The Organization Man

by William H Whyte

  Leinberger’s philosophy, in brief, was that a specific philosophy wasn’t something to worry about. “This business of denominational theologies should come later,” he explained. “Take schools, for example. When you move into a formative community like this, you don’t worry first about what the educational philosophy is. You want to know if there is a good building, teachers with degrees to indicate they are equipped, multi-purpose rooms, and things like that. You worry about the detailed philosophy only later. Because of disagreements on details of theological implications, the Protestant Church gets there ‘last with the least’ and ultimately makes very little impact on these new communities.”

  He wanted a useful church, and to emphasize theological points, he felt, was to emphasize what is not of first importance and at the price of provoking dissension. “We try not to offend anybody,” he explains. “In the Navy I learned it was important to conduct services to emphasize the areas where there was theological agreement and not bring up the theological points anyone could take exception to.”

  Human relations, he felt, were of key importance. “I think this is the basic need—the need to belong to a group. You find this fellowship in a church better than anywhere else. And it is contagious. In a community like Park Forest, when young people see how many other people are going to church regularly, they feel they ought to. Another need we fulfill is that of counseling. Young people want a place to take their problems and someone to talk to about them. Put all these things together and you get what we’re after—a sense of community. We pick out the more useful parts of the doctrine to that end.”

  When Leinberger began making his rounds, he found that Park Foresters couldn’t agree with him more. Their mobility, far from making them cling to a single church affiliation as a sort of constant in their lives, had weakened the denominational barriers. In moving from one community to another, many of the transients had gone where there was either no church of their faith or one that to them seemed mediocre, and as a consequence they had got in the habit of “shopping.”

  Of all the factors that weighed in their choice, denomination had become relatively unimportant. In a house-to-house survey of their religious preferences, Park Foresters were asked, among other things, what counted most to them in choosing a church. Here, in order, are the factors they listed: (1) the minister, (2) the Sunday school, (3) the location. In fourth and fifth places the denomination and the music.

  Here, by percentages, are the denominational backgrounds of suburbanites in Levittown and Park Forest:

  Sources: Park Forest figures were gathered by the chaplain in his calls on incoming families. Levittown figures, which have been readjusted to eliminate nonreporting residents, were gathered by the local churches in co-operation with the Philadelphia Council of Churches. The figures for the U.S., most of which are based on claimed membership, are from the Census of Religious Bodies of the United States, based on the Yearbooks of American Churches and the World Almanac questionnaire.

  Thanks to a question included in the 1950 Park Forest survey, there are some clues as to the latent desire for upgrading denominational ties. Of 3,919 respondents, 593 showed an inclination to switch. Comparing the number who wished to switch to a particular faith with the number who wished to leave it, we find that the Congregational, Episcopal, and Presbyterian faiths, in that order, come off best. Methodists, almost fifty-fifty, are in the middle, while the greatest potential emigration is from the Baptists and the Lutherans. The Catholic and Jewish faiths were both alike in that though more people showed a preference to leave than to join, the ratio of potential switchers to the total affiliation was so small that the two faiths appeared to be the most stable of all.

  Why not, then, one united protestant church? The young people did not want what is usually called a “community church.” This kind of church, they heard, had not worked too well in some of the communities where it had been tried, for it was too often simply a gambit on the part of a denomination to draw people in before the church flew its true sectarian colors. What the young people wanted was a true union of the leading Protestant denominations. And for practical as well as idealistic reasons. “Why spend a lot of money building a lot of little churches,” one layman argued, “when one church would do the job better, and do it now? Why give small salaries to five so-so pastors instead of a decent salary to one good one?”

  Leinberger agreed; like the residents, he saw the spiritual and the practical as reasonably synonymous. “It was just common sense. Central management is always more efficient and less expensive. Futhermore, I began to realize that it was a good thing for the church itself. Protestantism loses a lot because there is so much choice of churches. Protestants spend a lot of time shopping around, whereas the Catholics immediately become a part of the religious life of the community. Where there is too much choice, people often end up making no choice at all.”

  The denominations didn’t think much of the idea, but their opposition merely stimulated the Park Foresters to new efforts. “The kids said that if that was the story, then they’d go ahead on their own,” recalls Leinberger. “It was a real grass-roots thing. When the kids said they wanted it, I fought for it with them.” A fight there had to be, but before long, worn down by the sheer pressure of mass meetings, petitions of one kind or another (and some scoldings from the Christian Century), the denominations agreed to compromise. The Lutherans and Episcopalians, because of differences of liturgy and polity too great to be encompassed in the United Protestant Church, went ahead and set up their own churches, but under the leadership of five denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, United Presbyterian, Evangelical and Reformed), twenty-two denominations agreed to co-operate in setting up the church. There would be one basic service, but, unlike community churches, this church would encourage its members to retain their original affiliations. Doctrinal differences would not be obliterated—in baptism, for example, the pastor would both immerse and sprinkle, and there would be both pew communion and altar communion.

