Mark Chaves. Congregations in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Mark Chaves’ Congregations in America is a valuable if uneven contribution to the sociological study of religion. The book uses national survey data to construct a meaningful and useful contextual background for congregational studies. The first two chapters provide the necessary theoretical and methodological grounding to make sense of the quantitative analysis that follows them. In departure from pseudo-theological approaches to congregational studies that seek to grant churches a metaphysical status, Chaves shows how congregations are shaped by earthly concerns, including, especially, financing. Chapters three and four, the longest and best in the book, provide an excellent, sustained critique of the romanticized view of religious congregations as activist centers of social service and political engagement. Rather, Chaves goes on to argue in the next chapter, the primary function of congregations—by definition (pp. 1-2)—is to bring people together into a carefully structured space for worship.
But Chaves is careful not to suggest that a congregation’s primary function is its only function, and he uses the remaining chapters to detail other uses of a congregation. Unfortunately, it is in these remaining chapters that Chaves’ brilliance begins to falter. For one, the pacing of the later chapters is much too brisk, particularly when compared to the previous expositions on service, politics, and worship; indeed, the short cautionary notes in chapter eight feel more like a rushed afterthought than a fully developed extension of Chaves’ thesis. Additionally, the argumentation in chapters six and seven, on art and culture respectively, is noticeably less elegant than the preceding chapters.
Chapter six begins with the intriguing argument that congregations are responsible for exposing more people to live art than other social institutions. In preparation for this ill-fated excursion, Chaves asks his readers to abandon the distinction between low and high culture (pp. 168), which, having long since suspected this artificial distinction was hegemonic rather than an intrinsic aspect of “art” itself, I am only too happy to oblige him. But having disturbed the frail structure of cultural elitism, Chaves goes on to disturb the delicate balance of mutually exclusive conceptions of art that he tries to uphold simultaneously: art as a socially constructed category and art as an ontological object. “I do not mean to imply,” Chaves acknowledges to the detriment of his own argument, “that all, or even most, of the artistic activity occurring inside congregations is experienced subjectively as art” (p. 178). What does this sentence mean? Does Chaves mean to say that there is a “normal” way to experience art, or is he trying to argue that art does not need to be experienced in any particular way to be art? The phrasing is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so, and thus it lacks the lucidity of earlier sections of the book. If I take him to mean that congregants do not usually think of their musical and visual culture as art, then this leads to a thornier question: If the congregants do not subjectively experience a performance or object as “art” in what way can it “be” art—or “be said to be” art? The short answer is that, in this critical blunder, Chaves reduces “art” to an arbitrary and meaningless signifier.
The penultimate chapter is too reliant on the frail postulations of the previous chapter, and in attempting to show the reflexive interrelationship of congregations and “culture,” Chaves continues to unravel his thesis. Already having reduced “art” to an empty signifier, Chaves ultimately does the same to the category “culture,” leaving the reader with the unfortunate feeling that Chaves has taken the last forty pages to say, approximately, nothing. Chaves’ mistake in these two chapters is looking for a unity of purpose in American congregations, especially when in the earlier chapters he seemed to be working to problematize these sorts of unexamined, romanticized claims about the universal functionality of congregations. Functionalist analysis, I would argue, will be much more successful in case studies where the ability to universalize one’s findings is checked by methodological limitations. After all, beyond the obvious categorization of congregations as places of worship, I have serious doubts as to whether it is possible or even desirable to generalize about the way congregations function in society.
Despite the critical hiccups in the concluding chapters, the practical uses of this book compensate for its shortcomings. It is easy to see how the rigorous scholarship and challenging insights contained in the first two-thirds of this book could be applied in researching a local congregation on the ground. Chaves’ pioneering collection of data and analysis will help locate the often insular congregations of the Ozarks within the broader context of national trends. In conclusion, though, I must stress that Chaves, at his most successful, does not so much give readers a new way to think about congregations as much as he challenges our assumptions: Chaves asks us to refine our ideas about what congregations are—or at least what we take them to be. In attempting to go farther than that, Chaves falls into the familiar trap of a scholar who is overeager to found a new paradigm with insufficient research.
