330 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Ori.
~ns, Beliefs and Rituals of an African.
American ReIi~on, by Ct.UDE F. JACOBS
and AND~WJ. KAsLow.Knoxville: Uni-
versity of Tennessee Press, 1991, xii +
235 pp. $24.95.
Rooted in the Franco-American cul-
tural order of Louisiana, Spiritual Churches
are part of an African-American religious
tradition that has attracted the attention of
many writers, beginning notably with Zora
Neale Hurston, who in 1931 studied the
herbalists and magicians known as "hoodoo"
practitioners. In this comprehensive histori-
cal, ethnographic and structural study, an-
thropologists Jacobs and Kaslow view Spiri-
tual Churches asa religious movement with
distinctive rituals inextricably linked to mem-
bers' social and economic status in society.
The authors urge a reassessment of the view
that sucia churches are wholly other-worldly,
and see the beliefs and practices of the Spiri-
tuals as symbols of empowerment and protest,
especially for the large number of women
members.
First, Jacobs and Kaslow trace the devel-
opment ofSpiritual Churches, and show that
the churches are an amalgam of elements
from Voodoo, Roman Catholicism,
Pentecostalism, native American religions,
and the earlier forro of Christianity called
American Spiritualism, from which the con-
temporary Spiritual Churches ate distin-
guished. The Spiritual Churches' acknowl-
edged founder was Mother Leafy Anderson, a
controversial and charismatic woman who
founded the Etemal Life Christian Spiritual-
ist Association around 1920. The charisma of
the early period gave way to a slow institu-
tionalization that brought the congregations
further into the Christian mainstream. Spiri-
tual Churches today have an ambiguous im-
age in the larger religious community, iUus-
trated here by members' testimony that is
miIdly defensive of the church and its rituals.
Jacobs and Kaslow's ethnographic meth-
ods are the next best thing to being there.
Participant observation in eighteen congre-
gations, anda particularly intensive relation-
ship with one, visits to members' homes, and
numerous formal and informal interviews
provide the data that, along with twenty-
seven photographs, gŸ the reader a genuine
sense of the religious experience of Spiritual
churches. Descriptions of worship services
are detailed and show the high degree of
variation among the extant congregations.
The methods are especiaUy effective at un-
covering the meanings that ritual and belief
have for members. The Spiritual Church
members see the world dualistically, as a
constant struggle between forces of good and
of evil, forces that pervade both the visible
and invisible world. Jacobs and Kaslow show
that social ills ate often attributed to the
"unnatural" agency of evil forces. The use of
spiritual guides, possession by spirits, and the
roles of healing and private advising are de-
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scribed in detail.
The authors make efforts to put their
observations about Spiritual Churches into
the contexts ofbroader theories and perspec-
tives, sometimes successfully, other times not.
One intriguing discussion describes the wor-
ship services and rituals of the Spiritual
Churches in terms of the asymmetry of other
areas of African-American culture, such as
music and dance. Less successful is the appl~i-
cation of distinctions between "peripheral"
and "central," and between "subjective" and
"objective" orientations. These serve as a
useful framework to explore the syncretic
nature of the churches, but beyond that do
not provide a particularly compeUing ana-
lytical strategy.
A final approach to the Spiritual
Churches is described in a chapter on leader-
ship and membership. Here, the authors ana-
lyze data obtained in a survey of members
from three congregations. The age structure
of members, the high proportion of elite
membership, and the place of the churches in
the rural-urban continuum and the social
class structure ofNew Orleans are addressed.
Recent declines in membership are seen here
as part of a general dwindling of traditional
cultures, but the authors perceive a tenacity
and persistence in the Spiritual Churches
that may ensure their survival over the next
few decades.

Jacobs and Kaslow have provided a read-
able and intriguing account ofNew Orleans's
Spiritual Churches, skillfully making the most
of several methods of approach to their sub-
ject, and never undermining the dignity or
integrity of the church members. It would
make an appropriate text for courses in social
studies of religion or African-American stud-
les.
Anita M. Waters
Denison University
"Church and Age Unite ! " The Modernist Impulse
in American Catholicism, by R. ScoTr
APPLEI3"r Notre Dame Studies in
American Catholicism, Volume 11.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1992, vii+ 286 pp. $29.95.
Appleby applies William R. Hutchison's
American Protestant "modemist impulse"
concept to American Catholicism between
1895 and 1910. In Appleby's view there were
Catholics who held "a cluster of beliefs - - in
cultural immanentism, religiously based pro-
gressivism, and the adaptation of religious
ideas to modero culture"-- shared by Ameri-
can Protestant modernists. They also shared
with their Protestant counterparts a "self-
awareness with which they appropriated the
modem" (pp. 1-2).
Appleby uses Hutchison's concepts in
order to: determine what to call modemist,
distinguish it from the earlier Catholic liber-
alism from which it developed, and specify
the affinities the two tendencies continued to
share. He also uses them to make quite clear
why integralists were compelled to oppose
modemism and to demonstrate the ways in
which the American versions diverged from
the official church definitions employed in
their condemnations. Finally, he establishes
that there was great variety in emphasis and
approach in the thought of the relative hand-
fui of American Catholic modernists and
makes a case for its importance in the history
BOOK REVIEWS 331
of the church in this country.
That there was some American Catho-
lic involvement with modemist ideas has
long been known, but interpreters have dis-
agreed about many of the specifics. Adoption
of Hutchison's approach allows Appleby to
lay out his particulars convincingly and ex-
plicitly, and to follow what he terms the
"trajectory" ofCatholic modernism (p. 4). As
it follows Appleby's "trajectory," Catholic
modernism becomes increasingly self-con-
scious and approaches greater systematiza-
tion. It also becomes more stridently anti-
traditional and ultimately anti-institutional
as ir becomes uncompromisingly insistent on
forcing the church toward a rapprochement
with modern culture. Once it had reached
this "radical" stage (p. 206), it provoked sys-
tematic suppression at the hands of its oppo-
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nents, who recognized that it involved a
fundamental challenge to their authority.
Appleby delineates the sources ofAmeri-
can Catholic modemism in some detail: Eu-
ropean modernism, American Catholic lib-
eralism, and liberal American Protestantism.
He follows the thought ofkey individuals as
they move in the 1890s from Americanism,
the "precurmr," (p. 80) through modernism,
to 1910, by which two American Catholic
modernists held views virtually indistinguish-
able from the most advanced European ones,
and both left the priesthood and the Catholic
church rather than submit to official teach-
ings with which they fundamentally disagreed.
John A. Zahm moved toward and em-
braced theistic evolution by the mid-1890s,
and this development made AmericanCatho-
lic modemism possible because it involved a
self-conscious attempt to reconcile Catholi-
cism with modem science. This self-aware-
ness, in Appleby's view, is essentially what
separates Zahm and the other modernists
from Americanists. Nonetheless, Appleby
carefully de monstrates Americanists' (chiefly
Isaac Hecker's thought and the teachings of
liberal Americanist bishops) considerable
contributions to their modemist followers
and discusses both the evolution of Zahm's
thinking and its primarily European context.
Modernism in the curriculum and pro-
grato at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie