to be done. When these expectations are not met, the religious expressions
are not accepted as legitimate. Our analysis shows not only that two churches
with the same basic beliefs exhibited variations in expected local orders of
practice, but that these variations corresponded to the race and social class
aspirations of the membership.^8
In other words, there are practices that the parishioners treat as corresponding
with class and race in consequential ways. One of the two Assemblies of God
Churches, after moving from an urban to a suburban area, exhibited such
changes, even though the pastor and much of the membership did not change.
It was made clear that their new social class aspirations, and new location in
a white suburb, required abandoning old practices and adopting a new set of
practices geared toward the upward mobility of parishioners. This suggests
that aspects of religious practices, can be geared toward both supporting and
adapting to capitalist enterprise, while beliefs remain the same.
While Marx, Durkheim and Garfinkel are generally viewed as holding
opposing views on religion, they all considered knowledge and social order
to be the result of material relations; practice, or praxis. For each, the mistake
of reifying beliefs and abstractions and then substituting them for underly-
ing social relationships, threatened the understanding of modern social, reli-
gious and economic relations. Therefore, taking seriously the idea that religion
consists primarily of practices, and that beliefs are only a consequence of
those practices, has the potential to bring the positions of Marx and Durkheim
together with Garfinkel’s emphasis on practices in unexpected ways.
Pentecostal Worship as an Orderly Social Phenomenon
The high emotional content of Pentecostal worship services often makes them
appear to outsiders to be spontaneous and unorganized. They are in fact highly
orderly social events in specifiably detailed ways. Researchers have commented
on the contrast between the apparent disorder and the actual orderliness of
the services. John Wilson and Harvey Clow (1981:249) noted that, “Pentecostals
do not simply abandon themselves in their worship services. Instead there is
Speaking in Tongues: A Dialectic of Faith and Practice • 259(^8) See Bonnie Wright, “Producing Legitimate Expressions of the Spirit in the Context
of Racial Integration,” Journal for the Theory of Social BehaviorVolume 34(4) December
2005, for an extended discussion of this phenomenon. Among other changes, prac-
tices such as speaking in tongues were removed from Sunday services (done only on
Wednesdays) and parishioners were expected to adapt to this change.