“My Creative Left-Leaning Church”
Negotiating Progressive Protestant identities of self and
community in Amsterdam and Boston
Puck Hofman
10649069 18-06-2020 Master’s ThesisResearch Master Urban Studies
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences Supervisor: dr P.J. Prickett
1
Abstract
Religion has long been ignored in the field of Urban Studies, as urban researchers understood the city through a secular lens. As a criticisms on the secularization paradigm are pervading all of social sciences, it is now time for Urban Studies to take religious seriously as well. This research is part of an effort to disrupt dominant images of urban modernity by showing that urbanization and modernization do not necessarily lead to the disappearing of religion in the city. This thesis looks at how progressive Protestant churchgoers construct identities of the self and community in the secular urban contexts of Amsterdam and Boston. Qualitative methods were employed to get a nuanced understanding of how churchgoers constructed their individual identities in the wake of social changes at the level of the city and the nation state. This research finds that processes of secularization go hand in hand with religious innovations. Churchgoers report a deeper engagement with their religious identity as they have become more reflexive. Theories or religious individualism often misunderstand the appeal of religious communities that center on the self and self-acceptance because they ignore the experience of Christians that have experienced discrimination and marginalization in church. This research points out that this renewed focus on the self in church is more about a self-in-relation.
2
Contents
Abstract ... 0
1. Introduction ... 4
2. Theoretical Framework ... 8
2.1 The City versus Religion ... 8
2.2 The End of the Secularization Paradigm ... 10
2.3 Studying Religion in Cities ... 11
2.4 Religious Identities ... 13 2.5 Religious Individualism ... 15 3. Methods ... 20 3.1 Ethical Reflection ... 21 3.2 Participant Observations ... 23 3.3 Interviews ... 24
3.4 Structure and Coding ... 25
4. Case-selection ... 27
4.1 Who are Progressive Christians? ... 27
5. Analysis ... 32
5.1 Setting the Scene: Urban Church-going ... 32
5.1.1 Boston... 32
5.1.2 Amsterdam ... 36
5.2 Growing Up Christian ... 38
5.2.1 Social Change and Self-perception ... 43
5.2.2. Conclusion ... 48
5.3. Finding a new Church Home ... 49
3
5.3.2. Negotiating Christian Progressive Identities ... 52
5.3.3. Conclusion ... 56
5.4. Religious Individualism and Church Shopping ... 56
5.4.1. Church shopping in the city ... 58
5.4.2. Conclusion ... 67
5.5. Intentional Community ... 67
5.5.1. Self-transformation in Relation... 69
5.5.2. Authenticity and Community ... 71
5.5.3. Comfortable Church Culture ... 73
6. Conclusion ... 77
4
1. Introduction
Religion has always been influential in the city. It is part of the city landscape and an important reason for people to get together in urban space. Strangely, in the field of urban studies religion is often ignored. Urban scholars predominantly understand the city through a secularist lens. Cities are mostly understood as a site of capital accumulation, but this neglects other elements that make up the production of cities, such as religion (Lanz, 2014)
The reason religion is usually ignored within urban studies is because urban theory rests on false presumptions coming from secularization theories. The field of urban studies builds on theorists that wanted to explain the developments that came with modernity. Modernity marks a shift in theoretical thinking, in which theorists wanted to understand the recent changes they observed in the world. These theories of modernity address the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism. The urban phenomenon is often imagined as a result of processes of modernization, which is why these theories are at the core of our understanding of the city. Cities became the figureheads of modernization, the place where modernization processes came together to shape the modern urban fabric. With these shifting social relations, also came a change in attitudes associated with secularization and post-industrial life. These shifting attitudes are the rejecting of tradition and the prioritization of individualism and freedom. Modern city dwellers became increasingly rational, trying to make the urban systems most efficient. They encountered a plethora of different worldviews, which would make them, and the city, increasingly secular.
As it turns out, secularization did not happen all over the world (Habermas, 2008), and religion remained important even in the global North. In fact, Robert Orsi (1999, p 44) claims that “the world of the modern city has necessitated, encouraged, or simply made possible a tremendous explosion of religious innovation and experimentation.” A number of scholars in
5
urban research have therefore taken up religion, many of them through the notion of ‘postsecular cities’. Justin Beaumont and Christopher Baker (2011) and a number of other scholars discuss the renewed visibility of religion in urban public domains. Even though this has helped to redirect a debate on the role of religion in cities, religion is in no way new and accounts of lived religion in cities is still missing. When research is being done on religion in the urban context, it is always centered on minority religious communities and the politics of belonging (Burchardt & Westendorp, 2018). There is little understanding of the development and changing role of religious communities that have been important actors in the shaping of the city for centuries.
But because the urban literature talks so little about Christianity in the urban context, it seems like it has lost all its influence in the public sphere. Religion, however, is the sphere of the sacred through which many urban dwellers grapple with questions of the meaning of life. Therofore religion, for many people, still informs the way they connect to society. This research is part of an effort to disrupt dominant images of urban modernity by showing that urbanization and modernization do not necessarily lead to the disappearing of religion in the city (Burchardt & Westendorp, 2018). For this reason, this thesis looks at religious communities in cities that are known to be largely secular. In this way, I wanted to paint a different picture of the influence of processes of modernization and urbanization on the urban religious landscape.
The other dominant image this research attempts to disrupt is the equation of Christianity and conservatism. There has been a rise of the political influence of the Christian-right in the United States, most visible in their support for President Trump. In the Netherlands, a narrative has emerged around the importance of Judeo-Christian culture and values. And as it turns out, a lot of Christians have voted for right-wing parties during the last provincial elections (NRC, 2019). While conservative Christians gobble up all the attention from the
6
media, a movement of progressive Christianity has been growing as well, especially in urban areas. While Amsterdam and Boston have been facing massive church decline in the past decades, progressive churches have started to emerge, parading rainbow flags, marching the streets with Black Lives Matters signs, and fighting for refugee rights in their church buildings. This begs the question as to whether a progressive countermovement is happening within Christianity at the urban scale.
