Title: Why Conservative Churches
Are Growing
Author: Dean Kelley
Publisher: Harper & Row
Length: 184 pages including 5-page
index
Quote: “It is generally assumed that
religious enterprises, if they want to succeed, will be reasonable,
rational, courteous, responsible, restrained, and receptive to
outside criticism...to preserve a good image in the world (as the
world defines all these terms)...that they will be democratic and
gentle in their internal affairs...They will also be responsive to
the needs of men (as currently conceived), and will want to work
cooperatively with other groups to meet those needs. They will not
let dogmatism, judgmental moralism, or obsessions with cultic purity
stand in the way of such cooperation...These expectations are a
recipe for the failure of the religious enterprise.”
Before Dean Kelley's time, Dorothy
Sayers said what Kelley has to say in more poetic terms: the Lion of
Judah is not, has never been, will never be, a pet cat. That's all
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing has
to say to poetic and religious people. However, everyone can't be
poetic or religious, and some people needed to see it spelled out at
length, in sociological language, with graphs. So that's what Dean
Kelley did.
Nice, bland
churches that offer nice, bland, low-content “services” that
basically soften people up for the fundraising pitch for the schemes
toward which “social planners” want to direct religious fervor,
Kelley demonstrates, don't generate much fervor. Once people notice
that all these churches aim to do is get them to feel good about
themselves, well, most of us either work during the week or are
living with painful disabilities, and either way most of us will feel
even better about ourselves if we use the time churchgoing takes up
to make up for any sleep we lost during the week. The success of such
churches' outreach to the young depends on the social relationships
among the first half-dozen young people who attend them. If a really
pretty and popular girl, or a rock star's little brother, happens to
belong to the church a “youth ministry” will attract a few dozen
other teenagers. If not, well...not.
On the
other hand lower-status, reform-oriented churches that offer
working-class, even student and welfare-class, believers more hope of
recognition for making virtuous personal choices, that demand that
believers adopt strict standards for morality and even for “ritual
purity,” that don't cooperate easily with “social planners,”
that preach specific beliefs about God being altogether different
from “Humanity” as represented by the “social planners,” do
generate fervor and commitment.
Not only did the rebellious youth of the 1960s drop out of bland,
nice churches to become hippies or Marxists; they also dropped out to
join strict, conservative churches or movements of all
kinds—Protestant churches including the Southern Baptists,
Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Worldwide Church of God,
Wycliffe Bible Translators, and Salvation Army, and other groups
including the Mormons, Black Muslims, Christian Scientists, Baha'i,
Jehovah's Witnesses, Zen Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, Neo-Pagans, and
Unification Church.
What
these “conservative churches” had in common was that they did not
fit in with the “social planners'” plans for the role of churches
in the socialistic, Humanistic world the “planners” hoped to
build. Although the rules for members in each group were different,
each group did preach (and to some extent require) strict observance
of the rules. At this period the Black Muslims had minimal contact
with traditional Muslims and preached a radically
different—humanistic and Afrocentric—set of beliefs, defining the
concept of God in terms that could be described as not even theistic,
yet they too required members to obey rules that set them apart from
the unbelieving mainstream. The difference between S.D.A. and
W.C.O.G. beliefs, I remember firsthand, is historical: the two groups
formed independently, in different times and places, as a result of
different people reading the Bible and reaching almost identical
understandings of what it teaches.
Among
some of the other churches, and between “conservative” Protestant
churches and non-Protestant sects, differences in beliefs and
cultures could be vast. Some groups were antisemitic; some were
passionately pro-Israel. Many preached an improbable ideal of
spiritual chastity; at least one group encouraged young people to
sleep around, like hippies, in order to recruit converts. Some took
New Age beliefs like astrology, telepathy, channelling, divination,
spirit guides, ancestor spirits, and/or ancestral “gods” very
seriously; others preached that such beliefs were “of the Devil.”
