Religion: Suburban Religion

One of the surprising facts about the postwar surge of religion in the U.S. has been the caliber of its critics—the most telling jeers have not come from the village atheists but from the men of God. And of all the vineyards suburbia draws the most unremitting hail of clerical belittlement. One Presbyterian in a grey flannel suit who has long fumed at these attacks, behind his paper on the 7:28 from Bound Brook, N.J., is Personnel Manager George S. Odiorne of Manhattan’s American Management Association. In the current issue of Presbyterian Life he rises to the defense of suburban Christianity.

Skewering the Bourgeois. Suburbanite Odiorne runs through the standard attitudes of the suburban churchgoer’s critics—the “genteel disdain” for the quality of his faith, the “elegant reservations” as to the value of his energetic pursuit of bazaars, suppers, plays, baseball teams, bowling leagues, discussion groups. For these critics, says Odiorne: “The Johnny-come-lately, making up the pulpy mass of this return to religion it seems, has several basic flaws which make him offensive to the intellectual bourbons of the cloth,” i.e., his preoccupation with getting ahead in the world, conforming to his neighbors and raising his children.

“While this skewering of the bourgeois comprises excellent sport for the staff thinker at national headquarters or at the seminary, it leaves a few important things unsaid.” For one thing, the church gains in suburbia have not all been in numbers and money. “Within the suburban church there are more people listening attentively to the preaching of the Word who are taking part in administering the sacraments of the church, who are moving steadily toward lives of Christian devotion, and who are carrying the mission of the church through education and missionary endeavor.”

Also on the plus side, Odiorne rates suburban indifference to sects and even the suburban tendency to conformity, which he finds is modeled on “the proper mixture of doctrinal emphasis on the Bible, the Lordship of Christ, witness in life and by word.”

Group Therapy. Odiorne concedes that the suburban church’s proliferation of activities may be a waste of time and an escape from more spiritual undertakings, but he maintains that to the seasoned church worker this is “the available frontier” from which people can be brought deeper into the spiritual life. As for the frequent charge that suburban churches are top-heavy with the managerial elite, he replies that this is true of the communities themselves—hence of their churches. But “even suburbia has its drawers of water and hewers of wood, who enjoy positions of influence in suburban churches in rough proportion to their number and extent of their commitment to the church and its Lord.”

Critics of suburban religion, says Odiorne, are really attacking the suburbs, not just their churches. “The conformity which characterizes suburban life is the real object of their derision. They would have suburbia turn its back on this ‘other directedness’ and arrive at individual commitment through an atomistic thinking-through or insight.” But “the very suburban mind which is looked at with fear by the detractors may well be the basis for a beginning of a new Christian era.” Perhaps it is because the critics of suburban religion “lack insight into the nature of modern society and the group process that they would scratch out the gains of suburbia and start all over again in a comfortable model closer to their hearts’ desire. But after all, the patient who is cured by group therapy may be healthier than the person who doesn’t respond to individual treatment.”