There were thirteen established churches in Appleton when I arrived. They were, as listed in a local publication written for tourists: "Trinity Lutheran, First Methodist, First Presbyterian, Full Gospel Pentecostal, Church of Christ, Church of God, St. Mark's Episcopal, Seventh-day Adventist, Assembly of God, St. Mary's Catholic, Jehovah's Witnesses, First Baptist, Church of the Nazarene (rural)." These churches offered widely divergent forms of worship and theological tenets, and also several versions of a basically similar brand of Protestantism. I will attempt to analyze to what degree these churches were the same, and to what degree they were different, and how these similarities and differences ought to be understood.
To begin with, I want to point out the absence of any sort of classification-be it religious, social, historical, or even alphabetical-in the listing that I have just quoted. Similarly, the order in which church notices were printed in the local newspaper was totally haphazard, though different from the order I just referred to. This is a reflection of the main ideological attitudes toward the multitude of churches that could be found in Appleton: the idea that because all of them accepted the divinity of a supernatural being in the same Western tradition of Christianity, they were all "much the same" and "just as valid." This attitude was widespread, but it was only expressed in the same type of public situation, when unity had to be stressed. A tourist brochure intended to show how friendly a town Appleton was, was one of these sitllations, and so was the newspaper whose editor felt his role to be one of "bringing together" what he himself perceived to be the essentially disparate parts of the town.
The importance of religion in Appleton was quite great, although perhaps not quite so great as it was said to have been in earlier times. All civic occasions-Memorial Day, high-school graduation ceremonies, dedications of public buildings-required the presence of a minister or two and the saying o£ prayers and blessings. Churchgoing was considered by many to be a sign of respectability, and most holders of public offices were churchgoers. Yet disinterest in any form of religious activity within the confines of an established church was great also, particularly among the younger generation, which did not feel any strong pressure to join or attend any church. In 1964, Surajit Sinha gathered the figures on church membership in Appleton shown in the accompanying Table 2. Because of a great number of variables, the table can be indicative only of the relative importance of churches. Since it was clear to me that relative size had not varied much since 1964, 1 did not attempt to take a census of my own. Furthermore, Sinha lists only eleven churches, the brochure lists thirteen, and while I was in Appleton at least one more church was established. It is evident that the number of churches and their relative size is not a matter of structure. Only the very multitude is.
The figures in the table inflate somewhat the real dimensions of religious life in Appleton insofar as they deal with membership; such figures are always disproportionate to attendance and involvement. For example, in 1969, the Methodist church had a total membership of 392 and an average attendance of 153, or 39 percent. (The figure 392 refers to the total number of baptized and confirmed Methodists, while Sinha's figure for the Methodist church, 150, refers to families. It is also possible that the church grew under the impulse of a very active minister. In any event, it is necessary to shift the figures to compare membership with attendance.) This phenomenon is general in all the churches I went to, except the Catholic church and certain of the smaller fundamentalist churches, whose average attendance, compared with their membership, was better. Another fact to be note4l is that none of the churches was limited to people from Appleton per se; an important part of the membership of all congregations lived outside the town limits-no two churches included members from exactly the same area of the county.
At the most general level, the three main currents of American religious thought are represented in Appleton. There are the moderate Protestant churches, such as the Presbyterian and Methodist, characterized by a minimal insistence on any specific theological background. There are the fundamentalist Protestants, such as the Baptists or the Assembly of God, with a theoretical insistence on a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Finally, there is the Catholic Church, which includes, principally, recent immigrants from Catholic parts of Europe, their children, and a few converts interested in the more complex and systematic theological justification of the beliefs and liturgy of this church. The historical establishment of Catholicism in the United States is not really recent, but its ranks have constantly been renewed as immigrants came into the country, and its superficial organization is is still more European than American. Yet the process of Americanizing the Catholic Church in Appleton is certainly well on its way, as the influx of new immigrants has almost stopped.
I will focus first and foremost on Protestant churches because they reveal organizational realities at the most visible levels.
The distinction between the two brands of Protestantism or between Protestantism and Catholicism can be made to seem much sharper at a theoretical level than it is in reality. It is well known that the Episcopal and Lutheran churches incorporate many traits typical of the Catholic Church, such as complex ritualism and a religious hierarchy that limits the autonomy of the local congregation. Similarly, the Church of Christ, with a theological orientation that equates it with the moderate Protestants, incorporates the "coming forward" ritual and baptism by immersion typical of fundamentalist churches. On the other hand, the Baptist church of Appleton held services whose organization was very close to that of the moderate Protestant churches. From tHat point of view, the Protestant churches are positioned along a continuum with "high ritualism" at one extreme and "high emotionalism" at the other, the order being: Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, •', Church of Christ, Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, Assembly of God,Jehovah's Witnesses, Church of God, Full Gospel Pentecostal. (The ranking could be different elsewhere.)
This order loosely conforms to a sociopolitical order insofar as members of moderate Protestant churches held all the direct political power and most of the wealth that Protestants possessed in Appleton. Fundamentalists rarely participated in any political or social activities with members of other churches, even though they were often invited and most of them would have been perfectly acceptable almost anywhere. The Catholic church was a special case, since it included many of the richest and most powerful people in town (those who were not Protestant) and also a wide selection of people from all social levels. Therefore, it would be meaningless to rank it with the Protestant churches. These churches were much more homogeneous in their membership and could easily be characterized socially if one accepts that the people who dominated each congregation in some way represented the sociological reality of these churches.
As perceived by many people in Appleton, the Presbyterian church, for example, was supposed to be "intellectual" and "sophisticated"; the Methodist was the church both of older, established small farmers and younger, "up-and-coming" businessmen in the town. Indeed, the Presbyterian church appealed mainly to professionals and high-level civil servants, the Methodist to merchants. The school board was dominated by Presbyterians, the town council by Methodists. There was clearly a feeling of competition between these two churches, the most important ones in Appleton. For the time being, the advantage appeared to lie with the Presbyterian church for the top spot in the ranking system.
The Episcopalian church, being very small, did not play a very noticeable role in the social and political life of the town. The income of some of its members was very high, but the most -active members, a handful of them, congregated mostly with Presbyterians outside of church activities.
The Church of Christ was quite cose to the Methodist in many ways, but its atmosphere was very quaint and its congregation did not try to compete socially with the others, although one could feel a certain desire among some members to do so. Its members were often clos.e to people in the Baptist church, with whom they felt more at ease on religious matters than with the more liberal Methodists. They were generally not fun dam en talists, but they preferred this position to the liberal Protestantism preached by other churches.
The Lutheran church was quite outside this ranking system, probably because a large number of its members came from areas outside the town and because of a strong plurality of German immigrants in its ranks. In outward appearance, its membership consisted of many people whose socioeconomic background was very similar to that of the Methodists, and they could have competed with them, but they did not, and remained withdrawn.
An absolute ranking for the fundamentalist churches would be even more difficult. The Full Gospel church appealed mainly to . very poor white migrants from the South, many of them unemployed, and all with large families. They contrasted strikingly with the congregations of the moderate churches, in which people of this type were exceedingly rare. I could say that the Full Gospel church fell at the bottom of the social scale.
