{"product_id":"spirit-and-flesh-isbn-9780375702389","title":"Spirit and Flesh","description":"In an attempt to understand the growing popularity and influence of Christian fundamentalism, sociologist and documentary filmmaker James Ault spent three years inside the world of a Massachusetts fundamentalist church.\u003cb\u003eSpirit and Flesh\u003c\/b\u003e takes us into worship services, home Bible studies, youth events, men’s prayer breakfasts, and bitter conflicts leading to a church split. We come to know the members of the congregation and see how the church acts as an extended family that provides support and security along with occasional tensions. Intimate and rigorously fair-minded, \u003cb\u003eSpirit and Flesh \u003c\/b\u003ewill help non-religious readers better understand their fellow citizens, and will allow devout readers to see themselves through the eyes of a sympathetic outsider.“The best single-volume explanation of why American fundamentalist Christianity thrives among certain people, what needs it fulfills and why it will not die out.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e“An absorbing, groundbreaking, and intimate tale. . . . An ethnographic study that often reads like a novel.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003c\/i\u003e“Not just a first-rate piece of sociological journalism. Ault weaves his own story into the book, and . . . gives \u003cb\u003eSpirit and Flesh\u003c\/b\u003e a warmth and humanity that set it apart.” –\u003ci\u003eThe San Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e“This brilliant book is essential for anyone who wants to better understand fundamentalism — or for fundamentalists who desire to understand how they are viewed by others.” –\u003ci\u003eChristianity Today\u003c\/i\u003eJames M. Ault, Jr. was educated at Harvard and Brandeis universities. After teaching at Harvard and at Smith College, he made his first film, \u003ci\u003eBorn Again,\u003c\/i\u003e a portrait of this fundamentalist Baptist congregation, which won a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival and was broadcast in the United States and abroad in 1987. He has since produced and directed a variety of documentary programs for the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Episcopal Church Foundation, and other organizations. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.\u003cb\u003eMeeting\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eYou're either for God or against him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI remember trying to muster the courage to first pick up the  telephone to call the Reverend Frank Valenti. It was February 1983,  the middle of Ronald Reagan's first term as president and a moment of  ascending strength for a popular conservatism that was then  transforming American politics. As a young sociologist having  recently completed my Ph.D., I was several months into a research  project to better understand what I called the conservative  \"pro-family\" movement. By that I meant those groups struggling to  defend what they saw as traditional family values through a  constellation of enthusiasms including opposition to abortion, sex  education, homosexual rights and the equal rights amendment. While  the New Right as a political coalition also contained Libertarians  and old-style Republicans, it was this popular movement animated by  concerns around family and gender that gave new-right conservatism  its mass base and political clout.[1]\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy apprehension about calling Pastor Valenti stemmed from the  suspicion and hostility that hovered over my first contacts with  conservatives. I had sought them out near my home in Northampton,  Massachusetts, a county seat on the Connecticut River in the western  part of the state, where I had moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts,  to teach sociology at Smith College. My first contacts had been with  grassroots activists in right-to-life groups and in Birthright, an  antiabortion counseling group. They were almost always wary and  guarded, imagining that a sociologist--and one teaching at Smith  College at that--would be prejudiced against all they stood for.  Since I often sensed among them the lurking suspicion that I was an  enemy spy ultimately up to no good, I felt it important not to do or  say things that would stamp me as an opponent. This constant  vigilance was often more exhausting than making one's way in a  foreign country where you do not know the language or customs. In  that case, at least, ignorance did not mark you as the enemy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI took care in dress, demeanor and speech not to do anything that  would offend. Yet sometimes seemingly inconsequential things would  trigger distrust. For example, I once asked a soft-spoken woman who  counseled pregnant teenagers in a Birthright office about  contemporary attitudes toward \"sexuality.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What do you mean by that word?\" she snapped with an alarmed look in  her eyes. \"I can't stand when people use it. It always makes it seem  more important than it should be!\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had been referred to Pastor Valenti by Bill and Karen Fournier, a  Catholic couple active in right-to-life and other conservative causes  in the Worcester area. They reported to me with delight that  Valenti's wife, Sharon, and her mother had just gained public  notoriety by protesting a youth conference, \"Dealing with Feelings,\"  sponsored by Family Planning Services of Central Massachusetts. The  conference had been held at a local Congregational church and had  featured Dr. Sol Gordon, a noted sex educator. The Fourniers showed  me an article on the protest in Worcester's Evening Gazette, in which  Sharon Valenti's mother, Ada Morse, was quoted as saying, \"This  assault on our children's mores and morals is by an insidious  humanist group hiding behind a veil of feigned decency, voraciously  seeking to undermine patriotism, obedience, academics and morality  and supplant them with subversion, rebellion, ignorance and sexual  disorientation.\" This was the kind of conservatism I was looking for.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt had been the Fourniers' own campaign in their local schools  against Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist health-care book, that  had brought them to the attention of a correspondent I knew who  interviewed them for a National Public Radio program on book banning.  