Everything in Common: Vitality in Two Christian Intentional Communities.

Transcription

1 Book Prospectus Everything in Common: Vitality in Two Christian Intentional Communities. Mark Killian, Ph.D. General Description This book is about vitality in Philadelphia and Berea (pseudonyms), two Christian Intentional Communities (CICs) whose participants live in close proximity with one another to achieve religious values. Pulling from Anthony Gidden s (1986) theory of structuration, I argue that the vitality of both communities cannot be reduced to deterministic structural, individual, or organizational causes, as previous literature has highlighted. Rather, vitality in these communities is affected by all of these causes in relationship to one another. In other words, it s not that each cause matters (e.g., social structures matters, organizational behaviors matter, individual religious choices matter), but that these causes matter to each other (e.g., social structures matter to individual choices, individual choices matter to organizational behaviors, and social structures matter to organizational choices, etc.). To make this argument I develop the idea of the vitality nexus the interconnected relationship between the various causes of religious vitality. Everything in Common is based off of ethnographic fieldwork in Philadelphia and Berea from September 2011 to September CICs are exemplary sites for vitality research because (1) they tend to develop in waves (indicating structural changes and/or changes in individual tastes) and (2) they dissolve quickly (indicating organizational instability). Accordingly, in 2010 an analysis of the Fellowship of Intentional Communities online directory indicated a 70 percent increase in the number of CICs established between 2005 and 2009 compared to CICs established between 2000 and Further, there was a 291 percent increase in the number of CICs in-formation between 2005 and 2009 compared to CICs in-formation between 2000 and A similar analysis in 2015 revealed that only 31 percent of 1

2 CICs established between 2005 and 2009 were functioning in In other words, CICs tend to develop fast and die young; consequently, CICs that survive their initial establishment make exemplary sites for vitality research. I began my fieldwork in Philadelphia and Berea immediately following events that threatened the communities existences, observing raw insights into their vitality. Scholarly Contributions This book makes two distinct scholarly contributions. First, besides Markofski (2015) tangential discussion of CICs in his discussion of New Monasticism (see discussion of Markofski s work in the Competing Books section), the last substantial ethnographic research on CICs was Zablocki s work published in Thus, my research provides a much needed update and refinement to this body of knowledge. Second, previous research has given tacit attention to how various explanations of religious vitality interact, often giving primacy to their claim while relegating other claims as secondary causes of vitality. This research provides a thick description of religious vitality, explicitly seeking the nuances between the various explanations under the much larger umbrella of structuration. Target Audience Everything In Common will appeal to two different readerships. First, this book will appeal to scholarly readers who are interested in a broad understanding of religious vitality, including topics such as religious demography, religious legitimacy, religious ecology, religious economies, charisma, organizational strictness, congregational cultures, and lived religion. Second, as opposed to being theoretically deep, this book will be theoretically broad; consequently, limiting heavy theoretical jargon. As such this book will be accessible to popular audiences who are interested in understanding church growth, intentional communities, new monasticism, charismatic expressions of worship, and urban forms of religion. Everything In Common will be an excellent text for undergraduate, graduate, and 2

3 seminary courses in the sociology of religion, the anthropology of religion, American religion, and religious organizations. Publication The basis of this book served as my dissertation. Besides the University of Michigan Dissertation Database, no portions of the book have been previously published. Competing Books Everything In Common focuses on CICs in general; however, the book includes a discussion of New Monasticism, a communitarian form of evangelical practice. As such, Markofski s New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (2015, Oxford University Press) will serve as the book s primary competitor. Nonetheless, the contextual orientations of these competing monographs are very different. Markofski s uses Buordieuian field theory to show, in contrast to the theological individualism and socio-political conservativism of traditional American evangelicalism, neo-monastics take a holistic communitarian approach to theological, social, and political issues. In this sense, neo-monastics emphasize communal expressions of faith (e.g., living together in the same residence) and collective social action (e.g., the support of progressive taxation to resolve economic inequalities). Due to their holistic communitarian approach, neo-monastics challenges the political and theological hegemony of American evangelism by leaning to the political left and emphasizing communitarian aspects of theology. Thus, Markofski s book answers the question, How are neo-monastics transforming evangelicalism; whereas, my book answers the questions, Why are New Monastic communities experiencing vitality on the contemporary religious landscape? Additionally, there are several manifestos regarding New Monastic intentional communities. Rutba House s School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism (2005, Cascade Books) explicates the twelve principles that define the New Monastic Movement. Wilson-Hartgrove s New Monasticism: What 3

