Tag Archives: individualism

Religion in the American suburbs: religious practices interacting with a suburban lifestyle

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What does religious practice, activity, and belonging look like in the American suburbs? Is it different than religiosity in other settings, particularly urban and rural settings? This can be hard to parse out. Because more Americans live in suburbs than other settings and because of the pervasive features of American religion, it can be difficult to know how different religious faith in the suburbs is from religious activity in the United States as a whole. But, here are three consistent ideas from scholars and pundits regarding what marks suburban religiosity.

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First, suburban religiosity is an individualized faith occasionally set within larger religious communities and traditions. If “Sheilaism” from Habits of the Heart was true generally of American religion in the 1980s, it could easily be placed in suburbia. Suburban residents, often with some means, make decisions for themselves about what to believe and practice. They have numerous options to explore, ranging from highly individualistic practices unique only to them to being part of large religious organizations with broad reach and influence. This individualistic approach has consequences; religious faith may be centered in nuclear families or religious small groups or disconnected from larger neighborhood or regional concerns.

Second, megachurches are often in suburbs. They are not exclusive to suburbs. But, the megachurch that we think of now begins to emerge in the postwar, suburban-dominated decades. These congregations are often in easy to access locations (near major roadways), offer high energy experiences, and draw people from near and far. The majority of American religious congregations are smaller with a median congregation under 100 people but suburban megachurches, think of a Willow Creek or Saddleback, have exerted outsized influence.

Third, religious congregations and practice have adapted to suburban lifestyles and patterns. This was a concern of critics in the postwar era: how could relatively wealthy suburbanites in comfortable settings practice their faith? Could religious faith challenge their lifestyles? It may be the concern of new residents in the suburbs today who wonder how their faith mixes with American life in the suburbs. Even with the amount of religious activity in the suburbs, can traditional religious practices, beliefs, and belonging in different traditions survive an encounter with American suburbs and their particular emphases? Given the amount of religious activity in suburbs, the answer appears to be yes – religion has survived – but it is probably not the same after interacting with suburbia.

How do we know these features of religiosity in the suburbs? The final post will look at sources for exploring this subject.

Housing, design, and keeping living spaces private

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While discussing the potential of cohousing, Kristen Ghodsee describes how the design of housing in the United States tends to emphasize individualism:

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Our bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and dining rooms are places of great physical intimacy, and we often measure our closeness with others by the rooms we are willing to share with them. Close proximity also means vulnerability, and trust is an essential component of inhabiting common spaces and microbial environments. But our preferences are malleable. Both individualism and cooperation are learned traits; like muscles, the more we use them the stronger they become. Some of us just uncritically accept the private apartment or single-family home for ourselves because it is what our societies consider “normal.”

Americans like single-family homes and private dwellings. Even within these private dwellings, there can be plenty of room for people to have their own space and choose when they want to interact.

As noted above, imagining different housing possibilities is difficult because Americans are used to these options and what tends to be idealized. These options have been promoted for decades and backed with government funds and policies, ideologies, and preferences. To promote other options – like cohousing – requires a concerted and prolonged effort. Even calling such options “utopian” suggests it is unusual and perhaps unattainable.

And it is not like Americans are that much more likely to public to share spaces with others. We do have some spaces that are cosmopolitan where people of different locations and backgrounds can coexist and interact. But, we also more private spaces outside of the home that allow sociability and restrict who can be there.

This reminds me of the 2010 book In the Neighborhood where Peter Lovenheim tries to get to know his neighbors, with the mark of success being able to stay overnight. It is one thing to say hi to a neighbor, it is another to regularly welcome them into your home.

When strangers disappear from all of our photos

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This has been possible with Photoshop and similar tools for years but Magic Eraser from Google makes it even easier: we can get rid of strangers in our photos. Should we?

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My most Andy Rooney opinion, at least since the latest flare-up of the sleepover debate (I’m pro), is that we should not erase strangers from our family pictures. My original nuclear family’s albums, which my mother maintained in those classic 1980s scrapbooks with self-adhesive pages, annotating each image in her distinctive handwriting, are absolutely, positively chock-full of randos. When I was in elementary school, I loved to look at these pictures, hauling out two albums at a time and paging through them at our kitchen table. It was a time when I was becoming acutely aware of the difference between our family and others—not in a bad way, but in an interested one. We lived in a small town, and our family vacations gave us information about how things were elsewhere. I wasn’t going to pass up analyzing those clues.

The people we are around are also parts of our lives, even if we do not know them. To take pictures in public often means that others are present. We may not interact with them but we do not live in a world where we have our own bubbles and no one else is around.

