Sacred Subdivisions
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Sacred Subdivisions

The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism

Justin Wilford

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Sacred Subdivisions

The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism

Justin Wilford

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About This Book

In an era where church attendance has reached an all-timelow, recent polling has shown that Americans are becomingless formally religious and more promiscuous in their religiouscommitments. Within both mainline and evangelicalChristianity in America, it is common to hear of secularizingpressures and increasing competition from nonreligioussources. Yet there is a kind of religious institution that hasenjoyed great popularity over the past thirty years: the evangelicalmegachurch. Evangelical megachurches not onlycontinue to grow in number, but also in cultural, political,and economic influence. To appreciate their appeal is tounderstand not only how they are innovating, but more crucially,where their innovation is taking place. In this groundbreaking and interdisciplinary study, Justin G.Wilford argues that the success of the megachurch is hingedupon its use of space: its location on the postsuburban fringeof large cities, its fragmented, dispersed structure, and itsfocus on individualized spaces of intimacy such as smallgroup meetings in homes, which help to interpret suburbanlife as religiously meaningful and create a sense of belonging.Based on original fieldwork at Rick Warren’s SaddlebackChurch, one of the largest and most influential megachurchesin America, Sacred Subdivisions explains how evangelicalmegachurches thrive by transforming mundane secularspaces into arenas of religious significance.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2012
ISBN
9780814708392