The status of the other fundamentalist churches, though certainly lower than that of any of the moderate churches, is much more difficult to determine. On the one hand, none of the people who held political power or offices, whether in the school system or the town or county government, belonged to any of these churches. On the other hand, most fundamentalist church members held jobs and, more importantly, followed a life-style totally acceptable to, and often encountered in, the moderate churches. As long as religious subjects were not approached, it was often hard to distinguish between a churchgoing Methodist and a Seventh-day Adventist or Baptist. They were, in fact, regularly invited to participate in the ecumenical activities planned by the moderate churches, and just as regularly refused.
It soon became evident to me that the absence of any Baptist or Seventh-day Adventist in most townwide activities was the result of an ideological choice: "worldly power" was evil and corrupting and should be avoided. This was not a rationalization in the face of segregation. Many individual Baptists would have been politically acceptable. But if they had joined the political cliques in town, they could not have remained Baptist. They would have been reiected and, conversely, accepted in, say, the Methodist churcir: Socioeconomic differences among the fundamentalist churches were minute. The only differences among most of these churches were religious and theological; they were essentially "equal" among themselves, and their organization was based on principles similar to the organization of the groups of young adults discussed in Chapter 4.
All fundamentalist churches were very small, each comprising onl y four dozen families. And the smaller they were, the tighter and more segregative they were. The Seventh-day Adventists were the best example of this process, with their insistence on keeping Saturday rather than Sunday as their holy day. Their reason for doing so was, of course, a typical fundamentalist statement: "This is what the Bible says." They believed themselves to be more fundamentalist than all other fundamentalist churches combined because they kept the Sabbath and the others did not. On the other hand, their interest in health, nonviolence, conscientious objection to military service, and social service did not derive from a wholly literal reading of the Bible. They seemed to insist relatively less on salvation than other churches.
All fundamentalist churches present such a mix of literalism and interpretation with regard to the Bible. They have to be literal to justify their existence, and they have to be interpretive not only because of the ambiguous character of many biblical passages but also to differentiate themselves from other fundamentalist churches. By keeping Saturday as their day of worship, the Seventh-day Adventists devised a particularly efficacious way of differentiating themselves from the rest of the population. It made communication with other churches a little more difficult, contributing thereby to the strength of the bond among church members.
To be unlike all other churches was the main raison d'etre of most of the smaller churches. The differences based on disagreements concerning the interpretation of biblical passages played the same minor symbolic role as the presence or absence of flags in the churches. The Baptist church had two flags around the altar, an American and a church flag, plus a large cross painted on the wall. The Seventh-day Adventist church displayed a large American flag just by a lectern with neither altar nor cross. The Full Gospel church had a lectern and a bench for people who came to "receive the Spirit," but neither flag, altar, nor cross.
The differences among churches were also expressed by the use of different prayers during Sunday services or by small shifts in the organization of the service: some churches would use both the Gloria Patri and the Doxology; others would use only one at a time; some would use neither. There were variations in the frequency of communion services or in the order of the different steps of a service; communion generally came after the sermon, but it might be placed before, and the consecrating prayers might be said by the pastor or by one or several elders. These variations were quite important symbolically because of the relatively large amount of communication that existed among the congregations of these churches. People frequently attended services at churches other than their own and thus found out how other churches went about doing things. Practical help was often exchanged, and friendship networks existed across churches. Here also segregation demands communication.
I characterized the Episcopalian congregation as rich and in the orbit of the Presbyterian church. It was rich because it was clear that ·it could count on more money per member than any other church in Appleton. In spite of the small size of the membership, it could afford a full-time minister and a church fellowship hall complex at least as large as the Presbyterians'. Proportionally, this made the Episcopalians richer than the Presbyterians. On the other hand, the Presbyterians were much more active in politics and other aspects of the life of the town, while the Episcopalians were underrepresented. What does all this mean?
There were 80 names on the mailing list of the Episcopal church and 200 baptized Episcopalians in Appleton. About 150 people practiced, and the average church attendance was around 80 (none of these subdivisions offered to me by the pastor cover exactly the same units; statistics cannot be very precise, just indicative). In general, people holding high-status jobs (professionals, managers, civil administrators, small businessmen) made up about 40 percent of the congregation. People with lower-status jobs (clerks, secretaries, blue-collar workers) comprised 35 percent. Retired persons (25 percent of the congregation) were, in general, not very well-to-do, except for the two widows of Chrysler and General Motors executives, who were very well off and accounted for the relative wealth of the church; the large fellowship hall had been donated by one of them. Finally, no one in this church played the role of "old aristocrat." Even among the upper half of the congregation many were new, both to Appleton and to their social position. None of these people would have been unwelcome in the Presbyterian church. Nor were Episcopalians totally snobbish toward Presbyterians; there were many extra-church relationships between the two congregations.
The statistical composition of the Methodist congregation does not vary significantly from the Episcopalian: 35 percent of the people on the membership list (266 "units," 410 people) could be classified as "higher" (both in status and income), and 56 percent as"lower." There were also 9 percent who were retired and unaccounted for. (My criteria for determining higher or lower status are the same as those 1 used for the Episcopalians. My data are purely occupational; that was all I could get from my sources. Once again, these statistics are intended to be indicative of the type of people who were on the mailing lists of the respective churches.) The average and median incomes and jobs were thus most probably slightly lower for the Methodist than for the Episcopal church, a result well in keeping with the findings of sociological studies of American towns. The question is: To what extent is this difference in income averages relevant? To be more precise: Why is it that university professors, white-collar workers in a large chemical complex, and blue-collar workers in a Ford automobile factory could be found in all three churches-and, in fact, of course, in all the others? Why is it, furthermore, that the Episcopalian church gave an outward appearance of wealth and gentility, the Presbyterian one of intellectualism, the Methodist one of nouveau riche pride and self-consciousness, although the statistics reveal that the composition of the congregations did not vary significantly?
The answer to the first question is very simple: One belongs to one church or another primarily for personal reasons. A person does not join a group or a church because he is a university professor (or in spite of being one) but because he wants, for whatever reasons, to be a member of this or that church. A Methodist survey found that the three main answers given to this question were that one joins a church because it has a "good" minister, a "nice" church building, a "congenial" congregation.
A young couple I interviewed who had just moved to Appleton from Detroit, where they had not belonged to any church, decided that they should "because it would be a good example to the children," even though the husband said freely that he did not really believe in the utility of church membership. One Sunday morning, one of them went to a Methodist service, the other to the Presbyterian church. The Methodist minister made a sermon about "preparing a birthday cake for Jesus on Christmas ... Good grief!" The wife decided that it would be difficult to find anybody giving a better sermon in Appleton than the one she heard the Presbyterian minister preach. Their social position at the time was rather beneath the image the congregation presented. The church was also more conservative than they considered themselves to "be. However, they "adapted" and joined the Presbyterian church and are now very active in it.
Another couple had moved from Ohio to Louisiana to Appleton. They had been raised Unitarians, could not find the denomination after they left Ohio, and joined the Presbyterian church in Louisiana. Their experience there was very bad. ("People were so unfriendly there. They were polite on Sunday, but nobody ever called on us. I even proposed myself to teach Sunday school, but they said they didn't need anybody!") In Appleton they also joined the Presbyterian church and found it very congenial. A third couple was invited to the same church one Sunday by friends, who explained: "You'll probably like it very much there, and we would be so pleased to see you."
