Defining the “Good Family” in Local Congregations 165
newer family schema that is more open to alternative family forms and work-family
strategies.
This analysis sheds light on questions that occupy sociologists across the subfields
of religion, culture, and organizations. For sociologists of religion, this confirms that
the culture-wars thesis does not provide an adequate map of the cultural and moral
cleavages that structure local religious life (cf. Becker 1999, 1998, 1997; Wedam 1997).
The dominant family schema in these congregations cross-cuts the liberal-conservative
divide, reducing the impact of this ideological division on family rhetoric and family
ministry. The production of religious ideology at the local level is shaped by official
ideology and discourse, and also by the institutional and contextual embeddedness of
local religious practices, and other sources of discourse that can be creatively blended
with religious discourses at the local level to bring about ideological change (cf. Bass
1994).
For sociologists of culture and those who take an institutional approach to the study
of organizations, this analysis provides an important specification of the level of anal-
ysis at which anchoring schema operate and outlines the mechanisms through which
schema serve as filters on organizational change within a particular institutional arena
(Sewell 1992; Greenwood and Hinings 1996). A focus on anchoring schema as institu-
tional filters also enables a critique of market-based analyses of religious institutional
change by identifying cultural models that do more than shape supply and demand,
but also organize action within some portions of the field in ways that embody a value-
rational approach to action (cf. Stark and Finke 2000).
The Family as Anchoring Schema
In the 1950s, the growing economy, the rapid expansion of the postwar suburbs, and
the beginning of the baby boom all contributed to century-high levels of church at-
tendance. This was the decade when Will Herberg (1960) could argue that an ecumeni-
cal spirit had triumphed over earlier sectarian divisions and that being a Protestant,
a Catholic, or a Jew were three legitimate ways to express an American identity. More
specifically, these became three ways to express a white, middle-class American identity
or identity-aspirations, along with the social status and legitimacy thereby implied.
The 1950s was a decade of prosperity, expansion, and rapid institution-building
for the largely white denominations of which Herberg wrote (Ellwood 1997; Hudnut-
Buemler 1994). In the postwar suburbs of white America, record numbers of families
attended weekly worship. These families used congregations, along with schools and
other voluntary groups, as part of a larger institutional repertoire for constructing a life
that embraced the nuclear, male-breadwinner family model and the lifestyle associated
with it (Dobriner 1958). This pattern of church attendance spanned middle-class and
working-class communities, promoting the male-breadwinner family as an ideal, if not
an actual fact^1 (Bell 1958; Dobriner 1958; Fishburn 1991; May 1999; Mowrer 1958;
Nash and Berger 1962; Thomas 1956; Warner 1962a, 1962b).
(^1) Of course, even in the 1950s, with a century-high peak in nuclear family households, most
families’ lives did not fit this ideal, and some have argued that this model of the family was
from the beginning a form of nostalgic cultural construction (Coontz 1992; Meyerowitz 1994;
Skolnick 1991).