The RLDS Church, Global Denominations, and Globalization

Within the halls of academia, denominational history is a thoroughly unfashionable genre about an oft-ignored subject. This was not always so. Historian Lincoln Mullen notes that the field of religious history “used to be dominated by denominational histories, more often than not written by scholars from those denominations.” Such histories might make “a genuine contribution to the field, but most bordered on antiquarianism.” By the 1980s, most historians had turned “their attention to the discussions of race, class, gender, and power that animate the historical professions more generally.”1 Denominational histories, at least in this telling, were left behind due to a shift in what constituted an important historical story and a new focus upon the production of power through crosscutting categories of difference.There is at least another factor that has colluded to marginalize denominational histories. Most scholars of religion believe that denominations are dying entities, at least in the United States. Even the most optimistic students of denominational studies litter their works with statements that offer qualified pronouncements about the future viability of denominations. “Denominationalism looks doomed,” writes Russell E. Richey, the doyen of denominational studies. “It may be,” he forthrightly admits.2 Anthropologist Jon Bialecki characterizes much of the literature on denominations as proclaiming that “the denomination itself is on the cusp of extinction.” Bialecki himself playfully calls the most recent past age in the US the “denominozoic,” while the present, still unnamed age is something after this mass extinction event.3 As a scholar, I see no intimations within the patterns of current-day religious belonging in America that would dispute Bialecki and Richey's playfully earnest characterizations.Given these dour assessments of denominations and denominational histories, this article offers a modest argument for the continuing relevance of studying denominations, past and present. Namely, I argue that the study of American-based Mormon denominations provides a fruitful pathway towards understanding how globalization has reshaped Christian communities. I do so with reference to denominations and denominational belonging in three places: the United States of America, the Republic of India, and the Republic of the Philippines. Then, I make a brief excursus into what scholars mean by globalization and how I apply it. Next, I offer a case study of a church that metabolized the various social, political, and economic forces of globalization—the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now called Community of Christ). I offer a sketch of how its self-styled moniker, the “World Church,” described both its aspirations and new organizational forms in the 1960s and beyond. Finally, I draw upon this case study to articulate the general and generalizable characteristics of the new organizational form created in the post-World War II RLDS Church, an organizational form I call the “global denomination.” I end this section by arguing for the applicability of my definitional criteria for the global denomination beyond the RLDS Church. Thus, taken together, my four sections offer a case for why the study of denominations still matters.Created initially in Protestant Europe and Colonial America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the denomination is a particularly modern bureaucratized form of religious organization. As sociologist Nancy Ammerman notes, a denomination “is a trans-local cluster of mutually-identified religious organizations, developed by their members, and existing alongside other, similarly constructed, but each more-or-less-distinct religious groups” and colludes with the modern nation-state as “a mechanism for legitimizing and regulating religious diversity.”4 Some scholars point out that the denomination, or at least denomination-like structures, are not simply the invention of the Protestant North Atlantic world, but had simultaneous origins in nascent nation-states, like Japan during the Edo period in which state-imposed divisions in Buddhism created denomination-like structures. Nevertheless, more than in any other nation-state, the United States witnessed particularly effusive growth in denominational forms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, part and parcel of state religious disestablishment and the growth of modern bureaucracies.5As a Christian organizational structure, the denomination reached its high-water mark in the United States in the post-World War II era. Sociologists Andrew Greeley and Peter Rossi, writing in 1972, advanced the thesis that religion in America was structured as a “denominational society.”6 While such analysis ignored the blossoming of alternative forms of religious organization that would evolve into various types in our present age (parachurches, independent megachurches, a spirituality milieu, etc.), Greeley and Rossi had captured something of the import of denominations within their time. Post-World War II America saw a spike in people formally joining denominations, and denominational bodies across the US—flush with wealth from newly made middle-class members—underwent a church-building boom.7 Within such an environment, it seemed logical that Greeley and Rossi would characterize the structure of American religion along denominational lines.The so-called “denominational society” that Greeley studied in the 1970s was not simply an American creation, but the product of two centuries of transnational connections between American denominations and global “others.” Sociologist Robert Wuthnow helpfully describes (somewhat) overlapping historical eras for these global connections. The first era, roughly encompassing the nineteenth century, saw the rise of mission societies and boards controlled by American denominations and reaching out into places like Liberia, China, and India. The second era, between the late nineteenth century and World War II, saw the rise of independent mission agencies that recruited supporters across denominational lines (for example, the Student Volunteer Movement). The third, spanning most of the twentieth century, witnessed the creation of faith-based NGOs, many of which were connected with particular denominations (e.g., Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief), while others were connected with paradenominational bodies (e.g., World Vision and independent Evangelicals). Wuthnow notes that the organizational patterns created in all three of these eras remained active, robust, and even expanded in the late twentieth century among the numerically dominant Christian affinity groups in the US—evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals, Catholics, and even mainline Protestants (a group that many