Whatever the rules were, however, status within these groups depended
to some extent on adherence to the rules, sometimes more than on
wealth or professional prestige...and rebellious youths, none of whom
had professional prestige, most of whom didn't have wealth and the
rest of whom were embarrassed by their elders' wealth, liked
being rewarded for personal
virtue rather than inherited wealth.
Kelley argues that
strict rules of religious practice offer people a sense of “meaning,”
whether true or false; that this “meaning” is something people
need, and apparently don't get in churches that only ask people to
feel good about themselves and write large cheques frequently.
Considering
developments since the time of this book's publications, readers
might wish to consider the possible relationship between the extent
to which people look for “meaning” in religious disciplines that
go above and beyond what the majority of people seem to accept as
their religious duty, and the ages and other obligations of the
people involved. Catholic Christians have managed to incorporate that
search for extra “meaning”
through religious discipline, within the church, in the monastic
tradition; Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian churches have
placed a few “oblates” in Catholic monasteries, but the churches
that were formerly considered “low,” minority, fanatical,
heretical, and/or working-class have had a better record of making
use of the energy young people, and a few widows and retirees, almost
literally “have to burn.” The churches Kelley calls “mainstream”
tend to be embarrassed by so much energy, to wonder whether young
people who want to work for the church sixteen hours a day are likely
to start talking out loud to angels next. The revivalist and
evangelical churches tend to put those adolescent and midlife hormone
surges to work.
Although the “Peace
Church” subgroup (Mennonites, Quakers, Amish, Hutterites, Brethren,
etc.) were not “growing” rapidly in the early 1970s, Kelley cites
the history of this movement as an example of how strict, even
fanatical churches win commitment by offering “meaning.” Most
members of Peace Churches would prefer today to be known as gentle,
easygoing neighbors, but during their periods of rapid growth these
groups demanded that people give up bright-colored clothes. The original
Methodist church was likewise an intense, evangelical, “fanatical”
group—among other things John Wesley encouraged the breakdown of
social barriers between socioeconomic classes. Wesley preached to
unwashed miners right outside coal mines; his spiritual disciples
evangelized American slaves. Then there were the Mormons, who, like
traditional Muslims, demanded a lifelong commitment. In the 1970s new
Mormons still put on special undergarments marked with the sites of
the vital organs at which the “Destroying Angels” were to aim if
the wearer ever betrayed the church to its enemies...and the Mormon church was
“growing.”
Kelley proposes
that, because religious groups that seem very “reasonable” and
tolerant and broad-minded, and support good civic and social
activity, are competing with political and community groups for the
attention of people who are interested in the civic or social
activities in question, they will inevitably tend to become weaker
groups. Because religious groups that require members to uphold
specific beliefs about unprovable matters of faith, teach that
outsiders are at best tragically mistaken, have no room for dissent,
and demand that members do specific things, have a strong appeal to
their narrow niche “markets,” they will tend to be stronger
groups as long as their social niches last. “[T]he higher the
demand a movement makes on its followers, the fewer there will be who
respond to it, but the greater the individual and aggregate impact of
those who do respond.”
In the 1970s rich Americans found no “meaning” in church rules that banned makeup,
jewelry, dancing, theatre-going, and playing card games that might or
might not include Uno. Then again, many Americans were young and poor
enough to find quite a lot of “meaning” in rules that basically
rewarded them for being frugal. Most of these people had no real
alternative to being frugal, but in the “mainstream” churches
they were embarrassed by it, while in the “conservative” churches
they were rewarded for it. By the 1980s it had become a bit of an
embarrassment to Southern Baptists and Seventh-Day Adventists that
these groups might have been rewarding mere poverty for happening to
look like spiritual fervor...but on Kelley's thesis it was a mistake
for these churches to abandon their historic encouragement of
frugality.
How
coincidental is it that after the Anglo-American Adventist churches
adopted a policy of never encouraging
anyone who still chose to practice the historic disciplines of
frugality, those churches went into a decline? Meanwhile
Latino-American Adventist churches, against a background where
relatively low incomes and little temptation to waste money are
“mainstream,” but just being a Protestant still amounts to a
substantial commitment to be “different from the mainstream,” are
growing fast.
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