Chapter Five—
The Crooked Lines of God

Andrew M. Greeley

My life is not unique in that I am or think I am marginal. My impression, on the basis of a nonrandom sample of colleagues, is that virtually all sociologists think of themselves as marginal—a phenomenon that ought to be interesting to any psychiatrists specializing in treating sociologists. Nor is my sociological career unusual in that I am studying the phenomenon by which my marginality has emerged: the latter stages of the acculturation process of the Catholic immigrant group. Lots of us sociologists do that, though we do not always admit it.

If there is anything at all distinctive about my sociological efforts, it is that I write novels about that which I have studied sociologically. Moreover, the novels began as a test of a hypothesis in the sociology of religion: religion is fundamentally a matter of experiences, images, and stories, not of the acceptance of doctrinal propositions or the performance of ritual devotions or the honoring of ethical norms. Kenneth L. Prewitt, formerly director of the National Opinion Research Center and now president of the Social Science Research Council, summed it up with his usual flair for the epigram when he told me, "I'm not going to read any more of your monographs; all your sociology is in the fiction, which is far more palatable."

In May 1954 I was ordained a Catholic priest, something I had wanted to be since second grade, and I was sent two months later to one of the first college-educated Catholic parishes on the fringes of the city of Chicago. The theory in which we were trained in the seminary (if I can dignify with that term the assumptions around which the seminary

experience was structured) implied that it was the role of the priest and the church to protect the religious faith of the uneducated Catholic immigrant working class. Until 1930, or even 1940, such a theory might have been valid. In the prosperity after the end of World War II the earlier Catholic immigrant groups (e.g., Irish) regained the beginnings of affluence they had lost in the Great Depression, and the later immigrant groups (Poles and Italians), benefiting from the GI bill (apparently the only groups in the society to benefit disproportionately from that legislation), also struggled to the borders of the upper middle class. The immigrant era for American Catholicism was over, though of course Catholic Hispanic immigrants would continue, and still continue, to keep alive the tradition. (How relevant the Hispanic immigrants are to the institutional church may be judged from the fact that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles does not count the more than one million local Hispanic Catholics among its members.)

The embourgeoisement of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the immigrants was well under way. In the years between the end of the war and my ordination swarms of French clerical "religious sociologists" descended on Chicago and announced confidently, sometimes after only a week or two in the city, that with the breakup of the old national (foreign language–speaking) parishes and the movement of the offspring of the immigrants into the suburbs and into the middle class, American Catholicism would experience the same decline in religious observance that affected Catholicism on the European continent. For the "religious sociologists" it was not a matter that required empirical evidence. It was something obvious, inevitable, and fated.

However, at Christ the King Parish in the Beverly Hills district of Chicago, in the late 1950s, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly disconfirmed the French hypothesis. The new upper middle-class Catholicism was, if anything, more devout, more intense, and more eager than the Catholicism of the old neighborhoods. I was fascinated by what I was witnessing, and well aware that nothing I had learned in the seminary would equip me to understand these college-educated Catholics—especially the young people. The pastor did not trust me with the older laity of the parish, of whom he was very jealous, and he assigned me to work with the youth, doubtless figuring that I could do less harm there than anywhere else, especially because he did not mind losing them to me. So I began to devour the sociology books, pop and serious, concerned with social class, the affluent society, and the emergence of middle-class

suburbs. One of the writers who most influenced me at that time was David Riesman, who years later became a close friend. Jim Carey, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago and now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, persuaded me to come over to the University of Chicago (an hour-and-twenty-minute streetcar ride—young priests were not permitted to own automobiles in those days—and several cultural eons away from Beverly) to meet with Professor Everett C. Hughes. Hughes listened eagerly to my description of Christ the King Parish and then pleaded with me to keep a record of my experiences. "Everything," he said, "has happened in and through the Catholic church, and as it becomes the church of the American middle class, everything is likely to happen to it and in it again." Although Hughes did not realize it, he had just prophesied the Second Vatican Council.

I began to write memos to myself on the implications for the Catholic church of this sudden and dramatic upward mobility of its laity, a movement that, more than a quarter of a century later, the leadership of the institutional church has yet to fully comprehend. Donald Thorman, a Catholic editor, heard me give a lecture on the subject and asked me to write an article for a Catholic magazine. Phillip Sharper, the senior editor of the Catholic publishing firm Sheed and Ward, read the article and asked me to write a book. Thus, with more courage than common sense, I violated the ecclesiastical taboo against priests, particularly young priests, setting word on paper and published my first book, The Church in the Suburbs , in 1958 at the infantile age, for a Catholic priest, of twenty-nine. The next year Alfred Gregory Meyer came to Chicago as archbishop, having been warned by priests in Milwaukee that one of the first things he should do in Chicago was to silence me, not necessarily because of what I had said but rather because I had the audacity to say it, or say anything. To this demand Meyer had replied characteristically, "No, I won't do that. It wouldn't be fair. I value what he does. I will encourage him."

Encourage me he did, and in the summer of 1960 he agreed to send me to graduate school in sociology at the University of Chicago while I continued as a full-time assistant pastor at Christ the King (to the chagrin and dismay of the pastor, who, being an obedient priest come what may, nonetheless went along with the cardinal's wishes). There could not have been a better time to appear on the campus of the University of Chicago if one were a Catholic priest. John F. Kennedy was running for the presidency, John XXIII was pope, and the Second Vatican Council had been convened: the winds of change were in the air. Meyer asked

me whether I could stay in the parish and study at a local Catholic university, such as Loyola. I was delighted to stay in the parish, intractable pastor or no, because Christ the King was and is my first love as a priest. I responded, "Loyola or the University of Chicago."

"Oh, yes, that's right," Meyer said. "Chicago is closer, isn't it?"

And thus the long taboo against diocesan priests from Chicago attending the University of Chicago was smashed in the name of geographical convenience!

If I had gone to Loyola I suspect I might still be a graduate student there. But Phillip Hauser at the University of Chicago accepted me on the spot, and in the final week of September, during the fierce Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign, I began my work as a graduate student in sociology, destined, I thought, to be a sociologist in service of the archdiocese and the church. My first course, open to both undergraduates and graduates, was in social psychology taught by James A. Davis and Elihu Katz at 8:30 in the morning to some hundred students. I was utterly at sea: six years out of the seminary, no experience of a secular university, or indeed of any university, wearing a Roman collar, and daunted by the apparent brilliance of the questions of the younger students with whom I was surrounded. How could I possibly survive, I wondered, in such brilliant competition?

The midterm examination required that we analyze Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in terms of the social psychology we had learned in the class. I took Friar Lawrence as my principal concern and explained in considerable detail how he acted as a "dissonance reducer" in the story. (I thought I understood what Jim and Elihu were saying; it was the students who scared me.) When the tests came back, I noticed with enormous relief that I had received an A. They are easy markers around here, I thought. Then Jim Davis put the distribution of grades on the blackboard: there were six A's. Ah ha, I thought, this place isn't going to be so bad after all.

After the class Jim offered me a job at the National Opinion Research Center. The diocese was paying for my graduate education, and as I already had a job, I declined. A few months later, urged on by Harrison White to finish my work as quickly as possible, I wandered over to NORC (in those days housed in a brick two-flat on Woodlawn Avenue) and asked Davis if he had any data from which I might write a dissertation. He did. There was a study in process of the career decisions of the June 1961 college graduates: would I be interested in analyzing the impact of religion on their career choice? In June 1961 I found myself at

a tiny desk in the "bullpen" of NORC research assistants and started to work on my dissertation. Twenty-four years later my "temporary" and unpaid beginning at NORC continues.

When I asked Bill McManus, then superintendent of schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago and now bishop of Fort Wayne and South Bend, Indiana, if there was anything in which he thought I should be particularly interested in the project, he said, "Find out, for the love of heaven, why our kids don't go to graduate school!" At that time there was great concern among Catholics about the failures of "American Catholic intellectualism." Our young people, we were told, were very successful in the business world perhaps, but they were not becoming scientists or scholars. They were not pursuing arts and science academic careers or graduate-school education in preparation for such careers. None of the authors who wrote on the subject—Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, Professor Thomas O'Dea, and Professor John Donovan—seemed to think that it was unrealistic to expect immigrants who had been peasant farmers to immediately become scholars and scientists. Indeed the immigration factor was rarely, if ever, alluded to in their books. I expected to find confirmation of their hypotheses but also thought that among the young people whose families had been in the United States for several generations I would observe a tendency to go on to graduate school and pursue academic careers.

One Saturday morning that summer I stopped by NORC to collect the output from our project's IBM 101 counter-sorter (it actually printed raw frequencies). I did not even have to glance at the numbers on the sheet to realize that all the hypotheses explaining the lower graduate-school attendance of Catholics had collapsed: Jim Davis had written across the top of the paper, "It looks like Notre Dame beats Southern Methodist this year!"

Whatever had been true in the past was no longer the case. Catholics were indeed going to graduate school, and they were deciding on academic careers. I learned a lot from that experience:

1. Never trust a broad assertion that is not backed by empirical evidence.

2. Never expect cocktail-party liberals to abandon their conventional wisdom merely because you have empirical evidence to the contrary.

3. Never expect anti-Catholicism to yield easily to empirical evidence.

For over twenty years I fought this battle, first with Gerhard Lenski and James Trent and then with a host of other people, including Zena Blau. I think I have finally won the argument, though Commonweal , a Catholic magazine and one of my most bitter enemies, never really had the grace to admit I was right and they were wrong: there is no incompatibility between Catholicism—even and especially Catholic school attendance—and an academic career, academic productivity, academic excellence, and academic eminence.

Foolishly uncertain about how much time Meyer would give me to pursue my graduate work, I raced through the program at breakneck speed, holding what I still think may be the record for obtaining a doctorate from scratch at the University of Chicago—twenty months. Pete Rossi, the director of NORC, invited me to stay at NORC for two more years to work on a projected study of the effects of Catholic education, which would be the first national-sample study of American Catholics. (Later I learned that Rossi had attempted to obtain for me an appointment as an assistant professor in the sociology department of the university. He abandoned the attempt because of strong opposition. "I would no more permit that man in our department," a distinguished demographer said, "than I would a card-carrying Communist, and for the same reason." I do not think the man has changed his mind.)

Meyer at that time was busy with the Second Vatican Council and was not yet prepared to have me move into his house and teach him social science over the supper table, so he welcomed Rossi's idea and wrote a letter appointing me to NORC, a canonical appointment I still technically hold. In 1965, when Meyer died at the age of sixty-two and John Cody came to Chicago as archbishop, I suddenly found myself a marginal outcast. Archbishop Cody had no need for a sociologist, or indeed anyone else, to advise him, and he bitterly resented me for gaining attention in the newspapers and not depending on him for salary. (At the beginning of the parochial-school study Rossi insisted that I had to be paid so they could collect overhead from my salary. When I offered to give the money to the diocese, Meyer said, "Oh no, Father. I have enough responsibilities worrying about the money of the archdiocese. You should worry about the money you were paid.")

When I brought the galley sheets of The Education of Catholic Americans to Cody, by then a cardinal, he was totally uninterested in them. Who had sent me to graduate school? Who had given me permission to write? Who censored my books? How much money did I make? Did I still hear confessions? Did I realize that people said I wrote too much?

The same sort of people who had pleaded with Meyer to silence me had also pleaded with Cody. Meyer dismissed their envy; Cody accepted it. I was now an outsider in the diocese and the church, not because anything had changed in me, but because I had a different archbishop. I would later find out that most priests also resented someone with quality professional training in the social sciences, for such training violated the rules of amateurism and mediocrity—the notion that any priest can do anything—at the core of clerical culture. Morris Janowitz's joke that I was the company sociologist of the Catholic church could not have been more inaccurate. The Catholic church, as far as my archbishop and most of my fellow priests were concerned, did not want or need or approve of a company sociologist. Not only were my professional skills useless, but they were in fact dangerous as well—not because sociology was under suspicion but because a priest on the staff of the University of Chicago with an independent income was by definition suspicious in a clerical culture where the reward structure is extremely limited.

Thus my temporary assignment at NORC became permanent, and my dream of being a priest-sociologist in service of the church proved to be an illusion. I became, willy-nilly, a professional sociological scholar. In the twenty years since the fateful meeting with Cardinal Cody I have had three main sociological interests. First, the four studies my colleagues and I have done of Catholic education have provided solid time-series data on changes in the American Catholic church and the American Catholic population in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Second, in the seventies, principally working with William McCready and inspired by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer's Beyond the Melting Pot , I launched the first series of empirical studies of the survival of diverse ethnic subcultures in the United States. Third, through the years I have tried to reformulate some of the major questions in the sociology of religion, using the theoretical perspective originating in the work of Clifford Geertz on religion as a cultural system. My work in this area began with a study funded by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1972; it continued with a project funded by the Knights of Columbus in 1979 and finally with research funded from the illgotten royalties on my novels in the 1980s. Through this research I have fashioned a new theory of the sociology of religion, doing most of the work on that theory—which I think is my principal contribution to sociology—after I joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1979. In the process I have also done research on the sociology of the

country club, the sociology of the paranormal (mystical and psychic experiences), and the sociology of papal elections.

One need only look over that list of interests and add to it the fact that I am, as one of my opponents at the University of Chicago remarked, "nothing but a loudmouthed Irish priest" (to which I replied, "And may they carve it on my gravestone!") to understand why my life has been colorful and interesting, filled with conflict and controversy and doomed almost from the beginning to marginality. Small wonder that in my native Chicago neither the church nor the university wanted me, or wants me.

Worse luck for them, says I.