This study seeks to understand how progressive churchgoers understand their identity of the self and community in an urban environment that is seemingly increasingly individualized and secular by taking a grounded theory approach. This research builds on qualitative methods, such as participant observations and interviews with churchgoers in Amsterdam and Boston. In this thesis, I aim to answer the following research questions:
How do progressive Protestant churchgoers negotiate their identity of the self and community in Amsterdam and Boston?
• How do Protestant churchgoers negotiate their progressive identities growing up
Christian?
• How do Protestant churchgoers construct a progressive Christian identity throughout
their life-time
• How do progressive Protestant churchgoers construct a communal identity in the
city?
I will start by discussing the theoretical debates that underpin the research question. In the next chapter, I will further explain the connection between urban theory and secularization theories. Then I will move on to a discussion of the construction of religious identities, both in connection to an understanding of self and the religious community. Then I will discuss my methodological considerations and the selection of the two cases in Amsterdam and Boston.
7
What follows is the analysis of my findings in light of existing academic debates. Lastly, the thesis will end with a conclusion, summarizing the findings and its theoretical implications.
8
2. Theoretical Framework
2.1 The City versus Religion
The city has become an important lens through which to examine major global processes in the last few decades. While the field of Urban Studies originated from a concern about the many social problems facing cities at the time, it is now becoming a strand of social theory in itself as cities are taking center-stage in the global economy (Sassen, 2007). Throughout the development of Urban Studies as an academic field, however, the city has been understood predominantly through the secularist gaze. In urban research, the city is primarily understood as a site of capital accumulation, which is why other elements that make up the production of cities, especially religion, are usually ignored (Lanz, 2014). The fact that much of urban theory still rests on false presumptions coming from secularization theories plays a big role in this.
The term secularization, or the secular, is often taken for granted and its historical meanings have not been singular nor stable (Bangstad, 2009). Generally, these terms are used to describe three ideas. First, it describes the decline in individual religious belief and practice. Second, it refers to the privatization of religious belief and practice. And lastly, the term is used to describe the institutional separation of social systems, for example the division of church and state (Casanova, 1995). The debate about the role of religion in public life is an ancient one, stemming from Greek and Roman philosophers and was an important subject among Enlightenment thinkers as well. The understanding of secularism that has been most influential in the social sciences in the past decades, however, is most often discussed within the context of modern times. In this era, theorists like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber began theorizing modernity and developed the theory of secularization as a result. Their expectation
9
was that the influence of traditional religion in society would diminish because of rationalization, industrialization, and urbanization: or modernization.
According to Max Weber, modernity signals a new way of thinking in which people stop taking traditional value systems, like religion, for granted. He observed that societies and individuals were becoming increasingly rational. Rationalization, according to Weber, means a societal shift towards calculability, efficiency, and reflexivity. For Weber, the transition from traditionalism to modernity began with the Protestant Reformation. Weber in his The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1992), argues that the move towards
rationalization becomes inevitable for all of society and would lead to a disenchantment with the world.
Theorists of modernity predicted that the processes accompanying modernization would cause religion to become less important in politics, social, and cultural life and that religious belief and practice would become delegated to the private sphere (Taylor, 2007). Because these theorists understand modernization to be the shift from a communal traditional society into an individualistic society, religion long functioned as modernity’s other. These theories have played an important role in the development of the social sciences in which a decreasing role of religion in society was taken to be universal.
In the field of Urban Studies, these same theories hold a special place as well, as urban theory builds on modernization theories. This is because urbanization is understood to be a result of industrialization, a process arose when people became increasingly rational in modernity. Irene Becci and Marian Burchardt (2013) point out that the dissolution of community ties through Tönnies concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft were also at the base of both the urbanization paradigm and theories of secularization. As cities became the ultimate representation of gesellschaft, the logical conclusion was that religious decline in the urban
10
context was inevitable. The city has therefore long been conceptualized as a secular space (McLennan, 2011).
2.2 The End of the Secularization Paradigm
In the last decades, a number of social scientists have pointed out that secularization did not happen all over the world (Habermas, 2008) and even in the global North religion has remained important. Becci & Burchardt (2013) also claim that secularization as “religious decline in the global South is of limited importance outside particular elite cultural and political milieus” (p 8). But this also applies to the global North, where religion cuts through issues of race, class, and gender as well.
One of the most important scholars to knock down longstanding assumptions surrounding secularism in social theory was Talal Asad. In his book Formations of the Secular (2003), he criticized the conception of secularism as a neutral space that allows no religious inference. According to him, secular and religion are concepts with multiple meanings depending on the context. The understanding of secularism in both the European and American context is entangled with Christianity and therefore has never been neutral. In this way, he points out the cracks in the binary of the secular and the religious and shows that the two influence each other. However, expressions of secularism influence various religious communities differently depending on their relationship to the nation state.
So, as other fields of social theory start to wake up to the lasting influence of religion, it is time that the field of urban studies gives it its due as well. It is critical to study religion at the level of the city as it has primarily been analyzed at the level of the nation state, especially through quantitative studies. Becci & Burchardt point out that this “flattens out the differences in religiosity found within the nation state, as there are often particularities between various cities or between the city and its more rural surroundings” (2013, p 5). Religious places, like
11
churches, are embedded in a specific locality. Urban churchgoers have to negotiate different processes than rural churches, and relate themselves in a specific way to the nation state. Yuval-Davis (2006) additionally points out that religion at the scale of the city can function as an alternative to nationalist projects of belonging, rather than being incorporated into a specific nationalist discourse.
2.3 Studying Religion in Cities
Becci and Burchardt (2013) also explain that it is important, first of all, to look at religion in the context of cities because it rewrites the sociological narratives about the fate of religion in modernity. Since both urbanization and secularization are understood to be a necessary result of modernization, it renders religion as “part of an outdated stage of human consciousness”. In reality, secularization is not a single historical process and is more likely accompanied by religious innovations. Religious change and transformation are bound up together and so urban scholars should take into account both how the city influences the religious landscape and the other way around.
