In the mid-1990s, “contemporary” worship, with a specific musical style often associated with the Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago suburbs, emerged as an alternative to traditional hymnody in Protestant churches. This led to a period of “worship wars” in American mainline Protestantism, in which struggles over music defined many congregations. These conflicts reached their apex between 2005 and 2010. Deborah Justice’s (White)Washing Our Sins Away: American Mainline Churches, Music, Power, and Diversity explores these tensions in an ethnographic study of a Presbyterian church in Tennessee that decided to introduce Contemporary-style worship services. Throughout, Justice capitalizes the opposition Contemporary vs. Traditional, both because “Contemporary” has a more specific denotation here than “current” and because the opposition became such a fraught contest of meaning. The main takeaway is that “the worshipers in their pews were not providing mainline Protestants with much racial diversity, but the musical tensions of the Worship Wars gave mainline Protestants the opportunity to feel relevant and diverse” (220). In other words, musical diversity serves as a stand-in for the kind of multiculturalism white mainline Protestants desired but could not achieve. Justice maintains several throughlines throughout her discussion—interrelated questions about the ethics of ethnography, the meanings of whiteness, the role of music in communal identity formation, the history of worship styles, and the nature of mainline Protestantism are all admirably balanced to create a rich portrait of a particular worshipping community.
Hillsboro Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, decided to introduce “Contemporary” worship on March 5, 1995 (60). Congregants regularly noted that music was the central marker of difference between traditional worship and contemporary worship (97). The former relied on hymnody with organ accompaniment; the latter relied on praise songs with guitars and drum sets. Justice notes that mainline Protestants intuited what the scholarship later showed: if the music changed, the congregation’s identity would change (96). This explains why musical difference was such a source of conflict in these congregations. Furthermore, the congregation experimented with ways of reconciling these differences. Experiments in “blending” the musical styles did not work (148). Rather, the congregation held two separate services, with a “unity” service monthly that had alternating worship styles. Significantly, the musicians resisted worshiping in the “unity” services on Sundays when the other side had control of the music. Spiritually, she describes this conflict as one between a traditional desire to establish musical transcendence—a distinct sound for church—and a contemporary desire to establish musical immanence, a sound that is continuous with the music of daily life (125-9). Justice grounds this distinction with attention to the details of musical sound and the placement of musicians within the worship space.
Justice conducted her fieldwork at Hillsboro Presbyterian Church mostly between 2007 and 2011 (37). As an ethnographic study, Justice devotes a great deal of attention to the details of sound, space, and power relations. The power relations she interrogates include both those between anthropologist and informant and those within the community she studies.
A key aspect of how Justice examines power relations between anthropologists and informants is to focus on the ways in which anthropology has created racial others. To address this historical power imbalance, she turns the techniques of ethnography on her own community—she is a white Presbyterian studying white Presbyterians. She asserts that “studying white Christian music from an anthropological perspective indeed switches historical positions of power” (55, emphasis added). But here we see ways in which her argument reproduces in a different discursive register mainstream Protestantism’s conundrum of seeking to critique whiteness without being quite able to move past it. While casting the anthropological gaze on whiteness subverts, unsettles, and questions historical positions of power, the controlling voice of the analysis remains white. The agency does not switch positions. I want to stress that I do not write this critique from a superior position—as a white Quaker, I participate in similar community dynamics of struggling with the gap between anti-racist desires and practices that maintain white hegemony. Justice holds out a tentative hope that practice with negotiating sonic diversity will lead to the ability to better handle social diversity, but wisely does not push her argument to an assertion that it will do so (223). Here, a deeper engagement with debates around the meanings of “whiteness” would have strengthened her argument. Several key texts, such as George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple University Press, 1998), Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People (Norton, 2010), and Birgit Rasmussen’s The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke, 2001), are missing from her bibliography. I suspect a more thorough engagement with whiteness studies may have further tempered her optimism.
Music also changed power relations within the community. For example, there were shifts with regard to both who enacted and who selected music for worship. In traditional worship, the musicians enacted 50% of the service, as opposed to 45% in contemporary worship services. However, when it came to selecting music, contemporary worship empowered musicians: they selected 50% of the worship elements, as opposed to 31% in traditional worship. This attention to the distinction between different kinds of agency at work in musicking allows for a nuanced analysis of the multiple registers in which people exercise power.
Ultimately, (White)Washing Our Sins Away offers an excellent account of musical identity formation and its significance for spiritual experience. Its detailed parsing of the ways in which musical practice had unexpected consequences for congregational identity demonstrates how important music is to the study of religion. It pinpoints the tensions within mainline Protestantism’s identity in an era of numeric decline. The book is honest in its grappling with the way in which racist legacies continue to inform the communities, both religious and academic, to which Justice is committed. This honesty lays the groundwork for further critical engagement with both ethnography and mainline Protestantism.
Dirk von der Horst is an instructor of religious studies at Mount St. Mary’s University, Los Angeles.
Dirk von der Horst
Date Of Review:
June 29, 2023
