BY alan wolfe
Americans have always been suspicious
of institutions, or at least of those that become national
in scope and bureaucratic in nature. And these anti-institutional
proclivities spill over into the contemporary practice of
religion: A 1993 survey of baby boomers found not only that
54 percent believe "churches and synagogues have lost
the real spiritual part of religion," but also that
one-third subscribe to the proposition that "people
have God within them, so churches aren't necessary."
Religious denominations these days offer
a sense of belonging in the same way that the American Association
of Retired Persons and the National Association of Railroad
Passengers do; one joins them only in the most passive, coupon-clipping
sort of way. When it comes to the more intimate and personal
sense of belonging called fellowship, Americans tend
to view themselves as belonging to the church around the corner,
not the denominational headquarters in New York or Nashville.
All politics, former Speaker of the House
of Representatives Tip O'Neill famously said, is local;
so, it turns out, is religion. The preference for localism
that led Americans to create a federal system of government
and to disdain cities has also caused them to be distrustful
of the idea of a national church, or even national churches.
Of all religions in the United States,
the spirit-filled Pentecostals have been in the forefront
of efforts to capture the enthusiasm that comes when worship
is warm and personal. It is therefore worth noting that there
are some believers who find even Pentecostal church practices,
despite their singing and shouting, too institutional and
stultifying. "It was so dead for me," writes Jenny
Orr on a Christian Web page, about her experiences in one
such church. "I watched as people were going nuts and
dancing and shouting and I felt like I was looking at this
thru some kind of soundproof and feeling-proof glass. . .
. I was dying more and more each time I went. . . . I could
feel the flow become a trickle, and then nothing at all."
One day as she was praying, and being prayed over, her five-year-old
daughter Katy came up to her and handed her a cup filled with
dirt, which she took as a sign that the faith she had been
practicing was impure. "That was enough for me,"
Jenny says, convinced at that moment that God had released
her to find her own way of worshiping him.
When Jenny thinks back on what she calls
"that climate-controlled sanctuary" with its "big
Sunday morning dog and pony show," she wonders how she
ever could have been a regular churchgoer. "Nine o'clock,"
she now says, "is no holier or [more] apt to put you
in touch with God than any other hour of the day"; and
God does not want his believers to be "weak and codependent
on a structure or a man to tell us how to think or what to
say or to DEFINE WHO WE ARE IN CHRIST." There is, in
Jenny's view, something fundamentally wrong with the
idea that belief in Christ requires some form of instruction
from a person in authority. "Guardian, schoolmaster,
put in charge, supervision . . . these are all things of the
old law," another believer, Leta van Duin, writes on-line.
"But . . . this is not what leadership is supposed to
be now. Fatherly leadership is hard to come by. Don't
be a policeman."
Jenny Orr and Leta van Duin are adherents
of the house-church movement (both write for the Web's
Home Church Connection). Like the early Christians of the
New Testament, they believe they should worship in the sanctuary
of their homes. Although home churching has not been widely
studied by social scientists, it appears to have a strong
appeal to certain kinds of religious believers for whom authenticity
of experience is more important than congregational affiliation,
which they are likely to dismiss as mere "churchianity."
As Roger Upton, a former Southern Baptist pastor, explains
in Grace Abounding, his Web site devoted to the house-church
movement, "there simply is no scriptural basis for the
church meeting in a specially constructed religious building."
Institutions corrupt, Roger believes, and the church, understood
bureaucratically, can corrupt absolutely.
The house-church movement aims to practice
what another contributor to Home Church Connection, Glenn
Heller, calls "relational Christianity" rather
than "accomplishment Christianity." In his view,
"It is more important to focus on the being than on
the doing" and "The doing will come without any
effort if one learns the being." Like many people attracted
to the ecology movement, Glenn maintains that simpler is better:
"I've found the Lord is so good and guiding and
directing in such a natural way with minimum effort on our
part. Don't be in a hurry like the rest of the world."
House churchers resemble homeschoolers,
many of whom are also conservative Christians distrustful
of public worlds from which they feel alienated. They search
for experience uncontaminated by what they see as the inevitable
compromises that have to be made when public life is shared
with people whom one knows little and trusts even less. In
their down-to-earth forms of religious expression, representing
the ultimate in Protestant individualism, one can observe
echoes of both the frontier of the rugged West and the transcendentalism
of the effete East. House churchers treat the more evangelical
Protestant churches the way Luther treated Catholics, denouncing
them as being more interested in protecting their privileges
than in expressing their piety. Jesus, after all, reached
out to all who would follow him without, in the words of one
house churcher, "pyramid structures, programs, gimmicks,
marketing, psychology, advertising, titles, schedules, [and]
meetings."