There may be occasional times where removing strangers makes sense. Perhaps we want to focus on particular people or a particular scene. But, doing this at a larger scale always puts us at the center and makes it appear as other people do not exist.

Is this a continuation of the emphasis on the individual self? Social media, which is linked to the images we take, see, and use today, also encourages emphasizing ourselves. In images and a world where there is no one portrayed around us, we are at the center.

A future world where our pictures only feature us makes me think of Black Mirror or an extended global pandemic where streets and public places are empty. It would be a loss of our collective memories and the ways that we rely on nameless others every day.

The problems with suburbs: carelessness, lack of community

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Jason Diamond’s book The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs argues the suburbs suffer from these problems:

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The overall problem with the American suburbs has always been carelessness. Profit over people; keeping people out to keep up the property value; building up and out without much reason besides making more money. The idea is that what you and your family have is enough. What else could you need? Everything, you’re supposed to think, is fine as it is.

Almost every suburb in America has one thing in common: somebody built the place and moved on. These little subdivisions and towns were built, but they weren’t completed. Developers built houses and stores, but they couldn’t create community. And that’s the piece I saw lacking in so many suburban places from coast to coast: community. You can call the place you live one, but a community is only as good as the people who work to make it stronger. Nothing is complete: we’ve built the suburbs out, and now it’s time to grow them from within. It’s time to look at the past to see what we’ve done wrong, apply it to the present, and learn for tomorrow. Because whether we like it or not, the future is still in suburbia. We just need to reclaim it. (217-218)

Arguably, if you and your family have all you need in your single-family home and middle-class or higher lifestyle, what need do people have for community? People can believe they are self-sufficient enough to avoid reliance on others and can limit conflict with others. Whether this is actually true does not matter. Even as the suburbs have all sort of social networks and social interactions and are built on a long history of policies, decisions, and ideology, the perception that people can be independent and live the good life matters. This all contributes to the idea of individualism.

Reclaiming community at the suburban level is an interesting task. There are multiple communities already present in suburbia, but they do not necessarily advance the interests of the community as a whole or the people who might want to live there and cannot. For example, people are involved with local schools, public and private. Suburbanites care about education and how good school systems support higher property values. These interests and existing connections may be helpful or not for thinking about the community as a whole. Suburbanites like exclusion and local government control, two factors that can work against creating community for everyone.

“Sociologically he’s sick,” Officer Krupke edition

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In recently watching the 2021 film version of West Side Story, this stanza from “Gee, Officer Krupke” stood out.

Yes, Officer Krupke you’re really a slob
This boy don’t need a doctor just a good honest job
Society’s played him a terrible trick
And sociologically he’s sick

The whole song plays with this idea: the Jets are not responsible for their actions as they have been failed by their families and society. Elsewhere in the song, they are said to have a “social disease.” Sure, you could penalize an individual offender – with the police, analysts, social workers, and the courts involved in the song – but that would fail to reckon with the sizable social problems at hand. Of course, the song is meant to invoke laughs.

How much is an individual an individual given their social surroundings? This is one of the questions I raise early on in an Introduction to Sociology class. In the United States, the emphasis is typically on the individual: they make their own choices, develop their own identity, and are responsible for their own actions. Sociology pushes back on that individualistic emphasis by analyzing the social facts and forces that shape and outlive individuals. And West Side Story has its own ideas about individuals and society with its retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

The transmission of religious faith from parents to children and individual faith choices

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A sociology book published in 2021 emphasizes the role of parents in religiosity in the United States. From an excerpt:

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Parents define for their children the role that religious faith and practice ought to play in life, whether important or not, which most children roughly adopt. Parents set a “glass ceiling” of religious commitment above which their children rarely rise. Parental religious investment and involvement is in almost all cases the necessary and even sometimes sufficient condition for children’s religious investment and involvement.

This parental primacy in religious transmission is significant because, even though most parents do realize it when they think about it, their crucial role often runs in the background of their busy lives; it is not a conscious, daily, strategic matter. Furthermore, many children do not recognize the power that their parents have in shaping their religious lives but instead view themselves as autonomous information processors making independent, self-directing decisions. Widespread cultural scripts also consistently say that the influence of parents over their children recedes starting with the onset of puberty, while the influence of peers, music, and social media takes over.

Other common and influential cultural scripts operate to disempower parents by telling them that they are not qualified to care for their children in many ways, so they should turn their children over to experts. Further, the perceptions of at least some (frustrated) staff at religious congregations is that more than a few parents assume that others besides themselves (the staff) are responsible for forming their children religiously (in Sunday school, youth group, confirmation, catechism, etc.).

