In Institutional Dream Series (Sleeping in Public), 1972–73, Laurie Anderson slept in eight different public places in order to measure their institutional impression. In her experiment Anderson used dreams—ostensibly her own—“to see if the place can color or control my dreams.”Footnote 1 The short answer was—yes. Institutional Dream Series is an exploration of the self as medium. In sleeping and recording her sleep on the beach at Coney Island, in the halls of night court, at the bureau of immigration and naturalization, and in the women's bathroom at Columbia University Library, Anderson's performance suggests that vulnerability to bureaucratic structures and organizational schemes is not something to be avoided but studied.Footnote 2 For there is pleasure, fear, and wisdom to be found in such exposure.
Anderson's experiment speaks from an odd angle to Laurie Maffly-Kipp's 2014 Presidential Address to the American Society of Church History. Maffly-Kipp's reminder in “The Burdens of Church History” that organization comes in many shapes and sizes is a welcome one. Maffly-Kipp echoes the call, issued by Harry S. Stout and D. Scott Cormode a few years back, to tend to the “possibilities of redefining institutional history so it becomes a mediating perspective that encompasses both structural and cultural history, thus pointing the way towards an inclusive social history of religion.”Footnote 3 I appreciate Maffly-Kipp's insistence on the analytic primacy of church because it redirects attention to cognition and passion and effervescence amidst organizational environments. So despite the fact that I may fall under Maffly-Kipp's description of a “scholarly free agent”—I wholeheartedly endorse her insistence that we must leave “ourselves open to alternative understanding of what constitutes church history itself.”Footnote 4
The thread that I find most fascinating in Maffly-Kipp's address is her demand for more fine-tuned reflexivity: about the need to tend to—“in our scholarship”—the historicity of categorical transition underway and the future of any movement. This reflexivity is, in part, the burden of church history. It is a burden that we should not (because we cannot) jettison.Footnote 5 And it is a burden that generates all manner of urgent theoretical questions: What kinds of practices have suited particular forms of an institutional imaginary?Footnote 6 What kinds of sociality were promoted and/or occluded by particular institutional formations? What kinds of rationalities have undergirded these socialities and these formations?
A renewed focus on religious institutions would allow for a more robust picture of lives and tensions without reducing things to mere identity or mere advantage—a more complex understanding of agency than the choice-engine-self favored by the spiritual-but-not-religious types and their scholarly interpreters.Footnote 7 And amidst a relentless political push to delegitimize institutions, Maffly-Kipp's essay is born of sharp-edged, progressive intentions and offers a subtle skewering of those whose scholarly proclivities she sees as having been inflected by a neo-liberal imaginary. There is the compulsion to privatize to our detriment and church history may be a progressive counterweight.
Maffly-Kipp's writes of “mental conversations” with historical actors for whom church mattered, experiences that parallel Anderson's institutional dreams. For the burden of church history is, among other things, the call to converse more humanely with the dead. And although Maffly-Kipp does not address the presence and circulations of metaphysical traditions or their conversations with the dead, her historiographical insight parallels much recent work on occult histories and their relationship to ‘secular’ modes of inquiry.Footnote 8 This is my kind of history and so I share, as a general matter, Maffly-Kipp's unease with the willingness to narrow the terms of scholarly conversation with the dead—for these dead speak a strange and pressing language.
Maffly-Kipp demonstrates the importance of church (and its spectral excess) through the example of George Freeman Bragg and his insistence on the mediating power of institutions to simultaneously enable, constrain, and perhaps even liberate. Bragg's loyalty to an Episcopal Church whose racism was manifest sheds light on the complexities of the human psyche and the tensions of living in a world that does not necessarily conform itself to one's desire but more often than not actively thwarts it. Maffly-Kipp argues that there are subtleties to the religious life that can be overlooked when institutional demands and incentives are not accounted for. Consequently, one must entertain questions of sociality and dream life as much as church membership.Footnote 9 According to Maffly-Kipp, “Church was, for many African Americans, material evidence of a community that connected them to the dead, that anchored their activities in the present, and that pointed them toward a different kind of future.”Footnote 10 This is an elegant rendering and begs the question(s): what are the mechanics of connection, grounding and orientation?
The archive (talk about an institution!) is the best place to begin to address such questions. Even more so because the traditional work of church historians mirrors the work that has and must continue to be performed within the church (“painstakingly record[ing] baptisms, catechists, church growth, church debates, social outreach, and list[ing] prominent leaders in the movement”Footnote 11). Maffly-Kipp is worried that the hard and boring work of grasping the historical particularity of the church is being superseded by the spectacle of the new—cultural studies and the intellectual acrobatics (spinning in the air and spinning in circles no less being the essential image) of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. The kind of work Maffly-Kipp aims to counter is not discussed beyond its explicit association with these iconic figures and an implicit sense of narcissism, neglect, and beside-the-point theorization. But a portrait does emerge in bits and pieces.
As Maffly-Kipp observes, her concern over a decreasing “salience of church as a category of analysis” happens at a moment when institutions, in general, are under assault by neo-liberal schemes.Footnote 12 An ominous future is projected by way of literary allusion: “I would submit that, rather than opening up our historical explanations to a brave new world of cultural analysis, our own concepts of individual identities and selfhood as the preeminent concerns of religious subjects block us from—dare I say it—recognizing the profound ecclesiastical pleasures and collective commitments of historical agents.”Footnote 13
I, too, am concerned about the analytical occlusions that stem from an ignorance of institutions but I respectfully and steadfastly disagree with Maffly-Kipp's suggestion that too much “cultural analysis” limits our analytical imagination.Footnote 14 Here a progressive politics is welded to a conservative defense of an institutional (an identifiable and therefore peculiar) tradition. A defense against what or whom, exactly, I am not sure but I do not share her sense that “a brave new world of cultural analysis” hovers, ready to incur and to enact its limitations. Of course, some instances of cultural analysis do little more than extend the ideological intensities of their moment. Just as many church histories address only the most obvious and visible manifestations of “church” and do an incredible disservice to the power of institutional life in general and the problem of protestant indelibility in particular.Footnote 15 There is enough bad scholarship to go around. But might the insights of cultural analysis catalyze the tradition of inquiry that Maffly-Kipp seeks to defend? Might they provide an opportunity to better appreciate the complex entity of our analytics? How might these insights help resolve an impasse so as to be able to think, collectively, about religious institutions in ways that do not reproduce thin descriptions and dull analyses that characterize so much recent scholarship?Footnote 16
Maffly-Kipp suggests that the advances made by social history and other culturalist perspectives “have taken our work out of the church, and certainly have placed us at a far remove from the post-World War II focus on institutional life of which Wilhelm Pauck spoke.”Footnote 17 Trained in Germany, Pauck was a distinguished professor of church history associated with the liberal wing of American protestantism. He taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Union Seminary, and Stanford University, among other institutions. He was deeply invested in writing history in conversation with theological partners such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Maffly-Kipp recommends Pauck's 1952 Church History article for its insight into the “importance of religious institutional life in the early 1950s.”Footnote 18 Maffly-Kipp notes how Pauck addressed, through his Cold War lens, a postwar revival of interest in a notion of church. In doing so, he focused on something that is too often ignored—a sense of transcendental duty to religious organization. With general atomic anxiety, protestants in general had begun to unify against the spectral competition of communism and Roman Catholicism. In addition to his description of the scene, Pauck was also prescriptive, interested as he was in the contemporary re-orientation of protestantism. In light of this new market for institutional allegiance, protestants must come to a “fresh understanding of the distinctive functions and mission of the Christian Church.”Footnote 19