There have been a few scholars that have tried to redirect research towards religion in the city. Beaumont and Baker (2011), for example, proposed the notion of the ‘post-secular city’ to critically investigate the hegemony of secular definitions within urban administrative practices as well. While the concept of post-secularism has proved valuable in terms of reorienting philosophical and ethical debates on the legitimacy of religion in democratic public spheres, the bulk of the research following this proposition does not capture how religion is lived out and experienced in the city according to Marian Burchardt and Mariske Westendorp (2018). Hence this research will try to answer their call to expand this newfound interest within urban research.
12
Burchardt and Westendorp (2018) identify four types of research that have been done on religion in the city. The first strand of research on religion has looked at the politics of belonging. The use of the public city space for religious purposes is central to issues of belonging and identity. The city is a place where various faith traditions live side by side and attempt to claim public recognition while encountering the deep cultural hierarchies, social exclusion, political resistance and political ideologies of pluralism. The question of who belongs in the city is important to both religious minority newcomer communities and religious communities that have been part of the urban context for centuries.
The second strand of urban religious research is focused on regimes of space and territoriality. Religious worship often takes place in places of worship that are found in the city. Burchardt and Westendorp explain that these places “spatialise and emplace religious identities and forms of belonging in that they mark urban sites as religious” (p 164). Religious identities form relationships to modes of political organization, such as the nation state or the city, through space. These relationships are different for various religious communities, depending on the context. Research has found that religious communities that are part of the majority usually represent the space of the nation state, while minority religions find salvation in urban spaces.
The last two concepts researchers have been engaged with, are the role of materialities and visibility in urban religion. The materialities of the city impact religious practices as well, like buildings or clothing. These are not just passive containers but construct religious meanings as well. A lot of research has been done on the role of veiling practices among Muslim women in the construction of their identities, for example by Kuppinger (2014) in the context of German cities and Listerborn (2015) in the Swedish city Malmö. In many of these contexts, the veil is a symbol of boundary-crossing between secular and religious distinctions. Even though the Christian identity of the churchgoers in this research is not as visible or contested,
13
negotiating their sense of self in religious and secular spaces in the city is an important part of their everyday experience in the city.
These concepts have created a deeper understanding of religion through an urban lens, however, Burchardt and Westendorp argue that the emphasis on space in urban research leaves out “the diverse bundles of religious motivations, values and other ideational elements that inspire people’s practices of being in the city, belonging to the city and experiencing the city” (p 164). So an inquiry into the lived religious experience is still missing. They argue for a reconsideration of immaterial elements that make up cities, in which it is important to understand the agency that is involved in becoming a particular religious subject. A churchgoer’s relationship with the urban is not just one in which they are influenced by the city but also one by which they achieve certain goals by appropriating it. Instead of understanding churchgoers as being part of broad processes like modernization and secularization only, it is important to understand how and why they choose to express their religion, and how these considerations affect their experience in the city. While Burchardt and Westendorp move away from looking at the construction of religious identity because they claim the concept is too static, I think the concept of identity can be useful when taking account its complexity.
2.4 Religious Identities
Weber claims that humans have ‘an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position toward it’. For this reason, humans create systems of meaning that Weber called ‘world-views’. Many theorists of the last century, like Weber, wanted to understand the emergence of modernity and what these social and cultural changes signify. For these theorists of modernity, religion was understood as the traditional
14
worldview before modernity. Weber, and others, thus sought to understand the development of the modern identity in the realm of religion.
For many people, religion is central to issues of identity and belonging as it is the sphere of the sacred and of ultimate meaning-making. Schweitzer (2000) has argued that instead of looking for explanations for broad theories such as secularization, scholars should pay more attention to churchgoers’ biographical accounts. These accounts show the ways in which faith and social changes tied to urbanization are connected to identity formation. This last section of the theoretical framework will lay out the conceptualization of identity that underpins this research, and discuss in which ways modernization processes have been understood to shape religious identities.
In its simplest form, “identities are narratives, stories people tell themselves and others about who they are and who they are not” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p 202). Therefore, identity is a narrative construction that integrates life experiences into a story. In this research, I’ll be studying both autobiographical narratives and public narratives that shape religious identities. Autobiographical narratives are the stories somebody expresses about their own identity, while public narratives are attached to “groups and categories, cultures and institutions” (Ammerman, 2003, p 214). In the case of religion, it is especially important to understand that narratives are not only about language, but also about bodily experiences and emotions. Together, these narratives provide people with an understanding of where and to what groups they belong, and also why they belong there. Belonging can be an act of self-identification, but is just as often by others (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Identity is not an essential way of being, but is fluid. An individual identity can change over time, depending on life experiences and social change. In order to understand religious identities of the self and community, it requires an understanding of both the influence of structure and agency (Ammerman, 2003). This
15
research looks at how structures imposed by the secular state, the religious institution, and the city influence the churchgoers’ religious identities.
Yuval-Davis (2006) points out that looking at one’s social location is important when understanding identities. Social locations usually refer to people’s particular gender, race and class but people can also be part of an age-group, kinship group, or nation state. These social locations and economic locations have particular implications at each moment in time, depending on power relations in society. They also play a big role in the construction of religious identities, as one’s social location influences their religious experience. For example, growing up as a woman in church without seeing women in leadership gives a particular signal as to how they should perceive themselves and their role in church.