All three couples were relatively young. One husband was a high school teacher, the second was the head of one of the services in the county administration, and the third was a salesman for a large company (he was only in his twenties). They could all have joined any church in Appleton. The third couple could have become "almost hippie"; the first couple, though they could not have belonged to any such group-because of their age, mainly-knew John, Sue, and some of their friends relatively well. Nobody made theological comments. They answered questions about the differences they thought existed among the moderate churches by saying that they did not believe that there were any from the religious point of view. ("We all believe in the same things.") They were hard put to give an explanation for the existence of such a number of moderate churches beyond the statement that "some people are friendlier than others."
Building programs played a role, too. Ten years before, the Methodist church had been dominated by older people, had had a mediocre minister, and its church had been old, damp, and dark. (Architecturally, it had been one of the best buildings in town, but that did not count.) A new minister arrived, a younger and more energetic man. He organized membership drives and a very successful building campaign, the product of which was a brand-new church/friendship hall/office/classroom complex with lawns and a large parking lot, at the outskirts of the town. The result was a greatly enlarged congregation that included many younger adults; they worked hard for the church and changed its outward appearance. What these new members liked was the feeling of activity, development, and improvement displayed by the congregation and "symbolized by the new building." I often heard scornful comments about "the church that is not going to start a building program for a long time," meaning the Presbyterians, whose facilities were well below the size and plushness of the other church's buildings. Presbyterians said among themselves that "outward expenditure of money is no proof of Christian worth," which, of course, must be taken with a grain -of salt, since most of them were as much "conspicuous consumers" as any Methodist!
These examples of choice in church membership, however interesting in their explicit evocation of a structural reality, should not cause one to overlook the fact that many people belong to a church because at one point in their career it was the "only" church in town. Joining a church affiliated to a national denomination of which one was not previously a member might be a disagreeable process for certain adults, since it sometimes implies instruction in the basic tenets of the denomination or interviews with elders or even a new baptism, in some cases by immersion. It is always much simpler to transfer membership.
Even in the most extreme forms of congregational autonomy, to be found in Appleton in the Presbyterian church, transferring membership from a Presbyterian church in another town implied only a ritual acceptance of the person and his family by the.congregation. In this case, the prospective member was presented by an elder to the congregation during a Sunday morning service, and the matter was put to a vote. At this stage there was, of course, no chance for a negative vote: segregation processes always have a subdued character. A public negative vote or even a non unanimous one would have been scandalous and an impossible affirmation that the church was not a "community." If a "mistake" was made, the congregation's recourse was "unfriendliness/' the refusal of social intercourse with the new couple.
Segregation was, of course, just as current a process as integration, although it was never so well publicized. Cases of people "dropping out" were usually repressed-by both sides. Surajit Sinha reported a few expressive comments from people who had refused to join any of the churches because of what his informants called their "hypocrisy" and the impression the congregants gave to the prospective members of feeling "superior" to "ordinary folks." (Mrs. Howard's reasons for dropping out of the Methodist church first, and then the Presbyterian, were similar.) Such comments would have raised shudders of horror if told to the people concerned; they might even have gone so far as to say that they were glad a person who said such things was not a member of their congregation, ("Such a great group of people in which everybody works together so well!")
In fact, it is possible that the informants were, or felt, rejected. One would certainly feel rejected by any Protestant church, particularly the upper churches, if he came to church in anything but his best clothes. And he would eventually be rejected if he did not get the message and persisted in attending. But such an occasion must arise only rarely. An initially cold reception from the congregation would be enough to drive anybody a way. Any wellencultured American would interpret his exclusion from the outwardly warm and friendly salutations exchanged among integrated members as a clear rejection of himself as an acceptable candidate for membership.
I personally have not directly observed any examples of an individual's rejection by a church. I have often observed, on the other hand, rejection of a certain form of religious worship by an individual, particularly by the young, but also in two cases by adults, one being Mrs. Howard, the other being a member of the Full Gospel Pentecostal church, who testified that she had abandoned the Presbyterian church when she realized its teachings were heretical, its congregation hypocritical, and the whole "inspired by the Devil rather than by God." In many such cases the rejection is mutual. This is particularly true of young adults, whether they decide to abandon churchgoing altogether or to join a church different from the one in which they were raised. Such a shift is often associated with a move to a different town and is part of the last step in the long rites de passage an American youth has to endure.
There are also many examples, both in the sociological literature and in novels about American life, of people who would like to join a church, association, or clique they consider "higher" and are prevented from doing so by the resistance of the members of these groups to their application. Most of this literature (Dreiser, Lewis, Marquand, Warner) is critical of actual American life, and one can raise some doubts as to the validity of their analysis of motives, with their insistence on jealousy, envy, snobbery and other "evil" things as the primary motors of social stratification in America. But there is also little doubt that their descriptions -correspond to a certain reality.
Most people in Appleton would insist on what they would consider to be the positive aspects of group formation; they would insist that anybody is welcome in their midst ifhe is an "interesting" or "good" or "respectable" person-which means, among established, successful, white middle-class persons, as well as among their young, "radical" children that the applicant for membership is willing to conform to the rules of the group as defined by its dominant clique at the time of the application.
If a blue-collar worker wanted to join the Episcopalian church or even simply to remain in it without feeling too uncomfortable, he certainly could do sb in Appleton; there were several blue-collar workers in the church. His problem would be that he would not find many of his kind in the dominant clique, that he would have to play the game of sophistication in speech, dress, and outside interests, which he might be disinclined to do. On the other hand, the church might just happen to be dominated by blue-collar workers, and so he would not have to play a role too different from that of the majority of his fellow-workers. The Episcopalian minister had served in just such a parish before he came to Appleton. On the other hand, a blue-collar atmosphere might not appeal to the wife of a retired executive. But then again, it also might.
My argument here is that two things must be distinguished. First there is what might be called the sociological reality of the congregation, a reality dependent on the amount of money it controls and is willing to spend on church-related activities. Then there is the appearance it conveys by the use of certain symbols and by the activities of the group of people, always rather small even in the large churches, who hold most committee positions, meet informally regularly, and thus control the church. The interesting thing is that the two things are not necessarily related, something that has escaped many sociologists concerning American religion. There is a relationship between economic power and church membership only if one considers the churches in groups. But within each level there can be several competing churches, each a slight variation on the general theme. Thus the Presbyterian church in Appleton was not "intellectual" because there was a predominance of university professors and school teachers in it, but because several of the most active members of the congregation, those who planned and organized church activities, had enougli influence on the minister to orient his sermons in a direction that they considered "intellectual," were interested in some sort of cultural life, and pushed the congregation to accept it.