Though devout Catholics, Bill and Karen Fournier were unhappy with  what they saw as the liberal and humanist directions of the Catholic  Church. Two years earlier, Karen, a petite and energetic woman in her  thirties, had asked a young priest teaching in her daughter's  parochial school to reintroduce opening prayer in his classes. By  then, only two teachers in the entire school were carrying on that  practice, she reported. He refused, saying \"It would upset some of  the students.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat caused Karen greater distress was seeing her oldest daughter,  then in seventh grade, come home from school wearing jeans and makeup  and swearing. This caused \"a heaviness in my heart,\" she said, which  she carried with her to Washington, D.C., in 1980, to attend the  first Family Forum, a conservative conference on defending  traditional family values. There, she recalled, \"God brought me to  Raymond Moore's session on home schools.\" Soon after, she and Bill  took their four children out of parochial school and, with several  like-minded families, started their own home school, which they  called the Holy Family Academy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI made several trips to the Worcester area that fall to visit the  Holy Family Academy, run in a renovated barn attached to the  Fourniers' home, and to interview some of the close circle of parents  involved. The Fourniers themselves took more easily than other  conservatives I met to conversing with outsiders like me. This was  not because they were less radical or militant in their conservatism.  On the contrary. But they seemed more adept at articulating their  positions in the face of opposed views, in part because they were  able to notice and handle contrary assumptions underlying them. For  example, though I felt comfortable describing Our Bodies, Ourselves  as \"a feminist health-care book,\" Bill, who had done graduate work in  philosophy at Boston College, contested \"the very word 'health.'\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That particular book,\" he explained, \"takes the word 'health' and  calls 'healthy' the lifestyles it happens to agree with--like  extramarital sex, homosexuality and masturbation--and 'unhealthy' or  'sick' lifestyles it happens to disagree with.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"They would like to change society's values totally,\" Karen explained  quietly, \"especially in the areas of sexuality and family. Using this  book is one way of doing it, to get rid of the traditional family.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn retrospect, I realize, the Fourniers helped prepare me to meet the  Valentis and their church. I remember walking a picket line with Bill  Fournier one cold, sunny December afternoon in downtown Worcester  outside a tall, turn-of-the-century office building that housed a  Planned Parenthood clinic. As at other small demonstrations I had  once attended as an antiwar activist, people came and went throughout  the day, greeting and kidding friends. Some unloaded a pile of signs  with stenciled slogans: stop murdering babies, end death clinics and  so on. Others carefully assembled more elaborate and well-worn  homemade posters with photos of bloody \"fetuses\" (or \"babies\") and  lengthier hand-printed text. Bill introduced me to those he knew by  saying, \"This is Jim. He's doing a book on pro-life.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Great! We need that!\" several offered in hearty encouragement for a  book they assumed would affirm their cause. I felt strange about  suddenly being taken for a fellow partisan, though I could not help  appreciating the relief Bill's tact provided.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater that afternoon some of the bolder demonstrators sneaked into  the building and rode the elevator up to the Planned Parenthood  floor. Bill and I went along. Soon after we arrived, in the reception  area, a commotion erupted. A policeman arrived, and, as he herded us  to the elevator, some took the opportunity to speak their views:  \"They're murdering babies in there!... Next they'll be killing old  people and the handicapped!\" I was unprepared for the icy looks and  hateful stares from the Planned Parenthood staff as I stood there  mutely looking on, now suddenly on the other side of a line of battle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Fourniers said that before I finished my research in the  Worcester area I should go see \"the Valentis' school.\" Just as it had  been Karen Fournier's inspiration to start the Holy Family Academy,  it had been Sharon Valenti's idea to start the Christian Academy  attached to their fundamentalist church. What had moved her to do so,  Sharon later explained to me, was picking up some textbooks from her  children's public school and being \"totally shocked at what the  humanist view was teaching.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It was sex education that really bothered me,\" she said, \"because it  was from a perverted standpoint. It wasn't abstinence. They taught  about different contraceptives and how to use them, and encouraged  the petting and the experiencing. The Bible says to abstain from all  those things. They think they're not teaching any kind of morals,\"  she allowed, \"but you can't do that. You're either for God or against  him.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the wrenching reversal of American politics toward conservatism  over the past quarter century, no institution has been more decisive  than local fundamentalist or evangelical churches.[2] Week in, week  out, thousands of such churches across the nation educate members on  issues of the day, arousing and directing their political outrage and  concern. Such churches have provided a ready-made organization for  both Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition and, before it, Jerry  Falwell's more radical Moral Majority. At the height of the Moral  Majority's influence in American politics in the 1980s, most of its  chapters across the country, like the one in Massachusetts, were  headed by fundamentalist preachers trained at Jerry Falwell's Liberty  Baptist College or at schools affiliated with the Baptist Bible  Fellowship, a loose federation of rigorously independent  fundamentalist churches to which Falwell had initially belonged.  