Who, what, where, when, but why?

Surveys say that not many journalists go to church, but lately an awful lot of journalists have written books about going to church. As it happens, they are not journalists who habitually go to church themselves. Radier, they are prodigals who come back to church on a trial basis after years away; or they are outsiders who enter into the "experience" of church for a limited time only in the hope of discovering why people would go to church without a writing assignment to lure them there.

To come to such books as a journalist and a habitual churchgoer myself is to despair at how contrived these works are, and at the way the authors and their publishers embrace the contrivances as the heart and soul of the books. The setup is more or less as follows. The journalist introduces himself or herself as a person who writes on assignment--magazine articles, book contracts--and who has practiced journalistic standards of detachment and skepticism until they- have become habits of character. In paying an extended visit to church, though, the journalist is not just reporting on a subject; this time out, he is al so on a spiritual quest, an encounter with religion as such, in which his journalist's values will be put to the test. Whether or not the spiritual quest is genuine, it is a very useful device for the journalist. It lends drama to the proceedings, giving the work the shape of a wrestling with the angel. At the same time it assures the presumably secular reader that he or she is in the company of a like-minded soul, one who is wary of religion and who, being a good journalist, will be properly skeptical of church people and their doings.

The many recent books of this sort will be familiar to Commonweal readers, for although they are cast as reports filed from the religious front and meant for the secular reader, I suspect that in fact most of their readers are church people themselves. I have not read Dan Wakefield's Returning (Penguin, 1989), but an Easter Sunday magazine excerpt left me feeling warm inside. Three books that followed it--Patricia Hampl's Virgin Time Ballantine, 1993), Ari L. Goldman's The Search for God at Harvard (Bantam, 1992), and Samuel G. Freedman's Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (HarperCollins, 1993)--worked popular variations on what sociologists call the participant-observer method, and all three were weakened by the authors' struggles to sort out their motives for being in church. Freedman was so determined to portray the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood's Brooklyn congregation as an uplifting example of black life that he sidestepped hard questions about the congregation as an example of Christian life. Hampl, who strictly speaking is more poet than journalist, tried to reduce Catholicism to a very personal poetry of the spirit, and Catholicism resisted. Goldman wrote movingly about his conflicts as a modern Orthodox Jew, but depicted the Christians he met at Harvard Divinity School as a gallery of grotesques: the political radical, the lesbian, the person of color, and so on.

Now, there is nothing wrong with journalists having mixed motives in going to church. God writes straight with crooked lines, and so do great artists. The problem is that these writers (except Freedman at his beso, having elevated the impulses that led them to church to the order of a spiritual quest, lack the religious vocabulary and habits of mind that would enable them to make sense of the experience. They find that the journalistic approach isn't adequate to their experience of church--which is no surprise, for it was their sense of the limits of journalism that led them to church in the first place. They find that Christianity is more complicated than they had supposed--but they are on deadline, and don't have the time or the inclination to undertake ongoing training in Christianity. They have set themselves up on the road to Damascus with nothing to guide them but last week's magazines. One can hardly blame them for their predicament, for arguably it was the task of the Christians they met to train them in Christianity. But one can wish that these writers had felt obligated to become as knowledgeable about Christianity as they would have become about baseball, or economics, or foreign policy if that were their subject.

The two best recent books in which a journalist pays a visit to church are those in which the journalist's relationship to the church and its beliefs is clearest. To write In Mysterious Ways: The Life and Death of a Parish Priest (Avon, 1992), Paul Wilkes contacted the Archdiocese of Boston, "asking to be put into contact with any priests who were suffering a life-threatening illness and faced imminent death. My idea was to do a documentary film and a book--a modern-day corollary to Georges Bernanos's spiritual classic, 7he Diary of a Country Priest--following a parish priest as he lived his last days." It takes your breath away: he is going to exploit a dying stranger for the sake of a literary parallel! Fortunately, Wilkes was put in touch with Father Joe Greer, a charming man who fought cancer but lived to lead his parish again. Depicting this priest, Wilkes all but closed the gaps between observer and participant, journalist and co-religionist, for he was able to draw on his knowledge of Catholicism and his lifetime of experience in New England parishes. The contrived structure of his project fell away, replaced by writing that had real empathy and authority.

