Field Guide
to the
Wild World of Religion
2011 Edition
Pamela S. Dewey
Originally published 2005
Contents edited and updated for this 2011 Edition
Copyright 2012 Pamela Dewey,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
Field Guide to the Wild World of Religion Website
The companion website to this Field Guide book is at:
The website has a continually-growing collection of profiles of a variety of
individuals and groups which have been or are currently influential in the
Wild World of Religion.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
About the Author
Pam Dewey holds a BA in Education, magna cum laude, from Michigan State University, with graduate work emphasizing education, sociology, and psychology. Her popular Field Guide website provides information, documentation, and commentary on many religious teachers and groups.
ISBN-13:
978-1-4566-0722-7
Foreword
The American religious scene in 1955 was a very tame and predictable world. It matched the tame, predictable world of women’s clothing, where most women going out shopping wore a dress with coordinating gloves, hat, and shoes. And it matched the tame, predictable world of children’s toys, where almost every young girl yearned for a baby doll that said Ma-Ma, and almost every boy needed a coonskin cap. Choices of fashions, toys, preachers, and churches were limited and domesticated.
Fifty years later, the tame, predictable world of 1950s fashions and toys is long gone. Women go shopping in everything from sweatshirts and jeans to tube tops and short shorts. And both boys and girls want the latest Sponge Bob Square Pants video game. The same kind of transformation has gone on in the world of religion. It is no longer tame and predictable either.
Welcome to the Wild World of Religion of the 21st Century. Explore its habitats, identify some of the inhabitants, and learn about their characteristics and customs in this Field Guide.
Chapter 1
The Tame World of Religion
Drive through the side streets near the downtown section of any small American town or mid-sized city near noon on any Sunday morning, and you’ll notice a recurring phenomenon. Some of the intersections will boast two, three, or even four different large church buildings, one on each corner. One may be an imposing Roman Catholic Church with high, arched stained glass windows and a big statue of its “patron saint” out front. The other three will be different flavors of what are often referred to as “mainline Protestant” denominations: possibly Methodist, Lutheran, Christian Reformed, Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, or Presbyterian. All will look like they could hold several hundred people in their sanctuaries for the worship service.
But when the bells on the City Hall clock tower toll the noon hour, the group of people pouring out of the doors of each of these churches may well not be the crashing wave one might expect at all, but a mere trickle.
What is going on here? Is the population of the U.S. becoming mostly disinterested in religion? Wasn’t it different back when these church buildings were much newer?
Back to the Fifties
Indeed it was different, in one way. There would have been a time when most of these buildings would have been filled close to capacity. If you visited those same neighborhoods in 1955, you might well have found the sidewalks crammed to overflowing with families dressed in their Sunday best coming out of each of the churches. And in addition to the big churches on the main street corners, out at the edge of town you would have found one or two much smaller, much humbler little buildings. They, too, might have been filled close to capacity with worshippers. A hand-painted sign on the side of the buildings would announce that here was a “Pentecostal” or “Holiness” church. What they lacked in size, they would make up for in the enthusiasm and volume of their singing and shouting.
But the reality wasn’t exactly that there was much more deep “interest in religion” by the average American back in the Fifties. It was that attending church was much more of a cultural expectation in those days. A family planning a move to a new town would look for three things as soon as they settled on the purchase of their home—how close were the schools their children would attend, where was a convenient bank nearby, and what churches were nearby. Their choices would have been few and simple for all these. For the Fifties were, in many ways, a much simpler time in history.
Simpler times, Limited Choices
If you were a teenage boy in 1957, your choices at the barbershop would have been very simple. If your dad was recently in the Armed Services, chances were pretty good he would insist the barber give you a very close-cropped “crew cut.” If it was sheared straight across the top, it would be called a “flat top.” The other cut acceptable to most parents would have been only slightly longer on top, parted on one side, and combed neatly over, perhaps with a dab of Brylcreem to keep it looking neat all day. It was the sort of haircut that nice, clean-cut young singer/actor Pat Boone would wear.
For the adventurous young man wanting to be different, there was one other choice—if he could get past his parents’ protests. He could let the hair grow much longer on top so that it would tousle down over his forehead, and much longer on the sides so he could slick them back with a comb to meet in the back of his head (giving a distinct resemblance to the back end of a duck … thus the term “D.A.”). He might well have used not just a dab of Brylcreem to finish the look, but a whole gob of something even gooier. (Thus the label that some put on such young men … “Greasers.”) And, if he could grow them, long sideburns would finish the look. It was the sort of haircut that scandalous young singer/actor Elvis Presley would wear.
If you wanted to watch TV in the evening, your choices were likewise simple and few. Your TV would likely have had only one rotating channel selection dial, which went from 2-12. And that didn’t even mean you actually had a choice any time in the evening to watch 11 different programs. Your actual choices at any given time were only three. For there were only three networks—NBC, ABC, and CBS.
If you were a sports fan, there might be a few times during the week when one of these networks would be showing a sporting event. If you were a science fiction fan, your choices might have been even slimmer, with only one or two sci-fi shows available. If you liked national and world news, you would have to wait for the one hour in the evening when each of the networks ran their regular newscasts. And, no matter what your desire for programming, in most areas you’d have to just go on to bed at midnight. Most TV stations closed down transmission at that time, returning to the air with programming early the next morning.
If you were born after the 1950s, you may be surprised to learn that there really were national televangelists back in those days. However, like everything