Volume 31, Number 7 · April 26, 1984
Welcome to Munciekin Land
By Gerald Weales
All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion
by Theodore Caplow, by Howard M. Bahr, by Bruce A. Chadwick, by Dwight W. Hoover, by Laurence A. Martin, by Joseph B. Tamney, by Margaret Holmes Williamson
University of Minnesota Press, 378 pp., $19.50
I grew up in a small industrial city in Indiana not far from Muncie—the town made famous by Robert and Helen Lynd in their books on Middletown. Twenty years ago, a number of tiny evangelical churches there burst out of their non-descript buildings and moved into large and impressive new quarters surrounded by parking lots, where fleets of buses were lined up waiting to bring the faithful to services. When a point of doctrine or personality split one of the large new congregations, the departing parishioners rented an abandoned dry-goods store and held services there until they went on to a new church as grand and apparently well attended as the one they had left, which showed no signs of diminution. Meanwhile, in the established churches, the congregations seemed to grow older and smaller. One might assume from the unscientific evidence of my infrequent visits home that religion was flourishing but that there had been a marked shift in denominational loyalties.
Review, 2277 words
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