University of Virginia Library

To Conservatives with Love . . . From 475

One of the loudest voices in the cry to reconstruct reality in liberal Protestantism is Dean M. Kelley. His widely read book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing is not about why conservative churches are growing at all, but why liberal churches are declining. [4] As a member of the inner circle of the National Council of Churches and possessing a sterling record on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Kelley has all the requisite credentials for summoning the attention of main-line Protestant denominations. Who, better than an insider who has fought the good fight, can tell us what has gone wrong and whither the morrow?

In an age when science and human resources are rapidly

opening new vistas and unimagined horizons to the potential for individual and cultural fulfillment, Kelley suggests that seeking maturity for the human race is too threatening a business for the churches. Instead of helping the world cope with ambiguity and possibility, the churches should treat men to the security of a warm blanket and the milk of certitude on which to nurse.

At a time when our culture has at least momentarily retreated from the central struggles for human justice, it is not surprising that liberal Protestantism should follow course. Within this mood of retreat, thus, Kelley is making a bid to become the Daniel Patrick Moynihan of 475 Riverside Drive. He is telling his brethren it is time for the churches to treat issues of brotherhood, justice, and peace with a little benign neglect. So benign is this

- theoretician, however, that he neglects to mention the possibility that the problems the liberal churches now face may in some considerable measure stem from their leadership's aggressive programs in civil rights which moved beyond the wishes and expectations of the laity.

Not once does Kelley ask how we can get back in the battle. He assumes it was all wrong. Like the prodigal son, the church's fling with the world is over. Take no thought of the noble causes left scattered across the battlefield. It is time for repentance. Survival demands our attention now. Maintenance goals must take precedence over mission outreach. Therefore, drastically reduce wasteful and wistful programs and austerely eliminate the frills from bureaucracy. Most importantly, focus attention on the renewal of meaning among communicants. This is one sure thing that will keep them coming. Encounter groups may help members find themselves but, more importantly, seek ways in which religion can be relevant to the private lives of parishioners as they celebrate their joys, seek comfort for their sorrows, and ask for guidance when decisions must be made. As their personal needs are met, their commitment to the church will increase.

Pastors will find Kelley challenging them to take a firmer stand in their sermons, not on social issues, of course, but on doctrinal issues. Parishioners must know what to believe and must believe it absolutely and fervently if the church is to conserve its strength. Doctrinal distinctions between denominations must be emphasized so members have a clear sense of religious identity. Feeling

they are right, though they respect the privilege of others to be wrong, will reinforce their own special Christian identity. Church rolls must be cleared of dead weight, those who never attend or offer financial support, perhaps even uncommitted members who only occasionally attend and give. Such a purging increases per capita religious activity and communicates a greater sense of momentum to those who remain, thus generating some of the excitement of being a member of a religious movement. More careful attention to church rolls and the processes of entrance are similarly essential to weed out less serious applicants who might otherwise endanger group discipline.

These are but a few of the admonitions and suggestions which pastors and religious leaders might infer from Kelley's work. For the weary or weak-headed, all of this may seem to make sense as a game plan for the time frame of the seventies. But before Kelley's advice, direct or implied, is taken very seriously, his arguments and analysis require a more critical examination.

Kelley's entire analysis proceeds from a vision-a vision gleaned dimly from his examination of a set of time series tables of growth trends for several religious groups. While not predisposed toward visions ourselves, we are not opposed to this medium if it leads to insight and understanding of a problem. Unfortunately, what emerges is not insight and understanding but a neatly woven tapestry which blends smoothly from truths to half-truths to blatant distortions of social science theories and data.

Kelley is not the first churchman to discover a statistical table and instantaneously feel the "call" to social science. But the scope and magnitude of the proposals for which he claims legitimacy behind the sacred cloak of social science must certainly be without precedent. The discipline of his mind is revealed in the following comment: "Most of these [hypotheses] can be verified empirically but have not been" (page xi). Presumably, he has some providential assurance of the validity of his holy writ. Such bombastic utterances are not only a flagrant violation of the logic of scientific inquiry but an insult and betrayal of those who have turned to him in trust for guidance. But enough with our anger. Let us now take a careful look at what Kelley has to say.

