Paper City and Southern Parish: American Catholics in Postwar Social Science Research

Abstract

By the post-World War II era, the situation of much of the Euro-American Catholic population of the United States was in significant transition. Although on the surface Catholics appeared ensconced in a unified and “triumphal” Church, the slow but inexorable workings of broad social and cultural forces were reconfiguring the parameters of the Catholic engagement with American culture.1 The trajectory of Catholic assimilation in the United States through the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century paralleled the emergence of the modern social and behavioral sciences. During this same period, scholars in fields such as psychology, sociology and anthropology finessed older theoretical perspectives and generated new ones (functional, conflict/consensus, interactionist). More sophisticated research techniques that imitated the methods and goals of the natural sciences developed as social science practitioners strove to become more value neutral in theory and method. By the 1920s, sociology, in particular, was moving away from a close alignment with liberal Protestantism and its impetus to ameliorate the social problems of an urban, industrial, and increasingly bureaucratized nation.2 One genre of early twentieth century social science research focused on American community studies. Scholars such as W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki,3 W. Lloyd Warner,4 Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd,5 H. Richard Niebuhr,6 Elin Anderson,7