Defining the “Good Family” in Local Congregations 167
sexuality (Glock 1993; Hunter 1991). Missing from this analysis is any sustained focus
on local religious communities and organizations and how they respond to changes
in work and family (see Ammerman and Roof 1995). This oversight is particularly
unfortunate because the relationships of dependency and control between religious
institutions and the family are enacted, reinforced, and changed primarily through
face-to-face interaction in two arenas: The family and the local congregation. Yet there
are relatively few studies of congregations that address these questions, and those that
have been done privilege the importance of a left-right dichotomy and the teleology
of modernization and religious decline on which it is based.^3
Other work suggests that, within local religious communities, a left-right dichotomy
may not be the dominant or organizing distinction, even on “hot button” issues such
as the family, gender roles, and sexuality (Becker 1997; Wedam 1997; Williams 1997a).
The practices of local congregations are organized around upholding religious truths,
and are informed by religious ideology. But they also are organized around a kind of
pragmatic imperative to provide a caring community for members and compassion-
ate outreach in the broader community (Ammerman 1997b). This can lead to more
commonality in local congregational rhetoric and practice across traditions than a
culture-wars thesis would predict (Becker 1999, 1998, 1997).
This new emphasis on congregational culture is part of a larger intellectual turning
toward the study of lived religious experience as a way to refine theories of religious
commitment, symbolic life, and organization that have been based heavily in studies
of official religious culture and discourse (Becker and Eiesland 1997; Hall 1997). This
parallels the shift in the sociology of culture away from studying culture as subjective,
discursive, and symbolic and toward understanding culture as practice, code, and in-
stitutional routine (DiMaggio 1994; Jepperson and Swidler 1994). Taken together, this
newer work suggests a focus on local religious practice as a way to examine the pro-
duction of ideology while at the same time exploring other factors that influence how
congregations respond to social change on even “hot button” issues like changes in the
family.
Based on a comparative study of 125 congregations in four upstate New York com-
munities, I show that, despite vast differences in official family ideology, the practice
of ministry in most local churches is still organized around a neopatriarchal nuclear
family with children. The cultural schema of the family institutionalized in the last
great religious expansion provides a powerful filter on how changes in the family af-
fect congregational life, and congregations remain strong exponents of a relatively
traditional familism in the era of what Furstenberg (1999) has called the “postmodern
family.” The exceptions are a few congregations organized around radically different,
and newer, family schema. These innovators, although small in number, are quite large
in membership and are influential in the local religious ecology, giving them a dispro-
portionate influence, and lending a legitimacy to the newer forms of ministry they are
developing.
(^3) Demmit (1992) studies an evangelical congregation that maintains an emphasis on male
“headship” in rhetoric while accommodating dual-earner families in practice. Marler (1995)
studies a liberal Protestant church which exhibits what she calls a “nostalgia” for the male-
breadwinner family of the past, and has accommodated work-family changes in ways she
argues are problematic for long-term growth and vitality.