So deep can this anti-institutionalism
run that some house churchers worry about the potential for
corruption of their own movement. "It seems that in
all our newfound freedom in Christ to be a priesthood of believers,"
says the woman who maintains the Home Church Connection site,
Tracey Amino, "there are those who by stealth are attempting
to put us into bondage again." House churches have to
be wary, Tracey says, of "the Old Testament prophet
trying to operate and function within the New Testament church,"
by which she means those who "end up breaking fellowship
over something as trivial as a small point of doctrine that
you don't happen to agree with." Tracey is particularly
suspicious of "church planters," people trained
by one faction of the movement to go out and help start new
house churches. She warns fellow believers that the group's
efforts at "control and manipulation" have "caused
a tremendous amount of offense and division within the house-church
community."
Still, compared to other countries, especially
those in Western Europe, the United States remains a nation
of churchgoers hostile to nonbelievers and reluctant to join
an antichurch movement, however faithful its adherents may
be to God. A very small movement, the house churchers are
unlikely to dissuade most churchgoing Americans from their
regular Sunday habits. But the wariness that this movement
manifests toward established institutions nonetheless constitutes
a subcurrent in American religious practice to which nearly
all congregations have to be responsive. Distrustful individuals
can affect religious institutions even if they never leave.
The anti-institutionalism latent in American culture influences
a surprising number of churches in the United States as they
struggle to retain members.
 One
example is provided by home fellowship. Some churches encourage
Bible study and spiritual discussion outside the church, if
not explicitly to discourage house churching, then certainly
to answer a widespread desire for forms of religious expression
more personal and informal than a church setting can provide.
One such home-fellowship group, studied by sociologist Matthew
Lawson, is associated with the Hamden Assembly of God Church,
outside Philadelphia. Although Assembly of God churches are
usually classified as conservative--as most believers in this
congregation would classify themselves--the members of this
church have developed a suspicion of leadership resembling
the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Like the educational
reformers of those years who insisted that teachers ought
to shed their pedagogical authority, Hamden's Pastor Vince
goes to great lengths to assure those who gather to hear his
sermons that his words are not the final word. "Your pathway
in following Christ will be different from my pathway," he
tells the home-fellowship group, as if his leadership role
were purely advisory.
Formally, the church's activities
are organized around Sunday morning worship, and the evening
study sessions are meant to flesh out what takes place there.
But Pastor Vince seems to suggest the opposite: Home fellowship,
he says at one point, "is not a part of the church,
it is the church." And it is clear that such anti-institutional
talk pleases many of Hamden's parishioners. Paul and
Carla Christianson, active in the home-fellowship group, are
among them. Catholics by birth--as in other conservative
Protestant churches, there are a large number of former Catholics
in this one--they came to detest the liberalism of their
parish and switched to a fundamentalist Protestant church.
There they discovered how rigid and doctrinaire a Baptist
church can be, and chafing at the authoritarianism of its
preacher, they switched out of that church as well. They love
Pastor Vince because, they say, he "is not one who has
the authority thing."
Conservative Christians are not the only
religious believers attracted to nonchurch settings; liberal
Jews can be as well. Jews have always worshiped at home; it
is the place where the Sabbath candles are lit and the prayers
are chanted. But throughout the 20th century, Jewish leaders
tried to create large synagogue centers--the "shul
with a pool," in the words of one historian--where,
as Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism,
put it, Jews "might find a far wider scope for expression
and enjoyment than is possible in the home." Yet despite
this effort to bring faith into institutions, recent developments
in Judaism have taken faith back out of them. Decreasing rates
of attendance testify to the limited success of the synagogue-center
movement. And so do various efforts, inspired by the upheavals
of the 1960s, to create havurot (singular: havurah)--the
Jewish equivalent of home-fellowship worship, which takes
its origins from the Hebrew word for a group of friends. Part
countercultural, part feminist, part communitarian, havurot
reproduce the exodus from Egypt, as participants leave behind
the formal trappings of synagogue membership in favor of a
more immediate and direct spirituality. An example is offered
by Kelton Minyan, a since-disbanded prayer group in the Los
Angeles area in the 1970s. Distrustful of rabbinical authority,
the group designated a variety of people to lead the prayer
services at different times. The psalms to be read and the
melodies to be sung were chosen based more on personal preferences
than on the rules of the liturgy. And most of the group's
members rejected any interpretation of prayer emphasizing
that Jews were somehow a "chosen people" different
from others. The left-wing Jews attracted to Kelton Minyan
would no doubt have felt out of place in Pastor Vince's
Assembly of God Church, yet underlying both was a common feeling
of dissatisfaction with top-down forms of religious organization.
