SUNDAYS IN AMERICA

An ultimately numbing odyssey into modern-day American Christianity.

Raised in a religious Polish Catholic community, novelist and memoirist Shea (Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama, and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore, 2004, etc.) was told early on by a nun that if she set foot in a non-Catholic church, she, like the congregants of such a church, would be condemned to Hell. Growing dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church—stemming, as it did for so many, from the sex-abuse scandals—caused the adult author to wonder what worship would be like in the numerous Protestant churches across the country. (According to Shea, there are an estimated 2,500 different Protestant denominations in America.) During the course of a year, she visited dozens of houses of worship: Baptist, Quaker and Seventh-Day Adventist churches, as well as Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, the Colorado Springs Cowboy Church, the Moffett Road Assembly of God, the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church and the Kykotsmovi Mennonite Church, among many others. The journey quickly turns punishing—not for Shea, who appears to have the stamina of a mule, but for the reader, who may find it difficult to tell one church from another. While Shea makes some cursory attempts to locate each in historical and religious context, she doesn’t pay enough attention to the foundational values that distinguish one church from another, mostly because she’s more interested in what they have in common. She takes pains to point out that the worshippers all believe in Jesus, all want to live their lives in the best way they can and get to Heaven. It’s a generous and important message, and Shea is clearly loath to say anything condemnatory about any of the churches that opened their doors to her, though she does lament the bigotry she occasionally encounters.

Succeeds all too well in the author’s mission to make us understand how similar churches are to one another.