Religion in Secular Society by Bryan Ronald Wilson (1-22-22)

Bryan Ronald Wilson wrote in 1966:

* The Church, then, represents the values of the agrarian or communal
pre-industrial society: its forms are moulded from that stage of
social development, and it participates in the warmth, stability and
fundamental mutual involvements of a type of community life. That
this community is, in the nature of American society, not so much a
fossil as a reproduction piece is less damaging in the eyes of those who
have little experience of community life than in the eyes of visiting
Europeans. The synthetic nature of the community orientation of
many American Churches is evident to those from more traditional
cultures; the personalized gestures of the impersonal society acquire
an almost macabre quality for those who have experienced the natural
spontaneous operation of rural community life, in which the Church
may fit as a part. And yet it seems evident, whether the Church does
fulfil genuine functions of this kind or not, people obviously get some,
perhaps purely sentimental, satisfactions from pretending that it does.
This circumstance is obviously related to the trauma of the immigrant
who, though experiencing better economic conditions, may miss
the community values of the (usually) peasant society from which he or
she came to America. That many of the early Churches were the repository of immigrant values is evident. In the Church, as nowhere else in the new society, immigrants could continue their language, their
customs, their folkways.9 Even if these customs were not specifically
identified with the Church in the countries from which the immigrants
had come, the immigrants’ churches were the only place where they
could persist. In economic activity, in education, in general social
contact, American ways had to be learned, even including the consumption patterns of family life.

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