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In an attempt to understand the growing influence of the Christian Right, sociologist and documentary filmmaker James Ault spent three years inside the world of a Massachusetts fundamentalist church he encountered while studying a variety of new-right groups. He observed—and where possible participated in—the daily lives of the members of a church he calls Shawmut River. His book takes us into worship services, home Bible studies, youth events, men’s prayer breakfasts and Saturday work groups, after-Sunday-service family dinners, and bitter conflicts leading to a church split. He introduces us to the principal members of the congregation, as well as its shadow community of ex-members. We see how they respond to each other, to Ault as an unsaved newcomer, and to the outside world.
Ault draws our attention to how members use the Bible as a “handbook for life,” applying moral absolutes taken from it, more or less successfully, to both daily life and extraordinary events. We see how the congregation deals with issues around marriage, adultery, divorce, teenage pregnancy, and alcohol abuse. Ault makes clear how the church, embodying traditional extended-family life, provides the security of like-mindedness and community to its members. He also reveals the pervasive power of gossip to engender and perpetuate divisions and conflicts within a community. And finally, Ault describes his own surprising journey of discovery, revelation, and belief during, and in the wake of, his three years studying Shawmut River and making an intimate documentary about it.
Having experienced its life personally and in depth, James Ault is remarkably placed to guide us through the world of Christian fundamentalism—an abiding and, to many Americans, baffling phenomenon. In the course of telling his story, he builds a useful framework for better understanding the popular sources of both fundamentalism and new-right conservatism and their distinctive place in American life.
- Sales Rank: #862896 in Books
- Published on: 2004-09-15
- Released on: 2004-09-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.57" h x 1.40" w x 6.60" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 435 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Since they began flexing their political muscles with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Christian fundamentalists have attracted increasing attention from curious, and often suspicious, outsiders. Setting out to make a documentary about the religious right in the early 1980s, Harvard- and Brandeis-trained sociologist Ault found his way to a Falwell-influenced church, the pseudonymously named Shawmut River Baptist Church, and ended up spending more than two years there. There, much to the bewilderment of his fellow academics, he found a community whose beliefs sustained a social world of surprising richness. Ault masterfully combines narrative with careful, and frequently groundbreaking, analysis: "While fundamentalists' timeless, God-given absolutes may appear rigid from the outside, within the organism of a close-knit community... they can be surprisingly supple and flexible over time and place." But what is most striking is the way Ault brings his whole person, not just his capacity for insightful abstraction, into the story—and into the quest to know not just his subjects, but also their God. While most of the book's events took place almost two decades ago, Ault's hours of verbatim recordings, which he retells with gripping immediacy, keep the book fresh. This title joins Randall Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory as required reading for anyone who would understand America's most conservative Christians.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
For a self-admitted left-wing sociologist, Ault provides as unbiased a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the fundamentalist members of the Shawmut River Baptist Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, as might be found. His relations with the church began in the mid-1980s when his postdoctoral dissertation on why new-right conservative women eschew feminism led to a PBS documentary. Having continued, they now eventuated in this lengthy account of the professional and personal lives of the pastor and several congregants. Ault's narrative style should appeal to the Left and Right alike, particularly after he confesses his frequent discomfort when others mention their unqualified faith in the word of the Bible, which doesn't, however, impede his portrayal of that faith as earnest and heartfelt. Ault discloses all that the people of Shawmut River Baptist taught him about how fundamentalists make the world work for them; and by noting how liberals see the same world quite differently, he just may have written the seminal opus for bridge-building between those two factions. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Critical acclaim for James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh
“A unique contribution to the study of American religion….the best single-volume explanation of why American fundamentalist Christianity thrives among certain people, what needs it fulfills and why it will not die out.”
—Mark Oppenheimer in The Washington Post Book World
“This ethnographic study of working-class Christians is not just a first-rate piece of sociological journalism. Ault weaves his own story into the book, and the gradual coming together of the Harvard graduate and his fundamentalist research subjects gives Spirit and Flesh a warmth and humanity that set it apart.”
—Don Lattin in The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"This brilliant book is essential for anyone who wants to better understand fundamentalism—or for fundamentalists who desire to understand how they are viewed by others."
—Cindy Crosby in Christianity Today
“ One of the maladies of contemporary American politics is its descent into incivility….Spirit and Flesh calls this politics to task, challenging all of us ‘to listen more patiently, carefully, intelligently—even generously—to our
opponents.' Can somebody say amen?”