Many scholars have written about the emergence of new forms of identities in modernity. Ulrick Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002) claim that instead of being born into a traditional society where people’s place in the social world was taken for granted, modern individuals have to make an active effort to construct their own identity through self-reflexivity. This process of ‘detraditionalization’ leads to a shift of authority in which life choices and decisions come to rest with the self instead of traditional value systems, like religion. In this way, modern identities have become individualized. Reflexivity refers to the continual and organized use of knowledge about social life in order to re-order and transform it. Because of the availability of information in late-modernity, individuals are able to monitor and revise their beliefs and practices when circumstances change (Giddens, 1991)
2.5 Religious Individualism
In contrary to the claims of secularization theories, processes of modernization did not end religion but rather absorbed religious identification. It turns out that modernization processes transform all world religions (Casanova, 2009). Danièle Hérvieu-Leger (2003) observes that a
16
new movement has taken shape within Christianity that is characterized by a growing individualism. Bellah et al (1985) have explained this trough the stereotypical story of Sheila Larson, a woman who represents the individualistic tendencies of modern churchgoers. She shapes her own personal religious experience by taking from different religious traditions and creating her own meaning out of these, for which reason she calls her faith “Sheilaism”. This is an attempt to transform external authority to internal meaning. Bellah et al argue that religious people, whether formally part of a church or not, are increasingly concerned with personal self-fulfillment and the autonomy of belief, instead of giving oneself over to a transcendent moral authority. Scholars have often been concerned about the effects of individualization. Bellah et al see this focus on the self as being in competition with social concerns and commitments to the community (Sointu & Woodhead, 2008), and in the same line Charles Taylor claims that: “a society of self ful-fillment cannot sustain the strong identification with the political community which public freedom needs.” (1989, p 508, as quoted in Sointu &Woodhead, 2008). Giddens is also skeptical about the way modern identifications with religion takes place, as he claims that it has turned religious tradition into a sham because of the absence of overarching normativity (1992).
Carroll and Roof (2002), however, observe that religious individualism can also lead to a deeper level of religious engagement, instead of practicing religion as a form of habit. This “forces upon the individual greater responsibility for his or her own life” (Carroll & Roof, 2002, p 59). They are more optimistic about the effects of religious individualism, saying: “there can also be honest searching, self-conscious deliberation, and creative reinterpretation of tradition as it relates to people’s own lives” (Carroll & Roof, 2002, p59).
Herviéu-Leger (2003) points out that religious individualism provides opportunities for communities to develop different criteria for the validation of faith from the normative institutional model. It is possible for communities to develop a validation of faith that rests
17
with the community instead of an overarching authoritative institution (Skinner, 2017). A regime of mutual validation of faith can flourish in these religious communities when the authenticity of an individual personal spiritual experience is understood to be more important above all else.
Scholars disagree about what this means for the future of religion. Some argue that religious individualism is a precursor to the final demise of religion. Others, like Bellah (1985) claim that religious authority has simply shifted from formal religious institutions toward the individual. Religious individualism has effects at two levels: first of all, it alters the nature of religiosity at the level of the individual believer, and secondly it changes the workings of religious institutions, depending if they adapt or reject the change to religious individualism (Skinner, 2017). This brings challenges for Christian organizations, as they have to prevent too much internal incoherence without pushing away believers with an individualistic mindset.
Religious individualism is mostly associated with the American religious landscape, characterized by open free and pluralistic religious markets. According to Casanova (2006), this model is known to work well for the United States but not for Europe, as Americans are generally more religious than most Europeans. He explains that this is because Europeans see the waning influence of religion on society as connected to a decreasing number of individuals that practice religion. Casanova, (2009) sees this as the self-fulfilling prophecy of secularization in Europe, where even churches have accepted the theory of secularization. Here, competitive religious markets remain absent because religious institutions accept the lack of demand for religion.
Modernization processes influence all world religions, but in different ways. Casanova (2009) has therefore argued that researchers should look less at levels at modernization and more at
18
the relationship between church, state and civil society. In-depth comparison analysis of two religious contexts can shine light on the nuances in the relationship between modernization and religion. This Master’s thesis compares two progressive Protestant church communities in Amsterdam and Boston to see how contemporary Christian identities take shape in each urban context. Research on religion in the urban context has often focused on religious minority groups that did not fit into the ideology of the nation state. It is important to understand how minority religious communities are affected by dominant secular narratives. At the same times, it is important to take into account religious communities that have been around since the foundation of the nation state are subject to changes as well. This research takes a look at the changing face of Christianity in the Western world by focusing on progressive Protestantism, a religious community long conceived to be powerful in the formation of both the nation states and the cities. It will try and uncover the changing relations between Protestant institutions, the secular state and the city by looking at the level of the individual. Although a lot has been written about religious individualism, especially in Christianity, there is a lack of qualitative research looking at how churchgoers actually live out their identities of the self and community in this changing religious landscape.
20
3. Methods
Qualitative methods are best fit to uncover the nuances of churchgoers using their agency to construct identities and investigate to what extent they are constrained by structures in society. These methods offer insights into people’s relationships with certain aspects of identity. This thesis aims to answer the following research questions:
How do progressive Protestant churchgoers negotiate their identity of the self and community in Amsterdam and Boston?
• How do Protestant churchgoers negotiate their progressive identities growing up
Christian?
• How do Protestant churchgoers construct a progressive Christian identity throughout
their life-time
• How do progressive Protestant churchgoers construct a communal identity in the
city?
This research follows the principles of grounded theory. This is an interpretive qualitative method that attempts to understand how individuals give meaning to, and understand, the world around them. The researcher does not reproduce their views but rather interprets them. This research understands that “humans are active agents in their lives and their worlds rather than passive recipients of larger social forces” (Charmaz, 2006, p 7), such as modernization and secularization. Therefore, I attempt to understand how the churchgoers understand and also shape their life world through this research.
According to the principles of grounded theory, researchers start with data and then systematically move ‘back and forth’ between data and theory to generate theory (Charmaz, 2006). These theories are abstract renderings of specific social phenomena that are grounded
21
in data instead of preconceived hypotheses (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). This research began with a general interest in the persistence of Christianity in a secular urban context. To ensure my interest would connect to literature, I continued to go ‘back and forth’ between the data that arose from my observations, and existing theories. In conducting grounded theory research, it is helpful to keep asking oneself ‘what is this data a study of?’ in order to avoid that the conclusions are mere artefacts of the researcher but instead reflect real, grounded experiences of churchgoers (Charmaz, 2006). By continually asking myself that question, I identified that my research was about the construction of a religious identity of the self and community. The way these identities are constructed provides a deeper story about the changing relationship between religious institutions, the secular state, and the city.