scholars have assumed decreased their global connections in the same era).8 In short, denominations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were among the most important conduits for global connectivity between American Christians and Christians in other nations.Even as denominationalism has waned in the US after it peaked in the late twentieth century, it has seen a sharp rise in other nations over the past few decades. Take, for instance, India and the Philippines, two countries in which I have studied the Community of Christ. In both countries, a majority religion structures much of religious life, the Catholic Church in the Philippines and Hinduism, in all its varieties, in India. However, in both countries, Christian denominationalism is now flourishing. For example, recent studies of religion in the Philippines have highlighted the importance of denominations, arguing that the last thirty years has seen a significant increase in the power of denominations to mediate religious identity within the archipelago nation.9 Non-Catholic Christians account for only 11 percent of the Filipino population, yet they maintain an outsized public presence in large cities and the smallest barangays where distinctive, brightly colored church buildings announce the presence of a noisy and growing religious minority population. Their competition with Catholics for adherents has created an emerging denominational society in the Philippines.10In contrast to the Philippines where Christians account for 92 percent of the population, India has a Christian population that accounts for just over 2 percent of its population. Social divisions within Indian society increasingly have been formatted along the lines of “religion” whereas “caste” and “tribe” (both legally defined categories) once predominated.11 This is in part because tribe and caste often overlap with religious identities, thus making these older colonial markers of belonging—tribe/caste and religion—mirror the imperial collusion between race and religion in the United States. As an upshot of these historical processes, Christianity as an affinity category in India matters more than one's particular denominational identity. In addition, global ecumenical efforts had significant origins within Indian Christianity in the 1960s, thus reinforcing the dominance of religious identity over denominational identity.12Even so, denominationalism is alive and well within India. For example, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky conducted intermittent ethnographic research on the Christianization of Sora tribal people in south central Odisha (formerly called Orissa) from the 1970s to 2010s. Sora Baptist churches and Dalit Catholic parishes were the only Christian denominations in his research area for several decades. Yet, by the 2010s, “[Sora] Baptists are lured with food, lodging, and education grants by Pentecostals, Lutherans, East India [RLDS or Community of Christ], Orissa Baptist Evangelistic Crusade (OBEC), Bunangji (Brethren), Drena or Biswas (Faith, Trust), Seba Bharato (Serving India), Sanniara (Saturday, i.e., Seventh Day Adventists), Jisu Renukku (Assembly of Jesus), Compass, World Vision [an NGO], Good News . . . and Agape or Prema.”13 In short, even a rural area like the highlands of Odisha abounds with Christian denominations and diverse opportunities for Christian affiliation.Given the past and present importance of denominations within the US, the Philippines, and India, one would expect that scholars of global Christianity in these places would place the denomination as a foci for academic study. With a few notable recent exceptions, this is not so. Scholars of global Christianity, surmise anthropologists Minna Opas and Courtney Handman, “have focused in large part on the subject in Protestantism, emphasizing the ways in which the modern subject is a Christian subject.” This emphasis “has largely come at the expense of an emphasis on the social groups in and through which Christian practice takes place.”14 Similarly, Laurie Maffly-Kipp notes, “Our [scholars'] own concepts of individual identities and selfhood as the preeminent concerns of religious subjects block us from—dare I say it—recognizing the profound ecclesiastical pleasures and collective commitments of historical agents.”15 Thus, ignoring denominations risks misapprehending the strangeness of the past, even the recent past, as well as missing the places where many Christian practices have been formed and reformed. To Opas, Handman, and Maffly-Kipp's concerns, I would add that ignoring denominations misses one of the prime conduits for globalization in Christianity. This, of course, raises the question of what exactly is meant by “globalization.”Globalization is a word that burst into scholarly and popular vocabulary in the 1980s and has stayed as a mutable signifier ever since. Scholars have invoked globalization to describe the waning of state power and the rise of global cities (Sassen); the compression of time and space as well as our awareness of it (Robertson); the rise of networked societies (Castells); the global extension of commodification and neoliberal economic regimes (Harvey); the neocolonial creation of the Global North and Global South (Wallerstein); the space of new economic, cultural, political, and media-based flows beyond national boundaries (Appadurai); “McDonaldization” and cultural homogenization (Ritzer); novel interactions between the local and global that produce new cultural identities (Roudometof); and bifurcated clashes of civilizations (Huntington).16 For some scholars, globalization can denominate a rather narrow time period (i.e., the world after 1989), or it can be used in the broadest possible sense of the term to mark human interconnections from the Ice Age to the present. For others, globalization is not about a historical period (time), but about a connectivity process (space), thus delimiting it in a different way.17Given the many ways that globalization has been defined, scholars must necessarily delimit what they mean by the term. Manfred Steger offers a pithy definition of globalization that I have found particularly useful. According to Steger, globalization is “the myriad forms of connectivity that link the local (and national) with the global” and the “thickening of the ‘global-local-nexus.’”18 How those myriad forms of connectivity came into being, and their consequences, is the broadest outline for the story of post-World War II Mormonism in both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I turn now to the latter church's postwar story to briefly sketch how the RLDS Church became a “World Church.”In 1960, the RLDS Church debated and passed a resolution to rename their biannual “General Conference” as the “World Conference.” Almost immediately, church officials began to informally refer to their church as the