—Stephen Prothero in The New York Times Book Review
“This extraordinary book….an insightful look at some of America’s most conservative Christians and helps explain why the new Christian right has moved into the mainstream of American politics.”
—Elizabeth Bennett in The Houston Chronicle
“An absorbing, groundbreaking, and intimate tale….an ethnographic study that often reads like a novel.”
—Jane Lampman in Christian Science Monitor
“ Ault masterfully combines narrative with careful, and frequently groundbreaking, analysis….what is most striking is the way Ault brings his whole person, not just his capacity for insightful abstraction, into the story….required reading for anyone who would understand America’s most conservative Christians.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Advance praise
“It is vital that we learn to see fundamentalists in all traditions as vulnerable human beings like ourselves. If we simply dismiss them as either evil or hopelessly irrational, we contribute to the polarization that is putting us all in such deadly peril. James Ault has traced his own journey from disbelief to understanding and will take his readers with him. This book has made an important contribution to one of the greatest problems facing the world today.”
—Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God
“I was swept into Ault’s absorbing narrative right away. The book is a superb combination, a sympathetic portrayal of real people involved in a fundamentalist Baptist Church woven together with a well-informed portrayal of an increasingly important element in the religious and political life of America. His brave and courageous inclusion of his own journey as he worked on this project deepens and enriches the story.”
–Harvey Cox, author of Fire From Heaven
“Ault is a masterful participant observer who acquires a sympathy for this movement’s basic beliefs while retaining a scholar’s analytical eye. A community study that reads like a novel (with a surprise ending), Spirit and Flesh is a remarkable American story.”
–Joel Carpenter, author of Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American
Fundamentalism
“Compelling for its intimate portrayal of the men and women and valuable for its insights into the larger culture of Christian fundamentalism. This book takes readers into a world far beyond the common stereotypes.”
–Gustav Niebuhr, Correspondent and Associate Professor of Religion and Media Syracuse University
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Engaging and climactic
By FaithfulReader.com
In 1983 sociologist James Ault, a "sixties radical who had embraced...new-left enthusiasms of the day," took on a post-grad research project: getting to know the ins and outs of an independent fundamentalist Baptist church in Massachusetts. Ault's purpose: "to better understand popular support for this new-style conservatism marching proudly behind the banner of 'family values.'" His interest: "it wasn't [the pastor's] religion that had brought me to follow him on his round of duties....It was his politics." His method: anthropologically studying the "community enterprise" of this one church and its attendant school.
After a year, Ault proposed extending his involvement and filming a documentary about the church --- titled "Born Again," airing on PBS in 1987. The book project came more than a decade later, which means that some of the political commentary seems dated. And yet most of the book is a keen and still-relevant look at the church's faith, social mores, and informal systems.
Working from tapes and notes, Ault walks us chronologically through his several years as a welcomed but suspect outsider, at church services, home Bible studies, men's prayer breakfasts, Sunday dinners. He puts himself into the story; you see his measured reaction to parishioners; there's the day he reads his name on someone's refrigerator --- a prayer request for his salvation. And their reaction to him --- his quiet presence (listening) and carefully phrased questions (so as not to make people defensive). After a year, the pastor's wife tells him, "You know, I never know where you stand on things....But somehow I think you understand." Though an atheist, Ault had grown up in a liberal Methodist parsonage, and this surely gives him a head start in understanding some of the in-talk of sermons and extended conversations he chooses to print --- with dead-on authenticity. In time, mutual misgiving melts.
Ault's narrative, as engaging and climactic as a novel, is interspersed with cultural, and some theological, analyses of the church, drawing on a larger body of research, evidenced by 30 pages of notes and a 10-page bibliography. A chapter such as "Fundamentalism and Tradition" is not light entertainment.
Ault spends considerable time on family and gender issues, as does the church itself. "The day-to-day business of church life had much to do with transforming and ordering family relationships, especially marriage." Marriages have been solidified, largely because errant husbands had come home from local bars and taken responsibility for their families. But church and family patriarchy is more complicated than Ault had suspected. "The man's the head," the pastor's wife tells him, but "the woman's the neck that turns the head." This informal scheme is, as Ault says, "what everybody sees" and "what everybody knows" --- despite the official line.
There's an insightful tangential plot (and analysis) of social networks, gossip, and tussles for community power; factions leave the church, pastor and people feel betrayed, and ultimately new leadership takes over. This church, like every since the first, is made up of people who struggle, as the book title suggests, "between the spirit and the flesh."
Both the last chapter and the epilogue are postscripts to Ault's active involvement in the church, and in some ways they are the most interesting. Something took. Or, in gospel parlance, the seed bore fruit, the prodigal came home --- not that Ault became a fundamentalist or even a Baptist, but he has claimed faith and worships with a church community. And, even as the very publication of this book suggests, he has a vision for breaking down the negative, even demonizing, stereotypes that liberals and conservatives --- both in and outside of the church --- have of each other.
At the end of the book he proposes inviting "a group of fundamentalists and right-to-lifers together with a group of feminists and progressives" on a three-day boat ride. He admits it would be a risky venture (someone quipped, "Will there be enough life jackets?"), but at least he dares to dream. At least we could dare to suggest that people on both sides read Ault's book with an open mind.
--- Reviewed by Evelyn Bence
17 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Worth Reading but 15 years late
By DFE
Those of you reading this book looking for insight into the Born Again movement and why its membership is so successfully directing much of the current political and social discourse in this country with be sorely disappointed. The material in this book is 15 to 20 years old and the author spends little time relating the political aspects of the Born Again movement, but instead covers the daily life of a single small community during the mid to late 80's. This book relates the authors experience of observing a Christian Born again community, in the course of preparing for shooting a documentary. The book begins in 1984 as he first meets with the Minister of a church that had only been in existence for a few years. It is not clear just how long the author spent with them as for some strange reason most of the material is not dated and when he does supply a date for a section he only provides a month and day, but no year. However the author does mention that he spent two years away from the church while editing the film and then briefly touched based with them again in the 1988, so at best he spent two years with them.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section covers several of the core members backgrounds and how they came to Born Again. The second section deals with the various ministries of the church and how the church is bound up in the daily lives of the members. The third section covers the shooting of the documentary and the fourth section covers events that occurred within the community just after the film's completion. There is also a brief epilogue in which he talks about how his experiences effected his own faith and brief where are they now section for some of the principle subjects.
The author is a son of a Methodist Minister of what he refers to as "Mainline" or another words liberal church. At the onset of his research the author considered himself a standard liberal professor divorced from his religious upbringing, perplexed by the beliefs of the Born Again. In understanding his subjects, he tries to be as nonjudgmental as possible and ends up creating a very sympathetic portrait of their values and provides a reasonable explanation for why people are attracted to this faith. By the end of the book I felt like I had a much greater understanding for where these people are coming from. However I was sorely disappointed that there was not any current information on the Born Again community he visited, nor was there any attempt to show the political aspects of this movement. In one throw away sentence he mentions his discomfort in accompanying some of the church members to a demonstration in an abortion clinic but he never pursues this topic. In fact, if you missed that sentence you would never know that anyone in this church is involved in the movement to make abortion illegal. Similarly he mentions that the Minister of the church ran for the State house on a Christian Fundamentalist platform, but he does not cover this at all. Instead he chooses to focus on the day to day lives and struggles that are easier for us to relate too, accusing his fellow academics of being too closed minded to appreciate a different lifestyle. It is as if the author is studying the quaint customs of some isolated group, far removed from the everyday concerns of the presumed liberal readership. Lost amidst this sympathetic portrait is the reality that these people are seeking to dramatically change the laws of the US in ways that if they succeed with have very real effects on those who do not share their beliefs. You can almost here the author saying "Why can't we all just get along?" and he even goes so far as to suggest how the liberals and Born Again should be able to find common ground, seeming to forget the current level of venom that passes for political discourse in the US today. In the end, it is a fairly insightful if incomplete portrait of a young Born Again community.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Worth Reading
By Adam Gonnerman
I almost gave up on this book partway through the second chapter. The author seemed to be more focused on promoting his documentary than telling a the story of a fundamentalist church. I also thought he was failing to distinguish between fundamentalists and evangelicals, overgeneralizing. After letting a few days pass, I picked up where I left off, and I'm glad I did. You will have to read all the way through to the end to see how it all comes together and what impact his experience with fundamentlists had on the author. It was especially satisfying to see the clear-headed explanations of why fundamentalists think and behave as they do. Without becoming an apologist, he succeeds in bridging the gap.
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