Six decades of religion in Middletown:
Caplow, Theodore & Bahr, Howard At & Chadwick, Bruce A
EXCERPTS FROM 'ALL FAITHFUL PEOPLE' Six decades of religion in Middletown THEODORE CAPLOW, HOWARD M. BAHR, & BRUCE A. CHADWICK In 1924 Robert and Helen Lynd began a study of a mid-western city...
...The 1920s witnessed a growing competition between religion and recreation for dominance on Sunday...
...Compared to the 1924 respondents, the 1978 respondents mentioned benefits to their children somewhat more often and social and business motives somewhat less often...
...Mainline and fundamentalist pastors differ more in style than in substance on religious issues, although they differ profoundly in their social and political attitudes...
...it was 99 percent in 1979...
...I think about the beautiful things around me and how there must be a God...
...Eleven percent of the working-class housewives responding in 1924 said that it would make no particular difference to them...
...Conducted two years after the fieldwork for Middletown in Transition, the 1937 survey does not support the Lynds' impression that youth were abandoning Middletown's churches...
...There are more people now at the pious end of the continuum...
...The stability of the percentages is matched by a persistence of tone: . / used to cry when I was discouraged, but that didn' t help any...
...In addition to our own project, which we call Middletown III, in 1982 the Public Broadcasting System aired a remarkable series of documentaries by Peter Davis under the collective title of Middletown...
...3) The proportion of Middletown's marriages performed by ministers or priests increased from 63 percent in 1924 to 79 percent in 1979...
...The revivals, although more numerous than ever, have been shortened in recognition of the participants' other interests and obligations...
...During the 1960s, a few of Middletown's churches developed an active interest in public events...
...Most of the factories that were operating during the 1920s are still open but some have been closed, and those that remain are approaching obsolescence...
...The little teachers' college has mushroomed into a state university that is now the community's largest employer...
...But, aside from such politicized issues, the elements of Middletown's shared Christian creed-God, Jesus, the Bible, church, heaven, morality-are not differently perceived by Nazarenes, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, or Lutherans, and only some differences of emphasis separate these from Unitarians or Roman Catholics...
...9 percent said so in 1978...
...IN ANSWER to question C, "What difference would it make in your daily life if you became convinced that there is no loving God caring for you...
...When the Lynds went there, it was primarily industrial...
...Divorce, suicide, bankruptcy, and unmarried pregnancies are treated as disasters, not as crimes, by Middletown's ministers and churchgoers, and the victims are much more likely to be consoled than to be ostracized...
...When we first discovered the pattern of a sharp decline in church attendance from 1890 to 1924 followed by a sharp increase from 1924 to 1978, we were skeptical and looked for some statistical accident that might explain the reversal...
...and (11) an increase in attention paid to secular topics in sermons and liturgy...
...The Lynds had asked the housewives they interviewed in 1924 to estimate the church attendance of their parents around 1890...
...Thirty-two percent of the high school students surveyed in 1977 attended church regularly (which was close to the rate for their parents), 13 percent intermittently, and 37 percent occasionally, and only 17 percent said they never attended...
...But for all that, they never questioned the inevitability of secularization, and though they considered at length the possible ways in which religion might adapt to the changing times, they never envisioned the possibility that traditional religion would persist in the face of technological progress...
...These nine themes seem to provide the basic pattern for Middletown's dominant religion as described by its believers in 1924 and again in 1978...
...EXCERPTS FROM 'ALL FAITHFUL PEOPLE' Six decades of religion in Middletown THEODORE CAPLOW, HOWARD M. BAHR, & BRUCE A. CHADWICK In 1924 Robert and Helen Lynd began a study of a mid-western city which, following the polite custom of urban sociology, they called Middletown...
...A line of fracture developed between "worldly" and "other worldly" factions within the churches affected by the change...
...indeed, it represents a signal departure from Christian practice throughout history...
...In 1978, there were significantly fewer people who said they went to church primarily out of habit...
...These internal conflicts were particularly sharp in the denominations the Lynds had identified as "business class," especially the Presbyterians and the Methodists...
...LET US consider some of these trends more closely...
...The religious commitment implied by these responses is slightly less than that of the working-class women surveyed in 1978 but vastly greater than what the Lynds reported for their small group of business-class women in 1924...
...In the 1978 religion survey, we did take the opportunity of putting question C to a sample of men...
