In this fresh and intriguing study based on extensive fieldwork at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, Justin Wilford offers a geographer's perspective on the thriving megachurch phenomenon. Wilford is interested in what he calls the recent “postdenominational evangelical” (PDE) churches characterized by their location on the periphery of large cities; a loose denominational or nondenominational structure; a conservative, evangelical theology; multiple varieties of contemporary services and programs; a therapeutic style and message; and, especially important for this study, a reliance on small fellowship groups (Saddleback has over 3800). The core of their mission is an “unbending concern with engaging contemporary secular life with the goal of converting the “unchurched” and retaining the already churched” (8–9). Their success, Wilford argues, is rooted in a practical and limber response to their secularizing socio-spatial context. Members of the Saddleback community engage in a wide variety of practices that transform the suburban spaces of home, work, and play into “stages for spiritual self-transformation” (6). Even a Los Angeles freeway has an element of the sacred when the commuter is listening to a Saddleback devotional podcast.
Although acknowledging that an overarching secularization theory has been largely discredited, Wilford finds secularization to be a valid description of life on the ground, and he wants us to see its material and spatial realities. If modernity is spatially corrosive of community, how does the church respond? Saddleback imagines itself as concentric circles, with the “unchurched” community the outside ring and committed lay leaders at the core. This core is not geographically located at the sprawling central church campus, however, but in homes scattered across Los Angeles. In a suburban inversion of core and periphery, the home is the center of each suburbanite's world, the periphery as far as the car can reach. Large scale rituals seem inauthentic, but in the home, where suburbanites have the most hope of integrating their lives and feeling whole, rituals (generally not recognized as such) feel real. Postsuburban secularity, Wilford argues, has transformed the spatiality of the church. “Like its surrounding postsuburban environment, Saddleback is a dispersed, multi-nodal, multi-scaled network through which individuals link up in varying degrees with other individuals” (13). In home meetings individuals openly acknowledge the soullessness of suburbia and its pitfalls and strike back with an effort to reclaim what is perceived as good in the suburban dream: family, emotional intimacy, and local community.
Wilford uses Warren's “purpose driven life” paradigm to understand Saddleback's geography of “purpose driven places.” Saddleback's purpose is always evangelism — on a local scale — getting people in the door so that they can move toward greater levels of commitment and self-transformation. Because of the diversity of the community, this mission requires multiple spaces and approaches. One of the surprises of this study is the lack of uniformity in worship, devotional life, even belief (beyond core evangelical tenets) of Saddleback members, many of whom rarely if ever visit the main campus.
The last two chapters describe Saddleback's efforts to reach out via global evangelism and the local “Civil Forum.” In each instance, Wilford argues, although the scope seems national or global, the purpose is local. Global missions are promoted as an appropriate response to the blessings of suburban American life, a way of giving back and maintaining a “bargain of blessing” with God. Warren's “Global P.E.A.C.E. Plan” works against the tendency of evangelicals to think of doing right primarily in terms of their own selves and close family relationships. Even so, going far afield on a mission trip, Wilford discovers, is ultimately about the transformation of the self, the development of one's individual gifts and mission, “the ultimate self-improvement project” (128).
Finally, Wilford uses his geographer's toolkit to examine the political content of Saddleback's medium and message. Wilford acknowledges that the actions of Warren and his church might seem to be “crypto-theocratic”; the 2008 McCain-Obama “Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency” is the most well-known of Warren's forays into the political sphere. But Wilford claims this event and others like it (such as seminars on global health and AIDS, and Tony Blair's 2010 “Peace in a Globalized Society” forum) are a far cry from the politics and political ambitions of the 1980s Christian Right, or even a 2004 Rick Warren. Looking carefully at the local context for the 2008 forum, Wilford concludes that it was “a local, place-based strategy for evangelism, not for a Falwellian union of conservative Christianity and American government” (137). For instance, following the debate, Warren delivered the sermon, “The Kind of Leader America Needs” to a packed house. This was not a political endorsement, but rather a plea for integrity, humility and generosity in the lives of church members.
The leaders of Warren's church, Wilford argues, do what they do not to claim a national stage or to transform state politics, but to use a national presence to legitimize and make relevant what they do at home, to make sure that religion has a place in civil discourse and the full range of postsuburban life. Wilford found that such events do serve to counteract the privatism and self-interestedness of suburban life, offering “a welcome respite from the deracinating postsuburban politics that distills individuals' interests down to their personal property” (157). A “purpose driven politics” is one that serves the local community and the ongoing self-transformation of individual Christians. “What this means,” Wilford argues, “is that public religious action does not always mobilize individuals to political action or even political dispositions; sometimes it is the reverse: political action can mobilize individuals to religious action” (137).
Wilford does not rule out the possibility of other interpretations of Saddleback and similar churches. Certainly there is great variety within the evangelical megachurches. Yet Wilford's description and analysis of Saddleback challenges a more common interpretation of such organizations as protected and controlled enclaves that bless conservatism and consumerism and are fiercely invested in national politics. In Wilford's convincing geographical study, Saddleback's engagement with culture is far more complex, accommodating, and pragmatic.
