really" is.

Neville shifts, then, from saying that America has lost its soul to saying that its soul, revealed in ritual, is full of contradictions. The modernizers and industrialists who have brought the world of competition and bureaucracy into being are now celebrating their victories in Presbyterian pilgrimages, using this denomination as a test case. Their "cultural preoccupations" have been imposed on others, with different traditions, who have perhaps enjoyed fewer of the benefits along with most of the stresses of the modern world. Has America also-in gaining the world-lost its soul? What was-in the lowlands of Scotland-a ritual of protest against church and state, has become a festival of the successful in the highlands of North Carolina where the well-known retreat center gathers the people of God in the summertime for vacation and conferences. There, in fact, is a center initially financed in part by industrialists whose factories and mills, like those in Gastonia, N.C., were the source of bitter class conflict and where preachers served the interests of mill owners better than those of the millhands. Neville's critical stance appears in her use of terms like "ideological" to describe the notion of a covenant community, a notion that conceals contradictions and lacks spiritual substance.

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II

A very different picture of Protestantism in general-and particularly of Presbyterians-emerges in Wuthnow's book on The Struggle for America's Soul. He makes it clear that denominations are in a crisis; they may lose their distinctiveness and be unable to reproduce themselves in the next several generations. They are losing their distinctiveness because their social and cultural boundaries are becoming more permeable to outside influences. For instance, Presbyterians are becoming better educated, they intermarry more frequently with outsiders, switch denominational membership at a high rate, increasingly send their clergy to non-Presbyterian seminaries. In addition to the loss of distinctiveness, Presbyterians are not passing on their legacy effectively to subsequent generations, as the Book of Confessions itself ceases to be a norm for belief, as ecumenism and mergers vitiate the denominational heritage, and as the young-declining in overall numbers-take their inspiration from secular as well as religious authorities. There is a crisis of succession here that makes the quiet transmission of spiritual legacies on pilgrimages to sacred places, so well described by Neville, seem atypical, futile, and antiquarian.

It is no wonder, then, that Wuthnow finds the denominations, and Presbyterians in particular, torn asunder by schisms and distressed by heresies. Movements to prevent the Spiritual legacy of the religious community from being destroyed focus on threats posed by individuality (permissiveness), by women (in ordination), and by sexuality (permissiveness and abortion). Groups attempting to preserve the spiritual heritage of the denomination form special interest organizations and lobby at General Assemblies or take the more drastic action of seceding from the union. In fact, the number of schisms and secessions has increased as the boundaries of the denomination and its identity become more fluid through merger and acquisition. All this Wuthnow details with a modicum of commentary and explanation. The point, however, is that some Presbyterians seek to maintain the heritage through purity while others seek to defend that legacy by re-shaping the larger society in its own image. Both strategies require social action in the public sphere: either to ward off the threats of permissiveness, sexuality, and women or to make the world a better place for Christians in general, and Presbyterians in particular, to live in.

Wuthnow's explanation for these developments is largely macro-social; that is, as individuals become more mobile, as regions open up to outside influence and to the movement of populations, and as the state becomes more expansive in its activities and influence, the "third sector" of voluntary organizations and non-profit corporations comes under increasing pressure. Religion gets drawn into the public debate that becomes divisive and fragmented along the lines separating conservatives from liberals, the more from the less educated, the mobile from the deeply rooted. Special issues and interests proliferate at the expense of the

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public sphere itself. Although Wuthnow does not point a finger at the churches to say that the sheep have no shepherd and the people no vision, he does sound a prophetic warning against what he sees as an un-Christian acrimony and lack of compassion in Christians' public debates and performances.

There is an interesting paradox in Wuthnow's recent study of The Struggle for America's Soul. The first is that the number of fundamentalists and evangelicals has not increased, except in certain groups like the Assemblies of God, but the participation of fundamentalists and evangelicals in American politics has skyrocketed. Reviewing the evidence for a revival of religion-conservative style-Wuthnow finds none. It is the rise of special interest groups through direct mail advertising that focuses energy on specific issues for a short period of time that accounts for the apparent surge of conservative religion. But what causes their willingness or availability to be mobilized?

The answer, I suggest, is quite obvious. It is the threat to the conservative Christian community's way of life that has caused this outpouring of energy. We are witnessing another "Ghost Dance" only now it is not Sitting Bull and the Sioux but conservative religion that finds its spiritual legacy threatened by migration and the state's expansion. It is their soul, not the nation's, that is at risk.

The struggle for America's soul turns out to be an internecine conflict among liberal and conservative Protestants. I suspect that it is only the soul of Protestantism that is at stake. It is only an ideological stratagem for conservatives to argue that their struggle is essential to the salvation of the country as a whole. Note the kinds of issues that mobilize conservative Protestants: permissiveness, sexuality, women's roles and rights, and prayer in the schools. What is at stake here is the ability of conservative subcommunities to pass on their way of life, their spiritual legacy, to the next generation despite the influence of professionals, experts, the media, and the state's bureaucracies.