...10) New sects and new movements have continued to emerge-Pentecostal-Evangelical churches, cha-rismatics in the existing churches, national sects like the Moonies, Hare Krishna, and Black Muslims, as well as numerous movements involving social activism, liturgical reform, ordination of women, congregational democracy, and innovations in "outreach" and "stewardship...
...the remaining responses were scattered among the same themes recorded by the Lynds...
...Where every church was once explicitly segregated by race, all are now integrated in theory and many are in fact...
...have information about how frequently college students attend religious services, but heavy enrollments in religion classes indicate serious interest...
...But we have not been able to find much trace of the massive trend that was supposed to be carrying us irresistibly out of an age of faith into an age of practical reason...
...It might be argued that the importance of religion has been diminished by the relaxation of the moral criteria that formerly separated saints from sinners...
...A. What are the thoughts and plans that give you courage to go on when thoroughly discouraged...
...The expansion of that original study into a comprehensive community survey occurred while they were doing their field work...
...We shared with the Lynds, and with our 1978 respondents, the impression that religious faith and practice had declined over the past two generations...
...40 percent of them expressed no doubts about the existence of God, 37 percent voiced no doubts about the divinity of Jesus, and 72 percent claimed that they pray often when alone...
...The themes most often repeated are the following...
...3) a decline in the proportion of rites of passage held under religious auspices (for example, declining ratios of religious to civil marriages and of religious to secular funerals...
...The theological implications of these changes are not easy to decipher...
...OF THAT persistence in Middletown there can be no serious doubt...
...The working-class people of 1924 expressed abundant faith but reported little church attendance, apparently because they lacked the means to make a respectable display...
...7) No figures are available for the ratio of religious to non-religious literature in Middletown, but (8) the proportion of space given to religious announcements and activities in local newspapers has remained relatively constant since 1924...
...The words and the turns of phrase that people use now to describe their inner religious experience are so close to the language of their grandparents that we cannot tell them apart...
...Their interviews with the wives of a sample of Middletown families showed a sharp decline in church attendance from 1890...
...In 1978,35 percent said "often or daily" but only 17 percent said "never or almost never...
...We have fairly reliable information from Middletown about most of these eleven indicators going back more than fifty years...
...Indeed, the most striking feature of Middletown is that it contains little that is extraordinary...
...The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the late 1970s and the anti-American vituperation of Moslem mobs during the Iranian hostage crisis did not provoke any discernible anti-Moslem reaction in Middletown's churches...
...Church attendance in Middletown is positively and significantly correlated with education, occupational level, and income, so that the majority of persons with less than a high school education do not attend church regularly while the majority of college graduates do...
...and the age differential, although still evident, has been so much reduced that 76 percent of the young adults in our sample attend church at least occasionally and about a third attend at least once a week...
...While belonging to a church or regularly attending services implied a deep religious commitment in the early nineteenth century, it no longer does so...
...Ten years later, the Lynds restudied Middletown to see what changes had been wrought by the intervening decade of prosperity and depression...
...it was also a trade center for the surrounding agricultural counties...
...Adolescents in Middletown today attend church about as often as their parents...
...I rely on the Bible scriptures...
...The reality is that (1) there are more churches in Middletown today in relation to the population than there were in 1924, and (2) more people attend them regularly...
...WHEN THE Lynds observed the churches of Middletown in 1924, the abstention of the clergy from politics was as complete as it had been in Tocqueville's time, although the ministers of business-class congregations might occasionally have echoed from the pulpit the sentiments of their golf partners about labor unions or referred in passing to ' 'godless Bolshevism...
...Indeed, the sponsors of the project at the Institute for Social and Religious Research, a branch of the Interchurch World Movement, which was originally the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, were astonished to discover the new direction it had taken...
...The majority of persons in professional and managerial occupations attend church regularly while the majority of those in semi-skilled and service occupations do not...
...The YMCA no longer has any religious importance, but the Jehovah's Witnesses do...
...But where a majority of the 19 business-class women responding in 1924 said that they would be affected little or not at all if they lost their belief in a loving God, in 1978 10 percent found the proposition unthinkable, 47 percent said that their lives would be intolerable or utterly changed, 22 percent said it would make some difference, and 21 percent said it would make no difference, with most of the last saying or implying they already did not believe in a loving God and a few asserting their emotional self-sufficiency...