4 It Has to Say to Today s Church (2008, Brazos Press) provides anecdotes of New Monastic life as well as practical applications of New Monasticism for congregational development. Outside of New Monasticism, Janzen s The Intentional Christian Community Handbook (2013, Paraclete Press) serves as a guidebook for groups that are interested in developing a CIC. Much of this literature is connected to the growing field of research focused on the Emerging Church Movement (ECM). Although, Everything In Common does not directly address this discussion, it does make reference to it. Three academic books have dominated ECM research. First is James Bielo s, Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (2011, New York University Press). Bielo provides an anthropological context for religious practices and preferences of individuals who identify with the emerging church. The second is Josh Packard s, The Emerging Church: Religion at the Margins (2012, First Forum Press). Packard illuminates the organizational processes of churches that have adopted emerging evangelical practices, arguing that anti-institutional organizations can survive if they capitalize on religious market segments that other churches cannot capture due to structural barriers. Third is Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel s, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (2014, Oxford University Press), which addresses the origins, public understanding, practice, as well as the significance of the ECM. Marti and Ganiel argue that the ECM is one of the most important reframings of religion within Western Christianity over the last two decades. In comparison to the books on the EMC, Everything In Common connects more directly to the extensive scholarship on religious vitality, including, but not limited to, the following: Ammerman, Nancy Congregation and Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, Penny E Congregations in Conflict. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Chaves, Mark Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 4

5 Day, Katie Faith on the Avenue: Religion on a City Street. New York: Oxford University Press. Eiesland, Nancy L A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hatch, Nathan The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale Press. Hoge, Dean R. and David A. Roozen, eds Understanding Church Growth and Decline: New York: The Pilgrim Press. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kelley, Dean Why Conservative Churches are Growing. 2d ed. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row. McRoberts, Omar Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roof, Wade Clark Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Smith, Christian, Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Wuthnow, Robert After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Everything In Common distinguishes itself from these works by synthesizing the claims made by these researchers into one volume. In essence, the book that I have written is a meta-analysis of the vitality literature as reflected in two CICs. General Outline of the book Everything In Common is organized into eight chapters. The six main chapters contain my ethnographic and theoretical analyses of vitality in Philadelphia and Berea. The conclusion summarizes my argument and introduces the vitality nexus. Further, unlike other ethnographies in the sociology of religion I would like to include response letters from Philadelphia and Berea (if the communities are agreeable). Such letters would provide authentic assessments of my research process and findings. Besides a 3000-word limit and a general understanding of what the letter should address, I will not censor their responses. 5

6 Both communities have received early manuscripts of this work and have been asked to think about a response letter, but neither have provided one yet. These letters will provide readers with a broader understanding of Philadelphia and Berea. Specific Outline of the Book Table of Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1: An Introduction to Christian Intentional Communities I begin by introducing Philadelphia and Berea through two extended ethnographic vignettes. Then, I weave together central themes found in these vignettes, relating these themes to the increasing number of CICs being established on the American religious landscape. Next, I provide a brief history of CICs in American history, highlighting their volatility. I return to Philadelphia and Berea, noting how they survived volatile situations and, as such, represent excellent case studies for understanding religious vitality. Chapter 2: Religious Vitality: Understanding the Argument I begin this chapter by setting up the religious vitality debate as a response to the secularization theses of the late twentieth century. I note how researchers have contributed varied, yet theoretically meaningful perspectives, explicitly or implicitly framing their claim as this-and-that matters. For example, culture matters (Becker 1999; Chaves 2004), strictness matters (Kelley 1972), ecology matters (Ammerman 1997; Eiesland 2000; McRoberts 2005), etc. Although these researchers have not necessarily made their claims exclusive, they often ascribe deterministic primacy to their claim, relegating other claims as secondary causes of religious organizational vitality. Given this framing, I address this literature from three levels of analysis: structural, organizational, and individual explanations for religious vitality. Explanations from a structural level of analysis include: (1) the 6

7 demographic transition perspective, (2) the power elite perspective, and (3) the religious economies model. Explanations from an organizational perspective include: (1) cultural perspectives (interorganizational cultures, organizational ideology, and organizational identity), (2) the religious ecology model, (3) the strictness thesis, and (4) charismatic leadership. Lived religion serves as the explanation for religious vitality from an individual level of analysis. I, then, discuss how research concerning the explicit interaction of these explanations is missing from the literature, speculating that this void might be due to the fact that the field has yet to apply a theoretical apparatus that allows for such an analysis. However, I claim that by applying Gidden s theory of structuration (1986), the field can understand how social structures, organizations, and individuals simultaneously interact to produce social behaviors. In essence I argue religious vitality should not be viewed as a collection of explanations that can be referenced in certain contexts to explain religious vitality. For example, my church is growing because we moved to the growing exurbs (the religious ecology model), or my church is growing because we provide space for individuals to practice religious reflexivity (e.g., the lived religion perspective). Rather, religious vitality should be viewed as a nexus of these explanations interlinked and irreducible to one another, such that if we want to understand one explanation (religious ecology) we must understand how individuals conceptualize faith (lived religion). In other words, I stake my claim in this debate not by stating, such-and-such matters, but that such-and-such matters to this-and-that, and vice versa. Then, I note that this argument is ambitious and involves a broad understanding of religious vitality explanations. Without excusing the broad nature of my claim, I argue that limiting the scope of my research to two CICs provides a thick description of vitality, revealing in detail the interactions of vitality explanations. Chapter 3: A Deeper Look at Philadelphia and Berea 7

8 I begin this chapter by explaining how I gained access to Philadelphia and Berea. Next, I discuss my research methodology in four sections. The first section explains my use of multi-sited ethnography, illustrating my level of participation in both communities through ethnographic vignettes. In the second section I provide a context for including my children in the research. The third section details the forty interviews I conducted with members from Philadelphia and Berea (20 interviews for both communities). In the last section I provide an ecological description of Emeryville and West Sharpsburg, the neighborhoods in which Philadelphia and Berea reside respectively. This is followed by a transition into brief histories of Philadelphia and Berea, highlighting characteristics that are reflected in their pseudonyms. Chapter 4: Religious Alienation in Berea and Philadelphia: Reflections of the American Religious Landscape. I begin this chapter by reviewing research on religious shifts between the Baby Boomer and younger generations (Wuthnow 2007) as well as shifts reflected in the emerging church movement (Bielo 2012, Marti and Ganiel 2014). Then, I discuss how Philadelphians and Bereans reflect these shifts, reframing their responses under the theme of alienation. I provide vivid detail of the ways in which Philadelphians and Bereans have experienced societal alienation, but particularly focus on participants experiences that have alienated them from religious institutions. Next, I illustrate how Philadelphians and Bereans have responded with autonomy to these shifts by engaging in the religious economy through the creation of their own organizations. Referring back to Gidden s theory of structuration (1986), I conclude this chapter by noting how Philadelphia and Berea are products of individual responses to social structures, but simultaneously reinforce these social structures by establishing institutions that mimic the very institutions from which they were originally alienated. Chapter 5: Individual Responses: Why would anyone want to join Philadelphia or Berea? 8

9 I start this chapter with two excerpts from my interviews, one from a twenty-something Philadelphian male and another from a twenty-something Berean female. As echoed by other members of the communities, these interviewees state that love is their primary reason for joining. Then, I illustrate the many similarities in joining narratives between Philadelphians and Bereans, relating these stories to the literature surrounding lived religion (Ammerman 2013). In short, lived religion is the combination of individuals religious subjectivities and the manner in which these subjectivities are employed in daily routines. As is the case with Philadelphia and Berea, individuals who engage in conversations about their religious subjectivities coalesce to form spiritual tribes (Ammerman 2013). However, pulling from literature on charisma, I show how consensus is built within these tribes. Using several vignettes and interview references, I describe how charisma is legitimized in Philadelphia and Berea through individuals subjectivities, while simultaneously tethering those subjectivities to objective conventions established by charismatic authority. I conclude this chapter by reasserting what previous literature has already provided there is an interrelationship between religious agency and charisma, such that as religious subjectivities deinstitutionalize, charismatic figures become all the more important. Chapter 6: Culture, Identity, and Strictness in Philadelphia I open this chapter with a vignette from a worship service in Philadelphia. This vignette illustrates the relationship between Philadelphian cultural ideology, practice, and identity. Connecting to literature on religious subcultures, I note how the community solicits commitment from its participants by creating a cultural in-group that stands in contrast to unnamed and vague cultural outgroups. I, then, transition the discussion from inter-organizational culture to cultural boundaries, highlighting the strict social controls that Philadelphia employs to govern its participants. I provide a detailed description of the Philadelphian common purse, a community policy in which Philadelphians are to surrender all worldly possessions and income to the community, as well as policies surrounding sexual prohibitions. I relate these policies 9