World Church, a moniker that made it into conference speeches and official stationary. The term World Church aptly described church members’ aspirations rather than their contemporary realities. In 1960, the RLDS Church was overwhelmingly an American church, with most of its 174,000 members living in the US, and the vast majority in the midwestern US at that.19 Yet, over the course of the next thirty years, the church would attempt to live into its new name, becoming a global denomination. It did so in four ways.First, the World Church created a truly global reach after 1960 through missions; later establishing faith-based humanitarian NGOs. Before the 1960s, it had no mission presence in South and Southeast Asia, for example. After that time, it had a growing network of congregations in both India and the Philippines. To expand in both places, it relied upon indigenous ministers previously affiliated with other Christian denominations. These ministers were entrepreneurial agents who had cultivated global ties with American denominations, finally finding a reliable patron in the RLDS Church who sponsored the indigenous leaders’ missionary work.For example, Potenciano Carino was the general overseer of a small Adventist Church with ties to a rather fractious sponsoring Adventist Church in the United States, the Church of God, Seventh Day. In 1965, Carino joined the RLDS Church after corresponding with their apostles, and, perhaps most importantly, a friend and cousin who had married an RLDS woman in California. Over the next few years, Carino and a small cadre of former Church of God, Seventh Day ministers brought several hundred of their former congregants into the RLDS Church.20 In 1974, three of these ministers would become the inaugural board members for the church's first successful NGO, Community One Resource Development.21 The rapid establishment of NGOs in South Korea, the US, Nigeria, and India heralded that RLDS leaders in the US were shifting their understanding of the mission of their church in the late twentieth century. This paralleled similar moves by American Methodists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians whose proselytizing missions had largely become humanitarian missions by the late twentieth century.22Second, the RLDS Church created new ways for its adherents to relate to space. In the early 1960s, independent Indian Baptists in India out the church as a patron to with the of Christianity to Sora tribal people in the highlands of the in the state of The Sora who due to these missions their of space through of and two of economic and power had been by who as for who in the and caste who in the With the of the RLDS Church among the these as Sora became through a mission by RLDS This a cadre of who would become leaders in the Sora local and forms of social organization in Sora as who between church members and the American RLDS apostles, the latter the Sora with for in the Sora I have that this was an of the older in Sora and this within the structure of the RLDS Church as a global denomination. For the the American part of the RLDS Church became the new people of the even they a world Thus, globalization is “the compression of the world and the of of the world as a as Sora in such a of the RLDS Church Sora and Filipino into their global organization through a of that they as This from the first attempt by leaders of any Mormon to articulate a By RLDS leaders meant that their would be in a new place and to in the of that new and the to to American by the RLDS World that to the of within the itself be through forms of which are indigenous to the cultural patterns of the meant that churches in local be by indigenous leaders rather than American be Such the by Protestant in an These the church as of various in that the church, now as the World the RLDS Church neoliberal practices and that its aspirations to become a World Church that American cultural In this was in the of American new church leaders in India and the Philippines had to and account for to from the RLDS leaders be they did not such This was for the RLDS India national In officials at the church's from his he not account for to by the American-based RLDS for the World Sora leaders a similar has out that tribal often must by caste of and its Such that tribal are who do not how To these and power in the public tribal leaders often in that are for Indian and or for various to the of their This is the of a public official in places of state like rural Yet, in the late twentieth century, RLDS an such Indian practices as Thus, tribal church leaders were often between American and local realities. neoliberal practices the power of the American over churches at the of the RLDS my sketch of the RLDS Church as a World Church in the 1960s and I now offer a definition for what I call the global denomination. I not a definition that in but a one that can only be more or useful. By this I scholars like who particular case studies to offer more general and generalizable yet the that such can be I offer the as a one that that even with my definition itself produce new ways of about my importance of denominations as of to forms of transnational Christian the global denomination was an American creation that its American The global denomination was by the creation of transnational and transnational entrepreneurial the of its of time and space (and their to other and of among its and the global of neoliberal practices and processes, and These four markers of a global denomination be in various Christian the early modern for example, and their of the or even the of Jesus Yet, what I in this is the of such and the of a within a particular Christian organizational form after World War study of the RLDS Church in the post-World War II to this but I see it as for about the post-World War II Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day The Church created a network of missions and to the any emphasis on to America the last and a of the church to all the of to a more or across the and both and that neoliberal beyond the of the the particular of global denominationalism between the Church and the RLDS Church. For example, missionary of a few RLDS Church and practices of RLDS meant that and RLDS Yet, both churches the or general markers I have used to characterize the global what I have the post-World War II of other American-based denominations, such as the Church, the United Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and is to in the even these mainline Protestant denominations had a much more global network than any Mormon denomination in the War II I believe that denominations as denominations not be studied because they can be within they be studied because they are and have been of this the study of late global Mormon denominations is of the study of

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