1

Introduction

Postdenominational Evangelicalism, Saddleback Church, and the Postsuburbs
Orange County, California, has a contradictory reputation. It is known simultaneously as the home of insular, conservative retirees (Richard Nixon being the most famous) and also as the setting for the shallow, plastic libertines of the reality television series The Real Housewives of Orange County. It is considered to be a high-tech hub for computers, military technology, and industrial design while also a center for major global surf and skate retailers. It is as straight-laced and traditional as it is laid-back and iconoclastic.
On many warm, sunny Sunday afternoons in south Orange County, this contradiction can be seen in the flesh when a heavyset, middle-aged man in a comfortable T-shirt and swim shorts wades into a fountain that would not be out of place in a new suburban, open-air mall. Surrounded by a crowd that sometimes numbers in the dozens and other times in the hundreds, he has an easy, jovial control over his audience. As the sun glistens off the water splashing around his considerable belly, others begin to line up near the edge of the fountain. On this Sunday, the first to join him is a ten-year-old named Kyle. His parents and extended family, pushed now to the edge of the fountain, cheer as he wades close enough to the older man to hug him.
The man keeps his left arm snuggly around Kyle and raises his right as he speaks. The crowd immediately attunes to his words. In a friendly, comfortable manner, he tells them that this is his favorite activity because his father once did this to him. He tells them that this is a symbolic act not the real act. He tells them that they have already accomplished the real act, and now through this act they can tell the world about what has happened to them. He tells Kyle to cross his arms, and lean back. “I baptize Kyle in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he says gently as Kyle leans backwards, becoming fully immersed in the water. “As you are buried with Christ in death, you are raised to walk in the newness of life.” The crowd cheers as if the boy had a hit a home run. And the next one in line wades over to the half-soaked, fully cheerful man in the fountain.
This man is Rick Warren, a multimillionaire, best-selling author, and megachurch pastor who gives away 90 percent of his income. The fountain, though indistinguishable from one in any contemporary mall or office park, is part of the 120-acre campus of Saddleback Valley Community Church, known more commonly as “Saddleback” to Orange County, California, residents. Baptism scenes like this take place dozens of times a year at Saddleback’s main campus, usually after the largest weekend services. In what appears to be any place but a church, often dozens, sometimes hundreds, and, on rare occasions, thousands line up to be baptized “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The sprawling campus blends seamlessly into the Orange County landscape of well-manicured office parks, oversized shopping and entertainment districts, high-end subdivisions and condominiums, and meticulously maintained freeways. A mundane space as this, so accommodating to the secular design aesthetics of newly sprouted sprawl, is a frontline in a battle for souls.
Saddleback Church is one of the largest and most influential evangelical megachurches in America. Its pastor, Rick Warren, is author of The Purpose Driven Life, a book that has sold more than 40 million copies, as well as The Purpose Driven Church, the best-selling church-growth manual in the history of the genre.1 In fact, “purpose driven” has become a popular brand of its own in American evangelicalism. The term, Warren argues, denotes a set of key purposes that should be at the focus of every Christian and church community, but it more subtly implies an alliance with Warren’s broader theology and church-growth strategies. There are now “purpose driven” spin-off books, websites, church conferences, business strategies, addiction recovery programs, self-help regimens, and even sports camps.
In 2011 Saddleback held its highest attended Easter service in its history, bringing in over 50,000 churchgoers through the course of Easter weekend. Just weeks before the holiday, this south Orange County megachurch baptized more than 1,000 people in an afternoon after its introductory membership class (in 2008, they baptized some 2,600 before Easter). In the previous three years it planted three new satellite campuses, each drawing hundreds in their first weeks and now growing rapidly. And in the midst of the worst national financial turmoil since the Great Depression, it increased its revenue and operating budget to an all-time high of $47.9 million.
All of this growth and burgeoning attendance has occurred despite that fact that contemporary America is seen by many to be a nation losing its religion.2 In a series of recent polls on religious attitudes and behaviors in the United States, the American religious landscape is shown to be quite fluid and fragmented, far from one nation under God. One of these polls, conducted by the Pew Research Center, showed a near majority of respondents switching denominations or faith traditions throughout their lives. It also showed that a strong majority of religious adherents in the United States are quite tolerant of other faiths and thought that “many religions can lead to eternal life.”3 In early 2009, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS, a large national survey of religious attitudes conducted previously in 1990 and 2001) showed a historical decrease in religious adherence over the previous decade and a half.
Both the Pew and ARIS studies garnered quite a bit of attention. In the spring 2009 these surveys, alongside smaller post-election surveys, drove cover-page and above-the-fold headlines such as, “Losing Faith in Modern America,” “More People Say They Have No Religion,” “Almost All Denominations Losing Ground,” and “The End of Christian America.”4 The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr., exclaimed, “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.”5
If America has entered a secular, post-Christian era, evangelical churches like Saddleback have found a winning counterstrategy. This book looks at the ways churches like Saddleback are growing in size and influence while older, mainline churches and denominations continue a decades-long decline in membership. However, while there are many excellent studies of thriving contemporary evangelicalism, this book examines the particularly geographical strategies these churches employ in their quest for growth and relevance. This requires looking at and listening to not only what they say and do but where they are saying and doing it. From this perspective, place (and other geographical concepts such as space, landscape, and scale) emerges not only as a setting or stage for religious action but as fundamentally integral to such action. The strategies that lead to Saddleback’s growth and influence, then, are in part geographical. They are not just bound to their geographical settings, but they are also densely composed of geographical representations—of “the church,” “the family,” “the believer,” “home,” “the world,” “the globe,” and, most importantly, their postsuburban environment—the sprawling, freeway-laced landscape that is the setting for Saddleback and thousands of evangelical churches like it.
These geographical representations work within a set of cultural performances, acts that draws on deep cultural structures of meaning that bind or fuse individuals together in groups both small and large. This cursory definition relies on the recent work of the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander and others who argue that cultural action cannot be reduced to economic or political interests, and that effective cultural action “fuses” the elements of performance: actor, background culture, audience, setting, and structures of power are all seamlessly woven together in successful cultural acts, while they are “de-fused” or disconnected in unsuccessful ones. I explain in greater detail in chapter 3 that performance is a useful metaphor for cultural-geographical action because it alerts us to the ways such action, when it is successful, creates and is created by place.
