In its issue of September 2015, Christianity Today, the banner periodical of Evangelical Protestantism, carried a story by Morgan Lee with the title “My Small Group Looks like Me.” It deals with an experiment by several mega-churches to combine maximal inclusiveness in major Sunday worship services with smaller groups meeting during the week to allow members of various ethnic groups to be by themselves and worship in their own languages. Groups mentioned consist of Latinos, Filipinos, South Asians, and Indonesians. Apparently this practice is spreading; the story mentions as examples New Life Fellowship in New York and Christ Fellowship Church in Miami. There is no intention to give up the large multi-ethnic Sunday services, because it is felt that they are important as witnessing to Christian unity. Also, the children of immigrant families like the large services; they enjoy the many programs for children and they have no problems with English (their parents often come along, even if they do have a language problem—they can have the opportunity later in the week to meet with other adults who “look like me”).
There is a sociological and a theological assumption behind the quest for inclusiveness. The sociological assumption is that the reason for the empirically verifiable effect that on Sunday morning there is “the most segregated hour of the week” (the phrase was first used by Martin Luther King) is white racial or ethnic prejudice. The theological assumption is that this is a sin. The sociological assumption is probably valid in many cases. The theological assumption calls for closer examination.
The sociological assumption omits what is certainly an important factor in the shortfalls of the inclusive ideal: Class. This may or may not overlap with race or ethnicity. Class of course correlates with level of education. It is difficult for individuals with doctoral degrees to be at ease socially with high-school dropouts (even if they are all dark-skinned and speak Spanish). Interaction between rich and poor, especially in a society with a strong egalitarian ethos, is prone to evoke feelings of guilt in the former and of envy in the latter. What comes in here very strongly is a distinctively American Protestant notion of “fellowship” equated with relaxed sociability: This is empirically difficult among people with very different levels of class—even if (perhaps especially if) they are told in sermons that they ought to try, and feel guilty if they don’t. By contrast, imagine a Catholic cathedral in, say, colonial Mexico. The ladies of the aristocracy might well attend Mass in reserved seats, while poorer women sit several rows farther back (the men of both classes may not attend at all—hay que ser hombre/”one has to be a man”). Everyone is focused on what happens at the altar. The two classes need not interact with each other at all. Things have become more complicated in the U.S.: The Protestant notion of congregational sociability has infected everyone else—Catholics, Jews, Buddhists. If you will, church picnics have become an interfaith institution. Conservative Catholics have called this process “Protestantization.”
If you put together religious pluralism (many faiths and moralities co-existing in the same society) with religious freedom, you enable something that looks very much like the American denomination—that is, a voluntary association in competition with other such associations. In America every religion becomes a denomination—even Judaism, perhaps the least likely to develop this kind of religious institution. For most of its history Judaism was simply the faith of the Jewish people; an individual did not choose this faith, but was involuntarily born into it. In America there are now at least 5 Jewish denominations—Modern Orthodox, Haredi Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist—and more if you count in the different Hasidic schools, each of which acts as a kind of denomination. Is the following joke really about “Protestantization”? – An American Jew is stranded alone on an island. He somehow manages to use driftwood to build two synagogues—one in which he prays, the other in which he wouldn’t be caught dead.
The theological assumption is that when the Apostles’ Creed speaks about the “communion of saints”, what is meant is ordinary sociability in the here and now. That is questionable. The Church, described as the communion of saints, is the “mystical body of Christ”, including both the living and the dead—a supernatural rather than an empirical entity. It is not incidental that the term “communion” in the Creed is the same word that also refers to the Eucharist. I would not be misunderstood here: I am not suggesting a theological orthodoxy, which insists that Christians today must be rigidly bound by what the early Church taught and practiced. But if one understands that it is unrealistic to force people who have nothing in common in this world to enjoy relaxed sociability, it is useful to have a theological rationale for not feeling guilty about this. It is one thing to ex-communicate someone from the sacrament of the altar for some egregious moral failure (such as racism), it is quite another thing to ask an individual to stop attending meetings of the ladies’ altar guild because of her atrocious taste in flowers.