Kelley's analysis begins with an examination of statistics for liberal Protestant denominations, most of them available in the

Yearbook of American Churches. The chapter title, not surprisingly, is "Are the Churches Dying?" The data are grim. During the latter half of the 1960s, the major Protestant denominations ceased growing and began shrinking. Not only church school and communicant membership but also the contraction of building programs, foreign mission establishments, and denominational bureaucracies indicate this decline. For Kelley, these developments bespeak an obvious loss of social strength in the major liberal Protestant denominations.

We turn to chapter 2 and are asked, "Is Religion Obsolete?" Kelley cites two factors which might account for the organizational deterioration observed in chapter 1: obsolescence or internal failure. In a brief but competent presentation, he summarizes arguments for the obsolescence of religion in the modern secular world and quickly discards them. So now he has nailed the problem down to internal failure and set us up for his next startling discovery: not all churches are declining! Again he whips out his time series tables: notice the continued growth of the Southern Baptists, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Church of the Nazarene. Indigenous American religions, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, are also continuing to grow rapidly. Decline is not universal in American Protestantism. "Conservative" churches, as evidenced by their continued institutional vitality, are gaining social strength. Why the difference?

The difference for Kelley is simple. Main-line churches are failing to meet the needs of the parishioners. Amidst the carrousel of services, organizations, and projects, the liberal churches have missed the golden ring. Neither bingo tables nor picket lines, nor the panoply in between, have met the one essential of all religious organizations everywhere. The churches are not filling the hole in existence, the meaning in life. Main-line denominations offer ambiguous answers to ultimate questions; the growing denominations proffer certitude. In worrying about religious "relevance," Kelley reasons, the liberal denominations have failed internally to wind the mainspring of religious motivation: meaning. And this he defines as content plus demand. Humans respond with commitment, and in commitment lies social strength for the institution. From here Kelley proceeds to develop a model for explaining

the difference between strong and weak religion. Organizations handle the problem of meaning for their members by unspecified mechanisms through which shared goals are defined and inculcated, appropriate religious behavior is controlled through rewards and sanctions, and the communication of religious behavior is channeled. In a strong religion, therefore, the preaching of goals solicits commitment, and discipline produces strictly followed attitudinal and behavioral codes resulting in an outpouring of missionary zeal. This is then illustrated by case studies of four social movements: the Anabaptists, the Wesleyan revival, the Mormon migration, and the Jehovah's Witnesses. In each case, the movement members saw themselves at battle with the outside world, strict discipline was maintained, and commitment to movement goals produced zealous, self-sacrificing, and, by inference, "meaningful" behavior. In strong social movements, Kelley asserts, discipline and commitment to goals leads to absolutism of belief, conformity to the will of the group, and fanaticism in the view of outsiders. These characteristics may be called "traits of strictness."

On the other hand, he argues, main-line churches are characterized by "traits of leniency." Goals are relativized. A diverse rather than a conformist response to goals is encouraged. Finally, in communicating the faith to outsiders, dialogue (not conversion) is preferred. Rather than producing zealous, self-sacrificing behavior and deep meaning for the communicant, these traits of leniency nurture lukewarm faith, individualistic behavior patterns, and negligible or nonexistent evangelism goals. Having defined his concepts, Kelley hypothesizes that "A group with evidences of social strength will proportionately show traits of strictness; a group with traits of leniency will proportionately show evidences of social weakness rather than strength." [5] Social strength and leniency are therefore incompatible by Kelley's definitions.

Beginning thus with the empirical observation of the decline of certain Protestant denominations and noting their membership in the National Council of Churches, Kelley proceeds to spin a conceptual web to certain assumed underlying causes in a "follow the bouncing ball" string of inferences. Ecumenism implies social weakness. After all, support for the ecumenical enterprise indicates laxity in beliefs. Viewed from the bench of strictness, those

who differ from oneself in doctrine would be perceived as benighted and unworthy of parity in the journey of faith. Those denominations willing to join in such alliances must therefore have a lenient, relativistic view of doctrine and thus a lukewarm commitment among their members. Without commitment, the need for meaning cannot be fulfilled. That, Kelley argues, is the reason why communicants are dropping out and the denominations are suffering such losses.

The reverse holds for the "conservative" churches, in Kelley's view. Those religious groups least attracted to the ecumenical movement, like the Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Southern Baptists, have an absolutist, strict, and uncompromising view of doctrine. They must be uncompromising since they have organizationally avoided ecumenism. This indicates a strong faith commitment on the part of their communicants. The inescapable conclusion, for Kelley, is that their needs for meaning in life are being met. Their denominations continue to grow. Kelley works the puzzle neatly and easily, but, after all, he did cut his own pieces to fit.

Moving onward, this soldier in the battle for church survival turns his attention to the cause of the weakening. How did main-line Protestantism lose grip on its primary function and degenerate into leniency, social weakness, and the loss of members? Once again, simple: entropy. Religious groups gradually run down. Tightly wound springs unwind with time.

To illustrate the aging process, the decline of strictness, and the loss of commitment and meaning, Kelley resurrects the ChurchSect typology and argues that movement from sect to denomination leads to loss of strictness. He calls this process the "dynamic of diminishing demand." Success defeats a movement, both on the individual and the institutional levels. The poor, seeking meaning in life, adhere to a religious group which meets their need and offers a disciplined approach to life, eventually paying off in worldly success. Secular goals and meaning gradually undermine religious commitment and devotion. Organizations likewise grow large and indolent. They win the war by surrendering; they lose their impetus, their youth, and their vigor.

One survival strategy does offer consolation even in the face of the inevitability of entropy, according to Kelley. Churches can

follow the medieval Catholic example in the formation of "orders." Rather than allowing schisms, the churches can contain new social movements within the larger religious body through a process of ecclesiola en ecclesia (allowing little churches to develop within the church). As pioneers emerge, mother denominations with foresight and resources can foster new life.

But mother churches pregnant with little churches are insufficient for Kelley; his major prescription for conserving social strength is a restoration of strictness in the main-line churches. Retaining the key to this cage, though, Kelley warns in the next breath that strictness may be almost impossible to recover. "People who have become accustomed to leniency do not find it congenial to contemplate strictness, let alone live under it. Yet . . . strictness is the only way to conserve social strength, whether in ecclesia or ecclesiola." [6] Kelley recommends that churches serious about their faith must (1) develop sufficient consensus on belief so members can savor their uniqueness, (2) make high demands upon members and expel those not fully committed, and (3) encourage talk about faith and beliefs and vigorous defense against those not inclined to tape it seriously.

After stressing a need for firm and consistent demands for admission to and retention of membership, Kelley launches a rambling excursion into the failure of social-action goals in main-line churches. His observations are scattered and at best loosely related to his central arguments. He reminds us that religious institutions have always been repositories of beliefs for the society. Therefore, they are basically conservative organizations. Unfortunately, members' feelings concerning conservation of values do not necessarily coincide with the perceptions of the initial movement but rather stress the culturally dictated (ideological) beliefs of the past. Since social action is more often legitimated in terms of current social movements, the plea for change falls on unresponsive, if not hostile, ears and fails to arouse the enthusiasm of the guardians of received values. Even when social action can be justified in terms of past values, the conservationists of "truth" are unlikely to have the requisite inclination to innovate. In a battle for freedom of the press, the writers, not the librarians, will move to the front lines.

