The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholics by Mary Ellen Konieczny (review)

This book has as its subject the growing moral polarization among Catholics in the United States (ix). Through five chapters – on worship, the bonds and boundaries of identity, marriage, children, and work – the author investigates the ways that “American Catholicism itself has become polarized” (249) with respect to “cultural conflicts about the family” such as “women’s social roles, the debate over abortion . . . , same-sex marriage, and contraception” (3).

The author’s thesis is that “moral polarization within Catholicism . . . is not only shaped by elites and public figures but also constituted in the institutions and local cultures of everyday life in which Catholics interact with one another” (3). Accordingly, she focuses her study on “the relation of religion and family among American Catholics in local parish settings” in order better to understand “how polarizing tendencies are supported, shaped, and intensified” (3).

The book is rooted in “20 months of ethnographic research in two Midwestern Catholic churches,” namely, the “religiously conservative” Our Lady of the Assumption and the “theologically progressive” Saint Brigitta, in similar neighborhoods in the same city (which, because of a confidentiality agreement, the author does not name) (7). The author explains that she chose these two churches as “pertinent ideal types . . . , anticipating that they might yield insight into general patterns in the construction of polarization among Catholics” (235).

The book begins somewhat slowly, and from its beginning to its end the author tends to repeat, in much the same terms, the long quotations from parishioners that serve as her data for analysis. But the pace picks up midway through, perhaps because the author’s analysis becomes more and more persuasive as her evidence accumulates. Anyone who has felt deeply estranged from fellow Catholics with whom he or she shares, in the end, so much in common stands to gain insight from this book into the dynamics that drive us apart.

By way of example, the author draws attention to the “different central metaphors for the church” operative at the two parishes (25). At Our Lady of the Assumption, the church is cast as a family; at Saint Brigitta, as a community. She goes on to show that “[t]hese metaphors . . . express and support different normative patterns of social relations,” beginning with but extending well beyond the understanding of the proper relationship between priests and the laity (25). At Our Lady of the Assumption, where being Catholic means participating in a family, the family figures as “the source or fundamental location of [parishioners’] religious calling” (217). By contrast, at Saint Brigitta, where being Catholic means participating in a community, “the family is primarily at the service of people’s vocations in the wider world” (217). Different understandings of gender roles likewise follow. At Our Lady of Assumption, women tend to understand motherhood as a vocation and to reject paid work outside the home. By contrast, women at Saint Brigitta’s “more or less explicitly oppose the retraditionalized gender roles valued in Assumption’s milieu” (219). The upshot is that “the cultural milieus represented at Assumption and Saint Brigitta not only define themselves in part in disagreement with one another but also feel antagonism toward some of the other’s beliefs and outlooks” (236-237).

Drawing from Georg Simmel, the author notes that “[t]his antagonism, grounded in different understandings of . . . Catholic belonging, is a conflict between intimates” – typically the most intense kind of conflict, since it involves, in Simmel’s terms, the totality of our being (237). Simmel also observes, however, that “[a]t the highest level of spiritual cultivation it is possible to avoid [such conflict], for it is characteristic of this level to combine complete mutual devotion with complete mutual differentiation” (“Conflict,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, 92). American Catholics can be hopeful, I think, that Pope Francis at least aims to take us there.