Because the characterization of a church depends so heavily on an active clique, it is also something that can easily change as people leave or join the church. Sinha related that the conservative elements in the Presbyterian church were strong enough ten years ago to obtain the resignation of a young, rather liberal minister who had preached strongly in favor of renting a piece of church property in the best neighborhood in Appleton to a black family. (The congregation now accepts a youth service complete with rock music, protest songs, not-so-clean T-shirts, and bare feet.) Some members of the congregation wanted to set up a treatment center for people with serious psychological troubles, particularly drug addicts. The project had a hard time getting off the ground because of the lack of enthusiasm, if not the opposition, of other influential groups in town whose help would have been needed; it was too liberal, if not radical, for them. It may well have been too much for certain Presbyterians also; I heard that there were rumblings in the congregation, particularly among certain middle-aged members who thought it was going too far but who did not have the time and energy for a campaign against the trend-setting clique.
The Methodist church's transformation from an older, traditionally conservative church into a younger, modern, conservative church is another example of the same process. Many of the people who gave the church its character in earlier years are still around, but they were pushed out of their positions of power, probably gently but nevertheless firmly. The average age of people serving on committees is around forty-five, and it is the people in this relatively young age group who are the most visibly active. Yet their interests lie in very different quarters from those of the Presbyterians, w horn they know quite well. They feel the need to maintain a perfect outward appearance more consciously than members of the other churches, and they are ready to sacrifice a lot, in time and money, to achieve it; their answer to the youth-service experiments of the Presbyterians (in which two or three nominally Methodist youths participated) was the creation of "sacred dancing," as it was called, which consisted ·of a troupe of young girls in their early teens who performed classical dance pieces during certain Sunday services. Solo pieces or special musical pieces sung by the choir were performed more regularly. From the point of view of traditional Protestantism, these experiments may have been much more radical than the youth service. After all, singing hymns has always been a respectable activity for a service, while artistic performances, particularly dancing, have never been favorably looked upon by most Protestants, especially Methodists!
Here again, the opposition of conservative versus modern or liberal does not have much meaning. Any group is always "modern" and "conservative" at the same time. For example, the Methodists accepted dancing in church but showed a certain lack of enthusiasm for the large and successful local amateur theatrical troupe that was open to anybody interested (even people known by the director to belong to the hippie fringe were invited in my presence-the invitation was rejected). A statistical breakdown showed that Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and unchurched persons made up 80 percent of the troupe, while only 12 percent were Methodists and 8 percent were Catholics.
What this choice of symbols to characterize a church reveals is that the true role of these symbols is not so much to express the inner reality of the particular group as to differentiate it from those groups closer to it and in interaction with it. Youth services and dancing, a new church, or a theatrical troupe play the same role in the social organization of moderate churches and belong to the same category of phenomena as the presence or absence of crosses in fundamentalist churches or the length of hair and quality and frequency of drug usage in hippie groups.
The manipulation of these symbols for purposes of differentiation and identification has a distinct totemic quality to it. Each group is differentiated from all others by the symbols it uses to express its existence. These symbols almost never spring from the infrastructural reality the groups may also possess. They are also very rarely invested with any emotional meaning for the members of the group: they are not sacred. They are essentially intellectual means by which the need for a multitude of groups and communities is solved.
The totems are not sacred, nor do they represent in any sense the "true" reality of the groups as seen by the members themselves. They are, as they would say, just "symbols" of the essential humanity of the members. I was told many a time: "What matters that we be Methodists, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists (or even Jews)? We are all Christians (human beings) worshiping the same God." The totemic diversity of the social organization is a matter of surface appearance that hides an essential, and obviously very abstract and ideal, unity-the oneness that comes from the fact that all the members of these communities remain individuals whose attachment to their communities and· its symbols "is of the same nature.
All this must be stressed if we are to understand American culture. If America were simply "egalitarian" as de Tocqueville, for example, argued, it would have all the elements to evolve a clanlike social structure and-who knows?-it might still evolve into such a society: ethnic groups, religious minorities, "counterculture" followers could solidify into probably endogamous groups. Yet this would entail a radical shift in the definition of man: there would have to be an admission of mutual differences in the nature of human beings according to the group into which they were born. That the system would evolve in this direction seems at present almost unthinkable.
Max Weber saw in the question of the importance and relevance of ritual in worship the "decisive difference" that led to the schism in Christianity between Catholics and Protestants. Protestant theologians rejected the idea that there is an inherent value to ritual action or that it is only through such actions, "sacraments" as the Catholics call them, that men can get in contact with God or receive grace from him. This difference about the need of a mediation between God and the individual is still very much alive. The Catholic theologians Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler still say: "When the Church, engaging its whole being, makes absolute in God's name and Christ's this pledge of grace for the individual at the decisive moments of his personal saving history, we have the opus operandum-a sacrament." Paul Tillich, on the contrary, says: "The Protestant principle overcomes the gap between the sacred and the secular spheres, between priesthood and laity, Protestantism demands a radical laicism. There are in Protestantism only laymen."
Most of my informants would agree with Tillich. For them, the rites that were performed in their churches at most "expressed the unity of the congregation" or "contributed to the smoothness of the worship service" as a symbol-in the native sense-of a higher, nonritualistic reality and as a practical means of solving a natural problem. As Tillich says: "One can say in general that withdrawal from communal devotion is dangerous because it easily produces a vacuum in which the devotional life disappears altogether." All this was translated, in the stereotype generally accepted by people in Appleton, as meaning that the Protestant churches are not ritualistic (though some are more so than others) while the Catholic Church is.
This rather stereotypical description of the ideas on liturgy held by the two main branches of Christianity found in Appleton and the United States in general is accepted matter-of-factly by most sociologists. Even in Warner's The Living and the Dead, one of the best attempts to date at an anthropological analysis of the symbolic life of Americans, there is no analysis of the Protestant service, although long pages are devoted to the Catholic Mass.
Although it is certainly interesting to note that the Protestants have the feeling that their choices are devoid of "meaningless" rituals, there is no reason to believe that large groups of people could meet regularly and not develop certain routine ways of doing things that express dramatically the ideas they hold about the nature of their communion. In the process a ritual has been established, a meaningful ritual that is excellent material for an anthropological analysis.
This certainly applies to the Protestant service, which is, in fact, very rich in symbolic meaning and can be shown to be part of the same system of transformations that includes the other phenomena I have explored until now. While I stressed in the preceding pages the diversity of certain aspects of religious symbolic behavior for purposes of differentiating church from church and subgroup from subgroup in the town, I also implied many times that these differences were quite superficial and in fact had to be so to play their role. There is, indeed, enough uniformity of ritual behavior among Protestant churches to permit an observer to recognize at once that he is in a Protestant and not a Catholic church, although he cannot guess so easily the denomination without looking at the bulletin given to him by an usher as he enters the building. It might even be difficult for him to decide whether the denomination is fundamentalist or not if he pays attention only to what is done and not to what is said.
As one walks into any Protestant church in Appleton on a Sunday morning, one is always welcomed at the door of the church by at least one couple with whom one exchanges everyday greetings such as "How are you?" or "The weather is beautiful today, isn1t i!?,, If one is recognized as a visitor, somebody from another town or another church, the welcome will be more elaborate and somewhat inquisitive. Once inside the church, if it is of any size at all, one is taken in charge and led to a seat by ushers who distribute a bulletin on which is printed the order of worship and a few announcements.
