168 Penny Edgell
The Religion and Family Project
The following discussion is based on data collected between 1998 and 2000 in four
communities in upstate New York as part of the Religion and Family project. The com-
munities are:
Liverpool.A metropolitan, white, professional/middle-class suburb outside of
Syracuse.
Northside.A metropolitan, working-class neighborhood in Syracuse.
Seneca County.A nonmetropolitan county with a stable agricultural base and a largely
working-class population.
Tompkins County.A nonmetropolitan county with a large central town that is eco-
nomically prosperous and a largely middle-class, professional population.
For this analysis, I draw on a telephone survey of pastors across all four commu-
nities (N=125, response rate 78 percent). Each telephone survey lasted between an
hour and an hour and a half. In addition to the survey, the project research team con-
ducted participant-observation and in-depth interviews with lay members in sixteen
congregations, four in each community. Focus groups of pastors were also run in each
community, with a total of forty-seven pastors participating. In this chapter, the qual-
itative work is used in two ways. It provides a comparison between informal rhetoric
and the formal discourse that is revealed through the survey responses. And it allows
me to validate and interpret the survey results.
These communities are in no sense a “microcosm” of American religion. The com-
munities are, on average, 94 percent white. There are four synagogues and only a few
congregations in historic black church traditions, and no predominantly Latino con-
gregations. There are several congregations with significant proportions of immigrants,
mostly from Asian countries. Moreover, if one were to design a study to be a micro-
cosm of American religion today, it would have to include not only congregations but
also the small groups, new religious movements, and loosely organized networks of
religious practice that constitute the broader “spiritual marketplace,” and that are not
represented in this sample (Roof 1999a; Wuthnow 1998).
These communities do, however, provide a good sample through which to examine
how a specific set of white, middle-class religious institutions, dominant in the 1950s,
have adapted to changes in work and family. These institutions of American mainline
religion comprise a large majority of those who are active participants in organized
religion in the United States, and they have retained a cultural dominance that has
given them influence far beyond their own membership (cf. Roof and McKinney 1987;
Wuthnow 1988). Comparisons with national data, where available, suggest that the
congregations in these four communities are similar to congregations across the country
both in size and in the distribution of programming.^4
(^4) Based on comparisons with National Survey of Congregations data and with data from the
Faith Communities Today project at Hartford Institute for Religion Research. See Becker
(forthcoming), Chapter 6, for details (also available on request.)