I think my colleagues and I have established the academic excellence of Catholic schools, their importance to the work of the church (particularly in times of great religious change), and their enormous impact on minority students and disadvantaged students of every sort. American Catholicism, I have been able to document, has survived the traumas of the post—Vatican Council era remarkably well. In 1960, 15 percent of those who were born Catholic were no longer Catholics. By the middle 1980s that proportion had risen only to 18 percent. In the early 1960s approximately 68 percent of Catholics attended church weekly. Beginning in 1969—the year after the encyclical on birth control—church attendance fell precipitously, to 50 percent by 1975. (Protestant church attendance has remained unchanged in the United States since the late 1930s: 40 percent of Protestants attend every week.)

This decline stopped in 1975 as abruptly as it had started, and it seems to have been the result not of the Vatican Council but of anger at ecclesiastical authority because of the birth control encyclical. American Catholics, on the contrary, seem to have enthusiastically welcomed the changes of the Second Vatican Council. The most notable result of the council is that American Catholics now stay in the church on their own terms, making their own rules and following their own judgment as to when they will listen to their leadership. Thus, they reject the official teaching on birth control, premarital sex, abortion, and other related matters, although they oppose homosexuality, extramarital sex, and abortion on demand, in about the same proportions as do white American Protestants. Still they were notably affected by the letter of the American bishops on nuclear weapons in 1983. Before the letter 32 percent of Americans, Protestants and Catholics alike, thought that too much money was being spent on armaments. A year later, after the pastoral letter, the proportion of Catholics thinking that too much

money was spent on arms rose to 54 percent. This finding is a classic example of what has come to be called do-it-yourself Catholicism. If Catholics happen to think that something the church leadership says is correct, then they enthusiastically accept it. If they happen to think that the leadership does not know what it is talking about, then they rather easily and cheerfully reject it.

Though the church did not pay for our research, and despite the fact that Catholic reviewers have routinely patronized it, there is little reason to doubt that there is more data on Catholics in the United States than on Catholics anywhere else in the world and that since no one has been able to refute or even dispute the NORC studies on Catholics and Catholic schools, they have become accepted as valid social knowledge in the United States. The Catholic leadership has never been able to forgive me for proving that the Catholic laity rejected the birth control decision (though Archbishop Bernardin, before he became the archbishop of Chicago, told me off the record that he could not sleep at night because of what "that goddamned encyclical is doing in my diocese"). And at the University of Chicago my fellow sociologists dismissed this work as uninteresting and unimportant and hence not worth considering when the issue was whether I belonged as a full-fledged member of the university community.

There is no point in this essay in rehearsing the story of my conflicts with the sociology department of the University of Chicago in any great detail. Briefly, in the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of other units in the university had recommended me for a regular faculty appointment. (I had been a professor with tenure at the University of Illinois at Chicago for two years and resigned to resume full-time work at NORC because I felt so much more comfortable there.) In each case certain members of the sociology department intrigued against the appointment at higher levels of the administration and defeated it. It is, as any reader of this essay knows, easier in the academy to prevent something than to accomplish it. I was convinced then, and am convinced now, that the reason for the opposition had nothing to do with the quality or quantity of my work but with the fact that I was a Catholic priest. I accuse the responsible people of anti-Catholic bigotry, and I accuse the university administration of cowardly caving in to such bigotry. Moreover, I accuse myself of gross stupidity for getting into the conflict in the first place. I should have been intelligent enough to stay out of it, knowing that there was no way to win.

Incidentally, my funding a chair at the University of Chicago in Catho-

lic studies from the royalty income on my novels was not an attempt to get even with the university. As I said at the time the chair was announced, my only intention was to provide some kind of scholarly bridge between the academy and the church. If one wanted to do that in the city of Chicago, obviously the University of Chicago was the place to do it. I must say that the university's reaction to my funding the chair was singularly graceless. They accepted the money all right, rudely and churlishly, though they did not, like Cardinal Bernardin when he accepted a parallel grant to the seminary at Mundelein, act as though they were doing me a great favor. Once you are on the margins, you stay there.

In our research on ethnicity, my colleagues and I established that ethnic subcultures, distinctive styles of family behavior, religious belief, political activity, attitudes toward death, and especially drinking behavior persist from generation to generation despite education, the number of generations in America, the collapse of ethnic neighborhoods, and even ethnic intermarriage. (One Irish parent is enough to guarantee the survival of the Irish drinking subculture, for example.) Some people, most notably Orlando Patterson, have thought there was something chauvinistic and fascist about studying white ethnics (but not, oddly enough, black or Jewish ethnics). Scholarly research on ethnic diversity in the United States is now solidly established. The paradigms that McCready and I developed remain untouched. Patterson may think it is somehow uncivilized or irrational to be concerned about ethnic diversity, but those scholars and practitioners dealing with alcohol use and abuse are far more realistic. There are distinctive drinking subcultures with enormous durability that are passed on from generation to generation powerfully and unself-consciously. You do not have to think of yourself as Irish or participate in Irish ethnic customs or keep an Irish tricolor in your office to absorb the Irish drinking subculture, the Irish political subculture, the Irish family structure, or the Irish religious value system (a mixture of fatalism and hope).