...there are a lot of promises...
...Middletown's population has doubled, from about 40,000 to about 80,000...
...On the other hand, the attitudes toward personal conduct that prevail today in most of Middletown's churches are much more compatible with the doctrine of original sin...
...These estimates were given unhesitatingly and in full detail, but they cannot be taken as equivalent to an actual survey of church attendance...
...The sharp differences between the church attendance of men and the attendance of women (the Lynds estimated church attendance to be about two-thirds female) has declined to the point that when we allow for the greater numbers of women among the middle-aged and older population, the slight preponderance of women at church services is largely accounted for...
...engine parts, glass bottles, and woven wire were its best-known products...
...They did not curb the excesses of the developing industrial society...
...the proportion of broadcasting time occupied by religious services has increased...
...The Middletown Youth Study Group conducted a survey of Middletown ministers in 1937 as part of a study of the needs of American youth sponsored by the American Youth Commission...
...Thirty-six percent of the ministers agreed with the Lynds that the attendance of adolescents at their churches had decreased...
...There is no longer any preaching against the pope at revival meetings...
...The proportion of burials at which ministers or priests officiated is not known for 1924...
...We have no such reliable contemporary survey of church attendance in 1890 for Middletown, or for anywhere else in the United States as far as we have been able to determine...
...9) Personal immortality is promised by God and therefore is certain although not clearly visualizable...
...It has been argued that quantitative measures of organized religious adherence, like church membership or attendance, give no real indication of the inroads of subjective secularization...
...Thus we must view with caution the Lynds' conclusion-and our own-that church attendance in Middletown declined significantly from 1890 to 1924...
...A graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Robert Lynd had once intended to be a Presbyterian minister...
...The men's responses, as far as we could judge, were indistinguishable from the women's...
...The majority of contemporary church members - not just in Middletown - say that they pray privately, think about heaven, experience God as a personal presence, believe in the fundamental tenets of Christianity, and judge their own conduct by religious standards...
...In every measurable way, Middletown's religion has become less puritanical in the past two generations, that is, less conscience-stricken about faults, less censorious about shortcomings, less emphatic about rewards and punishments, and less preoccupied with sex...
...And yet the abandonment of Sunday to secular recreation that the Lynds anticipated has not yet occurred...
...IT WOULD be absurd to leave the impression that nothing has changed in organized religion in Middletown over the past half-century...
...The Reverend Rip van Winkle, Methodist minister, awakening in Middletown after a sixty-year sleep, would hardly know he had been away...
...There are people in Middletown who practice witchcraft seriously and others who shave their heads and meditate on reincarnation...
...As we HAVE shown, the general level of religious belief and practice in Middletown is not very different today from what it was a half-century ago, and the leading tenets of popular theology have remained virtually the same...
...The majority of our respondents who had high family incomes (over $30,000) attended church regularly...
...The Lynds' sample of business-class women was very small and showed more resistance to these particular questions-precluding taking these results too seriously...
...2) Prayer is externally efficacious...
...The predominately elderly and female congregations observed by the Lynds have given way to a broad cross-section of the population...
...The national surveys found no significant differences in education, occupation, and income between those attend church regularly and those who do not...
...The results of that study, published by the Lynds in 1929 as Middletown, became the first sociological work to be a best seller in the United States...
...The sexual morality preached in Middletown's churches in 1980 is quite different from what it was in 1960, let alone 1900...
...Working-class denominations such as the Southern Baptists, the Adventists, and the Assemblies of God were untouched by the problem and thrived between 1960 and 1980, while the Presbyterians and the Methodists declined in membership for the first time in living memory...
...the remaining responses were widely scattered...
...Respectively, 1924, 1978, 1924, 1978...
...The Catholics and the Lutherans, racked by the same issues, barely held their own...
...When we examine the data more carefully, however, we discover that there has been a dramatic decline in agnosticism among white-collar people and a dramatic increase in church participation among blue-collar people...
...Despite these changes, Middletown seems to us to have preserved the identity and atmosphere the Lynds described...
...Two-thirds of them never went to church at all, although most of the non-attenders sent their children to Sunday school more or less regularly...
...In contemporary Middletown, the conventional forms of Christian piety - prayer, fasting, meditation, alms-giving - all flourish...
...4) The Bible guarantees the eventual safety of those who read and believe it...