Small-group worship, intimate and personal
as it may be, cannot do away with the institutional priorities
of congregations entirely. Thus Kelton Minyan, as it began
to attract new members, became institutionalized by moving
into the religious center of a nearby university.
The experience of a Portland, Oregon,
havurah studied by sociologist Robert Liebman in the early
1990s is even more indicative of the inevitable pressures
toward institutionalization that can grow in even the most
anti-institutional environments. Wanting at least some spiritual
direction, the Portland group had advertised for a new rabbi
in 1987. But afraid to use the c word (for congregation),
havurah members insisted that the ad emphasize a teacher and
resource person, not a religious leader, bringing forth a
stinging letter of rebuke from the Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, the Reform denomination. An appropriate rabbi
was eventually found--causing some of the more anti-institutional
members to quit--but the havurah continued to rent space
for over a decade, unwilling to take the next step in institutionalization:
the acquisition of property. Insisting on its countercultural
affinities, the group holds fast today to a system of governance
by committee, yet as the havurah grows in size, each member
feels less influential and the committees themselves become
increasingly oligarchic. "Our institutions haven't
necessarily caught up with our size," one member says,
trying to capture the frustrations of a group of people who
want to worship together and who distrust institutional authority
but who find themselves nonetheless in the reluctant role
of institution builders.
 Yet
even congregations that grow out of revivalist traditions
and continue to appeal to the emotional rather than the organizational
needs of their flock have not found a way to bypass institutional
requirements. Pastor Vince of the Hamden Assembly, for example,
is not quite so anti-institutional as his advocacy of home
fellowship makes him appear to be. The function of such fellowship,
in his view, is not to question the church's teachings but
to bring waverers back to the truth; home fellowship is not
a seminar and he is not Socrates. Along similar lines, the
leadership of the Pentecostally inclined Spirited Church of
Muncie, Indiana, recognizes that the enthusiasm encouraged
in church will go for naught if it spins off in anarchic directions;
as one church document puts it, "An ongoing struggle is in
maintaining spiritual balance in the worship services. We
allow the Spirit freedom to move and work in our midst, and
yet maintain an orderly service, full of integrity and sincere
worship. . . . The key to maintaining spiritual balance in
the worship services is in the pastor maintaining control
and staying in authority."
But if anti-institutional movements within
churches cannot fully do away with organization, even the
most organized churches cannot ignore the anti-institutional
inclinations of their members. The best example is provided
by the experience of many U.S. Catholics. Faithful Catholics
are expected not only to belong to a particular parish and
to participate actively in the Catholic subculture of schools,
charities, and voluntary associations, but also to respect
the authority embodied in a series of institutions ranging
from the distant hierarchy to the local bishop. Yet in the
United States, practicing Catholics have not proved immune
to the anti-institutionalism existing everywhere around them.
Catholics seek personalized forms of
worship in many ways. Some 4 percent of Catholics claim to
be charismatic, for instance, and 23 percent of Catholic parishes
have charismatic renewal groups. What's more, about
one in 20 Catholics now attends some form of small-group worship--a
small percentage, to be sure, but a growing one that has begun
to attract the attention of Church leaders. Catholics who
participate in small groups like them because they lack the
sense of symbolic grandeur often attributed to Catholic worship.
"There's a set of rules that we established from
the beginning," as one member of a Catholic small group
explains. "No one is to preach and no one is to teach.
We're only there to share, and whatever's said
is acceptable." Bernard Lee, SM, the assistant chancellor
at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, is the leading
expert on small-group worship among Catholics, and like many
religious leaders he professes to be encouraged by the seriousness
of purpose such groups represent; they are, he writes, "genuine
Christian communities with churchhood about them." Still,
Fr. Lee may be trying to put the best face on a movement that
will inevitably lead Catholics to question the institutional
nature of their very institutional faith. While participation
in small groups reinvigorates the faith of many Catholics,
Lee notes there is a tendency for their members, in coming
to trust themselves more, to "become more critical of
the institutional Church."
Younger Catholics, moreover, are less
likely to respect the institutional prerogatives of the Church
than are previous generations. Mary Mallozzi, for example,
is the kind of Catholic for whom the Church ought to be grateful.
A cradle Catholic, she was raised in the institutional Church
and, as a 30-year-old, remains loyal to it. "Church
is a very big thing to me," Mary tells an interviewer
in Young Adult Catholics, by sociologist Dean Hoge
et al. "I need to belong to a parish that is going to
nurture me along and offer me the tools in the areas that
I need." Fortunately for her, she found such a parish,
where she met her husband, Jim. Both remain active in parish
affairs, yet, although Mary regularly attends Mass, she does
not believe that she is obligated by her faith to do so. "I
hate rules, such as ‘You have to go to Mass,'"
she says. "I try to reframe it and say, ‘It's
part of our growth as religious people.'" Her
Catholic identity is as strong as Catholic identity can be,
and she says proudly that "I don't think there
is anything that would drive me out of the Church."
