Coming Together and Falling Apart: “Independent”/Old Catholic Churches, the Quest for Unity, and the Burden of the History of American Intentional Religious Communities

Old Catholic churches in Europe are something of a mystery to most scholars, and those in the United States are even more mysterious.  In this country they are usually small, insular, and isolated from other religious bodies (often by choice).  Although the vast majority of these groups are not intentional communities in living arrangements, they are in social dynamics.  At the same time these churches are committed to striving for the unity implied by their Catholic identity.  Ironically, such attempts usually result in further schisms.

The cycle of isolation, attempts to achieve unity, and new schisms created by attempts at unification is a familiar pattern in American religious history.  While scholars have noted these patterns for decades, we do not have yet have a general theoretically scaffolding for understanding this ebb and flow.

In this proposed paper I will attempt to suggest some elements of an interpretive model for these phenomena by drawing on my participant/observer notes from the past three decades and subjecting those notes to an analysis utilizing some of the insights of a variety of scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Rowland Berthoff, Michael Kammen, Paul Johnson, as well as my own work on both “mainstream” and fundamentalist religious bodies in the United States.