Sampling a religious buffet
Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith
By Suzanne Strempek Shea
Beacon, 311 pp., $24.95
If you have painful childhood memories of being dragged to church Sunday after Sunday when you really wanted to be at the playground, be warned that "Sundays in America" might trigger nightmares. Suzanne Strempek Shea engaged voluntarily in what you were forced to do. She worshiped at 50 different churches, week in and week out, albeit with more commitment than your parents imposed on you: She left her home in Western Massachusetts and crisscrossed the country to sample denominations.
Her titular road trip came on the heels of the 2005 wake for Pope John Paul II, which mesmerized Shea with the devotion demonstrated by the mourners. A Roman Catholic who'd been raised to believe that non-Catholics were doomed to that great barbecue joint below, she'd come to feel spiritually adrift as an adult and was envious of the passion displayed for the late pontiff and his religion. She decided to church-hop for a year, sampling one service each Sunday at non-Catholic Christian houses of worship, searching for the engine that powers spiritual faith.
A former journalist, Shea luxuriates in visual descriptions of each stop on her itinerary. She's a catchy writer who uses "octopus" as a verb and "William Safire" as an adjective, and her factoids can be as interesting as her word choices. (Quaker Philadelphia in the 1730s was the only place in the British Empire that permitted public Catholic Masses, she reminds us.) She keeps her tongue in her cheek at appropriate moments, as when noting Mormons' abandonment of polygamy in 1890: "That's when, coincidentally and simultaneously, the federal government threatened to seize temples, and God told the [Mormon] Church to change its beliefs."
But with only one visit per church on which to base judgment, Shea's is a deliberately impressionistic survey, and there are no surprises in her findings. First Baptist Church in Spartanburg, S.C., offends her with its "take-no-prisoners fundamentalism . . . rejection of opposing views, and disdain for the secular." Baltimore's St. Sebastian, a church of "independent" Catholics who've broken with Rome, delights her with its embrace of gay people and female ordination.
She's bored by the Mormon worship she attends in South Royalton, Vt., though her observation underscores the limits of parachuting in for a single service; as any churchgoer knows, even the most dynamic congregation can have an off day. By the time she visits Saddleback Church in California, best known as the flock of pastor and "Purpose Driven Life" author Rick Warren, she has recognized that while she wants intimacy in worship, "maybe that's a different thing for everybody."
Precisely. It shouldn't take 300-plus pages and 50 church visits to realize that. While Shea's an agreeable tour guide, she does get repetitive. And what does she conclude at the end of her road trip? I'm not giving away anything by saying that her ideal church would be a composite of the best ones she visited, "a community that welcomed me warmly, didn't give a whit about my politics or lifestyle, gave tons of whits about the social justice needs locally and beyond, contained little-to-no hierarchy . . . offered a spiritual message inspired by love rather than by fear, and did all this in an art-filled place that rang with awesome music."
I find little if anything to disagree with there. Even so, "Sundays in America" ran to such length that it left me flashing back to my toddlerhood in New Jersey and that first, interminable Mass at Blessed Sacrament.
Contact Rich Barlow at barlow81@gmail.com. 