In the process of studying ethnic subcultures we also established that the American Catholic groups had caught up with, and indeed in some cases passed, other groups in the society in income, education, and occupation. The Irish, for example, are now the best educated, the most affluent, and the most occupationally successful of the gentile ethnic groups in America, and the Italians are not far behind them. This finding, like my other findings about Catholics and the intellectual life, the rejection of the birth control encyclical, the acceptance of the Second

Vatican Council, the persistence of ethnic diversity, and the prevalence of incidents of psychic and mystical experiences in the United States (about a third of Americans have had intense ecstatic experiences of the sort described by William James, and these experiences correlate positively with psychological well-being; about two-thirds of Americans have had some kind of psychic experience) are widely unaccepted because they are profoundly unacceptable, either in the church or the academy or both. I started graduate school in 1960 believing, quite irrationally, that the Catholic church as an institution had a monopoly on both envy and dogmatism. I now realize that though envy is worse in the church than it is in the professoriat, it is still pretty bad in the professoriat, and that dogmatism, strong in the church, is equally powerful in the academy.

But the most important work, at least for my own life, that I have done as a sociologist has been on the religious imagination. This work has influenced my personal religious behavior, my philosophical and theological reflections, and my turning to poetry and fiction, thereby adding to roles I already had as priest, journalist, and sociologist another more controversial and extremely enjoyable role as storyteller.

The sociology of religion is one of the backwater subdisciplines in great part because religion has so little power as a predictor variable. It is acceptable to study religion as a dependent variable: how many people go to church, how many people believe in life after death, how many people believe the Bible is divinely inspired, and so on. But having obtained that information, the understanding of other social attitudes, institutions, and behaviors is not notably enhanced. Thus, in the mid-1980s analysis I have done of material in the NORC's General Social Survey correlating twelve social and political dependent variables (including attitudes toward government help for the poor, the death penalty, racial justice, and nuclear armament) shows that neither church attendance, nor intensity of religious affiliation, nor frequency of prayer, nor confidence in religious leadership correlate with political and social attitudes and behaviors. The founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, were interested in religion. Religion is also something in which most Americans, if not most sociologists, are involved, but it does not seem to be of much sociological use.

Moreover, I have wondered through the years whether the reason for its lack of usefulness is that most sociologists of religion have been interested in the so-called secularization hypothesis—that is to say, in demonstrating that religion is no longer important and that religious

involvement is declining. In a book called Unsecular Man (1972) I could find no support for the secularization hypothesis, and in Religious Change in America (1989), a book on religious social indicators published by Harvard University Press, I again could find no evidence for secularization. Sociologists have chosen as their units of measurement the kinds of religous behavior (such as church attendance) that might be expected to decline or fluctuate over time. Though many sociologists of religion would probably accept some form of Clifford Geertz's definition of religion as a culture system, value system, meaning system, and set of symbols that provide ultimate explanations of what life is about and patterns of behavior for living, they have rarely tried to measure such symbol systems in their research. Might it not be, I have asked myself, that if we could get adequate measures of religion as a culture system, as a system of symbols of ultimate meaning, we would have a more powerful predictor variable and win more respectability for religion as a sociological phenomenon?

While I was analyzing the data from my 1972 Henry Luce Foundation study, I was also recasting my own paradigms for religion, under the influence of the theological writings of David Tracy and John Shea, and working out this reformulation in a book called The Mary Myth, in which I approached the Catholic devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, from a sociological perspective. It was clear to me that Mary's function in Catholic Christianity had always been to represent the womanliness of God, the life-giving, nurturing, tender affection of God. Our theologians never quite said as much, but there was little doubt that the poetry, art, and music of Mary were designed to use her as a sacrament (manifestation) of God's womanly love. Many medieval Catholic theologians (most notably Saint Bernard and Saint Anselm), mystics, and spiritual writers were at ease with the image of God as mother (even a nursing mother). This ease seemed to me to be clearly linked to devotion to Mary. Later, in our study of young adults for the Knights of Columbus, we discovered that despite neglect from an ecumenically minded clerical elite the Mary image was strong, powerful, and benign among young Catholics—correlating well, for example, with sexual fulfillment in marriage and, as was not surprising by now, with the image of God as mother.

