(White)Washing Our Sins Away
eBook - ePub

(White)Washing Our Sins Away

American Mainline Churches, Music, Power, and Diversity

  1. 320 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

(White)Washing Our Sins Away

American Mainline Churches, Music, Power, and Diversity

About this book

Analyzes how White American mainline Protestants used the internal musical controversies of the turn-of-the-millennium Worship Wars to negotiate their shifting position within the nation's diversifying religious and sociopolitical ecosystems.

What if simply changing musical styles could resurrect social power and religious vitality? By the early 1990s, Christianity was losing ground nationally, and mainline Protestants were trending even Whiter and older than America's overall demographic trajectory. The churches knew they needed to diversify. Yet, many mainline churches focused their energies on the so-called Worship Wars, intense aesthetic and theological controversies running through much of White Christian America. Historically, churches had only supported one musical style; now, many mainline Protestant congregations were willing to risk internal schism to support both Contemporary worship-centered around guitars, praise bands, and choruses-and Traditional worship with its pipe organs, chancel choirs, and hymns. Surely, they thought, musical diversity would broadcast tolerance and bring in new members-perhaps it would even help them regain their historically central role in American society. Based on years of ethnographic research, (White)Washing Our Sins Away explores how American mainline Protestants used internal musical controversies to negotiate their shifting position within the nation's diversifying religious and sociopolitical ecosystems.

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Yes, you can access (White)Washing Our Sins Away by Deborah Justice, Annetta Alexandridis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas & Etnomusicología. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Introduction: Academia, Presbyterians, and Me
  7. Chapter 1 Using Sound to Reconfigure Mainline Protestant Sacred and Social Identity
  8. Chapter 2 “The Least Puzzling or Flamboyant of Christians”
  9. Chapter 3 Telling the Story of a Useable Past
  10. Interlude
  11. Chapter 4 Sonic Diversity: Deciding When to Hear Harmony
  12. Chapter 5 “We’re Only Medium Contemporary”: Creating Identity Boundaries
  13. Chapter 6 Spatial Diversity: Making Places for Traditional and Contemporary Worship
  14. Chapter 7 Social Diversity: Defrosting the Frozen Chosen
  15. Conclusion: Music, Faith, and Reconfiguring American Protestant Identities
  16. Notes
  17. Bibliography
  18. Index
  19. Back Cover