In the past few years, I’ve started to notice just how often I choose to be in situations that have a lot of other people like me (age, gender, social class, etc….) I don’t think that I consciously choose to do so, rather how I express my interests in the context of the constraints and opportunities of my life end up being similar to how other people with similar interests, opportunities, and constraints do.

An easy example, I usually go grocery shopping early Saturday morning, and, lo and behold, there’s a bunch of other middle-aged guys there that time too. Same with going to the gym in the late afternoon and lots of other things that I do.

I notice this self-selection into situations the most when I end up in non-typical (for me) situations. So, if I change my shopping time, I’m surprised by how many elderly people are there in mid-morning, mothers with kids in the early afternoon, and professionals stopping on the way home from work in the early evening.

Similar principles hold in my experience with Christianity. My family and I attend a church which has a lot of people in the same general demographic categories as us. In fact, during services, we often sit among those who are most like us (think middle-aged).

This general principle–of similar people selecting themselves into religious groups–is one of the general explanations for religious homogeneity, i.e., why people in a given religious denomination or congregation or small group tend to be similar to each other.

Probably the most frequently studied form of religious homogeneity regards race. Bill Graham famously said that Sunday morning at 11:00 am is the most segregated hour of the week. This is because people feel most comfortable with similar others, and an important aspect of similarity in our culture is race an ethnicity.

So far this is rather straightforward, but here is where it gets tricky: Is this homogeneity a good thing?

On one hand, it provides a powerful mechanism for growth. Churches (or small groups or denominations) can probably grow best by targeting “types” of people. So, for instance, popular college ministries now offer different groups for students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Likewise, I know of a mega-church that offers different services targeting different groups.

On the other hand, this homogeneity decreases our interactions with people who are different than us, and so we might miss out on some of the benefits of such across-group interactions.

I don’t know if there is a “right” answer to this, and what’s best might vary by situation, but it’s an interesting, powerful dynamic to be aware of. If nothing else, it explains to me why I keep on sitting next to fellow old guys who like to joke around (and you know who you are).

Here’s a very interesting article by Stanford anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann, about gender and prayer. Specifically, she takes on the issues of why women pray more than men, and the answer, she writes, is imagination.

Previously I blogged on the finding that Christian women experience God’s presence more frequently than do men, which would fit with Luhrmann’s general point.

Here’s Luhrmann’s article:

“ Women pray more than men do. The 2008 Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey found that two-thirds of all women surveyed pray daily, while less than half of all men surveyed do. The Pew survey was unusually large, accounting for over 35,000 Americans, but gender differences in prayer frequency have been found before (notably by Paloma and Gallup in 1991). In fact, the observation is so common that among evangelicals, we hear it repeated as a cliché.

Why do women pray more? Some argue it’s because women are more conservative, that they stick more to tradition, while others believe it’s because women feel more responsible for their families’ health and well being than men do.

As an anthropologist studying religious behavior, I have a different explanation: Women pray more because women are more comfortable with their imaginations, and in order to pray, you need to use your imagination.

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that God is a product of the imagination. I am instead noting that to know God intimately, you need to use your imagination, because the imagination is the means humans must use to know the immaterial. This, by the way, is something the church fathers knew well. For Augustine, the road to God ran through the mind. It is our own peculiar era that equates the imagination with the frivolous and the unreal. That is why contemporary Christians sometimes get nervous about the word imagination. But they shouldn’t. C. S. Lewis knew so well that the imagination was a path to God that he entitled a chapter of Mere Christianity “Let’s Pretend.” “Let us pretend,” Lewis writes, “to turn the pretence into a reality.”" (To read the rest)

Earlier this week I attended what a church calls their “Theology on Tap” series. In it, they host a speaker at a local tavern, invited friends and family, and basically spent 2 hours drinking, eating, and talking Christianity. It was quite enjoyable at many levels, but the thing I’ve thought most about was the effect of place on Christian gatherings.

You see, this was an Episcopal church, and while I have not been to their Sunday services, I’ve been to enough Episcopal services to appreciate how solemn and generally not-rowdy they are. In contrast, the other night was a bit rowdy and lots of casual fun.

Why the difference? I assume mainly the location (though the beer might have helped). Taking over the back room of a tavern prompts a very different social atmosphere than if the same meeting had been held in the parish hall.

I know that there are people who put a lot of thought into the structure of church spaces, and this makes me glad that they do. It seems that getting the space right is very important and worth spending some money on.

Even in my teaching I have seen the effects of space. In the past 8 years or so I’ve had two classes fall flat, and both met in old fashioned rooms on campus–seating all on one level and rectangles with the longest dimension going from front-to-back (which, I believe, is the layout of most churches). In fact, the second time it happened, I realized what was going on, and I switched classrooms after three weeks to one with arena-style seating, and within minutes the whole tone of the class changed.

So, perhaps all some churches need is a change in space and, perhaps, beer on tap.