Mike Bryan hoped to keep the gap between journalist and believer as wide as possible. He was a journeyman writer and an unreflective liberal when he enrolled in Criswell College, a seminary allied with First Baptist Church in Dallas, in order to write Chapter and Verse: A Skeptic Revisits Christianity (Penguin, 1992). The book begins as a predictable look at Evangelical culture in the state where, as Bill Moyers once said, there are more Baptists than there are people. As Bryan discovered, however, evangelicalism resists being reduced to its culture, and insists on confronting the skeptic with its claims about the Lord Jesus Christ. "We have to insist on the Cross and Resurrection as the starting point for people corning to the Lord," the seminary's president told Bryan, hoping to convert him as he would anyone else. Bryan wanted to write a book about Evangelicals; they wanted for him to be born again. So Bryan was forced to ask himself what he believed. Why was the world made? What is man's purpose? He was a quick study, and soon he was reading William James and Elaine Pagels with the Evangelicals' critiques of them lodged in his brain. He never quite forfeited his journalist's detachment, nor was he born again; but the Baptists' frank and clear faith led him to reckon seriously with Christianity, and turned his book project into an authentic spiritual quest.

There is probably no church in America less like First Baptist Dallas than the First Church in Windsor, Connecticut. When Gary Dorsey joins the community at the beginning of Congregation (Viking, $24.95, 388 pp.), it is a 360-year-old church of the United Church of Christ, once Congregationalist, "a place of hard pews and stale air" like hundreds of other mainline churches in New England. Its membership is affluent but aging, its church building is treasured but in need of new clapboards and a fresh coat of paint, and its finance committee is about to begin a million-dollar capital fund drive that it sees as a referendum on the church's prospects for the next century.

If First Church is a typical mainline congregation, Dorsey is a typical journalist on a visit to church, and he makes this fact the organizing principle of his book. He begins by assuring his readers that he won't subject them to a preachy conversion narrative. He is just a journalist. "I have no interest in 'ancestor worship,' no regard for religion's frozen bolts of paradox or biblical injunctions chiseled in stone," he declares. "Probably like you, I am mostly curious, oblique, undisciplined, largely unoriginal." Then he gives account of his supposedly unoriginal religious experience. "Born and baptized Protestant, I became an agnostic, turned mystic, self-actualized, individuated, joined the Quakers, opted out--the usual course for my generation in the American psychoreligious carnival."

An ordinary man and an ordinary journalist, he comes to First Church because

he seeks an ordinary church for his book.

But not just that: like those who have gone

before him, he seeks a context for his encounter

with religion as such. As he seeks,

so he finds. In the course of things, he will

see First Church as everything but a church.

It is a "Sunday-morning roadhouse," one

of America's "original shrines of folk

art." It is an "erotic place," a "place of uncommon

intimacy," of "connection and

dependence." It is "a small place where

wonder [is] familiar."

There is a facile straining for the transcendent

in these formulations. They are

cast in the "spiritual" vocabulary of a person

who is unfamiliar with the hard sociological

explanations for why people go

to church and who is wary of the religious

ones (those bolts of paradox and biblical

injunctions). They are attempts to retrofit

the language of an observer so that it describes

the experience of a participant.

They are meant to inspire and edify, to

quicken the pulse, to open the reader's

heart, if only for a few hours, to the elusive

charms of religion as such.

In fact, they make Congregation a dully

ordinary book. But it is a honest book and

one with its own small fascinations, and

these have to do with its ordinariness. For

Dorsey unwittingly makes clear how thoroughly

the congregation he is writing

about shares his outlook. At First Church,

the experience of church is a reckoning

with religion as such, and the participant-observer

approach is the closest thing

there is to a public theology, as fundamental

to church life as the hymns and the coffee

hour.

The congregation itself comes

straight from central casting: Suddenly

they came striding across the

yard, dodging traffic in the street,

strolling through the cemetery,

dressed in dark suits and woolly

red-and-blue tartans: the old guard,

a batch of newcomers wearing boutonnieres,

widowers and newlyweds,

alcoholics and mothers of

alcoholics, winners in the stock market,

women battling breast cancer,

men fighting mental illness, successful

doctors, lawyers, accountants,

engineers, husbands without

jobs, a few former ministers, a solitary

stranger whose wife had died

just the day before.

Seen from afar, they have an austere dignity, these modern sufferers of quiet desperation. From up close, they are more often depicted as objects of Chaplinesque entertainment, latter-day Puritans who mock themselves as "God's Frozen People." Lottie is "a dutiful silver-polisher." JoAnne shows up early for Sunday service to dance the Spirit into the empty church. Joan has a paganistic shrine in her attic--a photo of Planet Earth, a phallic "tree of life," a chime which she taps to produce the Universal Tone. No one in the congregation knows about it.