3.1 Ethical Reflection
Churches are places in which people rest, share personal life experiences, and let their guards down. For this reason, it is important to reflect on my role as a researcher and potential disrupter. Besides, it is nearly impossible to not get personally involved in tight-knit communities such as these churches in the process of participant observation.
As a researcher, I am committed to to an ethos inspired by feminist researchers and, it is therefore important to reflect on existing power dynamics that informed the research. A reflection on how my identity and life experiences influenced my interaction with the churchgoers is essential, as Lorraine Nencel explains: “Reflexivity ensures research relationships that are egalitarian, non-authoritative and intersubjective. Through self-reflexivity the researcher enables a research relationship to develop that recognizes difference and the (im)possibilities this creates” (2014, p 77).
My class background and political ideals, first of all, are similar to those of the churchgoers at both churches, as they consisted mostly of left-wing middle-class congregants. The
22
congregations were both predominantly white congregations, though I do not intend to erase the ethnic diversity that was present in Boston especially. The biggest differences I am trying to bridge in this thesis are my sexuality, gender identity, and most importantly my lack of religious upbringing. As a heterosexual cis-woman that grew up in a secular environment informed by Catholicism, I had spent little time in Protestant before this thesis. Dutch secular culture at the level of the nation is informed by Protestantism on both a legal and a social basis, but I grew up in the South of the Netherlands where Catholic Churches dominate. My main concern was whether I was projecting my secular assumptions on my research project. I discussed the meaning of these differences with the churchgoers and shared my observations with them so that they could point out potential bias. Obviously, I did not let them be the only ones pointing this out and continued to read about what I might be misunderstanding due to my identity (for example in Gregory, 2006). For this reason, it was also important to stay close to the data when trying to formulate answers about what the experiences I discussed with the churchgoers meant to them.
I made sure to make my role as a researcher known to churchgoers from the moment I entered the churches. I either called the church leaders beforehand to explain my intent or told them about it when I visited the church for the first time. I also made sure to meet with leadership to discuss my intentions as well as give them an opportunity to voice any concerns they might have. In order to ensure a mutual understanding of the project, I made the leadership sign a consent form that listed the details of my thesis. The churchgoers knew about my role as a researcher through an email that was sent out to all congregants, and I always made it known in conversations.
I have ensured participants anonymity by changing names and other descriptions that could identify them in this thesis, as well as in transcriptions. I decided not to provide the names of the churches for this same reason. The churches could of course potentially be identified by
23
readers that pay attention to my description of the neighborhood characteristics, however, I do not name the neighborhoods the churches are in. I additionally offered to send the participants the final research after completion.
3.2 Participant Observations
A vital part of this research was conducting participant observations in each church community. When introducing this element of my methods, I must start at the very beginning of my participant observations. I did not know much about the religious landscape in each city apart from what I had read about in history books. I had little understanding of what going to a protestant church looks like in this day and age. This is why I decided to do what any modern churchgoer would do and went church-shopping in each city. Visiting different progressive protestant churches in the area helped me to get an idea of the religious scenes, and helped me to spot differences between worship styles and the use of language in churches. When meeting people, I would ask about vital progressive church communities in the city, and eventually found a progressive church community of my liking. I will discuss the decisions behind this selection more in-depth in a later chapter on case-selection.
In the course of this research, I spent four months at the church in Boston and three months at the church in Amsterdam conducting participant observations. Unfortunately, my time in Amsterdam was complicated by the developments of Covid-19, which meant that two months were spent doing online participant observations. Participant observations provide qualitative researchers an opportunity to investigate, experience, and represent the social phenomenon of interest in its everyday setting (Atkinson, Coffey, Delamont, Lofland & Lofland, 2001). By conducting participant observations, the researcher immerses oneself in a new social world, while producing written accounts and descriptions of this social world through field notes.
24
These field notes are accounts of my own experiences and observations as well as an account of narratives of churchgoers I talked to and overheard.
My participant observations consisted of going to weekly Sunday services and attending other activities like praise nights, community dinners, storytelling nights, young adult brunches, and much more. During those events, I would write down key words on worship bulletins but mostly refrain from writing extensive field notes. Instead, I paid attention to my surroundings and wrote about my observations and experiences afterwards on my own. At these events, I would frequently ask churchgoers if they would be willing to be interviewed.
3.3 Interviews
As participant observations helped me contextualize these church communities, the interviews ended up the meat and bones of the research project. Interviewing permits an in-depth exploration of the experience of churchgoers and is thus a useful method for interpretive inquiry (Charmaz, 2006 p 25). Interviews do not reproduce prior realities but rather show how the churchgoers make meaning out of their experiences. Over the course of the research, I conducted 19 interviews in Boston and 10 interviews in Amsterdam with churchgoers.
The interviews were semi-structured in order to make sure important subjects would be discussed, while remaining open to unexpected stories, and ask follow-up questions to surprising answers. I continued to revise my interview schemes to develop a point of focus and engage with new leads that emerged. The aim in this research is not to provide a universal Christian religious experience but rather to get an in-depth understanding of two church communities within two very specific urban contexts. I consistently asked questions about the churchgoers’ religious trajectories and how they ended up in that particular church throughout the interview-phase.
25
After the church service, there was always a coffee hour in which I asked people to participate in interviews. I additionally had access to everybody’s email address because I was in the online church group. I tried to get a diverse amount of people across personal identities but also on how active they were in church. The church in Boston had a majority of people that identified as women or LGBTQIA+. This was also reflected my interviews, in which I only spoke to three people identifying as male. In Amsterdam, I had invited four people to participate in the interviews however, after I could not continue to go to church in person due to Covid-19, asked the leading pastor for the contact information of congregants he thought would be able and willing to participate. Eventually, I interviewed six people identifying as male and with four identifying as female, and five of them identified as LGBTQIA+. This did not necessarily represent the congregation’s demography, as they were mostly female as well. This is not an issue, as the aim in qualitative research is not generalization but rather to provide a rich contextualized understanding of religious experiences.
All participants signed a release-form before each interview to make sure they were aware of their participation in a recorded interview for my Master’s thesis. The consent form stated the topic of my thesis as well as their right to cancel the interview at any moment, and that they should not share anything they were uncomfortable with. The interviews ranged from twenty minutes to two and a half hours. The interviews took place in different locations; I met up with some people in church, at a coffee shop, on campus, and at people’s houses. Eight of my interviews in Amsterdam happened through Skype or a phone call because I could not meet up face-to-face due to Covid-19.
3.4 Structure and Coding
The combination of collected written materials, field notes, and interview transcriptions provided me with a rich amount of data. The next step was to engage with the patterns that
26
arose from the data by coding. Coding is the process of naming and labeling pieces to sort large amounts of data. This is important in order to move beyond concrete statements to analytic interpretations of what is happening in the field (Charmaz, 2006 p 43). Following a grounded theory approach, I moved from an initial phase of naming words, lines, or data that stood out to a “more focused and selective coding phase that only draws on the most significant initial codes” (Charmaz, 2006, p 46). Slowly, I went from word by word coding to coding on specific themes. These themes will be further discussed in the analysis.
27
4. Case-selection
4.1 Who are Progressive Christians?
This research consists of two case-studies of progressive Protestant Christian congregations in Amsterdam and Boston. The study follows an embedded multiple case study design (Yin, 2009), as it tries to understand how identities take shape within the community but also looks at the interaction with the community and the city more broadly. By looking at a congregation, this research can uncover the interaction with the individual churchgoers, the community, and the city. As Yin suggests, multiple-case studies are likely to be stronger than a single case because “evidence from multiple cases is often considered more compelling, and the overall study is therefore regarded as more robust” (2003, p 46). It also offers a look into the ways modernization processes influence the religious landscape in each case differently.
Considering these two cases provides an opportunity to look at how the progressive Christian movement is informed by larger structural processes at a global or national level, while being locally embedded in an urban context. Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas (2000, p 431) have called for more research that investigates, both on a local and global scale, the particular circumstances under which particular forms of religion are changing. This research focuses on changes in the religious landscape in both cities, and how this is reflected in the way the churchgoers perceive themselves and their community.
Besides looking at differences between these two contexts, this study also highlights the ways in which ways urban religious developments are interconnected. Christianity is a global community often drawing inspiration from each other across national borders. Even though Amsterdam and Boston have very distinct religious histories, similar trends have become noticeable in the past decades. In the recent years, there has been a resurgence of the
28
Christian-right in the United States and the Netherlands. In the United States, especially, there has been a rise in the social and political significance of conservative and Evangelical denominations starting in the 1970s and 80s. The Christian-right has received a lot of attention both in the academic sphere as well as mainstream media. Edles (2013) confirms that there has been more visibility of a politically conservative Christianity in the public sphere than there has been of a Christian-left.
In the United States, the Christian-right has been most vocal about their support for Trump but in the Netherlands a Christian-right has been emerging in the past years as well. As it turned out in previous elections, many Christians have aligned themselves with right-wing parties (NRC, 2019). There was also a lot of controversy in the media around the support of the Nashville document in the Netherlands. This document, originally drawn up by Christian conservatives in Nashville, takes a stance against sexualities, gender expressions and ways of family formations that fall outside of the Christian conservative norm. The LGBTQIA+ community was specifically targeted in this document. When conservative Christian leaders signed the document in the Netherlands as well, more and more left-wing churches decided to be more explicit about their support of LGBTQIA+ identities in church. In Amsterdam, this became visible as Protestant churches unitedly raised rainbow flags during Pride (Parool, 2019). So even though, the Christian-right has been able to become so dominant in the media, there is also a resurgence of progressive Christianity, especially in cities (Edles, 2013).
It is often forgotten that progressive movements have always been a part of Christianity. Christians have been at the forefront of movements for social change in the United States and the Netherlands. Women’s suffrage movements, the civil rights movement, and workers movement have often been faith-based movements that were based on social justice principles taken from the bible (Edles, 2013). It is difficult to define progressive Christianity as there are divergent ways of being a progressive church; they can express different theologies, have a
29
diversity of worship styles and be part of various denominations. Edles (2013) definition of progressive Christians is helpful, defining them as having “1) an emphasis on Jesus’ life and
teachings, and 2) an emphasis on social justice and inclusivity” (Edles, 2013, p 7). She claims
that progressive Christianity as a movement is most vital today in their concern for the marginalization of the LGBTIQIA+ community in society in general, but more importantly within Christian churches.
For this reason, this research focuses on two progressive churches that are open and affirming to LGBTQIA+ people and are led by lesbian and gay pastors. The Churches in Amsterdam and Boston that are central in this research are different in theological stances and worship styles but they understand that by following the teachings of Jesus, social justice and inclusivity are important. In both cases, this is not only because they find these issues important in society but because they believe their Christian faith calls them to stand up for these ideals. The churches understand Jesus to be a radical historical figure who taught from a place of marginalization. Marieke, a heterosexual white female Amsterdam churchgoer in her twenties, explains this below.
Marieke: As a Church, we really want to be there for the LGBT-community. Not because the bible does not matter but because it does. That is our point of departure. When interpreting the bible we have no choice but to do what’s best for the world, for refugees and the LGBT-community. That is exactly what Jesus did. He surrounded himself with people that were on the margins of society and showed them you are accepted the way you are.
These congregations are both part of Mainline Protestant denominations making them all the more comparable. In the case of Boston, the church is part of the United Church of Christ and in Amsterdam, the congregation is part of the Protestantse Kerk Nederland. These
30
denominations were formed as different Protestant traditions merged. Churches within these denominations enjoy a high amount of independence and both conservative and progressive movements are present. However, in Amsterdam and Boston this denomination is known to have the most progressive Protestant churches in the area. Another important similarity is that the cities of Amsterdam and Boston are regarded as “progressive havens” within their nation state, so these congregations take up similar positions in the religious as well as the secular landscape.
