Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism by Justin G. Wilford (review)

Suburbia looms large in America’s political economy and cultural imaginary. Demographically, 1970 was the tipping point when the US suburban population outpaced the urban (Teaford 2006). This residential gap widened from the 1980s through the early 2000s as ex-urban locales across the nation bulged and burst seams. Only very recently, in a Brookings Institution report from 2010–2011 (Frey 2012), was there any evidence of metropolitan cores growing faster than their fringes. In popular culture, suburbia has been voiced in multiple registers: the Cleaver’s middle-class safe haven, Richard Yates’ breeding ground of psychological unrest, and the conformist punching bag of Malvina Reynolds’ satirical folk song “Little Boxes”—themes continually riffed on in more recent iterations like ABC’s Desperate Housewives and Showtime’s Weeds. Suburbia as a cultural site has also gained traction in anthropological accounts, most notably Low’s (2003) Fortress America critique of gated communities. One area of comparative, interdisciplinary research has been exploring the entanglement of suburbanization, conservative politics, and evangelical religion. Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions adds a cultural geographer’s insight to the work of historians (Luhr 2009) and anthropologists (Elisha 2011).

Wilford’s book is a qualitative study, carried out over 18 months in 2008–2009, of Saddleback Community Church: a megachurch founded in 1980 and now situated in southern California’s sprawling Orange County. As it happens, Saddleback is no ordinary megachurch; it is home to Rick Warren, the celebrity pastor who has written several mega-selling evangelical books, rubs shoulders with Bono in the fight against global HIV/AIDS, and who performed the 2008 US Presidential inaugural invocation. Sacred Subdivisions is not an ethnography of Saddleback, nor any subset of its members, but it does not claim to be so. The book does, however, adapt several tools of the ethnographic craft: the author lived near Saddleback during the research period; did participant observation at multiple church events; and conducted formal interviews with five pastors, six staff members, 28 congregants, and informal interviews with “dozens” (17) of other Saddleback members. The book’s central argument is that the organizational culture of this postdenominational megachurch directly reflects the structural realities of postsuburbia: fragmented, de-centralized, fluid, and privatized. In this way, Wilford nuances the standard sociological market model approach to explaining religious growth, and prioritizes the interaction between “geographical strategies” (3) and the cultural conditions of late modernity.

Bracketed by a helpful introduction and brief conclusion, Sacred Subdivisions is equally divided between three largely theoretical chapters and three more empirically-minded chapters that explore Saddleback’s organizational core. Chapter 2, “Sacred Archipelagos,” is a play on sociologist Christian Smith’s “sacred umbrellas” critique of Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy” secularization argument. Wilford accepts Smith’s premise that religious communities thrive despite being engulfed by secularity. But, he adds a geographer’s twist through the island imagery: the fragmentation of postsuburbia lends itself to a diffuse network of sacred sites. Wilford then complements this spatialization argument by advocating for the use of “scalar logics and frameworks” (36). This prompts the useful insight that megachurches like Saddleback scale their focus to concentrate on three locations—body, home, and local community—and far less so on abstractions like city, state, or nation. Chapter 3, “Sacred Scenes,” advocates for a lived religion approach in order to make visible the ways in which Saddleback uses “suburban cultural codes in an effort to weave contemporary evangelical institutions into the everyday fabric of postsuburban life” (68). Chapter 4, “Purpose Driven Pluralities,” concludes the theoretical framing by elaborating on the centrality of the private home in Saddleback’s ethos and strategies. Respectively, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 address weekly small groups that meet in members’ homes, short term missionary travel, and political engagement. Chapter 7 is the most provocative of the three. Wilford was uniquely positioned to observe the unprecedented 2008 “Civil Forum on the Presidency,” which hosted Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain...