The Organization Man

CHAPTER 27 The Church of Suburbia

The Church of Suburbia 365 More basically, what they have is a rather keen consciousness of self-and the sophistication to realize that while individualistic tastes may raise eyebrows, exercising those tastes won't bring the world crashing down about you. "One day one of the girls busted in," one upper-middlebrow cheerfully recounts. "She saw I was reading. 'What you got there, hon?' she asked me. You might have known it would be Plato that day. She almost fell over from surprise . Now all of them are sure I'm strange." Actually they don't think she's overly odd, for her deviance is accompanied by enough tact, enough observance of the little customs that oil court life, so that equilibrium is maintained. Just where the happy mean lies, however, still depends greatly on the degree of the group's cohesion. Relatively, the seasoned transient steers his course more intelligently than the others. But he too is not proof against beneficence. "Every once in a while I wonder," says one transient, in an almost furtive moment of contemplation. "I don't want to do anything to offend the people in our block; they're kind and decent, and I'm proud we've been able to get along with one another-with all our differences-so well. But then, once in a while, I think of myself and my husband and what we are not doing, and I get depressed. Is it just enough not to be bad?" Many others are so troubled. They sense that by their immersion in the group they are frustrating other urges, yet they feel that responding to the group is a moral duty-and so they continue, hesitant and unsure, imprisoned in brotherhood. cHAPTER 27 The Church of Suburbia THIS BRINGS US TO A QUESTION. IS THE ORGANIZATION TRANSIENTS' emphasis on the social a passing phase in their lives-a convenient accommodation to current reality? In the early stages of their life 866 THE ORGANIZATION :WAN in suburbia, patently, the sheer fact of living so close together is bound to make them put a heavy premium on fellowship, and to a degree they are preoccupied with other people because they have to be. Yet there is more than expediency to this impulse. There is internal conviction as well, and in evidence I would now like to turn to the church. I will concentrate largely on one church, Park Forest's United Protestant Church, for it is perhaps the most outstanding example of its kind in the country. It is outstanding, however , precisely because it so well expresses the temper of organization man, and the needs that it fulfills are deeply felt by him wherever he may be. The story begins in 1946. To church the community, Klutznick decided to give free land to the churches. But to how many and which? Obviously there would be a Catholic church and a Jewish synagogue, but the Protestant denominations posed a problem. To help him out, the leading denominations made estimates of how many people each would probably serve. Not too surprisingly, each was generous in its projections, and when Klutznick added up the estimates, it appeared that there would be more Protestant churchgoers than people. Klutznick tried a different tack. In effect, he would give the land to the people rather than to the churches. He would provide the church sites, he told the denominations, but only if they got together and, by impartial survey, determined what the young people themselves wanted. What was the actual number in each denomination? As time went on, how many would probably switch from one denomination to another? Or were they tired of denominations altogether? If the churches would send out a man to make the study-preferably a veteran-Klutznick said he would abide by the results. Thus, one day in 1948, Chaplain Hugo Leinberger arrived in Park Forest. It was one of those catalytic moments when the man and the environment come together. Leinberger had no strong denominational bias; he was, furthermore, a veteran. During the war he had served as a Navy chaplain at sea, and this experience, in an analogy he was later to draw on often, was almost a dry run for the chaplaincy of a village. Leinberger's philosophy, in brief, was that a specific philosophy wasn't something to worry about. "This business of denomina- The Church of Suburbia 867 tional theologies should come later," he explained. "Take schools, for example. When...