It is important to note the differences between Amsterdam and Boston as well. The Netherlands is much more secular than the United States. Around 25 to 35 percent of the Dutch are affiliated with a Christian denomination (Vermeer & Scheepers, 2017) but this does not represent the amount of people that are frequent churchgoers. The amount of church attendance has gone down by 76 percent over the last fifty years, with now only 12 percent of Dutch people going to church once a week. Amsterdam is experiencing a religious revival due to migrants (De Witte, 2011) but this is not happening in its traditional Protestant churches. Even though Boston represents one of the most secular areas of the United States, survey data suggests that still 25 percent of people in the Boston metropolitan area go to church at least once a week (Pew Research Center, 2014).
Lastly, it is important to note that these denominations have undergone similar developments, especially in these cities. The denominations, first of all, have seen a growing amount of people attracted to conservative Evangelical churches at the national level (Vermeer & Scheepers, 2017) while their own churches have been facing church decline for decades. Orthodox re-reformed churches do not seem affected by secularization in the Netherlands, while Evangelical mega-churches in Amsterdam are thriving (Vermeer & Scheepers, 2017). Below Jeff, a heterosexual white man in his early-thirties living in Boston, explains his vision for the future of church-going. He predicts that conservative mega-churches will continue to
31
grow but also points out another trend in progressive church-going. He is right to point out that while progressive Christianity is not mass-oriented, their cultural production has increased and there is a growing body of progressive Christian material for theologians and politically engaged people in the city (Edles, 2013). This is especially true for progressive churches in secular cities, as they struggle to stay relevant against the backdrop of a secularizing city. This illustrates how processes of secularization often go hand in hand with religious experimentation and innovation (Becci & Burchardt, 2013). The next section will begin to describe how these two congregations are finding a way to thrive despite their smaller numbers and their undervalued position within Christianity.
Jeff: Who knows! Maybe Church will get smaller and weirder over here and then like the mega-Churches will just keep getting bigger and bigger. That sounds like a pretty safe bet. These middle of the road congregations, it doesn’t feel like they really have anything for people who are my age. This church is not middle-of-the-road at all, I would say our Church is pretty far left.
32
5. Analysis
5.1 Setting the Scene: Urban Church-going
Churches have been important markers of the cities of Amsterdam and Boston for as long as these cities exist, housing one of the oldest churches in their country’s history. Even though these cities used to house one of the oldest and most powerful Protestant churches in the country, a lot has changed as they now express the lowest numbers of church attendance in their countries (Smeets, 2016). For many religious people or people that grew up around the Christian tradition, churches are still important places of meaning-making in the city. They have memories of growing up in church and they rely on these places for social and economic support. Churches play an important role in the process of place-making in the city. As people give names to bounded places in the city and use them in their everyday lives, they “become imbued with positive or negative emotional associations, memories or aspirations. Through everyday uses and narratives, and through more spectacular experiences, spaces gain meaning and become places” (Jaffe, 2015, p 25).
5.1.1 Boston
This process of place-making is visible as Beth, a retired nurse from Boston, expresses her attachments to the Catholic Church buildings in the city of Boston. Even though she switched to Protestantism later in life after the many scandals that surrounded the denomination of her childhood, these buildings are still important to how she experiences her city. She describes walking through the city and thinking about her memories rooted in the city and its churches as a spiritual practice.
Beth: I still would stop at this Catholic Church downtown that I really like because they do a lot of work with the homeless. I would stop there and light the candles just going
33
there just find a few moments of peace. And they also build a new Catholic church in the seaport. A beautiful church, Lady of the waves. It used to be an old fisherman church. Now of course Seaport is so expensive so but it’s actually, if you get a chance to see it, it’s beautiful. The inside is made to look like the bowel of a ship. It’s beautiful. It’s very gorgeous. I like to go in there. There is something kind of spiritual for me
walking around the city a lot. See the changes but also seeing my neighborhood and I like to go around the town and I feel a real connection with it you know much like I feel a connection with the city. I can go to parts of the city and I remember this and that and I like that.
The city in which Beth grew up has changed a lot in the past years, as Boston changed from a rough working-class city in which Catholicism long held a lot of power in the public space into a city that is now one of the top places in which to do business. Beth often finds herself looking at the real estate office window displays in disbelief, seeing the houses of her childhood friends going on the market for millions of dollars. Beth lives in the neighborhood of the United Church of Christ church she started going to later in life, one of the progressive churches where I started to do field work in Boston. This neighborhood used to be a working-class neighborhood until the end of the last century and attracted people from the arts and LGBTQIA+ people. This neighborhood has been known to be one of the most politically progressive neighborhoods of Boston but has been continuing to gentrify over the last decade. Walking around the neighborhood, this becomes clear as you see yoga-studios, an increasing amount of hip coffee-shops targeting an increasingly young wealthy urban population. At the same time, there are signs in backyards, protesting the rent increases and expressing the anger about the arrival of a Wholefoods that just replaced a local Hispanic market, representing an irreversible change in the neighborhood’s character. The church is located near a busy street, the building looks like a traditional congregational church like many in New England, except
34
for the Black Lives Matter sign that hangs prominently above its front doors. When you walk through those doors you are greeted and kindly urged to take one of their nametags, giving you the options of different pronouns in all colors of the rainbow. This church is an example of the changes that have started to happen in the religious landscape in Boston. As many churches found themselves struggling to keep afloat in an increasingly secular city, they had to think of ways in which they could remain relevant in a changing city.
The Boston church building had been a congregational church for years, attracting predominantly middle to upper-class local white residents. The population of the community was aging and they had a hard time attracting new members. To be able to make ends meet, they had already been renting out their space to a growing emergent church community that was targeting the LGBTQIA+ community. This new church community was never tied to any building before, as they were a new community rethinking what it could be like to be an inclusive religious community. Many LGBTQIA+ people were not welcomed or affirmed in most church buildings ten years ago, when this community was founded, and they were tired of trying to reform Protestant churches from within existing hierarchies. However, when the congregational church was in trouble five years ago, the religious landscape was starting to become more inclusive and as the emergent church kept growing, the community had become more eager to take up space in the city and the two churches decided to merge. As the community got its own building, it became a legitimate part of the religious landscape of the city, now changing a mainline denomination from within. In the quote below Laura, a middle-aged white lesbian, talks about the merger. It was important for this emergent community to have a space for themselves as it gives them new options of making meaning in the city, for Laura specifically it meant that she could get married to her wife in her own church building in which she felt completely accepted. Even though there is no one in the church that grew up
35
in this particular church, the building is of significant importance to many of the churchgoers in Boston, as they now feel part of a story of the building that is over a hundred years old.