10 to Kanter s (1972) work on commitment mechanisms, arguing that strictness is an organizational strategy of social control that, in accordance with recent research (Iannaccone 1994; Raynold 2014), has the unintended consequences of procuring members commitments. I conclude this chapter by demonstrating how Philadelphia s strictness is a reflection of its organizational culture but simultaneously defines the culture from which it originated. Chapter 7: Culture, Identity, and Ecology in Berea I start this chapter with a vignette from a Berean worship service, exposing the contrasts between Philadelphia s strictness and Berea s leniency. Like the previous chapter I note how this vignette illustrates the cultural ideology, practice, and identity of Berea. What follows is the positing of this question: Despite being similar types of organizations in similar types of places, why does Berea have an inter-organizational culture that is lenient while Philadelphia has an inter-organizational culture that is strict? I answer this question by showing how Berea s culture relates to the West Sharpsburg religious ecology. Through various vignettes, I argue that Berea thrives in a neighborhood with dying religious institutions because it has the cultural apparatus to create (not just extract) religious resources in its ecology. These cultural apparatuses are not present in Philadelphia; consequently, Philadelphia must rely on strictness for vitality. Berea, on the other hand, can afford to be lenient because the vitality in Berea is tied to the religious resources that the community generates from its ecology. I conclude this chapter by noting that the Berean inter-organizational culture gives meaning to religious resources, while simultaneously those religious resources provide the context for Berea s inter-organizational culture. Chapter 8: Conclusion I begin this chapter by summarizing the structural, organizational, and individual conditions that affect vitality in Philadelphia and Berea, noting the following interactions: (1) Philadelphia and Berea reflect 10

11 structural shifts on the American landscape, yet simultaneously facilitate these shifts as they operate with autonomy in the religious economy; (2) members of Philadelphia and Berea use agency to create social consensus through charismatic forces, while simultaneously surrendering their agency to those charismatic forces; (3) as evidenced in Philadelphia, strictness, in relationship with ideology, practice, and identity, constitutes an cultural milieu that produces vitality in the organization; (4) as evidenced in Berea, a cultural milieu defines and is defined by religious resources that produce vitality in the organization. Then, I illustrate these relationships through the image of a nexus, showing the interrelated set of conditions that drive vitality. I note that this research has explored only some of these relationships, encouraging future research to explore relationships unexplored in this study. I conclude the book with practical advice for religious organizations seeking to understand vitality in their congregations. Response Letters Appendices Bibliography Index Book Specifications Length: Preface: ~1,100 Chapter 1: ~5,500 Chapter 2: ~10,500 Chapter 3: ~10,000 Chapter 4: ~10,000 Chapter 5: ~10,000 Chapter 6: ~13,000 Chapter 7: ~13,000 Chapter 8: ~6,000 Response Letters: ~6,000 Total: ~79,100 Tables: ~3 Photo/Illustrations: ~30 11

12 Timetable for Manuscript Completion: A complete manuscript will be ready for external review no later than September 30, References Cited (does not include references from pages 3-5) Giddens, Anthony The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Iannaccone, Laurence R Why Strict Churches are Strong. American Journal of Sociology 99(5): Raynold, Prosper Sacrifice and Stigma: Managing Religious Risk. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(4): Suggested Reviewers Gerardo Marti, Davidson University, gemarti@davidson.edu, Brian Steensland, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Director of Social Science Research at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, bsteens@iupui.edu, Richard Cimino, University of Richmond, rcimino@richmond.edu, Michael Emerson, North Park University, moemerson@northpark.edu,