Most church people, Kelley argues, are more interested in

continuity and stability than in change. Nor do the majority of communicants hold any core of belief so meaningful and vital as to mobilize them for social action. Hence, social action, as a top agenda item of liberal religious leaders during the 1960s, was doomed from the onset. Action leaders misread the pew-sitters in calling the churches to the barricades, according to Kelley. Rather, the churches are "conservatories where the hurts of life are healed, where new spiritual strength is nourished and where the virtues and verities of human experience are celebrated." [7] They are the field hospitals, so to speak, not the troop barracks. Not surprisingly, therefore, those seriously interested in social action abandon the churches, or at least remain in only remnant fashion.

The treatise winds down in a gloomy mood of pessimism. Periods of vitality and revival in religion, in which new movements grow and flourish and established institutions are revitalized, do occur. And, intermittently, so do periods of consolidation, introspection, and regrouping, when social strength must be conserved against the tide of decay. Main-line American Protestant denominations are now moving through such an era of "tightening up" and reorganizing the structures fallen into disrepair during the preceding expenditure of a seemingly boundless supply of energy upon ever less central goals (such as justice, freedom, and peace). The church is patching the cracks and pulling the shutters against the winds, waiting out the storm.

To be sure, there is much merit in many of Kelley's arguments. We are on record as having made a number of the same observations. Our point of debate is with his apparent inability to differentiate between empirical observations, plausible theoretical interpretations, faulty logic, and value presuppositions which have no anchor in reality. Were Kelley simply a knuckleheaded academic and were church leaders not groping for understanding of what is happening to the churches, his book would have gone unnoticed. But church leaders are groping, and he is a church executive attempting to influence policy. The indiscriminate mixture of sense and nonsense therefore becomes a dangerous political treatise. Let us turn, thus, to a critical examination of his central arguments.

To begin, Kelley's entropy hypothesis, the principal organizing

concept of his work, distorts empirical reality. The major liberal denominations have not gradually wound down with age. They have declined suddenly, in the past half-dozen years, after a period of unprecedented growth. Ecumenism, Kelley's chief exhibit of leniency, coincided with growth, not decline. This suggests something perhaps far more complex than entropy at work.

Further, this period of growth during the postwar period cannot be attributed to unusual religious zeal in the churches. A number of factors, most not ideological in nature, converged in time and fostered expansion. Rapid suburban growth, coupled with a new idealism in family life stressing the sharing of voluntary and leisure activities, made the church an extremely attractive locus of activity. Family weekend camping, now cutting into church attendance, springs basically from the same impulse. The sense of national well-being, economic stability, and the rightness of American life may have contributed to the popularity of the church, which, as Kelley observes, has been a conservatory of traditional values. But the racial and urban crises of the sixties, an unpopular war, an uncontrolled inflationary spiral, the energy crisis, ecological survival, and the loss of confidence in government's ability to police itself make the 1970s a very different world. No doubt the American public is facing a crisis of confidence concerning our abilities and possibilities for coping with these vexing and complex issues. But the extent to which this is reflected in a sense of meaninglessness, as Kelley uses the term, is an open empirical question, one blindly ignored by him and on which his book sheds little light. The only way one can interpret the boom period in American Protestantism in simplistic social movement terms is as Kelley does, with vague ideas and question-begging assumptions which are meaningful arguments only to those so deluged by desperation as to grasp at any passing piece of debris which offers hope.

Kelley's conceptual model applies adequately to some types of social movements, including conversionist sects. However, identifying strictness as the independent variable affecting social strength is to get the cart before the horse. Strictness spontaneously arises in the process of social interaction when other factors are present. If commonly held beliefs and goals are considered

desperately important and efficient, and if concerted effort is required to accomplish the goals, then behavior or attitudes of members seen as undermining goals or morale will be strongly censured by group pressures, formal and otherwise. Imposing artificial codes of strictness will only drive members away. Enforcing external conformity to revitalize motivation is like painting an old automobile which needs a new engine. It may look better, but it still won't run. Nor will walking under open umbrellas make it rain.