  To finance the church, the Park Foresters had to break some precedents. Without sufficient money from the denominations they had to float bank loans with pledges of collateral—an action that caused much rethinking about church financing elsewhere. When a bond issue was floated, the parishioners dipped into their savings to make it a success; they sacrificed even more of their time, and a good part of the physical plant represents evening and week-end hours given up by many a weary young executive. In all of this they felt not too much sympathy from churchmen outside Park Forest. Few clergymen, they complained, were equipped to understand or meet the needs of Park Forest. “I found a great lack of insight into our kind of problem,” said one layman who was engaged in looking for the new minister. “I remember talking to one man we were considering. He kept talking to me about having to wait for the Call of God. Well, sir, I got the feeling that the Call of God was going to have to come over the telephone—and also going to have to say something about a pretty good salary. I tell you it’s hard to get across to most clergymen the frontier we are offering.”

  But the church has been successfully kept to its original vision. In choosing the first pastor, Dr. Gerson Engelmann, Park Foresters were hesitant at first because of his advanced age (he was forty-five), but in his own way he has proved to be ideally suited to the community. Dr. Engelmann, who is an ex-sociologist, has a keen understanding of the pressures that beset transients, and in talking over their problems with them, he has proved to be a wise and friendly counselor. He has been particularly effective in getting people rooted through community work, and in pointing out the advantages of the church in this respect he is refreshingly free from sanctimony. “Gerson realizes how terribly important church work is for young couples like us,” says a transient. “If you’re going to have any stability in our kind of life, you have to get involved with other people in things that really count. I can’t think of a better way than the kind of activity we have in the United Protesta
nt Church.” In the meantime a second United Protestant Church has been set up to take over the growing load. It appears to be cast in the same spirit as the first. Its pastor, Rev. Robert Crocker, has, like Dr. Engelmann, put great emphasis on Christian fellowship, and he too draws heavily on young business talent for its leadership. (The chairman of the church board is a lab technician at Swift’s; the chairman of the finance committee is an advertising-agency man; the chairman of the trustees is a salesman for Cities Service; the chairman of admission, a salesman at Swift’s; the young counselor, a professor.) The church building has not yet been raised, but all the indications are that the laymen of the second will display the same practicality and energy in tackling the job. Meanwhile, in the newest subdivision of the community a third United Protestant church has been formed with the Reverend Vernon Flynn as minister.

  Clearly, the United Protestant Church represents the basic temper of Park Forest. In proportion to the increase in population, the two United Protestant churches and the Jewish congregation have made the greatest increase. Except for the Catholic Church, the sectarian groups have increased the least, and some haven’t even kept up.

  Characteristically, the village chaplain the community selected, the Rev. Joseph Hughes, is of the same pragmatic stamp as Leinburger (who has since gone off, at the request of a near-by suburb, to revamp the approach of a more traditional church).* He has expanded the services offered by the chaplain—among other things, he follows up every police car and, like an M.D. referring a patient to a specialist, he will refer problems he discovers to the appropriate minister. When there was a temporary wave of shoplifting, Hughes worked on each case and, together with the police chief, did such an effective job of case work that not one of the housewives apprehended was ever found to be a repeater. He, too, is strong for the breaking down of denominational barriers. In calling on newcomers to find their religious preferences, he does not proselytize for any one church, but it is a matter of satisfaction to him that the idea of a United Protestant Church interests them very much.

  There are, to be sure, misgivings. Is it a church, some ask, or is it a social center? One wife who was trying to explain to me why she didn’t go to any church at all explained her feelings by referring to her child. “My little girl made a very shrewd comment,” she said. “She had been telling me that she didn’t want to go to the United Protestant Church Sunday School any more. I was asking her why. She told me, ‘I don’t want to learn about how Christian people live. I want to learn about God.’ “This remark smells a bit of the parental lamp, but it succinctly expresses the objection of some Park Foresters. Between the two poles, between faith and authority on one hand and the social and the pragmatic on the other, they feel the United Protestant Church has leaned much too far toward the latter. “I told Gerson Engelmann that if the Catholic Church got wise,” says one resident, “they’d send out a smart young Jesuit of the Monsignor Sheen type. If they did, I told Gerson, he’d better watch out, for half his flock would stray over the fence.”

  Certainly there is little likelihood of flight in the other direction. As the Unitarians have found out, there’s not much room left. Many had at first thought Park Forest would be ideal proselyting ground for Unitarianism. To a population predominantly indifferent to theology, it offered more freedom from doctrine than any other group. Like the U. P. Church, it stressed participation too and, if anything, with more conscious intellectualism. From the beginning, the local congregation has been very active in the community’s more serious cultural and civic activities, and the church’s own projects have had a marked secular appeal. (Most successful projects in 1955: a Modern Jazz Concert and a Folk Sing.) Yet the congregation has remained small, now numbering about 120 members. The full-time minister who recently took over is a thoughtful man and he may succeed in enlarging the membership considerably. For the time being, however, Unitarianism has not exerted a strong popular appeal.