Yet all empirical data tell us that for intergenerational religious transmission today, the key agents are parents, not clergy or other religious professionals. The key location is the home, not religious congregations. And the key mechanisms of socialization are the formation of ordinary life practices and identities, not programs, preaching, or formal rites of passage.

There are multiple implications of these findings. I’ll briefly consider one hinted at above. In the United States, religion is often considered an individual matter. A believer is one who has consciously made a choice in their religious beliefs, behaviors, and belonging. In the American religious system, there is plenty of freedom to make such choices, whether one is identifying with a different religious tradition, putting together multiple pieces from different traditions, or citing no religiosity at all.

But, sociology as a discipline suggests no one is a complete free agent. This applies in all areas of life, including religion. We are pressured – a negative connotation often in the American context but social pressure can be positive or negative – by society and its parts.

If a religious tradition then emphasizes agency and authenticity regarding faith, it has the possibility of ignoring or downplaying social forces at work. Take evangelicals. According to the Bebbington Quadrilateral, one feature of this group is conversionism. This emphasis on a religious conversion often refers to an individual moment when a believer made a decision and/or had a definable conversion experience. This helps establish that this is a true and authentic faith, in comparison to being a cultural Christian or adopting the faith of one’s family or people.

The excerpt above does not suggest that the actions of a parent – or other social actors or institutions – always leads to a certain outcome but rather that how parents interact with religion increases or decreases the likelihood of religious faith of their kids. It is not deterministic but it is a demonstrable pattern where social forces – parents – influence individuals regarding religiosity.

If parents influence the faith of a teenager, is that teenager’s faith less real? Or, is this how human life works: we are influenced by social forces around us and we have the ability to exercise some agency?

Blame drivers for 94% of crashes or find fault in the larger system

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Are drivers responsible for 94% of accidents? That is just one way to look at the issue:

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In 2015, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation, published a two-page memo declaring that “the critical reason, which is the last event in the crash causal chain, was assigned to the driver in 94% of the crashes.” The memo, which was based on the NHTSA’s own analysis of crashes, then offered a key caveat: “Although the critical reason is an important part of the description of events leading up to the crash, it is not intended to be interpreted as the cause of the crash.”…

Seeking to find a single cause for a crash is a fundamentally flawed approach to road safety, but it underpins much of American traffic enforcement and crash prevention. After a collision, police file a report, noting who violated traffic laws and generally ignoring factors like road and vehicle design. Insurance companies, too, are structured to hold someone accountable. Drivers aren’t the only ones who face such judgments. Following a crash, a pedestrian might be blamed for crossing a street where there is no crosswalk (even if the nearest one is a quarter mile away), and a cyclist might be cited for not wearing a helmet (although a protected bike lane would have prevented the crash entirely). News stories reinforce these narratives, with stories limited to the driver who was speeding or the pedestrian who crossed against the light…

With responsibility falling on those directly involved in a crash, it’s unsurprising that so many highway-safety efforts revolve around education campaigns, assuming that if people were just more careful, we’d all be okay. Officials at the NHTSA and state DOTs pour millions of dollars into these programs, but their benefits seem modest at best. Officials “see their role as trying to cajole people on the roads to make smarter decisions,” Seth LaJeunesse, a senior research associate at the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center, told me. “Wear a seat belt, don’t be drunk when driving, and signal appropriately. I think it’s misguided. After all, who’s going to address structural problems, if it’s just people being stupid out there on the road?”…

With the infrastructure bill now signed into law, the federal government has a chance to rethink its approach and messaging. Dumping the dangerous 94 percent myth would be a good start; deemphasizing pointless traffic-safety PR campaigns would help too. Encouraging state and local transportation agencies—not just law enforcement—to investigate crashes, which New York City is now doing, would be even better. What we need most is a reexamination of how carmakers, traffic engineers, and community members—as well as the traveling public—together bear responsibility for saving some of the thousands of lives lost annually on American roadways. Blaming human error alone is convenient, but it places all Americans in greater danger.

Put together a society based around driving and a cultural emphasis on individualism and you have this situation. Is the individual operator responsible or a system that puts people in large vehicles traveling at fast speeds?

It is less clear from this piece how to view the system as a whole in order to improve the safety of roads. There are a lot of pieces that different actors have highlighted over the years. Fewer vehicles on the road? More room for pedestrians and bicyclists? More safety features in vehicles? Lower speeds? All of these could help but they would each threaten the current system which attempts to move as many vehicles as quickly as possible.

The approach many government and business actors seem to take at the moment toward this are attempts at incremental progress. Who would put all of these pieces together in a short amount of time, especially if individual drivers are willing to take responsibility? Americans seem fairly content with traffic fatalities and pedestrian deaths.