Dogged persistence in discipline does not necessarily prevent institutional decline either. Take, for example, the United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. In the past few years it has suffered increasingly high attrition rates in its student body. The present graduating class will represent only about 60 percent of its entrance total. Yet the administration is determined to maintain the rigid codes of discipline it considers an important part of education in the academy. The "social weakness" of the academy, as measured by the attrition of its student body, has developed in spite of enforced discipline. If Kelley would argue that the academy remains socially strong because of its strictness, then social strength and institutional decline are not correlated. If he would argue that social weakness is reflected in its high attrition rates, then strictness and strength are not correlated. Kelley's logic falters when tested on real organizations, rather than a superficial historical analysis of social movements.

On closer examination, also, most of the growing "conservative denominations" are not qualitatively different from main-line liberal Protestant churches in either missionary zeal or disciplined conformity. Excommunications among Southern Baptists, for instance, are rare indeed. Nor could the vast majority of this denomination be characterized as fanatical in their missionary zeal. The model which Kelley develops perhaps holds for the two ends of the continuum. Those small, growing social movements holding strong commitment from a high percentage of members, and encouraging and rewarding absolutist faith, a "chosen people" self-definition, and zealous goal-oriented behavior would be considered strong by most social-organizational definitions. On the other extreme, those organizations unable to develop and maintain either a strong sense of commitment to goals or an

identification among the members will motivate little goaloriented behavior, zealous or otherwise, and will be considered weak almost regardless of the taxonomy or evidence of strength employed. However, there are very few religious groupings of any size in this country on either end of that continuum. Almost all fall somewhere near the middle, where relative strength or weakness, by Kelley's definition, is a matter of degree and not kind.

On closer examination, Kelley's taxonomy proves neither logically coherent nor capable of generating his hypothesis. He builds a typology on three organizational dimensions: goals, controls, and communication. His intention is to explain the maximum cohesion, vitality, and functional effectiveness of religion in its ideal form. However, he never specifies the unit of analysis and consequently shifts among the three levels of analysis without apparent rationale or consciousness. Strong and weak, strict and lenient, whether dealing with goals, controls, or communication, may refer to individuals at one end of a sentence and congregations or denominations at the other. The result is a massacre of the precision of the language and a muddling of already convoluted argument. The three dimensions, for instance, are introduced in organizational terms, presumably denominations. They are units which set goals and standards and communicate with their members and outsiders. The taxonomy as it develops, however, is illustrated almost exclusively in terms of how individuals respond to goals and controls and how they communicate. All this leads to a hypothesis which again is stated in terms of organizations-this time, presumably, congregations. Do you follow? What may first appear as intricate truth, opaque but meaningful, is actually only more polluted hot air, stifling to the social scientist impatient with untestable theory. From hypothesizing about the relationship of social strength and strictness, Kelley bounces to a wholesale condemnation of ecumenism and leniency in the main-line Protestant denominations. His is at best a leap of faith, politely referred to in the social science community as a problem of internal validity.

Another area of confusion in Kelley's argument focuses upon the central concept of meaning. He early states that content (belief?) plus demand equals meaning. Meaning so defined is difficult to distinguish from his use of the concept commitment,

which is what gives religious groups social strength. Later he argues that the church specializes in meaning crisis management. It excels, we are told, in interpreting the meaning of birth, death, tragedy, and decision-making for its clients. He also argues that downtrodden minorities seek in a religious movement meaning for their lives, implying a new status order for discovering self-worth and dignity.

His inconsistency with so central a concept leads one to wonder if Kelley expects anyone to seriously attempt to follow his argument. Note the following juggling act: "Ultimate meaning is essential to human life, and it is effective to the degree that it demands and secures a commitment in men's lives." [8] And, "Nevertheless, most people do not become perpetual devotees of a meaning regiment; their need for ultimate meaning is succeeded by other needs and interests, and their attention to the meaning system wanes." [9] And again, "Many people today may not be aware of a dearth of religion or meaning in their lives." [10] It sounds as though religion must create the need for meaning before it can satisfy it. And finally, Kelley advises, "Religious groups should not abdicate their unique and essential contribution to healing the world's wounds: meaning." [11] Right on . . . if only we knew what Kelley means by meaning.