The Big Sort (25 page)

Rick Warren's account of how he founded Saddleback Church is a set piece of megachurch lore.
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Warren wrote that in the summer of 1979, he "practically lived in university libraries doing research on the United States census data." Concentrating on four counties in California, he eventually "discovered" that the Saddleback region of Orange County was the fastest-growing end of the nation's fastest-growing county. "This fact grabbed me by the throat and made my heart start racing," Warren wrote. He would plant his church in the Saddleback Valley—and he would start it using the church growth techniques pioneered by Donald McGavran.

Warren and his wife moved to Orange County in December 1979. He studied maps and realized that the county "already had many strong, Bible-believing churches." (This was, after all, the home of Robert Schül-lers massive Crystal Cathedral and had been a conservative Evangelical refuge for more than a generation.) Warren spent his first twelve weeks going door-to-door, listening. His seat-of-the-pants market survey helped the young minister, as he described the process, "build a bridge to the unchurched." This was McGavran's metaphor, of course, taken straight from his 1955 book. Warren was out to bring the "peoples" of the Saddleback Valley into the faith. To do that, the young minister needed to break down the cultural barriers between this group and his church.

Warren practiced what he called "targeted evangelism." Based on his research into what sorts of people were moving to this booming area, he composed a composite portrait of the "unchurched" person he expected to attract to his church. And he named him: Saddleback Sam. Saddleback Sam was in his thirties or forties. He was college educated, married (to Saddleback Samantha, naturally), liked contemporary music, preferred casual dress, and had little free time. The picture of Saddleback Sam in Warren's book is of a white guy on a cell phone wearing a middle-age-baggy pair of pleated pants. Having identified his tribesman, Warren went to work breaking down the barriers between his church and Sam. He made the services shorter and tighter. He invested in the best sound system and musicians. He built the best daycare center and made sure there was plenty of parking. Warren didn't wear a suit or a turned-around collar. Formal dress made Saddleback Sam antsy. So Warren filled his closet with a collection of floral shirts.

Warren doesn't claim that any of what he did at Saddleback was new. All of these techniques—including the use of small groups—were there for anyone to see in the church growth literature. What
was
new, however, was the application of techniques used to overcome cultural barriers in the Third World to the new world of American suburbia. Like those on the political right who discovered the new politics bubbling up in places like Kanawha County, West Virginia, Warren didn't start a movement. Nobody tricked millions of people into attending churches like Saddleback and Second Baptist in Houston. The genius of Rick Warren and Edwin Young was in understanding the people filling the new neighborhoods being created by the Big Sort and in designing a church just for them.

A few months before the 2004 election, I asked Martin Marty what was distinctive about church life today, forty years after the "collapse of the middle." In Marty's view, the hugely successful church growth movement had undermined the church's older purpose—that of building community. Churches were once built around a geographic community, Marty said. Now they are constructed around similar lifestyles. "A huge element in retention of loyalty and acquisition of new church members can be summarized in a very simple phrase: a choice of a way of life," Marty said. "The great tragedy of it all is that. I've always argued that what society needs are town meeting places where people with very different commitments can meet and interact. Churches have been that. If you're a Methodist and you move to Des Moines, Iowa, and you get to the nearest Methodist church, thirty or forty years ago you would have an open encounter. People who were pro-Bush or pro-Kerry would talk. Fertilization would go on. Now it simply doesn't happen."

The two United Methodist churches in central Austin are a twelve-minute drive apart. Tarrytown United Methodist is your rich uncle's church. People at Tarrytown still dress up on Sunday. When the service started the Sunday morning I visited, the music was Handel, and it rumbled out of a gut-shaking pipe organ. Tarrytown counts among its members the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry. Tarrytown, it so happens, was also the home of the previous Republican governor of Texas, President George W. Bush. Just a few miles away at Trinity United Methodist, the service kicked off with the congregation singing and swaying to Sting's mystical anthem "Love Is the Seventh Wave." Trinity made a point of welcoming worshipers regardless of "sexual orientation" or "sexual identity." The Sunday I visited, the Reverend Sid Hall was continuing a series of talks on medieval female mystics.

