In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change

1. The Vibrancy of American Religion

1 1 The Vibrancy of American Religion If I had had the sense then that I have now, I’d refuse to live in Texas.” So declared Barbara Shaw when interviewed in 1958, at age thirty, five years after she had left Berkeley, California, with her young husband, an engineer who was returning to west Texas to work in his father’s prosperous ranching business.1 Becoming part of a wellestablished Texas family with a beautiful home might have struck those who knew Barbara as a perfect match for what researchers described as her “flamboyant and exuberant” personality. In adolescence, Barbara was socially ambitious and self-confident, a disposition encouraged by her mother, who believed “there was no reason [Barbara] couldn’t be a member of Congress” and who repeatedly reminded Barbara to “always better” herself. Barbara’s marriage certainly landed her in a wellto -do and socially prominent family. Unfortunately, Barbara’s mother did not get to witness her daughter’s accomplishment: she died, much to Barbara’s sorrow, when Barbara was just twenty-three. Barbara’s passions for socializing, politics, and public speaking found no shortage of opportunities in Texas. The girl who as a high school senior in Berkeley was president of the Associated Women Students and who in college had enjoyed an exciting social life was easily drawn into the civic and social activities of her husband’s family. But Texas was a “ 2 THE VIBRANCY OF AMERICAN RELIGION very different place from California. And Barbara had very little sense of what to expect, though her father had grown up in Texas before moving to the Bay Area to work in a successful law practice. The difference of place was crystallized especially in the religious atmosphere that dominated everyday life in west Texas. “It’s a Baptist town,” Barbara explained, “where you can’t smoke, drink, or tell an off-color story.” It wasn’t that Barbara was not herself religious. While growing up in Berkeley, she had in fact been very active in the Congregational Church’s Winthrop Club and Pilgrim Fellowship, and had “thoroughly enjoyed” the church’s local activities and regional conferences during high school and college. Indeed, in 1944, when she was sixteen, she told the interviewer from the Institute of Human Development that the man she would marry “must be religious and ambitious,” characteristics that mirrored her own sense of self. But she was keenly aware in her 1958 interview that being a Congregationalist was very different from being a Southern Baptist, and especially so in the 1950s, when Baptists were renowned for their separateness from other denominations (see Marty 1996: 448–49). Barbara pointed to the very different hold exercised by the two churches over their members: “Church didn’t have the same meaning to my family. You went to church and then you came home, or you were active in the various groups. But these people live their religion . Every member of the family is a good Baptist and lives it. They are self-disciplined, they give 10 percent of their income—every member does—to the church each year. I’ve learned to give my tithe too, out of my allowance. My husband’s whole family is involved heavily and lives by all its Christian tenets.” Barbara’s husband and father-in-law were deacons, her mother-inlaw was the church organist and music director for local religious radio and television programs, and her children, according to Barbara, had been “going to Sunday school since they were a month old.” With all the time and energy that Barbara’s family were contributing to the church, it is not surprising that Barbara too became highly involved. She longed for California but embraced the social and cultural demands of her new environs. She and her husband were members of a religious film discussion group and, to her surprise, “Even I teach Sunday school classes” (emphasis hers). For her Texas Baptist family, “religion is their life,” and Barbara was making it her life too. Yet she envisaged a future life outside Texas and back in California. Interviewed twelve years later, in 1970, Barbara was still living in Texas, now in Dallas, and was enjoying her marriage and five growing THE VIBRANCY OF AMERICAN RELIGION 3 children. Her husband continued to be a “devoted Baptist” and highly involved in church affairs, taking the lead, for example, in planning the...