Services always begin with a hymn and at least three other hymns are sung during the course of the service. The inner order of the service varies widely from church to church and sometimes also from Sunday to Sunday. A minister explained to me that this order of worship depends almost solely on the inspiration of the minister as long as it includes at least some of the various liturgical moments. These are:
1. Invocation. Always at the beginning, recited by the pastor or an elder. This is an improvised prayer to ask God's help that the service be fruitful.
2. Prayer of Confession (not found in all denominations). To ask for God's indulgence for one's sins.
3. Offerings. Consisting of a collection of money and a prayer over these.
4. Readings. Normally one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament.
5. The saying of the only mechanical prayers recited in Protestant churches (except for the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches). They are the Doxology (Praise God from whom all blessings flow; Praise him, all creatures here below; Praise him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen), the Gloria Patri (Glory be to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world wi.thout end. Amen), and the Our Father. These prayers are used mainly as transitions from one part of the service to another.
6. Communion (not found in all denominations and in others only once a month). It consists (except among Lutherans and Episcopalians) of pieces of white bread and tiny glasses of grape juice. These are placed on trays and passed from hand to hand among the congregation, who remain seated in the pews. Everybody always partakes.
7. Sermon. "There can be a service without communion, but not without a sermon!" a minister once told me. It is the high point of the service, and all the rest (except perhaps for communion when it is placed after the sermon) is more an introduction to it than anything else.
8. Invitation (not in all denominations). The minister or leaders invites people who want to join the church to come forward and make a declaration to this effect.
9. Benediction. Always at the end, recited by the leader of the service for the congregation. This, too, is an improvised prayer. Like the improvised invocation, the formula may be very stereotyped and repetitive, depending on the personality of the minister.
People move out after the complete singing of a last hymn, and as they do, they pass in front of the pastor, who shakes everyone's hand with a word of greeting. The whole affair normally lasts exactly an hour.
These are the main elements of a Protestant Sunday morning service, and many are self-explanatory. Yet the unity of purpose might be lost if one were to look at each of them separately as the embodiment of certain theological choices. It could be noted that no church in Appleton used both a prayer of confession and an invitation, one of the rare regularities in the liturgical life. This could be related to two different views of salvation. On the one side were those (mainly moderates) who believed that salvation was a continuous process throughout life, with God continually forgiving sins. On the other side were those (mainly Fundamentalists) who maintained that salvation is a on ce-and-for-all event, that if it is real, there cannot be lapses. Thus Fundamentalists often added to the invitation to come forward and join the church: "and repent of your sins." In Pentecostal churches this is considered to be life's greatest moment. Once one has been saved, there is no further need for prayers of confession, and indeed these churches do not use them.
The necessity of offerings, or a collection of money, is not disputed by either party. Cynical observers might argue that its universality is symbolic of the essentially financial character of all churches. The amount of money spent by the congregations on their "religious" activities is indeed staggering: Protestants in Appleton spent at least half a million dollars a year, and sometimes more when building drives were under way. This averages about three hundred dollars per family, although not everybody contributed. On the other hand, to interpret this ritual moment in the service as the necessary "offerings one has to make to further God's work on earth" is just as valid, and certainly closer to the perception of the faithful. Without denying the importance of the economic aspect, it must be noted that the collection is not simply a practical necessity, for large gifts are more often made in the privacy of the donor's or the pastor's office. Indeed, from a practical point of view , it might be easier to make one's contribution once a year. But a service must include offerings.
The importance of the sermon is well documented in: the literature on Protestantism, particularly American Protestantism. It is, of course, not by chance that a pastor is popularly referred to as a preacher. The remark about the necessity of a sermon to make a service complete was made to me by the Presbyterian minister, which shows that this point of view is shared by people of all allegiances. On that occasion he added somewhat cynically that "they all sleep through it." On another occasion, more seriously, he defined the role of the pastor as basically that of an organizer, a leader, and a preac;her. According to him, one is not a pastor because of a special sacrament that sets its receiver apart as a different sort of human being, but because of certain capabilities given to an individual at birth, particularly the ability to speak inspiringly, much as one might be born with the talent to be a successful manager or a great painter. To many fundamentalists, even this would be a definition that sets the minister overly apart; they would argue that anybody can preach if he is "inspired by the Spirit" to do so. In these churches, "testimonies" from members of the congregation or visitors are frequent and particularly appreciated as religious experiences.
The central place of the sermon is the most striking symbol of the whole orientation of Protestantism. A sermon is addressed to individuals, and it calls for individual action, but only in the realm of morals. A sermon is normally an interpretation of the sacred myths, emphasizing their relevance to modern situations. Yet the directives that a pastor may abstract from his analysis of a passage in the Bible must not be for specific actions in the social world. That would threaten the freedom of the audience as individuals. A pastor can indicate only general principles by which to orient one's action. Thus a Presbyterian minister may attack "those in our modern world who, like the Pharisees, believe themselves to be true guardians of the faith because of their outward morality and great gifts of money" without raising the ire of his congregation, which contains many people who exactly fit this description. An individual who does might think: "I know that God does not like Pharisees, but He knows that I am not one, that deep inside I am really very modest." But to preach actual desegregation, for example, may be unforgivable because it offers more than a moral interp retation in that it enjoins a specific action. A minister of the Presbyterian church was fired in the early I 960s, soon after he started preaching such "engaged" sermons. Nobody told me explicitly that he was fired because of his preaching. Considering the general importance of preaching in this church to the present day, the parting of the ways between the minister and his congregation must certainly be related to it.
The other important character of the sermon as ritual is the demand of passivity it makes on the audience. I have emphasized that the same passivity is implied in the reading of a religious magazine. A sermon demands even more passivity, for while one must decide at each moment to go on reading a text, one has little choice but to sit through a sermon once the service has begun. One may or may not decide to make an effort to listen to the sermon, bu·r one will have heard it.
One of the things that struck me most the first few times I attended services in Protestant churches was the uniformity of the congregation in matters of dress. In the winter (the summer heat is considered by many a good excuse for less formality) one would not find a man without a suit and tie (sports jackets are considered acceptable by some people, but the effect must never be sloppy), a woman without an elaborate dress or pantsuit and a hat. Even young children were dressed up. If they didn't want to wear a suit, they would be asked by their parents not to come to church at all for fear of embarrassment. Only once did I see members of the Presbyterian church in less than formal clothing. The occasion was the youth service I referred to earlier when a group of teenagers from the church symbolized their existence as a distinct subcommunity within the church. They chose the hymns, the musical instruments, and their (very informal, but still conforming within the mode they had chosen) dress-for the youth service, no youth came dressed formally.
The same formalism and striving for perfection of appearance can be recognized in the stark, abstract layout of the church building itself and also in the actual performance of the ritual. The impression, except in Pentecostal churches, is always that of a highly organized activity, perfectly timed, with almost no hesitation or blank moments. Each step is dearly indicated on the bulletin, announced by the pastor, and started by a trained member of the audience (the minister's wife or the ushers). Personal, individual rituals are totally ruled out, both by the absence of any slack moment in the service and by the impossibility of detaching oneself completely from the minister's doings.
All this is especially striking in contrast to a Catholic Mass, particularly before its recent transformations. In the Mass, the priest is the only person who has to be precise and exact, and the audience's participation in what he does is minimal. This gives a great amount of leeway for private acts of devotion, much more than can be found in any Protestant service. There, only group rituals are performed, all of which involve the whole audience as a body.
The Protestant Service begins only when everybody is in the church-there are very few, if any, late arrivals. Then the different choirs enter in procession, all dressed alike in long robes, while the whole congregation stands and sings a hymn. From then on, the only movements are sitting, standing, and the reciting or singing of prayers or hymns. At all times, except when the ritual of incorporation into the congregation is performed, the congregation is one body, acting in perfect unison. All this is done on signals from the pastor, whose role, apart from that of preacher, is mainly one of master of ceremonies and director. He is indeed the person who has planned the service, and he is responsible for its smooth progression. Some pastors included a minute of silent prayer in their services, but even this does not permit the individual to wander very far in private communion with God. No pastor would ever have to preach the sermons I have heard twice in Catholic churches, in France and in Chicago-sermons against old women entering the church during Mass and going about their private devotions to St. Theresa or St. Anthony without acknowledging that a Mass was going on. Yet some Catholic priests used to advise people to recite the rosary during Mass, something that is not a collective activity nor one that is directly related to the religious performance in progress. In fact, to say the rosary is but a mental version of the same activity for which the old women were criticized. All this would be unthinkable in Protestant churches.
In short, what is symbolized in Protestant ritualism is unanimity, one-mindedness, overarching community in which the participating individuals fully divest themselves of the qualities, symbolic and otherwise, that make them individuals. This is expressed most starkly in the ritual of communion. Not only is it considered to be nothing more than a sign of the togetherness of the congregation, it is also something that the congregation does together, as a whole: everybody partakes. Conversely, in Catholic theology, the reality of the Church as a community is never in doubt. What may be in doubt is the state of the individual, i.e., he may be in a state of sin. The onus is thus ritually put on him. He must actively decide to partake. And, until recently, many people did not partake, thereby affirming their individuality within the service itself.
Louis Dumont has shown how in the extremely hierarchical Indian culture, individualism, which is totally denied in the social structure, is permitted to flourish in religious rituals and doctrine and in the lives of saints; that is, of persons outside the social structure. In America, the reverse.happens. In a culture that emphasizes individualism, the religious rituals stress group activity. During the church service, the participants cease to be individuals. They form a disciplined society that effectively denies any individual freedom. This might be surprising to people who expect a direct relationship between the traditional interpretations of Protestantism and its rituals. In my preliminary analysis of religious ideas in Appleton, I indeed stressed the individualism to be found at their core. It would thus seem that the surrender of individualism during Protestant rituals (to generalize and encompass both public rituals such as the service, and private ones such as the reading of inspirational literature) does not depend on religious doctrine per se but on broader cultural principles.
In India, the caste system is derived from a religious definition of the world based on order and hierarchy. But it is in religion, and only in religion, that one can escape that very social order, either through renunciation of the world, and particularly of one's social place in it, or through participation in certain sects or bhakti move ments that insist on a direct relationship between the God and the individual during the ritual. 5 In fact, these rituals are organized along caste lines, and the sects soon become new castes as they get institutionalized. These types of reversal and apparent paradoxes have been well documented in the mythology and religion of numerous cultures. Levi-Strauss has argued that this may be a general process and that, in any event, one must not expect a direct relationship between a myth, the social structure of the mythical society in which its hero moves, and the actual structure of the society in which the myth is told. The contradictions are not absolute. They derive from the attempts made by native philosophers and theologians to deal with irreducible aspects of the human experience denied in certain ways by the culture. Thus, because the social ideas and the most abstract religious ideas of Indian culture, and not simply of Hinduism, deny the very reality of the individual, it became necessary to somehow deal with individualism-the fact that human beings, being distinct from each other, do not always fit their social definition as well as the social doctrine they may believe in would have them do.
In Appleton, it is evident that the Protestant service is but a more formal, more rigid, and more consciously acted out expression of the desire for uniformity among small groups that I analyzed at length in Chapter 4. Even such an apparently unimportant rite as the welcoming couple of the Sunday service in moderate Protestant churches expresses the same structural principle. A welcome implies two things: something to be welcomed into, and somebody with a desire to get into that thing; it implies a social unit and people outside of it. It implies both integration and segregation, even though most people would see it only as a means of integrating newcomers, of proving that the congregation is friendly, that is, well integrated and universally integrating.
Like social life in general, religion in Appleton is thus both individualistic and the pretext for the creation of communities and, perhaps, the expression of the inescapable fact that men are not island s unto themselves. Protestantism is individualistic in its definition of its domain, the relation of man to a certain transcendence; it is social-minded in its practices and rituals. It is thus another actualization, obviously more formal and consciously performed, of the same cultural structure that generated the interpretative behavior of John's group. In both cases the legitimacy of the group is based on an individual movement by each member; in both cases the result of an integration based on such principles is similar segregative tendencies, a similar stress on one-mindedness during the meetings of the group, and the same fragility.
There is a very real difference, of course, between a party and a church service, a difference that goes beyond the necessity of differentiating group from group. In the meetings of the smaller groups, I could refer in my analysis only to a certain atmosphere, to certain modes of behavior. I could not refer to specific ritual acts such as communion as symbolic of the unity of the congregation. I was able to show only that the small group was a unit of some sort even in the absence of formal rituals. I could have argued that the passing around of a ''.joint" expressed the same underlying idea as the passing around of trays with crumbs of bread and small glasses of grape juice in church; indeed, getting drunk or high in a group is but the use of an artificial means of achieving the "good" feeling that is supposed to be characteristic of a "true" community. I believe this is overinterpretation. Similarly, and however tempting it may be, such an habitual act in John's group as having coffee in a public place after a party always held in a private home cannot really be interpreted as a ritual of "reintegration" into the wider world after a period of symbolic separation and limited communion. It may have such a function, yet the absence of any specific ritual structure obliges the analyst to say that it belongs to a different sort of social reality from the service. For the people who attend them, parties are occasions when one has some fun. Passing around a joint is considered to depend solely on the practical necessity of holding one's breath for some time after having taken a puff, and not wasting an expensive commodity by letting it burn into the air. Similarly, coffee is considered to have sobering virtues and nothing else.
In contrast, welcoming couples and communion are considered by churchgoing people to be primarily symbolic acts expressing a sometimes elusive feeling of community. For while small groups can often be shown to be actually experiencing onemindedness, really to practice mutual help or in general to live the life prescribed by the cultural definitions, most churches, particularly the larger ones, such as all the moderate ones in Appleton, are formed of nothing more than an uneasy alliance of many subgroups and cliques, plus a few unattached persons. This makes their definition as "communities" very artificial, even from the point of view of the natives. Small fundamentalist churches often come close to an actual incarnation of the ideal: there it is the whole congregation that surrounds the newcomer on his first visit, know ledge of each other's lives goes beyond gossip, and mutual help beyond bake sales.