Not everyone at Tarrytown is a Republican. (A minister there told me that Tarrytown was the church home of a few Jesse Jackson supporters.) Nor are all the members of Trinity Democrats. But it's hard to imagine Rick Perry or George W. Bush going to Trinity, a church that identifies itself in its literature as being of the "cultural left," a church that promotes "social and ecological justice." And there is about a zero chance that any member of Trinity would trade Sting for Handel or talks about mystical Christianity for the straight-pew formality and by-the-book liturgy at Tarrytown. These are two different "peoples" in the McGavran sense, and both are quite homogeneous.

Trinity is an older church, closer to the center of town than to Austin's procreating suburbs. When Hall arrived in 1989, the membership was aging, the services were traditional, and few new people were coming in the door. Trinity was a textbook example of the disappearing middle in American religion. Hall told me that he began to "reach out" to the neighborhood. He opened the church for public meetings about the redevelopment of an abandoned airport nearby. He started a parents' night out. Hall attended these evening events, sticking around afterward to talk with the people who wandered in from the neighborhood. He noticed that the people he was meeting didn't look like those in Trinity's pews on Sunday. The neighborhood, just north of the University of Texas, was changing, and, Hall observed, the new people moving in "tended to be cultural left." Trinity changed "almost by accident," Hall said, because it began to reflect the cultural transformation of the neighborhood. Hall, who describes himself as "left leaning," welcomed the politically liberal folks who were attracted to central Austin. Eventually, some of these folks joined the church. These new members wanted Trinity to openly embrace gays and lesbians. At the time, a "reconciling" movement had begun in the Methodist Church. Some congregations were voting to support "full participation" of gay and lesbian church members—which included marriage. In 1992, Trinity voted to become a "reconciling" church, only the fifty-eighth Methodist church in the country to do so.

Like does attract like, just as McGavran and his Fuller colleague Peter Wagner said. After Hall changed the political and cultural tenor of Trinity, it began attracting the left-leaning people moving into the neighborhood. Trinity tipped from standard Methodism to something else. Like Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, Trinity now breaks down into smaller groups, but they are geared toward the kind of people who go to that church. There is a "social justice initiative" (the church is filled with activists) and the "Trinity Triangle," for gay and transgendered members. Trinity has even held weeknight courses on the meaning of the tarot. "We have some Wiccans who are part of the congregation, and that works," Hall said. "When I take the
Beliefnet.com
test, I always come out 'neo-pagan,' so who knows."

Trinity changed because the old-style church—the delivery of a standardized denominational liturgy to all comers—no longer worked. By 2004, Trinity had only eight members who were with the church when Hall arrived. "The church would be dead if we hadn't redefined ourselves," Hall told me. "It wasn't a lack of caring or anything else. But if we had stayed a kind of general Methodist church, then why would you go? Our parents would have gone [to the closest]...Episcopal or Methodist or Presbyterian [church],...but those of us who came after, we're more discriminating. Denominational labels don't mean that much."

There is no longer national "brand loyalty" in regard to religion. There are, however, local micro-brands. Ministers "try to market their church, to find a niche, whether it's being open to gays or lesbians or being strong as a pro-life church," Henry Brinton, an author and Presbyterian minister in northern Virginia, told me. "It's really finding a niche in the religious marketplace and then exploiting it." A minister's job these days entails more than transforming the spiritual lives of congregants. A minister keeps his pulpit by providing the type of services expected by his particular niche market. Trinity became a "reconciling" church, the name Methodists use to describe gay-and-lesbian-friendly congregations. Lutheran churches of the same persuasion are "reconciling-in-Christ." Presbyterians have "more light" congregations. The United Church of Christ has "open and affirming" churches. Some Unitarian churches call themselves "welcoming." And there is an "Evergreen" association within the Baptist Church. What tells more about a church these days, its denomination or whether there's a little rainbow flag attached to its welcome sign? The answer is the flag. Just as the political differences among states are not as great as the political differences among communities, the greatest political disparities are among individual churches, not denominations. Forget whether the church is Baptist or Episcopalian. The important question is whether the service begins with praise music, Handel, or Sting.