Wuthnow also notes the steady decline of membership in the "mainline" Protestant denominations, further cause for public display of Protestant values in politics and the media. The more conservatives display their values in public, the more necessary it is for liberals to dramatize their own moral commitments to peace and social justice, international harmony and harmonious relations with the natural environment. Wuthnow suggests as much in quoting a letter to The New York Times, whose author wished liberals to utilize the methods of conservatives to make their own values plain and public, to fight either for purity or for openness, for the importance of likenesses in the family and school or for the preservation of differences. These symbolic struggles for the soul of contesting status groups interact with and reinforce each other. Wuthnow ignores the dramatization of Catholics' and Jews' values, perhaps because he sees the contestants as being between classes rather than subcommunities.

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Other commentators on conservative politics and religion have pointed out that the mobilization of fundamentalists and evangelicals on specific issues over the short-term enhances the very process of secularization that conservatives' abhor. The public arena, thus, becomes a place for pragmatic politics, compromise, flexibility, and the muting of grassroots militancy into a more civil and utilitarian discourse.

III

Thus there are really two arguments in Wuthnow's book that try to explain why the conservative and liberal wings of American Christianity have come into such conflict with each other in the past decade. The first argument suggests that the conflict is as American as it can possibly be. Americans have always expressed their moral convictions in the public sphere. That was what Tocqueville found to be the singular virtue of the American republic, a virtue he attributed largely to the churches as vehicles for expressing and shaping public discourse. Religion thus informed America's sense of its purpose and mission, of what it would-and would not-tolerate, of how it would raise children, and of what it would expect from newcomers. One result was a shaping of civic discourse that kept a civil tongue in the mouth even of the most militant and triumphalist religious groups. Another result conformed to a more general tendency in Western civilization, a tendency, as Parsons reminded us, to trust the individual because the individual was held responsible for his or her own moral-and eventually professional-conduct. I would argue, however, that the two arguments are really one, that is, that responsible individualism has created and shaped the republican institutions and voluntary organizations of this country.

This argument, as Wuthnow reminds us, sees the polarization between religious liberals and conservatives as "itself a function of religion's involvement in the public life of the nation." It is not because the system is not working that we have conflict; on the contrary, the conflict is due to the vitality of the so-called "third sector" or private, non-profit, voluntary societies that serve a wide range of purposes, from health, education, and welfare to moral and religious instruction on civic and personal issues.

The conflict becomes more intense when it is "reinforced" by some of the political differences that traditionally have divided Americans from each other, for example, between advocates of a minimalist government and proponents of a more activist role for government in the marketplace, in education, and even in the protection and regulation of the family. Nonetheless, these differences in political philosophy sometimes coincide with-and at other times cut across-the lines of religious difference that separate liberals from conservatives. The result, according to Wuthnow, is a system in which religion makes contributions, for example, good citizens and responsible workers, to the political and economic subsystems of American society, which returns the compliment, so to speak, by providing a forum and a marketplace for religious

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groups to persuade the public and acquire adherents to their points of view and their institutions. The system works, even when it intensifies conflict, polarizes religious groups, and fragments discussion into a wide range of religious viewpoints on specific issues. America's soul is visible in its struggle with itself.

Wuthnow also adopts a contrary argument about the destructive aspects of American society; it has to do with the "fissures" and "fractures" of American society. It is a traditional line of sociological inquiry that has remarked for several decades on the erosion of ethnic, racial, and regional boundaries as individuals become more mobile, as urban areas and governmental agencies expand, and as people are, therefore, thrown together in schools and factories where they neither own nor control the processes of material and symbolic production. Added to this process is another one that threatens traditional boundaries between the generations and genders. The young seek to determine their own future, and universities and schools are therefore prompted to provide electives as well as information or "guidelines" for behavior that was formerly governed by religious and parental standards. The boundaries between men and women erode as well, whether through the division of labor that is indifferent to gender or through politics, affirmative action, and the work of the mass media in popularizing changes in sex-roles.

This latter argument agrees far more with Neville's point of view, but I would argue that still it is only the Protestant soul (conservative, at that) which is at issue. The conservatives' withdrawal into Christian enclaves, like schools and colleges, as well as their mobilization into mass political action can be seen as an attempt to reinforce old boundaries between Christians and Jews, blacks and whites, generations and genders, boundaries that have been weakened in social fact and, therefore, require reinforcement through symbolic action and the creation of defensive institutional contexts. What is at stake is the spiritual continuity, not of the nation but of the conservative Christian communities; these are losing their ability to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next. That ability depends on their success in meeting the realistic challenges posed by individuality and sexuality, by women and by various economic or symbolic exchanges with outsiders. That is why the same people are likely to want prayer in the public schools and oppose greater equality for women; they are concerned with the succession of patriarchy. The same people will oppose both homosexuality and abortion as forms of sexuality that interfere with patrilineal lines of succession. This social anthropological line of argument makes it clear that the spiritual reproduction of a patriarchal and patrilineal community-system is at stake, not at Montreat, which Neville observed, but elsewhere on the periphery.

The underlying dynamic is between charisma institutionalized at the center and charisma on the periphery. It is a dynamic rooted in what we term civilization rather than in a uniquely or particularly in the

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American context. What ensures the perpetuation of that dynamic in American society, however, is the public role assigned to religion in transcending the differences of ethnicity and region, class and status, political power and social authority. That role, I believe, is shrinking and may soon pass away.