No protest

Here's a book I'm really enjoying. Suzanne Strempek Shea is a Catholic writer, raised in a strong Polish community in New England, and yet somewhat estranged from the Church. So she decides to do what the priests and nuns warned her not (on pain of damnation!) to do: every Sunday for a year she will attend a different non-Catholic church.

My goal is to experience the services as a worshipper who's just wandered inside, rather than as a special guest on a mission. I won't phone ahead and ask for a press kit, nor will I mention my project while there. I want to get the first-timer's first impression, and will rely on a single visit to harvest that.

In each case, she describes how the place looks, how people are dressed, who (if anyone) greets her and how, and the service. Her descriptions start journalist and end subjective - what surprised her, what moved her, what didn't - a nice balance, though I can imagine not all readers will find her as interesting a witness. Her curiosity is genuine, and she is open to receiving spiritual nourishment everywhere she goes. (It's probably because I enjoy this kind of church visiting that my usual scholar's scruples don't kick in. She's not teaching a course after all!)

I'm seven Sundays in, and it's been a fascinating journey so far: she's already been to a wider range of churches than I ever have!

New Mount Zion Baptist Church, New York, NY
Colorado Springs Cowboy Church, CO
First Baptist Church, Spartanburg, SC
Arch Street Friends Meeting House, Philadelphia, PA
First Church of Christ Scientist, Boston, MA
St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church, Newport, RI
Cadet Chapel, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY

Don't mind that she said she was going to explore the varieties of Protestantism; it's really all "the 'banned' Christian faiths of [her] childhood" (xi) she's given herself permission to visit, which is everything non-Catholic. To a traditionally raised Catholic I suppose all the other varieties of American Christianity were no more than varieties of the well-meaning but mistaken promise of "Protestantism." (I used to think that, I confess...) And I suppose if you take the long Catholic view, the Great Schism was a mistaken reformation too, Protestantism avant la lettre! (Mark Noll made the same point, though appreciatively, in his Evangelical Protestant history of the church, Turning Points.)

But Shea's unsophisticated religious curiosity is part of what makes this book so engaging. It's not just a pilgrimage to all those churches one sees when traveling but never has occasion or nerve to enter, American Christianity in all its plainspoken mystery. In its openness, Sundays in America is itself a fruit of America's pluralistic - dare I say "Protestant" - religious culture.