Yet she will make up her own mind on whether priests should
be allowed to marry and whether birth control is permissible.
Among American Catholics between 20 and
40 years old, people like Mary Mallozzi are probably in the
minority. Far more typical are individuals like Robert Wilkes,
a 27-year-old graduate student. Asked in Young Adult Catholics
whether he will be a lifelong Catholic, Robert, who has no
interest in switching to any other religion, answers "definitely."
But he does not view himself as a lifelong parishioner. He
once found a parish in which he felt comfortable, particularly
because the priest encouraged lay participation and an active
concern with social justice. When the local bishop stepped
in and stopped any experimentation, Robert dropped out and
decided to keep his faith to himself, rather than find another
parish. Unlike Catholics who retain only an ethnic identity
with the Church, Robert is a believer, who considers himself
loyal in his own way. He would like to see the Catholic Church
become more like Protestant churches by altering what to him
is an outdated hierarchical and authoritarian organization.
And his kind of Catholicism may well come to represent the
future. The decision by the Vatican in December 2002 to accept
the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, after priests
and faithful Catholics in the Boston area demanded it, suggests
that the days of unquestioned obedience are over for American
Catholics.
These examples of alternative institutionalism
on the part of believers from a variety of religious traditions
suggest that Americans often want different rewards from their
religious practice, and not all congregations (or parishes,
synagogues, mosques, and temples) can provide them. On the
one hand, Americans are attracted to faith because it brings
them in touch with God's realm, a spiritual environment
before which human beings stand in awe. On the other hand,
they often find in their religious practice balm for the injured
self, as church becomes a place in which believers pray for
a loved one's cancer cure, join a support group for
the strength to face a job layoff, or attend services for
a sense of neighborly solidarity. Both realms--the Supreme
and the self-interested--can be seen as corrupted by
institutional church requirements. The realm of God is too
pure and powerful to neccesitate ordinary tasks of committee
meetings or market analysis. And the realm of the self is
too subjective to be equated with church attendance or putting
coins on a collection plate. As much as Americans tend to
think of their local congregation as the one religious institution
in which they have the greatest trust, the ways they practice
their religion make it difficult for the local congregation
to meet its own institutional needs.
The religious life of the American people--seeking
but not always finding, impatient for results, anxious for
authenticity, ever sensitive to hypocrisy--may not yet have
experienced the turbulence of professional sports, where free
agents search around for the team that will offer the best
contract, or of the cut-your-own-best-deal retirement plans
that increasingly characterize American business firms. But
it does seem to be heading in that direction.
This American propensity to reshape institutions
to satisfy personal needs, while perhaps appropriate to a
service economy, seems to many observers to be out of place
when matters of ultimate meaning are at issue. And there is
certainly cause for concern. Denominational officials ought
to worry about the unwillingness of believers to identify
themselves with the histories and traditions that help to
structure belief. Congregations can and do offer a sense of
ritual observance and participation in a collective endeavor
that cannot easily be found in the home, or even in the stadium.
If the development of long-term attachments with other people
were to become more difficult in religious institutions, as
it already has in secular ones, not only would fellowship
be lost but also the kind of sensibility that reminds individuals
that there exist duties and obligations to traditions and
forces more permanent than their immediate wants and needs.
Still, there is one potential benefit
to a form of faith that puts more emphasis on being than on
belonging. "Denominationalism is the opposite of sectarianism,"
the historian Winthrop Hudson once observed, for a sect "claims
the authority of Christ for itself alone," while a denomination
implies that the group so formed "is but one member, called
or denominated by a particular name, of a larger group--the
Church--to which all denominations belong." Hudson's is an
idealistic view that, alas, has little correspondence with
reality. Denominations and congregations were strongest in
this country when Americans cared so much about the specifics
of their faith that they formed ever more tightly bound communities
hostile to people whose faith was different from their own.
Against a historical pattern characterized by narrow sects--each
persuaded that it had a monopoly on the truth--and parochial
congregations that cared little for those outside the group,
there is something to be said in favor of religious switching
and transient congregational loyalties. In post-1960s America,
institutions have to earn respect.
Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. His essay is drawn from The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (© 2003, Alan Wolfe), by permission of Free Press, Simon & Schuster.
Photos (from top):
Catholic charismatics, New York City, 1992. By Lee Romero/ New York Times
Small-group prayer, Oakbrook Evangelical Free Church, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 2002. By Kim Bahr
A havurah Shabbat service, Nyack, New York, 1976. By Bill Aron
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