Sacrifice of praise: emotion and collective participation in an African-American worship service

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 1996 by Timothy J. Nelson

Despite the traditional label for this type of ritual there appears to be nothing unique about the emotions generated within an "emotional" worship service. Certainly, "nonemotional" Christian worship services also have feeling rules (which probably involve the same set of particular emotions) and they also have methods for evoking these emotions in the service (perhaps even using many of the same hymns, at least in Protestant congregations). Rather, the observable difference between the two types of services lies in the types of expressive behavior worshippers engage in, and it is to that topic that I now turn.

BEHAVIORAL NORMS

Some social occasions, a funeral, for example, . . . [possess] a distinctive ethos, a spirit, an emotional structure, that must be properly created, sustained, and laid to rest, the participant finding that he is obliged to become caught up in the occasion, whatever his personal feelings (Goffman 1963: 19).

Mourning is not a natural movement of private feelings wounded by cruel loss; it is a duty imposed by the group. One weeps, not simply because he is sad, but because he is forced to weep. It is a ritual attitude which he is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is, in large measure, independent of his affective state (Durkheim [1915] 1965:443).

Norms not only operate internally upon the feelings of the congregants but upon their external behaviors as well. These standards of appropriate behavior cannot be reduced to the internal feelings of the participants - as both Goffman's observation on funerals and Durkheim's discussion of mourning rites illustrate quite clearly.(2) Instead, they form a separate but related system of expectations, and these expectations can differ quite markedly from one congregation to another. The following account gives a graphic picture of the kind of behavior that was considered completely appropriate at Eastside Chapel that would be out of place (to put it mildly) during a "nonemotional" worship ritual.

One Sunday morning in mid-November Reverend Wright invited Reverend Rose Drayton, an assistant pastor at a nearby AME congregation, to act as guest preacher. The delivery of her sermon started out calm and measured, began to build in intensity and congregational response, and ended with most of the congregation on its feet clapping, while a handful of members engaged in prolonged shouting. Here is how it happened.

She began by reading a portion of scripture from the Old Testament book of Daniel, where the Babylonian king Belshazzar sees a disembodied hand writing on the wall during a banquet. When a Jewish captive named Daniel translates the writing, the King hears a prophecy regarding his impending demise. After reading this passage, Rev. Drayton closed the Bible and announced that her theme was going to be "The Party's Over." The gist of the sermon, which was delivered in the traditional call-and-response style, was that people should start living right because God was going to come back soon and announce to the world that "the party's over." The congregation was very quiet during the scripture reading and remained quite still for the several minutes it took Rev. Drayton to set out her general theme and establish her rhythm. Then she moved out from behind the pulpit and said, "Pray with me for a little while, now," and people started to come alive.