In larger churches, people know that they are divided and are forever planning activities to "further the sense of community among us"to little avail, of course. Yet the ideal remains, and the people continue to perform the ritual acts that they believe to be effective means to their ends. As an anthropologist, I must say that these acts, like all ritual acts, are not effective in themselves, or only insofar as people believe in their effectiveness. Yet there is a definite difference between acts that refer to ends different from their direct practicality-for example, communion in Protestantism has nothing to do with nourishment-and acts that refer directly to their practical ends-like sharing a joint. The distinction is often not absolute, but it is real enough for me to maintain that the former acts are basically ritual in character, while the latter are simply, and more generally, cultural; that is, typical of a certain society and its way of doing things.
At a more general level, both sets of acts can be considered to be "texts" produced by the culture, and, as such, it is not surprising that they should be structured in similar ways. Yet they have to be distinguished, for one pertains to an existential state of the members of the society and the other to a symbolization of this existential state. This can be restated in Victor Turner's terms: John and his f riends were a "communitas"; most churches were "communities."' The former found ritual irrelevant; the latter could not escape it, in spite of their theological commitment to nonritualism.
This distinction is quite important in the context of American culture because it points to a little-noted structural characteristic: an inverse relationship between ritualism and the existential realization of ideals. Americans, it is well known, claim to be impatient with any type of ritual performance, and they will easily discount foreign customs as empty ritualism. Yet American life has a great deal of ritualism-in church activities, of course, but even more in everything that touches the political system, as I will show in chapter 6. Except for critics, this is not considered to be empty ritualism but a meaningful symbolization of an actual state of affairs. It is easy enough, of course, to show that affairs are not in the prescribed state, and also that the more disunity exists in a group whose unity is postulated, the more exactingly precise the rituals become. The atmosphere surrounding the flag as a symbol 9f the whole nation is the perfect case in point.
The unstressed character of ritual on those occasions which allow for the more complete existential actualization of the structure is a direct corollary of that very structure. Ritual in its very nature is a mode of behavior that reifies a certain ideology outside the involvemerit of individuals. Parliamentary procedures, for example, must be followed to the letter by governing boards for their decisions to be legal. The members of the board have no freedom to improvise, a requirement that directly contradicts individualism.
And yet it is not possible for the society as a whole to escape a measure of ritualism. While the smallest communities are built on the cultural model, the larger ones cannot be. They could not segregate effectively, and their integration was always doubtful. And yet on all tbe occasions when they had to be symbolized, and insofar as they were not experiential entities, ritual had to be used, a ritual structured obviously by the same principles as those which structure social situations that would be recognized as real communities.
There is a huge Catholic church in Appleton, with a large membership, many wealthy and powerful parishioners, and a parochial school that, though in financial difficulties, was responsible for the education of a majority of the Catholic youth in the town. It is thus an important social force, even though most members of the church are recent immigrants to the United States from non-Anglo-Saxon parts of Europe-Ireland, Italy, and Poland, particularly. It is not possible to discard the experience of these people with the easy affirmation that their way of being is a mere survival bound to be melted into the main Protestant stream of American culture. This denies the fact that an identification with Catholicism remains widespread in America beyond the first generations after immigration, and that Catholicism has remained a variation on Christianity that opposes itself to all Protestant churches rather than to some of them.
This is true even though the recent changes that have occurred in the Catholic Church have made Catholicism appear outwardly to have become more Protestant than it was. For example, the new Catholic church building in Appleton looks very much like the Protestant buildings: it has the same abstract and stark atmosphere, with few of the nooks and corners and small side altars that permit private devotions. But the very way these changes were implemented, through decrees and decisions taken by the hierarchy and imposed on sometimes unwilling congregations, is but one example of the fact that the very structure of the religion remains what it has always been.
I am not going to analyze Catholicism in detail; I am just going to consider some of the basic traits that differentiate it most from American Protestantism to see how these are being interpreted by the faithful in their Protestant environment. For however different Catholicism may be, it is made to fit within the social organization of the town. How?
The universalistic appeal of Protestantism, the fact that it is open to "everybody," regardless of social position, race, color, or former "creed," is, in fact, severely limited in practice: the actual congregations are generally restricted to one social position, race, or color-and, indeed, creed. In theory, Catholicism, too, is universalistic in its appeal, and its basis is individualistic. Yet in its European incarnation, Catholicism denies a person-by opposition to the individual as a category-the possibility of a choice. Choice is not a social reality in Europe; converts are a rare sight, and religious diversity, in the few places where it does occur, often leads to serious tensions. In the last century a limited possibility of religious choice has appeared as it has become socially possible to reject the Church. But, in fact, most of the people who make this choice have been baptized in the Catholic tradition, which is enough for the Church. In American Protestantism, even if many members of a church do end up as members of denominations very close to their parents' i a conscious choice must be made: individual freedom must mean personal freedom.
Sociologically, the Catholic Church is organized into social units defined by the wider culture and society and not by the active will of the persons involved. Thus there is one church per town, or per parish if the town is larger than a parish should be, and everybody who is born into that town, after being baptized, is a member of the parish and of the Church in general. The sacrament of baptism is something that cannot be eradicated by whatever actions the person concerned may do in his life; it marks the receiver as a Christian for all eternity, anywhere in the world-a special type of Christian, of course, a Catholic with all the duties and rights attached to this status. Obviously, such an interpretation of individualism is not at all congruent with the American version. Society stands first, and a person is not given much choice. He may conform or rebel, but he cannot create. In practice, in the modern world where sociological pressures force people out of their original social position, in space or rank, the doctrine often leads to a useless bureaucracy, as the following case exemplifies.
In a meeting of the Appleton Catholic church parish council, a man once rose and, pointing an accusing finger at the pastor, said: "This man refused to baptize my child! A little crying baby! What if it had died?" The pastor explained that the man worked and resided in another town and that the child had to be baptized in that town. The pastor in bureaucratic fashion had decided that this man was a member of a certain social unit, that other town, by examination of certain criteria---work and residence. This disregarded the fact that the man did not define his social self in that way. Many Catholic priests do not take quite so seriously their role in the Church's bureaucracy. However, a Protestant minister wouldn't even have considered handling a request about baptism in such a way.
I will not go into the religious duties of a Catholic; they are too many, and their interpretation is too much tied with sociological \ ,,.... ideas irrelevant to American thought. I will deal at more length with one of the basic rights of a Catholic, a right that explains the peculiar character of the congregation of the Catholic church in Appleton by comparison with the Protestant churches. Membership in the Catholic Church is universal; one is not simply a member of a specific congregation. If one moves one's residence, one is entitled by right to membership in the local parish, and the congregation has no say. In fact, the phrase "membership in the local parish" is not appropriate; at most, one can be on the "mailing list" after one has registered with the parish administration. The process is bureaucratic, and only the pastor needs to know a new parishioner has been added to the congregation, and he may often not learn of it for a long time. Indeed, one of the most typical symbols of American Protestantism, the "welcoming couple," is not present in the Catholic Church, and I went for weeks to Mass without anybody coming to ask me who I was.