Divine Programming and the last two seasons of a critically acclaimed TV show that takes religion seriously

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In September, I wrote about reading the academic study Divine Programming and watching seasons one and two of the TV show Rectify. I have now watched the final two seasons of the show, seasons three and four, and was interested to see the role religion played. Here are some thoughts.

  1. Religion is certainly not as important to the plot as it was in the first season. The number of times it is mentioned decreases. There is no presence of organized or institutional religion; it is all personal or individual.
  2. The primary religious character has a return to their faith in the final season. This does not mean everything turns out correctly for them or religion helps solve big issues. It appears that their privatized faith emerges again after going through some personal trials.
  3. The final episodes interact with the themes of hope and disappointment. Arguably, these themes run throughout the entire series; when Daniel is released from prison at the beginning, this does not necessarily lead to long-term consequences for the characters as they engage with what happened in the past and their current circumstances. These are themes that certainly fit with a religious theme. Why do bad things happen? Why are we disappointed? What gives us hope? In the end, the themes of hope and disappointment are left more to the individual characters and immediate family to address, not to religion.

Considering the full show, religion did matter in the narrative arc of the show but it was not a primary force, one that even a majority of the characters engaged with, and did not provide hope or disappointment in the end. Other forces and actors were more influential and the show, like many American narratives, puts a lot of hope in individuals and close relationships among family.

The home of the brave and the (electric F-150) pickup truck

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With all of the talk of the electric Ford F-150, I ran into this statistic about sales of the current F-150:

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Still, if you’re going to pick an electric ambassador to the gas-loving masses, it would be hard to do better than the F-150. The truck has been the best-selling vehicle in the country for decades; more than 2,450 Americans buy a new one every day.

This is a hard number to understand. Roughly 2,500 a day? Some context might help. Americans like driving. They purchase millions of vehicles each year. According to Statista, they purchased over 11 million in 2020. Back in the early 1980s, the number was just over 2 million but there was a steady rise from the early 1990s to the late 2000s and then again in the last decade.

The anecdotal evidence I have matches these numbers. Having spent much of my life in the suburbs, I do not recall seeing many pickup trucks when I was younger. They were more of an occasional sighting, Now, there are pickups all over the place in all different sizes. The F-150 is indeed popular as are numerous other makes and models. The pickup is now a normal suburban vehicle.

According to Edumunds, the F-150 dominates car sales across the United States (and some other vehicles, including pickups, lead in a small number of states).

This reminds me of a magazine advertisement I used for years in my Intro to Sociology course. The ad was two pages and showed a parked pick-up truck within a swampy area. Sitting by the truck were roughly 15 dogs and standing nearby was the solitary man with his gun and camo. All of it screamed individualism and male vehicle. And this message is repeated over and over in television ads for trucks during sporting events and in many other places.

The electric pickup has the chance to keep Americans driving for decades in the big vehicles there are used to. There might still be a range issue for longer trips. But, imagine pickups that can accelerate even faster and just need to be plugged in at night.

Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the ultimate expression of American individualism?

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A while back, I encountered Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way” two different ways. In one instance, a radio host closed out an eight year run by playing the song and reflecting on the years of conversation. In the second instance, another person thought about their life thus far and used some of the words from the song to wonder what life might hold by the end.

Here is my sociological question: does this song represent American individualism in the twentieth century?

Americans are known for their individualism. For example, the sociological study Habits of the Heart examined how individualism plays out in the realm of religion and spirituality. President Donald Trump played “My Way” for the first dance at the Inauguration Ball and the song played when he left Joint Andrews Base in January 2021.

Take these two paragraphs from the song:

Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way

This is a man reflecting on a full life. He planned it, he executed it, and did it “my way.” Later in the song:

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried
I’ve had my fill my share of losing
And now, as tears subside
I find it all so amusing

To think I did all that
And may I say – not in a shy way
Oh no, oh no, not me
I did it my way

Similarly, thinking about the emotional aspects of life, the singer notes that he was not shy and “I did it my way.”

It would be hard for any single cultural work to stand in for an entire people or country. Yet, at the same time, there are certain works that become popular, stand the test of time, and embody particular values and practices. Is “My Way” one of these songs or does it fit a particular subset of Americans better than others?

Update 12/20/22: The song was part of the funeral service for football coach Mike Leach:

As the service was about to begin, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” played over the sound system. It was quickly apparent with every speaker who came on stage that Leach, who was born in California and raised in Wyoming, had carved his own path — from college rugby player to Power 5 head coach.

Many in attendance wore cowbell-shaped pins on their suit jackets. Inside the cowbell was a skull and crossbones, a nod to Leach’s nickname, Pirate.