Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present. - Review - book review

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2000 by Ezra Kopelowitz

Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present, by DOUGLAS JACOBSEN and WILLIAM VANCE TROLLINGER, JR. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998, 492 pp. $28.00.

Re-Forming the center is an edited collection that is both an important theoretical and empirical contribution, and a must read for all sociologists of religion and their students. The book is the product of Douglas Jacobsen and William Trollinger's "Re-Forming the Center Project," in which an impressive group of historians, religion scholars, sociologists, and theologians have met in different forums to tackle the question of how to analyze American Protestantism in general, and the nature of the "religious center" in particular. Jacobsen and Trollinger's efforts included three national conferences, as well as several panel sessions at annual conferences of the American Academy of Religion, American Society of Church History, and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion, culminating in this book.

How are we to capture the complexity of the religious experience? This question takes us beyond the purely Protestant focus of the book to an increasingly cardinal issue for our discipline. Within the last decade, a good deal of discussion has been generated on this issue, especially in articles and books that tout "new paradigms" to deal with the increasingly porous or shifting nature of American religious life, particularly in urban and congregational religious experiences. All begin by noting the diversity of religious experience that exists on the ground, and the failure of our theoretical paradigms to grapple with that reality.

The stated aim of the "Re-Forming the Center" project is no less than a coordinated assault on one of the oldest and strongest theoretical paradigms that continues to straitjacket any attempt to grapple with social complexity -- the Weberian ideal-type (p. 7). American Protestants are usually divided into two ideal-type camps that stand in direct opposition to one another: modernists or liberals vs. fundamentalists or conservatives. Any individual, group, or historical event that does not fit with this "two party paradigm" is classified as an exception or regarded as a mix of the extremes. The religious center, the ideological moderate or other religious realities are simply defined out of existence -- as by-products of purer forms of religious life. Jacobsen and Trollinger argue that the problem is both analytical and normative. Analytically we fail to understand the lived religious experience, which for the most part does not exist as a neat binary reality. Normatively, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy , in which a heterogeneous world, described in binary terms, has the danger of taking that same form.

The question is how do we move beyond the language of ideal types, to a paradigm that is able to grapple with social complexity? In their introduction and conclusion, Jacobsen and Trollinger argue that the next step requires us to do away with master analytical narratives that impose a pre-determined analytical frame on any particular historical case. They want to see an academic study of religion that begins with the religious experience and then moves to the level of generalization. However, beyond a limited discussion that points the reader to the manner in which the essays in the book begin to move us beyond the two-party paradigm, the editors do not provide a more ambitious synthesis of their project's achievements. Given the vast amount of work that went into this project and the richness of the essays in the book, a more aggressive synthesizing attempt at moving us beyond the two-party paradigm is sorely missed. This thick, 492-page book provides many pieces of the puzzle, but the editors only begin t o put them together. Included among the puzzle pieces are theory-oriented articles (David Harrell, N.J. Demerath, Fred Kniss, and Martin Marty), an article that tests theory through survey research (David Sikkink), an article that provides a comparative frame (N. J. Demerath), two articles on Protestant Theology (Mark Ellingsen and Gerald Sheppard), and sixteen articles that provide case studies of denominations, parachurches, interdenominational and local congregations.

Perhaps it is not Jacobsen and Trollinger's intention to put the puzzle pieces together and tell us how to move beyond the two-party paradigm. Indeed, they succeed in pulling the curious reader into the book, the breadth and depth of which sparks the sociological imagination and inspires further thought. In this sense, the book effectively raises questions, and provides the reader the raw material needed to begin to answer them.