  It is something of a case of stolen thunder. The Unitarians maintain that the Christian Message is a strait jacket to thought, but of the U. P. Church they say only that the Message is “latent” there. Similarly, while they advertise their church as the one for those who think, they cannot bear down too hard on this distinction either. Even if they did, furthermore, the interests of the U. P. Church would not be hurt; the more strongly the Unitarian position is delineated, that much closer to the middle of the road does the U. P. Church appear. “I get annoyed at the Unitarians’ ads,” says a U.P. member, “but I’ll tell you one good thing about them. It’s wonderful, for a change, to have someone imply we’re too doctrinal.”

  At the other end of the scale is the catholic church. It is convenient to see it as the direct opposite of the United Protestant approach—and the contrast is one Park Foresters often make. The tug between tradition and social utility, however, is not confined to Protestantism. Among young Catholics, too, there is a ferment for a more socially useful church, and suburbanism has greatly accentuated it. At Park Forest, as elsewhere, many parishioners feel that some of the customs traditional in the church were a response to social needs of former times and could without theological conflict be better attuned to those of today. For some, the problem is personified by their priest, Father Coogan. They like him, but they have the feeling that he embodies an authoritarian approach better suited to a city ward than middle-class suburbia.

  An interesting development has been the growth of the Catholic Action Movement at Park Forest. In the form of the Christian Family Movement, it is essentially an effort to apply religion to social and personal problems and it has proved to have strong appeal for many Catholics who have not otherwise been heavily involved in community activities. There are now about a hundred couples meeting regularly—a very high number for the population represented—and the leaders feel the number could grow still higher. The assistant priest, Father Didier, has helped them greatly, but they are now at a stage where they need an extra man assigned to them by Father Coogan. They do not feel that Father Coogan is especially enthusiastic.

  Some Catholic laymen are most definitely not enthusiastic. Noting uneasily the references to “group dynamics” in Catholic Action literature, they feel that a more pragmatic church would be a contradiction in terms: let the United Protestants try it if they wish, goes the argument, but Catholics cannot look to God and John Dewey at the same time. I append some observations on this score written down by a former member of the parish:

  Take the social aspect. Actually, the Roman Catholic Church can offer a better deal in this respect than the United Protestant Church. Look at it in pragmatic terms and you have everything that the social dynamists want: in one package you have an “explicitly stated consensus” (doctrine), a sense of direction (a reason for, or why), hygienic, interpersonal relation (participation in the Mystical Body), nondirection psychotherapy (confession), and an educational system that insures constant adjustment. From any of these pragmatic viewpoints the church has been servicing her transients for many years, no matter where they are or where they happen to alight. This, it seems to me, is what the United Protestants are looking to. But there’s one great difference. They don’t make the heavy moral and intellectual demands of the Catholic Church.

  The church must be socially useful, and I’ll admit that it hasn’t adjusted to the new problems as well as it should. But to get involved in “social dynamics” in a misguided attempt to meet “the needs of modern man” is to defeat the ancient purpose of the church. It would make an important concession to the view that man is more animal than rational and would deny his capabilities for social growth. It would deny, in fact, his free will, and this, to understate the issue, lies at the root of Christian doctrine.

  The church failed once before and the Reformation resulted, and she failed a second time, and Marxism grew and thrived. If she fails this time—by not adjusting or by adjusting too much—she may well be doing herself in.

  In the jewish community also there is a pull be
tween the religious and the social, and a more complicated one than affects Protestants and Catholics. In matters secular Jews have been adopting the values and customs of the middle-class majority; not only does suburbia tend to attract Jews who are less “different”; it speeds up the process in which anyone—Jewish or non-Jewish—becomes even less “different.” At the same time, however, there has been a revival among Jews of religious and cultural practices which intensify one’s sense of Jewishness.

  Yet, in some respects, this emphasis on revival stems from much the same drives that animate the Protestant suburbanites. In the more fixed community of old, people did not need so much to be aware consciously of the bonds which united them, but in suburbia they have had to think about them, to dramatize them, and this is why their emphasis on fellowship can seem so noticeable to those from more cohesive, aged communities. So with the Jews; the revival of interest in such traditional practices, such as the dietary laws, may seem a far cry from the Protestants’ emphasis on fellowship, but it too represents the impulse to make explicit a kind of belongingness that once was an almost involuntary, normal part of life. The new Jewish institutions of suburbia particularly emphasize the education of the children, but they have grown also, Herbert Gans has suggested, by serving social needs that Jews living in predominantly Jewish city neighborhoods could satisfy without benefit of formal organization—or did not feel to be desirable until they had begun to become more a part of middle-class American life. As Will Herberg has observed, less and less do they then feel the need to reject the Jewishness of the immigrant generation.

  Doctrinally, Jews too are trying to find the middle of the road. Park Forest’s Temple Beth Sholom is not interdenominational like the United Protestant Church; it is Reform—a “warm, liberal kind of Reform,” as the rabbi has put it—and could not well accommodate Orthodox Jews.* Its services, however, include many ritual and ceremonial elements usually associated with those of a Conservative synagogue.