Defining the “Good Family” in Local Congregations 177
Churches in the 1950s were organized largely around the Ozzie and Harriet lifestyle. To-
day, middle-class families are like the Huxtables, with two working parents, overachiev-
ing children, and a sense of tenuousness that Ozzie and Harriet never felt. Working-class
families have never fit the Ozzie and Harriet ideal to begin with. Single parents, adults
who live singly for long stretches of their lives, married couples who choose not to have
children, and gay and lesbian unions – these are not even on the map in the Ozzie and
Harriet world.
Lakoff (1996) argues that cultural models of the family provide anchoring schema
that organize other social and political divisions throughout our society, and that struc-
ture many of our institutions. Sewell (1992) makes a similar theoretical case for the role
of schema in anchoring social structures and in serving as filtering mechanisms through
which new information – including the effects of social change – are interpreted. For the
religious institutions that expanded so rapidly in the postwar era by organizing min-
istry around the nuclear, male-breadwinner family, this remains an anchoring schema
for congregational life. Most congregations that have adapted to changes in work and
family have done so in a partial, incremental way, and most innovations revolve around
facilitating new nuclear family arrangements.
The categories of “liberal” and “conservative,” although helpful for understand-
ing the official beliefs, doctrines, and theology that inform pastors’ views of the family,
prove less helpful in understanding informal, locally based rhetorics about family life or
the daily practice of family ministry. Local practices, and the interpretive frameworks
applied to them, are rooted in a common family model that lends a fair amount of
uniformity to local ministry and local culture. At the local level, both liberals and con-
servatives buffer their ministry not only from the more fundamental changes in family
life that have occurred since the 1950s but also from the more radical implications of
their own traditions’ theology and family ideology.
This buffering takes place because of the dependencies fostered by interinstitutional
linkages. This dependency, however, is not just a matter of resource flow. Interinstitu-
tional dependencies are a source of anchoring schema and, in turn, a source of limi-
tation on how adaptation to social change occurs within an institutional arena. Such
interdependencies may be decoupled from “official” discourse, to be expressed at the
level of analysis at which the practical interdependency is most acutely felt. In this case,
that is the local congregation, the arena where religion and family are most tightly in-
tertwined. Such practical interdependencies can shape how official beliefs, core values,
and ideologies are expressed – or fail to be expressed – in the institutional routines
within any given set of organizations, and thereby have an effect on the larger institu-
tional field.
Sociologists of religion need to study local religious rhetoric and practice, and in
so doing, incorporate the insights gained from such analyses into the field’s domi-
nant theoretical frameworks. The reactions of these local congregations to changes
in the family exhibit none of the dynamism and responsiveness of a market, nor do
they exhibit a kind of means-ends instrumental rationality (Stark and Finke 2000).
Rather, evangelical Protestants respond to change in the family with a kind of value-
rationality that resists any fundamental reworking of the ideal family they believe
is based in Scripture. And mainline Protestants and Catholics exhibit the kind of
“habitual” rationality of the bureaucracy, valuing past ways of doing things for their
own sake. Our theories of the religion field need to account for the multiple forms