The performances of Saddleback and churches like it work, in part, because they seamlessly incorporate everyday places into larger evangelical narratives, fusing them with deep religious themes and thereby transforming everyday places into religiously meaningful places. Through sermons, weekly small-group meetings in members’ homes, monthly training classes on evangelism, religious service, and worship, and the more intimate exercise of prayer and fellowship, Saddleback members recast places in their lives as sites of spiritual self-transformation. The freeway, the office cubicle, the soccer field are no longer mundane locales; they are made holy by incorporating them into evangelical narratives of grace, salvation, and holiness, which are crafted within the organizational infrastructure of Saddleback Church. Far from withdrawing from these mundane and secular places, Saddleback draws them into webs of sacred significance that its pastors and members co-create. The church sanctuary at Saddleback, then, becomes but one religious island in a sea of religious potentiality. This is in sharp contrast to “traditional” religious performances that rely on strictly marking and separating secular and sacred place.6 Sacred place achieves its power precisely because it is sharply bounded and removed from everyday life. But these new evangelical performances blend the sacred and secular so that the secular becomes only the potential for the sacred, not its opposite. From one perspective, the sacred in these performances invades every crevice of daily life, but it is this invasiveness that also makes them so fragile. The proximity of the secular and sacred in late modern societies means that invasion and corruption goes in both directions, with the sacred in peril as much as the secular. But more than this, what makes these performances precarious and unstable is the geographic paradox that lies at their core. The paradox is that these evangelical churches are aimed at, and must cohere within, an understanding community even as their location in postsuburban peripheries means that they lack such a community.
Overwhelmingly, the contemporary evangelical “local” is situated in what is often referred to as the suburban fringe, exurbia, sprawl, or postsuburbia. By any name, the most common site for large and growing evangelical congregations is on the multi-functional periphery of large metropolitan centers. Almost all of the largest and most influential evangelical churches are in such postsuburban locales as Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek Community Church outside of the Chicago metropolitan area (23,500 weekly attendees), Kerry Shook’s Fellowship of the Woodlands on the periphery of Houston (15,600 weekly attendees), or Andy Stanley’s North Point Community Church on the edge of Atlanta (17,700 weekly attendees). Rick Warren’s Saddleback Valley Community Church in postsuburban Orange County, California, with its 22,000 weekly attendees, is perhaps the most famous. Clearly, the metropolitan periphery is fertile ground for some of the largest, most innovative and influential evangelical churches in America. But is it the ground—the cultural geography, the built environment of postsuburbia—that is so fertile? It is not just the felicitous socio-spatial context of postsuburbia that allows these churches to grow to such sizes and exert such influence. Their success is rather the product of a very active but tenuous collaboration between church organizers, postsuburban constituents, and postsuburbia as a cultural and material place. In other words, successful evangelical churches are culturally responding to both their social and spatial environment.
To say that Saddleback’s success is due to it responding to its environment is to restate a set of influential explanations of recent evangelical popularity that cohere around what is broadly conceived as the religious market model.7 From this perspective, churches are firms that deal in supernatural goods, and they thrive in an open religious market so long as they respond effectively to the needs and desires of local communities as potential customers. As the sociologist of religion R. Stephen Warner puts it, “religious institutions flourish when they reflect, as well as engage, the cultures of the people who are their local constituents.”8 But what does it mean for postsuburban evangelical churches to respond to the cultures of local communities when the latter are newly formed, fragmented, dispersed, and transitory, as postsuburban communities typically are?
The evangelical church does not simply survive in its postsuburban environment, it thrives. This presents the religious market approach with two problems. First, the post–World War II American metropolitan periphery is socially and spatially fragmented with few homogenous communities expressing clearly delineated values, needs, and desires. The broad sea change in consumer preferences postulated by proponents of the religious market approach assumes a relatively coherent and homogenous group of churchgoers.9 But this jibes neither with the socio-spatial environment of postsuburban evangelical churches nor with these churches’ highly differentiated and dispersed organizational structures. The second but related problem is that the largest, most popular and influential churches reach well beyond a local area for constituents. Even if homogenous and coherent local communities exist in postsuburbia, the evangelical church’s reach is so geographically vast that no single local community could be its sole target. In other words, what it would mean to “reflect, as well as engage, the cultures of 
 local constituents” in a postsuburban evangelical church is not immediately clear.
The religious market approach, though, has a larger and more general problem. It forestalls the question of meaning. If a church is a firm that deals in supernatural goods—goods that are inextricably connected to “existential” or “fundamental” meaning10—and its congregants are customers, we have explained very little by referring to the effective marketing campaigns of successful congregations.11 The real question is how meaning is made, shared, and negotiated. The religious market approach, in essence, reinterprets the question of variation in religious popularity by re-envisioning the effects of pluralism; it does little to explain such popularity. To explain why churches, in this case, postsuburban megachurches, are successful, we must get to the heart of the matter: the socio-spatial work of making, sharing, and negotiating meaning.
By looking at such work as a set of performances, the postsuburban mega-church seems to reconfigure its local environment in ways that infuse the secular geographies of postsuburbia with spiritual significance. The mundane spaces of recreation, consumption, and labor become stages for spiritual self-transformation. A strictly critical approach to these socio-spatial performances would surely find them embodiments of false consciousness, enactments of self-delusion, self-grandeur, and self-therapy. While this project does not absolutely eschew such an approach, it is above all an effort to “give a brother’s account of belief,” in the words of the literary critic James Woods, rather than treating sincere religious action as “some unwanted impoverished relative.”12 This so-called brother’s account is concerned with how practitioners of American evangelicalism use the spatiality and materiality of their postsuburban environment to make their lives meaningful. Such an account is based on the premise that every act of inhabiting, using, and thinking about a place is an act of meaning-making13 and therefore open to the charges of false-consciousness, self-delusion, and so forth. To take such geographic meaning-making seriously is to focus on not only what is false about such acts but what is also, in the very same instance, true.
Megachurches, Evangelicalism, and Saddleback
Valley Community Church
There is no more perfect expression of American evangelical vitality than the megachurch. While technically a century-old phenomenon (and by no means evangelical in origin), megachurches did not become identified with evangelicalism until their rapid proliferation in the 1970s and 1980s.14 When they became popularly known in the 1980s and 1990s, especially through the soft-edged “seeker” megachurch, Chicago’s Willow Creek Community Church, and the hard-edged, fundamentalism of Jerry and Jonathan Falwell’s megachurch, Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, the many variations were quickly conflated in the popular imagination.15 One reason for this is that the common definition of a megachurch is any congregation with more than 2,000 weekly attendees. Such a definition makes it easy to speak of megachurches as a unitary phenomenon. This is especially the...

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