Also, by the way, I am not trying to pretend that book a week does not exist. I am behind, but perhaps not hopelessly. Earlier tonight, I had three books started and, in fact, pretty close to finished. I just finished the first one. So I will write about it, and then maybe I'll go read some more of one of the other ones.
Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, by Suzanne Strempek Shea, tripped me up. I expected to really enjoy it; I expected it to be a page turner even if I didn't find it amazing and enlightening, for I am, as previously noted, a spiritual memoir junkie. But I started to dislike it pretty early in and eventually began to find it uninteresting on top of unlikeable. The fascinating-in-theory premise is that Strempek Shea spends a year visiting Christian, mostly protestant, churches all over the country and writes about her experiences--a chapter per church, averaging about 6 pages each. Had I thought about the premise a bit more before reading the book, or had Strempek Shea thought about it a bit more before trying to write it, it might have become clear to both of us that short chapters about 52 different churches don't really fit together easily into....well, a good book.
From the beginning, it's never entirely clear why Strempek Shea (who I'm going to refer to as SS from here on out) decides to undertake this spiritual quest at all. She grew up Roman Catholic, remained a steadfast and apparently largely unquestioning Catholic as an adult, and it's only well into her 40's that she goes off in search of alternatives. Why? Well, it has something to do with getting (and beating) cancer and something to do with watching John Paul II's funeral on TV and being impressed with the passion of his mourners. Also priests who molest kids. There's never really time to explain how all this led to an interest in protestantism, however, because there are those 52 churches to get to.
Now, is this a story of spiritual seeking or a sociological survey of the state of faith in America (how's that for alliteration?)? Well, both. And, so, neither is done very well. SS is careful to note the racial makeup of every.single.congregation she visits. But that's it. Everyone was white except for this one Asian guy. The church was almost entirely African American. Wait--this one was equally split between black and white. There's no commentary about this whatsoever. Yes, isn't it interesting how racial integration seems to happen last in churches? Why is this particular church different? We don't know, and SS doesn't offer any theories. She notes the racial composition (along with average age of congregants and number of people in the room) and moves on. We generally get a short history or description of each denomination, and then she moves on to a description of the worship service. At times I kind of felt like I was reading an interminable series of 4th grade book reports: summary of the worship service and then, invariably, a brief conclusion that boiled down to, "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." Her criticisms of certain churches annoyed me at times as well. She doesn't list being anti-gay or anti-abortion or excluding women from the priesthood among her reasons for rejecting Catholicism, but any church that mentions any of those issues in its service gets an automatic "didn't like." This is fine, except that I'm certain only a tiny percentage of the denominations she visited, including the ones she liked, are actually gay-friendly. Apparently it's okay to exclude gays and lesbians from church life as long as you don't talk about it during the service.
And this is what we're left with at the end of the book: a list of characteristics that SS has decided her "ideal church" would include, and then a cliched rumination that no church is perfect but there is some value in all of them, even the ones she didn't like.
To be fair, I think the format is the problem as much as SS's approach to it. Obviously, this is not how people actually look for a church. They don't find the city with the cheapest airfare (and, yes, this is how she actually picks many of the places she visits) and then find an interesting church on the internet. They don't go to one service and then move on to the next place, not lingering long enough to get any sense of what the community is like. They don't judge an entire denomination based on one worship service at one church.
And, so, to sum up, I was disappointed. I've spent a good bit of time church hopping myself, so I had hoped for a more interesting or thoughtful account of someone else's experiences with it.
This is why, by the way, I don't want to actually finish my books, I think. Because once I do, I seem to want to write ridiculously long reviews of them.
Next up: David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win and Michael Clay Thompson's Classics in the Classroom
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