A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: Problematizing Public and Private in Organized Religion

ABSTRACT

Poll results consistently reveal Americans' high interest in spirituality, yet also point to a dearth of participation in religion. I position organized religion's waning attractiveness as an organizational communication issue as I analyze the discourse of an alternatively organized housechurch. Utilizing feminist principles, I position the organization and notions of church within a context of scholarly and societal notions of public and private. I qualitatively explore what motivates this group to adopt and maintain alternative patterns and practices that both enable and constrain members. Moreover, I draw attention to paradoxes and tensions that arise and are navigated as members negotiate traditional applications of public and private and enact alternative ways of organizing within the tradition-laden domain of Christianity.

Keywords:

• Public
• Private
• Religious Organizing

The author is grateful to the editors and to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful input.

Notes

[1] This study is intended neither as a theological, nor a sociological treatise defining “church.” Rather, it is an attempt to explore everyday notions, uses, applications, and implications of that concept for group members. I (and housechurch members) use the term in a gross discursive sense to encompass that mass of protestant and Roman Catholic organizations in America to which someone might refer when asked, “Do you go to church?” or when he/shesays something like, “I grew up in the Lutheran (or Baptist, or Catholic) church.” “Church” may mean the group of people who meet regularly in a neighborhood church building, or the counsel, the denomination, or the global organization that runs and embodies a particular church. These broad and vague uses of the term are consistent with housechurch members' use of “church,” and are, in fact, integral to their finding new freedom to organize differently within that general construct.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark A. Leeman

Mark A. Leeman is a doctoral student in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University where he specializes in organizational communication, and specifically in organizing that humanizes. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the 2005 Central States Communication Association convention in Kansas City, Missouri.