From these exercises in reflection and restructuring I developed a theory of the sociology of religion (articulated in Religion: A Secular Theory ) that saw religion as the result of experiences of hope-renewal. These experiences are encoded in images that provide a template for

life and hence are symbols, shared with others through stories, especially stories told in a storytelling community (church) of persons who share the same repertoire of images. Influenced in this theory formation by Shea and Tracy, by Geertz, Parsons, and Weber, and by Mircea Eliade, Rudolph Otto, and William James, I decided that religion was fundamentally and primarily an exercise of the creative imagination, the preconscious, the poetic faculty, the creative intuition, the agent intellect—call it what you will. Obviously, since we are reflecting creatures, it is necessary to reflect on religion and articulate it propositionally, philosophically, theologically, and catechetically; but such intellectual reflection, however essential, becomes arid and irrelevant when it is divorced from an awareness that the origins and raw power of religion lie in another dimension of the personality.

That conclusion was not particularly acceptable to most of my Catholic priest colleagues. It certainly could not be rejected as heretical, especially since I insisted that I was approaching religion purely from the sociological perspective and saying nothing about theological truth. But if it was not heretical, neither was it relevant, and in the years after the Second Vatican Council many Catholic clerics, especially the more influential ones, had pretty much abandoned religion in the sense I was using it and substituted for it social activism. I had no objection to social activism, but I thought of it as a consequence of religion and not as a substitute for it, as a result of religious faith instead of as a result of loss of nerve about the possibility of religious faith.

For such clergy nothing worthwhile could have happened in the history of Catholicism before 1963 and nothing could be more irrelevant, and hence useless, than to talk about the religious imagination. I had become an offense to them, not merely because I was drawing a professor's salary and had professional skills (through which I found that the laity were very critical of the quality of Sunday preaching); I was now a pariah all over again because I was talking nonsense. Of what possible use, as a Jesuit would ask in a book review in the 1980s, can the image of a Madonna's smile have in an era when the church has to be concerned about such life issues as abortion or nuclear warfare? I could demonstrate easily that those who were likely to have an image of God as mother were more concerned about nuclear war than those who did not have such an image; but for this particular Jesuit, as for most priests, I fear, empirical evidence mattered not in the slightest.

At the time I was developing this theory, I was influenced strongly by a major intellectual breakthrough in social research—the interactive

data analysis techniques developed by my friend Norman Nie in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (Conversational Program: SCSS) package. Analyzing data with SCSS was like writing poetry: you could become locked in an affective relationship with the data and follow hunches and intuitions with ease. More important than the speed of SCSS was the instant turnaround that enabled the creative intuition to work in the analytic process.

Rossi and Davis had taught me that the purpose of data analysis was to tell a story. With SCSS the same creative dimensions of the personality used in writing fiction were unleashed in the struggle to find patterns of meaning in the data. Ever since I had read Michael Polanyi in graduate school, I was convinced that the distinction between art and science was deceptive and irrelevant. Data analysis was as much a craft as a science. With SCSS the craft could become art. Fiction and data analysis are both modes of storytelling, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with plot, conflict, and resolution. Analyzing data prepared me to write fiction; writing fiction made me a more skilled data analyst.

As a result of my sociological reflection on Geertz, my theological reflection on Tracy and Shea, my work on The Mary Myth, and my preparation to write Religion: A Secular Theory, I came to two implicit, even preconscious, conclusions. The first was that I wanted to concentrate on my research on the religious imagination; the second was that I was going to try my hand at writing fiction. A lot of folks were talking about religion as story, but virtually no one was writing religious stories. If the theories were right, however, stories were the best way to communicate about religion, and the novel (and the screenplay) were the functional equivalents of the stained-glass window in our era. In January 1979, with one novel, The Magic Cup, about to be published (and disappear), I joined the faculty of the University of Arizona, and free from the burden of having to raise funds for our ethnic research center at NORC (where I continued to spend one semester a year), I had time to reflect on the issue of the religious imagination. With the success of my novels, beginning with The Cardinal Sins, I had funds from royalties to put into research on this subject. In a curious circle, my reflection on the religious imagination led to novel writing, and the novel writing in turn funded research on the religious imagination.

Thus far all of my novels have been situated in Chicago among the Irish Catholics of the community, continuing, I like to think, the work that James T. Farrell left off in his final book, The Death of Nora Ryan (which brings Farrell/Danny O'Neill/Ed Ryan to the mid-1940s). The

novels, as I have said repeatedly, are theological tales, stories of God—comedies of grace focusing especially on the womanly tenderness of God. As Professor Ingrid Shafer has suggested in her research on my novels, each of them, in one way or another, is like The Magic Cup, a story of a quest for a holy grail, for the womanly affection of God as revealed through human lovers. They are also, however, portraits of the Chicago Irish in transition from the upper working class and lower middle class into the upper middle and lower upper class, and of the turbulence and traumas, the excitements, the disappointments, the enthusiasms, and the despairs of that transition, particularly since the Second Vatican Council. Hence Ken Pruitt's dictum that all my sociology is in my fiction.