...From 1976 to 1978, we maintained a field office in Middletown and lived there (in rotation) with our families...
...The Lynds did not present quantitative data about the relationship between age and church attendance, but they thought that young people were drifting away from church...
...What about the difference between men and women...
...About the same proportion thought they saw a trend of increasing church participation...
...4) a decline in religious endogamy...
...It is by now no secret that Middletown, in reality, is Muncie, Indiana...
...5) a decline in the proportion of the labor force engaged in religious activity...
...6) More people contribute to churches now than in 1924, and they give larger proportions of their incomes...
...Today, church services are more numerous than they were two generations ago and better attended...
...The churches, according to the Lynds, served to reinforce class boundaries in the community and to rationalize the social system...
...The new tolerance is the most striking change in Middletown's religion in the past half-century...
...We repeated these questions in our 1978 survey of 333 married women living with their husbands and children...
...Middletown is geographically and culturally close to the center of America...
...There is plenty of preaching against classes of sinners in Middletown's churches (profligates, gamblers, irresponsible parents) but virtually none against individual sinners...
...All in all, Middletown might claim to be the city about which more is known than about any other city in the world...
...My religious beliefs are confused, but when things get really bad, I pray...
...The religious beliefs that prevail in Middletown have not changed appreciably over the past two generations...
...A comparison of business-class women's responses in 1924 and 1978 is less satisfactory...
...We do not know, alas, what trends prevailed during the ensuing 40 years, but in the late 1970s the religious interest and participation of young adults were fairly high...
...Of the 98 working-class women who responded to the same question in 1978, 27 percent referred to their religion, 24 percent to their families, and 6 percent mentioned both...
...The pattern seems to be for young people to join and to attend church about as often as their parents, which is quite often indeed...
...A Mass in one of Middletown's Catholic churches bears little resemblance to the Latin ritual of 1960...
...The continuum of belief that the Lynds discovered in 1924 is still intact, running from people who put their total trust in themselves, to those who rely on themselves and their families, to those who trust in their families and in God, to those who trust in God alone...
...The population is not quite as homogeneous as it used to be: there are proportionately more blacks (12 percent) and more Catholics (22 percent) now than there were during 1 the 1920s...
...There are no more diatribes against the Jews in Easter sermons...
...7) God provides all of life's meaning and hope...
...5) Jesus takes care of those who have made a commitment to Him...
...Today, as in many other respects, working-class families in Middletown do not differ very much from business-class families in religious participation...
...There are enough new things under the sun in Middletown's religion to amaze and delight a curious observer...
...Middletown's denominations do not agree about abortion, parochial education, the equality of the sexes, or the obligation to perform military service...
...the book remains in print to this day...
...These results were issued in 1937 as Middletown in Transition...
...As a commentary on that series, Ben Wattenberg directed another television documentary, called Middletown Revisited, summarizing results of our Middletown III study and detailing even later changes...
...B. How often have you thought of Heaven during the past month in this connection...
...The same Presbyterians and Lutherans who speak in tongues nowadays would not have spoken to anyone who defended the practice a few years ago...
...The Lynds attached particular importance to answers given by the married women they interviewed to the following three questions...
...The level of belief and even of religious practice among those who never go to church is impressive...
...We do not know how and why this transformation took place, but the vast amount of information the Lynds collected about religion suggests that the topic retained its primacy for them in 1924 and 1925...
...9) a drift toward less emotional forms of participation in religious services...
...When the Lynds came back to Middletown ten years later in the midst of the Great Depression, they were distressed to see that, with one or two exceptions, the Protestant churches of Middletown were taking no position at all on "internationalism, disarmament, pacifism, labor organization, social planning in the interest of the masses and the redistribution of wealth, civil liberty, the amendment of the Constitution, socialized medicine, and birth control...
...Immortality is perceived not as a public issue but as a facet of personal experience...
...religion is a vestigial institution destined to decline and perhaps even disappear...
...With respect to the doctrinal differences that ostensibly account for the existence of so many Protestant denominations (disagreement about episcopal authority, free will and pre-destination, the efficacy of sacraments, infant or adult baptism, original sin, revelation and the interpretation of Scripture), we found little interest among laypeople, who for the most part were unaware of the beliefs they were supposed to hold on these contentious points...
...Most of the changes we recorded in the religious habits of this community over the past half-century favor freedom of choice...
...2) a decline in the proportion of the population attending church services...
...The Lynds, who were never deficient in common sense, were quick to point out that "the direction of change is highly erratic...
...8) a decline in the attention given to religion in the mass media...
...When we put the same question to working-class women in 1978, 17 percent of them rejected it as unthinkable and 51 percent said that life would be intolerable or utterly changed...
...their congregations followed at a distance and with apparent reluctance...
...13 percent of the Lynds' working-class respondents rejected the proposition as unthinkable and 58 percent "were so emphatic as to say that life would be intolerable or utterly changed...
...The dean of the religion department at a private college close to Middletown remarked in 1978 that ' 'ten years ago our religion classes were small...
...According to at least one strand of that field of scholarship, secularization is supposed to be an irreversible process accompanying modernization...
...We can find no trace of the inverse relationship between income, education, and other measures of achievement that was anticipated by the theory that secularization accompanies modernization and continues inexorably until traditional religion disappears...
...In the fundamentalist churches, this leads to a view of the world as hopelessly corrupt and unimprovable...
...9) Although the long-term trend is difficult to decipher, within the past two decades there has been a drift toward more emotional forms of participation in religious services...
...but, according to one of his principal informants who was still living in Middletown when we arrived there, he had already turned away from organized religion when he began to observe Middletown's churches in 1924...
...C. What difference would it make in your daily life if you became convinced that there was no loving God caring for you...
...5) The proportion of Middletown's labor force engaged in religious activity increased between 1920 and 1980...
...Towards the end of the 1970s, we returned to Middletown to replicate as carefully as possible the Lynds' investigations and to see how the city's social institutions had changed since the 1920s...
...If secularization is a shrinkage of the religious sector in relation to other sectors of society, as most definitions imply, then it ought to produce some or all of the following indications: (1) a decline in the number of churches per capita of the population...
...But there is no evidence for this proposition...
...1) Prayer is internally efficacious...
...The two Middletown books were read, correctly or incorrectly, as exposes of grass-roots Protestantism...
...Not only do Protestants speak well of each other and benignly of Catholics, they abstain from condemnation of the heathen and favor teaching about Buddhism in the public schools...
...There is one serious flaw in our data on Middletown's church attendance, but it affects the figures for 1890, not the more recent ones...
...4) In 1977, however, twice as many couples (24 percent) reported interdenominational marriages as compared with their parents -a significant increase...
...The onerous parts of religious observance-long sermons, afternoon services, compulsory fasts-have been mostly abandoned...
...Of the 73 working-class women who answered question A in 1924, 27 percent said that it was their religion that gave them courage and 23 percent referred to their families...
...Over two-thirds of the students at Middletown's university listed a denominational preference when they registered in the fall of 1978...
...There is much more tolerance among churches and a good deal of ecumenical good will that was formerly lacking, but no more cooperation than before toward common goals...
...We doubt whether readers could identify which of those statements dates from 1924 and which from 1978 Of the working-class women who answered question B on Heaven in 1924,46 percent said "often or every day" and 31 percent said they "never or almost never" gave heaven a thought...
...3) Bible reading is internally efficacious in the same manner as prayer...
...Its population was mostly white, mostly native-born, mostly Protestant...
...When they marry and establish their own families, their church attendance declines for a while and then slowly but consistently increases again as they grow older...
...it strengthens the sufferer to endure or to surmount his or her suffering...
...The attack on the pope by a Moslem assassin in 1981 did not make Middletown's Catholics hostile toward Islam...
...11) Of the 102 sermons we sampled at random in 1978, only two dealt with secular issues...
...it can avert danger and cure the sick...
...The pressure exerted by children on parents and by parents on children to attend church or to participate in other church activities has been much reduced...
...Likewise, militant atheism, which the Lynds noticed was rarer in 1924 than it had been in 1890, is practically unknown in Middletown today...
...Spiritual renewal, instruction, inner peace, and Christian fellowship were repeatedly mentioned as benefits...
...No sentence in the New Testament is more widely known or more often quoted in today's Middletown than "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone...
...The proportion of adolescents who reported that they quarreled with their parents about attending religious services has declined correspondingly...
...Nowhere, not even in the Catholic churches, are worshipers turned away or made to feel unwelcome because they come from outside a designated territory, and no Middletown church today pretends to have any authority to compel the attendance of reluctant members...
...Hester Prynne would be welcome at a church supper nowadays and, after a little discreet whispering, might even be treated with a special kindness...
...7) a decline in the ratio of religious to non-religious literature...
...Religion of any kind is no longer perceived as a legitimate object of aggression...
...The wrath of the godly is now reserved for such secular targets as bureaucrats, abortionists, and pornog-raphers...
...Now I just get down on my knees and pray and that gives me strength...
...Finally, the Lynds concluded that industrialization was leading to increased secularization, that each succeeding generation was less religious than the previous one, and that the business class was more secularized than the working class...
...As it happened, the Lynds never interviewed adult men about their religious feelings...
...When I'm discouraged, I just read the Bible and think of the coming of the Kingdom...
...Moreover, the differences in devotion between women and men and between the working class and the business class that the Lynds described have all but disappeared...
...6) Morality of any kind is predicated on the existence of God...
...Most churches have a roughly designated territory and several denominations have precisely demarcated parish boundaries, but parishioners are free to cross them when they wish...
...A fairly unified belief system emerges from the responses of a population scattered among many denominations whose official beliefs on such matters as salvation and free will sometimes differ sharply from one another...
...There is surprisingly little discussion of heaven and hell in Middletown's churches, and arguments about immortality are often heard around the dinner table...
...The Lynds saw the church slowly but surely relinquishing the Sabbath to recreational pursuits...
...The same harmonious spirit that suppresses theological arguments before they begin inhibits censure of other people's behavior...
...8) The presence of God, when directly experienced, is not challenge-able by argument...
...The Lynds went to Middletown in 1924-1925 to study the crisis of the Protestant churches in a typical American community...
...It had no "outstanding peculiarities or acute local problems" and was just far enough from Indianapolis, Indiana, and Dayton, Ohio, to be able to resist much of their influence...
...The children the Lynds observed almost sixty years ago are now elderly people or they are dead...
...By contrast, they gave only cursory attention to religion in their 1935 study...
...10) a dwindling of new sects and of new movements in existing churches...
...but the Lynds' choice of a name-originally borrowed from a nearby village-was symbolically fitting...
...When they do attend church, Middletown people seem now to attend for more positive reasons...
...6) a decline in the proportion of income devoted to the support of religion...
...We do not These Middletown results have not been confirmed by the eight national surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center from 1972 through 1980...
...the majority of those with low family incomes (under $20,000) did not...
...Liturgies have changed, attitudes have changed, and whole bodies of doctrine have changed radically...
...And, although members of the clergy are aware of the finer theological points, they seem even less inclined to argue them with the representatives of other denominations...
...In the mainline denominations, it encourages a type of humility that withholds condemnation of even the most heinous personal acts, with blame reserved for political and economic "systems...
...the goal of the believer is to stop taking the world seriously...
...The religious zeal of the working class was taken by the Lynds as confirmation of their implicit thesis that religion was an obsolescent survival of pre-modern culture.* Such a thesis had deep roots in the modern sociology of religion...
...In 1924 habit was the most common motive for church attendance...
...The clergy led the movement...
...and those with intermediate incomes were fairly evenly divided.* Content analysis of the reasons given for church attendance reveals some shift in the motivational patterns between 1924 and 1978...
...Much more confidence can be placed on the finding that church attendance increased spectacularly from 1924 to 1978: the proportion of married women in Middletown samples that attended regularly rose from 23 percent to 48 percent and the proportion who never attended fell from 53 percent to 17 percent...
...Changes in the religious participation of business-class and working-class families have been more complex...
...The Episcopal Church has women priests and a new prayer book...
...The denominations of Middletown are perhaps more significant as sources of personal identity today than they were two generations ago, but the difference is small and is counterbalanced by a modest decline in religious endogamy...
...The boundaries between Protestant denominations have become so permeable that husband and wife may belong to churches of different denominations without inviting censure in either place...
...The battle between clergy and laity for the possession of the Sabbath that the Lynds described in such detail has been agreeably settled by reserving Sunday morning for religious services and Sunday afternoon for secular recreation...
...Seventh-Day Adventists, Quakers, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses do subscribe to some important doctrinal differences, but even these inconsistencies with the majority creed are subdued in the ecumenical atmosphere of contemporary Middletown...
...Today, they are second in enrollment to biology...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 21