In Catholic thought, both the Church as a whole and the local congregation are direct reflections of a sociological reality and exist not as voluntary associations of individuals but as a unit that includes all the baptized men and women born into an area that encompasses all the individuals who may live in it. As such, it does not demand any specific showing of one-minded unity inside the congregation, since the members have no say as to their existence as a unit. The unity of the society is considered to come from a higher order: divine or political. The result of this absence of individually grounded unity has led to a much greater diversity in the social constituency of the Catholic church than found in any of the other churches in Appleton, excepting perhaps the Lutherans. The richest and most powerful families in Appleton, the owners and managers of the larger industries that were the industrial basis of the town, were Catholics, and so were many of the poorest families. The bulk of the congregation was, of course, middle income, since the social characteristics of Catholics in Appleton are very close to those of the population at large. Symbolically, this is expressed by a greater diversity in the outward appearance of the congregation. Even at the most formal of the Masses, the eleven o'clock Mass on Sunday morning, outdoor jackets, open shirts, corduroy pants, or even jeans were possible ways of dressing and could be found in the congregation. Many might disapprove of this, but they could not reject the culprit the way a Protestant congregation could.
The Mass itself, even in its post-Vatican II form, is a dramatic
performance staged by a priest for an audience. The priest is still
set apart, he is not merely a "leader." One can still find some faithful
reciting the rosary, a private and individualistic form of prayer,
during the Mass. Even though there is much less time nowadays for
private prayers than there used to be during Mass, the amount of
time left for such prayers is still disproportionate to that found in
Protestant services. The latter are, in fact, also dramatic performances,
but in them the split between actor and audience has been
abolished: the play is not performed for the congregation but by it. Tillich said that in Protestantism there are no priests, but neither is there a laity, for participation is total. Perhaps we should thus turn Tillich's formula around and say that in Protestantism there. are no laymen, only priests.
I am not going to get into any more details about each of these
social and ritual characteristics of the Catholic church in Appleton,
since the contrasts to what I said about the characteristics of Protestant
churches are evident. Thus it is not surprising that what the
Catholic pastor first tried to impress upon me was how divided the
congregation was, how there was a constant battle between the "seven ethnic groups" that composed it. As the pastor explained to
me, only three are really important and account for most of the
power struggles inside the congregation: the Irish, the Polish, and
the Italians, in the historical order of their establishment in Appleton
from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the
twentieth. The four others play minor roles and are not so readily
identifiable; the pastor had to count on his fingers. They are "the
Croatians, the Slavs, the Germans, and the French-Canadians."
Among the subgroups that divided the church, one could probably
add all those who rejected the relevance of an ethnic identification,
a growing group as individual enculturation becomes widespread
among Catholics.
In the consciousness of many people, both in and outside the ethnic groups, the ethnic groups represent an actual force, organic wholes with interests of their own that one expects them to defend (in the same way farmers or blue-collar workers are supposed to do). The three main groups, particularly, possess a certain amount of cohesion expressed by the activity of national organizations such as the Polish National Alliance and the maintenance of strong kinship and business links between Appleton and the ethnic colonies of Chicago and Detroit. Self-identification is probably strongest among the Polish, among whom one can find continued resistance to the total encroachment of the English language: confessions were still being heard in Polish in Appleton two or three times a year (but not in Italian). The Italians, insofar as there are still in their ranks a high proportion of actual immigrants born in the "old country," possess a certain empirical reality, though the process of enculturation is particularly fast for them. The Irish are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the town population, except in relation to other ethnic groups inside the Catholic church.
Yet to talk of ethnic groups implies certain traits from a sociological point of view that these groups, if they had them to begin with, are losing very fast, and indeed for the most part have already lost. The term implies mainly a social unit that would transcend the individuals inside the groups; it implies that all persons who are born of an Italian father and mother will identify themselves as Italian, will want to marry inside the group if at all possible, and will participate in specifically Italian activities, culturally and politically.
In fact there is only a statistical tendency for people to marry inside their original ethnic group, which can easily be explained if one considers that very often a young boy or girl will meet only other boys or girls of the same nationality, not because of choice but because of residence patterns in large cities. When choice is possible, exogamy is frequent, and, in Appleton at least, couples in which both man and woman belong to the same group are becoming rare. National ethnic movements appeal only to a minority of all those who could justify membership in them. Finally, at the level of consciousness of an ethnic identification, no objective criteria can be found-in Appleton, at least; a man with only one grandfather from Italy may decide that for certain occasions he is Italian, while another will never claim membership, although he may have more right to the title.
All this points to the transformation of these once social ethnic groups-nationality in Europe is something from which one cannot escape-into basically voluntary associations at the same level of social organization as the Protestant churches. Many of these, formerly, or still today, had or have an ethnic flavor. Lutheranism is associated with Germans, Episcopalianism with English, Presbyterianism with Scots. There are many Dutch Reformed churches in parts of the Midwest. And so on. As time passed, native American religious sects were created, from Unitarianism to Adventism, and the ethnic identification of old churches subsided. But while it lasted-while it lasts, as ethnic identification is still very strong in many areas of American society-it did not create a social structural problem. The melting pot really worked, not by transforming all immigrants into archetypal Americans but by making them fit into the social structure whether they had changed their cultural ways personally or not.
The Catholic congregation in Appleton differed both from what it would have been in a European parish and from the Protestant congregations in Appleton. The latter are each formed of one voluntary association defined as being a social unit, though it often may not be so. The former is formed of several voluntary associations defined in the same way as the others and with the same social limits (the Italians are a unit only for ritual and mythological purposes; social differences among them are great and are the source for many subgroups and cliques). Thus the Catholic church in Appleton belongs to a different level of social organization than the Protestant churches, a difference that could be shown in the accompanying diagram.
Catholic church •Y " " " '\ *Irish *Italians *Polish ... • RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION 127 / . *Protestant churchii,,- /J\,, Presbyterian Methodist Baptisji.t:" ..
An asterisk indicates that the unit does not exist specifically as a religious unit in Appleton; inside the Catholic church the subunits are ethnic, and the church is supposed to include all the groups that may be found inside it. The Protestant churches level exists as the "town," but each church is supposed to be one independent unit.
In terms of enculturation, it is interesting that the Catholic church has not systematically broken down into its constituent parts and adopted a more Protestant or voluntary structure. Some ethnically typified parishes can be found in other parts of Amet'iq, and many groups are formed to worship in alternate ways, but ill this remains very limited and not, I believe, the beginning of a trend. It is not simply that Catholics are particularly conservative or disciplined. They are perfectly prepared to reject the orders of the Roman hierarchy when they dislike them (the papal directives against artificial means of birth control and their dismissal by most of the faithful and many priests is a good example). There must be structural mechanisms, and I believe that these lie precisely in the definition of the congregation as an involuntary association. In Europe this mechanism allowed the members of intractably hostile clans in a small village to worship in the same church, to make no attempt whatsoever at pretending to unanimity, and still to define themselves as belonging to the same social unit (I dare not say "community," since the unit may well hold together through hate rather than through love).
Transported to America, this structure allowed voluntary associations to be built along specifically American social-structural rules within the church itself without threatening its existence. Even the Church's ritual formalisms can come to be interpreted as appropriate for the abstract level of community that is the Catholic Church's and to parallel the formalism of the rituals that express the unity of the town as a democratic unit. And thus, with little change in practice, the cultural reality of Catholicism will have changed and come to fit within America.