Laura: It worked out really well for us. We had been renting and moved several times and always worried about would we be evicted you know would something happen to the place if someone wants their space back, would something happen cost-wise. I loved the idea of having our own building, and I find it to be a very beautiful church. And the other people were concerned that they would lose the space that had been theirs for over a hundred years so everyone got something really good out of that merger.
Secularization of the city was important for the churches to come together as they did. This shows that secularization processes often go hand in hand with religious change and innovation (Orsi, 1999). In this case, a small emergent church community of people previously marginalized within Christian churches was able to become an influential part of the Boston religious scene. The demography of the church changed drastically with the merger. The first change was the many young LGBTQIA+ people that joined the church. Because of this change, the congregation was also able to attract younger people and families from the neighborhood that wanted to be part of a local Christian community. Many young politically progressive churchgoers wanted to be a part of a more diverse and inclusive church, as becomes visible in Rose’s story below. For Rose, church is also an important part of experiencing and connecting to the city where she lives. When I arrived at the church, almost a decade later, the congregation is diverse across age, almost half of the congregants hold LGBTQIA+ identities and was led by two Lesbian pastors. The congregation is increasingly ethnically and racially diverse but still is predominantly a white congregation. Although the church’s members come from all different income groups, they attract an academic crowd.
36
Rose: My husband and I had been looking for a progressive church nearby that we could go to. It’s nice to have a church in your own neighborhood. It makes me feel kind
of grounded in the community and my husband had heard about the church being a good progressive church. I don’t know where he heard about it. So I remember we
decided to go one Sunday and I remember we came up the walk and we were feeling a little nervous you know entering a new space and there was a gentleman greeting at the door who has since passed and he waved us in and we came in and we sat in the back and the pastor greeted us right away and just the whole service felt like if I had to design a service in my head that is kind of what it would have been. And the kids got to play outside and my son when he heard that he was like what is this? It just felt like a great fit and I was like we are going! I never really felt that definitive about joining a new group but it was like this is where we are going now!
5.1.2 Amsterdam
The Amsterdam church also represents a change in the religious field of the city. While the city is full of centuries’ old church buildings that are increasingly used for other purposes, this church building is located in one of the newer additions to Amsterdam’s neighborhoods. While this neighborhood is diverse across race and class, the neighborhood also houses the wealthiest people in the city. This neighborhood has a higher number of young families than the rest of the city and while this neighborhood has been developing for years, it is starting to feel like a real big city neighborhood according to the churchgoers. Mark, a gay Chinese-Dutch man, has lived in this neighborhood from the very beginning.
Mark: This neighborhood has come to feel just like other neighborhoods in Amsterdam. It has changed from a small modern neighborhood kind of outside of the city to a
37
neighborhood that is identical to other neighborhoods of Amsterdam. The neighborhood is very mixed, there are a lot of different cultures and it has the same bustle.
From the outside, most people would not even recognize the building as a church. The building blends in with a row of apartment buildings and looks just like any community center. The church is part of the largest Dutch Protestant denomination, the Protestantse Kerk
Nederland, a merger of the Dutch Reformed Church, Reformed Churches Netherlands and the
Evangelical Lutheran Church. The denomination ordains women and allows same-sex marriages; however, local congregations decide how they live up to these rules. So there is a lot of diversity within this denomination and there are both more liberal and conservative movements within the organization. This church was built only a decade ago, as the denomination wanted to experiment with new ways of being a church in a secular environment. The organization had asked around and found that many of their churchgoers would not mind a more casual space. Most churchgoers agreed that they liked to get together in a more casual space, often after bible-study or evening worship they liked to chat at the bar and enjoy a couple of drinks together. Unlike the Boston churchgoers, the churchgoers in Amsterdam did not have attachments to the history of the building, as Joost explains below, but they were very rooted in the neighborhood. It was an important place where they had met people in their new neighborhood and started to feel grounded in their new living environment. The congregation was connected to many other social and religious organizations in the neighborhood. The church introduced them to local volunteer work and helped them organize public events during national and religious holidays.
Joost: I think it is a relaxed space. It is very clear and you know, I never feel like a massive church building is extra sacred or anything. I mean I am sensible enough to know that it’s just built by people. I know that God is with me whether I am inside a
38
When I started doing the field work at the church, it was led by a gay male pastor that grew up Evangelical. The church was socially progressive, standing up for women’s rights and LGBTQIA+-rights in the denomination and its members are often vocal about issues of climate change and active in refugee-organizations in the city. The church organized a lot of different activities and events besides from their Sunday service and was in close contact with other churches from the same denomination. Even though the Sunday service attracted mostly people from the immediate neighborhood, the church was successful in attracting a lot of people from other churches in and outside of the city. While promoting themselves as a church for all people, they also hosted events targeted towards the LGBTQIA+-community that attracted people from all over the country to their other events as well. It soon became clear that the Amsterdam Christian scene is small but tight-knit, and a lot of people visit each other’s churches when there is an event that interests them. The church denomination is well organized and shares the activities of all of the churches in the city on their websites and in a local newspaper. When the Covid-19 crisis hit in the middle of my field work, churchgoers could watch all of the Sunday services on the denomination’s own streaming service.
Mark: What makes us unique is that we really believe in God while being welcoming to everybody. We do not see ourselves as an LGBT-church and we don’t want that. We emphasize that everybody is welcome, it does not matter where you come from. We really try to be inclusive and we try to prove that the bible is like that as well as the Christian faith, it does not matter how much education you received, or how much money you make, or the color of your skin.
5.2 Growing Up Christian
As became visible in the previous section, churches play an important role for religious people to form attachments to the city. They are places in which important milestones in life