The discussion going into and coming out of the 2004 presidential election was about the relationship between church attendance and voting. Sixty percent of those who attended church once a week voted Republican in both 2000 and 2004. But that rough statistic misses what's happening within communities and within churches. Trinity's members go to church once a week, and they vote Democratic. Tarrytown's members also go to church every Sunday, and that home to Texas Republican governors, the minister told me, "tends to steer to the right." The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in the late 1950s, "The most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning." King was referring to racial segregation, and his observation may be as true now as it was then. But today eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is
politically
segregated, too. In the late 1990s, Diana Mutz, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist, surveyed people about their partners in political discussions. "Overwhelmingly, people said the people they met in church were extremely homogenous with them politically," Mutz reported. Church congregations, she wrote, exhibit "strong, extreme homogeneity." There is political discussion within churches, Mutz found, but because it takes place among like-minded people, the discussion tends to reinforce the beliefs of the group. Thus, the result of political discussion in a church built around homogeneous units is greater homogeneity in attitudes.
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The University of Akron's John Green has conducted polls about religion and politics since the early 1990s. Rates of church attendance have been a crude way to measure faith and politics; Green has dug deeper. He asks about the nature of personal beliefs—for example, is the Bible inerrant?—and uses this information to classify respondents as traditionalist, centrist, or modernist.
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A traditionalist Protestant church member would attend church often and believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. A traditional Catholic would fully accept the authority of the pope. The Second Baptist Church in Houston is a traditionalist church. In 1999, for example, during the festival of Divali, the church distributed a booklet warning that Hindus were under the "power of Satan."
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The church is "famous for its extensive program of (conservative) political activity," and a picture of George W. Bush hangs on the wall in the church's office.
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By contrast, Trinity United Methodist's exploration of "creation spirituality ... an eclectic tradition that honors women's wisdom and the cosmologies of indigenous cultures around the planet" might resonate with a modernist mainline church member.

When Green used those designations of belief to examine voters, he found the real religious divide. Thirty-two percent of modernist Evangelicals were Republican in 2004, compared to 70 percent of traditionalist Evangelicals. Similarly, 26 percent of modernist mainline church members were Republican, compared to 59 percent of traditionalist mainline church members. The categories formed a straight-line trend: the more traditional a person's religious beliefs, the more Republican his or her political beliefs.
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Voters who considered the Bible the inerrant Word of God were odds-on members in good standing of the Republican Party. Put a candidate in place of a generic party label, and the divide becomes even deeper. In the spring of 2004, Green found that among likely voters, a whopping 81 percent of traditionalist Evangelicals planned to vote for George W. Bush. Modernist evangelicals, however, favored John Kerry by more than 8 percentage points. Traditionalist mainline churchgoers favored Bush by 34 points. Modernist mainliners favored Kerry by 41.6 points.
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As Americans have sorted themselves geographically, they've sorted themselves religiously, too—and just as unconsciously. "People don't say, 'What's the most Republican church in town?'" Green explained to me. "They say, 'Where is the church that is most like me?' Which means that nine out of ten people in the church are going to be Republican. And it happens with liberals as well." The large churches, most of which follow McGavran's church growth techniques, are almost invariably traditionalist. Only 7 percent of the 1,210 megachurches counted in 2005 described themselves as "moderate." (That's as far to the left as the designations went.) Eight out of ten fell into traditionalist categories—charismatic, Pentecostal, fundamentalist.
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By Rick Warren's estimation, 85 percent of the Saddleback Sams and Samanthas in his church voted for Bush in 2004.
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