Review: Sacred subdivisions: The postsuburban transformation of American evangelicalism

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3166
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Wilford's book makes an important geographical contribution to the social scientific study of religion. Planted firmly in traditions of cultural geography, Wilford's ethnography of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, argues that Saddleback pursues a diffuse spatial strategy of organizational fragmentation that mirrors the multipolar postsuburban fringe of Southern California. It does so, Wilford argues, by centering the church's central practices on suburban homes, in which members' everyday lives of geographical fragmentation are reframed around purpose‐driven themes. Also examining Saddleback's involvement in global humanitarian aid and American civil society, Wilford demonstrates that these are strategies intended to evangelize local residents dealing with postsuburban ennui. Wilford's approach makes a church's use of space the central focus of a social scientific study of religion. Framing his argument around a previously published study on geographies of secularization, Wilford contends that more attention should be paid to the secular strategies that religious congregations use to attract members. This intervention opens possibilities for social scientists studying religion to interrogate how religious communities and the geographies in which they are located are mutually constituted. Implicitly building on geographer Lily Kong's call to explore religions beyond officially sacred sites, Sacred Subdivisions suggests that churches might use the officially secular to constitute religious places. This book, in turn, frees religious studies from its obsession, with debates over what precisely constitutes the “sacred” by demonstrating that even the fragmentation that is so iconic of classic secularization theory can be used for theological purposes.