Theologian William Cavanaugh considers his childhood and what drew him to faith:

While his parents grew up in a “thick” immigrant culture surrounded by other Catholic families, practices and symbols, Cavanaugh feels that his own upbringing in an assimilating American Church revealed a “thinned” bond. One might hear his future mentor Stanley Hauerwas’ judgment in this appraisal: The Church went out to convert America, but America converted the Church. Devotional objects adorned the Cavanaughs’ suburban Chicago home (until, as teens, William and his sister secretly discarded many of them), but his family’s “practice of the faith was primarily going to church on Sunday.”

Still, he felt Catholicism held out the hope of something “less banal than suburban life filled with Wonder Bread and Gilligan’s Island.” It captured his interest, he says, “precisely for the way in which it was indigestible to mainstream American culture. So, it became my little way of being outside of the mainstream.”

Cavanaugh is not alone in these sentiments. For example, Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley wondered about the compatibility of Catholic faith and suburban life in his 1959 book The Church and the Suburbs. Protestants of different traditions have echoed similar themes; is it possible to live the American suburban good life and have a vibrant faith?

The particular examples Cavanaugh cites are interesting. “Wonder Bread” began in the 1920s and became a symbol of a booming consumerist economy. Gilligan’s Island was a comedy that ran three seasons on television, another key part of an emerging suburban society. Food and entertainment are pretty central to life today. Did religion in suburbia become another consumable? Cavanaugh suggests Catholicism was “indigestible” for this way of life even as millions found ways to pursue religious beliefs, belonging, and behaviors in the American suburbs.