In three different ways, then, my sociology has shaped my fiction. The context is the same as the context for my study of American Catholism. The subject matter is the result of my reflection and work on the religious imagination—the womanliness of God. And the impulse, finally, to set about storytelling grew out of my sociological theorizing about the nature of religion. Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously—whereas my colleagues in the priesthood have been furious at me for writing novels and even more furious at me for succeeding at it, my colleagues in sociology have seemed to be amused and even rather proud that one of theirs is able to tell stories and at the same time continue to teach and do research on sociological issues. They are even prepared to believe what my clerical colleagues will never believe, that it was my work in the sociology of religion that induced me to write stories of God.

I started out life wanting to be a priest. I continued my life in the priesthood wanting to be a sociologist to serve the church. I discovered the church did not need or want a sociologist and became a professional sociologist who was also a priest. Then my sociology persuaded me that the best way I could be a priest was by writing theological novels set in the same context and about the same subjects as my sociological research. Though this pilgrimage has scarcely won me any acceptance in the priesthood or from my own archdiocese, it has nonetheless made me a more effective priest for the vast number of readers (half of whom do not go to church regularly) who now constitute my parish and my congregation. As Pete Rossi would have said, there are many ironies in the fire.

In March 1984, the night before celebrating the publication of my most popular novel, Lord of the Dance, and my thirtieth anniversary in

the priesthood, a functionary from Cardinal Bernardin's office came to visit me. If I wanted to be accepted back into the diocese (I was of course a priest in good standing, but he meant acknowledged as part of the diocese and not treated as a pariah who it is pretended does not exist), I would have to do public penance for all the harm caused by my novels. I protested that the research I had done on the readers of my novels indicated that they were by no means harmful. The functionary dismissed the research. The problem was not people who read my novels and benefited from them, he said; the problem was the "simple ordinary faithful" who had not read them but were shocked that I wrote them. (The "simple ordinary laity" are hard to find in any of the empirical research data but are a useful projection of the fears, anxieties, and worries of ecclesiastical bureaucrats.) If I apologized to them and promised them I would be sensitive to their needs in the future, then I would be welcomed back into the diocese and treated with honor, respect, and affection. "You have to crawl a little bit, Andy," he said.

As might well be imagined, I turned him down flat. Since they had not read my books, what earthly reason was there to think they would read my apology either? Besides, I was not going to abandon millions of people who, if the research evidence was to be believed, found religious benefit in my books, to placate a few people who had written nasty letters to the cardinal. I have been asked repeatedly whether I really think that Joseph Bernardin expected me to succumb to such ridiculous terms. Of course not. I think he knew full well I would not accept his terms, but he sent them to me so that he would be able to say to other bishops, the Vatican, the pronuncio, and the complaining priests and laity, I tried to reason with Andy and he wouldn't listen. The ability to give such a response was what Bernardin was really seeking. In fact, I think he would have been appalled if I had accepted his terms because then he would have had no idea what to do with me. Is this a coward's way out, or only an ecclesiastical diplomat's? Readers will have to judge for themselves.

The appointment to the University of Arizona was a complete surprise to me. I had often said that there were only four schools in the country that could lure me away from Chicago: the City University of New York, Harvard, Stanford, and Arizona—CUNY because of its distinguished chairs, Harvard because it is probably the best university in the world, and Stanford and Arizona because I loved the areas and because they both had become distinguished universities. However, when Philip Hammond, the chairman of Arizona's recruiting committee, and Stanley

Lieberson, the head of the sociology department, approached me, I did not think they were serious. The traumas in Chicago, both at the university and in the archdiocese, had through the years sufficiently eroded my self-esteem so that I did not think that a distinguished department like Arizona's could be interested in me. Moreover, I had heard that they were looking at three people for the vacant professorship and assumed, again I suppose as a result of my experience with sociologists at Chicago, that I was third on the list. But a trip to Arizona in January was always a pleasant experience, so I flew to Tucson and from the members of the department discovered that Stan Lieberson had been an ally through all my University of Chicago troubles, and we ate dinner at El Charro restaurant, which may be the best Mexican/American restaurant in all the world. There was indeed an offer. Lieberson and Paul Rosenblatt, then dean of arts and sciences at Arizona (and one of the best deans in America), were aware that my Chicago roots and my connection with the NORC would make it difficult for me to move to Tucson, so during Easter week in 1978, when I was taking my annual week off in Scottsdale, Lieberson called and proposed that we work out an offer on the phone. "No way," I told him. "I'm an Irish Catholic ethnic from Chicago. You and Paul are Jewish ethnics from Brooklyn. I'm going to come down and we're going to have tea and coffee and sweet rolls, we're going to work it all out and then shake hands." So we did, and I moved to Arizona for half the year and returned to the classroom. There I found to my astonishment that I was not merely a respected sociologist but, as far as the Arizona sociology department was concerned, a superstar. I am not prepared to place myself in that category, but having been treated like a pariah for a long, long time, I was perfectly prepared to accept the acclaim and attention, if not the title. Moreover, my new colleagues, especially Richard Curtis, Albert Bergesen, and Michael Hout, made me feel that however marginal I may be elsewhere, I am not in fact a marginal sociologist.