Moreover, fundamentalists in this independent Baptist tradition  represented the harder-edged, more aggressive and tougher strain of  conservatives on the American scene. This fact sharpened my fears as  I first picked up my phone to call the Reverend Valenti.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI introduced myself, saying the Fourniers had suggested I call, and  briefly described my study. Sure, he would be willing to speak with  me, Valenti said, and we made an appointment to meet in his office. I  did not take any notes of our conversation. I would soon get his  story face-to-face. The only thing that stuck in my mind was  something he said quite spontaneously toward the end. \"You know  something, Jim,\" he said, already quite personable with me, \"I used  to be in the garage business, and that was easy compared to running a  church. I got eleven people working under me right now--you know,  with the school and the church. And you know what? Managing people is  one of the hardest things to do. It just flat ain't easy!\" A  mechanic-turned-preacher, I mused. His candor was refreshing, and I  appreciated his observations about the challenges of managing people.  Little did I know what role those challenges would play in the fate  of his church, or how much change in my own life hinged on picking up  the phone that day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI knew very little about Worcester when I set out on a cold, bright  February afternoon to make the hour-and-a-quarter drive eastward from  Northampton to meet Pastor Valenti. In time I would become more  familiar with its leading industrial firms, such as Norton Company,  with the 360-degree views from Mount Wachusett rising all by itself  out of the Worcester plateau, and with the discrete neighborhoods  making up that city: Leicester Square, College Hill, Quinsigamond  Village.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEven though it is the second-largest city in the industrial state of  Massachusetts, Worcester struck me as a museum piece, with its old  craft-based industries, wire-pulling and machine tools, and its  abandoned downtown. From an academic's point of view, the last time  Worcester made news was in 1911, when Sigmund Freud, on his first  trip to the United States, chose to visit the then-prestigious  psychology department of Clark University. Since then, it seemed,  centralization and specialization had turned Worcester, like so many  American cities flourishing at the beginning of the twentieth  century, into a backwater--but a backwater that had changed,  nevertheless, in many ways. Among other things, the crisscrossing  interstate highways and the ubiquitous automobile had turned the  rural towns and farm communities on its outskirts into ungainly  suburbs, where old-time residents now complained about needing to  lock their doors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFollowing Valenti's directions, I exited the interstate in one such  suburb on Worcester's perimeter and found myself in an eclectic area.  In a short commercial strip, the common installations of mass  society--an outlet for electronic banking, McDonald's, Bonanza--sat  alongside establishments such as Danny's Lounge, the Valley Bait Shop  and Mike Dukas' Diner, which looked like an Airstream caravan that  had landed on cement blocks. On the residential streets, proper  suburban homes with neatly trimmed lawns sat alongside idiosyncratic  piecemeal constructions and homes with barns and horses. Commercial  vans parked in driveways, derelict pieces of machinery in the yard  and handmade signs--sewing done or curios 'n things--suggested the  presence of family businesses. It was an area where postwar suburban  sprawl blended with older farm communities and long-stagnant mill  towns of the New England hinterland, and where Frank and Sharon  Valenti had grown up and founded their church.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs I drove along a wooded suburban road, the terrain suddenly opened  to a large grassy field on my left. A small clapboard house sat close  by the road, and behind it, surrounded by a macadamized parking lot,  was a curious conglomeration of buildings. In the front stood an old  rectangular building made of red brick with white clapboard dormers.  Looming behind it was a large new warehouse-like building finished  with gray aluminum siding. A wooden sign at the driveway told me I  had arrived: the shawmut river baptist church--the reverend frank  valenti, pastor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI found my way to Pastor Valenti's office on the second floor of the  red brick building, which I learned used to house a bakery. It had  been purchased with a large parcel of land for an extremely favorable  price from two sisters whose family had worked at the Salvation Army.  \"The Lord's providence,\" those on both sides of the transaction had  affirmed. Valenti's secretary showed me into an office with  wall-to-wall red-orange shag carpeting. Light from the one large  window and from banks of fluorescent lights set in a drop ceiling  glared off the faux wood paneling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePastor Valenti rose from behind his desk to shake my hand, and I sat  down across from him. He was portly and about my height, five feet  eight, and was wearing a snugly fitting three-piece suit, a thickly  knotted tie and a large gold watch. He had short, neatly groomed  black hair, which came down in full sideburns to frame the face of a  comic: sheepish brown eyes, a slightly hooked nose and, set between  two full cheeks, a restless mouth always ready, I soon saw, to smirk,  grimace or smile. The olive green bookshelves covering the wall  behind him held a library dominated by a half-dozen sets of  like-colored volumes--Bible concordances and commentaries. A map of  the area with markings and pushpins was Scotch-taped to the wall in  the far corner of the room--an abandoned tool, I would learn, of  earlier efforts at \"systematic\" evangelizing.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301784146149,"sku":"NP9780375702389","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375702389.jpg?v=1767737097","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/spirit-and-flesh-isbn-9780375702389","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}