Pauck's article, published the same month that the Hubbard Association of Scientologists was established in Phoenix, Arizona, is a riveting document. For in addition to his archival focus on the church as historical entity, Pauck also offers a valuable peek outside. And it is this peek, with Marx and Foucault (and perhaps Freud) as my witnesses, that is telling. For after providing an “instructive” genealogy of the idea of church in Christian history up through the Reformation (the bulk of Pauck's article), Pauck notes with melancholic admiration how protestantism has been particularly affected by “secularization of the state and the economic order”—ideas of religious toleration, humanism and suspicion of hierarchical sacramentalism, exposure to print media, etc. The benefits of modernization have come at a cost to protestantism's brand identity in terms of both message and structural integrity: “The character of the ecclesia was more and more determined by reference to what were no longer vitally effective historical traditions or to social, economic or political factors. The churches became ‘feudalistic,’ ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian.’ They lost the relationship with the ‘sacred’ center. The meaning of the word ‘church’ based upon the meaning of the word ‘ecclesia’ was dimmed. ‘Denominations’ came into being.” This is a profound insight and one made even more poignant by Pauck's recommended solution: “contemporary Protestants [must] develop a doctrine of the church which convincingly states the Christian conviction that Christians are a ‘peculiar people.’ It is gratifying to note that the activities of the World Council of Churches are primarily directed toward the accomplishment of this end.” Pauck's penchant for scare quotes is suggestive for at some level Pauck is figuring change over time here as conceptual as well as material and structural. Might Pauck's penchant speak to his sensitivity to emergent forms of institutional mediation—the promises and demands made by concepts, circa 1952, and their constellations?Footnote 20
Given the political and economic and yes, theological inflections of Pauck's apparently neutral description of the contemporary Christian condition circa 1952, my sense is that “various types of cultural analysis” must be employed in order to begin to situate Pauck's “focus” within the institutional history he is narrating and to recognize our burden, as historians, to respond to his argument, in the present institutional moment, with both sympathy and skepticism. For despite Pauck's missionary charms, his article highlights a most significant development in the “institutional lives” of church members—a process he calls “secularization” and one that, in hindsight, might be understood as the saturation of microlevel deployments of a political rationality and technological strategies in domains for which they were not initially intended.
This is the language of scientific management and operation research. This is the conceptual drift from business and military strategy into institutions that tended to mental health, biology, education, public policy, and religion. This is the flourishing of self by way of corporate promise delivered in manners most efficient and shiny. Modernity happened and it happened because of the churches but it also happened to the churches by way of people on the ground, in public, sleeping or otherwise. Organization made its way in and out through dreams.Footnote 21
My sense, then, is that churches in the American grain—organizational structures that congeal over time and space around an explicit orientation to religion—are part of a larger story about secular modernity. That is not all they are but without this frame one loses much purchase on, for lack of a better word, context. For these religious organizations are part of the difference that unprecedented forms of organization have made over the past few hundred years. So if I were president of the Society of Church History and speaking to you right now I would not advocate “turning the tables on Marx and Foucault.”Footnote 22 On the contrary, I would urge you all to read and teach Marx and Foucault to your students in order to gain perspective on the technological, economic, and political environments in and through which any church emerges and sustains.Footnote 23
Like Maffly-Kipp, I acknowledge that institutions affect our dreams, which is to say, affect parts of ourselves to which we have little access and even less control over. Consequently, the significance of religious institutions cannot be reduced to either instrumental, structural, or agentive explanation. They are intensely symbolic and effusive. “Institutions do not just constrain options: they establish the very criteria by which people discover their preferences.”Footnote 24 Consequently, their moral force must be considered. And who better to assess such power than those who study the ways and means of piety? And like Maffly-Kipp I worry about how best to address our vulnerability to and ignorance of “the powerful forces that shape our social lives.”Footnote 25 But I do so because I sense a tradition of unwillingness when it comes to church historians tending to questions being raised outside of church history, literally and metaphorically speaking. Such questions could complement the collective knowledge of the ASCH. Offering caveats about a cultural turn in American church history (however one might define it) rather than seeking ways across this turn does not bode well for subtle understandings of institutional expanse and sophisticated renderings of “the many and varied ways through which we are constituted as subjects.”Footnote 26
The loss of church as a universal rubric, I contend, is not necessarily a loss of interpretive possibilities. Nor is it a demotion of the archive. Rather it is an opportunity for more subtle, rigorous, and multi-tiered analysis of it. It is an invitation to dream the institutional and to question how you approach and handle the archive, its contradictions and pleasures and inconsistencies and the experience of sometimes being overwhelmed by it.