Watt's work, the product of more than two years of field research in three Philadelphia churches-a nondenominational congregation called Oak Grove Church, the Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship, and the Philadelphia Church of Christ-proposes to provide "an ethnographic analysis" of the Christians identified in his title. "Bible-carrying Christians," the author explains, are those who carry "their own copy of the Bible to church on Sunday morning"-a practice, he confesses, those in his own Episcopal tradition would consider "odd." Watt aims to assess how conservative Protestant congregations view relationships of social power, and the way in which these churches "shape our understanding of which power relations are suspect and which are not."
The book provides interesting, even sympathetic vignettes of the life and workings of these congregations. Yet at the same time it disappoints by failing to make good on its comprehensive agenda. Snapshots taken between October 1991 and December 1993 of three small east coast urban congregations hardly make for a complete view of the subject Watt sets out to address. Moreover, one gets the sense that Watt's intended audience consists of those for whom the practices of Bible-carrying Christians are a strange and exotic phenomena. For many readers of Modern Reformation, much here will seem rather commonplace. Some of it will sadly confirm the excesses and foibles of mainstream American Evangelicalism so brilliantly dissected in David Wells's recent works.
Yet, given the political and social influence wielded by Bible-carrying Christianity, Watt's central question is an important one: Which social arrangements and relationships are "naturalized" in such a context? By "naturalized," Watt means that they "treat something that is actually historically constructed as though it were self-evidently 'natural' and therefore beyond questioning." One need go no further in history than the conservative Protestant churches' stance on slavery and racial equality to see that Watt here pursues a line of critical analysis that the American churches, in their own self-examinations, have notoriously neglected.
Watt consciously seeks to occupy a "neutral" ethnographic position "between belief and unbelief." Though his own liberal biases emerge, he deserves commendation for his "attempt to make [himself] a little less parochial." One only hopes that some of the subjects of his research will manage to muster the same sense of fair-minded decency. (At one particularly cringe-making point, Watt describes his conversation with a Church of Christ "discipler" who tells him, "in a contemptuous tone, 'It is easy to convert poor people. They are so needy.'") Yet the difficulty in maintaining his own neutrality quickly surfaces in the list of categories by which Watt proposes to conduct the analysis; he focuses, he says, on the ways in which these churches "do and do not naturalize the authority of the U.S. state, of modern corporations, of ministers, of men, and of heterosexuals."
Watt simply assumes that these are the important questions to ask, and that they are all equally important. He furnishes no independent justification for setting these concerns as his index of value. Nor does he attempt to provide criteria for distinguishing what sorts of social relationships are simply carried over from the dominant culture, or tradition, and which are authentically "natural." Presumably, in the "value-free" democratic culture championed by Richard Rorty and embraced by so much of the academy with which Watt identifies, nothing is natural; most if not all of the network of human social relationships are the product of historical conditioning. This creates an ironic effect: Watt appears to be genuinely frustrated that the mantra of his own formative years, "question authority," no longer carries the bite it used to. Could it be that Bible-carrying Christians actually do question authority, just not the kind Watt does?