Or they are depicted as familiar characters in church life, like those George Judson portrayed in a series of articles about a similar church in the New York Times a few years ago. They are admired for the eamest, halting, doubtful nature of their religious commitments--that is, for the ways their reckonings with religion as such resemble those of the visiting journalist. The pastor, Van Parker, is an administrator who is weary of the trends that have swept through the church, a no-non-sense man for whom spirituality is "as mundane as ham and eggs." Minister John Gregory-Davis is the church radical, speaking truth to power on behalf of homeless men in Hartford while others split hairs over the proper terms for church restoration (not "re-siding" but "replacement of clapboards"). Another minister, Bill Warner-Prouty, is a Yale-educated intellectual whose job at First Church is "to stand aside until needed, like a reference book...always ready to open to the pages of one thick volume or another, highlighting opaque Old Testament stories and myths and academic texts that most people no longer really knew how to use anymore." By the end of the year he has resigned his ministry to become a schoolteacher.

Dorsey writes well in these passages, which are grounded in close observation with special attention paid to odd tics of character--the essentially anecdotal approach of the journalist. And he competently employs other devices common to books of this sort. The book is organized around the seasons of the church year: Holy Week, Pentecost, Advent, Epiphany. The fund drive is a running story. A number of organized encounters--a Bible study group, an inclusive language seminar, a visit to the church's roots in rural England, a healing service for gay men with AIDS--serve to open up the narrative and allow the church people, and Dorsey, to take account of broader trends in Christianity today. And from time to time Dorsey touches on the troubles in his marriage, as he and his wife learn that they cannot conceive children. It is one of the saddest aspects of the book that in a situation that demands real spiritual searching, they search separately--he at First Church, she at a Quaker meeting.

Whether in a finance committee meeting or on the bus trip through the West Country, the members of the congregation are moved to ask themselves and one another just why they are church people after all. Dorsey dutifully records their questions, sometimes in their voices, sometimes in his own: "Where is God in all this?" "What am I still doing in a place like this?" They are questions that occur to the reader again and again as well. The members of First Church are clearly committed to it, and the checks they write for the fund drive testify to their commitment. But what brings them there, and keeps them coming? Christian faith? Social cachet? Tradition? Community?

All of these elements, of course, are in play in the life of any church, and the differences from one church to the next have to do, in part, with the degrees of stress given to the different aspects of religious experience. At First Church, Congregation suggests, what predominates among the congregation is a felt need for the apparatus of religion as such--not the truths and consolations of particular doctrines, not an encounter with the divine in worship, but a context in which the congregants' spiritual gropings are sponsored and considered valid.

It becomes clear just how vexed and attenuated such an emphasis can be in Dorsey's depiction of Joanne Taylor, a "spiritual director" who is charged with fostering the inner life of the church. Joanne's qualifications for the role are various: she led a children's ministry at a local church, spent some time in South America, completed a program in spiritual direction at the Shalem Institute, had a "crisis of the spirit," and offered her services to First Church around the time her book on the spiritual life of children was published. On the surface her approach is that of the smug and reductionistic post-Christian intellectual who aims to dismember the dead formulae of traditions.

"JoAnne," Dorsey writes, "wanted to shift the focus from morality, piety, judgment, and psychoanalysis, to peace, justice, and daily practice." She sees herself as "undoing an epidemic of bad theology." She sees the church as "not just an institution, but an institution that works against the spirit." Accordingly, she restricts her ministry to personal and confidential sessions with church members, and practices "a gentle detachment" from the church's institutional life-attending worship rarely, avoiding committees and daily "scut work," and feeling glad that her Jaguar is in the garage of her "middle-class" home the day the finance committee visits.

JoAnne, in short, strikes the reader as the sort of person who is more interested in dismantling Christianity than in building up an explicitly Christian community. But the members of First Church embrace her as "a person who could produce a well in dry souls." Before long Dorsey himself signs on, and after a few meetings in which they analyze his childhood views of church, he sees her as "a loving spiritual director" who is vital to his ongoing spiritual quest.

This is the participant-observer approach at its most twisted. As a participant in Joanne's course in spiritual direction, Dorsey is required to observe his own relationship with religion as such. At the same time, as a journalist, he observes the process of spiritual direction, with a sharp eye for the manners of the participants. But for a number of reasons--his own semiliteracy in religious matters; the free-floating beliefs of the people he meets at First Church; and their shared notion that hand-wringing tentativeness is the mark of true religion--he never fully moves to the deeper level of observation in which he would analyze Joanne's appeal and what it reveals about Christianity, and religion as such, as found in one Connecticut church.

The attempts to jump-start the Spirit at places like First Church have the makings of a fascinating story, and one rich in the themes of religious life and American life generally--the shifting relationships between sacred and secular, ancient and modern, discovery and commitment; the tensions between the strivings of the individual soul and the ways they are embodied in our common life; the impulse of each generation to make things new. That story is not to be found in Congregation, though, nor in the other journalists' accounts of their visits to church.

Maybe that is a story only the churches can tell, and only on Sundays. But one can wish that some journalist who makes a habit of going to church would write a book about it, one in which the gifts of the journalist and those of the believer were present in equal measures. That would be good news.