The Spirit's Tether

In this book, Mary Ellen Konieczny explores whether and how local religious cultures evince and contribute to moral polarization among churchgoers over issues of marriage, family, and work. Her interest in this topic springs from her conviction that the so-called culture wars evident in the United States today are not waged primarily by elites, but rather are enacted in the day-to-day, lived religious practices of ordinary Americans. To investigate the veracity of her conviction, Konieczny spent 20 months conducting ethnographic research of two Midwestern Catholic parishes, selected as ideal-typical cases of theologically polar parishes. Through her masterful and thorough description of how the religious cultures in these congregations influence the lives, perspectives, and identities of the parishioners, she is able to conclude that moral polarization is, indeed, constituted on the local level. In the first part of the book, Konieczny describes her two cases—Our Lady of Assumption and Saint Brigitta—and shows how their distinct religious cultures are based on different congregational metaphors and discourses expressed during worship. At the “retraditionalized” Assumption Church, the dominant congregational metaphor is the holy family, which is expressed through a more formal liturgy that evokes a transcendent image of God, emphasizes “orthodox” Church teachings on marriage and sexuality, and idealizes traditional gender roles within the family. In contrast, at the more progressive St. Brigitta Church, the dominant metaphor is the church as a community of equals, which is expressed through its more casual, participatory style of worship that accentuates an immanent God who dwells within the community and its dialogue homilies that stress social justice and equality. Through listening to the parishioners' “narratives of belonging to the church,” Konieczny observes how parishioners' engagement with these distinct religious cultures leads them to fashion new, parish-specific religious identities. Because she finds that parishioners often define the boundaries of what it means to be authentically Catholic by criticizing either other Catholics (as is common at Assumption) or the institutional church (as is common at St. Brigitta), she argues that these religious identities polarize Catholics and intensify the culture wars in the larger society.

Conviction · Liturgy · Metaphor · Political science · Sociology · Theology · Worship · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies