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5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange Communities, September 30, 2003
It is history. Two of the four communities portrayed have changed. One has become extinct, and one, San Francisco, has changed radically. Jerry Falwell's has survived, but it now seems less significant these days. Age-restricted communities have grown in numbers and scope. Frances FitzGerald is right to see the development of all four as peculiar. She stresses the role of life-style and religion. All of the communities are totalizing, meaning all-encompassing, experiences. All of them represent changes from former lives and so are explicable in terms of liminal states and rites of passage research. All require extreme commitment on the part of the participants. All are sheltered from the world in certain respects, or could be said to represent new versions of reality. Perhaps only the homeschooling movement of today requires similar exertions of will.
Reviewing history, it is noted that the Castro in San Francisco in the 1970's became part of a vast redevelopment project. Harvey Milk, though, and others were powerless to overcome the forces of gentrification. On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were shot and killed. This was eight days after the mass suicide at Jonestown. AIDS hit the Castro hard by 1984.
The next section bears the title, "Liberty Baptist--1981." Television evangelists came at the time of a change in American religious life in the 1970's. Conservative evangelists were attracted to television as a medium. The patriotism was no surprise, but the launch into electoral politics was surprising, even to their audiences. By 1980 Bakker and Robinson retreated. The risks of political involvement involvement were too great. Only two superstars, Robison and Falwell, remained. Robison was a Southern Baptist. Falwell was a pastor of an independent Baptist church. Falwell was head of the Moral Majority. Falwell was most characteristically an organizer and a promoter. Fundamentalist pastors had been identified as part of a new coalition, the New Right. Falwell was leading a radical movement.
Lynchburg is a small city of sixty-seven thousand. The city stands between Appalachia and Washington D.C. In the 1950's it was still a mill town, but it was being transformed into one of the cities of the New South. Lynchburg is really a collection of suburbs. Developers are still at work at the edge of town. It is not a graceful city. There are over a hundred churches. Falwell's church on Thomas road is block away from Lynchburg College.
The Thomas Road Church is a vast and mightly institution. It includes Liberty Baptist College. It is a church advocating separation from the world. It tries to be comprehensive. Success and how to get it are main themes in Thomas Road preaching.
Jerry Falwell was an ambitious school boy. He attended Lynchburg College for two years and then made a career decision and transferred to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. In 1956 he decided to start his own church in Lynchburg. He began broadcast activities immediately. In a year his congregation went from thirty five people to eight hundred sixty-four. His preaching style and theology are conventional. He is pithy, old-fashioned. He has organizational talent and enormous driving energy.
He built up his church's capacity for saturation evangelism. He has never had the money to complete any projects he has begun. He is always out ahead of himself. His church and college have been in financial crises. The author finds something a bit exotic about Falwell's congregation. Liberty Baptist College students refer to their school as boot camp. The Civil rights Movement showed Falwell preachers could be politically effective.
The next section is labelled, "Liberty Baptist--1986." In 1985 the college was renamed Liberty University. There is a plan to develop professional schools and a full range of graduate programs to equip church-influenced students to compete in the secular sphere.
"Sun City--1983" describes retirees. It is an age-segregated community. Sun Citians see very little of their Florida neighbors. Sun City is an island of wealth in the midst of rural poverty. There is something child-like about it. Twenty years ago couples settled in Sun City. At the present juncture there are couples and widows. The developers who built Sun City made no provision for sickness and incapacity.
Finally there is Rajneeshpuram, the attempt to build a Hindu city on an Oregon desert. The Rajneeshee came to Oregon from Poona, India via Montclair, New Jersey. The author heard of the Rajneeshee in 1983. The leader, the guru, was fighting deportation. The Rajneeshee were a major political issue in the state. Still, they remained quite mysterious to the Oregonians. The settlement, given the setting, was outlandish. Experts could not determine whether the settlers were pursuing good agricultural practices. The followers had had wordly successes. They were people of accomplishments. The ranch was awash in the Human Potential Movement. One observer thought that a traditional Oriental despotism had been created at the ranch. Through a series of miscalculations-- political, financial, public relations-- Rajneeshpuram in 1985 was a half ghost town.
There is a last chapter in the book entitled "Starting Over." It brings together strands from the previous chapters and opens up new areas of discussion in treating the matter of the Burned-over District. How such a variety of movements could arise in such a short time and in such a restricted geographical terrain of a few counties in New York State is an historical puzzle. The author suggests the Swedenborgians and Mormons and Abolitonists and the Fox sisters resemble some of the communities and movements she portrays in her book.
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