Adding the classroom experience in Tucson and the results of the Knights of Columbus study of young adults to my previous reflections on the religious imagination, I was finally ready to test my theories seriously against the empirical evidence. I devoted some of the money from my first sizable royalty check to paying for questions on the religious imagination in the NORC General Social Survey. After one year I was able to refine the questions so that a simple, easy to administer, four-item scale (four forced choices on a seven-point range: God is Father-Mother, Judge-Lover, Master-Spouse, or King-Friend) finally provided an effective measure of the religious imagination, which corre-

lated significantly with political attitudes and behaviors, even when other measures were used to take into account the political, economic, social, religious, and life-style liberalism. People who scored high on measures of God as mother, lover, spouse, and friend, for example, were 15 percentage points more likely to vote against Ronald Reagan in the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984. Your story of God, in other words, is a paradigm of the story of your life.

My next scheme was to try to do research on the readers of my novels to learn whether the stories did affect their religious imaginations. I also hoped to gather evidence to refute the claim inside the Catholic community that the stories were pornographic and trashy, a threat to the church and the priesthood. Of the readers of Ascent into Hell, 68 percent said that the book enhanced their respect for the priesthood because it revealed the humanity of the priest, whereas only 6 percent said that it lowered their respect for the priesthood (the story was about a man who left the priesthood to marry a nun whom he had impregnated); only 11 percent thought that the novels were trashy or steamy, whereas 80 percent thought the sexual scenes were handled with delicacy and taste. There also emerged from this research (narcissism begins at home, as Stan Lieberson would have said!) the observation that the attraction of the books for readers seemed to be based on the intersection of three factors: the books made them think seriously about religious questions; they helped them to understand God's love; and they improved their understanding of the relationship between religion and sex. Therefore, I wondered, could reading one of my novels have an effect on the religious imagination of such readers. In fact, in five of eight indicators there were statistically significant differences indicating greater likelihood of thinking of God as mother, lover, spouse, or friend among readers who said the books helped them to understand the relationship between religion and sex and appreciate God's love for them.

Obviously, there were two possible explanations: one, the novel did indeed affect the religious imagination of readers; and two, those who had religious imaginations picturing a more intimate relationship with God were more likely after reading my books to say that they understood God's love better and also comprehended better the relationship between religion and sex. Either result was satisfactory to me from the viewpoint both of a sociological theorist and of a priest storyteller.

Finally, did the much publicized sexual interludes in the novels (which Cardinal Bernardin himself had admitted to me were tame compared to most modern novels) have an effect on the linkage between the

story and the religious imagination? The correlation between, on the one hand, greater understanding of God's love and of religion and sex and, on the other, gracious images of God was specified in my final analytic exercise as existing entirely among those respondents who said they found the sexual interludes in the books compelling or sensitive. Far from being a scandal to the simple faithful, as my fellow priest contended, or trashy and steamy, as some of the hostile secular critics (mostly alienated Catholics) averred, the novels, including the sexual episodes in them, were just what I intended them to be—stories of grace appealing to the religious imagination of the readers and helping them to understand better the relationship between religion and sex and the depths of God's love. Based on the research, and on the thousands of letters I have received, I am confident that I have never done anything more priestly in my life than write those novels, which is precisely what my sociological theory has led me, with fingers crossed, to anticipate.

What next? More of the same, God She being willing.

I intend to continue to teach sociology and do sociological research, as well as to write stories and perhaps, again God She being willing, screenplays. And of course I continue to be a priest, wanted by the ecclesiastical institution or not. Mark Harris, in a cover profile of me for the New York Times Magazine, concludes by saying that after reading the letters I have received from readers, he does indeed believe that I am a priest and a parish priest. "His parish," he writes, "is in his mailbox."

As my friend from New York, Jim Miller, put it on the phone the other night, "Those so-and-sos at Chicago did you a favor. If they hadn't kicked you around, you never would be writing novels and you never would have the money to fund your own research or their chair." He meant the so-and-sos at the university, but the same thing could be said of the so-and-sos in the archdiocese. God, a French proverb tells us, draws straight with crooked lines. It is not a proposition that admits of empirical verification. (God thus far has not been at home to persistent NORC interviewers.) At this stage in my career, as a priest who is also a sociologist, journalist, and storyteller, I am no longer of any mind to question the crooked lines of God.